Panelists Dr. Holly Jean Buck of the University at Buffalo and Chris Barnard of the American Conservation Coalition join host Radhika Moolgavkar of Nori for this policy-focused episode of Carbon Removal Newsroom.
In April of 2021, Raj Kumar Singh, an Indian energy Minister, said at a UN conference that rich countries need to be net-negative and remove atmospheric co2 to account for historical emissions. While decades of climate diplomacy focused on emissions to come, Singh worked to shift the conversation towards pollution already emitted.
Later last year, journalist and author of popular climate book The Uninhabitable Earth David Wallace-Wells penned Climate Reparations in New York Magazine.
The long-form piece connected the inequitable effects of climate change, more drastically and quickly hitting tropical and global south countries, with the political outcomes made possible by carbon removal technology.
He points out that half of emissions come from 10% of the world’s population and that climate change has already decreased the GDP of some global south countries, while it has increased GDPs in the global North. This dynamic will continue and will widen already stark global wealth inequalities.
Wells reviews the field of technical CDR and finds that while it could present temptation for delay, it also provides revolutionary possibilities if historical emitters are made to pay to remove their pollution.
He calls this ‘climate reparations’ and quotes philosopher Olufemi Taiwo (who coined that term) “It’s just so clear to me that carbon removal is squarely the kind of thing that fits into the reparations framework.”
In this episode, we discuss the Wallace-Wells' piece and zoom in on climate reparations and climate colonialism, defining these phrases in more depth and explaining how these approaches might impact policies and institutions.
We also discuss the idea that carbon removal is not limited by physics, so what is carbon removal scaling limited by?
We round out the episode with the good news and the interesting news of the week, then we bid a warm farewell to our beloved co-host Holly, who will be going on sabbatical for the year. We will miss you Holly and look forward to seeing you back on the show!
Full Transcript
Announcer: You’re listening to Carbon Removal Newsroom, a weekly show about current events in the world of carbon removal, from technology and innovation to policymaking and job growth. Brought to you by Nori, the carbon removal marketplace.
Radhika Moolgavkar: [music] Hello, everybody, and welcome to the January 13th episode of Carbon Removable Newsroom. This week, we’re going to be looking at policy. With me, as always, is Holly Jean Buck, Assistant Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University at Buffalo. Hi, Holly.
Holly Jean Buck: Hello.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Also, as always, is Chris Barnard, Policy Director at the American Conservation Coalition. Hey, Chris, how are you doing?
Chris Barnard: I’m good. Good to be here.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Cool. And... As always too, this is Radhika Moolgavkar, Head of Supply and Methodology at NORI. So today we’re going to go a little bit back in time for a long form article that was written in the New York Magazine back in the fall. It was called Climate Reparations and the Case for Carbon Removal. I am going to let Holly maybe do a little bit of an overview of it because she was extensively credited in that article and quoted in that article. So Holly, maybe you can give our listeners an overview.
Holly Jean Buck: So this is a long form article and there’s been a few discussions of this topic. One notable point is that in April of last year, an Indian energy minister said at a UN conference that rich countries need to be net negative and could remove atmospheric CO2 to account for historical emissions. That was kind of people, you know, their ears perked up at that. And I think a lot of this long form piece, it talks about climate inequality, how it’s hitting tropical and global south countries, but most of the emissions come from the global north.
So is there a responsibility for those global north countries to remove carbon? Arguably so. A lot of this comes from the work of Dr. Alufemi Taiwo, He just published a book this month called Reconsidering Reparations, and it talks about climate reparations as part of kind of an overall look at that.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So Holly, do you agree with the maybe Taiwo’s, I hope I’m saying that right, premise that the world has to choose between climate reparations and climate colonialism?
