Hey everyone, thank you for listening.
This is Ross Kenny, and I'm your host.
I have two sponsors that I'd like to tell you about today.
They're both organizations doing valuable work within Carbon
Removal. One of them is a new sponsor of
the show and the other one has been with us from the start, so
I'm going to start with a new one.
I'm going to give them a chance to go first.
It's Climify. Personally, I think they produce
some of the best content within Carbon Removal.
Their reports are top tier. I always look forward to reading
them. I've learned a lot from them.
There's one in particular that I like that I referenced in a blog
post I wrote a while back called Bridging the Cdr Financing Gap.
The comprehensive guide. Just really powerful, great
work. If you're looking for good Intel
on carbon removal, check out the Clima Fire reports.
They're really good. There are lots of intermediaries
within carbon removal. If someone wants to buy carbon
removals, many people will heed the call and try to sell them
some. Climify is a group that I see
almost more as a white glove service.
They're quite selective in what they choose to do.
The way that they put it is that they empower companies to
develop and manage robust, high quality, durable Cdr portfolios
that's built upon market intelligence.
They have a proprietary rating system.
You may have heard that they just gave Deep Sky in Canada a
very high rating. They're involved in the
procurement themselves of facilitating, sourcing and
managing RFPs for companies. So if you're looking to run a
carbon removal RFPA request for proposal.
So you could have. Carbon removal companies coming
to you with proposals for what they might be able to do.
Climify as a group that can very much help you with that, perform
the due diligence, structure the portfolios, negotiating,
executing transactions, that's all something that they can help
you with. And then also just managing the
portfolio of making sure that the projects are monitored,
warehoused appropriately and then when the time comes,
retired. Climify's project database
covers about 95% of all the durable Cdr projects globally,
but out of the 500 plus projects reviewed by Climify, only 15%
meet their standards for delivery and integrity that they
look for. And eventually only 5% of those
projects are included in client portfolios.
If you're looking to buy some carbon removals, if you want to
run an RFP, follow the link in the show notes to learn more
about Climify. And of course, I'm also very
happy that Arbonics is sponsoring the show again.
Arbonics connects European land owners to corporate credit
buyers in order to remove CO2 and protect biodiversity.
They're very data-driven. They're trying to turn degraded
and abandoned land in Europe, in the Baltic States back into
biodiverse force. That's a really impactful good
thing to be doing for its own sake.
Outside of carbon removal, it's a good thing to do but is also
very much focused on how much carbon can be sequestered while
also pointing us towards the importance of Co benefits and
ecosystem services. I think sometimes carbon removed
people forget about. We're pretty focused on the PPM,
but the other stuff is really important too.
They're doing fascinating work on the data layer side.
I'm not sure if you've seen the digital twinning of forestry,
but they're making it. It's exactly what it sounds
like. Our Bonics is on the cutting
edge, trying to make forestry work for carbon removals and
turn your back into that beautifully forested continent
that it once was. So if that interests you, the
link is in the show notes to go check out Our Bionics.
Also, Lizette Louie, one of the founders and COO of our Bionics,
was on the podcast earlier this year.
Go check that out because we dig into a lot of the role of
temporary removals within carbon removal.
It's a fascinating big topic and Lizette brings her a game to it,
so I hope you enjoy. Link to both sponsors are in the
show notes. If you'd like to be a sponsor of
the show too and hear more about what that might look like, you
can e-mail me. The e-mail is in the show notes.
And then also, if you're podcasting and you want to use
Riverside for recording or D Script for editing and
transcription services, I have affiliate links in the notes
too, and that also helps drive the show's financial solvency.
So thanks so much for listening. Here is the intro to your show.
Hello and thank you for listening to the Reverse in
Climate Change podcast. I'm Ross Kenyon.
I'm a carbon remover, simple as that.
Been involved in carbon removal for the better part of a decade.
I'm really happy to present this show today.
It's with my friend Christian Gavers.
Danut Christiana tapped me on the shoulder when City Cdr
initiative was something that he was just starting to think
about. It really captured my attention.
As you can tell on the show, I'm really passionate about the
kinds of questions that his work involves.
At a superficial level, the city Cdr initiative is an attempt to
embed carbon removal in municipalities and sub national
political units. A lot of people think about
climate policies happening at the national level and
international level, but below that it's more symbolic or not
really that interesting to a lot of people in some cases.
But I think actually that is not correct.
And I think the kinds of political questions it asks are
very important and fundamental. They are questions around what
is the correct size of entity to undertake climate action.
And I think a lot of the momentum is to scale that up as
high as possible. We want climate policy that one
cannot defect from, and the assumption is that having that
at the highest level makes that more possible.
