2020 Democratic presidential primary contender Andrew Yang discusses his plans for carbon removal and geoengineering if elected United States president. https://www.yang2020.com/policies/climate-change/
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hey, I’m Ross Kenyon from the Nori Carbon Removal Marketplace. Thanks so much for listening to Carbon Removal Newsroom. If you dig the show, share it out, give us a great review and rating in iTunes or Apple Podcasts as they’re calling it these days. We’d all be very grateful if you would. It helps us bring the show to more people and broaden the This episode is a fun first. I’ll see you next time. This is my first time as part of a press gaggle so me and the good folks at GeekWire were I thought Andrew’s answers were so interesting because they seem to prioritize geoengineering solar radiation management solutions over carbon removal, which, as you may already know, is much more controversial than sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere through regenerative agriculture, afforestation, direct air capture, etc.
In any case, I appreciate the plain speaking on this topic. I think it’s necessary and valuable and I appreciate that someone is willing to do that. It isn’t as common as one might think. So judge for yourself. Here it comes. Andrew, I’ve noticed that you’ve made carbon removal and geoengineering a part of your platform for climate change. How important is that and what do you plan to do?
Andrew Yang: So the last four years have been the four warmest years in recorded history and climate change is clearly accelerating in its impact on our planet and soon our way of life. And unfortunately, even if we were to go very aggressively towards renewables, The fact is right now the horse is probably out of the barn and the United States only accounts for about 15% of global emissions so even if we were to cut our emissions very quickly you’d still probably be slowing the rate of warming incrementally. To me it’s only responsible for us to start trying to mitigate some of the worst effects of climate change.
Certainly a carbon fee and dividend would help internalize the cost of emissions and redistribute that value to hopefully Are you looking at things like regenerative agriculture?
Ross Kenyon: Are you talking about direct air capture in addition to geoengineering as far as carbon removal goes?
Andrew Yang: Yeah, certainly to the extent that we can capture carbon and sequester it in various ways, I think we should be planting a lot of trees, but also some of the other measures that have been discussed like seeing if sulfur clouds are warm.
Ross Kenyon: I noticed that you wanted to fund a center that would be funded by the federal government for looking into geoengineering and carbon capture. How exactly might that work?
Andrew Yang: So, there was a group of academics who tried to come together and have a geoengineering conference a couple years ago in the US and then there was some movement in the UN saying, hey, maybe we should look into this and then someone put the kibosh on it and it didn’t happen. Now, you don’t need that much in the way of research. And I think that’s what I’m talking about. And say, hey, like, you know, NOAA or NIH or whichever agency you decide you want to lead it, just put like a modest level of resources and just say, look, we should convene a geoengineering conference.
And there are already academics working on that here in the US and around the world. It wouldn’t allow them to come out into the open. We’re decades behind the curves in terms of openly discussing this.
Unknown speaker: So there you have it.
Ross Kenyon: In the show notes, I’ll link to the climate change portion of Andrew Yang’s platform. There’s a lot more to say on this topic, and I wish we had more time to dig into the details. So maybe I’ll get a chance to at some point in the future. It’s possible Andrew Yang speaking about carbon removal, as well as Washington Governor Jay Inslee speaking about soil sequestration lately, nudges other candidates to speak on carbon removal. In my humble analysis, carbon removal is not fully in the mainstream image of what needs to be done on climate change yet.
The Yang campaign has made an effort to lead on some of these issues and not take their cues from elsewhere, so it isn’t surprising to see them take a strong position here, but it isn’t quite a tentpole issue for anyone at this time, at least as far as I’ve seen. I would be very happy to be corrected about this if anything changes. If you haven’t already, please check out our other podcast, Reversing Climate Change. And until next time, thank you so much.
