Paul and Aldyen discuss the outline for the Green New Deal released by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on February 7th, 2019. They talk about the small references made to carbon removal, and share their opinions on whether this is a good plan for the future of carbon removal.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to Carbon Removal Newsroom. I’m Ross Kenyon, I’m Lead Strategist at Nori. Today I have joining me Paul Gamble, who is CEO at Nori and Aldyen Donnelly, Director of Carbon Economics. They won’t always be Nori people, but they are near me and that makes it very easy to ask their opinions on things that are important to them and as it pertains to carbon removal. So I’m going to pass it over to Paul. We’re going to talk about the Green New Deal today.
Paul Gambill: Yeah, so you’ve probably heard about the Green New Deal being talked about a lot since the most recent election in November last year. And today we’re recording this on February 7th. Today, the outline for what a Green New Deal is. Now, this outline is not legislation language. It doesn’t include Like what actual programs would happen or, and I think most importantly, how they would pay for it. But it does list a bunch of goals that they have. And we thought it was interesting because there actually seems to be not very much focus on current.
There are a couple different references to it, one of which is, And they also included a subclause later on that said they want to eliminate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector as much as is technologically feasible, including by investing in sustainable farming and land use practices that increase soil health. But that’s pretty much it. There’s nothing in there about supporting any sort of market-based mechanisms or trying to get industry to help support this. Nothing about the future of developing carbon removal technologies like direct air capture or embedding CO2 in construction materials.
So I just thought it was interesting that this is definitely coming from a particular political viewpoint and I think is leaving a lot of potential solutions off the table.
Ross Kenyon: What do you think it was intentional to leave carbon removal off? Or are they starting with low hanging fruit that are just in other approaches to climate change?
Paul Gambill: Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was intentionally left off. And we’ve heard this often and we’ve talked about it on our other podcast before about the moral hazard argument that people make about carbon removal, which is if you have the ability to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, then you reduce the pressure on countries and companies to reduce their overall emissions. But that’s just a guess. I don’t actually know.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. What do you think, Aldyen? You have any insight here?
Aldyen Donnelly: I don’t know. And hopefully, and this is me really reaching here, hopefully they were just busy thinking about other things and are actually feeling positive about carbon removal, but it just didn’t get the space in the existing documentation and announcements that it will get in the future. Having said that, we do hear about the moral hazard argument often. And the problem with that is, again, we would not be achieving our climate change goals if Emissions were zero today. We need carbon removal anyway. And I don’t think that’s well understood. And again, I’ve said so many times there are only two ways to reduce concentrations of heat trapping gases in the atmosphere.
And one is remove them and one is to retain the fossil fuels which turn into heat trapping gases if we combust them. It’s wonderful to have a great plan that’s all for renewable energy, but last time I looked, most wind turbines are made out of aluminum and steel, and that’s a lot of greenhouse gases there. Going to zero isn’t possible even if we had fully intended to execute the plan that’s outlined in its detail.
Ross Kenyon: One thing I noticed, and I’m sure it caught the eye of both of you as well, is that there is a focus here beyond just climate change. There’s also economic goals related to jobs and such.
Paul Gambill: Healthcare, oddly enough.
Ross Kenyon: And healthcare. So there’s things in there that are not necessarily climate related or maybe the link needs a bit more explanation than is typically thought of.
Paul Gambill: This goes back to one of my sort of, I guess, sticking points with the way people put policy proposals together, which is, so my background is as a project manager. And as a project manager, trying to achieve some sort of goal with a team of people, it’s always really important that you eliminate superfluous scope. So scope meaning... Things that you are trying to do to achieve your goal. And when you remain singularly focused on achieving a single task, it is much more doable and achievable within the constraints that exist, whether how much money you have or how much time you have or the people you have working on it.
When you start adding in a bunch of other very difficult to achieve tasks or goals to what it’s doing all that you’re doing is making it harder to actually achieve the first thing that you started out. Including at the very end of the Green New Deal, let me scroll down to this, other goals they want to provide all people of the United States with high quality healthcare, affordable, safe and adequate housing, economic security, and then access to clean water, clean air, healthy and affordable food and nature. Those are like... Healthcare, I mean, healthcare has been an issue in the United States for many, many decades and trying to attach that issue to the issue of climate change, I think is just going to kill your cause.
