House Republicans launched the Conservative Climate Caucus on Wednesday and it’s already the third-largest caucus in the House with around 60 members. Maine becomes the first state to order public fossil fuel divestment. A new paper in Nature Climate Change looks at the difference between avoidances and removals of CO2 (a more accessible summary of the paper was written for Carbon Brief). There is a proposal at the International Criminal Court to define a new global crime called 'ecocide.' All of this and more, discussed in this week’s episode of Carbon Removal Newsroom.
Host Radhika Moolgavkar of Nori is joined by panelists Dr. Holly Jean Buck of the University at Buffalo and Chris Barnard of the American Conservation Coalition for this episode.
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: Hello, all of our listeners, and welcome to the June 24th Carbon Removal Newsroom episode. I am joined, as always, today by Holly Jean Buck, Assistant Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Buffalo. Hello, Holly. How are you doing?
Holly Jean Buck: I’m great. Thank you.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Good. Ready for a socialist mayor in Buffalo?
Holly Jean Buck: We are so ready.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And I’m joined by Chris Barnard, Policy Director at the American Conservation Coalition. Hey, Chris, how are you doing?
Chris Barnard: I’m good, especially after the news yesterday, which I know we’re going to talk about.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, we’re going to get to that in a second. I won’t spoil it yet. And this is Radhika Moolgavkar, Head of Supply and Methodology at NORI. So today we’re going to start with a little oil and gas news. There’s Two articles about the new Exxon board, which I found interesting and some other things that were happening. Also for those carbon accounting wonks, we’ve got a new paper highlighting the different impacts between emission avoidance, i. e. never releasing an emission and removal, which is more removing historical carbon emissions. So it’s kind of a new way of thinking potentially.
And lastly, as the lawyer in the group, it caught my eye that there is the proposal for Ecocide, a new Potential crime that has been floated at the International Criminal Court. So I wanted to talk about that a little bit. But first, I’m going to hand it off to Chris because he has some pretty cool and interesting news to announce. So go for it, Chris.
Chris Barnard: Awesome. Thanks. Well, yesterday, people might have seen the House Republican members actually unveiled a new caucus, which is called the Conservative Climate Caucus. And there’s a cool kind of personal story and connection for me there. And I think that’s a really good question there, because the idea, broadly speaking, for this caucus emerged on a hike that I was a part of in Utah back in October with Benji Backer, the president of ACC, and Representative John Curtis from the third congressional district in Utah. And just really kind of talking about steps to get conservatives and Republicans Not just start talking about climate change or even just caring, but actually being a part of the conversation, legislatively and policy wise in the House.
And so now, what is it seven, seven months later or so, they launched this new caucus, which is I think around 60 members already and it’s already the third largest caucus in the House. And I was at a reception yesterday at the Capitol Hill Club with a bunch of the members and staffers and everything and people were just so happy that conservatives are now kind of Starting to lead on this issue and trying to really be a part of the solution and trying to come up with solutions as part of this caucus that will get more Republicans into the climate fold and at the same time push for policies that are good for America good for the planet.
And that can also have potential bipartisan success. So it’s really kind of cool to see that journey, having witnessed it firsthand and then being there yesterday the official unveiling of it. And it was really organizations like ACC and others that pushed members to do this. And so it’s a really cool story for us that it’s finally happened.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, congratulations, Chris. That is really exciting. And I’m thrilled, actually, to hear that you’ve made such progress. Big movement actually in seven months. It seems like a significant amount of movement for the Republican caucus on this. I did read this interesting article that the first meeting was kind of done in secret because there were, you know, weren’t sure the interest level. So just, you know, if in a couple of minutes, can you tell us how it went from secret to such an overwhelmingly positive response that it’s the third largest caucus in the, you know, in the party?
Chris Barnard: Yeah, so kind of the intermediary step between this infamous hike and the caucus was in February, we co-hosted a conservative climate summit in Utah with 24 Republican members of the House to over three days just talk about climate change, talk about potential ways for conservatives to engage on the issue, etc. And some of the members said that they wouldn’t attend if it were a kind of public facing thing like it would remain private in terms of who was there, but they didn’t want it to be in the news and they didn’t want their name attached to something like that.
