This week our guest is Roger Aines the Energy Program Chief Scientist in E Program at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. Roger leads the Carbon Initiative at LLNL, which “aims to understand, develop, and implement technologies for the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.”
Several months ago, Roger wrote about the “Three Demons of Carbon Removal” in a submission to the journal Chem about “Misconceptions and Myths Surrounding Carbon Removal.”
In that piece, he said that three big issues stand between us and our goal of reaching our climate goals-
-The Timing Demon- resources are required to stop emissions today but building a carbon removal industry will take decades and needs to begin now.
-The ‘Me-Too’ Demon- will the reality of carbon removal mean that emitting industries do not pursue decarbonization aggressively?
-The Demon of Injustice- carbon removal must demonstrate it can exist to benefit, not burden, communities who have previously been burdened by industry.
On today’s show, we’ll discuss these demons with Roger and how he sees them in the context of some recent news in the world of carbon removal. Also with us, as always, is our policy co-host Chris Barnard, Policy Director at the American Conservation Coalition.
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, everybody, and welcome to the April 14th episode of Carbon Removal Newsroom. This week, we are focusing on policy. And we have with us Roger Ames, and he is the Energy Program Chief Scientist in the E-Program at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. Roger, thank you so much for joining us.
Roger Aines: Thank you for having me.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And then, as always, I have Chris Barnard, Policy Director at the American Conservation Coalition. Hi, Chris.
Chris Barnard: Hey, Radhika.
Radhika Moolgavkar: How are things in D. C.?
Chris Barnard: They’re in D. C.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Some interesting legislation was proposed this week, so we’ll have to talk about that in the upcoming weeks, but today we’re focused on something a little different. And then finally, this is Radhika Moolgavkar, Head of Supply and Methodology at NORI. So our guest today is Roger, as I said, and he is part of the e-program at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and he leads the Carbon Initiative there, which aims to understand, develop, and implement technologies for the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Several months ago, Roger wrote about the three demons of carbon removal in a submission for the journal Chemabout Misconceptions and Myths Surrounding Carbon Removal.
And he said that the three big issues standing between us and our goal of reaching climate change is the timing demon, the Me Too demon, and the demon of injustice. So on today’s show, we’ll talk about those three demons with Roger and Chris. And I will start with maybe having Roger just describe to us in his own words what those three demons are for carbon removal.
Roger Aines: Well, the important question is what keeps us from getting to the future that we want to have? And we spent quite a bit of time at Lawrence Livermore thinking about the technologies. And that also ends up thinking about what are the barriers? And these barriers are basically first timing, that it’s going to take a long time to build up the scale of the cleanup The technologies we need to clean up the air. So they don’t exist today and we need to have them be very large in around the middle of the century.
The second is that there are a lot of players today, particularly in industry, who think, well, if you can clean up the atmosphere, why can’t I keep polluting? That’s obviously a real problem. And then the third one is that we’re talking about very large activities, cleaning up the air, removing the excess carbon dioxide that’s already there is going to be a giant activity. And it’s subject to having the same problems that we have when we created the giant industries of today, creating inequities, creating disadvantaged community problems. And so that’s another major issue is how do we keep from doing that again?
Radhika Moolgavkar: All right, so with that, we’ll start with this idea of the timing demon, which is that, as Roger just said, there are a lot of resources required to stop emissions, but building a carbon removal industry will also take decades, and we need to start right away. So on Tuesday, Stripe announced a huge partnership with Shopify, Google, Meta, and McKinsey to develop a $925 million, sorry, million dollar advanced market commitment for carbon removal. And they’re basing it on the vaccine industry, which we’re all familiar with, in which a market for the product is established before the product is invented.
So these companies will be funding the program alongside thousands of companies already paying into Stripes Climate Fund by donating a share of their transactions from Stripes payment processing software. It is the largest buying coalition for carbon removal and probably the biggest single private sector commitment to carbon removal ever. So, Roger, I wanted to talk to you about that is how can we scale CDR fast while still funding all of the main decarbonization that needs to happen? You know, it seems clear that some buyers may want to intervene in the market in order to access the carbon credits they’ll want in the future.