But I'm also. A strong believer in this idea
of subsidiarity, that organization should rise to the
appropriate level of centralization and scale, but no
greater than that. And there's a lot we can do that
is sub national. There are things that States and
cities and counties and other units can do that are useful
experiments for figuring out what kinds of policy even works
at a much smaller scale before we choose a much riskier and
higher level of complexity organization like a national or
international level. And as we get into in the show,
all politics is local and someone has to live.
With carbon removal infrastructure.
And that could be anything from improving soil health and having
more carbon in the soil and healthier soil slowing down
water runoff and increasing the resiliency for communities in
the face of floods. Or it could literally be
pipelines carrying compressed CO2 to classics wells, and a lot
in between that cities are going to interact with carbon removal.
And being able to find ways to do that in a way that is
acceptable and maybe even better than acceptable to residents is
work very much worth doing. And given that larger scale
political units are in a time of crisis, I think it's fair to say
geopolitics is something everyone is pretty much talking
about. There's trade war, there might
be greater conflict, and I hope not.
If that does happen, I think it's going to throw a lot of
climate work into question. It's one of the narratives that
I actually don't like so much about the reshoring trade war
discussion and how it might impact climate change.
Because if there is war, especially at the level that
reshoring might be useful for, it will be the most disruptive
set of policies possible for avoiding catastrophic climate
change. Great power conflict and war
would be an immense wrong turn. Looked at only from the
perspective of climate change, nothing good is happening for
climate during a time of great power war.
Short of that, though, while larger political units are
thinking about trade policy and strategic advantage and various
theaters of war and conflict, there is a lot of opportunity
for smaller political units to step up to make sure that carbon
removal and other types of climate action can take place at
smaller levels. That we can learn from, that we
can grow from, and that is incredibly valuable work.
I'm very happy to be involved with the City Cdr initiative as
a strategic advisor, working on communications and knitting
together the various comms threads of this project.
That's been super fun for me. I'm honored to be working on
something I find to be so important, and I think Christian
is very clever in the way that he's approaching this entire
topic area. If you'd like to get more
involved, there are links in the show notes to do so.
There's also I Feel Like. The show requires like a link to
The Federalist Papers and. We talked a lot about, I mean,
you can probably tell if you've read James C Scott, a lot of my
my thinking comes through understanding someone like Jane
Jacobs and Robert Moses fights over the shape of New York,
urban living and things like that.
So if you are intrigued by any of these questions, cool.
We would probably be friends in real life because these are
fascinating questions for me and the links are in the show notes.
Also, if you love this show, please consider becoming a paid
subscriber $5.00 a month. It's ad free for all of the
programmatic ads that Spotify slips in.
There's also bonus content. There won't be bonus content for
this show, but a couple of the shows before this have had bonus
content. I try to make sure that the good
stuff that doesn't fit into the main show ends up still being
able to be listened. To you by paid subscribers.
It helps make this show a reasonable, feasible thing for
me to continue doing. So thank you for doing that.
Short of that, a great rating review on Apple Podcasts and
Spotify is also really helpful to me.
If you could take a minute right now, open your podcast app,
whatever it is, and give me the full rating and review.
If that is an option, that would be terrific.
In any case, here is Christian. I hope you enjoy.
Christiana, it seems like every couple days I see another
announcement of yet another city that has joined the city Cdr
initiative. I'm getting fatigued by them.
Can you? Can you consolidate all of these
Dang announcements? No, just kidding, I love it.
Yeah, totally. No.
And I guess maybe the starting board is to acknowledge that we
don't have some kind of, you know, organization that we set
up and unfold on the way you press the button.
No, you know, instead we're on a journey.
You know, we're building a plane while flying it.
And there's all these new cities and organizations coming on
board. And it turns out that, you know,
instead of the kind of small plane we thought we were
building, it is becoming some massive jumbo jet.
And and that's why, you know, a lot of cities perhaps get a
sense of FOMO. That's one thing.
But on the other hand, I think the reality is just that cities
are looking at the topic of carbon removal, are wondering,
you know, how they are going to address their residual emissions
or are wondering how they could leverage more climate finance
for their, you know, adaptation and reduction efforts where
synergies can be realized and so forth.
And so please promise me that you don't chew now, just yet,
because there's so much more to come.
No, I'm entirely joking, I think people.
Who do not? Work on policy.
Imagine that interacting with any sort of governmental body
takes a very long time, is very conservative, making decisions
requires stakeholder approvals that are complex, And yet it
seems like you just unlocked a torrent of cities who care about
this obscure weird little field of carbon removal.
I didn't even know cities cared about it this much.
And you're attracting some serious municipalities here like
you're getting Phoenix. You know this thing is not
Amsterdam. Just signed up too.
Yeah, like bigger ones like Amsterdam, Tito, Ecuador, San
Francisco, Baltimore, Zurich, Sydney, Yeah.
So, so, so larger municipalities.