Now, there’s 24 members that went and obviously all the staff surrounding and it’s very hard to keep something like that a secret so it ended up getting leaked to the media somehow and It became a thing. And so I think they kind of realized that it’s time to lean into it. And so with this climate caucus launch, it’s conservatives, Republicans in the House thinking, well, we should lean into this rather than be afraid of the issue. So that’s what they’re doing now.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, again, congratulations. When I’m in D. C. , which I probably will be in September, If there’s a reception, I want to be invited because I would love to mingle with some conservatives who believe in climate change and are leaning in. I think that’s fantastic for all of us.
Chris Barnard: Yeah, that’d be awesome.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Holly, anything from you?
Holly Jean Buck: Great news. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes from it and I hope there will be policies that work in there.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah. All right. Well, with that, let’s turn to our With almost becoming a weekly kind of thing, and let’s talk a little bit about oil and gas news. First interesting thing was that Maine announced that they are going to divest of all fossil fuel investments for their state, I think, retirement funds. You know, first thing that came to my head was this is a similar strategy to what we heard with tobacco companies, but that didn’t drive tobacco companies out of business, nor did it even make them change their product lines, which continue to be cigarettes and the like.
So Kind of wondering, Holly, what your perspective is on this and how you’re thinking about these things.
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I mean, with Maine, so this is divestment that applies to both the state cash pool and the public employee retirement system. I think this is a good step, but I mean... Mainly just for the employees, right? I wouldn’t want my retirement to be bound up in fossil fuels that some of these employees have lost, you know, millions of dollars on their investments as the industry lost hold on this over the past 10 years. I do have the question of what will they be investing in now? You know, is it just going to be like, Facebook and Amazon stock or what, like, is that the best socially optimal thing?
But, you know, in terms of the climate space, I think this is one small thing, but I think it makes a difference more from a, you know, sober business standpoint than as part of a real climate strategy. I’m sorry to say, for those who are really pushing divestment, I know it’s been a huge emphasis of the climate movement.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, Chris, do you have any thoughts on, you know, The mingling of finance and policy.
Chris Barnard: Yeah, I mean, obviously, predictably, I’m probably just a little bit skeptical broadly of kind of public investments in that sense be on behalf of Individuals like through retirement funds and whatnot. But as far as there is one, I think it does make sense to not invest in fossil fuels. And I think even the market is pointing in that direction. Most of the kind of fastest growing stocks and companies are clean energy companies. I mean, NextEra overtook Exxon as the largest energy company briefly. During the pandemic, and I’m not sure if they’re at that right now because of the oil prices having risen and whatnot, but it just showed it does show that there is a trend in that direction.
And I think if you look at the long term prospects of Fossil fuels, they’re not great. So just purely from an investor point of view, I don’t think it’s a very smart thing to do with people’s money. And obviously there is the environmental and social component of that too. So I think it’s sensible. They maybe have to do it in a kind of phased out way to make sure it doesn’t impact finances too much. But broadly, conceptually, I agree with it.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, so talking about clean energy, so obviously now there’s a big push for these legacy oil and gas companies to invest in clean energy. So again, to you, Holly, I was curious if this is the type of investment you envision would help with what you’ve often talked about is that managed decline of oil and gas.
Holly Jean Buck: Well, I do think that these companies are going to need a transition strategy, and I would recommend You know, prefer to see them move into renewables rather than petrochemicals, as I’ve probably talked about. So, yeah, I mean, I don’t think that Shell has done very much. You know, the reporting said that they’ve spent about $84 billion on oil and gas exploration and development since 2016 compared to clean energy investments, which are just... 3. 2 billion and that’s not a I don’t think that’s a typical I mean most big oil companies have the clean energy part that they like to talk about is just very small compared to their oil and gas exploration so.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Do you agree, though, when I think it was the CEO of Shell said that it would not help the world one bit if we stopped selling gasoline and diesel today because people would keep filling up their cars and delivery trucks at other service stations? I mean, that’s the argument, right?
Holly Jean Buck: I mostly agree. It might help the world a tiny bit. I wouldn’t say it won’t help the world one bit because of the signaling effect. But I think that CEO is right is that you need coordinated supply side policy to drive the decline. You need a demand decline too if that demand Remains constant. Somebody else is just going to fill it and they might have even worse practices or carbon intensity than Shell.
Radhika Moolgavkar: The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know kind of thing. The other thing that occurred to me and Maybe this is obvious to both of you. I kind of, for the first time, really understood how different the supply chain will be for these oil and gas companies. They are used to controlling both the source and where you get it from, right? So they drill for the oil and gas, and then they have their gas stations and things where they fill, amongst other ways of supplying the world.
