Science Friday - Carbon Removal Technology, IPCC And Policy, Sustainability News, Listening To A River. April 22, 2022, Part 1

Episode Date: April 22, 2022

Celebrating Earth Day With Sustainable Action Today is Earth Day, when many people around the world are taking time to think about their relationship with the planet and to focus on activities helping to mitigate the existential problems our environment faces. And we will be doing the same: devoting our program to Earth Day stories, ideas, and issues. Sara Kiley Watson, assistant editor at Popular Science in charge of their sustainability coverage, joins Ira to talk about some challenges facing our planet—from air pollution in megacities to the tension between ethanol biofuels and food supplies. She also offers some tips for actions individuals can take to make a small difference on their own, such as improving home energy efficiency even if you’re a renter, reducing the impact of your takeout order, or considering a neighborhood microgrid.   Can The Latest IPCC Report Pave The Way To Better Climate Policy? One of the best resources to understand the state of our climate crisis is the report developed by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), every six to seven years. The most recent installment of the IPCC report, compiled by Working Group III, was released earlier this month. It outlined ambitious steps needed to mitigate some of the worst possible climate futures. It’s increasingly unlikely that we’ll be able to keep the planet from warming by an average of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Yet, the report optimistically focuses on achieving that 1.5 degree benchmark. The report’s recommendations include things like phasing out coal entirely, slashing methane emissions by a third, reducing our carbon output among all sectors of the global economy, and developing new technologies to help us do it. But how do governments make laws to reach these goals? That’s not addressed in the IPCC report. Ira is joined by David Victor, professor of innovation and public policy in the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego to discuss the difficulty in developing climate policy solutions and some that seem promising.   Can Carbon Removal Actually Make A Difference In Reducing Emissions? One of the technologies highlighted in the latest IPCC report is carbon removal. Not to be confused with carbon capture, CO2 removal is a process that absorbs CO2 already in the atmosphere and stores it elsewhere. Carbon capture, on the other hand, is removing CO2 from smokestacks, for example, before it gets into the air. CO2 removal technology has some climate scientists worried about pouring money into this new technology, in lieu of cutting back on our reliance on fossil fuels. Joining Ira is Amar Bhardwaj, energy technology policy fellow at the International Energy Agency, to talk about the pros and cons of carbon removal.   Composing A Sound Map Of An Ever-Changing River Annea Lockwood thinks of rivers as “live phenomena” that are constantly changing and shifting. She’s been drawn to the energy that rivers create, and the sound that energy makes, since she first started working with environmental recordings in the 1960s. One of her projects has been to create detailed “river maps” of the Hudson, Danube, and Housatonic rivers. Using stereo microphones and underwater hydrophones, she captures the gentle, powerful sounds of the water, along with the noises of insects, birds, and occasional humans she finds along the way. Lockwood’s composition, “A Sound Map of the Housatonic River”—a decade old, this year—takes listeners on a 150-mile tour, from the headwaters in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, past sites of toxic PCB contamination, to the Connecticut Audubon sanctuary, where the river spills into Long Island Sound.   Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.       Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Irafledo. Today is Earth Day, where many people around the world are taking time to think about their relationship with the environment and focus on activities aimed at solving the existential problems our planet faces. And we will be doing the same, devoting our program to Earth Day stories, ideas, and issues. First up this hour, our news Roundup. Joining me is Sarah Kylie Watson, Assistant Editor at Popular Science, where she's in charge of sustainability coverage, and she's collected an assortment of Earth-focused stories and some do-it-yourself solutions. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here. Nice to have you. I want to start off with an issue that I recall we were talking about on the first

Earth Day five decades ago and still talking about it today, and I'm talking about the problems with big cities of the future. Many visions of the future involve big megacities in places like India and China where the density of the population can lead to air quality problems in these mega metropolises, right? Right. So I think when you have the combination of industrialization and more people coming into, you know, the same square footage, you can have more factories and things producing carbon emissions.

You can have more people with their cars and with their houses and using energy. And basically that all kind of piles up on top of each other. And if there aren't regulations in place to keep pollution under control, it can kind of get a little bit out of control. Let's talk about the study you looked at. In that study, they worked through what pollution might be like in these megacities down the road. What did they find? So right now, a megacities defined as a city with a population of more than 10 million people. And currently, according to the UN, there's about 30. And so in this study on science advances, a group of international researchers examined satellite air pollution data across 13 years between 2005 and

2018, across 46 projected future megacity locations throughout the tropical regions of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Basically, over these 13 years where these cities aren't even really megacities yet, we're seeing a lot more pollution just as they're starting to grow. Well, have we formulated what the ideal city of the future should look like? I think we're definitely working on it. We've got to figure out a way to make industries that are polluting, less polluting instead of just copy and pasting them into other parts of the world, I think is the gist here. I think some of the easy things that we can learn from are, you know, lowering the dependence on cars in these major cities, lowering the sprawl that we've had experiences

with in places, you know, in the United States where there are like a lot of pollution problems, making sure that pollution is strictly regulated so that we aren't just taking one problem with industrialization and moving it elsewhere because these are cities where, you know, millions of people will be living. Yeah, yeah, these are all issues we talked about five decades ago. It's amazing how these have just continued to be main issues. And one of the issues we talked about years ago, and one that we're talking about, again, is stretching out the gasoline supply by adding ethanol to the gasoline blend.

