Rev Left Radio - After Geoengineering: Carbon Removal and Social Transformation

Episode Date: September 13, 2021

Dr. Holly Jean Buck joins Breht to discuss her book "After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration". Follow her here: https://twitter.com/hollyjeanbuck Outro Music: "Wooden Soldiers" by Modest Mouse ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we have on Holly Jean Buck, the author of After Geoengineering, Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration. Holly Jean Buck writes on emerging technologies in the Anthropocene, with work appearing in journals such as development and change, climatic change, global sustainability and the annals of the American Association of Geographers. And since 2009, she has been researching the social dimensions of geoengineering as a faculty fellow with the Forum for Climate Engineering Assessment in Washington, D.C., as a member of the

Steering Committee for the International Climate Engineering Conference in Berlin, and as a doctoral researcher at Cornell University, from which she holds a PhD in development sociology. So Holly is credibly qualified to talk about the crisis more broadly and specifically the elements of geoengineering and coming from a broadly left-wing political position. She also understands the absolute essential role that economic, social, and political transformation must play in addressing the crisis. So this is a conversation on that book about different concepts of geoengineering, what they necessarily entail, some of the fault and how the, The left broadly thinks about these problems and the role, whether we like it or not, that technology is going to have to play in addressing the climate crisis

and how a left-wing embrace of that can shift the conversation in ways that go towards meeting our larger goals and away from the maintenance and perpetuation of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. Well, before we start, as always, if you like what we do here at Rev Left, radio you can join us at patreon.com forward slash rev left radio we are will always be a hundred percent listener funded um we do not have uh any advertisers we never will we don't have any corporate backers we never will uh so this is 100 percent DIY and funded by the people who support the show it helps support me and david's family and we love each and every one of you that that supports us in that way but again if you don't have

enough money to support the show we totally understand you can always leave a positive review share the episodes with family and friends etc those things really really do help spread the show and bring in more support for it so without further ado here's my conversation with holly jean buck on her book after geoengineering climate tragedy repair and restoration I'm Holly Jean Buck. I'm a writer and environmental social scientist. Yeah, Holly, it's an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Today we'll be talking about your book from a couple years ago entitled After Geoengineering,

Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration. I really, really loved this book, and I've loved your appearance on other podcasts as well. And I'm happy to have you here. So let's just go ahead and dive into the questions here. We had a lot of stuff to cover. And I guess the first place to start is why did you write after geoengineering and what were you trying to accomplish with it? Well, I wrote it because I could see that this was going to be a topic of discussion. Unfortunately, as climate change, worsens as we are way too slow to phase out fossil fuels.

It seemed inevitable that we would be talking about removing carbon from the atmosphere and possibly about solar geoengineering, which is reflecting some amount of incoming sunlight back into space. So seeing that coming, realizing that most of the people I talked with, you know, dismiss both of these as kind of far-flung science fictional things that would be in the future, not necessarily up for discussion in the next couple of years. I mean, part of my impetus was just to kind of write, you know, an explanation of what these approaches are, who's talking about them and why, kind of to familiarize an audience. right, so that somebody could, like my mom or, you know, my sister might check this book out of the public library and have some kind of baseline understanding of the science and politics around it. But I also wanted to challenge this kind of binary we find where, you know, small scale, local action is what's good. And large scale, technological, planetary intervention

is bad because I don't think we can afford to hold on to that binary any longer. Yeah, absolutely. The intervention that you make in just left-wing discussions around the topic and these rigid binaries that we'll get into in this conversation, I think, is a really important part of the work as well as somebody on the left who cares deeply about these issues and is engaged with them, you know, it was very clarifying to see how different elements of the left are responding to the crisis and how they feel about things like geoengineering, which of course we're going to get deeper into in this discussion itself. But I guess I want to start with a little

bit about how you introduce fiction into the work, because I really enjoyed in the book how you use these fragments of fiction to bring the human dimension of the crisis alive. And my wife and I actually had a, she's on bed rest right now because she's pregnant. And we had this nice little time together where we were reading through your sort of choose your own adventure style fiction piece in the introduction. And it was really interesting and illuminating. So can you talk about why you added this element into the book and sort of the general importance of humanizing the crisis and what we lose when we don't do that? Yeah, well, I think we need to understand these possible futures in an embodied way and not just think about the technologies determining the

futures. I mean, it's the social relations that determine the futures. Right. So we need a way and to think about not just making a referendum on a particular technology, but saying, okay, this technology in this social context with this set of social relations is pretty apocalyptic, the same technology, you know, in a socialist future or an eco-feminist future, whatever sort of future with an alternative set of relations of production, relations of, you know, who's profiting from it, all these sorts of things. there's are choices we can make and demands we can make and conversations we can have. And right now, the discussion is just so thin because we're saying, oh, I like technology A, but not