But what do you think of this announcement and how do you think it’ll affect the trajectory of the CDR generally?
Roger Aines: Well, I think this announcement is fantastic because these companies are not obligated to do this. They’re doing it because they think it’s the right thing. And that’s really important. There’s been concern that carbon dioxide removal technology might take our focus away. The answer is that we have to We have to do both. We have to stop emitting carbon and we have to clean up what we’ve already done and the amount that’s going to still accumulate because we’re just not being fast enough. We don’t have any choice but to do them both.
And when companies like this step up and make it possible for startups to actually make money doing this, that’s going to really enable on a market. I like to say that we have to clean up billions of tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere and nobody moves a billion tonnes of anything without businesses that make money doing it.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So, Brian, you don’t have any fear that by doing this, they’ll lose sight on reducing their own emissions or reducing emissions as aggressively in other parts of their supply chain as they can?
Roger Aines: No, these companies have all already acted aggressively to reduce their own emissions. And we’ve worked closely with Microsoft over the past year to look at what their negative emissions options have been. They’re not one of the parties to this, but in Microsoft’s In this case, much of the emissions that they’re trying to account for are what’s called scope three or the emissions that they don’t control. In this case, the computers that we’re all running while we’re doing this, running Microsoft products or using electricity, they’re causing carbon emissions. Microsoft takes credit for that.
And so negative emissions, carbon dioxide removal is a way that they can account for that carbon dioxide. And these companies that are part of the Stripe Frontier Coalition have the same issues, that they can control their own emissions, but their customers and their supply chains they can’t control. And so they’re stepping up to say, well, we’re going to do it even though we don’t have to.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So Chris, what do you think of this announcement? I know you’re a free market kind of guy, but is this also bad because it’s an example of a policy failure potentially?
Chris Barnard: So I’m going to start by saying amen to pretty much everything Roger said. He made some excellent points and, you know, especially where he said that you can’t achieve the scale necessary without private sector and business buy-in. I think that is 100% correct. And I’ll add a little bit of a spin to what he said about the companies doing this because they think this is the right thing. I don’t doubt that there are probably people on the boards, people that work at these companies that want to genuinely tackle climate change.
But I will also add that at the end of the day, when companies do this, it’s because they are responding to what the market is wanting them to do, right? Being green, being eco-friendly, being environmentally friendly is in right now. And consumers are demanding it from the companies that they buy at. And so I think that’s a really good thing because that shows that consumers have power and it shows that if we hold companies accountable to that, they will respond and they will do these things. And so that’s exactly what this commitment is responding to.
Now, in terms of whether this is a policy failure or not, Of course, when you’re talking about emitting carbon dioxide into the air, that is in some sense a market failure, what we call a negative externality in the economic literature. And there are different ways that you can go about remedying that either the government kind of leverages attacks that would take into account the impact on society of this negative externality or it regulates it. Neither of those solutions have proven either particularly effective or politically viable. I think the only alternative is exactly what Roger was saying and what I’m saying as well as you need private sector buy in and it’s good to see that so many companies are stepping up to provide that.
Roger Aines: I want to add something.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, please do that, Roger.
Roger Aines: You know, we often get lost in what this problem really is. We’re throwing our trash in the air for free. And people say, well, how are we going to make money cleaning up? We’re not going to make money cleaning it up. We’re all going to pay to do that, just like we pay to have our trash taken away. Here in my town in Livermore, we don’t throw our trash in the street. We pay someone to take it away. And had we piled it up in the street, we’d be paying someone to clean it up.
And we just need to acknowledge that this is going to cost us money. And the trick is to have it cost as little money as possible at the time that we need it.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So that raises a question that I would then send over to Chris, because obviously throwing your trash on the ground is not acceptable. We all pay a service, but it’s a service that we pay to the government, right? The government runs most utilities, trash is a type of utility. These are private companies that we are going to somehow pay. So is it really an equivalent analogy in that sense, or should government actually be the one that’s thinking about this And monitoring this and we pay them as a service, whether it’s local, state or federal, to remove our trash from the air.
