You're listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast
by the team at NORI, the Carbon Removal Marketplace.
This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs
developing solutions to climate change.
Hello, and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast
with Nori. I'm Ross Kenyon.
I'm one of the cofounders of Nori, which is a carbon removal
marketplace based in Seattle. Today I have with me Jeff
Goodell, contributing editor of Rolling Stone, author of The
Water Will Come and his latest, The Heat Will Kill You First,
Life and Death on a Scorched Planet.
Welcome to the show, Jeff. Hi.
There. Thanks for having me.
Happy to have you. I really liked your previous
book. The Water Will Come and now
you're doing fires. He did one on water.
When on fire. Are you going to do a tour of
the Greek elements? Well, this is not exactly fire.
This is heat, which is a little bit different than fire.
That's true. They're they're related.
But it's interesting that fire actually doesn't make that much
of an appearance in here. Is there much of anything about
fire? In here, A little bit about it,
yeah. You know about it.
About how more extreme heat dries up.
Landscapes and dries and stresses trees and makes them
more prone to these larger, hotter wildfires like we've been
seeing and some of the air pollution consequences of that
from the, you know, the wildfire smoke and things.
So I talked about it a little bit, but I don't really go into
it a lot. One thing that caught my
attention in your latest is that when I read The Water Will Come.
So much of that is about how the US military is preparing for
climate change and what they're doing.
They're practical people. They want to make sure bases
don't flood, that their readiness is is up as up as it
can be. But that didn't seem to be as
prominent in a story about Heat. But given their theaters of
operation, you would expect heat to figure into military
calculations. But is it not happening, or are
you just not tracking that one as closely?
Yeah, I just, I mean it's happening a lot.
A lot of the research on heat impacts on human bodies and
things comes from military researchers and the military has
done a lot on heat. Several of the scientists, the
physiologists that I talked to in the book are former military
researchers and physiologists. The whole idea of a what's
called a wet bulb standard, which is a a a more accurate way
of. Measuring temperatures, the
actual effects on on a person, including sun, sunlight and, you
know, solar radiation and humidity and air temperature and
wind speed and all that kind of stuff, it's a it's a very
accurate measurement that is used by heat researchers called
wet bulb temperatures that was developed in the military.
But yeah, I don't have as much about it in this book simply
because. Heat was and is an immense
topic, and I just sort of felt like I had done as much as I
could. And like, you know, I mean, I
could have kept working on this book for another 12 years.
So I had to draw some limits. Yeah, fair enough.
There is a lot covered here. There's lots of great reportage
to where it's, you know, heavily vignetted.
There's lots of stories of people.
It's surprising. I've had heat related
experiences too, one hiking to the river and back in the Grand
Canyon, I went too late in the season one year.
And but by the time we were like a mile or two out from Indian
Wells or Indian Springs or whatever it's called, I was
like, I need water right now or I feel physically endangered.
And then last year I played disc golf in Arizona during the
shoulder season. It wasn't like I was there in
the summer. I think I was there like early
fall and I had to stop. I was getting nauseous about
halfway through just because I couldn't continue.
And I don't think I realized how imperiled I was with both of
those, where you have stories of reasonably physically fit people
just dying from heat and just like that.
I mean, you know, I. I, as you know in the book, tell
story of my about myself climbing a volcano in Nicaragua
on a humid day. This was before I started the
book and wasn't. I knew nothing about the risk of
heat and you know, I felt part way up this hike.
All of a sudden, you know, my heart started pounding.
I started getting really dizzy. I started sweating in a in an
uncontrollable way. It was just like water pouring,
pouring off me and I had no idea what was happening to me.
I I. I had no idea.
And luckily some of the people who were with me did have some
idea. But you know, like most people,
I was terribly under educated or uneducated about the risks of
heat. And, you know, it was a similar
walk like that in Phoenix a few years later when I was thinking
about what to do for a next book, when I had to walk just 12
blocks and got dizzy and and, you know, felt my heart pounding
that I thought, OK, there's. People don't understand,
including myself, don't understand the risks of extreme
heat and what it does to the body.
And that's sort of where this book was really born out of what
it did to me and my understanding that I didn't
understand what it was doing to me.
Yeah, I think I remember that from that Phoenix walk.
Were you like down by the convention centers and and the
ballpark and stuff in Phoenix? Yeah, it's all concrete and it's
just so reflective and it's harsh.
Yeah, it's brutal. And you know, the air
temperature that day was 115 or so and it was probably 140
degrees there because of the reflective heat.
And you know, this urban heat island effect is well known
phenomenon in every city and in in Phoenix, especially in that
area, it's particularly bad. The most striking I've ever seen
the difference in shade coverage is in Mexico City where you land
at the airport and you're at like a NASA, like on the east
side and there's no trees, it's just concrete baking.
And then if you go to Condesa and Roma, like like everyone on
Instagram is right now, it's nothing but trees.
And it's, you know, 2 digit degrees cooler everywhere you
go. And how does that add up over
time and result in different life experiences and how that
might affect people's health overall?
Well. You know, I mean.
He doesn't have a cumulative effect on one's body, right.
