This episode features Dr. Jane Zelikova, Chief Scientist at Carbon180, and Dr. Trisha Shrum, behavorial and environmental economist at the University of Vermont.
Jane organized The Royal Society's new Interface Focus issue on carbon dioxide removal called, "Going negative: An interdisciplinary, holistic approach to carbon dioxide removal". She additionally wrote an article in it, "The future of carbon dioxide removal must be transdisciplinary". Trisha also wrote an article in this issue, "Behavioural frameworks to understand public perceptions of and risk response to carbon dioxide removal". We walk through what this issue covers and then discuss in greater detail Trisha's research and the basics of behavioral economics & science and what that has to say about carbon removal.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to Carbon Removal Newsroom. I’m Ross Kenyon. I am the lead strategist at the Nori Carbon Removal Marketplace. Today I have with me two guests, one alumna, Dr. Jane Zelikova, Chief Scientist at Carbon 180. Hi, Jane.
Jane Zelikova: Hey, Ross. Thanks for inviting me back.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, always good to have you on. Jane, you just organized an issue, Volume 10, Issue 5, of the Royal Society’s Interface Focus publication on the theme of Going Negative, an Interdisciplinary, Holistic Approach to Carbon Dioxide Removal. And you also wrote a piece within it called The Future of Carbon Dioxide Removal Must Be Transdisciplinary. So that must be fun. The Royal Society, as an American, that’s just probably inherently impressive to you.
Jane Zelikova: Sounds fancy.
Ross Kenyon: It does sound fancy.
Jane Zelikova: Yeah, it took almost two years from the initial kind of idea to having the issue come out. So it’s two years of work on behalf of, you know, the folks that contributed the other pieces in the issue and just thinking about what an interdisciplinary scientific journal issue on CDR could look like and what topics should be represented. It was really fun.
Ross Kenyon: That’s great. So we’re going to work through this and Jane’s going to explain what she chose to cover in this issue and what is going on there. And then we’re also joined with an additional guest, Dr. Tricia Arshram, Behavioral and Environmental Economist at the University of Vermont. Hey, Tricia.
Trisha Shrum: Hello. Thanks so much for having me, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: It’s my pleasure to have you. First time. You co-wrote Behavioral Frameworks to Understand Public Perceptions of and Risk Response to Carbon Dioxide Removal. So we’re going to go into that one in more detail. But I think perhaps a good place to start is, Jane, what were your motivations in framing this issue in this kind of way? And how did you choose what went into it? And what actually is in it?
Jane Zelikova: Yeah, happy to. So I guess a little bit of like behind the issue, sort of like behind the music. The editor of this particular journal Interface Focus reached out interested in doing a special issue on CDR and really just wanted us carbon 180 as the carbon removal experts to think about what the cool emerging topics in carbon dioxide removal were and who the really interesting, compelling researchers in this space were and propose a series of papers that would go together into this thematically. Organized Journal. So that probably happened two years ago and it took a while to come up with a potential list of people and then reach out to them and see if they would be interested in writing something contributing to the issue.
So that’s kind of how the process went along. And then just because like there’s always attrition when people have to do work on top of work they’re already doing. I think I reached out to something like 15 or 20 different researchers working across the CDR space really widely and ended up, you know, with a much smaller number, I think eight total papers or nine total papers that were submitted and went through peer review and were published. So there was some attrition and not every topic that I would have wanted to include ended up being included in the final report.
The other considerations were, I think when we talk about carbon dioxide removal, we often focus on the technological capacity and maybe even the techno-economic potential, but we rarely talk about whether these CDR solutions should be deployed and how they should be deployed in real-world situations with real people. When I was thinking about organizing this, I really wanted to have a lot more contribution from folks working on the social science side to really frame the idea of CDR deployment very much from this perspective of should we, could we, and if we do, then how, making sure that deployment is equitable, safe, and doesn’t sort of perpetuate existing harms.