But, but mind you, you know, the whole idea is that it's a kind
of universal initiative. And we believe that every city
has the agency to act. And not just cities, in fact,
also, you know, county governments or provincial
governments, though the focus is initially on cities.
Every city has the agency to act on this, irrespective of their
size, geographical locations, legal competencies, fiscal
competencies and so forth. It's just a matter of
understanding what is your advantage point as a city.
And that may be, you know, that of a city that can be the
strategizer, you know, being at the heart of a car removal push
or if you just don't have the means, you know, all the, all
the way. At the other end, the spectrum,
we've identified a role for cities as a as an enabler or as
a facilitator or convener. In fact, we called it that, you
know, allows the city to pursue Cdr, but by bringing together
the relevant players that can actually take the action.
There are various roles in in in between.
Why do such, you know, cities sign up?
I mean, first and foremost, I think it's important to say that
we are not asking them to put down money.
We're not asking them to go quickly.
That'd be great. But The thing is, you know, most
cities are strapped for cash. You know, they don't have a lot
of money. In fact, that is also why
they're often overlooked, you know, in, in, in, in, in terms
of sort of at times in terms of climate action writ large, but
certainly in the case of carbon removal, they have little to
spend. But there are other reasons.
And then we'll get into that why they are so important.
But for now, we have just created a low bar to entry,
which is to say that you know, we need them to support our
opportunity baselining phase by actually providing the data to
ground truth all of our insights and recommendations that
ultimately provides the foundation for setting up the
capacity building program and the investment mobilization
program. I imagine lay people think about
climate policy mostly at the level of international politics.
the United Nations, they're thinking about COP.
I don't think people's first association with climate policy
are cities. I imagine you would agree with
that, but it is something that you would like to change.
Am I framing that? OK, Do you like that
understanding? Do you think I'm on to something
with that? To some extent, but let's, you
know, nuance it a little bit, which I should say as a former
lobbyist, EU energy and climate policy.
So I've been sort of down the road of hardcore nitty gritty
policy making in, you know the well, let's not get too far into
this, but the, you know, unseen rooms under the European
Commission buildings and stuff. This is not what cities do,
right? They don't make that kind of
policy. In fact, I think what what
cities do is slightly different. They to a large extent they have
to fulfill, you know, national level policies or state level
policies or all of this tends to sort of cascade down.
Imagine it from the perspective of the Paris Agreement, let's
say that's sort of a, you know, piece that has been agreed
multilaterally, OK, this is what we need to achieve.
You know, these are the targets, the objectives, and subsequently
national governments, or in the case of the EU, supranational
government, right, develops a set of policies, then national
governments develops a set of policies that implements those
supranational policies. The state level governments
implement policies that that connect up with those national
level policies. And so there's this whole string
of policy making along different governance layers.
And when it comes to cities, you know, the tools they have at
their disposal, first and foremost difference very vastly
per per city. You know, some may be able to
levy taxes, others not. You know, some may be able to
drive building codes and do their own zoning policies,
others not. Some may be able to do zoning
for municipalities within the vicinity of their own, you know,
municipality because of, you know, whatever kind of set up in
a given county, for example. So it is more, and that's what
we're trying to identify is, is it's more about sort of what is
the, the, the toolkit of a city. And that is different from the
tool kit of a national government.
And nobody has ever investigated in depth how the tools and
instruments that a city has as its at its disposal, you know,
can be leveraged for the purpose of advancing, you know, Cdr.
And so that is sort of one side of the the coin of what we're
trying to to investigate, You know, what is the capacity to
act for cities on something like carbon removal?
There seems to be so much heterogeneity in how these
different size political units are nested within each other,
especially by country, compared that to the international level
where we have converged upon the the state formations shelling
point of the nation state. Like the entire world is
composed essentially of nation states.
There aren't really empires by name anymore as nation states.
But if you have cities and counties and states, but others
have provinces, some might skip counties entirely.
Some cities may be very autonomous, others might be
enacting with their higher body demands of them.
Does that not make the work much more complex than than maybe
working at the international level?
Yes, but we didn't get into this business to do easy stuff.
So that's one point and the second is efficient.
I like a good challenge. This is one that's not many
people have embarked on in, you know, plus national governments,
the international level. We have sufficient folks, you
know, focusing on that. And that's critically important.
You know, no city can do truly impactful, meaningful stuff if
national governments don't provide the framework to to do
that though, you know, I must say, you know, you're in the
case of the US, obviously the federal government is sort of
stepping back on a lot of this stuff and, and, and state level
governments are are trying to sort of in some cases step
forward. And in that context, I believe
that there is a very important role for for cities to play as
ambassadors of climate action By yeah, by, by, by, by forging
your hands, really. And, and, you know, at times in
direct opposition to national government's policy.
There lies a real opportunity here in the US in the current
environment. But, you know, by and large,
there is a lot of heterogeneity between cities.