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, maybe I’ll talk just very quickly kind of what he might mean by those terms if listeners aren’t familiar. So in terms of climate reparations, Taiwo says that these aren’t one-off payments. He says climate reparations, and I’m quoting, are better understood as a systemic approach to redistributing resources and changing policies and institutions that have perpetuated harm rather than a discrete exchange of Money or apologies for past wrongdoing. So he sees this as like a systemic transformation. Yeah, I do think that’s a necessary part of the fight against climate change. In terms of climate colonialism, you know, he’s talking a lot about climate migration and how about the ability to respond to climate change, where you live, where you can go, what economic resources you have access to.
All of that has been shaped by colonialism. So climate colonialism. Would be a situation in which the global north, these colonial powers historically, but still, you know, kind of retreat behind their walls and safeguard themselves while the rest of the world is left to adapt and suffers loss and damage. And so clearly that is not where we want to go.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So, you know, Part of the climate reparations, what Taiwo talks about is that carbon removal is squarely in that kind of thing that fits into the reparations framework. How do other environmental justice advocates reconcile maybe their concern about the moral hazard of carbon removal and the fact that it might be absolutely necessary to invoke climate reparations and to avoid climate colonialism?
Holly Jean Buck: Well, I think that, you know, Dr. Taibo’s view and my view are not to speak for him, but based on our conversations and his work, I think we would say that carbon removal could be a part of this, but may not necessarily be. It depends on how it is arranged and used and, you know, who’s profiting from it, who’s bearing any harmful impacts from it. And so those are, in my view, policy choices, right? And so I can’t speak for environmental justice advocates, but my sense is that many of them are really concerned about the moral hazard or mitigation deterrence issues.
Many of them see carbon removal as one in a long line of false solutions that have been proposed that aren’t really getting to the root of the problem. And so This argument about repair, reparations, is probably maybe a new perspective. That’s what I would say about that.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And Chris, obviously historical emissions have definitely come from wealthier countries. How do you think of it from a conservative perspective, something like climate reparations or just generically- How it would impact the climate solutions you would advocate for.
Chris Barnard: Yeah, I think I’m going to sound probably a little bit cynical here because as I’ve come to kind of realize and kind of one of my gripes with the climate movement is that these terms like colonialism and reparations and things like that, they make sense kind of in the classroom, they make sense into kind of theory, they make sense for professors at universities and can they’re like sociological terms, but they’re very abstract for most of the average human, like most people in the world have no clue what they mean and if they do know they tend to kind of instinctively Be very uncomfortable with those discussions.
And so, and this is not at all kind of like a gripe against your work Holly, but just in general, I do think that sometimes these conversations are too far removed from what’s a politically possible and be understandable to people. And so when you’re talking about like reparations and colonialism, those are very, very heavy words with kind of like Heavy histories as well. And so just seeing them like thrown around easily in the climate discussion makes me a little bit uncomfortable, to be honest. And obviously, there’s just there’s just so many things that you’d have to clarify around this, obviously.
Wealthier countries have become wealthy thanks to fossil fuels and it’s raised living standards, but it’s also done that in poorer countries and they’re catching up to that now. And so what does that mean? Like obviously all the countries that are growing rapidly now, India, China, Nigeria, other countries like that. Their carbon emissions are projected to go up hugely. And so where will this conversation be in 50 to 100 years when they might reach some kind of fossil fuel emission parity with us right now? And there’s just so many like, there’s just so much moral attribution or moral criticism here that I find It distracts probably a little bit too much from the actual discussion of how to reduce emissions with technology as fast as possible.
And so I tend to kind of try to be more hands-on and pragmatic than engage in kind of those terms.
Radhika Moolgavkar: You know, it’s funny you say that, Chris, because I think we’ve talked about this in the past, how I’ve had these experiences when I’ve worked in the government of sometimes it does feel like The government and academic perspective can be far removed from the movement on the ground or the effects on the ground. And so I can see where you’re coming from. And I also agree with kind of this feeling that those terms sometimes can then cause people to back away from the solutions because they don’t want to be part, to be associated with that language, right?
