In The Arena by TechArena - Solving Climate Change with Jonathan Koomey and Ian Monroe

Episode Date: June 26, 2023

TechArena host Allyson Klein chats with leading climate researchers Jonathan Koomey and Ian Monroe to discuss their new book and how they're delivering a mandate to leaders to take action now.

Welcome to the Tech Arena, featuring authentic discussions between tech's leading innovators and our host, Alison Klein. Now, let's step into the arena. Welcome to the Tech Arena. My name is Alison Klein, and today I have a really exciting episode. I am joined today by Ian Munro, President and Chief Investment Officer at Etho Capital. He's also a lecturer at Stanford University and has consulted organizations as far-reaching as the UN, the World Bank, and the U.S. State Department on sustainable solutions. And Jonathan Coomey, president and founder of Coomey Analytics. He's a former lecturer at Stanford and widely hailed as one of the leading thinkers

on sustainability as well as compute sustainability. You guys certainly get around. You've also recently jointly published a book called Solving Climate Change, a guide for learners and leaders that lays out a shockingly actionable guidelines for organizations to move swiftly on climate action. Welcome to the program, guys. Why don't you go ahead and introduce yourselves? Ian, why don't we start with you? Thanks so much for having us. So my background has been a mix of a bunch of things related to scaling up solutions to climate change. Originally, I came into it as a scientist and engineer, and then got pulled into international development, working on renewable energy and carbon projects related to forestry and agriculture all around Asia, Africa, and Latin America and over 30 countries. And then I got pulled back into academia, at least part-time, starting to teach and run a program on bioenergy and biomaterial sustainability at Stanford.

While doing that, I launched a tech company called OroEco to help track personal climate footprints and gamify that in their early days of the app economy. And out of that, it morphed into a joint venture to form a company called Etho Capital, which focuses on doing deeper dive climate analysis and overall ESG analysis to select the publicly traded companies that are the leaders across the global economy and invest in the most climate efficient, sustainable companies in the context of broad based public equity index investing. So I'm a bit of a weird mix of originally a sustainability science and data geek with a lot of tech and finance and a bit of academia mixed in there too. I started focusing on climate solutions back in the 1980s. And I was a graduate student at the Energy and Resources Group at Berkeley. I was working at Lawrence Berkeley

National Lab where I was a scientist for many years. And I've been interested in ways to solve the problem since then. And my background is like Ian's, an interdisciplinary one. I've done a bunch of work on science and engineering, but also economics, public policy, been a visiting professor at a few different universities. And so my foot is partly in the research world, but also partly in the world of practice. And I think that's one of the things that unites Ian and I in our efforts is that we cross boundaries that normally are not

crossed by individuals. And we try to find solutions that work regardless of which academic box they happen to fit in. Nice. I read your book. It was greatly impactful to me. And you start it with a quote, it's warming, it's us, we're sure, it's bad, we can fix it. Where did this come from? And in your minds, just how bad is it? Well, first, this catechism, if you will, comes from a book by Kimberly Nicholas, who wrote the foreword to our book as well. And it's a simple way of summarizing the issue that helps people who aren't as versed in the details get it quickly. And so it is important for people to understand that the science of climate change is based on some of the most well-established principles in physical science. These principles are very well understood, and we know with as much certainty as one can have

that continuing to put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will warm the Earth and push global temperatures well outside the comfortable range in which civilization developed and human societies formed. So we are playing with forces that once unleashed will be very difficult to manage for human society. So it's really bad. Like this is, it's still not too late to do something about it, but we really need to move quickly. If there's one lesson that we'd like readers to take from our work, it's that we have to move quickly. There's no more waiting around. There's no wait and see. There's no more, let's wait for the next report. No, we have to start immediately reducing greenhouse gas emissions to zero as

quickly as we can. Now, when I read the book, you know, one of the things that I thought about is your backgrounds, working with industry, working with broader institutions on this challenge for such a long time. Jonathan, you and I have known each other for well over a decade and work on sustainability issues within the tech sector. And Ian, your background goes back just as far in terms of engaging. Why do you think the time is right now for this book? And what has changed in the broader landscape, do you think, that has made folks ready to not wait for that next report? I think it's really a question that just circles back around to the urgency of our reality, which is climate change is no longer something to worry about in the future for future generations.