That is true. Yet, if you look at the world,
I'd say that after, on average, after national governments, city
governments are the most powerful governance layer around
that is able to drive truly systemic, you know, policy.
Now that may not be the case in the US, you know, but that is
the case on average in most countries in the world.
Wow, I've never thought about it quite like that.
I suppose even in the US there's cases where someone like the
mayor of New York City may be more powerful than certain
governors of less prominent states.
So like maybe that's the case where that.
Happened. Yeah, but they're all, they're
probably also other countries in the world though, where maybe
Cape Town is more powerful than the province itself or other
provinces just by virtue of that alone.
The size of the dominance culturally, economically is, is
that kind of what you're describing or is it something
else? Yeah.
No, no, that's exactly it. And so there is that variety,
that is true. But you know, it's a matter of
how can we for our purposes, right?
How can we create a type typology of cities that allows
us to differentiate them, categorize them in a way that we
can provide them with the kind of toolkit, the policy
opportunities, the tools, instruments available to them
that are tailored to these specific categories of cities.
And so we can only do that as we, you know, source for data.
This is not some kind of that's of research exercise solely.
This has to be fed through real life data and that's what we are
doing. And you know, under the
subsequent capacity building phase, there will be a lot of
that tailoring according to these categories.
So the typology of cities that we're creating.
Can you explain what kind of taxonomy you're working with for
cities and also which kinds of data are they providing?
Yeah. So the data we were asking at
the moment we're, you know, I'll be honest, we're the kind of
beggars can't be choosers situations, right.
And that means, you know, a few things.
But one thing that it means is, is that not all cities have all
the data available that we're asking the requirements for a
particular city in North America to let's say track greenhouse
gas emissions are vastly different from European cities.
That's just one take and many cities in the US are not keeping
a very details greenhouse gas inventory.
I can tell you that in addition, many cities in countries in the
global S are generally not able to source all the data that they
may need because of various reasons such as capacity
constraints or whatnot. And so the data we are asking is
granular but inevitably a little bit patchy when we, you know,
have to work with that. And it straddles everything
between questions around governance set up, How are these
administrations set up in a way that it's hampers or promotes
their capacity to act on carbon removal?
Think about this in terms of sort of, are there opportunities
for cross departmental task forces to be set up?
You know, where is there a first and foremost, is there a
sustainability director or not? You know, is there a, you know,
resilience officer or not, you know, and where is this, is this
sustainability director embedded?
Is there a dedicated sustainability department or is
this person embedded in some kind of economic unit or, you
know, all of these things matter in terms of a city's capacity to
act. And therefore, in terms of sort
of the recommendations that we can give around how to innovate
your governance set up in order to be, you know, more, more or
able to, to act. Other questions revolve around
policy and regulation. You know, how is all of this
organized, not just climate policy, but also non climate
policy and, and allowing us to understand sort of where Cdr
objectives might be embedded in in non climate policies.
And a third set of questions that we're asking is what
technical that revolves around the like design features of
urban systems and particular urban infrastructure such as
your wastewater, you know, processing facility or desalina
tion plant. Or you know, the generally you
know, how material is sourced for the roads that are being
built or the age of your building stock and the
renovation cycles of that. All of which aims to point at
real opportunities for integrating, you know, Cdr in a
way that is different from what what we have done so far.
Namely, not just pureplay stand alone, you know, great shiny,
flashy Cdr facilities somewhere in the middle of nowhere.
But you know, Cdr solutions that are integrated in our everyday
living environment on the doorstep or front yard of of
people and, and, and I believe that, you know, we'll speak a
bit about that I think, but, but I believe that is very important
because it's so distinct from the way that the Cdr market or
space has developed so far in terms of project deployment.
Does interacting with so many different types of polities make
you more supportive of the idea that Poly centrism, complexity,
diversity of governance models is a good thing?
Or do you secretly? Or maybe not so secretly, You're
in for legibility, standardization, clear org
charts that are the same across cities.
There are trade-offs either way you go.
What does your heart call out for?
Like with such questions, I mean, they are sort of rabbit
holes, right? I mean, we can go quite deep
into the trade-offs of fun or, or, or the other, but, but
probably the reality is that, you know, it matters less that
we standardize the way that such administrations are are are set
up then that we standardize the way that they realize impact.
Put it differently, we want to make sure that the way that
cities account for negative emissions in the greenhouse gas
inventory is standardized across the board, right across all
other cities to be able to make it comparable as data force, to
be able to feed it directly into national, you know, NDCS in a
standardized way. All of this is important
ultimately from a climate science standpoint because
otherwise, you know, if it's not comparable data, we cannot
properly track the impact on on the climate, which is what we
are doing all of this for at the end of the day, right.
But how that action is realized, what kind of setup comes before
it, all of that has to be grounded in a local context to
make it as powerful as possible, as effective as possible with
the right kind of, you know, in the end, social buy in, right?