We're seeing that being replayed now with a call to increase ethanol from 10% from the early 1970s to 15% now of the blend. But you say that adding this extra ethanol has a downside. Yes, there's this really interesting story in Canary Media from Michael Grunwald, basically about how biofuels are both making the food crisis a bigger problem and also the climate crisis. So there's a lot going on in the world right now. Of course, we all know there's a war going on, and there's basically what Grunwald called a,

we're on the brink of unprecedented catastrophic levels of food insecurity. So he says, it's a weird time to divert more grain from the food supply to fuel tanks. The amount of corn that it takes to fill an SUV with ethanol could feed a person for an entire year. Basically, when you're growing food to be put in a fuel tank, it's not as efficient of fuel as it is efficient for feeding people. Could we not try to make biofuels from things that are not corn? Other waste. Yeah, I think when you're thinking about the options of getting into a more environmentally friendly energy world, you have to think about all of the things that we have to offer. And you can make biofuel from seaweed and certain agricultural waste and things.

So I think there's definitely a space for figuring out a way to make biofuel actually friendlier than just replacing it with, corn, which is this intensive crop that we rely on to feed people. Let's turn to some more positive food news, something each of us can do, a change we can make. So let's say our food takeout orders are more sustainable. I know you have some suggestions for that. Yeah. So at Popsie, we've been doing a couple of pieces basically looking at little things that we can all do to make all of the things that we do in our day-to-day life a little bit greener.

And so I live in New York. I love takeout. I love eating. So this one was a big one. for me. There's only like one thing really not to love about takeout and it's the waste. Packaging products like plastic containers, cutlery, drinking cups and straws make up about 269,000 tons of plastic found in the oceans right now. On top of that, food waste is also a huge problem, you know, when we put food into landfills that leeches methane, which is an even icky or greenhouse gas

in the short term run than carbon dioxide. And there's been a couple of studies over COVID, looking at how people tend to panic order or over order when they get food delivery, which can lead to this food waste. But luckily, there's a lot we can do. The first step is super easy, and there's a lot of options. I feel like you can just see it on Uber Eats or whatever, but to turn down extra napkins, sauce packets, plastic knives, all of that. There's not an option to leave it like literally in the app.

Then you can call a restaurant or leave a note, and that will automatically just slim down what ends up in the garbage can. Yeah, yeah. You could also order less energy-intensive food, like less red meat. Oh, yeah. I mean, I think if we're going to eat meat, it needs to be a little bit of it, not the whole shabang. So switching to more whole grains and things like vegetables, fruits, all of that is going to

help a lot when it comes to the carbon intensity of our diets. I'm going for my tofu curry on this one. That sounds really good. A few weeks ago, we talked about steps you could take to make your whole more energy efficient, but a lot of solutions and incentives work best for people who own their homes. But you have some suggestions for renters as well. Tell us about those, please. Yeah, sure. So I'm a renter. So these are things that, you know, come to mind. The first one is weatherize and energy efficient proof your apartment or house as much as you can. You know, get those LED light bulbs.

Get little pieces of weatherization strips to, you know, if there's a draft where you're like, okay, my air conditioning is running away through there. So find ways to fix that where you can even take out and take it to your next place. Even things like blackout curtains can sometimes be helpful in lowering your energy bill. And another thing that you can do, so certain utilities across the U.S. have these programs where they can let you know when there's about to be a peak energy hike. So do a little research and just figure out what time of the day are people using a lot of energy in my community. And when you know that's happening, then you know it's not time to run your dishwasher, it's not time to run your dryer, it's not time to plug all of your laptops into the charger.

So just being a little bit aware of, okay, we're on the border of needing a lot of energy at this time. So if it's a really hot day, it's when everybody's in front of their air conditioning, all of that. So just being aware of kind of what everybody else is doing. And some utilities will set up a way for you to know that. There's also a couple of programs where you can pay a little bit extra and have your utility bill come from renewable energy. So checking it out, seeing what your options are, you know, like that's something that you can do without, you know, getting your landlord involved. Going back to the bigger scale for homeowners like myself, I installed solar panels and battery storage, and I became part of a small electric grid in the Northeast where we actually share electricity when we need it.