It's really here and now, and it's causing, in some cases, irreparable damage already. I actually started working on climate change all the way back in high school when I started seeing the science and seeing it relate to particularly what I was seeing around the small farm where I grew up in Northern California, which already was getting impacted by drought that was far different than we had ever experienced from the stories I was getting impacted by drought that was far different than we had ever experienced from the stories I was getting from my mother and grandmother. And I literally, as a child, would have nightmares about wildfire engulfing our valley, which really seemed highly unlikely because we had never had big catastrophic wildfires. We had the kind of small fires that often happen around that area of Northern California, but it's a pretty lush coastal mountain range part of Northern California.

And that was what got me working on climate as a scientist and engineer and the trajectory that I mentioned beyond that. Flash forward a few decades, and unfortunately, that nightmare has come true. My family's farm was in the middle of one of the massive fires in 2017 that overnight burned down homes for over two dozen family members and thousands of community members around us. Several of our neighbors got trapped and died. And this was a fire, again, far different from any fires we'd ever experienced.

It was literally moving on hurricane-force winds, moving miles and minutes. And I frankly am just very grateful that my family was able to get out with their lives, mainly because my cousin's dog had woken him up in the middle of the night and he saw the fire and started this chain of neighbors warning neighbors. And that fire barely even made the national news because it was one of over a dozen huge fires that were burning in California that night that destroyed thousands of homes and many more lost their lives. And unfortunately, since 2017, when that happened, that's become more the norm than the extreme. We've just seen fires getting bigger and bigger.

And it's not just the immediate danger from these fires, but it's also the smoke, as has now been experienced on the East Coast with the Canadian wildfires that are burning. And it's, of course, not just in North America. This is happening even from the Amazon Basin up to above the Arctic Circle and Australia. Literally, our world is on fire. And all the climate science says it's only going to get worse. And of course, there's sea level rise and violent storms and weather extremes and other

directions already. And to John's point, just every day of delay, the situation gets worse. And it's really that urgency that pushed us to want to write this and a realization that we importantly are also just not talking enough about the actual happy realities of all the solutions that are already we were actually a bit shocked to find that there wasn't a good textbook on solving climate change. There were books on the climate science of why climate is changing, and there were books on specific climate solutions like renewable energy, but we couldn't find anything that put everything together in terms of decarbonizing every piece of our economy that we have to.

And then the more systemic pieces related to moving money out of problems into solutions, aligning incentives to make sure decarbonization is happening as quickly as possible, and then fixing our communication systems to elevate the truth about not just the realities of climate problems, but also the solutions that are out there, which ones are really solutions and all the co-benefits for those solutions. And another why now piece is that the climate targets that we're setting right now will have profound implications for our future moving forward. And we really need to make those climate targets much more aggressive

and aligned with the reality of climate science. There's been a movement towards setting net zero by 2050 targets, which would have been sufficient if we started acting a couple decades ago based on what the science said then. But now we have a couple more decades of pollution that's built up in the atmosphere that will stay there for over a thousand years without us actively removing it. And that also means that warming is happening faster and we need to decarbonize even faster. And really our target should be getting beyond net zero to net climate positive, where we're removing more pollution than we're putting up. And ultimately our target should be getting back to the healthy, stable climate

that humans and every other species evolved with. It shouldn't be a one and a half degree warmer world, which is the stretch goal of the Paris Agreement. But a one and a half degree warmer world is already a much worse world than the one that we're in, which already, I would argue, has far too great climate damage extremes going on. So I'll pause there. But the why now is really the fierce, fierce urgency of now and the experiences of the extreme damages