They don’t want to be associated with the idea of being a colonist or have to do reparations. I throw this back to you, Holly, because I do think there’s a lot of worth in the conversation, but how do you balance both the practicality and the need for the academic conversations and how do you then bridge the gap to people who might feel uncomfortable with that language while recognizing the need to do something differently?
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, I think in a sense, people should feel uncomfortable about where we are because The violence, the extraction of resources, these flows from the global south to the global north and within a country like the US with settler colonialism and basically genocide in some ways of indigenous peoples, not to say that indigenous peoples aren’t with us and thriving in spite of All the harm, but I mean, all of that, you know, should be uncomfortable because it was horrible, right? So then the question is, what do we do with that discomfort?
How do we make it so it’s not just a closing down, but we can move through it. And I think that here it’s really kind of a longer term educational challenge. Like the students I’ve worked with the university, a lot of them haven’t really learned about colonialism. Inside the US or abroad, like it’s new, like we need to be, you know, making this part of our education to understand the state that we’re in. So I don’t think there’s like a quick and easy way. And so I, you know, some of what Chris said does resonate in terms of discussing operationalizing.
But, you know, we have to just do the hard work, I think.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So Chris, I mean, this is a fascinating topic to me. So I want to spend just a couple more minutes on it because Chris, I’m curious, do you think that I’ve been, you know, I follow you guys on Twitter and I think you guys are advocates for practical solutions that reach conservative audiences in a way that’s meaningful to them. And so how do you think you can educate or bring people who maybe don’t feel comfortable with this language But also are interested in climate solutions, help them work through the discomfort, or is it even possible?
Chris Barnard: I think it’s certainly possible. And I think one of the issues with this discussion is that we tend to, it kind of tends to be pitting one group versus another, or kind of one historical subset against another historical subset. And I think that we risk sometimes kind of idealizing For example, indigenous people versus demonizing non-indigenous people. Because the reality is that genocide was a feature of human history throughout of it and resource extraction was a feature of all people throughout history. Those are things that humanity has moved through regardless of the color of your skin, your culture, whatever it is.
And the reality is that many indigenous people enslaved other indigenous people. And so not to kind of launch a whole historical discussion here, but I think A lot of skepticism, especially from conservatives, comes from the fact that there seems to be a blame game going on, at least in their minds, and they feel like they’re being blamed for a lot of these other issues. And frankly, I think it makes them feel unwelcome in the discussion, because on the one hand, we’re saying, look, oh, you’re Throwing around in terms of climate colonialism and reparations and things like that.
And at the same time being like, hey, want to be part of the conversation? I think there’s a little bit of a mismatch between the two sides and how they engage. And conservatives certainly play their part in that. We’ve not nearly been honest enough with our intentions and our side of the debate. And a lot of conservatives have been very obstructionist when it comes to this rather than trying to find ways to work together. And that’s exactly what ACC is trying to change. But overwhelmingly, conservatives care about clean water, clean air.
They care about a healthy environment for their children to grow up in. I think those are the terms that are forward-looking and positive and optimistic that makes conservatives want to be part of that conversation. And because of that, conservatives actually overwhelmingly support renewables. They support nuclear. They support planting trees. They support carbon removal. And polls show that because if you frame it in those terms, Those terms and really kind of the end goal being a clean environment for our children to grow up and there’s nothing more conservative from my perspective than that idea.
And so I think those tend to be understandable, pragmatic, on the ground terms that conservatives tend to be open to and want to have a conversation on.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I mean, I could go on and on about this, but we are going to move on. One thing though, I think you, Chris, you answered this question, but you did have this quote, Holly, that I loved. The question is, is what sort of people do we want to be? I think that most Americans want to be people that clean things up. They don’t want to have their legacy be one of trash. And I was going to ask Chris, do you agree with that? But I think he just answered that question.
But anything else you would add to that, Holly? Because I think that was, that to me is the spirit we need. Like we all want to work together to make this better. How do we as Americans show our innovation and show our creative spirit, but anything else?