When there's a storm out or powers down in one part of the region, and that was set up by my electric utility. You suggest going one step further, starting or joining your own microgrid. Talk about that, if you will. Yeah, so this is something that you can do, you know, in correlation of the utility, you can do it. You can reach out to a couple of companies, I think Teslin Sunrun are two that I looked at. So you can put solar panels on your roof and store it yourself and kind of have your own thing going. But you can also expand that to multiple houses or even some towns kind of have this thing set up where they're all sharing this. So not only does this allow you to say, okay, my energy is coming from the solar panels on my roof or my energy is coming from like the wind turbines that I'm aware of.

You're also able to kind of keep your grid small. So if there's ever a situation where there's a wildfire or a snowstorm or anything like that where you can't, you know, get to those big utilities or the big power plants, you will have some basics to rely on in your own community. We've had these kinds of systems set up forever, you know, in terms of hospitals and some like university campuses. But I think there's now a shift to if you wanted to do this, if you want to say I know where my energy comes from and I want to be more resilient in that way, homes and communities are able to. to do that too, which I think is very, very cool. Yeah, that is cool. Finally, I love a good construction material story. My staff will tell you that. But it's another topic, because you have one about how someday cement, one of my favorite topics. Cement might be part of a climate solution because right now it's a big source of emissions, is it not? Oh, yeah. So this one is from the economists, but I love

talking about this. One of the sneakiest ways right now that carbon is emitted is through cement. And according to this story, the 5 billion metric tons of cement made every year ends up creating a whopping 8% of global emissions annually. So cement, if it was a country, would be just outside of American China in terms of emissions. But it doesn't have to be that way. So basically, when cement is made, it's dug up in limestone and then it's quarried and mixed with clay in a process called calcination, which then emits carbon dioxide. The leftover lumps that are there are cooled and then mild it to cement.

but the economist goes through a couple of neat options on how we can kind of combat this. But the one I'm most excited about is capturing the carbon from this process, from this calcinization, and then using it to actually go in and cure the cement. So you can use water to cure cement. But when you use CO2, it actually makes the cement even stronger. And what excites me about this is that not only is it a way to utilize the CO2 that's being emitted, but once you have CO2 back in cement, it's going to stay there. It's not like putting it back into fuel or putting it under the earth.

It's locked in. Yeah, it's locked in there. So that's very cool. That's a great idea. Thank you for telling us about that. Sarah Kylie Watson, thank you very much for taking time to be with us today. Thank you so much for having me. This was so great.

Nice to have you. Sarah Kylie Watson is an assistant editor at Popular Science based in New York. And now here's Cy Frize trivia host, Diana Montano, with some Earth Day Meditations. Thanks, Ira. Did you know? Some desert mosses can capture water straight out of the air using specialized, semi-transparent, hair-like structures at the end of their leaves called Ons, that's spelled A-W-N-S. You may picture the Earth's mantle as brown or orange, but the igneous rock peridotite and mineral olivine, which make up much of the mantle,

means it's really more greenish than brown. Malio birds lay their eggs in deep sandy pits. The eggs are then incubated by the heat of the sun or from geothermal energy from volcanoes. The earth is about 5.54 billion years old, give or take a few million years. Thank you, Diana. That was quite enlightening. Diana will be back with more meditations later in this show.

After the break, why the latest IPCC report is long on data, but short, on policy. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. One of the most quoted Bibles on the state of our climate crisis is the IPCC report, the Environmental Panel on Climate Change at the UN. And the most recent installment of the IPCC report outlined ambitious steps needed to mitigate some of the worst outcomes. It's increasingly unlikely that will be able to keep the planet from warming by 1.5 degrees Celsius on average above pre-industrial levels. Yet the report focuses on achieving that

1.5 degree benchmark. It optimistically says we can do that. The committee's recommendations include things like phasing out coal entirely, slashing methane emissions by a third, reducing our carbon output among all sectors of the global economy and developing new technologies to help us do it. But how do governments make laws to reach these goals? That's not addressed in the IPCC report. Joining me now to talk more about how we get to climate solutions is my guest, Dr. David Victor, Professor of Innovation in Public Policy and the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego in California. Welcome to Science Friday.

It's great to be with you, Ira. Nice to have you. When you look at the most recent IPCC report, what is your reaction? My reaction is that they're still trying to figure out how you would stop warming at 1.5 degrees because politically it's just too difficult to walk away from that goal. I think, as you said in the introduction, it's really not feasible to meet that goal. And so there's kind of a lot of twerking around how quickly can we reduce emissions, stop warming at 1.5 degrees.

