It's a jarring phrase. There's an even more jarring version of it in this episode. You've been warned.
Economists are well-known for gnomic sentences that can sound cruel. For some, that's one of the job's many perks. But that doesn't mean that there isn't some truth in representing decisions as trade-offs.
Today is a bonus monologue episode where I am going to unpack this phrase (and its nastier cousin) and explain what it has to teach the carbon removal industry as it grapples with the tension between scale and quality.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hello, this is your host, Ross Kenyon.
I'm doing something that I have not done before.
I feel like I did a long time ago, but it's been a while.
But in trying to make this show financially sustainable, I was
able to pick up a couple of sponsors.
It would do me a great favor if you could please listen and
learn more about each of them since they offer something to
(00:20):
different parts of our audience that I think you will care about
These two sponsors and thank youfrom the bottom of my heart for
becoming sponsors are off stream.
And our bionics, our Bionics is a project developer.
They're the ones that are actually pulling carbon dioxide
out of the atmosphere and storing it and they are doing it
through trees. You know, trees have had a
(00:42):
difficult time within carbon removal.
You should go listen to the showthat I did with with Lizette
Louis from our Bionics. We did a show probably about six
weeks or 8 weeks ago and we talked about how the trajectory
of trees, Afro station reforestation within carbon
removal has played out, how thatimpacts whether we are storing
(01:03):
biological material and anoxic environments for carbon removal
purposes alone. Arbonics is doing something a
little bit differently. Europe has over 14,000,000
hectares of underused land, which, you know, abandoned
farmland. It's low quality pasture.
Not a lot is happening there. A lot of it once was forced.
It was cleared a long time ago for farming, but the global food
supply and better yields elsewhere has meant that a lot
(01:25):
of this land is just underutilized and we haven't
quite figured out what to do with it yet.
So our bonnets uses technology to help land owners find this
land and then restore it back into carbon, removing biodiverse
forest. And that last point is really
important because a lot of forestry that takes place is a
monoculture, which is maybe solving one problem, but it's
not solving the overall Poly crisis, ecological crisis.
(01:48):
So our bionics pursues that way of going to market in order to
offer corporates high quality data backed European carbon
removal credits, helping companies reach their
sustainability goals with maximum trust.
So goals of that conversation with Lizette.
I'll put a link in the show notes if you want some more.
And if you're thinking about this in terms of a cycle here,
(02:09):
Off Stream would be a service provider to our Bionics.
Off Stream is there to make carbon compliance simple for
project developers. If you're listening, if you work
at a carbon removal company or company producing other types of
carbon assets, the data portion of this is super challenging.
If you're listening and you haven't had to read through a
methodology or any registry documentation, you'll probably
(02:31):
live longer than the rest of us who have.
It's non trivial. It's difficult, and that's not
to say that it shouldn't be difficult.
Much of this should be. So we make sure that quality is
actually taking place when carbon is removed or avoided or
anything like that. And Off Stream exists to make it
easier for product developers tonot get stuck on the level of
(02:52):
data. Barsha Ramesh Walsh, Off Stream
CEO, She likens their platform to being Agps For your carbon
credit and your MRP plans. It's guiding you through the
jungle of certifications and compliance.
Oh, I love that. That's such a fun, visual way of
putting it. This is a world where you can
develop and iterate on your project.
(03:13):
LC as in minutes, not weeks. Where you can focus on doing the
important work of growing your business, scaling carbon
removal, generating more creditswithout having to necessarily
hire more employees. This is really an important time
in carbon removal where minimizing headcount may be
necessary for a number of companies to stay alive and keep
(03:34):
going. And Off Stream is here to help
you do that. They're here to help you with
your LCA needs. If you're listening, you're a
project developer, you know one and they are having persistent
migraines for paperwork like go over to use off stream.com.
Tell them that Off Stream can help them handle the quote UN
quote boring bits while they canfocus on saving the planet off
(03:57):
stream because paperwork shouldn't be a full time job.
Crack me up. Thank you Off Stream and our
bonics for sponsoring Reversing Climate Change.
I'm really appreciative that you're able to help me do this.
It means a lot. If you're listening to this and
you'd like to sponsor Reversing Climate Change, feel free to
send me an e-mail. I'll put the e-mail in the show
(04:17):
notes too. And let's talk.
And OK, now I'm going into the show proper, the intro.
Here it is. And thank you again for
listening today. I have what I expect to be
somewhat unlikable and provocative statement.
(04:39):
I'd like to read it out, poke atit and understand what it has to
teach us. My name is Ross Cannon, I'm a
climate tech entrepreneur. I've worked in carbon removal
the better part of a decade and I'm the host of the Reversing
Climate Change podcast. So what is this very mysterious
statement? Well, I have a friend who's an
economist and there's a certain type of economist that very much
(05:01):
likes to push buttons. They are the ones who famously
receive criticism like they knowthe price of everything but the
value of nothing. Those kinds of economist and
they are very good at offering hardcore trade off thought
experiments. Ones that make you think, ones
(05:21):
that keep you up at night, ones that really should be torturing,
ones that invoke tragedy and grief.