Ross Kenyon: Let’s work through this outline. Tell me about the individual pieces and then let’s conclude on Prish’s and then we can really sink our teeth and do it.
Jane Zelikova: Yeah, so the pieces kind of range from straight kind of here is why CDR research should include social sciences. So a group of researchers from Cornell University and myself and Rory Jacobson who used to work at Carbon 180 and is now a student at Yale Worked on this paper that essentially presented how social sciences should be integrated into CADR research and setting a bit of an example of how other disciplines have done something similar, integrating social and sort of physical sciences together. And using some concrete examples and setting a bit of a research roadmap.
So if we’re going to do this, here’s where we can start. Another paper in a similar vein is Holly Buck wrote a paper called Should Carbon Removal Be Treated as Waste Management? Lessons from the Cultural History of Waste, where she kind of sets waste management as an analogy for carbon dioxide removal and just managing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, providing some historical examples of other waste systems and other ways, you know, culturally that we’ve thought about waste and how we’ve moved from Different systems of waste management. And then she presents some opportunities to use the same framework, but also some really big cautions about some of the drawbacks that we should consider if we start thinking about CO2 as a waste.
Then another paper that looked at forest policy and management approaches to carbon dioxide removal. Folks from Colorado State University thought about forest-based CDR Some of the kind of governance issues around forest and some of the forest policy considerations that we should take into account as we create policy tools to balance managing forests, both for climate and other policy priorities, in part because we already do a lot of forest management and we have a lot of policy kind of on the books. The idea here is how can we integrate managing for carbon within existing policy structures and where do we need to create new ones?
Then kind of shifting gears a little bit, there was a paper on climate change mitigation potential in wetlands and the cost effectiveness of their restoration. They really, the folks that wrote that paper kind of did a biogeochemical and biogeoeconomical meta-analysis to figure out how coastal ecosystems could be restored and how they can do that at a cost-effective way. Next, Hannah Gosnell and Paige Stanley and Susan Charney wrote a paper called Climate Change Mitigation as a Co-Benefit of Regenerative Ranching, Insights from Australia and the United States. And they basically presented a framework for integrating social biophysical and policy disciplines together to address the scaling of regenerative agriculture more broadly.
With carbon sequestration as one potential co-benefit but recognizing in their social science research that is not the main motivator for farmers and ranchers who are implementing these practices.
Ross Kenyon: Jane are you finding that the link between the physical sciences and social sciences is particularly weak within carbon dioxide removal or is this just Endemic to many other fields, too. Or is just carbon removal so new that link hasn’t been made as of yet?
Jane Zelikova: In my experience, and I would love to hear what Tricia thinks. In my experience, it’s endemic. As someone who is trained in sort of ecosystem science biology, I... Rarely had the opportunity to work with social scientists or understand what social scientists do. Even just the training, graduate training was pretty siloed in my graduate program. And I know there are interdisciplinary programs and there are more and more of them kind of every, you know, every year there are more programs that focus on providing interdisciplinary education. But I think it’s still the exception, not the rule.
So in my experience, it’s, it’s an endemic of the whole kind of academy. That people work in silos, in disciplinary silos. So I don’t think it’s necessarily unique to CDR, but I think because CDR is a relatively new field of science and people are still kind of figuring out some fundamentals, they’re doing so without working explicitly with social scientists to root their work in like direct applications or even in like some of the social science disciplinary theory that I think It exists, it’s robust, the scholarship is robust, and it just isn’t being tapped into.
Trisha Shrum: Yeah, I would absolutely agree. There’s a huge problem with lack of collaboration between social scientists and natural scientists. We always talk about it being a problem, but there’s so many just fundamental issues in academia for what is rewarded and what is not. And siloed work kind of gets more rewards than a lot of transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary rewards. Like my background, I was trained as a I was training myself as an ecologist, as an undergraduate, was going to become, go into ecology and graduate school, but then shifted into social science. So my training is interdisciplinary just by By gathering way too many degrees and spending way too much time in grad school.