I think the reality is that we've actually made quite a lot of progress. So only about the decade ago, we were on track for warming of about maybe five degrees over the course of the next century, which is just a massive amount of warming. Right now we're on track for maybe two and a half degrees, maybe three degrees, still a huge amount of warming, but a whole lot better than five. And I think that's actually the larger message. But the IPCC, because it requires the consensus of scientists and the consensus of governments, the IPCC can't quite say that because it implies that we need to change our goals. And that's its Achilles heel, then. I think that's exactly it's Achilles' heel. You know, the report is enormously powerful because it's the one place where everybody goes and says,

this is what the scientific community says. The report is also very conservative. It mostly focuses on things that we know a lot about for big reductions in emissions, transformative changes in our economy. Those are things that require policies where we don't really know how to design the policies. We don't know which policies work better than others. as we know a little bit here and there. And that kind of subtle dealing with uncertainty is something that's very hard for the IPCC to grapple with. Now, you were a part of the third working group

for the previous report in 2014. You've written about how the need for consensus, as you say, makes it hard to advance solutions, which are ultimately needed to address the climate crisis. You didn't join in writing the current one. Is that out of frustration with this consensus process? It's a little bit out of frustration with the consensus process. This is also a big, big job. And I have an enormous amount of respect for the 300 or so scientists who were involved in this most recent report. This most recent report is the third an installment of three major reports. It's a really big commitment. I spent probably five years or so of my life working on the last report, was part of the team that helped draft the key summaries and negotiated with governments line by line to get those

summaries approved. So I think it's very important as a public service. I think it's also important that we think about opportunity costs. As a scientist, the time you spend on an activity like this is time that you're not working on science. And I think those opportunity costs are getting bigger and bigger. If you say that we're not going to achieve the 1.5 degree that we need to, and the IPCC keeps telling us to do that, what use is the report? I mean, if you say governments are not going to pass laws to get us there, of what use is it to actually continue to? doing this? Well, I think the report serves an extremely important function in identifying the places where the scientific community has roughly a consensus and also identifying some of the places

where we don't yet agree or where we need to do more research. And that part of the report continues extremely valuable. I think this effort by the report to continue to focus on goals that are unachievable, that part of it is doing a disservice. And the problem there is not so much the scientific community. The problem is the governments, that no government wants to be the first to say, okay, 1.5 is not feasible. Let's look at other goals. Frankly, I think two degrees is also not feasible. I've thought for now six or seven years that two degrees, which is the most widely discussed goal, is not feasible. It's not that we're not making progress. It's that it's very, very difficult to turn the industrial system around on a global basis as quickly as you need to

to stop warming it at a goal like two degrees. Speaking of turning the industrial system, you wrote a piece in the New York Times this week called Why It's Time to Start Caring Much More about Clean Hydrogen. President Biden, in his state of the union address, singled out clean hydrogen as something to invest in. You're in agreement with that. Yeah, I think, and this is an area where the United States has also made some progress, there's $8 billion in the bipartisan infrastructure law for clean hydrogen hubs for these investments in these new hydrogen systems. Hydrogen is really important because it's one of the leading

ideas around switching from conventional natural gas, which causes emissions to a cleaner gas system. And natural gas and gaseous fuels are a big part of the modern industrial economy because they're easy to move around. They're easy to store. When you burn them, they produce very high temperatures, which is extremely important for some industries. And because they're easy to store, it's also an easy way to store electricity and then generate electricity when you need it by simply burning the hydrogen. I think one of the big opportunities with hydrogen is that the European policies to invest in clean hydrogen

are on steroids. And they were always there. And then the Russian invasion of Ukraine made the Europeans really focus on how are they going to reduce their dependence on Russian natural gas. And one of the leading ideas is to switch to hydrogen as quickly as possible. In the short term, they're going to be switching

to other sources of natural gas. And so it'll take a little while for this to diffuse into service. But the piece that we wrote in the New York Times on Monday is about how this European doubling down around hydrogen is potentially good news for the global energy revolution. And you think that the U.S. could mimic that switch. I think the U.S. could mimic it. In some areas, the U.S. could help lead. These hydrogen hubs could be a very big deal.

