This week's panelists are Aldyen Donnelly, Nori's Director of Carbon Economics, and Tito Jankowksi, cofounder of Negative (a startup making products out of captured atmospheric carbon dioxide) and host of the AirMiners community.
Here are the articles discussed:
"Unilever’s New Climate Plan Puts Carbon Labels on 70,000 Products" by Akshat Rathi in Bloomberg Green.
"Impossible Foods CEO says the meat industry will be obsolete in 15 years — ‘That’s our mission’" by Tyler Clifford on CNBC.
WRI's webinar on soil carbon: "Why Regenerative Agriculture Is Good for Soil Health, but Has Limited Potential to Mitigate Climate Change".
Here's the link to apply to join the AirMiners Slack community, and here is Cool Farm Tool.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to Carbon Removal Newsroom. I’m Ross Kenyon. I am the lead strategist at the Nori Carbon Removal Marketplace. Today I have with me two panelists, Aldyen Donnelly, one of my colleagues at Nori, the Director of Carbon Economics there. Hey, Aldyen.
Aldyen Donnelly: Hi.
Ross Kenyon: Happy to have you back. And also Tito Jankowski, co-founder of Negative, which is a startup making products out of atmospheric carbon dioxide and host of the Airminers Community. Hey, Tito.
Tito Jankowski: Hey, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, thanks for being here. Also, if you’re listening, sorry we missed last week. We just could not swing it given all the things that were happening on our ends, but hopefully we don’t have to do that too often. But we have a cool show today. I’m going to run us through the outline and then we’re going to dive in. So the first thing that I have on here is that Unilever has announced a new climate plan where they’re going to put carbon labels on 70,000 products. I think that has some interesting implications for carbon removal.
And then WRI had a webinar on soil carbon. That’s the World Resources Institute. So we’ll talk a bit about the implications there. We wanted to talk about Rhodium Group and Carbon 180s. They had a presentation that happened yesterday based on a report that Rhodium did about the jobs that would be created due to carbon removal legislation and policy. But we’ll have to talk about that next week. So that happened this week, but we will be dealing with it next week. And then also there was a full committee held on the Growing Climate Solutions Act in Congress.
So that is underway right now, too. But you’re also going to have to wait until next week to get a more substantial take on that. And then also we want to talk about... I don’t even know how you say it, Tito. What’s the proper term? What do they like? Lab-grown meat? What do they like?
Tito Jankowski: Lab-grown meat works good.
Ross Kenyon: Lab-grown meat works good. And there’s some updates on that and may relate to the future of regenerative agriculture, CAFOs, meat, et cetera. So we’re going to dive into all of that, but let’s start at the top. Tito, tell us about Unilever.
Tito Jankowski: Unilever. So if that name, first off, isn’t that familiar, or if it’s familiar but you’re not sure what they do, Unilever is one of these giant brands, kind of a house of brands approach where they own lots of things that you’ve heard about, like Dove Soap. Briar’s Ice Cream, Dollar Shave Club. All of these are part of the Unilever empire. And this week they announced that for all their products, they’re going to be all 70,000 of their products. They’re going to be adding labeling to show how much carbon dioxide greenhouse gas was used during production and shipping.
What’s cool about this is it’s It’s such a wide span of different products. This is something that you’re going to be seeing pop up in your life in many, many different ways, from the things you eat to the things you buy at the store to things that hang out in your shower. I think the timing is interesting. As part of the COVID outbreak, the CEO addressed that and said, it’s something that we can’t take our eye off the ball right now, even though there’s a lot of other things happening. We’ve seen similar type announcements or practices from other companies.
You see, for example, Microsoft announcing its billion-dollar carbon removal and carbon neutral investment recently. You see Lyft making its rides carbon neutral every time you take a Lyft. What I love about this is it makes sense for Unilever. They’re making a move in the climate space that’s a fit for them across all their brands. Every single one of their products has a package, and they’re using that across these 70,000 products to tell people more about business. The changing climate and greenhouse gases. So I really like how they’re using their strength there to say, look, we’re going to put this on shelves all around the world.
So that’s really exciting. I think we’ll see more announcements like this where it’s a company doing its thing and figuring out how climate and carbon can amplify the work that they are doing. What do you think, Aldyen?
