Carbon removal is in the news as Elon Musk has teased a one-hundred million dollar prize for the best carbon capture technology. What does it mean for the sector, and what is likely to happen next? Tito Jankowski of AirMiners is on the show to discuss.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to Carbon Removal Newsroom. I’m Ross Kenyon. I am Nori’s creative editor. Today I have with me Tito Jankowski, who has been on so many times. Hi, Tito.
Tito Jankowski: Hey, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: You are an air miner extraordinaire, carbon removal luminatus.
Tito Jankowski: Is that okay? I like that, sure.
Ross Kenyon: Also, sorry for the long lag between episodes. This is the first carbon removal newsroom in some time. Been focusing on reversing climate change, our other podcast, and this has perhaps gotten the short end of the stick. So sorry about that. And thanks, Tito, for nudging me to keep going on these.
Tito Jankowski: Yeah, sure thing. Happy 2021. It’s off to a good start.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Well, you pitched me on this show because, well, one, I think it’s probably the biggest carbon removal news I’ve seen in a while, just based on how many people outside of this sector that I’ve seen shared on social media, people I’ve known on Facebook for a long time. We have no connection to climate change, anything being like, whoa. Elon Musk, $100 million prize for carbon removal. Why don’t you tell the whole story?
Tito Jankowski: I love that. So it was on Friday and Elon Musk tweets that he is going to donate $100 million to a prize for carbon capture. And it just lit everybody up. I first saw it on Airminer Slack. John from Carbinclic had posted it. And just the gears started turning... Turning from there. No details yet. He said details coming this week, but we can certainly speculate and we can certainly see the effect that it’s already had and how people are talking about it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’ve seen it in a number of places, including people already arguing about it. I saw many of those jokes we were talking about before the show of, oh, but we already have the technology. It’s billions of years old and it’s so successful and it’s called trees. So I saw a lot of things of that ilk, a lot about the cost of industrial carbon capture and how exactly that will work. People are worried about links with fossil fuel industries and point source collection of it. I imagine Elon maybe has some sort of ulterior motive of, I know he wants to capture from the air and create hydrocarbons that would allow for interplanetary travel.
So it’s probably something like that is working together. Does that make sense?
Tito Jankowski: Oh, it certainly makes sense in sort of like the reading that Elon Musk tea leaves part. Yeah, he’s got a YouTube video from 2019 when they were launching Starship. And like at, I think it’s one hour... Four minutes and 20 seconds in, somebody stands up and, interesting timestamp, somebody asks a question like, what’s gonna be here at this rocket launch pad in a decade or two decades? And he says, basically, we’re gonna be able to pull propellant From the ambient air. We’re going to do that here. We’re also going to be able to do that on Mars.
And that’s the biggest, that’s one of the biggest changes that you’ll see to this launch pad. So it’s clearly been something he’s been thinking about for a while.
Ross Kenyon: I think so. So I think we’ll probably see Something more akin to that. I would be very surprised if anything turned out to be more on the ecological side of carbon removal. And it seems just from his Iron Man, Titan of Industry, hardware entrepreneur kind of background that we’ll probably see something closer to industrial carbon capture.
Tito Jankowski: It depends. I’ve definitely done the whole nature or technology thing as a spectrum with one direction and the other. 2021, I’ve kind of let that go. I think that really what we’re talking about is, does it scale? Is it economical? How well does it work? Whether it’s biology, whether it’s chemistry, whether it’s engineered biology or engineered chemistry, If it answers those questions, that’s what matters. And I think that we might just get a new twist on it that nobody’s expecting. I think that’s what will come out of this. But sure, yeah, he’s like super into like machines and metal and stainless steel.
So maybe the solution will involve those materials.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, he doesn’t seem like a guy who would stick his hand into some dirt and smell and go, ah. That just doesn’t, I’m just not getting that vibe from him, which is fine. Not everyone necessarily needs to do that, perhaps.
Tito Jankowski: But yeah, I saw some interesting takes on it too.
Ross Kenyon: I saw people like Roger Ains about how much energy it would take to scale up direct air capture right now relative to more ecological methods. And it’s just super out of reach. But a lot of the discourse in carbon removal spaces so far has been focused on permanence, which is at least partially a result of Stripes purchasing choices and everything that fell out from there. So... Yeah, I try to be neutral and agnostic. And as long as it’s reasonably credible and ethical, I think we should be funding and supporting all of these efforts and not spending too much time attacking.
It seems pretty early to do that.