Holly Jean Buck: Well, that was a very long conversation I had with Wallace Wells, and I can’t remember the exact context of saying that, but I think it’s true. And it comes from talking with some of the people that maybe Chris was referencing, like people in rural communities, in communities that vote Republican. That’s what I heard, people want to clean up, they want to, they associate kind of, you know, things like recycling in a positive way. So if we’re going to have a red wave, which I think we will, we have to think about, okay, what are we going to accomplish working with conservatives on climate change?
I mean, we just have to, we can’t afford to like You know, wait another four, whatever, six, I don’t know, eight years until another democratic administration comes around. Climate change is not forgiving in that way. So, you know, I urge listeners to think also about what Chris is saying in terms of what’s pragmatic because that may be the situation we’re in pretty soon.
Chris Barnard: You’re entirely right in your quote about like Americans generally wanting to clean things up and like valuing things like recycling and their legacy. Do you see how kind of my perspective or broadly speaking on behalf of the conservative perspective that like talking about things like climate colonialism or reparations almost seems to kind of be loaded Against their legacy. Say you’re a conservative who’s proud of America and proud of where we’ve come from and where we’re going. And yes, we’ve had problems, but we’re moving in the right direction. And then we’re talking about throwing terms around colonialism and whatever.
Then do you understand how we feel? In a way, the legacy is already tarnished in your eyes. We’re already doing the bad things. There’s nothing else we can really change about that rather than looking forward more. I think that’s the way that conservatives respond to a lot of these kinds of terms. Sorry to keep the conversation going.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I’ll give you a chance to answer that and then we’ll move on.
Holly Jean Buck: I think there’s a couple points of common ground. I think one is in skepticism of Corporate America and somehow some elites have maybe abused their power. I feel like we see that on both sides. That’s one meeting ground. There’s also a meeting ground around fairness that I’ve noticed. If you put these things in terms of what’s fair, people on various sides of the political spectrum have a keen sense about this. Recently, I did a study with some colleagues around carbon capture and storage in California, and we message tested a bunch of different arguments kind of supporting and opposing it.
And people in both parties were really sensitive to the environmental justice arguments. It wasn’t just like a Democrat thing. Significant majorities of Republicans also found environmental justice arguments convincing because it was about fairness and local communities not wanting to be steamrolled by outside interests. I think there’s common grounds if we get past these words You know, particular terms that we could build on.
Radhika Moolgavkar: All right. Well, with that hopeful note, I’m going to move on to another theme of the piece was kind of carbon removal’s future and what it looks like. And so I think we all agreed that 2021 was a big year for carbon removal in terms of its kind of launch into the mainstream and that Now the carbon removal industry will have to kind of grapple with politics and governments and how do you meaningfully scale in this current environment of both necessity, but also funding and all the other things that go along with it.
So Holly, you’re quoted in the article as saying, I don’t think that the entire cost needs to be borne by this generation necessarily. You can imagine this generation contributes apart and so does the next one making a kind of bell curve extending a couple of hundred years into the future. Can you expand on that idea? Because again, it was an interesting thought to me. I was thinking about my children and their children and how that payment mechanism went. And also my frustrations that my parents’ generation kind of skates free on this, right?
The biggest maybe driver of environmental change, boomers won’t have to deal with it. So can you expand a little bit and tell us what you were thinking?
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, so my point there might not have come through in the final version of that article. It wasn’t that we should be putting the burden on future generations. It might have read that way. The point really was that this is a multi-generational project and we need to plan for that. So we need to be thinking in terms of a couple centuries, I think, at least in terms of the amount of carbon that needs to be removed because there might be a big cumulative potential, but year on year, we can only do so much.
And I think that The imperative is to preserve choice and flexibility for future generations. So yeah, but we have to do our part too, right? We have to set them up. I think our work right now is to set up the future so that they have options.