Because because you know, none of this can be some kind of top
down effort if we wanted to lead to a kind of exponential scale
that we are after. So I would say, you know, ensure
diversity of action, but meanwhile guarantee
standardization of, of impact and, and how we read impact.
I like that answer. It's difficult in places like
the US, where you are now seeing potentially A constitutional
crisis around how much federalism we're willing to
tolerate. The Trump administration's been
very critical, to put it lightly.
Various cities that have sanctuary city policies that do
not check immigration status of residents, and I even see
rhetoric being used of withholding disaster funding
from blue states during times of crisis.
It's unclear to me to what degree States and cities in the
US will be able to act divergently from higher national
polities like the US federal government, because it's it's
also possible that rather than it being a beautiful case of
federalism as laboratories of democracy, it opens them up for
political retaliation. Do you think there is room for
smaller units in the US right now to act decisively or does it
open up a lot of risk for city managers?
Wow, this is a big question disguised as perhaps as I was.
This is what? The podcast does Christianity
you want to. Unit economics.
OK, well, let's let, let me go back then to, to sort of my, my
earlier days in, in political science then then, you know, I
would say off the bat that in this is not any more about the
rule of law, right? This is, this is about something
else entirely, as you say, sort of the risk of political
retaliation and powers that the federal government has to, you
know, to, to to, you know, target smaller entities.
We see censorship already. We see that certain cities
wouldn't dare to put their head above the parapet.
Yeah, of course. And certainly in red states.
I approached a lot of cities in red States and the far majority
never bothered to answer. Why is that not because these
cities themselves wouldn't really care about the kind of
action. You know, many of them may be
sort of, let's say blue cities and it sees the red.
But I cannot think of it in any other way than than a kind of
self censorship, right? Kind of fear.
They're they're sort of, you know, forcing in in in in in
into not acting. But I guess you know, what we
can say is that, and then I'm taking this from a kind of
political activist standpoint, right?
You know, all the rights, everything that you think you
have today, including as a city government, you know, maybe lost
tomorrow if you don't stand up and and actually use those those
rights. So we are at risk also city
governments and certainly also states in the US of certain
rights being, I don't know how you would call it clawed back,
right? It's like the federal system is
under threat. And this also relates to city's
agency, of course. But if we don't execute the
agency, you know it will be as a it, it will die in darkness.
And die in darkness. Well, it's just one of the
things about the US Constitution that it's fundamentally
intention. Very few people have a
principled position on something like states rights.
It's often invoked instrumentally when it's
something that an individual state wants and it's against the
will of the federal government. People tend to favor states
rights when they're in power at the federal level.
They want to enforce their desires upon all the states.
And I feel that on both left and right, I haven't seen a
consistent application of do we care about decentralization or
our vision of justice being enacted.
And so this states rights versus 14th Amendment fight is sort of
a fundamental tension that is irresolvable given that you live
in a country that is diverse, that disagrees about some very
important basic issues about what it means to be a citizen in
the US. So I'm not surprised basically
that you couldn't come to a final conclusion and solve
America. For us, it's a it's a big
question. Like we looked at Europe like
the Napoleonic Code was an attempt to get rid of medieval
rules and regulations of weird overlapping polities and just be
like, cool, this is the new way we do things.
It actually has like, it's the metric system, but for law.
And it's very, you know, orderly in America.
We we built in tension in a way that does not centralized in a
in a neat way. So yeah, we went into political
science mode. Exactly.
So it's messy, you know, but messiness allows for ambition,
allows for leaders to stand up, forge ahead, pace their own ass.
You know, a lot of this is not written and especially not in
this time. So, you know, I'm not an
American and I certainly don't have to expect to become one any
day, any day soon. But you know, I would, I would
say to anyone listening here is that yes, you know, the future
is unwritten and when it comes to carbon removal, ever more so
I finally, you know, if it's not done here, it will be done
elsewhere. It's already being done
elsewhere. And not that momentum will
continue to grow. And it's generally a good thing,
of course. But I would like to see that a
lot of the capital, a lot of the innovation, a lot of the talent
is retained here in this country where it's a lot of it
originated. And that can only happen if if
we have those, those leaders amongst cities, amongst states,
amongst project developers, amongst NGOs, you know, amongst
Congress people in Congress, of course, you know, but the more
people sell censor themselves, you know, the higher the risk of
all of that, that good stuff, just, you know, going elsewhere.
That's. One of the reasons why I was so
excited to support the City Cdr initiative is that overall,
either way you go, centralization,
decentralization, they each have their own pathologies and
frustrations like anything on earth essentially does.
But I tend to trust the emergent principles of complexity that
you know, smaller units can act other people will emulate.