It’s just going to make it so much harder to actually achieve progress on this very significant and important issue that we need to do something about right now.
Ross Kenyon: Well, if you want to appeal to the right of center, probably framing this as a new deal was probably the wrong way to go about it to start. So maybe they’re not worried about the bipartisanship issues of this. Maybe they’re just not relying on that.
Paul Gambill: Well, that’s the strategy that was taken here. I was here in Washington State last year when there was an attempt to, well, there was a ballot initiative put on the ballot in Washington that would have enacted a carbon fee. And that initiative was put forth by... So if that was possible to do anywhere, Washington would probably be likely. But the thing is, that bill failed spectacularly. So even in a very democratic state, they were not able to get that sort of legislation passed. So from a purely strategic perspective, if you were going to try to pass legislation at the federal level, you really need to be building a broader coalition than just left-leaning environmentalists.
Aldyen Donnelly: I think there’s something more systemic here, and I’m willing to believe everybody’s As my grandmother would say, doing all the wrong things for all the right reasons. But there’s a 30-, 40-year trend we’re looking at here that worries me, and it’s confusing the means and the ends. And if you look at, I think, our history since 1980s on climate policy, both internationally and domestically, and I would say the environmental movement as a whole, We have often failed to make progress, significant progress towards our environmental objectives by substituting our fight for how to do it and putting that in place of what the real debate should be and that’s what to do.
And I hope I’m not taking this off topic, but it’s a much more consequential approach. That reminds me of the mistake that we made about commercial fish farming in the late 80s. You know, everybody in the environmental movement said, gee, there’s all of these potential environmental risks associated with putting open net fish farms on the coast and Atlantic salmon and da-da-da-da-da-da. So the environmental movement focused exclusively on shutting down the fish farm industry and trying to stop it from proliferating. And the environmental risks they forecast often have played out. Now, if they had said fish farming is going to happen, so our position is it must all be closed system, closed net, maybe- Meaning you build tanks on land or something?
We grow trout on land. The first on land salmon farm that I know of in North America started operations nine months ago. In the late 1980s, if the fish farm movement focused on the environmental objective, instead of trying to shut down a whole industry, I think they would have got fish farming on land.
Paul Gambill: Which is a better outcome.
Aldyen Donnelly: Less than 40% of the salmon consumed worldwide was farmed. Today, more than 75% of all the salmon consumed worldwide is farmed. Trying to shut down the industry has never worked for the environmental movement. Focus on the environmental objective. It’s a different way of saying what you said earlier. Get narrow. Stick with your focus on the outcome you’re going for. Don’t prescribe the means. Focus on the outcome.
Ross Kenyon: Helpful advice for any policy, I would suppose. Paul, take us home telling us about the open letter that came out about this the other day.
Paul Gambill: So a little bit before the Green New Deal outline was published, this was almost a month ago, back in January. In January, a group of 626 different environmental groups, including Greenpeace and 350. org, sent an open letter to Congress that included some very similar sounding language. And one paragraph at the very end really caught our attention, which is they said that they would vigorously oppose any legislation that promotes corporate schemes that place profits over community burdens and benefits, including market-based mechanisms and technology options such as carbon and emissions trading and offsets, carbon capture and storage, nuclear power, wasted energy, and biomass energy.
And that’s another one of those things where if you want to live in a world that is not emitting carbon dioxide as part of its energy production process, you have to include nuclear. There is no way around that.
Aldyen Donnelly: I’ll give you another reality check. All of the reported by the United Nations Environment Program, 16 national greenhouse gas reduction programs that they deem Have a possibility of getting the 16 countries to achieving their Paris goals. All of those plans rely on carbon capture and storage for at least 35% of their forecast reductions. 35%. 35%. Underline that.
Ross Kenyon: Yes, it seems like carbon removal’s reputation has been in flux, I guess. It’s been becoming more positive as time has gone on. People have realized that cuts to emissions are not going to be nearly enough to address climate change moving forward, yet it does not seem to be universally popular still. So we’ll keep talking about this as it comes out. More details about the Green New Deal comes out and focus on the carbon removal angle to all of it. So thank you very much for being here and thank you for listening.