technology B. And that shouldn't even be the question. I mean, the question should be is, you know, how are we using this? And I think we're starting to have those questions with things like industrial scale solar or wind or, you know, thinking about renewables in terms of what's, a fair way of deploying these, you know, who's harmed by them, who's benefiting from them, and extending that also to carbon removal and even solar geoengineering, thinking about the different configurations of how we might use these. And I think fiction allows one way into those conversations. Yeah, absolutely. I recently had on Kim Stanley Robinson, the science fiction author of, I think the Mars trilogy, but his latest book was The Ministry for the Future.

And it's just really fascinating peek inside a fictional account of how one trajectory through which things could play out in the next several decades. And geoengineering is obviously a big portion of that. But he ends the book optimistically. And I also think the human element is important for a variety of reasons. But I also think it's important not to, as people with the platform, with reach, to not be too nihilistic, to not be too despair oriented when it comes to this and to try to infuse our discussions about the stuff with, you know, some optimism, some hope, not this naive, polyanish sort of hope, but a hope rooted in the belief in people mobilizing in the face of crisis to overcome injustice, inequity, and eco-collapse. So I highly recommend that.

Have you read the ministry for the future by chance? I have, yeah. I've really found that to be an interesting way. And your book has little elements of that, and I really appreciated that. So we're going to dive into the details of the book. But first, I just kind of wanted to mention the IPCC report that was just released. And it was predictably pretty grim. And for those that don't know, as a way to set up the rest of the conversation, can you kind of talk about where warming currently is, what temperature thresholds, the IPCC and scientists sort of set that we need to stay below and kind of how these thresholds relate to the content of your book? Yeah, well, right now we're, you know, maybe 1.1 degrees Celsius of warming, a little bit, just over 1 degrees

Celsius already. And the world decided in the Paris Agreement to strive for temperatures well below 2 degrees Celsius and aim for 1.5 degrees. So that's a target that we have as a globally collective aspiration. As for why that target was chosen, there's another IPCC report you can read, which is the special report on 1.5 degrees Celsius. I mean, obviously, even one degree that we're at now isn't exactly safe, right? We're seeing all sorts of climate disasters.

But, you know, it gets progressively worse. And so 1.5 was decided at this, you know, collective ambition. And what the new report says. So I should back up and say that there's actually different components to this report that will be released over the next year. There's three working groups to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Working Group one assesses the physical science. like this is what we know about the physical science of the climate system.

Then there's going to be Working Group 2 released next spring, kind of about vulnerability, about impacts, and then Working Group 3, which is more along the lines of mitigation and what we can do about it. And then finally there'll be a synthesis report of all of those. So stay tuned for all of that. This is kind of the beginning of the discussion. But what this recent Working Group 1 report said is that,

we're going to be at this 1.5 degree threshold in the 2030s. So this isn't, you know, the far future. This is right around the corner. Yeah, absolutely. And that previous threshold that we had talked about for many years of being 1.5 and keeping it at that seems at this point and is reflected in the IPCC report as pretty much impossible. We will likely overshoot that. And so a more reasonable goal is to try to keep it at or below two degrees. I did hear recently, that there was a leak of the third sort of working group in the IPCC, and there was some language there that was very explicit about having to overcome and transcend capitalism itself that will probably be taken out in the final draft because of the sort of tendency

toward conservatism in rhetoric that is produced by these working groups and trying to stick to the science and not be overly political in such a way that, you know, huge swaths of people will turn away from the science itself. Have you heard anything about that leak? I haven't. And I should just say that I'm a contributing author to one of the chapters in that third working group. But, I mean, I haven't followed the whole draft, nor the leaks. What I can say for readers that you should know is that the summary for policymakers, so these reports are thousands of pages long, but then they have a summary, and summary sounds short, but that can still be many, many pages, right? That's something that governments go over line by line, and they kind of negotiate them in this

plenary session. So it's this kind of funny process where, you know, there's a scientific assessment, but then there's kind of a global political way. And so why those reports come out the way they do is influenced by that process. Yeah, interesting. Yeah. All right, well, let's go ahead and talk about geoengineering. And geoengineering itself is a big and often vague concept that honestly points to a varied set of approaches to the climate crisis. Can you talk about what geoengineering actually is, sort of where the term comes from,

and why you think it's important to think of life, as the book suggests, after geoengineering? Yeah, it's a very funny term, because it's a wide umbrella, and basically there are two basic, categories that go under that umbrella, the removing carbon from the atmosphere, which some people will say isn't geoengineering. But I think that at a large scale, you can consider that geoengineering. If it's at a planetary scale that's aiming to change greenhouse gas concentrations, then I think it's defensively geoengineering. Although I don't like to use the term myself, I might prefer climate intervention. Because we don't have the precision to engineer the climate that's absurd. And actually, any scientist that works on it kind of thinks that would be absurd too.