One that stay with you. You might say.
So this friend of mine one time told me that the optimal number
of traffic deaths is non 0. The optimal number of traffic
(05:45):
deaths is non 0. You think about that and you
wonder what does it mean for us?It means that we have accepted
the trade off that moving aroundefficiently in cars is better
than driving at a safe speed forall of us.
(06:06):
We could be driving at 5 miles an hour everywhere.
It would take a very long time to get places, but the mortality
rate would drop wildly. And last time I checked, I
believe there's 10s of thousandsof people a year in the United
States alone who die from traffic related fatalities.
And those could be dealt with byus either not driving or driving
(06:30):
very slow. And this line, I don't think he
told me this like a decade ago. And it comes up fairly often in
my brain because it's so provocative.
And I often think about it in the context of carbon removal
when we obsess over quality. There's long been a, calling it
(06:54):
a shibboleth sounds a little pejorative.
Gosh, what a, what $100 sentencethat is.
But there's a, there's a thing people say, wow, that's a way to
dumb it down. There's something that people
say in carbon removal. And it's that the problem is, is
trust. And we move at the speed of
trust. And that's true to an extent,
(07:14):
though, because sometimes we getso focused on upping the quality
of carbon removal that we start to trade off against other
attributes of that carbon removal that would otherwise be
available to us. For instance, we could get
quality to 100% and create carbon credits for removals that
(07:37):
were 100% durable, 100% additional 100% just if we
wanted to get to create a perfect carbon removal credit
that was 100% durable, you know,if you put it somewhere, you
know it was going to stay there 100% additional.
You know that this activity would not have happened without
(07:57):
the buyer putting money out for it 100%.
Just you can know that no one even had a bad feeling about the
project at all. And in fact, everyone who knows
about it and should know about it did know about it and hardly
endorsed it. But once you maximize to to that
(08:17):
level for quality, how many credits start to exist that
could possibly meet the standard?
We know what every atom, subatomic particle, I don't know
that you need to, I don't think you need to go into quantum
physics here, but let's just sayyou did.
(08:38):
You know the superposition and the position of every subatomic
particle affiliated with this carbon removal process.
You have it all measured. We know that last one's a little
farcical, so that one probably wouldn't wouldn't happen
anyways. But if you did want to optimize
for quality in this way, how many carbon credits do you think
we could generate? And my supposition is that it'd
(08:59):
be very few and they would be extremely expensive.
How could they not be? It would take a massive amount
of effort to guarantee all of these things and be so sure
about it. And that's bad because quality
is not something that we need tomaximize up expensive.
Everything else it it faces trade-offs and at some point
(09:21):
quality is actually more harmfulthan good.
So our goal, I think, should be to aim for just enough quality
to trade off against scale in a way that's meaningful, by which
I mean the goal of carbon removal and in fact all carbon
management, including mitigation, avoidance,
(09:45):
adaptation, all of these things.The goal is to decrease the
amount of carbon we're adding tothe atmosphere as quickly as
possible, barring some other trade-offs.
For instance, we can't just turnoff industrial civilization.
Well, some people think you can.I am not one of those people,
(10:07):
but they are sometimes fun to read and listen to.
But I do not think that's a goodidea because if we did just turn
off all fossil fuel emissions right now, it would cause
horrible calamity. The goal of all carbon
management is to have an impact on the climate that results in
less human suffering and less disruption to ecosystems of
(10:29):
natural world. That's the goal.
And if you make perfect carbon removal credits, but there's
only a couple of them because they're very expensive to to
produce and to sell, it doesn't really matter.
You need to get over the line ofhaving more tons removed.
Even if more of those tons are impaired at some point later on.
If they're imperfect in some wayor they're not really of perfect
(10:52):
quality like I suspect for some,there's some types of carbon
removal that is really, let's just imagine that there's a type
of carbon removal that has greatscale, but it would help us
avoid an integers worth of global average temperature
(11:13):
change, which would be a massivedeal.
But it was really hard to measure.
I don't know that we should avoid doing it because of that.
I think there we might say, well, that's really impressive
that we can do that much good. It's a shame we can't do more to
measure it and we should try to measure it more, but I think the
fact that this is going to have this level of impact makes it
(11:35):
worth the trade off to do. Or if we could have, you know,
10 or 100 X the amount of 100 year removals versus thousand
year removals, I think there's agood reason to do that, even
though it will just push the problem down the line a little
bit. I see various papers and math
that shows that this is not a good idea.
(11:58):
I've read these things and I I've never really understood why
it would be the case that removing these tons at greater
volumes for 100 years wouldn't be better than an insignificant
amount of tons for 1000 years. I can't say I really get it.