But it’s very rare to find the types of transdisciplinary departments that really promote this kind of work. Like, for example, when I was hired or when I found the job at my department, the Community Development and Applied Economics Department at the University of Vermont, It was an interdisciplinary economics department, which I didn’t even know existed. I’d never even heard of an interdisciplinary economics department. And it’s a department where we have all sorts of different types of mostly social scientists, but people who are working in And all different aspects of social science.
And we’re always interfacing with people from natural sciences. So, you know, our department at UVM is the exception rather than the rule. But I think that, as Jane said, you know, it’s starting to become more common. It’s commonly identified as a problem, as a blind spot in the way we conduct research. But hopefully we are moving towards a better, more integrated future of science.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’m used to seeing research, especially coming out of the Academy on carbon removal, being focused on the how, I guess in terms of the physical processes, but not necessarily how does this impact people or interact with political economy. I mean, that’s one of the reasons why Holly Jean Buck comes on the show as often as she does for reversing climate change is because that research I find very fascinating. I remember reading Some of Jane Flagel’s research too. Those questions are really, really interesting, but they certainly don’t get as much of the attention relative to the, can we do this?
How do we put it into reservoirs deep underground, et cetera?
Trisha Shrum: Yeah, that’s what really piqued my interest with this work where, you know, Jane brought together a bunch of social scientists. Gosh, how long ago was that? Probably close to two years ago, right?
Unknown speaker: Yeah, I think so.
Trisha Shrum: At our first, the first that I attended, Carbon 180 workshop, and got us all together thinking about carbon dioxide removal. And many of us really didn’t have much of a background in carbon dioxide removal. With the exception of Holly Buck and a number of people who have had been working on this question for a while. But the idea of coming in early and talking to, you know, engineers and scientists and policymakers, while this issue is still fresh, while it doesn’t have that much engagement or knowledge in the public, we can maybe Get ahead of the game and understand how these things will play out in a social world.
And we might be able to avoid some mistakes that would otherwise handicap a lot of these efforts.
Ross Kenyon: Well, maybe this is a good place to dive right into the paper that you actually you co-opted it with Holly. So that’s neat.
Trisha Shrum: Yeah, and I also have to give a huge shout out to our other co-authors, Ezra Markowitz, Holly Buck, of course, Robin Gregory, Sander van der Linden, Shazeen Atari, and Lee Fenn Boven. And they are just all very excellent, experienced behavioral scientists and social scientists who came together to really think deeply about this problem. And we really enjoyed digging into it.
Ross Kenyon: What exactly does this mean? I can imagine if you’re not within this field, this might be a bit word salad-y for you. Maybe break this down, give us, and especially me, I’m not even totally sure I understand the full repercussions of what you’re trying to do.
Trisha Shrum: The idea is that, you know, right now, most people don’t really know about carbon dioxide removal, or at least they don’t have strong opinions about it. Like a recent paper in Nature Climate Change by Emily Cox, Elspeth Spence, and Nick Pidgeon said that less than 10% of people in the country said they knew a great deal or a fair amount about carbon dioxide removal. So it’s a very small portion of the population that has even heard of this stuff. And some of them are open to it. Some of them are concerned about some of the negative impacts.
Some are concerned about the moral hazard that’s going to distract from other efforts. But most people just haven’t really made up their mind. So we’re kind of at this point where we have an opportunity to stop and think about how do we present these ideas and how do we Use what we know about how people think, how people make up their minds, how people evaluate risk, how emotion comes into play. Those individual psychological processes that psychologists and behavioral economists and other folks have been spending decades trying to understand. And then we also can pay attention to these social processes that really come into play, especially when we get into these issues like climate change, which for better or for worse, mostly for worse, has been highly politicized.