Radhika Moolgavkar: It’s funny you talk about choice and flexibility because I don’t think traditionally government policies are thought of in that sense, right? Usually they’re thought of as rigid and But I do think the vaccine creation is a new and interesting way of looking at ways to build in flexibility and choice that maybe can be mimicked in the carbon removal space, right? These private public partnerships that they call three Ps. So just something that I’ve been thinking about more and more that maybe we do have a model to build that kind of flexibility in, but what would be the system That you would want to see to ensure a multi-generational carbon removal.
Is there a policy lever, a tax lever or something else that you think is needed now to make sure we set it up right for the future generations? And Chris, I’ll ask you that same thing too.
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, I think now we should be focusing on kind of a data infrastructure monitoring You know, having systems that are transparent and open that people have trust in that seem credible. And I think about that in terms of, you know, CO2 injection, but also in terms of more open systems, huge need in terms of oceans. We’ve talked a lot about monitoring for forest carbon and soil carbon as well, kind of setting up an infrastructure that people think will work and can use because Without that, the whole project just, I think, falls apart.
So that’s a very near-term task, like the next decade, right? But that’s where I would focus now. And that sets up more things down the line.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Chris, anything else you would focus on or anything you want to add?
Chris Barnard: I think it’s a really interesting discussion that actually abounds a lot in the philosophy of environmental change and what Different economists and philosophers, kind of their discussions around this. And it kind of goes down to the fundamental question of will future generations be better off than current generations and by how much, right? And so when you’re thinking of things like how much is the social cost of carbon and what is the discount rate for how much we invest now versus later, you’re essentially making an economic but also almost a value statement on I think that a current generation is probably going to be worse off than a future generation.
And that’s kind of like the trend of history, right? On average, future generations have done better economically, had more resources, better quality of life, life outcomes, et cetera, than past generations. And so the question is, how much should we sacrifice today, our generation, in order to prevent runaway climate change for future generations with the understanding that they will probably be better off than we are anyway? And so there’s like a really interesting discussion around this and I read this quote from a climate scientist called Brian O’Neill the other day and he said we’re generally in the climate change field not talking about futures that are worse than today.
And the kind of underlying assumption within that is that climate change could be bad, yes, but even with how bad climate change could be, the future will probably still be better than the present in terms of longevity of life, like educational outcomes, poverty levels, all those kinds of things. And again, that’s like borne out by history. And so, like, I think one of the things that I’m Most interested in our policies today that make economic sense and don’t impoverish us today to reduce the climate risk for future generations, but make economic sense for both generations right, and so I think.
I think a lot of that is carbon markets, I think are excellent ways of doing that because they’re very cost effective. And generally that’s why I prefer competitive energy markets because you have efficient allocation of resources and you have a good balance, for example, like in Texas and you compare Texas to, for example, Germany or California, you have... More emissions, but you actually tend to have lower carbon intensity because the grid is more stable than overly renewable grids. There’s all kinds of economic problems there. So this is a very long winded way to say that one of the things that we focus on is kind of what we call a no regrets climate framework.
So what are policies that are good, even if climate change turn out not to be real? So things that would help increase grid resilience, clean energy because we’re going to run out of fossil fuels anyway. Things like making sure that we have cleaner air, cleaner water, getting regulations out of the way that impact our economies as well as our ability to have reliable energy, et cetera, et cetera. So again, not a particularly good answer, but I think an interesting one at least.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And bringing it back to Texas, always in the Texas grid. We can’t leave that place. So before we wrap up, one last question then for you. We didn’t touch on even like 50%, maybe even 40% of the article. It was so dense. One thing that was quoted in it is that CO2 removal is not limited by physics. So what are we limited by for carbon dioxide removal? And how can those limitations be overcome to remove carbon dioxide at scale in the next decade to 15 years, would you say? And Chris, I’ll start with you.
And then Holly, I’ll end with you.
Chris Barnard: I would probably say we’re limited by one, economics and two, policy. So the first one, economics, obviously, it has to be economically attractive and doable to remove carbon out of the air. Like that just that’s intuitively makes sense for most people. But the second thing is policy, because obviously, if there’s no incentive for people to remove carbon out of the air, no matter how cheap it is, then they’re not going to do it. Right. And so there’s a matter of what are the correct incentives? Should there be a price on carbon that gives a kind of reverse price on removing carbon out of the air?