(12:20):
My guess is that a lot of opposition to that take place at
the level of political economy and people who support the
thousand year permanent standardare very concerned that should
they relax it, corporations would buy carbon credits for 100
years of permanence, claim that it negates fossil emissions that
(12:42):
will last for, you know, thousands of years.
Are they half life out and call it good and I'm not?
I don't want to get into that level of it.
Arguments like that I think are confusing.
And they also end up in noble lie territory, which is an idea
from Plato's Republic that for much of the population, we need
(13:05):
to manipulate them in certain ways where the truth is not easy
for them to grapple with. So therefore we manage them by
lying, but it's a lie that serves their interest.
I don't really like that. I feel like that line of
argument doesn't really work that well in 2025 because often
times you'll have it be the casewhere people will get angry.
(13:28):
Like the example that comes to mind is.
I'm hesitant to dig into this one because the details of it
might be a little more complicated, but let's just take
for granted this is how it happened because it is how the
story gets recounted to me by people who care about this a
lot. But for instance, when COVID
started, there were a lot of people who were saying that it
(13:51):
looks like COVID was a lab leak in Wuhan.
And some of these people were just called horrible names for
even suggesting this. They're called the sort of
conspiracy theorist or they wereracist in some way.
And then, you know, years later,I even saw a news article the
(14:12):
other day from, you know, mainstream source saying that
FBI and the CIA, like both at this point, have acknowledged
that that is a plausible and, infact a likely theory of how that
happened. And so the people who were just
excoriated as lunatics for believing this, they remember
that they were dealt with in this manner.
(14:34):
And I think there is a desire bythe people who manage crises
like this to have a noble life framework where they're trying
to protect people or they don't want to encourage geopolitical
friction by pointing at China inthis way.
But it it really adds up. And the people on the Internet
like find out about stuff and then they they talk about it and
then they're very upset in this way.
(14:58):
So anyways, I don't really like this political economy angle for
it. Another thing economists like
the the point to they love the line from Robert Heinlein.
The moon is a harsh mistress. There ain't no such thing as a
free lunch. Tansiful, I don't even know how
you even say that. Actually, I hardly ever say that
one out loud. But quality doesn't come for
(15:19):
free. Quality requires increased
measurement. It requires stricter standards
that make fewer projects eligible to generate credits.
So we have less supply. The supply that does exist ends
up being more expensive and we need to balance that off of
scale because if we do not generate enough carbon removal
and avoidance, we're headed towards a world of it's not
(15:45):
going to be good. We're not headed towards towards
a good place. So we cannot overly fetishize
quality. It is only good up to a point
and the point at which it tips is whether or not we are making
an impact on climate change in away that is meaningful to the
entire world. If we are not doing that and we
(16:06):
designed the most perfect credits, we could all pat
ourselves on the back as being so pure and so honorable and
having such high integrity. But there's going to be some bad
credits in there, without a doubt.
And the point of trading this off is at the point where there
are credits that get made that ultimately turn out to be
(16:26):
failures, and that's OK. I feel like carbon removal is so
scared of being accused of greenwashing or having credits
become impaired that we are willing to settle on many fewer
credits being generated and consumed so that we never face a
crisis like this. But I think optimizing so far on
(16:46):
the side of quality like that almost guarantees that we will
not produce the numbers necessary that we need to
reverse climate change. There's a worse version of this
economist line that a friend of mine likes too.
And this, this one's grosser andit's worse, but it applies to
cereal production and agriculture where the optimal
amount of rat poop in cereal is non 0.
(17:08):
There are always going to be rodents involved, I guess in the
production of cereal grain. And then going to the factory
and having large amounts of grain Co located, you're going
to have rodent activity. And we could optimize for never
having an amount of rat poop andcereal.
(17:29):
And I would like to not eat thatfor sure, but the amount of work
it would take to guarantee that it was not present and keeping
all of that safe would raise theprice.
I don't I don't know how much, but I imagine it's a lot.
And there's a lot of times like this where it's like, OK, it's
(17:49):
not great. Obviously it's not ideal, but
optimizing so far on the side ofquality, it really harms US1
related idea here that helps me make sense of this, even though
it's disgusting, is the idea of the Pareto principle.
You probably heard this put as 8020 and it's that 20% of the
(18:10):
work gets 80% of the results, which is a way of saying you
often get pretty close to the way there by a first attempt.
Much of the outcome is done withthe 1st 20% of the work, and
that could be the rough draft. You could, you know, write 100
pages and you could spend probably more time editing it
(18:34):
and fine tuning it by the time it's done then you did just
composing that enormous amount of text.
And that's how it is here too, where, OK, if it costs 20% to
get you to 80, every additional unit of doneness just cost you
more units above that 20 to get there.
The price just goes up with every additional integer of
(18:56):
quality of doneness that you getto.
I think carbon removal would do well to keep that in mind, that
getting to 8020 is a way of ensuring that there's scale.
Good counter arguments to this is that we will never scale if
there are frequent crises that occur as a result of low quality
(19:16):
issuances, impairments, things of that nature that will so
badly harm the reputation of thecarbon removal industry that it
is in fact imperative that we never have one of those.