The best you can kind of hope for is to make an intervention, watch the results, try to modulate that intervention. But the other category of things under that big umbrella term is solar radiation modification or solar geoengineering, which is reflecting incoming sunlight. So the umbrella term refers to things that are both intentional. So, you know, burning fossil fuels hasn't been considered geoengineering because it wasn't intentionally for the purpose of changing the climate. And it refers to things that are at a global scale. So some regional thing that doesn't have impacts on some other region wouldn't really be

considered geoengineering. So in terms of where it comes from, I mean, this term was first used in probably the late 1970s by scientists here and there didn't get too much traction until I would say the mid-2000s and was still pretty confined to the scientific community. And I would say that Most of the thinkers were just really alarmed about where climate change was going, saw that the world was not adequately concerned, saw that climate action wasn't moving very fast. So, you know, they were thinking from, you know, the things they knew about and the tools they had, which would be, you know, models and thinking about, you know, radiative forcing in the atmosphere. And so they started modeling solar geoengineering. So I would say that's kind of the origin of the concept. Although some people might trace the lineage longer towards weather modification.

So there have been a lot of different attempts to modify weather throughout history. I personally think that's a bit different than modifying climate. I would make the distinction between weather and climate. But some people trace that lineage. Anyway, so I thought, you know, after geoengineering is really important because geoengineering in its best case is a means toward an end, right? And that end is a stable climate, full decarbonization, a sustainable energy system. And I think you could even expand that end. I mean, it's up to the world to negotiate what that end is, right?

But there should be one that's explicit that we're moving towards because I don't think, Anybody, even proponents of geoengineering in so much as they exist, wants to be doing geoengineering forever. It's more of a question of, you know, this is going to be a messy century. We need to get to this end point of a full fossil fuel phase out, but time is not on our side with this. So can there be a geoengineering intervention that is part of this transition to blunt the worst of climate change, impacts while we're getting our act together on decarbonization. And, you know, that's an open question because obviously there's a danger that the very powerful fossil fuel interests and other vested interests just prolong this geoengineering and never make the full transition, right?

So people are worried about moral hazard or mitigation deterrence. You know, could these techniques just delay what we need to do, which is a very real. danger. Yeah, in both your book and in Ken Stanley Robinson's book, there are at least in your choose your adventure style, some scenarios like the U.S. and Russia, there's like, there's like in the book itself, there's like this national interest that sometimes, you know, there's the threat of people trying to engage in geoengineering on the national level without international cooperation and out of desperation, not out of a, you know, thought through. plan that has that uses it as a means toward a deeper end as opposed to just like a desperate

stopgap in the moment. And so I think, you know, that's an interesting tension that we're going to see play out, particularly as in Kim Stanley Robinson's novel where there's this already is and there's going to continue to be this disproportionate pain felt, particularly by people in the global south and how those places will react, you know, in an international context and where other countries might not be as concerned is an interesting thing. And so that idea of thinking about after geoengineering, extending the timeline that we're thinking in beyond 2100 is also really important. I mean, we ended at 2100 for the sake of modeling and for a nice little century sort of

cap to it. But the impacts of climate change and whatever we do to battle climate change are going to exist many, many years, decades, centuries, possibly even millennia on some fronts. after 2100, and it will really define and shape the context of humanity going forward for many centuries. Is that correct? Yeah, I think we definitely need a longer time span. You know, the world doesn't stop at 2100. Absolutely. Now, let's go ahead and break down these two main components that you mentioned. One is carbon removal. One is solar geoengineering. Let's start with carbon removal. Can you just talk about what it is, why it's necessary, and the different ways of doing it?