that are already being suffered. And the fact that we're setting targets right now that are still grossly insufficient to fully solve the problem. You in the book go into science of climate change in some depth, and you talk about the complexities of different forces that are creating this state of affairs. Yet the focus, as you laid out, is still getting net carbon negative. Where do you see, as you've looked at across industries, across the way society functions, the biggest opportunities for us to reach that first carbon neutrality and net zero and then beyond it, bring balance back to the planet? The biggest opportunities, as Ian kind of suggested in his comments, relate to doing things that are smart to do for many reasons.

So something like eight to nine million people every year die from pollution, from fossil fuels. So putting aside the climate damages, we're seeing huge health damages from the use of fossil fuels. That's just the air pollution side of it. That's not water pollution. That's not other kinds of pollution that come from fossil fuels. So anything that has these co-benefits, anything that is smart to do for many reasons are things we should be doing anyway. And the sooner we do them, the sooner we will capture those benefits. A climate-stabilized world will be a better world. That's one of our headline findings from this research. It will be a better world. It's not a world that will be poorer or sicker or anything else. It'll be a healthier world. It'll be a safer world.

And so the high level point is focus on the activities that have these co-benefits. We talk about some of the technical solutions at a high level in the book. And we talk about electrifying currently fossil-fueled end uses as a major step in solving the problem. And it turns out electrification has a lot of those co-benefits. So if you have an electric car, you no longer have any local air pollution. If you have an induction cooktop, you no longer poison your family with natural gas and related pollutants inside your house. So that set of benefits turns out to be really powerful. Another aspect of electrification that's important is that it allows you to eliminate massive inefficiency in combustion of fuels. It turns out for when you burn fuels, there are

limits to how much energy you can get out of the fuel. Ultimately, you can't get more than 100% of the energy in the fuel, but actually you will get less. And for most combustion processes, you're losing half to two thirdsthirds of that energy as heat. So when you run your automobile, there's heat that comes off of it that's just waste. It's not driving the car. When you generate electricity from a fossil fuel power plant, two-thirds of the energy that goes into the plant comes out as waste heat. It doesn't do anything. And so by changing to non-combustion resources for power plants, that means shifting to renewables like solar and wind,

or at the end use level, switching to electric vehicles or anything else, heat pumps instead of furnaces, it allows you simply to eliminate this waste heat and eliminate that source of inefficiency in the society. So there are many benefits to the technical steps that we talk about in the book. And to the extent that we can, we should be focusing first and foremost on the things that result in everyone's life becoming a lot better from eliminating combustion. You're laying out technologies that are broadly available and have, you know, broad proliferation to some extent. Maybe it's because I work in the tech sector, but I think that there's always this

notion in broader conversations that somehow technology innovation is going to solve this for us. And there's going to be some magical scientific discovery that will set the world straight. But what you're laying out is there are pragmatic technologies today that we just need to adopt more broadly to make real change. And I know that you're working with a lot of companies from across many industries. Where do you think the industrial opportunity is to help accelerate some of these broad deployments that we need? And where do you see new innovation still needed to help contribute? So the good news is we really do already have almost all the technology we need to fully

decarbonize our global economy. And then getting beyond net zero to net climate positive, there still are some innovations that should happen, but they really can be accelerated with the right policy incentives put in place. So with my day job at Etho Capital, we look at a really complete climate footprint for about 10,000 of the most commonly traded public companies around the world. And that complete climate footprint in climate geek speak includes not just scope one and scope two emissions, direct emissions for a company and scope two, it's electricity use, but also scope three emissions, which are all the embodied climate pollution associated with the company's supply chain.