It's empirical how many of theseincidents are how harmful to
(19:37):
carbon removal. Like if we look at the major
crises that have happened withinthe broader offset market, you
know, I think people like to point to Guardian articles.
The John Oliver expose was a bigone.
The New Yorker one about the Kariba project was another.
They were bad, but I don't thinkthey tell us very much that we
(20:00):
didn't already know. I think the people who think
that there needs to be financialmechanisms for carbon management
saw those as, yeah, like at thisvolume, you're going to have
some rat poop in the cereal. And it's our job to make sure
that it gets dealt with and it'sinsured and it's, we minimize
it. But some of that is going to
(20:21):
happen. The people who were most
critical and supportive of the John Oliver thing, were they
ever going to like voluntary carbon market mechanisms for
addressing climate change? I doubt it.
I think anyone has heard the same exact criticisms of carbon
removal and BCM activity for a very long time.
Think we've all heard about indulgences as the most common
(20:43):
one, that they're just greenwashing and they don't even
do anything. That's fine, I hear that one a
lot. But I think anyone in the know
at all know that there's actually a lot of nuance in
here. There are avoidance projects
that are meaningful. There are carbon removal
projects that are also meaningful.
There are some that are potentially less meaningful and
deserving of a different price. There are some that are maybe
(21:06):
rated more like junk bonds or maybe they will be able to
perform and we discount them because they might fail before
the coupon arrives, you know, before they reach maturity.
And that's why they're discounted.
And that's fine. We, we expect, we don't expect
all bonds to make it. We don't expect all bonds to be
solvent by the time they reach maturity.
(21:27):
And we don't do that for carbon credits either.
We we shouldn't, but I think we end up second guessing ourselves
in a way that makes us lose track of the Pareto principle.
It makes us lose track of the ultimate goal here, which is to
produce enough carbon removals and avoidance to not face the
worst consequences of climate change.
And if we do not reach that goal, but we get to pat
(21:48):
ourselves on the back the entireway because we prioritize
quality and we have such high integrity as an industry, it
doesn't matter. Maybe it matters in in a moral
sense that we didn't cut any corners, and that's a really
beautiful thing. But if we didn't achieve the
outcome that this whole edifice was built to service, it's
unclear to me what exactly we'redoing.
(22:11):
I don't even know that I have anyone specifically that I'm
pointing towards here. I didn't write this and riff on
it in order to counteract something that I see that is
actively harmful. I think in all of us, this is an
impulse that exists in our souls.
We're here because we care aboutthe climate, we care about
(22:31):
carbon removal. We think market mechanisms have
a role to play in reversing climate change.
And we don't want to be a part of an industry that lets the
world down and is part of the corporate environment that we
see and find very disappointing.I I understand the impulse.
I think probably everyone in this space has inside you.
(22:56):
There are two wolves and one of them is wanting to make sure we
we do enough, even if it's of crappier quality but gets us
over the hump to reverse climatechange.
And the other one wants to make sure that we never cut any
corners and everything is done just so.
And there's a little bit of the perfectionist in there.
How could there not be? They were talking about some
serious stakes here about human lives and animal lives and the
(23:18):
planet as a whole that are very important.
But also we need to move quicklyand moving slowly is the same as
dying in this case in terms of our industry and the impact that
we would like to make. So I encourage you to think
about that. Sorry for putting the idea into
your head. Horrible, horrible economist.
(23:39):
The optimal number of traffic deaths is non zero.
It's true. The optimal amount of rat poop
and cereal is non 0 to the person listening, I know you're
listening. Who?
Who told this to me? Thank you that that sentence now
lives in my brain rent free. I'm I'm sad that it does, but
think about this in the future. Think about how much we
(24:01):
overemphasize quality and make sure we're not doing it in a way
that loses sight of other variables.
We cannot optimize for that one variable in the system.
I think that would cause us to not hit the scale that we need
for carbon removal. And I am also very open to
empirical arguments here swayingthis opinion.
(24:23):
All I care about is getting the PPM down parts per million of
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere down to a pre
industrial level as quickly as possible as ethically as
possible. And if obsessing over quality
above all else is the way that we can do that, I will.
I will gladly change my mind on it.
(24:44):
I'm not committed to this position at all.
I just think that this is an impulse that I've seen or a
stress on quality or trust in a way that and because it doesn't
keep track of other variables, it makes it sound like it
doesn't cost anything or the costs are negligible, which I do
not believe is the truth of the matter.
So thanks so much for listening.I hope you liked it.
(25:04):
If you like it, as I say on YouTube, smash that like button.
Give me a thumbs up, you know, five stars on Apple Podcast,
Spotify. I'll write a review.
If you're using Apple Podcast, please tell people that this is
a cool show that you learned something from that you like.
I have a subscriber program if you'd like ad free listening.
If you want to get bonus content, please join the
community of subscribers. It means a lot to me.