Tito Jankowski: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s heartening to see that kind of discussion and questions about will this work and will this scale. At the same time, I think it’s important to Try things and see how it plays out. I mean, I recall a meeting with a major global scale climate funder and they had been investing in solar and batteries for the last 10 or 20 years. And this was about two years ago, but they said, if you told me three years ago that the prices would be what they were today, I would like, we did all the modeling, we did all the projections.
I, I never, and I’m like, I’m the world, you know, person in this never would have, never would have said that they would get here. And, and, and, you know, if I just say, Hey, we’ll just, everything can always take off. Um, that’s not exactly what I mean, but just in the sense of there is to me, you know, there’s something really powerful about trying it and, uh, uh, Seeing how it works. I mean, just, you know, I always go back to with technology, Kevin Kelly, author Kevin Kelly talks about what technology wants and just this framing around thinking about the second order and third order and fourth order Influences and connections that happen with any, any invention or change.
So often it’s, it’s just, it’s hard to predict what the, you know, second order effects, third order effects. What does that cause? What are the 10 things that causes? What are those What do they cause? And then you think about some other invention, like virtual reality, or you think about a new presidency, and you just see all those things colliding together. It is really hard to see where things will go, but I think trying things makes sense.
Ross Kenyon: That’s true. I really do hope it scales as quickly as that. And there’s a bunch of things that we didn’t know that we didn’t know that become unlocked. And then, wow, order of magnitude difference in cost or volume or something like that. So yeah, I certainly do hope that happens. We need carbon removal to work. I am on team carbon removal.
Tito Jankowski: That’s right.
Ross Kenyon: So someone in this crew or people that aren’t even in it yet will be making big advances in it and just want to be supportive of that. So yeah, I think that’s a fine little addendum you’ve added there. And now I want to push you to speculate wildly. As you said, where do you think this money is going to end up? Is this going to be a part of some existing organization? Do you think he’s going to start his own thing? Is it Airminers? Is it going to Airminers?
Tito Jankowski: Oh, right, right. This is where we make claims that include phrases like, I will eat my hat. So we do have one person putting their money where their mouth is. Well, I guess besides Elon Musk, but it’s Yon from Carbon Click. On Airminer Slack, he has put out a $100 bet that the winner of this prize that Elon’s talking about is part of the Airminers community. I think it’s, yeah, I always like to see people putting money where their mouth is. I think especially in climate discussions, which can kind of end up being like people just kind of fighting back and forth.
I think it’s nice to say, hey, you know what? Here’s how I think this is going to turn out. I’m willing to put some money on it.
Ross Kenyon: I think so. I associate betting both for prediction markets and also I’ve seen a number of public intellectuals make bets with other ones. Brian Kaplan who’s been on reversing climate change is pretty famous for this too. And I think having agreed upon ex-ante metrics for determining who is right or wrong certainly encourages a responsible kind of knowledge production, or maybe not. I really only see the positive side of that story. I’m sure there’s some takes that are less nice, but yeah.
Tito Jankowski: I’ve definitely seen that with betting markets. This is just from a few stories, but that they’re really good. Predictive. They can beat, I think it was in the political world in terms of elections and things like that, that they’re saying that the betting markets were actually more accurate than pollsters. I mean, yeah, I’m interested to see more bets come up. Like, when do we pull a million tonnes of carbon from the air? What day does that happen? And Freud’s worth that bet that Jan put out, like, I would be happy to see somebody take the other side of that bet or how does betting work even?
I guess, like what if I said, I’ll put another $100 on this bet, but there’s nobody on the other side of it. So like, we’re just, you know. Anyway, if somebody wants to do that, it’s a friendly bet and I’d love to see it.
Ross Kenyon: I’m looking for a counterparty out there.
Tito Jankowski: I’ve also seen people say that prediction markets are less accurate. Than polls sometimes.
Ross Kenyon: I think I’m inclined to trust them a little bit. But you also had cases like, did you see the fallout from the election where Trump supporters were taking bets on whether or not the election would be deemed fraudulent? And so a bunch of Trump supporters put a lot of money on those bets and then were lashing out and quite angry that they lost them.
Tito Jankowski: So, yeah, the story went on, right, because it was they were continuing to take bets after the election was over. That’s right. That’s where it was really like, wow, that’s a that’s an intense bet.
Ross Kenyon: But the odds are good. I guess if you turned out to be right, I’m sure, you know, fewer and fewer people willing that you get better odds for getting against that.
Tito Jankowski: That’s right, that’s right. So yeah, you know, if anybody wants to take the other side of this bet, great, but you can also, I think you can, that’s how you increase the odds, right? You say, well, I also will bet $100 that this person is part of the Air Myers community. We can better define that. How do we get down this threat?
Ross Kenyon: Where’s the money going to? What is it?