The good stuff tends to filter up 1 hopes, and that's a really
powerful thing rather than having to depend upon all
important decisions coming from the top down and filtering down
that direction. There are you can name examples
of the top down approach being like really great for humanity
to in certain cases, but overall I tend to prefer that.
So I'm very attracted intellectually to what you're
trying to build. Yeah, no.
And I fully agree with you. And then and I would like to
take it a little bit further, which is to say that, you know,
it's not either or often a lot of the, let's say large scale,
heavy-handed top down stuff, you know, that we also want in the
case of CDI, you know, we want big policy initiatives.
You know, we want big, you know, public incentive programs to
come on stream, you know, because otherwise we'll never
move beyond the innovation phase that that that we are still in.
But none of that will come to fruition in the absence of
social legitimacy, in the absence of citizens that are
also voters, you know, agreeing that this is a good thing to do.
And where can we make the case to citizens, to voters?
You know, that Cdr is something that requires such a big policy
effort. It's at the city skill.
There's no other skill that we can do that truly.
You know, it's in the front yards.
We need projects, showcase projects in the front yards of
everyday citizens. We need front yard narratives
that are deployed within cities. We need people to, to make, to,
to feel that it's tangible, to feel that they benefit from it
directly, to feel that they can talk about it, you know, in
their own words, in a way that connects with them and their
personal needs. You know, we haven't gone there
as the Cdr community, but it is, it is the next frontier that's
and, and, and we hope that with the city Cdr initiative, you
know, we are paving the way for others to follow and follow us
as, as we, you know, as we pioneer what I consider to be
Cdr, you know, for the purpose of creating a positive living
environment. Fantastic segue.
I was just about to ask you about that.
We have an expression. You probably heard it all
politics is local. You familiar with that?
You're trying to make all Cdr is local a thing, it sounds like.
What can cities do like Cdr at the city level?
I imagine people can infer some of what that means, but there's
several things inside of the proposals that we worked on
together that I expect are not the first top of mind thing
people think of. What actually would it look like
for Cdr to be embedded at municipal levels?
Yeah, A first we should say something about sort of define
Cdr, right. So, so we are not talking solely
about durable or permanent Cdr here.
We are talking about the the full spectrum of Cdr from more
temporary solutions that involve often sort of interactions with
natural processes to more more durable and permanent forms of
of Cdr. Now we are, as I said, on a
journey and so we are exploring the full sort of breadth of what
I call, you know, urban Cdr pathways, that's to say project
value chains that either involve the capturing of CO2 from the
atmosphere within the city or the storage within the city or
both taking place within the city.
Now what we have seen so far is that there's a wide spectrum of
of methods and some you already know, they involve integration
if we're talking about more durable city or they involve
integration in existing urban systems.
So lately a lot of people have been talking about, you know,
integrating Cdr solutions in wastewater processing facilities
or plants, right? Can lime wastewater, you know,
there, there there are other ways of, of turning sewage
sludge into biochar, which can subsequently be, you know,
distributed well as one does with biochar anywhere on, on
sort of land, but can also be integrated into construction
materials which can be subsequently used in building.
You know, the building stock in a given city.
There is there, there, there is obviously more innovative deck
opportunities like integrating it with the HVAC systems.
There are ways of doing enhanced rock watering and, and deploying
this on rooftops and, and, and, and, and sort of gravel roads
and, and public lands. There are obviously ways of,
let's say enhanced carbonation, let's say of construction and
demolition waste, which is subsequently used as aggregates
in construction materials, which are used in the built
environment, making, you know, ultimately what we're creating.
Then a city that is not an emitter.
This is a little bit sort of into the future, but what I hope
we would be able to, to create is, is, is carbon sink cities
where, you know, they store more CO2 than they emit and are net
negative themselves. That, that, that is sort of the,
the ambition, that is the, that is the mission and, and that
coincides with, with making cities.
And it's another concept, nature positive, like integrating
nature blue and, and, and green infrastructure, you know,
directly within cities, which has significant carbon removal,
you know, benefits and components, of course, as well
as integration with adaptation policies and obviously, you
know, mental health, you know, priorities, right.
So, so the variety or the portfolio let's say of urban Cdr
pathways is pretty vast. The opportunity is significant.
Study by the Poster Research Institute in Berlin at the end
of last year estimated that at over a giga tons that could be
realized, giga tons of removals that could be realized on an
annual basis by 2050. And that was just a sort of slim
set of of of solutions. So the potential is big and it
does mean that we should look at cities not as some kind of, you
know, units that are static now, but rather as, and I'm, I'm just
kind of familiar with this. I'm not an urbanist or anything,
an urban planner. But you know, this concept of
looking at cities as, as organisms, as something that is
called the concept of urban metabolism, that, you know,
absorb materials and exude materials that absorb that, that
emit CO2 and, and evidently you should also absorb CO2, a
missing component in the, in the, in the theories of, of
urban metabolism. And so when we think about it in
those terms, then the city is not just some kind of static
unit, but rather is one that is characterized by transient
spaces between the urban environments, the peri urban
environment and the rural environment.
