Reversing Climate Change

Today David joins Ross and Christophe to explain why civilizations that degrade their soil don’t last. We discuss the troubling numbers around soil degradation and loss and the three simple farming practices that would restore our soil. David walks us through the residual benefits of regenerative farming and the factors that inhibit widespread adoption.

Andrew Himes is a partner at Carbon Innovations, currently working with the University of Washington’s Carbon Smart Building Initiative. The project seeks to transform the built environment from an existential threat to a net carbon sink that absorbs more than a billion tons of CO2 each year by converting captured carbon into useful building products and creating market demand for carbon capture.

Professor Dowlatabadi joins Ross and Christophe to share his frustration with the lack of evidence-based policy employed by governments as well as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change temperature targets. He offers his insight on geoengineering, explaining why he is so confident in its inevitability. We debate the ‘unobtainable goals’ of Elon Musk and compare Nori with Professor Dowlatabadi’s 2005 Offsetters program.

When it comes to climate change, the mining industry is typically seen as a ‘bad guy,’ depleting the Earth’s natural resources and emitting CO2 in the process. So you might be astounded to learn that carbon can actually be captured and stored using the waste produced in the mining process. Indeed the potential exists for scaling up this carbon capture process to remove billions of tons of CO2 per year—simply by recycling mining waste.

Ross and Christophe are joined by Dr. Klaus Lackner, the director of ASU’s Center for Negative Carbon Emissions (CNCE) and professor at the School of Sustainable Engineering. The CNCE is known for advancing carbon management technologies to capture carbon dioxide directly from the air in an outdoor operating environment. Today Klaus explains how he conceived of the windmill-sized structures that could scrub CO2 from the air and how these towers prove to be a more efficient solution than planting trees.

Today Ross and Christophe are speaking with corporate environmental attorney and blockchain enthusiast Mike Denby of Arizona Public Service, the largest power company in Arizona. APS is a vertically-integrated utility, both generating and selling power to its customers. They discuss how blockchain technology might be utilized in the energy sector and how the conservative business culture of the utility industry is likely to impact its interest in cryptocurrency.

In a world where ideology informs decision-making and policy-makers have little understanding of what is plausible when it comes to negative emissions technology, challenging doesn’t even begin to describe the task of reversing climate change. In this top-down approach, a small number of academics, activists and politicians are making the decisions for 7.5 billion people—and spending a lot of time arguing hypotheticals rather than taking action.

Carbon sequestration is an integral part of reversing climate change. The question becomes, where can we permanently store all of that CO2? One possibility lies in the basalt rock under the ocean floor. In fact, Earth science researchers at Columbia University have a project in the works that could scale up to capture millions of tons of carbon dioxide annually.

Today Ross and Christophe are joined by Propagate Co-Founders Jeremy Kaufman and Ethan Steinberg to discuss the fundamentals of agroforestry and how the Propagate model works to provide farmers with capital for planting trees. They walk us through the process, explaining how an analysis of crops appropriate to the bioregion and the farmer’s goals work together to determine the specific tree crop appropriate to the project.

Today, Ross and Christophe are joined by Sophia Mendelsohn, Head of Sustainability at JetBlue to discuss the incentive to offset carbon emissions at the personal, company, and global levels. They speak to how the industry is addressing climate change via the CORSIA deal and why limiting carbon exposure and liability makes good business sense from a financial perspective.