But now you’re going to have an intermediary utility, right? Because they are the grid. I think for the first time, it made me kind of contemplate how it’s much more than just a divestment and a new type of strategy, but it’s also maybe a whole new supply chain model that they have to figure out how to make it lucrative. And I was thinking of that in relationship to Shell is obviously working on battery storage to smooth out wind farms energy, but that still has to go through some Utility grid. And also they are looking at electric charging stations and poles in London.
So they provide the charging station, but the electricity still comes through some utility grid. So Chris, have you thought about this at all? Or I’m probably late to the party, but like I said, just occurred to me.
Chris Barnard: I mean, no, it’s an entirely valid point. And it is one of the challenges in terms of this transition, because there’s that kind of like broader grid conversation to be had. I think if it shows that the profit will be there, I have no doubt in my mind that they will find a way to make it work because that’s kind of how the market works. So yeah, I mean, it’s definitely not as easy as, oh, we’ll just go to clean energy. There’s a lot of steps that have to happen in between where we are now and there.
But I do think that if you make, if you create a competitive business environment in which this is able to rise to the top in the market, I think that the market signals would be enough for them to want to do that and they’ll figure it out somehow.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, well, let’s hope so, I guess. The other thing that was in the news this week, in both the Washington Post and New York Times, I found it interesting. They had pretty extensive articles on the Exxon board with that engine number one. We talked about this a few weeks ago, but I was curious, Chris, if you knew this gentleman, Mr. Karsner, he’s a Republican who’s newly on the Exxon board, because he seems like The type of Republican you might know.
Chris Barnard: I hadn’t heard of him before this, but I mean, any conservative slash Republican that likes clean energy and wants to tackle climate change is good in my books. So maybe I should be in touch with him.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, he likes his favors of carbon tax. What do you think of that?
Chris Barnard: Well, so you have to separate kind of the theory behind a carbon tax and the political reality behind a carbon tax. I think the kind of economic theory, if you could just design it perfectly and just implement it, It would be the most efficient way of reducing emissions without strangling the economy, which is kind of like the Baker Schultz plan that he advocates for and kind of like the main one that’s floated around. But the political reality is that there’s just Not enough appetite for that to happen right now. So as an organization, we try to focus more on what are the wins that we can focus on now for the environment and the climate.
And there’s plenty of other organizations that will continue to advocate for a carbon tax and dividend plan. And maybe they’ll be successful, maybe they won’t. But in the meantime, we want to do other things, such as the Growing Climate Solutions Act being passed today. But maybe we can talk about that next week.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, we should talk about that next week because that happened a little too late for me to put it into the podcast.
Chris Barnard: I think it happened as we were recording.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, just now. So we will make sure and hit that tomorrow because I don’t think it’s a surprise, but it’s definitely good news. Holly, the last thing I kind of wanted to talk about was this new democratic initiative about subsidizing biofuels. I have always been confused whether biofuels are a good thing or a bad thing from an emissions reduction perspective. Kind of wondering what you’re thinking about this new bill that’s being pushed and any thoughts?
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I mean, it’s hard to categorize biofuels as good or bad because it really depends on the system boundaries. It depends on the feedstock. So very dependent upon the details of whether a biofuel is going to be carbon neutral. I think there’s some good things about helping the biofuel industry. I think that rural areas are sometimes left out of climate solutions conversations. So I’m glad about soil carbon storage. I’m also glad about biofuels. I think that we need more innovation for more advanced biofuels. And there’s some appropriations in the science bills that would fund more of that.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And I was surprised, and maybe I’d have misunderstood it, that they’re also advocating for a nationwide general waiver exempting U. S. refiners from some obligations. And that would lower the amount of renewable fuel that they have to blend in the future and create a price class on compliance credits. I couldn’t quite figure out why you would do that from an environmental perspective.
Holly Jean Buck: I don’t think that would be driven by an environmental rationale. I think there’s some challenges in the biorefinery industry that I’m not up on the details of, frankly.
Unknown speaker: Fair enough.
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, the conflict here, people are thinking about biofuels versus EVs. Why should we invest in Drop in fuels when electric vehicles are on the horizon. And I think that’s a good question to ask. But the fleet turnover time towards electric vehicles is going to be longer than we’d like. Frankly, it’s going to take a couple of decades. And you can make some near term emissions reductions right now with the infrastructure we have with biofuels.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So that’s why I’m the right kind of biofuels, as you said earlier, with the right kind of feedstock, though. As always, the details are the critical part. So something you brought up to my attention, Holly, so I’ll let you kind of lead the way, is this new paper that’s in the Nature Climate Change Journal. At a very high level, it shows that a removal of carbon dioxide is not the same as an avoided emission. So take it away.