These are totally connected, you know, not just in terms of
material flows, in terms of emission flows, but also in
terms of culture, in terms of politics, in terms of, you know,
ultimately, I guess, our capacity to act on something as
as challenging as climate change.
Beautiful answer. I like that we.
Paired so much of this work with resilience, with beauty, with
the enhancement of the urban experience too.
It's not just how do we remove carbon, it's about tying in
carbon removal to values that people do hold that either makes
them more resilient in the face of drought or other
environmental risk that they might face.
It's about adding shade, it's about making their environment
more beautiful, helping with mental health, things like that.
That there is often money and support for that may allow for
some amount of double dipping or just something like multiple
policies achieved at the same time that had that sort of
overlapping goodness to it. I really like that approach.
I think that was a very intentional choice by you too.
I guess what we were trying to do is realize this impact
multiplication, right? So money that can be used to
realize multiple urban priorities.
And the way to do that from the perspective of Cdr, what we have
found with cities is to present them with the opportunities to
integrate Cdr or embed Cdr in non Cdr policies in a way that
it enhances their ability to meet the priorities related to
that. That policy, whether it is a
waste management policy, whether it is a mental health policy,
whether it is an urban greening policy, whether it is a, you
know, jobs creation policy or whatnot, right.
And that is how we are approaching this and that is
what struck A chord with these cities.
And, and now we are, you know, on this, this journey of, of
discovering as well, not just in the physical opportunities of
integrating Cdr in the urban environment, but also, you know,
the, the, the, let's say, political opportunities to
integrate Cdr in policies that, you know, almost horizontally,
right, policies that would not otherwise be used for climate
action. We feel that there lies a huge
opportunity, missed opportunity so far that can be replicated at
the national level as well. So that connects up with this
ideals and cities and laboratories of of democracy to
some extent, right. So experimenting in that sense
with with policy and yeah, cities that have so far signed
up seem to agree with the idea that it's good to go down this
path rather than say we need a stand alone Cdr policy that is
separate and requires an additional separate budgets that
we just don't have a city government strength I'm.
Going to bring it back to political science for a second.
I hope you don't, please. I think one of the the risks
here that can take place even at the city level is an over
reliance upon central planning and city policy in a way that I
think about Canberra, Brasilia, Ankara, he's like essentially
planned cities that are not that livable.
They're very legible, they make sense, you can look at them,
they're very well planned, but they don't have that human
organic livability factor to it. I also think about Robert Moses
fighting with Jane Jacobs over the highways in in New York and
how that worked. How do we make sure that
mentality doesn't come into carbon removal at the city
level? Although I, I wonder if you're
salivating about that level of power.
Would you like to be Robert Moses or Lake or Busey?
But for carbon removal, is that your secret dream?
I mean, you know, Bossier is her role that as a hero, right?
And in in terms of urban design and architecture, whereas Robert
Moses is largely vilified in retrospect as a guy that
realized a lot of stuff, but perhaps at the expense of, you
know, the ways that politics should be done and, and, you
know, rule of law and, and and whatnot.
But to answer your question directly, no, we don't.
We, first of all, I don't want to be that person, But secondly,
we do not promote the idea of building new cities in the
desert in order to be able to make them, you know, net zero or
net negative, right? No, no, no, no.
It's the whole. It's the whole like it is all
the editor of this initiative is about identifying physical
opportunities and identifying policy opportunities to
integrate Cdr into what already exists today.
That is our, our, our, our, our, our light motif, right?
And yeah, sure. You know, build a new city in,
in the Arabian desert or, or, or, you know, whatever.
I mean, it's great, good, you know, do it, right?
But but we have these legacy cities all over the place,
everywhere, right? That's what we need to deal
with. It's kind of innovative,
futuristic places where in the end, you know who truly lives
there, right? It's not built for everyday
citizens. We're still building those
though, like I see layers kind of smart cities that happen in
South Korea. People are trying to do these.
We have the the planned community movement in the in the
US was a big thing too of like, how do we just before anyone
lives here, how do we structure? We can't just have lower
Manhattan with its weird little streets.
Thank you, Dutch people again with weird little Dutch streets
and lower Manhattan. What if we just grid everything
out and planned everything perfectly so that no humans need
to think about design ever again or or add their impact at all
here? That that that is still, they're
still happening. That that way of thinking has
not gone away. I know, I know.
But you know, I will tell you. I'm still also confused here in
DC. You know when I'm looking for a
street. Oh my God, am I in Northeast?
Southeast where? Which quadrant?
Then I and I might find myself a
few miles away from where I'm supposed to be.