It has a, I mean it doesn't have a cumulative effect in the in
the like daytoday thing, but it it doesn't have a cumulative
effect sort of year to year. So I mean basically what it
means is that you know, people who live in wealthier shaded
areas and shade is very much correlated throughout the world
with with wealth. I feel it here in Austin, TX
where I live. I felt it in Mexico City also.
I wrote about it in Mexico City. You know it.
It's just simply a much more hospitable place.
And, you know, trees require space and money to maintain and
everything. And they, you know, poor
neighborhoods simply don't have them.
They have just, you know, in Mexico City or here in Austin,
their concrete sidewalks, you know, lack of trees sometimes.
You know, there's tree planting campaigns that go on here and in
Houston and other in Phoenix to where they attempt to put in
trees and they do. But, you know, it's really easy
to gather up a bunch of people and get some money to plant some
trees, but it's a lot harder to keep them alive, especially in
these kinds of hot places, and to keep them watered and
everything. And so the.
The longterm life expectancy, I think the the life expectancy of
St. Tree in Phoenix is 7 years,
which is just nothing. And especially when you think
about what were you really need are you know sort of large large
canopy trees. And I think of Phoenix too.
I think of Palo Verde and things that are, you know, trying to
limit water loss so they don't have large, like deciduous
leaves. Right.
So they're not giving as much shade as you would get from some
place like in Seattle where I am.
Right. Yeah.
But we also have Seattle's cutting down trees right now.
There's there's conflict over the density versus trees and
like how much we're actually able to plant right now.
And then also there's not that many different varieties of
trees that are planted here. So there's also concern about
pests. And as the range of these change
with with heat changes, what should cities be doing right
now? I feel like a lot of these
problems have a lot of different facets to it, and it's not clear
how cities are going to react to this.
Yeah. And you know and every city is
different and you know the requirements of different cities
are different. But to take St.
Trees as an example I mean you know they the one of the
problems is now that because they're our climate is changing
so fast. Is that a tree that you plant
that works well today is probably going to be a very that
same environment is going to be very different in 20 years and
that tree is not going to do so well in 20 years.
So there's. A lot of urban arborists and
tree planting organizations are thinking about, you know,
planting the tree for 20 or 25 years from now, which means a
different tree than than you would plant if you believed that
the climate were going to stay the same, Which of course it's
not. So you know, but I mean tree
planting is just one aspect of what cities can be do be doing
and you know are beginning to do here in Austin, they're starting
an experiment of. Painting the streets white in
some neighborhoods in order to increase reflectivity.
Has that already started? Is that already under?
Yeah, there, there. Yeah.
It's only, it's only you know maybe a 20 block area right now,
but it's happening. LA has been doing it, Vegas has
been doing it, Phoenix is doing it.
You know it's it's helpful on the margins.
There's a lot of white roof initiatives around the world,
lots of different cities. That's a very easy way to.
Increase reflectivity and lower the sort of urban heat, you
know, limiting vehicles from downtown and and creating more
green spaces, you know, is a big thing.
Paris is doing a great job of that of, you know, bringing sort
of nature back into cities and and turning, you know, these
parking Oasis into kind of green Oasis that helps a lot.
So there are, you know, there are a lot of things that cities
can do to. Help cool off and give people
access to cooler places in public spaces.
But it's takes a while. And cities are, you know, took
hundreds of years to build these cities.
It's going to take a long time to kind of reimagine them in a
way that is suitable for our rapidly changing climate.
How bad do you and the scientists working on this thing
heat is going to be? I worry about some place like
Phoenix potentially becoming uninhabitable.
I have a lot of faith in human adaptation and ingenuity, but
you can't fight the wet bulb effect to some degree either.
Like how how much room is there for us actually to figure this
out? Or what places will have to be
abandoned? Well, you know, when you ask,
you know, will places become uninhabitable?
You know, the first response to that is like uninhabitable for
who and at what cost, right? I mean obviously.
We can live on Mars if we have enough infrastructure and enough
money and you know, the right kind of rockets and all that
kind of thing. You know, I'm just reading a
book right now about these submarines that are voyage down
to the deepest parts of the ocean trenches.
You know, I mean, we can survive in all kinds of extreme
climates. It's just for how long and who
and what cost. So, you know, Phoenix is.
And has been a boom town because it's a place with cheap real
estate, low taxes. Everybody wants to go there and
hang out in their shorts and their flip flops.
And, you know, it's sort of there's something, you know,
kind of everybody likes warm weather.
Well, not everybody, but most people prefer warm weather.
It's it's. So there's a lot of virtues to
it. But those virtues very quickly,
you know, get reversed when temperatures get too high.
You know, once. It's one thing to be hanging out
in Phoenix in 100 degree weather.
It's another thing to be hanging out in Phoenix in 120 degree
weather. And it's one thing to be hanging
out in Phoenix in 120 degree weather if you have plenty of
money and you can afford to air condition your place and you
don't care about the electricity costs.
It's another thing if you're working as a waitress in a
restaurant, you've got three kids and you're trying to, you
know, feed your family and then you've got, you know, $600.00
electric bill because your electric.
Your air conditioner is, you know, ancient and inefficient
and you can't afford to run it very often.