Chris Barnard: Yeah, I would say that there’s a difference here in the sense of the emissions that are being put into the air are only one side of the coin. The other side of the coin is levels of living standards that are higher than we’ve ever had in human history, kind of Economic growth, people having jobs, all those kinds of things. So if I drive my car and I drive it to work and it’s the only way I can get to work and I make carbon emissions like that’s really unfortunate about the carbon emissions because it’s helping drive climate change.
But also it’s giving me a very significant societal and economic benefit. And too often when we talk about these conversations, we look at kind of fossil fuels or emissions as kind of just always the enemy and We don’t really look at the benefits that they also bring. Now, obviously, if you can get those benefits without having the negative aspects, that’s the ideal. And right now what these companies are looking at is how can we provide those benefits and have kind of society thrive without the garbage that is attached to that.
And so I would really just say that we should be focusing on kind of maintaining a similar level of economic growth and living standards, but trying to find innovative ways to get rid of the trash. And so in that sense, does that make sense? It’s a little bit different, just because there is that other side of the equation, and people often forget how much fossil fuels do contribute to our daily lives and our economy, and we can’t just get rid of that immediately that easily.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I think what you’re saying makes a ton of sense, Chris, because as I understand it, at least, is that the garbage that we create In our daily life, the physical garbage, let’s call it, that doesn’t have a ton of use for anything besides it’s just extra stuff we’re getting rid of versus the emissions. This type of airborne garbage is actually has a benefit associated with it, which is that all of our actions create these emissions, but our auctions also create other benefits like higher living standards, jobs. And in the global south, the need for You need these emissions to help rise the living standards.
So it’s that tension between the good part of the carbon economy, which I think people don’t like to acknowledge, but we have to acknowledge that it did cause all these benefits. And now we’re dealing with the negative and the negative externalities are a lot more difficult to measure, but we need to figure out how to measure them and how to monetize them and eventually how to get rid of them. Is that a good synopsis of what you’re trying to say?
Chris Barnard: Yeah, it is. And, you know, it’s interesting when you have these lawsuits coming up where there’s young activists trying to sue the government or sue companies for causing climate change. And kind of typically when you sue someone, it’s because they did something one-sidedly bad, right? Like they committed a crime or they stole from someone or whatever. But the interesting thing is here is everyone’s voluntarily buying these products because it makes their lives better and there’s trash attached to it kind of It’s not just the companies or the government. It’s like literally everyone is participating in this.
You have to hold everyone accountable or no one. There’s no kind of in between there. And so I think that analogy is correct about how we need to take into account both sides of that coin.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So I am curious how you both feel about this sort of approach, the AMC approach. Do you think that This market will need more support. Do we need some more policy intervention to make sure that it develops and becomes more broadly accepted? Because obviously under the vaccine situation, it was the federal government who was paying for this. These are private companies. So where do you see or do you see any role for the government in helping make this a more vibrant market or a more vibrant program? Roger, I’ll start with you.
Roger Aines: Well, the government has been investing heavily in technology development. So particularly in the last few years, but really over the last decade, there’s been a lot of science and technology developed. And now the companies that are evolving from that investment are trying to turn into businesses. And so this advanced market commitment is really a way for them to say, yes, we really have a market and you can invest in us because we’re going to have a business in the future. I think, though, that ultimately, just as Chris said, this is going to be something that governments, regions take on in a utility-like sense.
And the challenge is to try and quickly drive the cost down because you just don’t reduce the cost of things with technology investment. You have to go out and do it. That’s what drives the cost down. Solar panels are cheap today because we built so many of them. We didn’t imagine our way to a cheap solar market. And so that’s what we have to do here. We have to drive that cost down and it’s delightful that people are stepping up and investing in that.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Roger, or I mean, Chris, anything else you want to add to that? I see you nodding your head a lot.
Chris Barnard: I’m just going to add, I’ve never heard this much common sense on this podcast. It’s really good to have you here, Roger, because sometimes I’m the one batting for my side and I think you’re adding a lot of good perspective to it as well. The one thing I’ll add is just throwing some kind of And there’s a lot of terms out there that I think help make sense of this. With the technology investments that the government is making and that private companies are making, but a lot of the R&D that the government is investing in, we’re kind of creating the supply side aspect of we’re supplying the technology, we’re allowing it to enter the market, and we’re creating this technology.