And what are the policies that we have to Like implement to make that happen. So I do think the two biggest obstacles are the economics of it and the policy of it.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Ali?
Holly Jean Buck: I basically agree. I think that there will also be social limitations in varying contexts that will constrain the technical potential that always happens. But I just see our own governance systems not being up to the task of taking kind of long-term anticipatory action. You know, have we made progress on climate change because of our great policy and foresight? Well, a lot of it was due to our technological advances in fracking and the shale gas boom and pricing out coal. Plus, you know, that wooden solar got cheaper quicker than experts saw it.
It’s not because we had this awesome governance system.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I mean, maybe that was like part of it, but, you know, in general, we need to get more anticipatory Yeah, I generally am going to be optimistic in this field because I think even if the governments have to be brought along, which they seem to be maybe slowly coming, we do have this huge environmental and finance interest that’s just building and building. That’s what we talk about in our business segments every few weeks. And so I just see that as being A great way to push the innovation because it’s a huge opportunity to do well financially and do well by the climate, which is, you know, I think not the worst incentives for a lot of people to jump in and get creative.
With that, I’m going to pivot to good news slash interesting news. I kind of liked last week, or I think it was last week when Holly used that term. I have two little things I wanted to highlight this week. So my first interesting news is that the client earth in the UK is suing the UK government for their pie in the sky net zero strategy. And this caught my eye because of Chris and him being from the UK and wondering, I wanted to get his reaction on what he felt about An advocacy group suing the government for their pie in the sky, net zero government strategy.
Chris Barnard: I mean, I consider this to be very similar to people suing the government over inaction on climate change. I think it’s kind of a political stunt. That’s a waste of time. But it does underlie an interesting discussion that’s happening in the UK is To what extent is there actually a mandate for the government, a democratic mandate for the government to move towards net zero? I mean, arguably that was the election, but some people are saying we should have a referendum in the way that, similar to Brexit, on whether net zero is something that this country or the UK wants to go towards.
So there’s like an interesting discussion happening and all of that in the context of kind of rising energy prices and kind of the energy crunch that we’ve seen in Europe in this winter. So yeah, I think it’s an interesting... It’ll be interesting to see what happens.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And then my other little piece of news, which I think is good news, I know Chris will think is good news, but maybe some others won’t, was that there is a startup out of Portland, Oregon called New Scale, which is trying to make the nuclear energy lessen its footprint. And so they have just gotten design approval to build their first unit. And I think that’s a huge step in the right direction. I’m not, you know, I started my time on this podcast, not maybe like instinctively not liking nuclear energy, but I think as I’ve delved deeper into it, I realized it’s kind of necessary to the overall carbon reduction solution.
And so I’m happy to see that there are places and especially out the Pacific Northwest that are looking to push the boundaries on this and develop solutions that might be more palatable to the world and help drive us to truly net zero. With that, I’m going to turn it over to Holly because I’m sad to say she will be leaving us for probably a year. And so she’s going on sabbatical. So Holly, any last words for us as you go off on your next great adventure?
Holly Jean Buck: I want to thank everybody for listening and all of my colleagues for collaborating. It’s great to hear a lot of different perspectives on carbon removal. I love the new format of the show that’s Covering science, policy, business, and looking forward to listening and hopefully returning.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Whenever you’re ready, Holly, you always have a spot. With that, I will thank everybody for listening this week. Have a wonderful long weekend. Enjoy MLK. And I look forward to you listening in a few weeks. Take care.
Announcer: Thanks so much for listening to Carbon Removal Newsroom. If you like the show, the best way you can help us is by giving us a great rating and review an Apple podcast, following the show on Spotify, and by sharing the show on social media. Tell your friends and help us spread the word about what’s happening in the world of carbon removal.