So carbon removal is removing carbon that's already out there in the atmosphere and putting it somewhere else, so that somewhere else may be ecosystems. You could plant a forest, a new forest, and those trees would take up carbon. You could put carbon back into the soils by changing farming practices. There's a lot of research and debate around how that works, how to monitor it, how to know that you've really accomplished it. So there's this sorts of biological, natural approaches to carbon sequestration. I mean, they're called natural, but to do them at a large scale actually requires a lot of different sorts of technologies for planning and monitoring. So any of these is kind of an enterprise that's going to involve technology in some way. The other thing you can do is industrial techniques. So these would generally involve carbon capture and storage, which is a set of techniques used in mitigation. So if you want to mitigate the emissions from a cement plant, there's discussions about natural gas plants too. I personally think that carbon capture and storage should be used for industrial decarbonization

rather than the power sector, which is a whole other conversation. But if you install carbon capture and storage equipment at a cement plant, say, then you're taking those emissions from the factory, transporting them somewhere and injecting them into rock formations underground. So industrial carbon removal could involve building. building machines that suck carbon directly from the atmosphere and put it underground. And so it's a whole process. It's the, you know, the removal, the transportation, the storage.

And all of those are challenging. It's a lot of new infrastructure. So people are, you know, instinctively say, hey, I don't know about building all this new stuff just to suck carbon out of the air. shouldn't we just be stopping emissions? Yes, of course, we should just be stopping emissions. We should be doing that right away as much as we can. The problem is that we've emitted so much carbon already

that it would be better to take some of that back out of the atmosphere. So it's not wreaking havoc, right? It's safer for it to be underground. So, I mean, in terms of the need for carbon removal, there's a few different roles for it. In a lot of scenarios, people are picturing some amount of carbon removal to balance some amount of remaining emissions. So let's talk for a minute about net zero targets. Net zero is something that countries and cities and companies all around the world have signed on to. Basically, it means that there's some amount of remaining or residual

or positive emissions, balanced by some amount of negative emissions or carbon removals. So you might ask, okay, why aren't we doing just plain zero? Why is it net zero? And the reason for that is that we don't totally have the technologies needed to decarbonize all the way for all the things. So some things we should be able to decarbonize. I think we should be able to decarbonize the power sector. It'll be hard because, you know, You know, we don't have all the batteries we might need to store renewable energy. There's some challenges, but that part seems doable. Industry is also pretty tough.

There's some new things that are coming online. Green steel, you can use green hydrogen to decarbonize some industry. You can use carbon capture and storage. There may be some remaining industrial emissions. Things like aviation and shipping, again, there's progress. but kind of on this time horizon that we need by 2050, it's hard to see how we get all the way to zero. There's also other greenhouse gases, emissions from agriculture, so far.

So basically the plan that most of these countries have is to have some amount, you know, 10, 20% of remaining emissions and cancel those out with carbon removal. Possibly by 2100, we might have the technology to go, all the way to zero. So that's one role for carbon removal. The other role is to take out emissions that are already there, the historical or legacy emissions. So that's why carbon removal, why we need it, it could really help. And I actually think it's a moral imperative at this point. If we have these technologies, we should be using them. Yeah. And doing that in the natural way, you know,

building kelp forests, you know, regrowing, reforestation, regenerative agroecology as opposed to industrial extractive agricultural practices. These things will help replenish, you know, things that, you know, help sequester carbon naturally and have many other downstream benefits for society as a whole. But there's also these other elements. And correct me if I'm wrong, but there's these two types. When I think of carbon removal, there's like the at-site carbon removal where it's like, you know,

at a big industrial facility, you know, on the smoke stacks, there's some, you know, device created to prevent the carbon from going out into the atmosphere. But then there's also like this general carbon removal, like technological thing where it's like these huge fans,

which are just sort of theoretical at the moment. Correct me if I'm wrong there, but could possibly be scaled up in the decades to come Am I right that there's that dichotomy of this generalized carbon sucking out of the atmosphere and this on-site carbon removal of emissions at the point of release? Yeah, so building stuff on-site is considered mitigation rather than carbon removal because it's just preventing emissions from going into the atmosphere. But carbon removal is sucking out emissions that are already in the atmosphere. year. So yeah, I mean, it's kind of these distinctions. When it comes to policy, the distinctions get more important. But in terms of, you know, building the giant fans, I mean, I don't think

this is, I wouldn't call it theoretical at this point because we have a few facilities that are doing that already. The technology works. There's larger facilities being built. The problem is that it's not economical to suck pollution out of the air, right? Just like it's not economical to, you know, properly recycle, which is why we have a bunch of plastic in the ocean and stuff like that, right? There's not a policy that is forcing polluters to clean up, so it's expensive. So the technology exists. It's not in theory.

It's just that, like, under capitalism, nobody wants to do it. I see, I see. And there's also this idea as well of sequestering carbon into materials that you can actually build with. I know you mentioned that a little bit in your work. Could you expand on that a little bit? Because I find that interesting and might be one of the routes through which it could become more economical in the short term to do sequester. If you could put it into a product and then sell that product that people actually need, but it's actually taking carbon out of the atmosphere. Is that a viable option?