So between these individual psychological processes and these social processes, we have a lot of Knowledge about how people generally respond to things and we might be able to use that to try to improve the way we’re presenting Carbon dioxide removal technologies and understanding where people are not going to respond well and what kinds of reactions they might have that might shut down more rational discussions. And I said the word rational as if it was the right way to go, which I shouldn’t because we use both rational and emotional processing and that’s fine and that’s what makes us human.
But if we can understand how we think about things, then we can understand how to communicate things.
Ross Kenyon: So it seems like your work builds on but makes more complex some of the assumptions made in rational choice theory, which is the foundation of microeconomics and much else. We should probably do a full proper episode on behavioral economics and behavioral science, but could you maybe give us an outline, a little spark notes for people who are new to this discipline entirely?
Trisha Shrum: Sure. So in economics, rational choice theory, as you mentioned, is this idea that we all have, we all are able to take in information about a given decision, a given problem, and we take in all the benefits, we take in all the costs, we assign probabilities to all those different types of outcomes, and then we do a little calculation in our head, and we end up with a decision that incorporates all that information in a rational way As one would do if they had just, you know, created an equation that put probabilities on outcomes.
So it kind of says, you know, they call this homo economicus is the term that we use very straightforward rational processes to make decisions. But it turns out that humans are actually a lot more complicated than that. And we have a lot of different things that affect And those things are not, it’s not like it’s irrational. It’s not like there’s anything wrong with the way we are built. It’s just that It leads to unexpected outcomes compared to this base case where you’re expecting everyone to just, you know, you give them a platter of information and then they process it like a computer.
That’s just not how it works in the world. So behavioral economics kind of comes in and says, psychologists have been studying people and their brains for a long time. Let’s take a look at how they think people actually make decisions. And they bring in a lot of the insights that psychologists have been developing for decades and apply them to economic models so we can better understand How people are actually behaving, how people actually respond to information, and what other factors that aren’t included in rational choice theory have a big impact on people’s beliefs and decisions.
So things like emotion, things like framing, things like where they get the information, who tells them what, seeing what other people do. So basically we’re trying to give a richer understanding Look at human decision making to better understand how to interact and how to communicate and how to design policy.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, one of the most basic behavioral interventions that I think about is defaults. So for instance, is it opt in or opt out for being an organ donor when you get your driver’s license?
Trisha Shrum: Right.
Ross Kenyon: That has a big impact, right?
Trisha Shrum: Right. Or like, you know, like, for example, when I got my last job, we had this extremely generous retirement fund where they give us, you know, this really nice, nice perk. I failed to sign up for it for months and lost out on thousands of dollars because I procrastinate and I had a million things to do and just I was always going to do this thing later. A rational choice Theory would predict that there’s no way I would just throw away money like that when it’s like a five minute investment.
So if you change the default, then you can really affect behavior and really affect, um, Welfare as well. I wasn’t better off because I procrastinated on signing up for my retirement fund. It wasn’t a choice that I made and wanted to defend my freedom to make that choice. It was a choice I just failed to make. So default is a really big one. Nudges can really help in a lot of different ways. Even just like, do we put fruit or candy bars near the register? That can really affect people’s calorie intake at a cafe.
We can look at How we talk about different issues and paying attention to the way we’re framing Situations and risk, like with the CDR, the issue of how natural these different technologies are viewed is a big piece, you know, like how we react to those things, we have an emotional reaction. So straight up traditional economic theory wouldn’t account for these things, but we try to kind of bring them in and we try to walk through, the whole article kind of reads as a, Behavioral Science 101 and Social Science 101, to some extent, and how it might apply to CDR.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, how might it? I’m trying to think, or at least pretend I haven’t read this. How might this apply to CDR? Because I can imagine someone struggling to make the leap between the examples we just gave and where this fits in with carbon removal.
Trisha Shrum: Sure. So going back to the natural processes. So one paper found, this is Corner and Pigeon from Climatic Change. They found that if they framed carbon dioxide removal as an analogy of a natural process, like direct air capture works like artificial trees. Like that’s a really nice way of explaining direct air capture because it’s, sure, it doesn’t look anything like a tree, but the idea that we’re sucking carbon dioxide out of the air and It’s an analogy versus if you explain it as a chemical process involving large machinery. It probably doesn’t come as a surprise that people would have more support for a policy that’s described as it works like artificial trees compared to it works as a chemical process.