And like Roger said, when we did that with solar panels and wind turbines, you kind of had to overcome that innovation barrier and do that. And there’s a significant role the government has and continues to play in that. We’re needing the demand side to step up. We’re needing companies to scale this and to continue repeating this. And that’s where the private sector really has its role to play, because as they demand more and more Scaling up of this technology, they kind of put it into practice. That’s really when the cost will come down.
And I think that’s the role that the government should not be playing because it inevitably becomes less efficient, picks winners and losers. And the whole point of this right now is to reduce the cost as fast as we can to be able to take as much CO2 as cheaply and quickly as possible as we can out of the air. And I think that’s where the private sector steps in.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So, Christy, do you think, though, that the government could play a role as just a demand side actor in the sense that they’re out there barring carbon removal credits, like as one of the biggest procurement bodies in the world?
Chris Barnard: Yeah, I think there is beyond the R&D some elements of government procurement playing a role in this. The problem is in terms of how much money the government is willing to spend on this upfront, right? Because there are carbon dioxide removal solutions called Nature that are much cheaper. And so the question is, like, do you want to pick the low-hanging fruit first and then go to kind of the more technological solutions? And in that sense, steward taxpayer dollars the best you can? Or do you kind of Decide 75% nature, 25% technology.
I think there’s a political calculation to be had there, and I don’t think there’s a wrong or a right answer. But I do think using federal procurement for carbon dioxide removal to offset the government’s own emissions is setting a standard for the market.
Roger Aines: And I expect that’s going to happen. But right now, the other thing that happens in government is this question of how much money is there to spend and what do we spend it on? We still make some electricity in this country with coal. There are issues to resolve before we get around to cleaning up the atmosphere in terms of stopping making the atmosphere worse. So I think that really drives a lot of government action, too, is that they need to get this near-term problem solved while the growth curve of carbon dioxide removal occurs.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, very well put, Roger. I want to move on to the Me Too demon, which is that the energy transition is difficult enough, as Roger just highlighted, right? The federal government is still procuring electricity through coal, and we all know about that. And oil companies have long been successful in slowing climate progress by lobbying governments, and some would argue using deceptive PR campaigns. And then Bloomberg earlier reported this week that oil companies hope to have more influence at the upcoming COP27 as their products are in especially high demand and prices are high due to the war in Ukraine.
So we also have this interesting global dichotomy of what the US is thinking about versus the rest of the world. We obviously know Germany is in a real pickle right now because of their dependence on Russian oil and they’re moving away from the nuclear sector. Roger, how do you see carbon removal intersecting with this energy transition? And particularly in light of current events, how hard will it be to keep the fossil fuels companies from using CDR to continue their social license to pollute?
Roger Aines: Well, remember that the Opportunity to use CDR to take care of their emissions is entirely a regulatory issue. That isn’t something that we have to let anyone do. That’s a choice that regulators can make. And if regulators around the world decide to let oil companies continue selling oil and accumulate the CO2 out of the atmosphere at a later date, That’s a choice that they can make. I don’t think that’s ever going to be as cost effective as simply not emitting that CO2. So I think what the responsible oil companies around the world are doing is thinking about how do they provide the same services that we all want?
Transportation, lubricants, the chemicals that we need to run our lives. You’re probably sitting on carpet today that is made out of petroleum. It doesn’t need to be. It could be made out of carbon dioxide. And it’s going to be an opportunity for those same companies to do that same job. And the question is, how much are they going to rely on keeping doing the same things they’ve always been doing and offsetting those emissions or simply stopping those emissions? The Me Too demon really centers on the fact that the scale of the carbon removals that we’re going to need to meet worldwide one and a half degrees C is already stunning.
And that’s assuming that we don’t use any fossil fuels anymore, that we electrify everything, that we have the most efficiency we can get. Even with that, we’re going to need between two and 10 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide removal per year. Ten billion tonnes is twice the size of the world oil industry today. The idea that we’re going to increase that in order to keep doing things like using petroleum is Foolish. We’re not going to have that much capacity. At the same time, though, we have places like Africa. Are we going to tell Africa that you have to switch to all electric cars today?