So you know, it's a different thing if you're working in a
construction crew and you're outside than it is if you're
working inside, you know, as a lawyer or something.
So these questions of uninhabitability really depend
on who you're talking about and and and at what cost.
But you know, it's very clear that in these.
As these temperatures continue to rise, the Phoenix that people
know and love, or Vegas or Austin for that matter, that
people have known and loved or is going to be very different in
the future. So in a case like Southern
Florida, maybe where are we going to adapt to that?
Are people just going to keep pumping water out or will they
have to leave? Is is flooding in that way maybe
even more severe because it will require urban abandonment?
Or are we just going to double down on all these things and
keep innovating and adapting to all of these changing
environments? Well, again, I don't think it's
an either or thing. You know, there will be places
that will adapt better than others.
You know, you can adapt to rising seas.
There's things that you can do. You know, Miami, Tampa, all
those places. New Orleans, you know the whole
Galveston here in Texas, all of these place Norfolk on the East
Coast. Are all hugely at risk with
rising seas. And you know, on one level
rising seas can be dealt with by elevating structures and
changing building codes and things like that.
But you know other parts of it can't or are much more
difficult. Like changing where airports are
for example, that are often on low lying places, changing
septic systems that are dependent upon water levels for,
you know, sanitation. Just even elevating roads and
things like that. I mean at certain point the cost
of, I mean could you engineering wise, could you elevate all of
Miami 3 feet, 4 feet, 5 feet, Yes, you could.
You know it would cost bazillions of dollars and why
would anybody want to do it? But you certainly could.
And so there will be places that spend more and more money on
adaptation, sea walls and things like that and.
They will become islands of, you know, habitation in these in
these higher sea level zones and then there will be vast swaths
of places that are just deemed not worth putting the money into
and abandoned. And it'll it'll have a varied
the coastline will be. It will look very different than
it does now. Which places do you see changes
likely to happen? One potential I saw was labor
laws around heat. Is that going to become much
more regulated moving forward? You have stories, one particular
out of Oregon, about a nursery worker dying.
Is there going to be action on that?
Is that something that's likely to change?
Well, you would hope because it's not expensive way to save
lives, right? All you require is, you know,
small things like requiring shade and water breaks every.
You know, hour for 10 or 15 minutes during when heat levels
get high is not, is not, doesn't seem like it would be difficult
thing to do. But, you know, OSHA has been,
you know, the Department of Labor has been working on
federal regulations for heat standards for seven years now.
And they still can't manage to do it because all the
corporations complain that it'll hurt their productivity if they
have workers, you know, hanging out under a tree for 15 minutes
and drinking water. Here in Texas, two weeks ago,
during the height of the heat Dome here when it was, you know,
112 degrees, 113 degrees here in Austin, the mayor, I mean the
governor of of Texas, Greg Abbott, signed legislation
prohibiting any city or county in Texas from instituting any
laws requiring water or shade breaks.
And again in the. Idea that this was going to hurt
productivity and stuff. So, you know, I don't know where
this is going to go. You would think if it were a
rational world that yes, there would be increased heat
standards and you know that there would be laws that keep
workers from dying while they're on their jobs.
But you know, that may not be the world we live in right now.
It's been remarkable to see how much action has occurred since
the Delta lawsuit over policy representing offsets that they
were buying. Like how much movement that has
had in the voluntary carbon market space.
Wouldn't surprise me if there was a torcious claim from or
even a class action lawsuit against some set of employers
for heat related injury and death that would maybe create
the regulation just through the common law, just through the
courts. It wouldn't surprise me if that
happened. Maybe.
Maybe for you. Would that surprise you?
No, it wouldn't. I mean I think lawsuits are of
all of all sorts on these issues are gaining a lot of power.
You know I'll note that the a county in in in Oregon.
The County of the Portland is located in is is suing.
It has filed a class action lawsuit against big oil
companies for the heat wave that killed 1000 people in the
Pacific. Northwest in in 2021, suing for
damages and loss. You know, it's one of the
cascading number of these sorts of lawsuits around the world
that we're basically arguing that the fossil fuel industry
has known for a long time with the consequences of their of the
continuing to burn fossil fuels has been that they've waged A
disinformation campaign very effectively about that.
And that they are in some way to be determined by the courts, you
know, liable for the losses and damages that are related to
this. And you know, and I've been
covering climate change for 20 years and there's no question
that it just in the last five years the momentum on these
lawsuits has really accelerated. And you know, it's been, it's
been pushed along by these revelations that have come out
about. Exxon Mobil's modeling and how
good it was in the 70s on on on warming related to CO2 and on
what's called attribution science, where climate modelers
can now say with virtual certainty, as they did with the
Pacific Northwest heat wave, that it would not have happened
without elevated CO2 in the atmosphere.
So it's not all events can be attributed that clearly
sometimes you know like there was an extreme.
Flooding event in Pakistan last year that they looked at also
for attribution and they basically decided that no this
we can't. This you know may well have
happened without the elevated CO2.
We can't describe describe it ascribe it specifically to that.
But with heat waves are particularly are are easier to
to attribute and not every heat wave can they directly can.
They say this would not have happened without.