But when you’re talking about a technology, especially if you’re a natural scientist describing your work, You tend to get, you tend to focus on the details of what you do and like what’s the nitty gritty of here’s how these different chemical processes work and here’s the inputs and here’s the outputs and oh by the way the risk is really low. But what comes across to people who often don’t understand all of the ins and outs of the jargony discussions, they just think chemical, process, machinery, like that sounds scary.
Ross Kenyon: That sounds scary.
Trisha Shrum: Yeah. So it brings up what we call dread risk. Whereas if you can make it clearer and make it Use kind of what people already know to explain a new technology. It just reduces that dread risk, reduces those kind of the emotional reaction that you would have to that type of technology. So, I mean, I was just looking up You know, headlines on carbon dioxide removal. And, you know, one of them was, you know, using rocks and farmlands to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Like, that is a really nice description of enhanced weathering.
Now, enhanced weathering, like, what does that mean? That doesn’t sound like anything.
Jane Zelikova: Yeah, I still don’t know what that means. I have read that paper.
Trisha Shrum: Yeah, enhanced weathering, like that sounds kind of scary or sounds like weird or unfamiliar, but using rocks and farmland to remove carbon dioxide, that sounds fine. That doesn’t get up any of my dread risk or my concern about something not being natural. So even though carbon dioxide removal is, some of it is a natural process, some of it’s just kind of leveraging a natural process and kind of amping it up. If we can talk about it in ways and just think about how not only what we’re saying and not only the facts and the information that we’re trying to convey, but how that information is received.
So just thinking about how something is received in the other person’s brain before you say it or before you craft a policy around it or before you try to Increase public awareness on it can really change that initial first impression. And so with CDR, we have this opportunity to make a good first impression to a lot of the public. So we have to be, we should be thoughtful about it.
Ross Kenyon: Maybe the switch is that, you know, I used to have this view that we are presented with information and we evaluate that and integrate it and come to decisions. And then I’ve read Stuff like Jonathan Haidt’s research and others that talk about also just like behavioral economics is somewhat based on this idea that humans do have a fundamental irrationality in how they make decisions and how many biases and fallacies they fall prey to. So is it how to persuade people given that information doesn’t persuade people as you might initially think because of those gaps in how our brain works?
Is that kind of on the right track?
Trisha Shrum: Yeah, that’s kind of on the right track. And I also don’t want to say that we’re here to be the marketing service for CDR because in some cases, the risks do need to be well understood and that we are not always sure exactly what the risks of some of these technologies are. So it’s not that, I just want to put that caveat in there. But the idea that If you were trying to talk about direct air capture or some other type of technology, and you’re trying to make people feel like it’s a safe technology, you might tell someone that, oh, there’s a 0.
001% chance that the carbon dioxide that we Mm-hmm.
Unknown speaker: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Trisha Shrum: But the thing is, is that we often instead of using those probabilities, like you think that a 0. 001 or 0. 001 or however many, whatever the probability is, you think that is going to provide them with like a reassurance, whereas they’re saying like, wait, So you’re saying there’s a chance? That sounds bad. And instead of anything that moves away, people are really sensitive to deviations from certainty. So if there’s a 0% chance versus a 0. 001% chance, that’s actually perceived as a large difference. And... Keeping that in mind is really important.
So people kind of fall back onto what we call the affect heuristic. So instead of thinking about these probabilities and outcomes and weighing those in a rational way, we really think about taking the information and then we really assess how we feel about it. And this is, you know, you call it going with your gut. This is actually a really useful thing that our brain gives us. People who don’t have this ability will just spin endlessly and never make a decision. They’re like, well, I don’t know, white bread or wheat bread?