Planning that same way too. Come on, you don't get like
enormous roundabouts and diagonal streets without some
amount of geometric planning far in advance like, you know,
because. Totally.
We like we need to choose a a place that was.
I mean, all those cities exist because they don't want the main
commercial powerhouse to also be the capital.
It's just too much power. That's why I like it can't be
Istanbul. It's got to be Ankara, a new
city. It can't be Sydney or Melbourne.
It's got to be Canberra. We just want to make a city out
of nothing just so there's no politics.
Sacramento instead of instead of San Francisco or Los Angeles
team like those are how decisions get made seemingly,
but then they often times. They're political decisions,
right? They're politically to to to win
sort of political recognition. They're like pride projects in a
way, right. Like in a way.
Do you see was that as well? It was Washington, George
Washington, you know, banding together with Pierre Long for
some French architect and saying, hey, I want this grand
city, you know, and then this long files like, well, you know,
yeah. How about we take Paris as an
example? You know, we built this massive
avenues from iconic building to iconic building.
Sure, you know and. The housemakers criticized for
this, too, for the same reason. Because that was built so the
army could crush rebellions that Paris faces back in network
times, Yeah. Yeah.
These are not city citizens. These are not cities built for
citizens, you know, And therefore, if we look at carbon
removal, we should do carbon removal ultimately, you know, in
a way that works for citizens, not in a way that works against
them. Because it will bite us in the
ass. We will not get that social
legitimacy, that citizen buy in that we need to be able, at
least in democracies right, to be able to drive large scale
policy efforts. Speaking of that last point too,
I often see environmentally minded people fantasize about
how fast Chinese projects get built in the in the absence of
secure property rights and democracy.
And you're like, yes, you could move really fast if you don't
have to ask for consent for things or or do the difficult
democratic work, but do we want that?
It does allow for faster climate action, but it also sacrifices
many of our other values at the same time.
I feel uncomfortable when people are not suitably reflective by
my lights with regard to that. Yeah, me too.
And it's reminds me a little bit of in a response from one city
official that sadly have a turban removal.
I, I, I really do not want some kind of techno utopia from being
realized. And and and that is what, you
know, city officials in some cases associate carbon removal
with. And to be honest, you know, that
is what some environmentalists that's, you know, think that
that might be the only way, right, Wouldn't sort of disagree
with that. That is something we need to
create because it would be the only way to stand the climate
change. But obviously, as you said, at
the expense of so much more that, you know, makes us, I
guess who we are today. That's.
True. Well, people want to get
involved. Follow your work, support your
work. What stage is the City Cdr
initiative at right now? Give people something to to hang
on to that might be able to to help support this work.
Yeah, of course. So as I said here in the first
phase of, of what we see is 3 phases, this is the baseline,
the opportunity opportunity baseline phase.
And and as of I think in the next month, we'll start
releasing a number of let's say assets, city case studies, cross
policy fact sheets, number of sort of super tangible.
I would see them as tools directed at city officials.
So very practical. The idea is we will launch this,
this large report, hopefully at New York City Climate Week,
which you know, benefits from the work with now over 15 cities
from all around the world and a consortium of partners of over
20 partners leading Cdr players also putting together now a
third, let's say, community of project and technology
developers with an existing focus on cities to further feed
technical insights and, and, and know how into our into our work.
But then after that, you know, we'll work towards COP 30 and
hopefully launch this capacity building program by that time.
So, you know, in the interim, in the interim, reach out, check,
check our LinkedIn, you know, page and reach out if you have
certain cities that you think you know could be brought on
board. If you know of any funders that
want to chip in helpful as well. And, and otherwise just, you
know, follow what we are doing and we'll be releasing lots of
interesting stuff in the months to come.
And for project developers, you know, there is significant
benefit in following what we're doing because down the line
we'll be seeking to in this investment mobilization phase to
channel capital directly into projects within the cities that
are participating in the capacity building program.
So, so yeah, I'm very excited to, to continue down this path,
to be on this journey and say join this journey, this
exploratory journey as we, yeah, as we, as we, as we pioneer Cdr
for a positive living environment and, you know, break
new grounds. Thanks for being here,
Christian. I've really enjoyed my time
working with the city Cdr initiative.
I think this is immensely important work, especially right
now. We're federal governments,
National governments may be pulling back from climate
action, at least in some parts of the world.
I also just like the ethos of smaller entities being able to
step up. So thank you for providing the,
the framework, the legibility, the access so that they're able
to do so. I think, I think you're doing
some of the most important work out there right now.
Thanks, Ross for having me on the show.
Really appreciate it. You know, I, I very much value
the kind of how can I put this? We might be doing cutting edge
climate action, but you're you're doing cutting edge
podcasting here. So, so thanks Ross for for
batting the way asking. You all those bizarre questions
that no one else has probably asked you.
Those are the best conversations.
I'm glad you think so. OK.