There are many utilities in California that are now very focused on hydrogen because in California, a few other places in the country, there's a very aggressive set of laws that are requiring a big reduction in emissions, and you've got to figure out what to do with the existing natural gas system. And so these utilities are investing in hydrogen is one of many options. And when we talk about clean hydrogen, you're talking about making it from renewable energy, not from natural gas. Well, that's an open question right now. About 98% of the hydrogen used today in the world, which is using the petrochemical industry and refineries and so on, is made from natural gas and that causes emissions. So we can't make it that way. That's all called gray hydrogen. We could

make it from natural gas and capture those emissions and put them underground, which would make clean hydrogen. Some people call that blue hydrogen. Or we can make hydrogen by using electricity and then running electricity through an electrolyzer and splitting water, H2O, and turning it into hydrogen. The electrolyzer route looks like the most cost-effective route for the long term. But right now, it's very, very expensive, which is why these investments that are being led by the European policies, these investments are so important because they're going to result in buying many more electrolyzers and then producing those costs. Electrolyzers could be the next battery or the next solar cell where early investments bring down costs through learning and then those reductions

and costs expand the market share for electrolyzers and the costs come down further. And I think we may be on the cusp of a kind of solar moment for hydrogen electrolyzers. We're now in a phase that we cannot ignore the reality of climate change and what it's doing. We're seeing rising sea levels. we're seeing disasters by weather. Are you seeing any communities, states, countries realizing this and acting to mitigate, understanding that this is the future? Yeah, I'm seeing that happening very quickly. As a political scientist, the politics are very interesting here because even if you're not

convinced that we ought to do something about global warming, and that's true for a lot of the American public, especially on the right side of the political spectrum, you still have to deal with the climate impacts. So take Miami, for example, in Florida, which is hardly a blue state. Miami is now one of the leaders in the world in thinking about the potential impacts of rising seas on their groundwater table, on the stability of the land in that area. And so you've got this completely different politics around dealing with the impacts of climate change because the impacts are unavoidable. And in many respects, the biggest impacts of the United States are going to happen actually in the red states in the southeast, where more frequent heat waves are going to make some places actually uninhabitable. And I think that

political shift is now very much underway. Is the political shift happening without having to call it climate change? Yeah. It's happening because of tornadoes. It's happening because of sea level rise, because of hurricanes to some degree and floods and drought. I think one of the things that we're pretty far behind on, and this is true around the world, is how do we set up our disaster assistance programs, for example, to better reflect the reality that they're going to be more disasters in some areas. And so rather than having FEMA come in and rebuild the same thing over and over and over again, we ought to be shifting our investments towards more preparedness and avoiding places that are going to be harder and harder hit as the climate changes.

Do you see that people view this as a problem that they cannot take action themselves individually? Are there things that people can do to make them feel like they're having an impact? Yeah, there's a lot that people can do to make themselves feel that they're having an impact, but I think it's also important that we'd be realistic about how much is in our individual control and how much of this is a larger societal problem and therefore really require society-wide policies. It's an interesting exercise, and our listeners should do this, to go and do your own inventory of emissions. For most people in the Western world, higher incomes, emissions are coming from transportation, from driving around, from flying, if you do a lot of

flying. Aircraft are extremely efficient, but you cover very long distances in airplanes, and so those emissions are very high. And also diet. One of the things I found very surprising in a pleasant way in the latest IPCC report is some attention to how shifts in diet could also result in big reductions in emissions. For example, eating less meat and eating more vegetables, eating more efficient meats like chicken and less beef, which is a particularly inefficient way of converting primary calories into final calories. So there are all these things that you can do. A lot of people say, I don't need to worry about climate change. I recycle. Practical impact of that on the overall global warming problem is almost zero. And so we have to be analytical about this. And we also have to

recognize that the problem is mostly outside of our individual scope. And so we really need to be putting pressure on governments and on firms to be organizing policies, investing in new technologies and doing the things that we collectively as a society have to do. So you're talking about becoming more politically involved? Yeah, I think that's vitally important. This is a is an area where many scientists are themselves struggling because one of the norms in science is to do your science and stay out of the other areas. And many climate scientists have recognized sometimes to an extreme that they need to be much more active politically because the problem is not going to solve itself. Yeah, because I recall during the first Earth Day, it was very

politically active. You had scientists like Paul Ehrlich talking about it, Barry Commeter, talking about pollution in those days. But they were very, very vocal, very visible. They were on the evening news every night. And we don't see enough of that, or we don't see very much of that these days. I guess we see less of it these days, but also, you know, the society has changed and our sources of news have changed quite a lot. And scientists are elites. They're kind of uncomfortable with that word. As a general rule, elites have not fared very well in terms of public opinion. So people are looking to other sources for news and for information. I think one of the things is that we as scientists have to do is get more comfortable also talking with other people

who are the real purveyors of information inside the society and help shift that information flow into things that are much more accurate. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. If you're just joining us, we're talking about the latest IPCC report with David Victor, Professor of Innovation and Public Policy in the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego in California. But we are seeing a shift in our own production of energy in this country. I mean, last week we set a record for wind power in the U.S. It was wind power was a second highest source of electricity for the first time since the energy information administration began gathering data. Isn't that hopeful? It's hopeful. We are making progress. When you look over the last few