I don’t know. I just can’t decide. Actually, like that emotional check on your decision making is how we stop the wheels from turning forever and leaving us with indecision. But it also leaves you vulnerable if you don’t have a lot of information to start with. Or you don’t have strong opinions to start with. It leaves you vulnerable to influence from people who might want to color a certain technology as either like scary or maybe it’s like a cop out. They can color that in ways that would elicit fear or disgust or like a negative association.
Like for example, The only public relations things I’ve seen on carbon dioxide removal is from oil companies that are advertising, or maybe fossil fuel companies in general, advertising how they are going to create this green future. Well, like, in some sense, it’s great, like, it’s good for them for, you know, Trying to reduce the carbon dioxide load in the atmosphere. But if the first messenger that you hear about carbon dioxide removal, if that first messenger is the fossil fuel companies, then that level, any distrust that you might have on Any distrust you might have of fossil fuel companies then kind of gets transferred onto this technology and you think that they’re just trying to greenwash or trying to find a way to continue to emit, trying to continue to get oil and gas forever and ever, which, you know, it may or may not be true that’s the case, but you just have to be aware of how that might influence people’s risk perceptions and perceptions of the technology moving forward.
Because, like, right now we’re at this point where people don’t have these strong opinions, but once those opinions form, they’re much more difficult to move and to convince them of an opposing viewpoint.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, that makes sense. Thanks for clearing that up. We should also probably just have a more dedicated conversation on this topic because I love watching the fights over paternalism within behavioral science and economics. And I think those questions are really fascinating. So let’s revisit that. We totally should in greater depth. But Jane, maybe you could help take us home here. And what happens now? Like, is this... Are you expecting anything to come out of this? Is this a nice byline for your CV? What happens?
Jane Zelikova: Yes. Well, it is nice to add something to my CV. It’s been feeling a little stagnant lately, so that’s always a bonus. But I think the biggest thing is I know some of the authors of the papers that are in this issue have already reached out to me that they’ve had a lot of positive feedback. People are reading the papers and reaching out to them. So I think part of what we want always as authors of any peer-reviewed scientific work is that people read it. And have opinions and reach out.
So I think that’s already happening and I hope it continues to happen as more people read these papers. The other thing I think is just to continue pushing towards a more transdisciplinary field of CDR where folks that are working on the specific technologies or a specific chemical reaction are not just interfacing with but Talking consistently with social scientists to help frame the research that they’re doing at the start. So we want those integrations, the interdisciplinary part of it to be foundational to CDR research and not as an afterthought. And I hope that this issue maybe takes one small step towards getting there.
And so even though we didn’t tackle every single CDR pathway, And we didn’t sort of like work on embedding social science into every solution that we discuss. I think this issue presents a bit of a blueprint of what transdisciplinary research agenda for CDR could look like and what deploying CDR in the real world could be informed by.
Trisha Shrum: Yeah, and I would also add to that, that there’s more questions raised than necessarily we have answers for, because we can come up with, we can kind of pull out what we know from other applications, but there’s been really very little research so far. I think that this issue is a huge step forward, so I think Jane’s doing excellent work on that. But there just hasn’t been a lot of research into how to frame Carbon Dioxide Removal, how to inform people accurately about the opportunities and the risks of these different technologies.
So I think there’s a lot of work to do, and we hope to be moving forward with that as well.
Ross Kenyon: Terrific. And if you’d like to read it for yourself, the link is in the show notes. It is in the Royal Society’s Interface Focus publication, and it is called Going Negative, an Interdisciplinary Holistic Approach to Carbon Dioxide Removal. So Jane and Trisha, thank you for being here.
Trisha Shrum: Thanks so much for having us.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it was great. And I’ll put links to all of the things that you’re involved with in the show notes if you’d like to follow up with either of them. And thank you so much for listening. Please write us a review on iTunes or Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. That sort of thing helps quite a lot if you use those platforms. And thanks again for being a fan and for checking us out and share it out. So thank you.