(25:26):
It helps the show grow. Thanks so much for listening.
I'm Ross Kenyon, this is reversing climate change and
sorry for putting some of those ideas in your head.
So thanks for listening. Bye for now.
Hello, this is your host, Ross Kenyon.
I'm doing something that I have not done before.
I feel like I did a long time ago, but it's been a while.
But in trying to make this show financially sustainable, I was
able to pick up a couple of sponsors.
It would do me a great favor if you could please listen and
learn more about each of them since they offer something to
(00:20):
different parts of our audience that I think you will care about
These two sponsors and thank youfrom the bottom of my heart for
becoming sponsors are off stream.
And our bionics, our Bionics is a project developer.
They're the ones that are actually pulling carbon dioxide
out of the atmosphere and storing it and they are doing it
through trees. You know, trees have had a
(00:42):
difficult time within carbon removal.
You should go listen to the showthat I did with with Lizette
Louis from our Bionics. We did a show probably about six
weeks or 8 weeks ago and we talked about how the trajectory
of trees, Afro station reforestation within carbon
removal has played out, how thatimpacts whether we are storing
(01:03):
biological material and anoxic environments for carbon removal
purposes alone. Arbonics is doing something a
little bit differently. Europe has over 14,000,000
hectares of underused land, which, you know, abandoned
farmland. It's low quality pasture.
Not a lot is happening there. A lot of it once was forced.
It was cleared a long time ago for farming, but the global food
supply and better yields elsewhere has meant that a lot
(01:25):
of this land is just underutilized and we haven't
quite figured out what to do with it yet.
So our bonnets uses technology to help land owners find this
land and then restore it back into carbon, removing biodiverse
forest. And that last point is really
important because a lot of forestry that takes place is a
monoculture, which is maybe solving one problem, but it's
not solving the overall Poly crisis, ecological crisis.
(01:48):
So our bionics pursues that way of going to market in order to
offer corporates high quality data backed European carbon
removal credits, helping companies reach their
sustainability goals with maximum trust.
So goals of that conversation with Lizette.
I'll put a link in the show notes if you want some more.
And if you're thinking about this in terms of a cycle here,
(02:09):
Off Stream would be a service provider to our Bionics.
Off Stream is there to make carbon compliance simple for
project developers. If you're listening, if you work
at a carbon removal company or company producing other types of
carbon assets, the data portion of this is super challenging.
If you're listening and you haven't had to read through a
methodology or any registry documentation, you'll probably
(02:31):
live longer than the rest of us who have.
It's non trivial. It's difficult, and that's not
to say that it shouldn't be difficult.
Much of this should be. So we make sure that quality is
actually taking place when carbon is removed or avoided or
anything like that. And Off Stream exists to make it
easier for product developers tonot get stuck on the level of
(02:52):
data. Barsha Ramesh Walsh, Off Stream
CEO, She likens their platform to being Agps For your carbon
credit and your MRP plans. It's guiding you through the
jungle of certifications and compliance.
Oh, I love that. That's such a fun, visual way of
putting it. This is a world where you can
develop and iterate on your project.
(03:13):
LC as in minutes, not weeks. Where you can focus on doing the
important work of growing your business, scaling carbon
removal, generating more creditswithout having to necessarily
hire more employees. This is really an important time
in carbon removal where minimizing headcount may be
necessary for a number of companies to stay alive and keep
(03:34):
going. And Off Stream is here to help
you do that. They're here to help you with
your LCA needs. If you're listening, you're a
project developer, you know one and they are having persistent
migraines for paperwork like go over to use off stream.com.
Tell them that Off Stream can help them handle the quote UN
quote boring bits while they canfocus on saving the planet off
(03:57):
stream because paperwork shouldn't be a full time job.
Crack me up. Thank you Off Stream and our
bonics for sponsoring Reversing Climate Change.
I'm really appreciative that you're able to help me do this.
It means a lot. If you're listening to this and
you'd like to sponsor Reversing Climate Change, feel free to
send me an e-mail. I'll put the e-mail in the show
(04:17):
notes too. And let's talk.
And OK, now I'm going into the show proper, the intro.
Here it is. And thank you again for
listening today. I have what I expect to be
somewhat unlikable and provocative statement.
(04:39):
I'd like to read it out, poke atit and understand what it has to
teach us. My name is Ross Cannon, I'm a
climate tech entrepreneur. I've worked in carbon removal
the better part of a decade and I'm the host of the Reversing
Climate Change podcast. So what is this very mysterious
statement? Well, I have a friend who's an
economist and there's a certain type of economist that very much
(05:01):
likes to push buttons. They are the ones who famously
receive criticism like they knowthe price of everything but the
value of nothing. Those kinds of economist and
they are very good at offering hardcore trade off thought
experiments. Ones that make you think, ones
(05:21):
that keep you up at night, ones that really should be torturing,
ones that invoke tragedy and grief.
One that stay with you. You might say.