Aldyen Donnelly: I think it’s really interesting and I really applaud Unilever for taking this first step. I also think it’s a little more complicated than it sounds. So for example, if you look at the process of making a bar of soap or making all of the bars of soap that are sold under the same name and the same brand around the world, the actual Greenhouse gas footprint for each individual bar of soap can be very, very, very, very different. And so it’s still going to be a process of figuring out how to allocate emissions to each individual bar of soap.
I think it’s a really, really good idea to go this step in the branding so that the consumer is starting to get a better idea of the greenhouse gases generally embedded. In the products and services we use on the one hand, there are two sort of cautionary notes that I would offer however, which is it’s going to be close to impossible to actually have an accurate greenhouse gas footprint attached to every bar of soap. And we should be comfortable with the idea that we’re looking at in many cases, Global product supply chain averages and not have expectations for specific product accuracy that can’t be met.
And I think Unilever’s got the right goals, but sometimes the language is suggesting a higher level of precision or accuracy than is going to be realized. And that should not matter. It will only matter if consumers perceive That they’re being given better information than they need. So don’t want to have backlash happening because of misperceptions that we might create unnecessarily from the get-go. Does that make sense the way I say it?
Ross Kenyon: Makes sense to me. One thing that stood out to me in this article, which by the way, all the articles we’re discussing are in the show notes if you’d like to read them for yourself. Is that they not seem to be very supportive of offsetting as a plan. They seem to be much more focused on what’s called insetting, if you’ve never heard this term, which is actually decarbonizing from the inside out rather than buying something external to these processes to negate or offset those emissions. What do you think? I mean, do you think that they’ll end up supporting more regenerative agriculture as a company or finding other ways to inset without relying on external marketplaces?
Aldyen Donnelly: Well, I said earlier I had two concerns, and that relates to my second concern. And again, I strongly applaud Unilever for their intentions and their goals here. When a company says, I am not supportive of offsetting, but the goal is insetting, that typically means the company is saying, I as a company want to manage all of the opportunities to reduce emissions in my supply chain and keep credit for any reductions that are realized because of my programming. Keep the credit and keep it within my supply chain, keep it under my brand.
In other words, I as Unilever do not want to find myself in a situation where maybe my suppliers can choose between Selling real interest in those offset credits to me, Unilever, and maybe selling those offset credits to British Petroleum, or I guess we call it BP now, we never, how old am I?
Ross Kenyon: Anyway, so my- You’re not old enough to call it the Anglo-Iranian, whatever it was called before, BP.
Aldyen Donnelly: I’m almost that old.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, you’re almost that old, okay. Sorry, continue.
Aldyen Donnelly: So I really applaud corporate goals to manage their supply chain greenhouse gas emissions and not having them double credited or double claimed. But certainly my preference would be to live in a world where food and fiber producers in those supply chains are free to sell real interest in their emission reductions and carbon removal. To the highest bidder. And I also kind of like the idea of it being an open marketplace so that food and fiber producers might be able to use this ability they have to deliver a valued ecosystem service to get revenues from new sources outside the food supply chain that makes the food supply chain more secure.
So I don’t buy into the offsetting is bad and insetting is the only way Approach to doing things because that is not necessarily in the best interest of those who are in the business every day of growing the food and fiber that are the starting place of these supply chains. And I’d also go one step further. I really hope we don’t fall into this being an either or discussion because the hope, and I applaud it as well, is that This branding will lead to a consumer willingness to pay a higher price for the products that legitimately have a lower greenhouse gas footprint showing on their label.
The difficulty I have is going back over the history of my experience. My experience suggests that when 5% or 10% of the bars of soap that are on the retail shelf Are certified and have that lower environmental footprint or higher social value, whether it’s free trade or other factors that are being reported. When that market penetration of the superior product is small, it’s only 5% or 10% of the bars on the shelf, there seems to be quite a nice consumer willingness to pay a premium for those products. So I want Unilever to be able to exploit that willingness.
In my experience though, there’s some market penetration wall and I see it every time, but I still don’t have the capacity to forecast where that wall is. But there’s some place where that percent of bars of soap that are on the shelf hits a maximum, at which point in time the consumer’s willingness to pay a premium for the superior product goes away. I don’t know if it’s at 20% or 35% or 65%, but when the percentage of bars of soap on the shelf reach that penetration wall, then all of a sudden the willingness to pay the premium is gone.