I mean, that could be a viable option for kick-starting some of the innovation. I can't believe I use both those words together. But, like, it's true that, you know, companies need some cash to experiment with to make these processes work better. And if they're not getting paid to clean up pollution, it needs to come from somewhere. I think it should come from the government personally. But in the absence of that support, yeah, I mean, you can put carbon into all sorts of products. You can use it to make fuels, which is one thing that we're probably going to need to do to decarbonize aviation is to just make fuels from CO2, all kinds of.

But, you know, consumer products, mattresses, shoes, you can find all sorts of stuff made from carbon that's utilized. the biggest market for it might be cement manufacturer. So that's a thing. But the thing is that the scale of our emissions is so huge. You could only productively use a tiny fraction of the carbon that's out there to make anything. I see. I see. So another aspect of geoengineering that you mentioned and that you cover deeply is solar geoengineering.

And I think this is what people, like the image that comes to people's head when they hear the word geoengineering is often like planes spewing orangish chemicals in the high atmosphere. It's sort of like the quintessential picture of what people imagine geoengineering is. And many on the left are suspicious of it, which we can get into in a second. The next couple questions address that aspect of it. But just for the basics, can you talk about what solar geoengineering is the importance of marrying it to carbon removal and what the general risks are? Yeah, so solid geoengineering is a technique that would reflect some amount of income in sunlight, like a percent, like a small amount, back into space that would cool things. And there's a few different techniques that people have thought about.

One is making clouds brighter or creating, you know, marine clouds and brightening them by spraying salt and that kind of thing. The thing that is discussed the most is stratospheric aerosol injections. So putting some aerosol precursors, something that will form an aerosol up into the stratosphere, which is the upper atmosphere above where planes usually fly. And if you put aerosols such as sulfur, that's the aerosol that's been modeled the most because volcanoes do this, right? So there's some precedent or natural analog to go off of there. If you put these aerosols into the stratosphere,

they might circulate around the globe for a year or so and eventually fall back. So the first question people normally ask is, hey, haven't we been trying to clean up like sulfur pollution? Like what about acid rain? Like, why would we put more in? And the short answer there is because these particles are staying up there, for a long time, you don't need that much of them compared to the sorts of volumes that are affecting people on the ground in the troposphere,

you know, pollution from power plants and cars and trucks and that kind of thing. So, I mean, that's the idea, kind of like a planetary pollution blanket. don't know. You know, there's different ways to think about that. But one thing that I want people to know about, because this is a really hard problem, is that right now we have a bunch of air pollution that we are trying to clean up particulate matter, that a lot of countries are doing a really good job at actually working to clean this up. It's a really important public health thing. The thing is that some of these aerosols have been masking warming, so they're exerting a cooling effect. There's different studies that are trying to measure the amount of cooling that our

current air pollution is providing. The most recent IPCC report said, you know, it could be up to 0.8 degrees Celsius, which is really a lot. So as we are cleaning up air pollution, we are unmasked some warming that's already there. Yeah. Just wanted to put that out there. So, you know, we're already modifying the stuff through what we're doing. Yeah, that particular fact is incredibly sort of disorienting that, you know, the net result of our pollution is, of course, greenhouse gas warming, but there's this other weird cooling

effect that our pollution has that by trying to address the former problem, we could unmask and create and you know create extra warming by the taking away of pollutants in the atmosphere it's it's sort of mind-boggling but obviously something we have to keep an eye on when we come up with solutions to the problem and I think you know in your book you you investigate this really well the also the the risks of solar geoengineering as a as something that you try to do perpetually or something that you do as a cover to continue fossil fuel extraction and emissions is that the moment that that solar geoengineering blanket, if you will, is taken away, all that extra warming that was put into it in the meantime could radically accelerate

warming at a truly unprecedented rate. And so that's where the importance of marrying it, if it comes to that, to carbon removal, to buy us some time to take carbon out of the atmosphere, because if that is not done, you could have catastrophic warming in a matter of years as opposed to decades. Am I correct about that? Yeah. So this is something that scientists have referred to as a termination effect or termination shock. Basically, you don't want to be doing solar geoengineering over time to mask, warming, and then have that program be interrupted. So this is something that would need to be continued until mitigation has happened until some carbon has been removed from the atmosphere and then you would want to gradually phase it out. But if you interrupted it

for some reason, then the warming that had been suppressed would happen at a much more rapid rate, which would be much more difficult for ecosystems and human systems to adapt to. So that's a danger. And some people say, oh, that's not a very realistic danger because, you know, why would anybody stop doing it and have that happen? But like, I don't know. I think things are unpredictable. So we should guard against that danger. And obviously the best way to guard against it is to have a real plan that we're using for decarbonization and carbon removal.

Yeah. Yeah. And in a more politically destabilized world, you know, it becomes even harder. And you explore that in the introduction where you talk about, you know, maybe countries like America and Russia. going rogue and then not participating or preventing the planes from going up and doing the thing because they think it'll benefit their agricultural crops or whatever you can you can imagine a million different political social economic reasons why there could be an abrupt stop to this thing and cause even more wreak even more havoc so it's it's scary for sure and what would the

effect on the sky be as far as just like you know you talk about uh these people in the future like you know, in one possible trajectory, not necessarily experiencing the blue skies that you and I grew up with. So what would the effect on the sky exactly be if this solar geoengineering was attempted? I mean, it really depends on the amount of aerosols used. So geoengineering isn't exactly an on and off thing. I mean, it's more of like there could be a small amount. There could be a large amount. But at a larger amount, it's not totally well studied. I think it should be better studied. But you'd have some effects on sunlight. So if you think about if you were in the U.S. in the past few weeks, you know, smoke from the wildfires out west, kind of moved over

moved over to New York where I am, New York City as well, you know, and the sky looks kind of hazy, right? It could be like an effect something similar to that. Yeah, like that bright red ball in the sky is the sun and it looks weird with the with the haze over it. I flew into Colorado a couple weeks ago and it was at that time when I was flying into, flying through the haze was absolutely surreal and it was, you know, the most, the lowest quality of air of any major city in the world on that day because of the wildfires not only in Colorado but even further out west so I guess we have a little taste of what that would look like really quick before we move on I'm just curious what's your thoughts on nuclear power is

particularly as you know like Germany for example is deconstructing all of their nuclear power plants and there's the talk of like you know multiple generations of new technologies in the power plants making them safer and cheaper to run, etc. Some people argue that it would be a necessary sort of stopgap to get off of fossil fuels while we try to decarbonize more broadly, since nuclear power already does exist widely. What are your thoughts on it broadly? I think we're going to need more new nuclear. And actually there's some, you know, interesting new designs out there. We should be investing in this because there's no perfect solution. Like there's going to be tradeoffs to everything. And if I compare nuclear to fossil fuels, or if I think about, you know, energy poverty,

which we should have a serious conversation about, too. I mean, I think it's the least bad option. What do you mean by energy poverty? I mean, we have to also think about the global perspective, but also, you know, energy poverty here in the U.S. I mean, we might be starting to get a taste of how people react when energy is intermittent or unreliable. We need abundant clean energy, right? I think that one thing I'm concerned about as renewables scale up, if they're not scaled up well with good planning, with new transmission lines, there will be some blackouts or blips along the way,

and that could have a political backlash against Renewable. So I think that firm clean power is going to need to be, you know, there's a lot of ways to get there. Nuclear is going to be part of the mix. But we also have to think about, you know, a global phase out. And nuclear has an important role in a lot of other countries too. Yeah. And I think in your upcoming book releases fall-ending fossil fuel, you dive deeper into those questions of the scalability of renewable energy, the possibility of gaps in the energy production and distribution, et cetera, and we talked before

recording. We're going to have you back on the show as that book comes out to discuss it in detail because I think that's a really important element of this discussion. But I want to shift now towards sort of the politics, if you will, of the crisis. And in the book, you talk about the rigid binaries that often pop up in these discussions. And you explore the tensions that exist on the left, which are often articulated through these binaries. So I was hoping you could talk a little bit about what some of these binaries are, some of the ways that the left struggles with them, and what sort of synthesis that you think is necessary to sort of get out of these rigid binaries? Yeah, so I guess I have, I mean, I just want to start by saying I have

empathy for these binaries. So I think that one of the binaries that gets mapped on to geoengineering is how we think about agriculture and food systems transformation. And I understand why people prioritize, you know, small-scale agro-ecological methods. I think that a lot of this is really important. But then, you know, thinking about big industrial scale, GMOs, you know, intervening. So, I mean, this is the familiar kind of frame that I think a lot of us intuitively approach geoengineering with. However, with this planetary scale problem, I think we have to think more about, you know, embracing large-scale solutions. And there's dangers there.

There's, you know, centralization of power potentially. But maybe there's other ways to do it, too. So there's a scalar binary, and then there's this binary about technology. So, you know, natural is good, technological is bad. That's another binary that doesn't really work anymore. We're going to need to employ creatively and well all sorts of new technologies to fix this mess. Yeah, absolutely. So some of the more left-wing articulations of just, you know,

that are completely just push any possibility of geoengineering. of the conversation immediately. Some of those are going to have to be rethought just because of the nature and scale of the problem. And it's going to have to be a full frontal attack using all the natural methods and all the technological methods at our disposal to try to tackle the crisis. Is that fair to say? I'd say most of the technological methods. Some of them might not be that good in real life. But I think that what we lose, if we don't engage, with these technologies is the ability to shape them, the ability to articulate what a left approach

or a worker-centered approach, a justice-centered approach. We lose the ability to shape that if we just say, oh, these technologies are like the Republican thing, and we're not going to engage with that. And they're all false solutions. You know, they're not all false solutions. The way that capitalists articulate them is going to make them a false solution.

But that's on us if we don't articulate, like, another version of what they could be. So there's just a failure to imagine and demand, I think. Yeah, I think a real legitimate concern on that front from a lot of people on the left is that these technological solutions, whatever they may be, are going to be mobilized in an effort to prolong the life of the fossil fuel industries, as opposed to really address. the root of the problem itself, which I think is a fair critique, but that cannot then be elaborated to include all forms of using technology to address the crisis. Yeah, I mean, I understand how it's hard to like argue that we should, you know, hard to have our own vision and take control of these technologies if they're in the hands of fossil fuel companies. But not all of them are. And I think that, I mean, this is

more tricky or contentious, but capitalism isn't monolithic and fossil capital is pretty weak compared to where it was and also compared to some other forms of capital, right? So if you look at the world's biggest companies by market cap, they're all, you know, tech companies, right? it's not oil majors are not like the top five or ten anymore right um so you know there's there's different strategic conversations we should have because tech capital is also pretty awful but it might have different interests in you know having a habitable planet than fossil capital would or you know think about agricultural industries that you know there's there's a lot of different forms that I think, could go up against fossil fuels.

Yeah, and I think we will continue to see intra-capital tensions and disagreements and jostling as the crisis continues to develop. And I think that's important to remember. It's like, as you said, it's not a monolith. Not every capitalist or industry is on board with the fossil fuel industries, profit incentives, et cetera. So we should understand those intra-capital debates. and insofar as possible, use them to our advantage, particularly when it comes to squashing out the existence of the fossil fuel industry as it currently stands. And let's talk a little bit more about that, because on the left, regardless of our specific ideas around geoengineering,

we all agree that social, economic, and political transformation is going to be foundational to meaningfully address the crisis. I just had on Max Isle, who wrote a People's Green New Deal, who really dives into the global dimensions, the history of colonialism, imperialism, et cetera, how it shapes the crisis and what is going to take to just and equitably address it. And we definitely talk about that because it is incredibly important. Just to think about how colonialism in particular and the destruction and the ongoing genocide of indigenous communities around the globe is part and parcel with the environmental crisis. and if we're going to get out of it, indigenous leadership is going to be absolutely crucial

and that entails protecting indigenous right to self-determination more broadly. So I like to ask, and everybody I have on about climate change, they're all coming from a different perspective, they all have sort of different backgrounds of knowledge, and I just like to get their general take on this. So if you had to bet, you know, knowing what you do, what's the most likely trajectory that you think things will take in the coming decades? Like, what scenario would you advance, not as the most optimistic or pessimistic, but as the most likely? I mean, I just see kind of a continuation of the dynamics we have where there's some momentum for ESG, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, like scope three emissions, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Like, people will, you know, because there's good people working actually for some of these companies that want to do something, but it's going to be. too small, too late, and then we end up, you know, towards two and a half, maybe three degrees of warming. And it's pretty terrible for a lot of people. That's maybe you wanted something more like granular. But, you know, so that's maybe the middle of the, the bell curve in terms of likelihood. But I think there's a lot of things that could change that up on the negative end. There could be much more conflict. There could be war that would pretty much crash our chance to build an actual clean, sustainable economy. So I'm very concerned about that. And actually, that's part of why I entertain the idea of solar geoengineering at all is because I think

there are some scenarios where it could be used to broker or keep some sort of peace. On the other hand, I also think it's quite possible that, you know, we're at the edge of a social tipping point where fossil fuels have already lost a lot of legitimacy that could continue. There could be more mobilizations, more leadership from governments, understanding that constituents really want this taken seriously. And, you know, we could see in the next decade more rapid decarbonization. We have all the roadmaps to do this. It's understood how we do this.