And then also the downstream climate impacts once a company's products and services go out into the world. And in looking at these thousands of companies around the world, we find climate leaders everywhere. We find companies everywhere that are substantially decarbonized relative to their peers and over time getting even more so. And also really excitingly, we're seeing that in general, on average at least, companies that are climate leaders relative to their peers, particularly when you include this more complete picture that includes a company supply chain and

downstream climate impacts, those companies on average financially tend to perform better than their peers. So the Etho Capital indexes and associated funds like the Etho ETF that we've helped create in general, we've just seen financial outperformance relative to broad-based benchmarks that are comparable. And of course, I need to keep financial regulators happy by saying past performance can't guarantee future results. But if you really believe in broad-based decarbonization of the economy as a necessity, which is what certainly all the science says and what all the policy targets say now, it certainly seems like already we're seeing financial performance advantages related to decarbonization, not just in the obvious areas like renewable energy, which is already solar

and wind are the cheapest ways to produce energy almost everywhere in the world already. But we're also seeing it in terms of healthcare companies and technology companies that are decarbonizing. They're just financial performance advantages, some related to efficiency, as John was talking about, some related to the fact that renewables are cheaper, and a lot of it just related to overall operational efficiency, material use switching, and just doing more with less relative to your peers. So in the book, we talk about eight pillars of climate action that have to happen really quickly. There are several that are technological pillars, electrifying everything, as John mentioned,

decarbonizing electricity, minimizing our non-fossil greenhouse gases like methane related to land use and industrial agriculture and livestock in particular, being as efficient and optimizing systems as much as possible. Those are all things that are already substantially improving with lots of technological advances. The last technological pillar that needs more innovation, but actually the tech sector has really been pushing it forward, is the carbon removal piece. It's taking up the CO2 that otherwise would stay in the atmosphere for over a thousand years and taking it out of the atmosphere and locking it up in a permanent form underground or mineralized in rock, or maybe even in products that can be used and replace products that

otherwise would use fossil carbon. So there's something that's funded by a number of tech companies called the Frontier Fund, which is paying for carbon removal by a number of really exciting carbon removal tech startups like Charm Industrial, which was actually founded by a co-founder of the tech company Segment before he decided to switch over fully to Climate. And that company is taking carbon that plants take out of the atmosphere, using waste biomass from the ag sector and actually converting it into what they call bio-oil and basically doing a reverse it into what they call bio oil and basically doing

a reverse oil process where they inject that oil underground and it locks up that carbon for thousands of years. There are also technology companies that are doing enhanced weathering, basically accelerating the natural process of carbon uptake through mineralization and rocks, and at the same time restoring coastlines. There's a company called Vesta that's doing that, that actually started as a nonprofit. And so there are large tech companies like Stripe, Shopify, Alphabet, Autodesk, a number of others that are really supporting this nascent carbon removal industry and demonstrating a willingness to pay for carbon removal services that are frankly more expensive than the carbon offset market that's been around for a couple of decades now. But as many are now becoming aware, unfortunately, the carbon offset

market is not really benefiting climate in most cases. And there's some studies coming out saying that carbon offsets, at least the cheap ones out there, are somewhere around 90, 95% fraudulent. And so companies are realizing that they can't just go out and buy some carbon offsets to make up for their pollution. They actually have to support an industry that permanently is removing the carbon that's been put up into the atmosphere. And so there's a whole lot of technology development that's constantly going on. But long story short, we already have the technologies we need to decarbonize most of the economy. We can certainly make them better, more efficient, cheaper, but it's really about scaling what

we have as quickly as we can. And the carbon removal piece is the one piece that we probably need additional funding, certainly, and incentives to really scale up. Now, we've talked a lot about corporate actions, but something that I think about is the average consumer who's still prioritizing their investments based on what's cheapest in market or other factors other than climate change. What do you think it's going to take in your minds to engage them? You know, and you shared your story about your family farm and your family's horrific