And that differentiation goes away. I think it’s reasonable And I hope that retailers and consumer products producers exploit all of the opportunity to attract a premium. But the reason I think they should support offsetting and the coincident development of vibrant and robust carbon markets is because the carbon markets will last after they hit the market penetration wall and that consumer willingness to pay a premium goes away.
Ross Kenyon: Got it. Well, anything to add there, Tito?
Tito Jankowski: No, it’s a great story. I look forward to more stories like this as these companies kind of build out and develop their language and around their commitments.
Ross Kenyon: And what if I swap this? Since we’re already talking about consumer products, why don’t you fill us in on lab-grown meat and what’s happening over there?
Tito Jankowski: Yeah, so you may be a person that has these kind of products in your fridge or in your freezer. Right now I’ve got a bunch of Beyond Meat plant-based protein. And today I saw this great, very interesting announcement from Impossible Foods. They’re the developers of the Impossible Burger. And the CEO was saying that, kind of projecting forward and saying that he sees the end of the meat industry or the collapse of the meat industry coming soon. And so I thought that was an interesting story that came up in the sense of it’s something that...
My background’s in biomedical engineering and biological engineering. And so these types of products have definitely come up on my radar before. But now that I’m taking an interest in climate and climate solutions, to start to look at an announcement like that and say, wow, I wonder what kind of effect that will have on On carbon, if I’m moving from ground beef to Impossible Burgers, what is the net effect if the meat industry collapses and is replaced with these plant-based meats or lab-grown meats? What do you think about that, Aldyen?
Ross Kenyon: And also, do either of you know about, I imagine eating CAFO farmed beef or just meat in general is not very good for you relative to regenerative meat. And I don’t know how healthy it is for you to eat something that’s more processed that is plant-based meat replacement protein. I don’t know about the relative health of it, but I doubt it could be worse than eating CAFO meat. So that, and then also, do you think this will be farmed regeneratively, Aldyen? Do you think there’s a possibility to have this kind of upside as well?
Aldyen Donnelly: I don’t know. I wish I did. There are two topics that I just struggle with over and over and over and over and over again. And one is meat, and particularly CAFO meat, and one is nuclear. And I have to say that I don’t have the right answers. And have been trying to find the right answer for a long time. I’m an animal lover. There’s a lot about CAFO versus managed grazing in open grasslands that really bothers me. Whenever I’ve tried to really take a long view of the total life cycle, environmental, not just greenhouse gas effects, every time I try to figure out the numbers, I get different numbers.
So I’m still in the process of trying to form an opinion based on facts. I’m not there yet. I’d like to be, my life would be easier, but I’m not there yet.
Ross Kenyon: Well, what do you think, Tito, either about the health implications of this for humanity at large, and also you think they’ll probably go, I mean, I imagine in 15 years, regenerative agriculture has come a long way from now, too.
Tito Jankowski: What was your, what was the specific question? I was looking up the term CAFO meat, it wasn’t something I was familiar with.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, sorry. You’re basically just, yeah, factory farmed meat in case you’re listening out there. Oh, just I’m wondering about because people, one of the criticisms of plant-based protein has been the degree of processing and whether it’s reliant upon various monocultures for soy or for corn or whatever is going into these products is not necessarily always the best thing to be eating. But is that any worse than CAFO beef?
Tito Jankowski: I really doubt it is.
Ross Kenyon: But if you compare that to regenerative meat, I think, and people often claim, is a rather healthy kind of meat to be eating. But I don’t know, you probably have more of a biology background than me, and I’m just guessing. So don’t take what I’m saying as goth.
Tito Jankowski: Yeah, certainly. I guess I would probably apply a similar logic that I would to electrification of vehicles. So I think an argument I’ve heard about electric cars is, well, you know what, the supply chain and manufacturing of them is a giant carbon emission, has a lot of implications there. Does that undo the value of electric cars? To me, the electrification of cars is just going to happen and we’re going to get better at At the manufacturing, at the supply chains in order to make them better from a carbon footprint standpoint.
So it’s more a question of the trajectory. And I think I would apply the same logic here. We were in the very early stages of these plant protein and lab-grown meat companies. In the sense of the technology is pretty early. Beyond Meat, I think just IPO’d in the last two years. Impossible Foods has not IPO. It’s a very early stuff. And I think that if the foods are highly processed and you want to get something that tastes good with all the processing, I think that’s something that will be developed. But in terms of the base level of it, it’s plant protein.