So this friend of mine one time told me that the optimal number
of traffic deaths is non 0. The optimal number of traffic
(05:45):
deaths is non 0. You think about that and you
wonder what does it mean for us?It means that we have accepted
the trade off that moving aroundefficiently in cars is better
than driving at a safe speed forall of us.
(06:06):
We could be driving at 5 miles an hour everywhere.
It would take a very long time to get places, but the mortality
rate would drop wildly. And last time I checked, I
believe there's 10s of thousandsof people a year in the United
States alone who die from traffic related fatalities.
And those could be dealt with byus either not driving or driving
(06:30):
very slow. And this line, I don't think he
told me this like a decade ago. And it comes up fairly often in
my brain because it's so provocative.
And I often think about it in the context of carbon removal
when we obsess over quality. There's long been a, calling it
(06:54):
a shibboleth sounds a little pejorative.
Gosh, what a, what $100 sentencethat is.
But there's a, there's a thing people say, wow, that's a way to
dumb it down. There's something that people
say in carbon removal. And it's that the problem is, is
trust. And we move at the speed of
trust. And that's true to an extent,
(07:14):
though, because sometimes we getso focused on upping the quality
of carbon removal that we start to trade off against other
attributes of that carbon removal that would otherwise be
available to us. For instance, we could get
quality to 100% and create carbon credits for removals that
(07:37):
were 100% durable, 100% additional 100% just if we
wanted to get to create a perfect carbon removal credit
that was 100% durable, you know,if you put it somewhere, you
know it was going to stay there 100% additional.
You know that this activity would not have happened without
(07:57):
the buyer putting money out for it 100%.
Just you can know that no one even had a bad feeling about the
project at all. And in fact, everyone who knows
about it and should know about it did know about it and hardly
endorsed it. But once you maximize to to that
(08:17):
level for quality, how many credits start to exist that
could possibly meet the standard?
We know what every atom, subatomic particle, I don't know
that you need to, I don't think you need to go into quantum
physics here, but let's just sayyou did.
(08:38):
You know the superposition and the position of every subatomic
particle affiliated with this carbon removal process.
You have it all measured. We know that last one's a little
farcical, so that one probably wouldn't wouldn't happen
anyways. But if you did want to optimize
for quality in this way, how many carbon credits do you think
we could generate? And my supposition is that it'd
(08:59):
be very few and they would be extremely expensive.
How could they not be? It would take a massive amount
of effort to guarantee all of these things and be so sure
about it. And that's bad because quality
is not something that we need tomaximize up expensive.
Everything else it it faces trade-offs and at some point
(09:21):
quality is actually more harmfulthan good.
So our goal, I think, should be to aim for just enough quality
to trade off against scale in a way that's meaningful, by which
I mean the goal of carbon removal and in fact all carbon
management, including mitigation, avoidance,
(09:45):
adaptation, all of these things.The goal is to decrease the
amount of carbon we're adding tothe atmosphere as quickly as
possible, barring some other trade-offs.
For instance, we can't just turnoff industrial civilization.
Well, some people think you can.I am not one of those people,
(10:07):
but they are sometimes fun to read and listen to.
But I do not think that's a goodidea because if we did just turn
off all fossil fuel emissions right now, it would cause
horrible calamity. The goal of all carbon
management is to have an impact on the climate that results in
less human suffering and less disruption to ecosystems of
(10:29):
natural world. That's the goal.
And if you make perfect carbon removal credits, but there's
only a couple of them because they're very expensive to to
produce and to sell, it doesn't really matter.
You need to get over the line ofhaving more tons removed.
Even if more of those tons are impaired at some point later on.
If they're imperfect in some wayor they're not really of perfect
(10:52):
quality like I suspect for some,there's some types of carbon
removal that is really, let's just imagine that there's a type
of carbon removal that has greatscale, but it would help us
avoid an integers worth of global average temperature
(11:13):
change, which would be a massivedeal.
But it was really hard to measure.
I don't know that we should avoid doing it because of that.
I think there we might say, well, that's really impressive
that we can do that much good. It's a shame we can't do more to
measure it and we should try to measure it more, but I think the
fact that this is going to have this level of impact makes it
(11:35):
worth the trade off to do. Or if we could have, you know,
10 or 100 X the amount of 100 year removals versus thousand
year removals, I think there's agood reason to do that, even
though it will just push the problem down the line a little
bit. I see various papers and math
that shows that this is not a good idea.
(11:58):
I've read these things and I I've never really understood why
it would be the case that removing these tons at greater
volumes for 100 years wouldn't be better than an insignificant
amount of tons for 1000 years. I can't say I really get it.
(12:20):
My guess is that a lot of opposition to that take place at
the level of political economy and people who support the
thousand year permanent standardare very concerned that should
they relax it, corporations would buy carbon credits for 100
years of permanence, claim that it negates fossil emissions that
(12:42):
will last for, you know, thousands of years.
Are they half life out and call it good and I'm not?