experience with wildfires. My family in California has been affected by the wildfires as well. Do you think it's going to take everyone being personally touched by climate change to get folks to get out of their apathy and into action? I think that is unfortunately already happening. There's a massive survey that the Yale Project on Climate Communications and Facebook did around the world with over 70,000 respondents from the most climate polluting countries around the world. And over 90% of people in almost every country realize now that climate change is happening and it's bad. What we're missing is an understanding of it's

going back to it's real, it's us, it's bad, we can fix it. Those pieces still, most folks don't understand even just the link between fossil fuel burning and climate change. That is something that we're not talking about nearly as much as we should be. And of course, there are financial reasons that a lot of misinformation has been accelerated and put out there to muddy that understanding. But technology has a huge role to play in elevating truth, which is one of our systemic pillars that we talk about in the book. Certainly, AI can be a source of misinformation or it can be used to generate and direct people towards the climate messages that are based on sound climate science and really resonate with them. And that's something that we really should be doing as quickly as we can, because we're not, the more

we can elevate truth for just the general public and certainly for companies and for investors and the more we enhance the transparency of what are the real climate impacts of different company decisions different investment decisions just different personal household decisions and how do those impacts relate to co-benefits like improved air quality and overall health that does just make it really obvious that a decarbonized world as john was saying is just overall a better world it's a healthier world it's a world with more prosperity for almost everyone aside from maybe a few top executives at fossil fuel companies. So one of the issues with framing the problem as a consumer choice problem is that it puts the

onus on people who don't necessarily have the knowledge or expertise to make decisions that are climate friendly. And the most important thing to me is creating a system or changes in the current system that will always make the zero emissions option the cheaper option for consumers. But that's not a consumer issue. That's about changing the systems. And that's about changing laws. That's about leadership.

That's about elevating truth, as Ian mentioned. And so while it's great that people make sensible, climate-aware decisions, that's only part of the challenge and to me the more important thing is getting the system changes that will make the climate sensible choice the cheapest choice for consumers changing the game because the fossil fuel companies have had 150 years to rig the game and that's part of the lesson of the book is that we need to figure out how to unrig the system and make the system focus on zero emissions tech and make the zero emissions tech the cheapest.

Fortunately, as you deploy more tech and the people in the IT world know this well, as you deploy more tech, and the people in the IT world know this well, as you deploy more tech, it gets cheaper. And that's a virtuous cycle that we can capture. As we deploy more of this zero emissions technology, things will get cheaper. And that will make it even easier to bring these technologies to wider availability. So let's not just talk about this as a consumer choice question. Let's talk about it as a system change question to help consumers make the best

choice in the easiest and cheapest way that they possibly can. Now, I'm glad that you guys brought up AI. I'm glad that you brought up efficiency through scalable compute. This is obviously the tech arena and is focused on the tech sector. And this episode is going to kick off a number of episodes on compute sustainability. So my final question is about how do you see the tech sector contributing? And what do you want to see in terms of investment and focus from the tech sector to contribute to the future that you want us all to get to? I will say that really, we need to be tackling climate change from every direction.

We need better policies and we need bottom-up, more just citizen understanding and engagement, because that's ultimately connected to driving those better policies. And then we also need companies and investors to be pushing decarbonization everywhere they can. And the eight pillars of climate action framework that we talk about in the book, all those pillars are pillars that the tech sector can be implementing themselves and then also can be accelerating elsewhere from electrifying everything and decarbonizing electricity for big server farms, for example, having onsite solar and batteries batteries or at least purchasing 100% renewable energy are options there. Accelerating decarbonization related to non-fossil greenhouse gases, particularly methane connected to livestock.