It’s your growing plants. And that’s very different than anything that involves land use and meat. I think for lab-grown meat, that’s got its own thing. But again, I guess that’s how I come from it. As I say, yes, and this technology and these companies are rapidly, rapidly making progress. And so I just think about more where that transformation can go, which is it can go to Replacing animal-based protein with plant-based protein or lab-grown protein.
Aldyen Donnelly: I also think that when we start to have a better idea of what first of all the numbers are for the plant-based options and the full consideration of livestock, I think we’re going to find that it’s not We’re going to have to start differentiating between beef, pork, poultry. The answers are very, very, very different. Even if you’re talking CAFO or confinement operations, for each of the species we rely on for a flesh-based product, the numbers are so, so, so different.
Ross Kenyon: This is a conversation hard for me to have because my dog is begging for my attention right now. And yeah, I think Beyond that, the carbon benefit too, I think just the, if you could produce something that would be indistinguishable and nutritionally indistinguishable from capo meat, and you could subtract the enormous cruelty of the factory farming system, it seems hard to see why anyone would not go for that. So I hope that’s the case. I would love to see that switch. I am very curious to see, because if it does, lab-grown meat is of course different from something that might require feedstocks from externally grown agricultural products.
So will we see, will that increase the demand for various monocultures? Is it possible to produce those in a regenerative fashion that is not the worst of conventional agriculture? I guess we’ll have to see, but I don’t know, Aldyen, maybe we can sum this up by saying if this is a prediction that’s being made for the next 15 years before this happens, do you think regenerative agriculture will be truly the dominant agricultural paradigm in the United States?
Aldyen Donnelly: You know, 20 years ago, nobody ever or few heard the words regenerative agriculture. We talked about conservation practices and then we moved on to sustainable and we’re now in regenerative. And I think 20 years from now, we’re going to be saying not what is the greenhouse gas footprint of a pound of meat, whether it’s plant-based or animal-based. And we’re going to be saying what’s the integrated environmental footprint per, I don’t know what the right metric is, Per unit of nutrient value for everything we put in our mouth. So the denominator is going to be, there are going to be two denominators, nutrient value and taste.
And the numerator is going to be a metric that represents the broader environmental footprint. We’re not there yet, but I think we’re going to be talking in completely different terms in less than 20 years.
Ross Kenyon: Well, I hope you’re right. That sounds good to me. Any last words there, Tito?
Tito Jankowski: Yeah, again, looking forward to this discussion continuing. I think Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat. There’s a bunch of other companies in the pipeline, including Air Protein. CEO Lisa Dyson was one of the speakers at the recent Air Miners Conference. I think it’s definitely a topic to watch, and it’s particularly interesting to me because it’s an intersection of biotechnology and food and climate.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think you made a good point, too, that we are at the beginning of this curve. And I’m sure even if even I’m not saying this is the truth, but even if it were the case that various types of these plant based proteins are not. Amazingly healthful for you currently or they’re they’re heavily processed or they’re not nearly as healthy as one might expect. That’s not to say that this technology will not continue to improve. I’m sure great strides will be made over time too. And I’m also looking forward to seeing what comes out of the industry, but we’ll leave it at that for now.
And then Aldyen, if you could introduce this WRI webinar on soil carbon and what the context is there, that would be great.
Aldyen Donnelly: Well, the World Resources Institute, which does a lot of great work, has been trying to work through What their positions and recommendations should be with respect to insetting, offsetting corporate strategies to reduce emissions and offset which emissions they cannot reduce directly. And in the last few weeks, they’ve come out with a quite, at least on my part, unexpected and quite sort of Almost dramatic position and that in summary is discouraging companies, whether they are integrated food company, globally integrated food companies or energy companies, from including paying farmers to draw down and sequester carbon in the soil in their offsetting strategies and insetting strategies.
Ross Kenyon: But that’s just for carbon though, right? They’re supportive of them doing it for other reasons, perhaps.
Aldyen Donnelly: No, they’re saying of all the things you can do, of all the options to draw carbon dioxide or heat trapping gases out of the atmosphere, when your goal is to retain the recovered carbon in a terrestrial reservoir, whether it’s natural man-made, do not include projects that claim to store carbon in the soil in your portfolio. They presented a number of arguments that suggest that there is no scientific basis for suggesting that incremental carbon can be stored for any length of time in the soils, which quite frankly, which statements I can’t really understand because The science as we know it is quite different from how it was described in the WRI webinar.