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, so I mean, this is something that’s been mostly understood in the Scientific community and, you know, among people who work around global carbon cycle modeling, but I’m not sure it’s appreciated in policy fully. So basically there’s this asymmetry, you know, having a tonne emitted is not going to be the same as having a tonne removed and it increases the more CO2 is emitted or removed. So if there was a pulse of 100 gigatonnes of carbon emitted. That would be a kind of a 3% asymmetry. You’d have to remove more than 100 to make it balance.
And that increases up to 18% for 500 gigatonnes of carbon. So, I mean, okay, why is that the case? There’s some different mechanisms. One is that the CO2 fertilization effect, which is when plants produce more biomass under a higher atmospheric CO2 concentration. That is an effect that saturates at higher atmospheric CO2 levels. There’s also stuff going on with the ocean, to make this very brief. So there’s these nonlinear processes. So an emission now results in a different atmospheric CO2 concentration change than a removal of Sarah Holtzman, The lead scientist, Kirsten Ziegfeld wrote kind of a more accessible summary of the paper in Carbon Brief that people should check out.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So here’s my question for you. From a policy perspective, what do you think this means? Like, what should we be thinking about as we develop policies moving forward around net zero?
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, I think policymakers need to be aware that there’s not an equivalence. And I think that in the future, we’re going to have to figure out some sort of Mathematical function or some sort of, you know, okay, here’s one tonne. How much do you need to remove to compensate for that one tonne? It’ll be more than one tonne, a little bit more. What’s that little bit? And apply that to policy. Would you agree?
Radhika Moolgavkar: I would agree. Chris, do you have any thoughts?
Chris Barnard: I mean, this is really kind of, I feel more the realm of science and math than it is the realm of policy in a sense, just because policymakers can only really create policy on the basis of kind of the right formula, for example, to calculate how much emissions abatement is worth versus emissions removed from the atmosphere. So I think, I think it’s not really my wheelhouse in terms of knowledge. But yeah, I think it would probably make sense for some kind of formula to translate one to the other and what that what that looks like.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I think personally, I think we should also just separate the two when we’re thinking about net zero, right? I think lumping removal with avoidance has all sorts of issues. And one of the other ones is it kind of makes it The moral hazard question about removals then prevents avoidance. If you just have two categories, it seems like it would help with that question and how you track that question, even if it still is an issue. So I would like companies and policymakers to think about net zero in two buckets, I guess.
Avoidances to the absolute extent that they can happen and then reductions in areas as we’ve discussed that are much harder to decarbonize right now. Another place where I was actually quite confused about the accounting, and maybe Holly, you can help me around this, is this new story about how emissions from food production are undercounted and that it has an impact on the Paris targets. I guess where I got a little lost is, first of all, I know the numbers are important, but shouldn’t we just be focusing on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and not getting super into the weeds on the numbers?
But really what confused me is it seemed like They said all of these are associated with food and then they listed things like transportation and retail and waste. But aren’t those emissions counted in transportation, foods, consumer goods and waste? And so how do you think about that?
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, so this was a paper in environmental research letters from Francesco Tubiello at the Food and Agriculture Organization and colleagues. And the thing with this paper is that It describes a different way of kind of bounding what we’re talking about, which is the food system. And so agriculture is just a small part of the food system. You’re looking at, like you said, transport, you’re looking at manufacture of fertilizer, which is huge. You’re looking at food waste, which is another bucket. And so all of that is part of the food system and that’s a higher Basically, this paper was reporting that the emissions from food production are undercounted.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Maybe you don’t know the answer to this, but if these are counted within food production, do they not count towards transportation anymore? I guess that’s where I was getting a little lost, where you draw those boundaries and when transport gets pushed in and how you then separate out transport. It seems so confusing.
Holly Jean Buck: Oh, I think it’s a great question. And I think why you draw those boundaries different ways, like why would you draw all of these things in together as a food system? I think if you’re focused, if you’re an organization focused on food or an advocate focused on food and you want to transform the food system, you want to look at that broader bucket.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, that makes sense to me. And how you translate that to an actual accounting is what I am still Not completely understanding, but that’s not unusual. I’m often not understanding how these things work. So I will continue to persevere and learn. One thing I did read about this week that I thought was interesting and that this is more from a buyer or a user of these goods is this idea of creating tracking carbon in more of a green, yellow, red sense. So I think I can’t remember what company, but they were looking at it almost like health labels, right?