Tito Jankowski: Yeah. Well, Ross, you know, we’ll get to that eventually. But I have to tell you that on Twitter today, I have used my Twitter account. I am one of the people that is not banned from Twitter yet. I’m pleased to report. And I have put out a tweet of my own that says, Am donating $100 to a prize for carbon removal memes and so that I think that has a lot of potential and we need more memes if we’re going to really unlock true scale carbon dioxide removal I deeply believe that we need more more of an inflow of memes.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’ve been seeing more of them and some of that’s coming out of Carbon Removal Academy. But we need someone to start the Facebook page, Twitter account of carbon removal memes for climate restoring teens or whatever is the format of those pages. Something something memes for blank blank teens. Yeah. So if you’re listening, please go and make this happen. We need carbon removal memes.
Tito Jankowski: That’s right. We need, we need a hundred million means. That’s right. Um, so, so to answer your question more directly though, you know, where is this money going? Um, just speculating. I mean, like you can look at, so, so for one, the whole, like the money’s going into carbon capture, topically there’s been some back and forth on that. Like maybe we can talk about that, uh, Afterwards, but just in terms of, you know, how will this get deployed? I looked it up and Elon Musk had done a Hyperloop prize of some sort.
I think it was, it was a much, it was like an order of magnitude or two small. I think it was like, maybe it was even 10, $50,000 kind of prize. So he’s got like a track record for just being like, Hey, like SpaceX is going to do this contest. Though, you know, obviously the Carbon X prize comes to mind. As they have their Carbon X-Prize, NRD Cosia Carbon X-Prize that launched several years ago and is in its final rounds. And they’ve previewed at their annual X-Prize Bonanza something about a upcoming carbon removal prize on Twitter.
So I remember that. That was, gosh, again, time is funny, but whenever that was. Probably a year ago. But yeah, so there’s some speculation there. That’s where I’m assuming it’s going without any insider information. Even if I had insider information, I would not establish . Yeah, I mean, I think there’s space made for other players in prizes, but XPrizes, they’re the one that I come up with when I think of Prizes of any sort for technological kind of innovation.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Well, I suppose we’ll have to keep our eyes peeled. With our luck, I think as soon as this episode goes live, there will be an update.
Tito Jankowski: We’ll be like, oh, crap.
Ross Kenyon: One day later.
Tito Jankowski: One day later. I think it’s good to speculate. I mean, like, I am, to me, again, like, I think it’s we actually have this nice breadth between, like, announcement and details because we get to speculate and, like, To me, this fits the narrative of being, when he says carbon capture, to me, it fits the narrative of like carbon capture and removal, like not point source capture, but ambient air capture. Like until last week, we’ve always had this narrative that there was a planet and it was in trouble. It had too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
People around the world were, were Nervous about this. They were growing increasingly concerned. They were wringing their hands about it. There was a small group of people working on solutions to be able to pull the carbon dioxide from the air and do something useful with it. Then one day, an important scientific group announced a report that confirmed that we did need to pull carbon from the air. Because of that, some person came in and said, this is going to be my ride or die thing that I’m going to put a lot of money on.
Because of that, tens of thousands of new companies and solutions were created. And because of that, new systems, partnerships, and visions for the planet Started to come together. And because of that, we ended up with this incredible planet and universe and solar system that we’re part of today in whatever, year 3000. And the rest of the story is that person in the second statement of that story that stepped up and said, yes, this is the thing. As far as I can tell, that’s Elon Musk. That’s what’s happened. That’s the timeline that we’re on, is that IPCC report comes out, says that, hey, yeah, this is real.
And then a few years later, the richest person on the planet at that point steps up and says, yeah, like, to me, this is the biggest announcement of the past five, maybe more years. And I think this will be the biggest announcement for the Next five or more years, just in terms of like popular media attention, people hearing about this, maybe not in like sheer numbers, but like in terms of growth, this is the biggest percent growth of the carbon removal pause that we’ll have in the next five or 10 years.
Like this will, let’s say this is like a hundred percent growth, um, over the next six months. Like that’s the biggest leap in growth that we’ll have. He’ll potentially like I’m struggling to think about like, what is the next milestone? Like there’ll be technological milestones, but like that doesn’t get people like your friends who don’t know crap about carbon to write you and say, oh my gosh, like what’s the next, you know, like that’s, that’s me. It’s like, well, what’s the next milestone after this? Like, what’s the next thing where your friends are going to write you and say, Holy crap, did you see this?
Aren’t you the carbon person I know? Like that’s this. So that’s the narrative now. The narrative is filling in that Elon Musk is the person to step forward and give this, that kind of financial validation that it was waiting for.