And in fact, seven of the world’s leading soil scientists, including but not limited to Rattan Lal and Keith Postgen in the United States responded to the WRI webinar with a concise and I think very complete retort. And that was significant because there are lots and lots of opportunities and temptations for the soil scientists to respond to claims that don’t stand up. And they usually don’t respond. So these seven world-leading soil scientists felt the need to respond as quickly and completely as they did in and of itself is a signal that Something’s weird here.
And I don’t know what that is. The second, and I don’t like attributing motivations to people when I don’t know what they are, but I really don’t know what the motivations are, the drivers are for WRI taking this position. I might, if I understood them, Really agree with why they started down this path. I just can’t, I can’t agree for a moment with the conclusions they’ve drawn.
Ross Kenyon: When I think about WRI or groups like CDP, Carbon Disclosure Project, the goal is to help companies and organizations make decisions about how they’re choosing to deal with their sustainability goals. So a group like WRI saying soil carbon, And regenerative agriculture is not going to help you on your carbon goals is a really big deal because it might close off parts of carbon removal to companies who are currently considering it. Is that accurate?
Aldyen Donnelly: That might be what they’re thinking, but it’s certainly not accurate. And what I’m about to say is me relying entirely on CDP’s carbon majors reports. The reality is that 57% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, man-made greenhouse gas emissions, are the scope one and scope three emissions of 50 and only 50 companies worldwide. To get up to 82% of anthropogenic emissions, you only have to get up to 244 companies. Wow. If you look at the current annual reports and sustainability reports of that top 50 that account for a discharges between 31 and 32 billion, no, sorry, 31 and 32 is the 244 companies.
The top 50 is less than that. But if you look at their annual emissions and their plans, even the greenest of the green in those companies has not only no plan To reduce their scope one and scope three combined emissions by 2030. They have no plans to reduce those emissions and they continue to grow through 2040. And if you look at their capital spending budgets in their most recent annual reports, in sum over 50% of their capital spending continues to go to exploration and development of fossil fuel reserves. Even if you look at Equinor, used to be Stat Oil, Norway’s people-owned energy company, in their most recent annual report, only 4% of their capital spending is being dedicated to the development of all forms of what they call new energy supplies.
So let’s be real. Every carbon CDP, Carbon Disclosure Project report, Shows is the source of the facts that say, not only are these companies not planning on cutting their emissions over the next 20 years, because they aren’t, and as long as they aren’t planning on cutting their emissions over the next 20 years, it’s not even possible for the Paris Accord 2030 goals to be achieved, no matter what everybody else does, except for one thing. The only thing that is big enough and affordable enough and has enough co-benefits to offset that reality I just described is paying food and fiber producers to adopt regenerative practices.
Global food and fiber producers could reasonably be drawing down 10 to 25 billion tonnes a year by 2030. Certainly not enough to cover The 31 or 32 billion tonnes a year, the 244 largest emitters are still going to be emitting in 2030, but a nice bite in it. So at what point are we going to say, hey, CDP, your own reports say these guys aren’t going to do it. At what point are we going to start saying, guess what? These guys aren’t going to do it. So what do we do now?
As opposed to, Somehow we’re going to spend another 30 years, just like we spent the last 30 years, which is saying, hey, you guys, you got to do it.
Unknown speaker: Are you amazed with her memory for figures? Yeah, this is great.
Ross Kenyon: Samurai. I’m amazed you’re able to just pull out percentages and numbers off of reports that I assume you read once or maybe twice. Do you have anything to add there, Tito? Or is that so comprehensive, you’re intimidated?
Tito Jankowski: It’s pretty damn comprehensive. Yeah, I’d love to, if there’s anything specific regarding, as we were talking about with... Cattle farming and stuff like that. I think that’s something that came up in the webinar too. They were talking about kind of balancing things there. I think it was half of all agricultural emissions are related to meat. Do you have anything else to add to that piece of it?