Like green is good from a carbon perspective. Yellow is neutral and red is bad because I think that’s a lot more accessible. A lot of the claims that we’re seeing right now, you don’t know really what they mean. And so I think one thing that as a community within the carbon world that we need to think about is how you make These things accessible to people who don’t have the time or energy or ability to understand all of the dynamics that go into creating like a green label. So that’s why I thought that was a great sort of leap forward in terms of thinking because it makes consumers, it makes it easier for consumers to make a good choice.
That’s my little editorializing about that today. Last thing I wanted to touch on is, and Chris, I wanted you to talk about this a little bit because I didn’t know how you’d feel about it, but it’s this new idea that’s coming out of the International Criminal Court, which for our listeners who may not know, deals with things like genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression. So all very interesting. Terrible crimes that humans perpetrate on other humans. Our panel has recently recommended that a fifth crime be added to the International Criminal Court, which is called ecocide.
So Chris, what do you think of this idea? Maybe you can give a brief description of what ecocide is too.
Chris Barnard: Sure. So I’ll just take the definition that they put in the actual recommendation and we can kind of go from there. So according to them, ecocide means unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts. So essentially extreme and long-term damage caused to Ecosystems or the environment, broadly speaking. And what I found interesting about this is that they’re in a way kind of trying to anthropomorphize nature. They’re trying to give nature specific rights.
And obviously you start getting into really nebulous philosophical and moral discussions around that kind of stuff, because does nature have rights? Can you separate that from the impact on humans specifically? Now, the kind of intrinsic instinctive conservative in me Even at the most local level, if there’s a beautiful oak tree in your cute little village in England and that oak tree gets cut down, I think that is in a way kind of a crime and a crime against my kind of moral sensibilities of the intrinsic value that tree has. And so at a much wider scale, I believe that The way that the Soviet Union essentially destroyed lakes and ecosystems and forests in Eastern Europe was essentially criminal.
And it was literally ecocide. I mean, they destroyed millions of acres of land in Eastern Europe for kind of their industrial agenda. And up to the point that Lake Baikal, one of the biggest lakes, is barely a lake nowadays. Yeah, in my view, that’s kind of criminal and that’s kind of this conservative sensibility that what we have is good and we should protect that and we should stand up for it. Now, that is a kind of very broad, conceptual, philosophical way of looking at it. And the problem when it comes to kind of these institutions is how do you enforce this?
How would this actually work? Is the definition too vague to be actually practical? And so that’s probably where my skepticism would come in, is how could we actually enforce this, especially considering four of the most, the biggest emitting countries in the world, India, Russia, China, and the US aren’t even part of the International Criminal Court. How would this actually work in practice? Now, I think there’s a kind of Interesting constructivist sense of we’re applying these principles to nature beyond humans. And that might be a signal for people to take that into account.
And there might be an interesting kind of way for people to start thinking about this in a better way. But I think in practical terms, I’m not sure how successful this push will be for this ecocide definition at the ICC.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah. Holly, what are you thinking about this whole thing?
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, I’m down with it. I’m not sure how effective it will be. I’m wondering if it has the potential to think about repair, and I’m wondering how it applies to ecosystems that are already created by humans. For example, the Salton Sea in California, California’s largest lake. It comes and goes, but the most recent version of it was created by an engineering mistake. And now the ecosystem is collapsing. The state of California has a legal responsibility to do something about it because of this water transfer agreement that was signed, but they haven’t been.
So could you take the state of California to court for, you know, ecocide or would they just say, well, The ecosystem was already damaged because of this accidental sea. So I don’t know. I think there’s a lot of interesting questions you can get into about the responsibility of repairing damage.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I think we’re all sort of in the same place with it, which is it’s an interesting signaling idea. But how you enforce it and what it means is very difficult, at least to understand, based on the broad framework that they’ve provided right now. I went straight to the Citizens United case, which I know involves corporations, but it seemed like the same idea where you’re ascribing rights to something that did not have rights before, and it can cause all sorts of unfortunate outcomes that you Well, maybe were intended in Citizens United’s perspective, but certainly are maybe not as beneficial to the average human as we had hoped.
Also, I couldn’t understand when they talk about unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there’s a substantial likelihood of severe and on and on. I mean, don’t we all kind of know that certain acts could lead to a substantial likelihood of a severe outcome? Like if you’re in California right now and you light a fire and it accidentally spreads everywhere, I think most people are aware that’s a big deal. Would that count? So again, I think that it’s... It is very vague and it’s hard to understand how it would be enforced.
I was also thinking about it in relationship to this Wall Street Journal article that came out, which I had to highlight this week because I so rarely find environmental articles in the Wall Street Journal, so I was excited. Where they basically, the UN has recommended that the Great Barrier Reef be classified as in danger because the country’s center-right government hasn’t done enough to protect it. So would that kind of fall underneath it because they’ve had plenty of warning the government, they haven’t acted on it, could you sue them because they haven’t protected the Great Barrier Reef?
What if there is no way to protect the Great Barrier Reef right now? Anyway, the questions go on and on, but certainly an interesting idea that will take many years to develop.
Chris Barnard: Well, one of the interesting things that they appear to as a criteria is whether it extended beyond your own borders.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Right.
Chris Barnard: Area Reef is purely Australian, if I’m getting my geography right.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, you are.
Chris Barnard: So it’d be kind of hard to I feel like apply that to something that is just confined to Australia and they’re the ones kind of being negatively impacted by it. And that seems to be one of the criteria that they brought up.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I thought about that actually, Chris. And my experience is that borders, you know, unless that term is very specifically defined, which we don’t know, we haven’t seen it. But assuming it’s a little vague, you could argue that the Great Barrier Reef impacts lots of borders because it has impacts on other ecosystems outside of Australia’s borders. There’s a tourism, you know, people from around the world use it and it’s a benefit to the world. And the law always seems very straightforward when you write it and then you get clever attorneys in who can figure out how to make it work in many, many different situations.
And so I personally don’t really have an issue with creating some sort of some way of criminalizing certain behaviors within the environmental sustainability movement I just. It has to be done in a way that makes sense and I’m not sure that we’re we’re there yet, but there’s a lot of work to be done and it’s going to be years, I think.
Chris Barnard: Yeah. One other thing to bring up that was interesting about this whole Great Barrier Reef thing is what I consider like the pretty empty kind of moralistic criticism of the center right government in Australia, not having done enough to protect it. Even if Australia had zero carbon emissions, it would have done absolutely nothing to stop the Great Barrier Reef, like the ocean acidifying and the Great Barrier Reef. It’s a much broader problem than the center right government of Australia. And so sadly, I think one of the only ways we’ll long-term be able to save the Great Barrier Reef is through adaptation mechanisms, restoring it, kind of trying to come up with technologies that can find ways to restore the reef rather than kind of just hoping that because Australia reduces its emissions, all of a sudden the reef will be saved because that’s not at all what’s going to happen.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Ali, I saw you smiling. Did you have something you wanted to add?
Holly Jean Buck: I agree with Chris on this point, and I don’t know what we’re going to do. I’m interested in the potential of marine cloud brightening. Scientists have been researching that with regards to the Great Barrier Reef, but it’s looking kind of grim.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, and that exactly goes to my point about the ecocide definition. It’s not always that it’s within your control, within your own borders, to control an event that could have massive environmental impact. How you figure out the responsible parties, on and on and on, we can go. But I don’t want to end on something that grim. So Holly, is there something good happening in the world of sustainability, carbon, et cetera?
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, yeah. Today, the EU parliament passed the climate law. So formally.
Radhika Moolgavkar: What is that? Tell us.
Holly Jean Buck: Now there’s a binding obligation to be net zero by 2050. And after 2050, the EE will aim for negative emissions. So not a surprise, but today’s the formal day. So great for them.
Chris Barnard: UK has had this target for at least over a year now, which I know that’s my British background kind of tells me to brag about that.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, congratulations to the EU and to Britain for putting up some lofty goals that I hope the rest of the world will try and meet or exceed. With that, thank you everybody for listening to us this week. Just as a little plug for Nori, we have a new job that’s been posted on our website. It’s the Methodology Analyst. And so we’re looking for a few good candidates who might be interested in helping us develop our different carbon removal projects. And grow our company and our ability to impact carbon in the atmosphere.
With that, thank you all. I’ll see you too next week. And Chris, we will talk about the Growing Climate Solutions Act for sure and anything else that might come up. Thank you.
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