I don't want to get into that level of it.
Arguments like that I think are confusing.
And they also end up in noble lie territory, which is an idea
from Plato's Republic that for much of the population, we need
(13:05):
to manipulate them in certain ways where the truth is not easy
for them to grapple with. So therefore we manage them by
lying, but it's a lie that serves their interest.
I don't really like that. I feel like that line of
argument doesn't really work that well in 2025 because often
times you'll have it be the casewhere people will get angry.
(13:28):
Like the example that comes to mind is.
I'm hesitant to dig into this one because the details of it
might be a little more complicated, but let's just take
for granted this is how it happened because it is how the
story gets recounted to me by people who care about this a
lot. But for instance, when COVID
started, there were a lot of people who were saying that it
(13:51):
looks like COVID was a lab leak in Wuhan.
And some of these people were just called horrible names for
even suggesting this. They're called the sort of
conspiracy theorist or they wereracist in some way.
And then, you know, years later,I even saw a news article the
(14:12):
other day from, you know, mainstream source saying that
FBI and the CIA, like both at this point, have acknowledged
that that is a plausible and, infact a likely theory of how that
happened. And so the people who were just
excoriated as lunatics for believing this, they remember
that they were dealt with in this manner.
(14:34):
And I think there is a desire bythe people who manage crises
like this to have a noble life framework where they're trying
to protect people or they don't want to encourage geopolitical
friction by pointing at China inthis way.
But it it really adds up. And the people on the Internet
like find out about stuff and then they they talk about it and
then they're very upset in this way.
(14:58):
So anyways, I don't really like this political economy angle for
it. Another thing economists like
the the point to they love the line from Robert Heinlein.
The moon is a harsh mistress. There ain't no such thing as a
free lunch. Tansiful, I don't even know how
you even say that. Actually, I hardly ever say that
one out loud. But quality doesn't come for
(15:19):
free. Quality requires increased
measurement. It requires stricter standards
that make fewer projects eligible to generate credits.
So we have less supply. The supply that does exist ends
up being more expensive and we need to balance that off of
scale because if we do not generate enough carbon removal
and avoidance, we're headed towards a world of it's not
(15:45):
going to be good. We're not headed towards towards
a good place. So we cannot overly fetishize
quality. It is only good up to a point
and the point at which it tips is whether or not we are making
an impact on climate change in away that is meaningful to the
entire world. If we are not doing that and we
(16:06):
designed the most perfect credits, we could all pat
ourselves on the back as being so pure and so honorable and
having such high integrity. But there's going to be some bad
credits in there, without a doubt.
And the point of trading this off is at the point where there
are credits that get made that ultimately turn out to be
(16:26):
failures, and that's OK. I feel like carbon removal is so
scared of being accused of greenwashing or having credits
become impaired that we are willing to settle on many fewer
credits being generated and consumed so that we never face a
crisis like this. But I think optimizing so far on
(16:46):
the side of quality like that almost guarantees that we will
not produce the numbers necessary that we need to
reverse climate change. There's a worse version of this
economist line that a friend of mine likes too.
And this, this one's grosser andit's worse, but it applies to
cereal production and agriculture where the optimal
amount of rat poop in cereal is non 0.
(17:08):
There are always going to be rodents involved, I guess in the
production of cereal grain. And then going to the factory
and having large amounts of grain Co located, you're going
to have rodent activity. And we could optimize for never
having an amount of rat poop andcereal.
(17:29):
And I would like to not eat thatfor sure, but the amount of work
it would take to guarantee that it was not present and keeping
all of that safe would raise theprice.
I don't I don't know how much, but I imagine it's a lot.
And there's a lot of times like this where it's like, OK, it's
(17:49):
not great. Obviously it's not ideal, but
optimizing so far on the side ofquality, it really harms US1
related idea here that helps me make sense of this, even though
it's disgusting, is the idea of the Pareto principle.
You probably heard this put as 8020 and it's that 20% of the
(18:10):
work gets 80% of the results, which is a way of saying you
often get pretty close to the way there by a first attempt.
Much of the outcome is done withthe 1st 20% of the work, and
that could be the rough draft. You could, you know, write 100
pages and you could spend probably more time editing it
(18:34):
and fine tuning it by the time it's done then you did just
composing that enormous amount of text.
And that's how it is here too, where, OK, if it costs 20% to
get you to 80, every additional unit of doneness just cost you
more units above that 20 to get there.
The price just goes up with every additional integer of
(18:56):
quality of doneness that you getto.
I think carbon removal would do well to keep that in mind, that
getting to 8020 is a way of ensuring that there's scale.
Good counter arguments to this is that we will never scale if
there are frequent crises that occur as a result of low quality
(19:16):
issuances, impairments, things of that nature that will so
badly harm the reputation of thecarbon removal industry that it
is in fact imperative that we never have one of those.
It's empirical how many of theseincidents are how harmful to
(19:37):
carbon removal. Like if we look at the major
crises that have happened withinthe broader offset market, you
know, I think people like to point to Guardian articles.