Aldyen Donnelly: Yeah, there’s different ways of doing the numbers. I would probably say the single largest source of agricultural emissions, and it kind of really depends on how far you go down the supply chain, is still related to synthetic fertilizer use. So to the extent we could be substituting animal waste compost for synthetic fertilizers, We could be making a good positive difference. So I’m not arguing in favor or against meat. I’m saying that as long as meat is in the supply chain, there’s at least a transition to lower emissions in agriculture that includes as long as we’re producing meat using that waste to substitute for synthetic fertilizer.
Tito Jankowski: Got it. Thank you. Is that, was that when they were talking about manure management, is that kind of what you’re referring to? Okay.
Aldyen Donnelly: Yeah. But don’t, yeah. And, and again, and when it comes to manure and organic matter substituting, you know, compost substitute for a synthetic fertilizers, weird thing is same story applies. Really, really each animal you’re talking about is, is really, really, really, really different. I’ll hit the punchline. I keep thinking I should stop eating meat. I eat meat in all forms of meat because I love meat. But if I ever stop being a hypocrite, I’m probably going to dump beef out of my diet first. And I’m going to probably eat pork till my death.
Not just because I love how pigs taste, but I can do a lot more sustainably and derive a lot more environmental benefits out of hog manure than cow’s waste. There’s a real difference between what comes out of an animal that has more than one stomach and one that comes out of an animal that has one stomach. And the other thing is, you know what the great thing about pigs are? They can eat anything. So they’re also a waste disposal bin. So when we get into it in detail, there’s a whole bunch of different ways to transition that don’t necessarily mean stop eating all forms of animal flesh tomorrow afternoon.
There might be good animal welfare reasons to do that. I’m not discounting those. As I said, I changed my mind on this stuff every 25 minutes. But if you’re looking at rank order, I gotta love pigs.
Tito Jankowski: Beautiful. To jump on the enthusiasm train, I love this. There’s this quote from the CEO of Impossible Foods that I’ll paraphrase, but it explains why my freezer probably will be full of plant-based meats or lab-grown meats until my inevitable death. It was something like nature has had millions of years to evolve the flavor of meat, but we’ve only just begun evolving the flavors and processes and textures of plant-grown and lab-grown meat. So to me, I have similar enthusiasm, I think, for the potential that’s still out there, that’s undiscovered.
Aldyen Donnelly: I totally agree with that. Again, I made my argument for pigs, not as an argument against plant-based meats, just illustrating why I’m so confused about this topic.
Ross Kenyon: Sure, yeah. Yeah, there are good versions and bad versions of all of those broad categories of meat, I’m sure. I think what we’re doing currently as the dominant paradigm with CAFOs, Cage Animal Feeding Operations, Those are clearly not working for cruelty reasons, for environmental reasons, for carbon reasons. There’s a whole bunch of overlapping problems, labor reasons. There’s all sorts of terrible things about them. But it isn’t to say it will always be that way.
Aldyen Donnelly: Can I add one more thought too? And I’ll probably make huge enemies saying this. I have trouble with mixing up all of our causes into one pot.
Ross Kenyon: Like what I just said? Yeah. Or something else? How would you say it instead?
Aldyen Donnelly: Well, I would be okay with arguments to reduce our dependence on confinement operation grown animals. I think if that’s the primary reason to not eat that meat, we should stick with that being the primary reason. I find that we seem to go through phases where if the theme of today is greenhouse gases, then the whole reason to do it is greenhouse gases, even when the better reason to do it is animal welfare. And I find half the time we don’t achieve our environmental goals and objectives Is we keep mixing up multiple objectives and putting them under one flag, which seems to be the flag of the moment.
And we lose the battle every time. So let’s stay focused. If there’s one primary and totally legitimate reason to switch from a food source, let’s not put that all under the E. coli battle You know, for a few years and the greenhouse battle for a few years, if it’s about animal welfare, let’s just talk about animal welfare. I think when we try to put everything under the label of the day, we lose the battle every time.
Ross Kenyon: Well, yeah, this is a long running debate. I don’t know how you feel about it, Tito, but you could link this to people and various approaches to climate change where is this just about the PPM and the atmosphere or are we linking it to various types of climate justice problems that surround this? Are we linking it to animal welfare? What exactly? How inclusive or all encompassing are we imagining our activism with regard to climate change? I think it’s an open question, but I think everyone’s certainly leaning towards more justice-focused approaches these days.