It's not like a mystery. It's not like anybody doesn't know. And actually, it doesn't even cost that much compared to, you know, the costs of inaction or the costs of some other things. It's so doable. So I can see a future in which this social tipping point is pushed, crossed, whatever. And we do keep warming to two degrees Celsius. Yeah, in my more optimistic days, I feel that way is too. I always say young people are, you know, they're not in power. Like we have a disproportionate amount of like 70 and 80 year old, really wealthy white people in power in lots of key countries in the West. And young people coming up don't have the luxury of denialism. They know increasingly that their entire futures are really on the line here. Everything from, you know, how many kids do. I want? What career do I want? What is things going to be like when I'm 60? I mean, kids know that this is going to be a huge impact on them and they're not going to sit idly by and let it all go to shit. So I think the movements are going to increase. They already have increased over the last few years. The awareness now is seeping broadly into people's minds. And just recently, I think it was a Gallup poll. Climate change for like the first time ever in these polls was like the

second most important issue for Americans of all political stripes just under health care. Of course, these things are deeply related. So that shows some breaking through. The outright denialism that the Republican Party has peddled for decades, my entire life, is becoming harder and harder to maintain. That denialism does evolve. It doesn't stop. So, you know, I talked to a conservative family member just to kind of get the conservative take on climate change and they said, I'm not really worried about it. There's no real consensus anyways, and if there is a problem, people way smarter than us, we'll fix it. So it is sort of this, like, it's not that big of a deal. And even if it is, we'll come up with techno solutions and we don't

really have to worry about the problem at all. And that's a new form of denialism. And that techno-utopianism is obviously fostered by Silicon Valley and its sort of public relations and people like Elon Musk, et cetera. So I think that nihilism will be a problem, but I think the mass movements for change will continue. And as you said, the fossil fuel industry already losing legitimacy and will continue to lose legitimacy as the years go on. So there's some reason, I think, for optimism.

But that more negative trajectory of 2.5, 3 degrees by the end of the century is really, really horrifying. I mean, once we get to that level of. warming, it's like a lot of things are taken off the table as far as our predictive capacities, tipping points, et cetera, you know? Yeah. Before we wrap this up, I do want to mention your new book that is coming out that I guess I mentioned it a little bit earlier, but it's entitled Ending Fossil Fuel.

And we're definitely going to have you back on to discuss it in detail when it's released. I've already been reading the PDF that you sent me in. It's really fascinating and brings up really important points and arguments to address. But for now, can you just sort of give us a sneak peek into that book and what issues that you're exploring within it? Yes, this book is, I mean, the main thing is that we got kind of, well, I shouldn't say we, but, you know, climate professionals, I feel like, got a bit tricked into talking about emissions and carbon and all this all the time instead of thinking about the point of production. Like, we really need to be thinking about stopping production of these fuels. not just dealing with the emissions after they've been combusted. So thinking about how to end production is a really challenging but interesting question.

Given that fossil fuels still make up 80% of the energy we use, given that, you know, there's a billion people without access to energy. Given that the population is growing, we need more energy. A lot of people are without enough energy. So the book takes, you know, a few different lenses to approach that problem, thinking about transitions in culture, in infrastructure, in political power, even in computing. What are the different ways we can look at this transition? What does it mean to look at it, you know, through a geopolitical lens?

So there's a lot to go into. And I didn't, you know, I didn't mean to write a book on that, but it's such a complex. problem that it needed a book length. You know, sometimes you read a book and you're like, man, that could have just been a magazine article. I don't think this one is more like a book, but it's a short book. And it talks about, you know, what policies we need to end fossil fuels, you know, do we need quotas on production, obviously revising subsidies?

I think we should nationalize the fossil fuel industry and, you know, use that technology. you need to remove carbon instead. So this kind of ideas are in that book. Yeah, absolutely agree with that. And, you know, the first step to addressing the crisis is stopping the bleeding, stop the emissions from going up into the atmosphere, and then we can start to figure out how to remove it and do all the other things that we need to do. But we have to stop pumping it into the air as soon as possible. So I'm really looking forward to that book coming out. We will love to have be back on to discuss it when it does. Before I let you go, though, can you please let listeners know where they can find you

and your work online? Yeah. I have a website, geo.design. You can also find me on Twitter at Holly Jean Buck. Perfect, and I'll link to that in the show notes. Thank you again, Holly. I really did love the book. I'm really looking forward to ending fossil fuel.

Keep up the great work, and I'll talk to you very soon. Thank you so much. Didn't plan it, didn't plant it, different planets stare down on us, never blinking, sort of winking, indifference as it's ceiling, observing never kneeling, the sands, building plans, making plans in the sands, as the tides roll in, I ban to sit in the stove, because outside has sure been cold for garbage cans, refrigerated,

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