Ross Kenyon: Those are big in my memory too. I think before the IPCC report a few years back that, um, Really mainstreamed carbon removal, which I may be misremembering this, but I think before that, carbon removal had a stronger link with geoengineering, was a bit more fringe. The IPCC saying this is actually really important if we’re going to keep it below a couple of degrees and maybe even reverse the thing entirely. That was a big deal. This also feels, you know, I’m sure someone listens and be like, I can’t believe you’re comparing the IPCC’s importance to Elon Musk, but surely Elon Musk doing something of this magnitude is a really big deal in the same kind of public consciousness raising activity as that.
The IPCC report was probably still more, like not a lot of regular people reading what they have to say anyway.
Tito Jankowski: That’s right.
Ross Kenyon: But they’ll listen to Elon Musk on Joe Rogan or That’s right.
Tito Jankowski: Yeah, that’s, that’s the stuff that I’m seeing. You know, you just, somebody like that picks up a, an idea like a hundred million dollar prize for carbon capture. And that, that means like, it’s like a mathematical function. It means like, they will be talking about that on Joe Rogan sometime in the next 12 months. Like, that’s just like one thing follows another. Like, have you seen this guy’s tweets? Like, Like, it’s just, that’s where this is going. This is going big in terms of new people, new ideas, new critics, new contributors.
I think critics and contributors can’t do the same thing. But yeah, like, that’s just, it seems, that’s the narrative, right? That’s the narrative. And because of that, 10,000 people jumped in and started companies and ideas and built new Some of them were called ecological, some of them were called technological, but looking back hundreds of years, what we know that they all did to succeed was to pull carbon dioxide from these. That’s the narrative. I mean, it’s just, that’s the narrative. Like that’s where this goes from here. That’s where it goes.
Ross Kenyon: Tito Jankowski, fireside chat vibes going on in here. Bringing it all together. Yeah, I think so too. We need smart people. We need elbow grease. We need it all. Let’s make it happen. We need memes. Memes first and foremost. You’re not really a subculture until you have your own memes. I think that’s well understood. That’s right. Yeah. Meme Lords listening, get on it. I doubt there’s... I doubt that’s who I’m reaching this show, but who knows? Um, well, anything else we should cover right now, Tito?
Tito Jankowski: Oh, well, of course. I mean, if you are, if you have an idea that you’re like, Hey, Elon dot, dot, dot, uh, certainly, you know, tweeted out, uh, also come, come join air miners, come, come sign up for the, uh, we have an announcement for the air miners accelerator listed on the air miners website. Um, That’s where people are going to get the support they need to if they have an idea or they have a team and they need you know early early support for that the air miners community is here to help and as is the air miners accelerator that’s coming together.
Ross Kenyon: There’s so much happening at Airminers. And if you’re listening, it seems like every episode is an exhortation for you to finally join because this is where the carbon removal community gathers online at the Airminers Slack group. Link in the show notes. I did a thing. I signed out of many Slacks except for Nori’s one on my computer because otherwise it would just light up all day long because people are always talking. I don’t have it on my... Yeah. Although now I look at Airminers and it’s like every channel’s lit up always and there’s events.
Seems like a lot is happening, but I’m sorry. I haven’t been frowned as much lately. I’ve been trying to focus, but it looks like amazing stuff is happening on your end with Airminers. The accelerator, big deal.
Tito Jankowski: Yep. There’s a whole pipeline. We want to inspire, educate, and accelerate people working on carbon removal solutions. Among other things, there’s Xamarin’s events. We’ve got a carbon dioxide removal book club that’s based around the CDR primer that just launched. We’re meeting every week to work through each chapter. So yeah, wherever you are in the pipeline or in the process of learning about carbon removal or having ideas or building a team, come check out what we’re up to and see if we can help you.
Ross Kenyon: That’s great. Okay. Well, links to all those things are in the show notes. You should read that CDR Primer or I sometimes say Primer. I think that’s the British way of doing it. It makes me sound a little bit obnoxious, I think. So I’ll just say CDR Primer. Definitely worth reading. Cool. Well, thank you for being here, Tito.
Tito Jankowski: Great to be here, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you. I’ll try to do these more often if you’re listening and you’d like these. Great rating and review on iTunes. Apple Podcasts certainly helps a lot. Put some wind in the sails. Sometimes it’s a little easy to neglect a show like this because we’ve got a lot going on, but it’s fun and we should do more of them. And how could we let this tweet go by without commentary? I think that would have been an outrage. So thank you again, Tito.
Tito Jankowski: All right. Till next time.
Ross Kenyon: Until next time, thanks for listening and goodbye for now.