Tito Jankowski: Yeah, my take is I just think we’re limited in the depths of our imagination. I think that if we have an inclusive future where we see something bad happening or the world just going to crap, then I don’t think that engages people. I think in order to grow beyond the existing climate movement, we need to really connect to people all around the world. I mean, there’s millions and billions of people on the planet, and they’re not a part of this conversation. That’s part of the work that I’m doing at Air Miners is working on how do we take this conversation and grow it in terms of including millions and billions of people in this.
Aldyen Donnelly: Yeah, this might be taking us off on a tangent too long, but I keep remembering, sadly, the late 80s when the environmental movement reasonably decided to be very, very concerned about the proliferation of salmon farms, open net salmon farms on the coast, especially in the Pacific. Where we were introducing Atlantic salmon into the Pacific because we knew how to breed them. And in the late 80s, in the 1990s, the environmental movement decided the goal was to shut down the industry. Don’t let it get off the ground. And of course, in 1989, less than 30% of all the salmon people Eight worldwide was farmed, and today it’s more than 80% of the salmon.
So the attempt to get the salmon farming industry shut down was a total failure. I swear, and this is just hypothetical, I understand, but I swear that if the environmental movement in the late 80s has said, salmon farming has to be closed system. You can do it, you just can only do it if you can prove to the regulators That you’re releasing nothing into the ocean. I swear if they had focused on that environmental objective, that no releases into the ocean, that we would have had salmon farms and they would mostly have been on land.
In British Columbia, the first on land salmon farming tank opened up just in the last few years. So when the goal was to shut down the industry Nothing happened. If the goal had stayed really focused on what’s the environmental outcome that we want to prevent or create, I think we could have had a completely different salmon farming industry alive and running today.
Ross Kenyon: So you’re arguing for a very specific, narrow focus. That one thing, if we had focused on, would have made all the difference.
Aldyen Donnelly: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Okay. Yeah, there are certainly trade-offs either way you go. I know if Jane were here, Jane would be arguing super hard the other direction that this is an intersectional, multifaceted problem that we need all that complexity on for reasons of ethics and justice. But yeah, it is a long-running, open question. Well, let’s wrap it up. We did good work, I think. What do you guys want to plug? Tito, why don’t you go first?
Tito Jankowski: Plug. We just launched our negative newsletter. If you go to gonegative.co, we’re working on growing the conversation around these technologies, around these trends. Basically, it’s a way to... Yeah, to be a part of this conversation. I think for a lot of people in the airminers community, it’s something they do, it’s something they work on, something they’re actively working in. And with negative, we want to take those stories and start sharing that out to more and more people. So check that out at gonegative.co. It’s an experiment. We’re trying it out.
Come join us.
Ross Kenyon: And then am I okay to just issue an open call saying go join the Airminer Slack?
Tito Jankowski: Totally 100%.
Ross Kenyon: If you’re listening to this, you would fit in. These are your people at the Airminer Slack. So the link to join is in the show notes as well, as well as gonegative.co. Aldyen, anything beyond Nori, nori.com.
Aldyen Donnelly: Yeah, beyond Nuri.com, I want to actually go back to where this discussion started, which is Unilever. In that Unilever, many years ago, put the funding in place to create something called the Cool Farm Tool and the Cool Farm Alliance. And the Cool Farm Tool, which you can look up, was a tool that was developed to help food and fiber producers Develop a picture of their product life cycle, greenhouse gas footprint. And it’s a really useful tool in that context. It’s not a tool yet that we can use to monetize carbon, not because they made a mistake.
It’s because they firmly intended to have the tool not used to monetize carbon, to help people figure out how to quantify Carbon stock changes and sale real interest in those ecosystem services. But last April, the board of Cool Farm Tool agreed that they would authorize the staff to proceed to decide whether or not to modify the tool to monetize carbon. And as of a few weeks ago, The decision has been to go forward. So it’s probably going to be some time and they’ll require some fundraising to make the changes to the tool that are required for it to be a carbon quantification tool.
But they’ve set out to do that. And that’s a really great decision. And it’s a wonderful team that’s working on it. So we congratulate them.
Ross Kenyon: Well, that’s nice. Tito, do you feel bad? You could have rubbed someone else and rubbed yourself. Cool farm tool. Link to that is also in the show notes. Thanks you both for being here. Great stuff. Nice being with y’all.
Tito Jankowski: You too.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, thanks. If you like the show, please share it with a friend. Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. And thank you so much for listening.