No, that would be incredibly irresponsible of us. So there’s a balance to be struck here, but we can’t just assume that there’s going to be an infinite capacity to clean up the atmosphere. There won’t be. It’ll be all we can do just to clean it up at the minimum we are imagining today.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So, Chris, I’m curious, what types of policy levers do you think the U. S. can pull to influence countries like Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Middle East who are highly oil dependent, obviously, for their livelihoods and their state of living? And who don’t seem at all inclined to move to this like more this vision that Roger put forward that I think some of the Nordic oil companies have been more quickly moving towards and some of the North American oil companies have been moving towards.
Chris Barnard: So there’s a lot of things I want to say to that. So I’ll try to kind of be as brief as I can. The first thing I will say is we have to be realistic about the current energy Requirements and options that we have and has kind of the whole Ukraine situation shows is that we are still heavily dependent on. Fossil fuels and it’s better if we depend on our own fossil fuels and that we depend on, for example, Russia to supply those. That is not only from a kind of geopolitical and humanitarian perspective, but also from an environmental one.
I mean, American natural gas and oil is about 22% cleaner than Russian or Saudi oil and gas, simply because we have better technology and higher environmental standards to achieve that level of cleanliness. A lot of countries still rely on coal. To supply their energy needs. If they were relying on natural gas instead, that would be better for the climate because natural gas is cleaner than coal. And so really, I do think that the US has a role to play within the fossil fuel kind of paradigm in the sense of weaning countries off of Russian and Saudi oil and gas and also exporting US natural gas to, for example, countries like Japan and Korea, who still rely quite heavily on coal and helping them reduce their emissions that way.
As we still live in a world reliant on fossil fuel. So that is one kind of important aspect of the debate, but obviously not satisfactory when we’re talking about climate change. Now, the interesting thing about the whole situation with Russia is that countries are seeing that Controlling your own energy resources is incredibly important. And there is a kind of literal physical end to fossil fuels because we will run out one day. And so that’s why you see China investing very heavily in clean energy. That’s why you even see Saudi Arabia making investments in solar energy and wind energy in battery storage.
And you see that kind of all over the world that countries and companies are starting to look at clean energy as, huh, this is something we can produce at home. And it is theoretically infinite. And so that contributes to energy security. And so in many ways, I see clean energy as the oil of the future. And the ways that the US can help leverage that and expand and accelerate that around the world is a few things. One is regulatory reform at home. Right now, the National Environmental Policy Act, which is our kind of permitting process for Infrastructure, all infrastructure is disproportionately burdening clean energy infrastructure.
42% of all projects under NEPA that are kind of currently backlogged are clean energy projects versus only 15% for fossil fuels. So if you make that permitting process easier, you’re going to see a huge boom of clean energy projects coming on within a few years rather than decades as they are right now. So that’s kind of the supply side response there. In terms of kind of leveraging this around the world, I think right now there are a lot of different tariff and non-tariff barriers to the free trade of these kinds of goods and technologies.
So right now, if the US wants to export a kind of wind or solar or different technologies to other countries, they get hit with a lot of tariffs and there’s all kinds of rules and regulations around that. Which obviously push up the cost of that. I think if we can work with countries to create kind of like a free trade zone for anything clean energy related, you will see countries trading this and this will become much more beneficial for them to work with other countries to get their clean energy technologies and to reduce the prices that way.
And make it more competitive versus fossil fuels. And I think that’s a key way that we can, for example, compete with China, that they don’t flood our industries and destroy our industries with the cheap solar panels that they produce. But if we also produce those and create a market with our allies to trade that freely, they can really help bring down the price and kind of send a signal to the world is that, look, the international market is heading in the direction of clean energy. You better get on board or get out.
And that’s really one of the best ways I think that we can address this both domestically and internationally.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I saw your tweet about the solar panels, Chris. So we are running up against a little bit of time pressure. So I want to turn to the demon of injustice, though I think we could have really dove much deeper into the meaty demon. So, Roger, I’m curious what types of environmental justice issues Could you see a rising as CDR expands into communities? And are you worried it will create pollution or can it be done safely? I think that’s what I hear a lot from these communities, marginal communities who have been on the front line of climate change, that they just don’t trust that we will roll this out in a way that’s fair and equitable.