That's something that technology is actually coming up with some really interesting solutions. And there's all the plant-based meat and cultured meat work that's going on that I know is a bit beyond the kind of tech community that typically you're talking to with this podcast, but really interesting space. And some of that connects up to interesting AI computing modeling as well. And efficiency and optimization, obviously, always important and always improves the ability to decarbonize in that the more we do with less, the less we have to worry about the impacts. But we can't get to a net zero world and beyond to a net climate positive world through

efficiency and optimization alone, which often is where the conversation starts, but it's really just one piece of this overall puzzle. And then importantly, I talked about carbon removal, going beyond that to the systemic things we need to be working on, aligning incentives, mobilizing money out of climate problems into climate solutions and elevating truth, those are all places where technology can play really key roles in making invisible climate impacts and co-benefits beyond climate, like reduced localized air pollution impacts, just visible in decision-making for companies, for consumers, for investors, and importantly, elevating truth about just the benefits of this transition.

The fact that already many climate solutions, at least if you look at full cost of ownership, are just cheaper than the alternative polluting status quo. So electric vehicles already are becoming cheaper in many markets, certainly if you look at full cost of ownership. And as mentioned, solar and wind already are the cheapest forms of energy in many markets. And now when you combine that with improving batteries, which are getting cheaper and cheaper every year or two. That can be a 24-7 baseload energy source that now actually can be cost competitive with peaker natural gas plants, for example. There still is this false narrative often that's tossed out there about paying extra for the

climate-friendly option. In some cases, we still need to do that to scale up technologies and get them to price parity or even to be cheaper. But in many cases already, the climate-friendly option is just the best, cheapest option with many co-benefits beyond that. But that reality just needs to be conveyed to all the decision makers from individuals and communities to companies,

to investors, to policymakers. Most people don't realize that information technology uses only a tiny fraction of our electricity. And data centers as a whole use about 1% of the world's electricity, and I'd argue it's a pretty good use of that electricity. The important lesson to me at the highest level is that IT is a key enabling technology. It's what's called the general purpose technology that has broad and deep implications for changes in the economy as a whole. And that 1% of the electricity enables us to optimize the other 99% of the electricity and all the fuels. So it's not just about the direct electricity use, which that tends to garner headlines.

It's actually about the value that's being produced for the economy from those technologies. And so when people think about IT, I would want them to think about the benefits of that IT for optimizing the other 99% of the electricity and all the fuels. And that gives a sense for the kind of lever that IT is for solving the climate problem. I call it our ace in the hole. We didn't have it during past energy transitions. We have it now. And it can make a huge difference in reducing emissions to zero as quickly as we can, which is what we need to do. Ian and Jonathan, thank you so much for being on the program. I encourage everyone who's listening to this podcast to immediately go to your favorite place to get a

book and engage. It's probably going to be the most important book you read this year. Where can folks go to get that book and learn more and get their hands on more information that you guys are putting out and engage with you? So we've set up a website at solveclimate.org, where you can even download some free pieces of the book and just see this overall eight pillars of climate action framework. That's a large part of what we talk about in the book. And we're planning to make the solveclimate.org community a larger community beyond just talking about the book and actually putting up action checklists for companies, for individuals, for policymakers, for investors about how they can fully transition beyond net zero to net climate positive. So solveclimate.org is a great place to get more info about the book. You can find out more about what we're doing at Etho Capital at ethocapital.com, E-T-H-O

capital.com. And you're always, uh, welcome to reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm always happy to geek out about climate solution stuff as that's how I spend all my time. Well, it's easy to find both Ian and me for contact. You should feel free to get in touch with us. And the publisher of the book is the Institute of Physics. That's a textbook publisher on their website. You can buy a low cost paperback version that I think, on the order of 30 bucks. The textbook itself is in color and it's much more expensive, but by going to the Institute of Physics website, and there's a link

on the solveclimate.org site to help you do that, you can get that cheaper paperback, which will give you the gist of what we're talking about. Well, thanks so much for being on the program today. It's been a real honor and pleasure. And I can't wait to hear more as the book has impact out in the broader community. Thanks so much for being on today. Thanks so much for having us. Thank you. Thanks.

That was fun. Thanks for joining The Tech Arena. Subscribe and engage at our website, thetecharena.net. All content is copyright by The Tech Arena.