decades, the United States has actually been one of the world's leaders in reducing emissions from its economy, and particularly from its electric power system, this is a very strong result in almost all the energy models. An economy that decarbonizes is an economy that electrifies because it's easy to electrify as many uses of energy as possible. Think about cars, for example, switching to electric vehicles, and then to reduce emissions from the electric power sector. And we're already reducing emissions from the electric power sector quite a lot, in part because of the revolution in natural gas production. Horizontal drilling and fracturing of gas wells has produced a lot of gas at very low cost. That's helped push the coal out of the electric power system. Now we have a lot of

renewables, a lot of efficiency. These results from the wind supply are very encouraging, and I think we've just barely begun. We're building more and more wind, more solar. We're now starting to develop offshore wind. It should be over time a cost-effective and large supply of renewable energy. So we're making progress, we just have to be realistic about the rate at which these industrial systems change, which is over several decades. You identify that one of the biggest problems in transitioning away from fossil fuels is a followership problem, not a leadership problem. What do you mean by that? Well, so I live in California, and my state is always thrilled with itself about its leadership on climate policy and lots of other policies. And leadership's really important. What leaders do is

they redefine the technological frontier. They invest in new technologies. They show how it's done. They lower costs. Those benefits then flow to the whole world. But I think it's really important for leaders to remember the core logic of the climate change problem. What causes climate change is mainly the buildup of gases in the global atmosphere. So the more the leaders do to control their own emissions, ironically, the more irrelevant they become to the overall problem.

Their emissions shrink, emissions from other. countries continue to grow. And so the goal here is not just to be a leader for leadership's sake, but it's to do things that then can be emulated in the rest of the world so that the kinds of technologies we're adopting in California, for example, then get adopted in other parts of the United States and adopted all around the world. And then that's what's ultimately going to cause big reductions in the global emissions, and that's how you're going to stop global warming. Dr. Victor, thank you for taking time to be with us today. It's really a pleasure. Thank you very much, Ira. David Victor, Professor of Innovation and Public Policy in the School of Global Policy

and Strategy at UC San Diego. I'm Diana Montana with another meditation for your Earth Day. And I've got a trivia question for you. I'll read the question, then give you a few moments to shout your response in the direction of the radio before I tell you the answer. Ready? Here we go. The oldest still-living, non-clinolet tree known of the world is a great basin bristlecone pine named Methuselah. It lives in the white mountains of eastern California, but exactly how old is this tree? Time's up. Through the careful and diligent work of dendrochronologists who use the scientific method of dating tree rings, we now know that Methuselah has been alive for 4,8754 years. If you love trivia questions about the earth and want to join me for you for

for our weekly trivia nights, go to sciencefriy.com slash trivia. Thank you, Diana. We have to take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll be talking about carbon removal. How much of a role could it play, should it play, in reducing the CO2 in the atmosphere? Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I am I. Refledo. We're continuing our conversation about ways to battle the climate crisis.

One of the technologies highlighted in the latest eye. IPCC report is carbon removal, not to be confused with carbon capture. CO2 removal is a process that absorbs CO2 already in the atmosphere and stores it elsewhere. Capture is removing it from smokestacks, for example, before it gets into the air. CO2 removal is a new technology, but it has some climate scientists worried about pouring money into this new tech in lieu of cutting back on a reliance on fossil fuels. Joining me now to talk more about the pros and kinds of carbon removal is my guest. I'm Rabardwaj, Energy Technology Policy Fellow at the International Energy Agency.

Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Eric. Great to be here. Nice to have you. Okay, so carbon removal is when you suck out CO2 from the atmosphere, you store it somewhere. How many different ways can you do that? There's a whole range of different approaches to do that, and even more that are being innovated even as we speak, but they broadly fall into three rough categories. So the first is

engineered carbon removals. These are more on the technological side. And the prime example of that is direct air capture, which is probably the most well known of those engineered solutions, where air is blown over some material that's engineered to grab the CO2 out of the ambient air. And then some form of energy input is needed to re-release that CO2 from that material and then store it underground or use it for some other purpose. Another class of carbon removals is more biomass-based carbon removal, which essentially entail growing plants and allowing them to photosynthesize, incorporate CO2 into their structures, and then use that as a form of removal and then use the plants biomass either to store the CO2 underground or use for some other purpose.