And I think they, of course, have every right to have that distrust. How do we overcome it? And are there CVR methods that you think are more suitable than others to overcome this trust issue?
Roger Aines: Well, you just asked a three-volume book there.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Can you give it to me in 30 seconds?
Roger Aines: So I think the first thing to recognize is that we’re talking about gigantic businesses and industries here just to clean up the atmosphere, let alone to provide all the energy, clean energy that we’re going to need in the future. Remember, we don’t need to just replace the energy we use today, but we’re going to electrify a lot of things. So we have to increase the size of those things. So we have to be careful. Our Natural proclivity toward trying to make everything as cheap as possible has given us the environment we have today.
We have to recognize that these things have costs associated with them and that in order to have the environment we want to have, in order for everyone to have the kind of lifestyle that we would like them to have, we’re going to have to pay more to do those things. So that’s the first thing to recognize is that driving things to the minimum possible cost is unlikely to have the impact on You know, things like environmental justice that we want. The concerns that we hear when we talk to people here are, will there be air pollution involved?
Well, we need to make sure that there isn’t. That’s a simple regulatory thing. It’s a technology thing, but it’s also a regulatory thing. We need to confirm that. The communities that are at risk need to believe that regulators are going to act on their behalf. I think there’s some question that in the past. I think that all these things around money have been at the heart of everything about the energy transition. It’s always money, money, money. But we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about people’s lives. And more importantly, we’re talking about the land that we live on.
We’re talking about land use. And many of these things take enormous amounts of land. Solar panels here in California have become a real hot button. We know that we can build enough solar panels to power California, but how much of California will we cover with those solar panels? And will we still like the California that has all those solar panels in it? I think that can be worked out, but it’s not trivial. It’s an enormous amount of land. Same for wind power, same for all these industries that we’re talking about, same for changing our agricultural systems.
And so there’s a lot more to this than just money. There’s quality of life. And environmental issues that we have to think about.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yes, it’s interesting. I used to live in California, but more importantly, land use issues in California are always fraught across the board because you have housing issues, you have wildfire, you have the rural wildfire interface, and then you want to throw in huge plots dedicated to solar panels. And it’s like, how do you balance all those competing interests for what is a finite resource, which is land? So, Chris, you were mentioning that NEPA is obviously a huge barrier, a permitting barrier for these clean energy projects. But how would you approach communities who might also be a barrier to permitting by objecting to these types of projects, particularly carbon removal projects that they don’t feel comfortable with, they don’t understand very well?
How should policymakers go about approaching and bringing these communities along, do you think?
Chris Barnard: Yeah, it’s a really tricky question really for anything on how to get communities to be a part of it, right? Communities are opposing clean energy projects as they’re opposing all kinds of projects just because kind of there was a little bit of a NIMBY spirit that dominates with local communities, which I personally think is understandable, but also you want to overcome that when it comes to certain pressing priorities. In this sense, I think there’s a lot of honest conversations that need to be had. And I think really emphasizing the economic opportunities that exist as part of this for communities is important.
And so like one example is there’s a bill in Congress called the Competes Act. And the whole point of that bill is to make it easier to kind of build the infrastructure and the pipelines to help take the CO2 out of the air. And transport it to places where it can be kind of sequestered into the ground or whatever it might be. And obviously that includes infrastructure, but infrastructure also means jobs and it means economic opportunities for local communities. And so I think really emphasizing that this is a way for them to be a part of the solution and for them to get some economic activity in their backyard and that there’s something in it for them rather than just being forced upon them.
And I think those conversations need to be had rather than just kind of Going in with eminent domain and saying, we’re going to do this regardless of what you think. I think having that honest conversation upfront is important. One very quick thing I’ll add is back to the previous question about companies Using potentially carbon dioxide removal to kind of slowball their own progress on climate. I realized I gave my whole spiel, but didn’t actually answer the question. What is happening with countries in terms of their transition to clean energy, I think is happening with companies as well for the exact same dynamic.
And that’s why you see some of the major fossil fuel companies really diversifying their own portfolios, reducing their own emissions. And Roger talked about how a lot of companies are really cleaning out their act on that. And I think it’s also because they realize it’s the future and they’ll fall behind in the market if they don’t do it. So same dynamic there.
Radhika Moolgavkar: All right. So last question for you both. Obviously reaching 10 gigatonnes a year of carbon removal is going to leave some sort of footprint. I think that we all have to accept that we’re going to have to have some tradeoffs in terms of land use, potentially other environmental impacts. No matter what we do, however responsibly we can act, not to mention unknown consequences that we couldn’t imagine today. That’ll be obvious probably in 50 years. So how do you think about communicating the trade-offs of carbon removal when you’re speaking to an audience of just general folks?
And what will the benefits that you think will need to gain acceptance to really help bring Skeptical people along in supporting carbon dioxide removal projects. And I’ll start with you, Roger, and end with you, Chris.
Roger Aines: I think the analogy to trash collection is really a pretty exact one. That’s something that we have to pay for. It costs us money. And it also costs us things like landfills. It costs us, you know, trash trucks waking me up at six o’clock in the morning. These are things that we tolerate in order to have that part of our environment be better than it would be otherwise. And I think we’re going to have to make the same kinds of choices here. Hopefully, as technology gets better and as we reduce the need for these things by being more efficient, by having more renewable energy supplied, these are going to be less burdensome on people.
But I think we just have to accept that we made an awful mess of the atmosphere and we’re going to have to clean it up. And that means we’re all going to have to step up and do some things that maybe aren’t quite perfect in our local lives. We’re going to have to share the responsibility of cleaning this up so that we can all have a better future so that my grandchildren can have a better future.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, amen to that, Roger. I hope we do better on this program than we have done as a country around COVID, not to bring in another hot topic issue, but collective responsibility does not feel like we’re something we’ve been very good at in the last few years. But Chris, I’ll turn the question to you because I promised you the last word. So what are you thinking?
Chris Barnard: I’ll just add two things to what Roger said because he’s again entirely correct. The first one is communities from the communities that I’ve spoken to at ACC and kind of the conversations we’ve had with people on the ground is they want to be a part of the solution. They don’t want to be vilified or told that they’re the problem. They want to actively help and still framing it in that way. This is your way to help in this this monumental fight that we’re in, I think, does help and gives them a sense of kind of responsibility and purpose.
And the second thing would be really talking about the economic opportunities that I think are adjacent To these kinds of things, and that nearly $1 billion announced for this purpose by these companies, that’s money that can go to your community. And I think if you frame it that way, I think that’s much more helpful. One final thing I’ll add is in terms of like obviously what you mentioned in terms of a footprint, like there will be facilities, industrial facilities tend to be ugly, like there’s no way around it. Maybe there’s a way to, and I’m kind of spinning this off the top of my head, but there’s a way to balance the industrial carbon removal with natural carbon removal and talk about how maybe there’s ways to invest in communities, both in the technology, but also in planting more trees or restoring ecosystems and kind of helping that beautiful I think New York State’s doing some interesting work around that, where they’re using landscape architecture to help also around carbon dioxide removal through use of mineralization and things like that.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So I do think there’s lots of opportunity if we can only harness the lessons of the past and apply them correctly to the current state. With that, Chris, I want to give you an opportunity for some good news before we end the program. So let’s hear it.
Chris Barnard: Yeah, I think this is very topical to everything we were talking about. But the Energy Information Administration recently released kind of a status report of new energy projects last year in the US. And it turns out 84% of those were clean energy projects, which I’m not at all surprised by. And it just shows the direction that we’re heading. And obviously, we still have to displace a lot of other dirtier energy from the past that we’re heading in the right direction.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Cool. Well, that’s a nice way to end it. I’m happy to see that the momentum is heading the right way. With that, Roger, thank you so much for your time. I know it’s been a busy week for you, so we really appreciate you joining us. And Chris, as always, I love having you on the show and I’ll see you in a few weeks. And to all our listeners, we look forward to seeing or for you to listen this week and in the upcoming episodes. Thanks a lot.
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