The John Oliver expose was a bigone.
The New Yorker one about the Kariba project was another.
They were bad, but I don't thinkthey tell us very much that we
(20:00):
didn't already know. I think the people who think
that there needs to be financialmechanisms for carbon management
saw those as, yeah, like at thisvolume, you're going to have
some rat poop in the cereal. And it's our job to make sure
that it gets dealt with and it'sinsured and it's, we minimize
it. But some of that is going to
(20:21):
happen. The people who were most
critical and supportive of the John Oliver thing, were they
ever going to like voluntary carbon market mechanisms for
addressing climate change? I doubt it.
I think anyone has heard the same exact criticisms of carbon
removal and BCM activity for a very long time.
Think we've all heard about indulgences as the most common
(20:43):
one, that they're just greenwashing and they don't even
do anything. That's fine, I hear that one a
lot. But I think anyone in the know
at all know that there's actually a lot of nuance in
here. There are avoidance projects
that are meaningful. There are carbon removal
projects that are also meaningful.
There are some that are potentially less meaningful and
deserving of a different price. There are some that are maybe
(21:06):
rated more like junk bonds or maybe they will be able to
perform and we discount them because they might fail before
the coupon arrives, you know, before they reach maturity.
And that's why they're discounted.
And that's fine. We, we expect, we don't expect
all bonds to make it. We don't expect all bonds to be
solvent by the time they reach maturity.
(21:27):
And we don't do that for carbon credits either.
We we shouldn't, but I think we end up second guessing ourselves
in a way that makes us lose track of the Pareto principle.
It makes us lose track of the ultimate goal here, which is to
produce enough carbon removals and avoidance to not face the
worst consequences of climate change.
And if we do not reach that goal, but we get to pat
(21:48):
ourselves on the back the entireway because we prioritize
quality and we have such high integrity as an industry, it
doesn't matter. Maybe it matters in in a moral
sense that we didn't cut any corners, and that's a really
beautiful thing. But if we didn't achieve the
outcome that this whole edifice was built to service, it's
unclear to me what exactly we'redoing.
(22:11):
I don't even know that I have anyone specifically that I'm
pointing towards here. I didn't write this and riff on
it in order to counteract something that I see that is
actively harmful. I think in all of us, this is an
impulse that exists in our souls.
We're here because we care aboutthe climate, we care about
(22:31):
carbon removal. We think market mechanisms have
a role to play in reversing climate change.
And we don't want to be a part of an industry that lets the
world down and is part of the corporate environment that we
see and find very disappointing.I I understand the impulse.
I think probably everyone in this space has inside you.
(22:56):
There are two wolves and one of them is wanting to make sure we
we do enough, even if it's of crappier quality but gets us
over the hump to reverse climatechange.
And the other one wants to make sure that we never cut any
corners and everything is done just so.
And there's a little bit of the perfectionist in there.
How could there not be? They were talking about some
serious stakes here about human lives and animal lives and the
(23:18):
planet as a whole that are very important.
But also we need to move quicklyand moving slowly is the same as
dying in this case in terms of our industry and the impact that
we would like to make. So I encourage you to think
about that. Sorry for putting the idea into
your head. Horrible, horrible economist.
(23:39):
The optimal number of traffic deaths is non zero.
It's true. The optimal amount of rat poop
and cereal is non 0 to the person listening, I know you're
listening. Who?
Who told this to me? Thank you that that sentence now
lives in my brain rent free. I'm I'm sad that it does, but
think about this in the future. Think about how much we
(24:01):
overemphasize quality and make sure we're not doing it in a way
that loses sight of other variables.
We cannot optimize for that one variable in the system.
I think that would cause us to not hit the scale that we need
for carbon removal. And I am also very open to
empirical arguments here swayingthis opinion.
(24:23):
All I care about is getting the PPM down parts per million of
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere down to a pre
industrial level as quickly as possible as ethically as
possible. And if obsessing over quality
above all else is the way that we can do that, I will.
I will gladly change my mind on it.
(24:44):
I'm not committed to this position at all.
I just think that this is an impulse that I've seen or a
stress on quality or trust in a way that and because it doesn't
keep track of other variables, it makes it sound like it
doesn't cost anything or the costs are negligible, which I do
not believe is the truth of the matter.
So thanks so much for listening.I hope you liked it.
(25:04):
If you like it, as I say on YouTube, smash that like button.
Give me a thumbs up, you know, five stars on Apple Podcast,
Spotify. I'll write a review.
If you're using Apple Podcast, please tell people that this is
a cool show that you learned something from that you like.
I have a subscriber program if you'd like ad free listening.
If you want to get bonus content, please join the
community of subscribers. It means a lot to me.
(25:26):
It helps the show grow. Thanks so much for listening.
I'm Ross Kenyon, this is reversing climate change and
sorry for putting some of those ideas in your head.
So thanks for listening. Bye for now.
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