and that can happen through aforestation or reforestation, just growing trees, or can also happen in oceans, growing algae for the same purpose, or a range of other ways. And then the third category is carbon mineralization, which is a reaction by which CO2 is uptaken into mineral form, and that can happen through a lot of different methods through industrial waste streams that are good for that reaction. It can happen through rock formations that exists naturally in the world, naturally do this mineralization reaction, but are engineered to do the reaction faster. Well, let's talk about what scale we are at now and where we get to go. Where we need to go. These are some crazy numbers in terms of the difference between where we're

at now in terms of the scale of carbon removal and where we're looking at over the coming decades. So right now, for reference, the biggest carbon removal project or installation, that exists is something called the orca plant by a company called Climbworks. The plant is based in Iceland, and this is a direct air capture plant, like I mentioned earlier, that removes 4,000 tons of CO2 per year from the atmosphere. And that might sound like a decent amount, but it's very, very minuscule compared to the scale that we're looking at in the future. The skill for getting to net zero emissions that many different agencies or analysts have centered on, at least in a broad sense, is gigatons of CO2 removed from the atmosphere per year

by mid-century. So that's billions of tons of CO2. So there's a lot of growth that's going to have to happen in the industry in order to reach those sorts of levels of carbon removal. Amur, how much will all of this cost? Yeah, we're looking at some big numbers. So right now, with some of these engineered solutions, for example, it might be around $600 per of CO2 removed. For more biomass-based solutions, that can be cheaper. The target that many have agreed on is getting cost down to $100 per ton of CO2. So if we imagine we have $100 per ton large-scale carbon removal, and we're removing billions of tons of carbon per year, that is a couple hundred billion dollars per year just to keep that industry running, just to keep

removing the CO2. We would also need all the money that's required to get to that point. So it's a major commitment, but I guess if you balance that against not doing anything and what happens to the planet and all the people living on it, it may not seem like such a big amount of money after all. Oh yeah, no contest compared to the cost of not doing anything and just dealing with the consequences of the climate crisis. I mean, this sounds to me like we have a long way to go on this, don't we? I mean, I guess I'm saying it's not very practical right now. We will definitely need a pretty wide range of these different forms of carbon removal solutions. And we should think about the limits to scale for each of these different methods. So for example, with aforestation

or reforestation, you only really want to be growing forests in places where forests are supposed to grow, where it makes sense ecologically. A very similar example is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage where you're growing crops or plants that are sucking out CO2. That will require huge amounts of land to grow the crops. Basically, with all these different carbon removal solutions, there's going to be some level of infrastructures that are required to be built to support them. There will be a lot to grapple with in terms of the impacts of those huge infrastructures that we're going to be building. Often we've seen that with the infrastructures we have now in the fossil energy system, they are disproportionately impacting communities of color that are put in the

way of these infrastructures. And when they fail or when they fail, or when they're, they create pollution, they are the ones that are going to be adversely impacted by that. The big emitters like the fossil fuel companies are getting into the carbon removal business, are they not? I mean, is this a sincere business-like effort or is it sort of a greenwashing effort? The fossil fuel industry is definitely very well positioned to use the growth of carbon removal to say we can continue extracting our fossil fuels and selling them. And the emissions from that aren't going to be as much of a problem because we can just cancel them out with carbon removal. So in one sense, the carbon removal industry that's being stood up

begins to serve as kind of a piece of the social imaginary, so to speak, that the public or politicians can think this will be available in the future, these large amounts of carbon removal that make it easier for us to continue emitting the way we are now. I think another piece of that influence that the fossil fuel industry can have is with actually working with carbon removal companies, purchasing them or funding them, and in one sense, using that involvement to, like you say, greenwash and say that they are fully committed towards decarbonizing, reducing fossil fuel use while they continue to pour most of their expenditures into fossil fuel exploration and extraction, but also in terms of directing the industry,

the carbon removal industry, in a direction that's favorable to them. And one example of That is, like I mentioned, these carbon removal facilities use a lot of energy, and that could come from low-carbon resources like low-carbon electricity, for example, which would be pretty necessary for allowing the CO2 removed to actually be CO2 that's net removed from the atmosphere. But you could also power these with natural gas, and there's no, you know, there's no law stopping you from doing that. And so if we have a carbon removal industry that through the influence of the fossil fuel industry ends up getting built up to consume huge amounts of natural gas, for example, that's a win on multiple fronts for the fossil fuel industry and damages the efforts in good faith to get towards net zero emissions and reduce fossil fuel use. This week there was actually a nearly $1 billion investment in the CO2 removal industry. Tell me more about the investment details. Yes, so this was what's called an advanced market commitment that was organized by an online payments company called Stripe with funding from Alphabet, Meta, and a few other companies.

And they basically committed to buy almost a billion dollars worth of carbon removals. So it's called an advanced market commitment because there is not a billion dollars worth of carbon removals available right now to buy. but it provides a really strong demand signal for companies that are entering the space that there will be a buyer in the future when they get there. With these sorts of investments and with the overall general momentum and hype that's being built around carbon removal and that there is some risks along the lines of potentially creating some sort of bubble in the carbon removal industry with all the excitement that this is going to be this huge thing that's going to start working very soon, there's a sense that we don't really allow for these technology. to experiment, to fail, to iterate, because there's such new technologies for removing carbon, we need that level of leeway towards failure that might be a little bit counterproductive when we have these huge amounts of money and these messaging pouring in that this is going to be big very soon.