See you too. But a number of them they've
been able to, and the Pacific Northwest heat wave was one of
them. That was surprising to me that
that level of attribution is even possible or getting getting
better over time. Because this is one of the
things that I saw people fighting over the the broad
details of climate science about.
Oh well, there's just more monitoring stations, people live
more places. Of course there's more damages
that are crew over time because people live more places they're
living, so. Is that really are there really
more extreme weather events or bigger ones or is it just for
better at measuring them now? This is sort of the anti climate
change is a real threat camp arguing this.
It seems like progress has been made.
People can say there is a relationship between this CO2
levels and an extreme climate event or extreme weather event.
Yeah, I mean and like I said, not every event and you know can
they because what they basically do is they have very
sophisticated models that allow them to run a counterfactual.
They can run the model, you know, they can program into the
model like what happened and then they can run the same model
with lower levels of CO2 and see if they get a similar or same
result. And it's, it was very new
science 10 years ago, but it's gotten really, really good
recently. And the lawyer, I've talked to
some lawyers about it and people who had been skeptical and you
know, they're basically saying, yeah, this is good enough to
hold up in court. So you know, the day will come
very soon when we can point to a extreme event, not all extreme
events, but some extreme events and say this was caused by
elevated CO2 levels, which means basically it was caused by
burning fossil fuels. I mean, that would be a game
changer. I remember watching the Trump
indictment stuff and even if there's a men's raya
intentionality component to it, where like he would have wanted
a coup to happen, The idea that you could say like his ideas,
his words led to a onetoone relationship between what
happened after that is super hard to prove.
But if you could prove that, that's that's the whole thing.
You have intentionality and you have the action that occurred.
But climate change may be at the point of of having that.
Yeah. Again, not for every event and
not in all cases, but in a lot of events.
And I I would encourage anyone who's interested in this.
I have a whole chapter in my book about this about the whole
history of attribution science, and it's a chapter called
Anatomy of a Crime Scene Man. It focuses on one climate
researcher who's particularly well known in this field named
Frederica Otto and who is in in the UK and her work is really
phenomenal. And in fact, her recent report
about these heat domes in the US that was just released like a
week ago was on the front page of the New York Times and most
of other newspapers around the world and again pointed to these
heat waves and saying, yes, these were caused by elevated
CO2 levels. And so this is not some kind of
fringe hocus pocus. See, you know, science, some kid
modeling stuff in the basement at MIT.
This is really serious, mainstream stuff that I think
can have a dramatic implications on both the legal and the sort
of moral status of this relationship between fossil
fuel, fossil fuel companies and climate damages.
Yeah, that relationship really tightens up pretty quickly if
you have all those elements. It certainly caught my ear.
And listen to this and in my eye and reading this, one of the
thing that caught my attention is the importance of naming heat
waves in the fights over that. Can you retell that story here?
Well, I mean, one of the difficult things about heat
waves and about understanding heat in general is that there's
no visual component to it. So unlike a hurricane, where you
look out your window and if the wind's blowing 5 miles an hour,
it looks very different than when the wind is blowing 70
miles an hour. And you can just tell very
quickly what's going on. You know, I'm looking at my
window right now here in Austin. And, you know, I know that it's
107 degrees, but it doesn't look any different looking out the
window than it would if it were 70 degrees.
And so visually, we have a very hard time understanding the
risks of heat. And so there's a group of
meteorologists and A and a nonprofit group called the
Adrienne Arsht Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center,
who's really been pushing this idea of naming heat waves
similar to the way that we name storms, with the idea that it
helps people communicate in shorthand about the risk.
And like, if we know, you know, Hurricane Katrina is coming and
then everyone can kind of get that idea and it just, it
becomes a kind of communication shorthand for weather casters
and others to communicate the risks of this.
And there's a lot of controversy about it because unlike unlike
hurricanes, for example, which are rated strictly on wind
speed, you know, 80 miles an hour, I don't remember the exact
category, which category 123, where the wind speed rank is,
but they're ranked by wind speed, wind speed.
You can't do the same thing with temperature because you know 100
degrees in Phoenix is very different than, you know, 100
degrees in, you know, Bangor, ME and what people are used to how
wet. You know there's a big
difference between dry heat and wet heat.
You know the the dangers are different depending on how
prepared buildings are, how many people have air conditioning,
all that kind of thing. But anyway, it's an attempt to.
This idea of naming heat waves is an attempt to help make them
visible, you know, and there's all this informal naming going
on. You know, they're they now.
Right? Literally in the papers
yesterday in the in the Times, there was a story about these
environmental groups or climate activist groups in Europe naming
these heat waves that are hitting Italy right now after
oil companies, you know, and in order to connect them more
clearly. And so I I think it's kind of
inevitable that we will have a kind of some kind of formal
naming system for heat waste because we need to do something
to do a better job of communicating about them.
I imagine the surprise many people experience your book with
too. Is my reaction.
Pretty common where they're just like didn't realize this was as
big a deal as it is now. And it's a Do we need to do all
this now? Do we need to start naming these
heat events? Am I?
Am I alone in thinking this? Yeah.
I mean it's a new idea for sure. And you know whether we need to
start naming them now, I I don't even know.
I mean I think there's a lot of people who who think it's a
really good idea. I I I think that, you know I
think it's a good idea too. But I don't think it's like job
one. I think you know the a more
important idea is simply some kind of a ranking system.
So if people are because people get stuck on, like what should
we name them and should we name them after Greek gods?
Should we name them after oil company?
Should we do them alphabetical? Should we?
There's all kinds of politics in naming.
And I think that you know, just getting better at ranking and
messaging about them and having weathercasters talk about them
is, is what's kind of really important.
And whether that is just a ranking system like red, yellow,
orange, you know, something like that or numerical system or
naming something that helps people communicate about the
kind of risk that is coming with this heat wave.
And. And to prepare for it.
Right. To check in on people to make
sure that you're, you know, if you have air conditioning you
that it's working and all that kind of thing that you have.
If you don't, you have access to cooling centers not to go
outside at certain times of the day.
All these kinds of simple precautions that people take to
stay safe during extreme heat events.
I haven't read one of your earlier books about
geoengineering, but you do tell a story about cross country
skiing across Baffin Island with David Keith, which is a great
yeah. Wasn't on my bingo card for this
podcast about this book. Didn't expect that to happen.
But you were covering this beat. A long time ago, about carbon
removal, about geoengineering, when those things were much
closer than they are now. I feel like they're very
distinct, or at least often people in the carbon removal
camp like them to be distinct categories.
How's this change since you first wrote that book, which was
I think 2010? Is that when you're
geoengineering? Yeah.
So much has happened, yeah. So much has happened since then,
You know, obviously, you know the solar, the solar
geoengineering part, which is the idea of putting particles in
the stratosphere to sort of reflect the way heat is, still
remains a kind of taboo subject. There's nobody doing it, they.
Still, there's a startup that was doing it.
They got a bunch of attention. I don't know if you saw that
they weren't actually doing it. I mean they were trying to do
little science, little experiments, but I mean no one's
doing it in the sense of flying airplanes around and actually
trying to manipulate the, you know, the Earth's climate.
So it's still a a kind of, you know, last ditch nobody wants to
talk about, but we may have to do someday kind of ideas.
And so it's that's kind of where it was 10 years ago, 13 years
ago when I wrote the book. It's advanced a little bit, but
it's still on the fringes of science.
Carbon removal, as you know, is completely different now.
You know, I was with I remember visiting David Keith when he was
building his sort of little first carbon removal device in a
engineering Bay at University of Calgary.
And it was basically look like it, you know, looked like it was
made out of, you know, Silly Putty and toilet paper rolls.
I mean, it was, it was really a primitive thing.
And now, of course, Carbon Engineering is a big company of
companies like Occidental Petroleum, you know, saying
they're going to be the Tesla of carbon Removal.
You know, it's getting involved in the offset markets.
You know, airlines are really, I mean it's taken off in a big
way, you know. And so yes, they really have
sort of split in their in their acceleration into the future.
These two different ideas that 15 years ago were were lumped
under the same idea of geoengineering.
David Keith is probably the best illustration of that, who is
like firmly a godfather of both and so involved there.
I see many people, I don't want to out anyone in particular, but
many of the carbon removal people that I've spoken to
recently. That solar radiation management,
at the very least needs to be well understood, and many of
them think it's likely to be necessary even if we don't want
it. Do you think that's that's true?
Should we be supportive of more research and maybe even get
comfortable with the idea of deploying it?
Well, I don't actually don't think we should get comfortable
with the idea of deploying it. I think it's, you know,
something we don't want to do unless we have to do it.
But, you know, I think the idea that it's taboo to talk about,
that it's taboo to do any kind of principled research on, you
know, I think that we need to know.
I still think we need to even, and this is even this is very
controversial because a lot of people think that we should.
This should just be you know like one of those taboo areas of
science that nobody should tread into at all because the
potential consequences of fucking it up are so huge.
But I do think that you know we need to know more about about
the real life consequences of it.
And you know there's David and others have supported the idea
of small scale research where you actually, you know put part
some particulates in the atmosphere very, very small
amount that you know rains out almost immediately.
But just to get a real world distribution idea of how they
work. And you know, I I think more
knowledge is good in this context and I kind of support
the idea of of a well structured, well regulated, well
run scientific research project on this because there is some
sort of you know, tragic inevitability about this in the
sense that I think that it's the way we're going.
At some point somebody's going to try it and and the more we
know about it the better. But you know, I, I, I, I don't
know how you exactly structure that program and how you get the
rules in place and it's a very very, as you know and probably
most listeners know, it's an incredibly divisive and
emotional discussion whenever you bring up Geo engineering,
solar Geo engineering. I was surprised that I heard
people recently speaking with such comfort or it was almost
taken for granted, that it may just become inevitable at some
point that we will not decarbonize as fast.
You have multiple sections in your book where you just said we
need to stop burning fossil fuels.
That's the main thing we have to do.
Are we going to do that? And if not, we should prepare
ourselves for, you know, much more extreme measures to be
taken. But I don't think any of us.
Would choose that freely. Probably some people, but it's
unlikely that many would. Yeah, No, you'd have to be
insane to say, you know, we should just keep burning fossil
fuels and we're just geoengineer our way out of this.
I mean, that's that's insane. That makes no sense whatsoever.
But you know, the fact is, is we're not doing a very good job
of eliminating fossil fuels. And yes, renewable energy is
cheaper virtually everywhere in the world for new builds.
We're building a lot of it. But you know, the the scale and
speed that we have to do to really deep decarbonize, you
know, our power system is just enormous.
And so, you know, even though we're building a lot of
renewable power around the world, we're still, you know,
we're still burning a lot of fossil fuels.
When you look at the only metric that really matters which is the
CO2 levels in the Mauna Loa in a graph of of of CO2 in the
atmosphere, the the curve is just going up and up and up and
up. And so, you know, as long as
that curve keeps going up, as long as we keep adding CO2 into
the atmosphere, it's going to keep getting hotter.
And as it keeps getting hotter, we're seeing more and more of
these kinds of consequences. You know, that we didn't
anticipate and the risks we see even with these extreme heat
events now we're seeing how dangerous it is just at this
level. And when you think about, you
know, a kind of doubling of this, of the amount of heat that
we've added to the atmosphere over the next of the rest of
this century, that's really alarming as to what that would
mean for our lives and the lives of every living thing on this
planet. So, you know, we got to figure
something out. I, I, I, I don't know what the
answer will be, but we're, we're doing it once a great job of
changing the economic equation on renewable power.
You know, 15 years ago everybody was saying, oh, you got to build
coal and gas plants because we need to get cheap power to poor
people because, you know, energy is the the way is the engine of
development and we need to and we need development.
And that was sort of always true.
And then, you know, now that's flipped though.
If you want to get cheap power to people, the best way to do it
is renewable power, solar panels, winds and things like
that. So it's not an economic argument
anymore. Now it's now it's, you know
we've slipped into this sort of cultural argument stuff where
you know, do you believe what these people are telling you
about climate change? Do you believe science?
You know or do you or do you not, do you believe these you
know, elites are trying to run the world and you know George
Soros is is, you know in this conspiracy with Bill Gates to
control our energy systems. And it's just like these.
It's gotten entrenched and culture wars in a way that it
hadn't or it wasn't 10 years ago, and that's a very different
political dynamic. Really strange too, because
being dependent upon a couple big oil companies versus having
your own homestead generated power.
I feel like that's that back to the land smallscale
conservative, especially if you're like a populist
conservative of not being dependent upon the elites,
that's that's pretty powerful. You even see things like in
Texas, where renewables in certain parts of Texas have.
Surprisingly done quite well, and at least the reportage that
I've read about it and it apparently that's an economic
thing. It doesn't even get to the level
of culture. It's just about is this cheaper
and easier and less polluting. It's kind of just a simple
equation at that point, yeah. Well, you know, logic and
evidence and simple facts and things are are not a big part of
the discussion right now. But, you know, it's absolutely
true. I mean, I'm here in Austin, TX
and you know, it's the belly of the fossil fuel beast and you
know, nobody talks about it here or they don't talk about it
enough. But you know, Texas is the
leader in wind and solar in this country.
You know, during these extreme heat waves of the last couple of
weeks, we've been getting up to 30% of the power on the grid
from renewables, which is amazing.
And and not only that, it's cheaper.
And not only that, the reason we've be getting so much
renewables on the grid is because a lot of the thermal
plants have been going down because these thermal plants
have, you know, they're much more mechanical, right.
And it's a natural gas plant has a lot more moving parts that a
solar panel does. And these moving parts in this,
these, these the the mechanisms of thermal plants are much more
vulnerable to heat. So they go, they are more likely
to go offline during these extreme heat events, whereas
renewables thrive in this kind of climate.
And so Texas is proving the case that, you know, not only are
renewal is a renewable grid cheaper, but it's also more
reliable in these kinds of extreme conditions.
And for a place like for that to be happening in a place like
Texas is, I think a real landmark event.
And you know, in a rational world would be a real turning
point. But you know, we don't live in a
rational world. Jeff, about two years ago I
watched your debate. Can Carbon Removal bring us to
Net Zero? Do you remember that event?
Yeah. Why did it go so poorly?
It was one of the worst carbon removal discussions I've ever
seen. It would.
I feel like the the terms were not well defined.
People look at this Julio and Elizabeth Young.
Pierre Julio Friedman was the other discussant.
I feel like they were talking past each other and I think
Carbon removal people worried that's the future where carbon
removal gets tied up with carbon capture and in oil and gas and
are not well understood. Environmental justice people are
concerned, justifiably so, that Carbon Removal is going to
ignore their interest and create another cancer alley kind of
situation. Like petrochemical or just oil
and gas infrastructure generally causes.
Yeah, sorry to put you on the spot about that.
I know it wasn't wasn't your fault.
I probably got out of hand. But why?
Why was that such an intense carbon removal debate?
Well, yeah, I I don't really know why it was.
You know, I think that Julio and Elizabeth came at this from
entirely different perspectives. It it was an example of how far,
you know, the sort of two polarized parts of the climate
movement, energy movement really are, even though they're
ostensibly on the same side, you know, they don't understand each
other very well. There's a lot of confusion about
carbon removal, geoengineering, carbon capture.
You know, all of this stuff is very new to a lot of
environmentalists and environmental activists.
They don't really understand the difference in the what they're
talking about. And there's a been a lot of
distrust sowed by the oil and gas industry who have done a lot
of greenwashing over, you know, obviously over the decades.
And to some extent their embrace of of of this has not helped,
even though it has helped in the sense of moving it along
financially and engineering wise.
And, you know, there's a lot of virtues in, you know, a big
company like Occidental Petroleum or something like
that, really staking a claim on this.
But, you know, there's just this enormous gulf of distrust and
disinformation between these sort of various wings of the
environmental and climate movement that I think was on
display there. And then there was also just
personality stuff that you know, some people get along and
communicate better than others and the other sometimes people
are just on different wavelengths entirely.
I imagine you're at the very least, you're very curious about
carbon removal, and you have been for a long time.
Do you think that we're doing the right thing, or by focusing
our careers on carbon removal? Is that a good place to focus
right now? Do you think it's a sideshow?
Some combination? What do you, what do you think
about carbon removal? Well, I mean I think it's
obviously a really important technology long term.
I think you know there's no question in my mind that you
know we're going to develop technologies that let us kind of
modulate carbon levels. It's a that's a really important
idea you know and and so in that sense I I I think it's fabulous
and I think that all of this progress that I've seen in the
last decade around it is very encouraging and inspiring.
I think the problem is when it gets to be seen as or used as a
way just to continue burning fossil fuels, a way to extend
the life of oil and gas companies, a way to say, you
know, we don't have to worry about climate change because we
have these machines that can suck CO2 out of the atmosphere.
And people don't grasp this scope and scale of this project
to to really take meaningful amounts of CO2 out of the
atmosphere. How enormous this, you know,
scaling up has to be. And you know, the simple fact is
we are in a climate emergency right now and you know,
technologies that will make a difference in 70 or 80 years on
at scale, You know, that's great.
But we need to do stuff now and we need to like stop burning
fossil fuels now. We need to get off of fossil
fuels now. We need, you know, this.
We need to do both the shortterm, immediate emergency
stuff and the longterm, you know, thinking about technology,
thinking about stuff like carbon removal and stuff.
So I think that that sort of time scale gets confused and I
think that a lot of people feel that the amount of money that is
being poured into carbon removal is, you know, could be better
used in other ways. You know, it's very easy to see
how you can make money in carbon removal.
It's very hard to see how you can make money in adapting
cities to, you know, better weather, climate extremes.
You know you don't make it. You're not going to get make
billions of dollars building better bus stops for for people,
right? Or.
House company that does it do pretty well, yeah.
Or planting trees or being a building cooling centers or.
I mean, there's just a lot of things that we need to do in the
near term to keep people alive and to help our world adapt and
to move more quickly away from fossil fuels.
And I think a lot of people see carbon removable as a kind of
brain and money drain away from these more urgent measures seen.
A little bit of a sea change in carbon removal recently, where I
previously used to hear people say things like.
We should work with oil and gas because they have the
infrastructure and expertise to run the system in reverse, and I
don't hear that as much anymore. I think things like the Oxy CE
O's comments that happened recently saying that direct air
capture is going to extend fossil fuel infrastructure's
lifespan for decades. I think carbon removal companies
are increasingly skeptical about becoming a concubine to oil and
gas. You're nodding very
affirmatively. You think this is we should stay
away. I think that's a very dangerous
place to be because within the climate movement, you know, and
I mean there's just they are not a, you know when I say they
there's obviously all different kinds of actors in this world,
just as there are different kinds of people.
And by saying they you're painting with a very broad
brush. But, you know, they are have
proven themselves very well over the years to be, you know, not
good actors, right. That they have pulled political
levers, spent billions on disinformation, political
manipulation. There's a huge gulf of distrust
around, you know, when you look at the, what I don't even
remember the number now, what was it?
More than a trillion dollars in profits last year?
You know, I mean the enormous, you know, profits that they're
making during these extreme times.
And you know, there's just a lot of reasons to think that they
are not, you know, the best people to buddy up with in in at
a moment like this, both for the larger public good and even for
the good of people who are really, you know, engaged in in
Carbon Removal and who and I and I and I'm not dissing Carbon
Removal. I think it's a really important
technology. I just think it's a question of,
you know, where it fits into the larger movement and where
resources are sort of deployed, right?
Never really wanted an industry as powerful as that to be backed
into a corner where their only options are to be stranded or
nationalized or something like that, and hopefully having.
An honorable pivot available to them may be seized upon at some
point, but I'm increasingly comfortable with the idea that
I'm being naive, and maybe that is not forthcoming.
You don't You think they would just fight it all the way?
But I think you don't want to back them into the corner, do
you? Shouldn't they have, like, a way
out? Well, I mean, no one's talking
about shutting them down. There's no, like that's not
going to happen. You know, it's just a question
of like for example, you know, stopping new exploration, right,
saying you know we're not doing more exploration, we're not
giving you more permits to drill in the North Sea, We're not
giving you more permits to drill in the petroleum reserve in
Alaska. You know there is a finite end
and we are and you know you need to, we're going to sort of
enforce that, right. And from a government point of
view, you know, I I think that this is pretty obvious that the
strategy of oil and gas industry in general and again there are
good actors and bad actors in there, it's not monolithic.
There are certainly people who are doing a much more, a much
better job and are much more progressive and sort of
trustworthy than others. But you know, the basic idea and
as you just said with, you know, the comments about carbon
removal, is to extend this as long as possible, right to to
slow this transition down to renewables and to the
elimination of fossil fuels as long as possible for all kinds
of obvious balance sheet reasons, stranded assets, all
kinds of things. So to the degree that carbon
removal has become seen is become seen as just a tool to
extend that slow transition. That is a very bad place to be
politically for this technology because you're just going to be
seen as a tool for these larger interests and not as a solution,
but just as a tool. And that that is, I think, a bad
place to be. It's very strange to me too,
because if oil and gas companies were forced to pay for their
emissions to be truly negated with permanent carbon removal,
it would. Very radically change the
economics of oil and gas in general, like the price would go
up quite a bit and would hopefully encourage them to
decarbonize faster or to switch to being renewable energy
companies. I hope.
But I also. Yeah, I'll go ahead.
Yeah. Well, I just want to under score
that, you know, there are a lot of people working in the Carbon
Removal space who I like have huge respect for.
You know, you mentioned Julio Friedman before, a well known
figure in this space. I think he's fantastic.
I've known him for years. He's just fantastic.
I think David Keith is fantastic.
I think David Keith cares more about the planet and the climate
and the what the right strategy is and how to manage all of this
than almost anyone I know. So you know, I think that
there's a lot of really smart thoughtful people engaged in
this and and you know, so I I hesitate talking about it in a,
in a in a kind of broad kind of way.
But you know and at a certain at a certain point there's no,
there's no like you know how you control the technology is beyond
anyone's kind of reach, right. I mean these, for one thing,
these oil and gas companies have a lot of money and a lot of
money comes with a lot of power and you know, they can do with
this what they want. One proposal I've seen is to say
that carbon removal can be used for legacy emissions that
shouldn't be used for current emissions.
That might address a fair amount of the problem, Yeah.
And you know, I have to say that.
I mean, I wrote my book about all this thirteen years ago.
My this book we're talking about now.
The Heat Will Kill You First is took up four years of my life.
The book before that was about sea level rise.
And so I I do not want to like in any way advertise myself as
UpToDate on the latest proposals and sort of dynamics in the in
the carbon removal business because I am certainly not.
Oh, certainly not. Yeah.
That's a lot of beats to cover. There's too many things
happening in climate these days to to really cover all those
beats. Well, but the interesting things
for me. So, so like we're talking about
carbon removal. And you know, as I mentioned a
few minutes ago, I remember David Keith's first carbon
removal device made of, like I said of, you know, Silly Putty
and toilet paper rolls in the engineering base.
So it gives me a really interesting perspective on these
the movement of these technologies and and the
movement of the sort of climate and energy world in general.
You know, I mean, like I said, the economic change in how we
produce energy is so dramatic in the last, you know, 15 years.
And just this whole conversation, you know, shifting
away from, you know, the, the economics being reversed is such
an enormous deal that I think a lot of people just haven't
grasped yet. And you know, here in Texas, you
know, I moved here four years ago and you and you really feel
the sort of fossil fuels sort of legacy power, you know that they
have a lot of the institutions here that including the
government and state government but also universities,
philanthropic, philanthropic groups and all that are funded
by oil money. And there's a lot of cultural
and political inertia behind keeping that alive, even though
the economics don't really make sense anymore.
And so it's a really interesting kind of dynamic watching that
shift, you know, and watching these new energy, clean energy
entrepreneurs rising and and then, you know, Elon Musk moving
the Tesla Gigafactory here. And you know, Elon's a whole
other, you know, nightmare of paradox and contradictions.
But it's just so there's some advantage in being just having
been around long enough to watch a lot of these changes play out
over the landscape. Yeah.
What a, what a purview you've had and also listening to and be
like, wait, can I hear that right.
Is that, is this the same David Keith?
I'm like, oh, you're going on a month long vacation with David
Keith. You're as plugged in as anyone
to the latest in climate just by that much.
David Keith FaceTime. You're good, Jeff.
Yeah, in a little tent on ice in the middle of nowhere for six
weeks yet. I know, I know David very well
and and I can, I can only tell you that this trip and all the
things we went through and the many much hardship and
difficulty only increase my respect for him.
Yeah, it's very cool to hear. Well, the book is great.
If you're listening, you should definitely pick up a copy of The
Heat Will Kill You First. I very much enjoyed it And also
The Water Will Come is great. It's a great book because.
The work on the military preparedness angle that we
started the show with is fascinating.
I think people assume that the right left dynamic is going to
play out in the same way, and it doesn't When it comes to sea
level rise. It's super interesting
Reportage. Check out that one too.
I need to catch up on your old books.
Maybe next time we speak, I'll have all of them under my belt
and I'll be fully, fully ready for for your next one.
OK. Sounds good.
Well, thanks for being here, Jeff.
Thanks for having me. It's a great conversation.
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