Are you feeling optimistic in the long run that this could make a dent in carbon in the atmosphere? Yeah, that's a loaded question. It's one that I definitely think through a lot these days. I think there are a couple parts to that question. I think one is about whether we achieve the scale that we need. Seeing the momentum now and all the innovation that's happening in the space, there's a good chance that we can reach maybe a couple gigatons of CO2 removal per year. And I think another side of it is when we reach that gigatone scale industry, what does it actually look like from a social or political or justice perspective. Is it an industry that's basically replicating the scale and impact of the fossil fuel industry now, where it's trampling on

communities of color, where it's entrenching fossil fuel use, where it has political systems beholden to it, or is it a system that is co-produced with the communities around it, where those communities are benefiting from this carbon removal, and for sure, where it's compatible with reducing fossil fuel use. I think that is a much harder outcome to achieve than just the scale itself and requires a lot of forethought starting now to get to that point. Well, I want to thank you for elucidating all those options in the future

and taking time to talk with us. Thanks very much, Ari. Amur Bardwaj, Energy Technology Policy Fellow at the International Energy Agency that's based in Paris, France. We'd like to end this hour on Earth Day by taking you to the banks of the Hussatonic River, which flows from the Berkshires in Massachusetts, south all the way to Long Island Sound. Like many rivers in the Northeast, it has a long history of pollution from the factories that were built along its banks. For decades, General Electric dumped toxic PCBs near the headwaters,

and decades later, parts of the river are still contaminated. But for a long, wild stretches, the river snakes through mountains and undercover bridges, and you wouldn't know about its troubles. Two years ago, we met someone who captures the ever-changing sounds of rivers like the Hussetonic, captures the sounds with stereo microphones and underwater hydrophones. So if you can, you might want to put on your headphones for this soundscape. My name is Inaya Lockwood. I'm a composer. I make pieces for singers and instrumentalists, but also I do a lot of environmental sound recording, and I have done for many years going back to the 60s. I'm doing it almost entirely by ear.

In other words, I look at local maps, look at areas that are marshy, for example, where I expect to be able to find a lot of aquatic bugs, and make good underwater sources. Look at areas where the flow is clearly going to be fast, in which case I get very complex water textures, which I love, and then just let my ears guide me. I want to draw people into the energy of the river, and by that means arouse associations, personal associations,

in people's minds with rivers that they know and love. And from there, move on to figure concern about the health of rivers. That's my aim. But the sound has to be right, has to be really good for that immersion, you know, of a listener. I don't want the sounds of oars or paddles to be included in the recording. I sort of don't want people's attention to be drawn away from the actual energy of the river itself. So I always just record from the bank. Besides, the banks are so interesting.

I mean, that's where the friction is between water and land and the sounds which rivers create at their banks are beautiful and complex and varied, tremendously varied. I remember being truly shocked when I got to Pittsfield and I remember reading a sign which pointed out PCB contamination in the mud and if you were trying to embark on a canoe or a kayak, make sure to wash your legs as quickly as you possibly could. It was the first time I'd seen that sort of warning. It was shocking.

And when I got to do a recording which was purely an underwater environment, I've been recording underwater in various spots by then, on the Danube and up in Montana and in New York, and was used to hearing a lot of activity underwater. It should have been plenty going on late spring, early summer. There was very, very little, and I wondered if PCB contamination and the other contamination, which had been flowing down river for so long, had just sort of decimated underwater populations,

not just a fish, but of smaller creatures too. No river, in my experience, has an over-reiber. characteristic by which you could identify, ah, that's the Danube, that's the Hudson, that's the Hussetonic. Every single site on a river has its own characteristic. So I regard rivers as live phenomena which actively create their sound, by the way they work with the materials of their banks and restructure their banks and change their banks, and not to mention the bed of the river changing constantly. So, if they're Every single site has its own sound.

And moreover, every site's sound changes somewhat within a very short space of time. There's no pinning a river down. And I like that very much. You can hear more of Inaya Lockwood's sound map of the Hussetonic River on our website, Science Friday.com. Here's Charles Burquist with some of the folks who helped make this show happen. Thanks, Ira. Danielle Dana is our executive director.

Beth Rami is our controller. Ariel Zich is our director of audience. Annie Nero is our individual giving manager. And I'm radio director Charles Bergquist. Thanks for listening. Thank you, Charles. BJ Leiderman composed our theme music. And of course, if you missed any part of the program,

or would like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts, or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Wishing you a thoughtful Earth Day. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato.