Seemingly everyone in carbon removal says they want more data transparency and the sharing of scientific results. Why isn't open science more present, and how can we get more of it? Could a pre-print server for CDR be part of the solution?
Today is the official launch of CDRXIV ("cee-dee-archive"), a new initiative from CarbonPlan that aims to spur scientific conversations within the carbon removal community.
On this episode, Freya Chay (the CDR Program Lead at CarbonPlan and a Member of the Advisory Board to CDRXIV) and Tyler Kukla (a CDR Research Scientist at CarbonPlan and the Content Manager for CDRXIV) are on the show to explain how pre-print servers drive progress in other scientific fields, why CDR needs one, and how it may change our industry.
If you'd like to submit data and/or a paper for publication to CDRXIV, please email hello@cdrxiv.org, or visit their submission portal here.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Before we begin, I'd like to share a few words from our
sponsor, Arbonics. Thank you, Arbonics, for
sponsoring reversing climate change.
You helped make this show possible.
I'm so grateful to you and you deserve it.
I don't like taking sponsorship from people whose companies I
just don't believe I don't want to work with.
And thankfully I don't have to because they're companies like
(00:22):
Arbonics who are willing to comeand support reversing climate
change. If you don't know about them,
they're doing amazing forestry projects in the Baltic states in
Europe. Europe has over 14,000,000
hectares of underused land. A lot of it's abandoned or low
quality. Not a lot is happening on it.
It used to be forced, but it wascleared for farming as farming
intensified. And then a lot of that farmland
(00:43):
was later abandoned as the global food system move towards
lower cost producers. The land just wasn't worth
tending, and certainly not tending in a way that we would
respect as regenerative and carbon sequestering process.
It was just underutilized, maybeunloved Bionics uses technology
to help land owners even find this land, and once they do have
(01:04):
it, how to restore it back into carbon removing biodiverse
forest. If you care about carbon being
removed and you want to see Europe return to the forested
continent that it once was, you should be looking at our
bionics. Go talk to them.
I had Lizette Lewick, their founder, on the podcast.
The link is in the show notes ifyou'd like to listen to it.
(01:25):
We talk about a lot of the tricky issues that surround
durability and carbon removal and how does forestry fit in.
It's a very thoughtful episode. I really like talking to her.
They made it really easy to pitch our bionics on doing some
business together because I wantto see their work be successful
restoring biodiversity and making forestry, especially good
forestry, profitable again. Man, that is a game changer and
(01:45):
so important if you can pull it off.
Thank you again, our bionics. The link to check out our
bionics website is in the show notes.
You should listen to the show ifyou haven't heard it already
that I do with Lizette. It will teach you quite a lot
about how they think and what they're doing.
And now we will feedback in to the rest of the show.
Thank you for listening. Here it is.
(02:11):
Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change
podcast. I'm Ross Kenyon.
I've been involved in carbon removal for the better part of a
decade. I'm a climate tech entrepreneur
and I'm really excited about today's show.
Before I introduce the show, I want to take a moment to thank
everyone who has become a subscriber so far.
Your support is amazing to me. It really is incredible that so
(02:32):
many people want to contribute $5 a month to help make sure
that the show continues. The link is in the show notes.
It's done through Spotify. It's very easy.
It gets you ad free listening bonus content and my very
sincere gratitude. So please do that if you haven't
yet become a subscriber, give a great rating and review on Apple
(02:52):
podcasts and or a five star rating on Spotify.
That helps a lot too, is also very much appreciated.
And now I'm going to tell you about today's show.
If you're familiar with carbon removal, you've almost certainly
encountered the work of carbon plan.
Carbon Plan puts out an enormousamount of research on various
(03:12):
topics, much of which relate to carbon markets, and carbon
removal is very data-driven. Groups such as Carbon Plan serve
an extremely important role within carbon markets.
Having watchdog organizations make sure that what is being
claimed is actually happening isincredibly important.
(03:35):
I really admire what Carbon Planis trying to do right now.
Carbon Plan built and maintains CD Archive, which I think is a
great thing for them to do. CD Archive is a preprint server
that allows for material that will ultimately go through peer
review, or much of it will, but can be preprinted without review
(03:57):
basically immediately. This is great because peer
review can take quite a long time, and this is an area where
we really don't want to spend huge amounts of time waiting for
results to be confirmed before even discussing papers.
Obviously things need to go through peer review and make
sure that this work has been done appropriately and reviewed
(04:20):
with the correct amount of scrutiny, but in order for the
conversations to continue advancing at pace, preprint
servers do very important work in a number of other
disciplines. That Carbon Plan is now bringing
to carbon removal, and carbon removal is very famously
interdisciplinary. There are so many types of
(04:42):
scientists that I think before carbon removal, probably we're
not coming into contact with each other very often.
In fact, someone told me recently, and this was a
geochemist who told me this, that geochemistry was at
backwater until Cdr plucked it out of obscurity.
That's just now having it's, it's time in the sun, you might
say. I really like work that's trying
(05:04):
to break us out of competition. People always talk about how
we're too competitive and peopleneed to open up and share more
information and do more learningin public.
And it's one of those things where I hear a lot about it.
I don't see as much of it as I might like.
And this is a great illustrationof why nonprofits can be so
valuable in for profit spaces isthat they can make it much
(05:27):
safer, at least partially, for those who work at commercial
companies to go to their commercial colleagues and say,
hey, I'm doing this research. We should put our data that we
actually have a proprietary right to.
We do not have to share this, but we can put it up on this
preprint server called CD Archive that Carbon Plan runs
(05:47):
and that will allow us a forum to have discussions about our
work that brings legitimacy to what we're trying to do and
shows leadership that we are trying to do this work in public
so all of our peers can learn. It's good for all of us when any
one of our quote UN quote rivalssucceeds.
There is still a great deal of growth, I suspect, for so much
(06:09):
of carbon removal that even those working within the same
niche, I think there's plenty ofroom for everyone to go after
and still have a pretty nice chunk of the pie.
And I think efforts like CD Archive have the right values to
make that legible to those wishing to publish data and to
(06:29):
give them a forum to convince their colleagues.
If anyone wants to reach out to CD Archive wants to get
involved. Hello at CDRX iv.org they have a
clever way of writing Archive there.
Link is in the show notes. Thanks for listening.
I hope you enjoy the show. The guests that I have today are
(06:50):
both from Carbon Plant and both work on CD Archive.
Freya Che is the Carbon Removal program lead at Carbon Plan and
she is on the Advisory Board of CD Archive, and Tyler Kukla is a
research scientist of Cdr at Carbon Plan and the content
manager at CD Archive. Thank you, Freya and Tyler, for
being on the show. I'm really glad that you're
(07:11):
here, honestly. Thank you for being a voice for
Open Science. I hope others will hear what
you're doing and emulate you. Get in touch.
Thanks so much for listening. That's enough prologue.
Here is your show. Tyler and Freya, thank you for
(07:32):
being here with me. Thanks for having us, Ross.
Thank you. Tyler, does this feel weird that
we don't have beers right now? It does feel a little bit I I am
missing our Seattle area MCDR happy hour.
It's also weird that we're in Seattle and we're not together,
but I think that we're going to make it work.
I think we're going to make it work too.
(07:53):
I'm happy we're doing this show.We've been talking recently
about open science and how important it is, and also how
absent it is from so much of carbon removal.
Carbon Plan has a new initiativecalled CD Archive, which I'm not
sure I would have guessed from how you have it written out, but
it is a very clever way of of styling this new initiative.
Would one of you introduce CD Archive?
(08:15):
Sure. Yeah, CD archive is a preprint
server, so it's a place to shareearly research and data on
carbon removal. It's modeled off of other
archives. There's a physics archive and a
bio archive. Essentially, they are
infrastructure for open science values.
Basically, how do we do science in a way that is transparent,
(08:39):
that it's accessible to everybody and that is fast, that
really enables, I think open archives tagline is
communication to happen at the speed of science.
What does it look like when science is done without a
preprint server like this? What?
What does science even look like?
(09:00):
Something from the academic side, should you finish some
kind of project that you've beenworking on often for, you know,
a couple of years? It can take shorter than that,
but also it's a long It's a longprocess.
You want your results to be madepublicly available, or at least
available to the readership thatyou care about.
And you submit your your you write it up as a paper, and you
submit it to some academic journal.
Then it goes out for peer review.
(09:20):
The peer review process can takeanywhere from 3:00-ish weeks all
the way up to a couple of years,depending on how many iterations
happen, depending on how responsive the peer reviewers
are and often the culture of theacademic journal itself.
And what that means is that something that you discovered or
something that some new progressor new step forward that you
have made in the lab or in your models or in any discipline can
(09:44):
take a very, very long time fromthe moment that you make that
new result and that step forwardto the moment that other people
have access to that information.And the the process of peer
review taking, you know, up to ayear and or more is, is a real
challenge when you want science to be moving quickly and when
science itself is moving a lot faster than the stuff that
actually ends up on your feed ofnew results that are making it
(10:06):
in the published literature. Do journals like services like
these? You should ask them.
I mean I think a lot of if the culture around preprinting
varies by discipline. So in some disciplines like
physics, most of the activity isreally around archive and
(10:28):
preprints, sharing preprints, reading per prints, That's where
people are really tracking progress.
In a discipline like biology, there is growing activity around
bio archive. A lot of that work will
eventually also go through the peer review process and end up
on a journal. So bio archive is a place where
you can see those results early,disseminate results early,
(10:52):
foster a faster conversation between an intellectual
community, But it it's not replacing the peer review
process, it's just speeding up the conversation.
I think a really great example of that was during COVID where
you had, for instance, the COVIDGino ending up on by archive
(11:13):
within a couple of days of it being sequenced.
Like that was a conversation that needed to happen fast.
There was a lot of academic follow up to that work, but the
preprint server was really a place for a quick conversation
among an intellectual community to happen.
That then went on to go through the peer review process and and
show up in journals. Does preprinting ever have a
(11:36):
dynamic where sensational articles get more attention than
they would if they had been through the peer review process?
It's a really good question and I think it actually is best
answered by maybe taking a step back and talking about the
culture of open science. So preprinting is 1 tool for
(11:57):
open science, but you really step back the.
The value that is underpinning preprinting is that science
should be transparent, it shouldbe inclusive, and it should be
effective. When you really cultivate a
culture of open science, you may.
(12:22):
You end up using something like preprint servers, but it comes
alongside the recognition that it's your responsibility as
someone consuming that material to bring your own judgement
about what a valuable contribution is.
You're not relying on a journal stamp of approval.
Something's not more valuable because it ends up in nature.
(12:44):
It's really a a conversation among peers.
So yes, it does require more discernment.
And I also think that's actuallyreally constructive dimension of
the culture of open science thatis supported by other practices.
Yeah, I would add that there's there's two sides of that coin.
So on the one hand, like the things that end up on the
(13:06):
preprint server, usually by the time that you're looking at
them, it hasn't gone through peer review yet.
You can of course update the next version of your of your
manuscript to a preprint server after the has been around or to
a peer review. So that doesn't mean that
everything that you read inherently hasn't seen the touch
of peer review. But on the flip side of that
coin, like a lot of the feedbackthat we've heard from folks who
(13:27):
had been using preprints for formany, many years, they'll tell
us that, look, some of the best feedback that I get on the
results that I make available happen because I put it on a
preprint server. The peer review process often
engages 2:00 to 4:00 if you're lucky or unlucky, other peer
reviewers to take a look at the the research that you did.
And as research becomes more andmore interdisciplinary, it's
(13:48):
hard for those two to four people to have the expertise to
span all of the stuff that you did in your paper.
Which means that there is definitely stuff that slips kind
of through the cracks through the peer review process because
nobody that looked at it in the process of peer review might
have the specific expertise needed to to assess something
that you did. But if you make something
available as a preprint for everybody to look at, you have a
(14:08):
better chance of, of catching all of the relevant people along
the way. And that tends to to lead to
better outcomes. One of the things we want to
encourage more of this feedback and communication around these
preprints because that's what you really need for that
mechanism of of more. Comprehensive set of feedback to
work. Does one reviewer always have to
be mean or is that is that not the case?
(14:31):
I know that's the reputation. Yeah, it's usually we say it's
reviewer 2 or whoever was the last reviewer, they get numbered
like 1234. The last one to turn it in is,
is the last number. And then usually the last one to
turn it in because they really didn't want to read the paper
that they got sent. And so no, you do not need to
have a meme reviewer. And I, I wish that peer review
(14:51):
was a nicer process, but it can have these mean elements.
And it's usually that last reviewer that you want to be
emotionally prepared to read. I think the benefit here is
pretty clear why we would want to engage in science in this
more rapid way, even though peerreview is clearly a very
important part of empiricism andthe scientific method.
We're talking about open science, and I think people
(15:12):
could probably infer parts of what you're saying as being
constitutive of open science, and maybe we should define it
clearly and contrast it against what might have closed science
look like. Yeah, that sounds great.
So as I said before, I think open science is really rooted in
(15:32):
some values and so and the culture, and in my mind, the
easiest way to talk about that culture is kind of expanding
your understanding of who is on your team if you are a
researcher. So I think that really starts
with the process of research. What does it look like to create
(15:56):
collaborations in which people can really understand and
participate in what you're doing?
What tools do you reach for if that's your goal?
What kind of documentation do you make around your methods?
Then there's this like next layer out, which is how do you
share your findings? How do you share your findings
early, quickly, and in the open?How do you share them in a way
(16:19):
that people can give you really good feedback?
How do you not just share your findings, but share the data and
the code and the tools you builtwith permissive licensing that
let other people on your scientific team, which is this
whole community, use them and build upon all the work you've
already put in? And how do you be transparent
both about your methods and about things like conflicts of
(16:40):
interest? I think all of those practices
underpin this culture of like, really seeing science as a team
effort that's in the public interest.
How can a broadly commercial community like carbon removal?
(17:03):
Maybe you disagree with that characterization, but it
certainly has a number of commercial interests that
interweave through the process of science.
Is carbon removal an example of an open science community?
Are parts of it openly scientific?
Where is it and where is it not?You can take it any way you
want. Yeah, it's a great question.
So I think, I think it's interesting to talk about the
(17:27):
academic community working on carbon removal and the kind of
industry or industry adjacent community, as you know, very
interrelated but maybe separate states.
So I think in the academic community, it's not a norm to be
participating in open science. I'm not sure there is really yet
a single Cdr kind of like topic area academic community.
(17:52):
Instead you have kind of still disciplinary communities who are
thinking about particular types of Cdr.
You certainly have certain Pis or labs who are very committed
to practices like preprinting, But Cdr as a topic area in the
academic world, I don't think has the type of culture you
might see, for instance, in physics where everyone is is
(18:15):
using preprint servers. A lot of Cdr research will just
end up in in journals. So I think there's room for
growth there. But examples of of leadership
certainly from some labs in the kind of industry and industry
adjacent NGO funding space. I think we have so much room for
(18:36):
growth. Again, I think you have examples
of people pushing in the right direction.
We can go into those people who are trying to share data from
industry LED field trials, who are either doing those field
trials or trying to facilitate the data sharing.
(18:56):
You have examples of funders whoare starting to ask for data
sharing. But if you just think about how
much we are learning through industry efforts in the field
and what fraction of that is publicly available to anyone to
build upon and learn from, I think we have like a pretty big
(19:19):
and clear area for growth. How do you feel about all of
that, Tyler? I think that feels right.
And I think that it's worth thinking about like, OK, there's
this room for growth, but what is like the prize at the end?
And when you make more information openly and publicly
available, I think that there are a bunch of great reasons to
do it. And one of them is that when,
(19:41):
you know, we talked to folks in the in the Cdr community, it's
pretty clear that a lot of folksare in agreement.
Pretty much everybody's in agreement that we want to figure
out what works and do more of the stuff that works.
And we want to do it quickly. We want to do it as quickly as
we can to keep up with the pace of climate change really.
And, and open science is a way to do that.
It helps us, you know, get over the things that don't work
(20:01):
faster. It makes the, the mistakes and
the missteps, just little hiccups along the way, rather
than like big entrenched problems that grow into
something that can erode or create challenges down the line.
It, it serves a lot of the purposes of what we're trying to
accomplish as ACDR community. And I think that that spans both
academia and industry. And I think that.
(20:22):
It's worth keeping that in mind as we're talking about what is
the right way to build an open science culture in in Cdr.
Ross, I feel like you've thoughtabout this too.
What's your answer to that question?
I can tell you a funny anecdote about it.
Maybe, maybe this will partiallyanswer it.
I've had so many conversations with project developers or
(20:43):
people that are working on the commercial side.
Yeah, why? Why aren't we more transparent
about pricing or about the science that we're doing
internally? I'm like, yeah, why don't you
just publish that information? You could just do it
unilaterally, like, well, not alone, like, OK, I can't just do
that all by myself. What if no one else does it?
But clearly then you just have, you know, bad prisoner dilemma
(21:05):
dynamics. The the game theory of it
prevents anyone from doing anything.
And we end up in this sub optimal equilibrium here where
none of us learn and it's all private.
I don't even think that the privacy is that valuable either.
Everyone is so focused on IP, and that's often driven by
venture capital dynamics. But I don't think a lot of this
IP is going to be, in the case of wind down, super valuable.
(21:27):
I don't think that we need to beas focused on patenting as we
are. I don't think that being
secretive is that valuable of a Moat either.
Tito Jankowski of Air Miners hasa line that I've heard him say
so many times, which is that ourchief rival is obscurity, you
know, not one another. It's more likely that carbon
removal will just fade out into nothingness.
(21:48):
And So what, Like if you're in enhanced rock weathering and
Mati wins the grand prize of X prize, are you really worse off?
In fact, you probably raise the profile of everyone in the
entire space by that happening. But yeah, I think we end up
being competitive in ways that are actually not even smart if
you're a Machiavellian. They're just sort of suboptimal.
Even if you're a ruthless self interested person, it's still
(22:11):
bad. So I've always tried to lean
that way and encourage people togo that direction.
I think unilateral action can look like great leadership and
be commercially valuable for companies to do.
Yet no one takes my advice on it.
I don't know why. Yeah.
I mean, that all really resonates with me.
I think there's such a strong argument that the nature of what
(22:32):
is trying to be sold in this industry has such intangibility
and such scientific uncertainty that the benefits of the
potential learning and making ittrustworthy and real so far
outweigh the potential losses toa business mode.
But I have also never run a startup, so I I recognize that I
(22:54):
have a limited view here. One of the resources I shared
ahead of doing this podcast was an episode that we recorded
probably at this point about a year and a half ago, internal to
Nori, about the direct air capture and storage methodology
that we created. And we decided at that time to
publish our methodological work,of which there were three under
(23:19):
a very permissive Creative Commons regime that allowed
others to remix our work, to reuse it exactly as written.
Other registries, isometric or reverse, could just pick it up
and issue credits through it, should they like it enough.
And I was hoping to see more of that, but unfortunately, as far
as I know, no one has taken thatup and run with it.
(23:40):
And I'm not even sure it's that great of an area to compete
against one another on 2. Like, does it make a lot of
sense for puro and isometric to be neck and neck on mythological
development? Is that actually in the interest
of our industry? I imagine you're probably going
to say no, but maybe you'll surprise me.
I don't think I'm going to surprise you on this one.
(24:02):
Yeah, I mean, I think historically when we've seen
competition on methodology development, it's created a race
to the bottom. How do you make a methodology
that you can still sell a creditfrom, but it's easier for folks
to comply with? And a certain amount of that I
think is useful. We don't want to create
methodologies that are are unusable.
(24:25):
That's an important thing to be attuned to.
But yeah, if if the story we're telling about methodologies is
that they accurately help us quantify real world outcomes,
then the idea that we should be sharing the ability to get the
best understanding of real worldoutcomes with each other feels
(24:46):
extremely obvious. And I might actually, you know,
extend your observation about registry licensing of protocols
to also the data that's on registries we we recently built
by tool at Carbon plan called offsets DB offsets database.
And it scrapes a bunch of project data from all of the big
(25:10):
traditional voluntary carbon market registries.
And one of the really tricky parts of that project was
navigating the licensing around data.
So yeah, you can go on their website and freely use it, but a
lot of that data is actually licensed in a surprisingly
restrictive way that makes it legally questionable to
repackage it, make it public, dowork on it.
(25:34):
And that seems to me like a pretty big problem if we're
talking about registries being amechanism for transparency in
this field. Wow, talking about this just
makes me feel like am I actuallya climate hippie and I've been
denying it this whole time. I thought I was a hard edged
businessman. Turns out I'm just like data, it
(25:57):
needs to be free. Yeah, yeah.
Come, come to the nonprofit side, Ross.
Carbon Plant has a reputation asbeing a very strong and powerful
watchdog and trying to make sureyou end up on the right side of
the science and are attuned to quality standards in a way that
(26:17):
allows you to claim that you're producing credible carbon
removal is actually genuinely difficult.
And so Tyler and I spend a lot of time talking about
fundamental questions of enhanced weathering are still up
in the air in some ways. And yet there's commercial
developers who are basically assuming that it works and
broadly works the way that it isintended to, even though there
(26:37):
are so many open questions here.And the tension is often between
how do you run a business that is reliant upon science when so
much science is still up for grabs and still being worked
out? I think even if you have good
intentions and you mean well, you can still face incentives
that are really difficult for commercializing in the face of
this uncertainty. The tension and the friction
(26:59):
between scientific integrity andcommercialization, it runs
really, really deep here. Does it create a fundamental
conflict of interest? What does it mean to be on the
non commercial side of this? Watching commercial developers
do things with science that you care a lot about, that maybe you
don't feel great about sometimes.
I think one thing that's interesting is in, in talking to
(27:21):
a lot of the researchers that are involved in these startups
think that they, their read on the literature tends to be
pretty similar to mine, which isthat like we still have
questions that we're trying to answer.
And, and also that our startups that that are, are have all this
wonderful funding and infrastructure to build out
monitoring systems and so on andso forth are really great
vehicle for starting to try to answer some of these questions.
(27:43):
And the challenge that we are faced with then is like, OK, you
might have orders of magnitude more data than I'm able to
access through what's available in the academic literature.
And in fact, that data is probably a lot more useful for
thinking about what an enhanced weathering deployment might look
like in the real world. Because academic studies don't,
aren't subject to the same constraints as a company trying
(28:03):
to operate and and do their own field study where we're, you
know, working with spherical cows often and kind of academic
land. And that's the on some spectrum,
some academic studies are a lot more close to what a real world
deployment looks like than others.
But at the end of the day, the question is, OK, if you've
generated new knowledge by collecting way more data than
anybody else has access to, do you have a responsibility to
(28:26):
share that new knowledge publicly to help pull the rest
of the field forward? And is it possible that you can
just share that new knowledge with funders and convince them
that this is all buttoned up? And do we have this world where
like there are people that are more compelled or convinced that
we about the state of knowledge and enhanced rock weathering
because the fact that some data is kept under closed doors and
shared internally than the rest of the public is.
(28:48):
And I think that those are hard questions to answer.
But I do think that one of the things that you get from like
one of the prizes of open science is that you start to get
data synthesis. You can bring a bunch of
different data sets together to paint this picture that nobody
else can see from the specific experiments that they're working
on or that the point sources that they're looking at.
And this is where we often see across fields like big steps
(29:10):
forward in scientific progress and understanding.
And I think that if we really think, you know, as I think
people agree that there are barriers to understanding right
now, there are knowledge gaps. We need to fill the, the, the
potential for big data synthesislike this by making those data
available, can I think do a whole lot of great work at
plugging those knowledge gaps up.
(29:31):
The challenge is how to do it, of course, but I do think it's
challenging to, to walk that line around, you know, how much
data is being produced and how do we make that data useful for
public learning at the same time, I'm going to.
Add in response to your question, Ross, one of the
things that really strikes me isa piece of this puzzle that
(29:54):
makes things really hard is the offsetting claim that comes at
the very, very end of the chain.And if we were operating in a
world where we weren't trying tomake claims about physically
undoing the harms of a fossil emission, the leeway for
uncertainty and the consequencesof being wrong at any given time
(30:19):
step, they're dramatically lower.
So part of my curiosity is like,wow, in what other world?
Like what other levers do we have, policy levers, private
sector levers to allow learning by deployment without the
pressure of the offsetting claimat the very end.
(30:39):
And this is a curiosity I've hadfor a long time and I think it
matters for all sorts of things like soil carbon and forest
carbon and uncertain long duration Cdr.
Not, not an easy answer, but I think will be really interesting
to see how that evolves over thenext five years.
That's such an uncomfortable space, though, where so many
people in our sector come from STEM environments where there
(31:03):
often is some amount of objectivity or presumed
objectivity, and you don't want the questions to end up in.
Well, it ultimately comes down to political economy yet again,
where we're telling stories about what these credits are
good for and how does that impact what corporations and
governments are allowed to do inthe meantime, The amount of
indeterminacy in a solution likethat, I think makes a lot of
(31:25):
people uncomfortable. That's a really hard question.
Unfortunately, it may just be the truth.
Yeah, Yeah. I guess my, my lighthouse is
always like, we've got to learn how do we tell the truth about
what we know all along the way? Because I think as soon as you
start overstating what we know, which I think offsets ask us to
(31:45):
do for a lot of these technologies, if they're the
only funding vehicle, then I think we're, you know, really
counter to open science values. We're like creating this, this
obscurity that really doesn't allow the full community to seek
truth together. And I think that's a really
(32:05):
counterproductive dynamic over the mid to long term do.
You have some alternative in mind relative to the offsetting
paradigm. I mean, I, if I had the perfect
solution, I would have tried to write about it or convince
someone to do it by now. I mean, there have been lots of
(32:25):
experiments. So I think there are experiments
where you're still fundamentallythinking about carbon credits,
but you're using an expenditure model and not supporting
offsetting claims. So that's one kind of pressure
relief mechanism. I think the whole conversation
around beyond the value chain mitigation, imperfect, but
(32:48):
another example of someone trying to release that pressure
valve. I think there's a blossoming
conversation right now about policy mechanisms that could
support Cdr activities in a way that doesn't require offsetting
claims made by the government ormade by regulated private
(33:09):
entities. I think all of those are really,
really interesting. There's not a clear answer yet,
but worth continuing creativity,I think, especially on the
policy front when we're thinkingabout how we invest public
resources and developing high potential but deeply uncertain
carbon removal approaches. There's some line.
(33:30):
It's either told about A Brief History of Time or The Elegant
Universe, one of those pop physics books about how for
every equation that was added tothe book, sales would drop an
order of magnitude. And that always makes me laugh.
But Nori, when we were active, we, we only ever felt
comfortable guaranteeing 10 years of carbon storage in
(33:51):
soils. And that was such a hard story
to explain to buyers who've beencoached since Kyoto that they
just buy a ton and they don't have to think about it again.
And instead we have to explain different types of stacking and
why verticals not really considered that great, but
horizontal maybe. And you just lose people because
it's really complicated. They just want to like, what do
I pay? And then can I move on to the
(34:12):
next thing of 100 that is on my To Do List.
And this is part of the, the tension here of, of doing good
science and having rigor versus just selling the thing that
moves the, the ball along. And I'm not sure that we ever
figured out a great solution to it because it, it bedeviled us
and was a really hard problem tosolve.
A customer education making surethey actually understand what a
credit is good for. Yeah, it's tremendously hard.
(34:36):
The real world has a lot of details and details are hard to
organize ourselves around. I hear that.
I. Think another challenge that
emerges is that like even if youmade all the data that companies
are collecting publicly available, that still might not
get you exactly as far as you want to go in terms of feeling
really good about how effective a given removal method is.
(34:58):
You know, it like companies in enhanced rock weathering, for
example, are collecting soil samples that are, I don't know
how deep they are, but because we don't have the data, but I, I
have to guess something around 30 centimeters or so, maybe 50cm
deep on the high end. And that's, you know, a very
small fraction of the total distance of that carbon is going
to travel before it ends up in some durable storage reservoir.
(35:20):
And so we have this other question around like how do we
support not only just making data available so that we can
drive and accelerate learning, but how do we develop mechanisms
for doing the work that also directly support the learning
process? How do we develop mechanisms for
doing the work that help us sample places that we might not
be sampling otherwise, if all that we need to do is
demonstrate that something happened in the top 30
(35:42):
centimeters of the soil profile?And I think that that's a hard,
the hard thing to do. Like funding that supports
learning is difficult kind of across all sorts of different
funding models. If you could guarantee
compliance with your wishes, what would you design so that
this was no longer a problem? Oh, can you say, say one click
(36:05):
more? Well, just assuming that you
don't have to face the game theoretical issues of people
having to opt into this. What if we just knew they were
committed to to doing the right thing?
What do you mean is the right thing?
Is it as simple as just publishing all of this data all
of the time and giving you access to it so experts can
parse it in the open? Yeah, it's a great question.
(36:29):
OK. So we're saying basically,
assuming business models didn't create big barriers to
participating in open science, what would it look like for Cdr
companies to really implement those values in practice?
Yeah, it's a climate hippie question.
Climate hippie question? Yeah, I mean, I do think one
(36:51):
piece of the puzzle is really thinking about how to share data
and tools publicly and quickly. I think part of the mindset of
open science is that you don't know who your findings will be
useful for and you don't know when they will be useful.
(37:11):
And the idea that you are creating more surface area for
collaboration and for unexpectedinsight by sharing stuff, even
if you don't have a super clear story about who exactly is going
to use it for what, that's really core to the open science
project. So yeah, if I was waving a magic
wand, and I do think there are important caveats around data
(37:34):
quality, data interpretability, data provenance, but I think we
would be seeing a lot more data sharing with no restrictions.
So CD Archive is one place that you can put a data set, you can
get a DOY, it can be clearly linked to you.
If someone uses it, they have togive you credit.
But there are no restrictions. Anyone with an Internet access
(37:55):
can see it, they can ask questions about it and they can
reuse it. That kind of data sharing I
would love to see a lot more of and I would love to see that not
only for positive results, but for null results.
So I think this is another kind of deep tenant of of kind of
traditional academia that's tough is that you get credit and
(38:17):
you get shiny papers when you publish exciting results and
null results are super importantto figuring out what doesn't
work, which is a huge part of the Cdr project.
But they don't get you papers inacademia and they don't get you
credits in carbon market land. So what does it look like for
startups to be sharing more information about what didn't
(38:40):
work with each other and with the science community?
And then I guess the the last thing I would say is right now,
even if we're not in that perfect world where you've, you
know, sidestepped all of the incentives that make sharing
hard, transparency about what exactly is making sharing hard?
(39:03):
I mean, I think the collective action problem in general is
floating around and I understandit's really tough.
But beyond that, like we have lots of general conversations
about transparency. How do we make it more specific?
How do we disclose when you choose not to share exactly why
in ways that help other people problem solve around that as a
(39:24):
community? Those would be kind of my my
three top ideas. Anything to add, Tyler?
Yeah, I I agree with all of that.
And I would just add that like if we live in a world where you
can just throw all of them in there and make it publicly
available, I think it would be, I think it would be better.
I think that sounds great. And also what you really still
(39:47):
need is that culture of open science, like a lot of what
makes open science work, happensbefore anything actually is made
publicly available. It happens in like the culture
that you develop in your lawn, the tools that you use to share
your files across all of your collaborators to make sure that
everybody sees what you're up toand can contribute and pitch in
in ways that, as Freya said, might end up being a little
(40:08):
unexpected. So that you have all of that
infrastructure in place so that you can make your information
publicly available when when thetime is right, when the project
has concluded, or whenever that is.
You in order for open science toreally work, you can't just
throw a bunch of stuff for the wall and like hope that
everything is going to like stick or find like a place that
that they can add more value than it otherwise might if it
(40:29):
just lived and died with the thing that you said about it,
You, you need to build infrastructure around that as
well. And that's why like we think
about open science as a culture,because when you think about
there's the culture of open science, it implies that you
have some like additional building of infrastructure and
nourishing of the broader systemthat goes along with it.
And so that makes it easier to, you know, if you are making all
(40:49):
of your data publicly available,the infrastructure around it
makes it easy to direct your attention and find the stuff
that you're looking for and makesure that it's not an inundation
of, of information, but it's a totally navigable sea of
information. And then that is a tough thing
to build, but it does require that culture.
It takes time. There are a lot of great tools
to do that already, and we don'tsee the archive in large parts
(41:10):
that it is a place for that, like one example of
infrastructure to support open science to take place.
And I think there's a lot more that we can do.
If you have someone's attention who is a project developer
working in carbon removal, how might you convince them?
Right now we can conclude with this make make your plea to the
carbon removal community. One thing that I'll say is that
(41:34):
like coming from an academic world, when we talk about open
science, it's almost entirely talked about as like a
grassroots thing. And then it should be like it is
a cultural thing, as I mentioned.
But in large part of academia, we talked about it as like this
is a grassroots driven movement in part because the institutions
are so slow to respond. You need to build like a lot of
(41:54):
momentum before you get top downsupport for the resources that
are needed to make open science work.
And I think that we're lucky that like that's not really the
world that we live in in CBR, the, a lot of the, the top down
institutions and buyers and funders are really dynamic and
they're keeping up with the science and they're trying to
understand what is going to helpresearch and knowledge and
understanding progress quickly. And when you have those elements
(42:18):
of the system, I think it's really easy for the the top down
institutions to not be followersof a momentum, but actually be
leaders and, and push things forward.
And so I don't know exactly whatthat's going to look like.
And I would love to see you no more requirements around data
sharing as as one example. But I think it's just important
to note that we don't have to rely on institutions that are
(42:39):
moving slowly here. I think that the the top end
institutions are really dynamic and flexible and thinking hard
about this. And so I would place a call to
action there as an opportunity to to lead a shift toward a more
open science culture in the community.
Yeah, plus one. I think what I would add for a
project developer is I really think this project of carbon
(43:03):
removal is only going to work atscale and fast enough.
If we expand our idea of who's on our team and if we work
together and if we learn a lot. And we recognize that not all
the incentives are there and notall the infrastructure is there.
But you can lead by example. You can help start breaking the
(43:24):
collective action problem. And I think you will get credit
for that. I think you will be respected
for that and you will contributeto the type of collaboration and
external examination that ultimately I believe will give
you a path to, you know, long term project development in a
(43:46):
sustainable and trustworthy way.So I recognize it's not easy,
but this is 1 opportunity. CD Archive is 1 opportunity.
There are other ways to embrace those values.
And I just really encourage people to to lead by example
and, and start conversations about the specifics of like how
do we translate these open science values and the potential
(44:08):
benefits they bring into our industry in a more granular way?
If someone is writing a scientific paper that may be
applicable to the server, how dothey get involved with CD
archive? How do they submit what's on
there now? What's the status of it?
So right now I think there are 13 preprints on CD archive.
(44:34):
The process is really simple, soyou can show up on CD Archive,
you make an account and there's a pretty simple submission
process where you can upload either an academic style
preprint, A preprint plus data, or just a data submission.
That submission goes through a very light touch review process,
(44:54):
which relies on a really awesomeset of external scientists who
really are just checking to makesure that a new research result
is presented. It's not a peer review, it's
just a, a, a light touch check to make sure it's about carbon
removal and there's actual research there.
And we commit to communicating back to you within three days.
(45:18):
And assuming that submission meets CD archives criteria, it
will be posted publicly with theDOI on the website.
And after that you have the chance to update or change your
submission. And there's a version control
system. But what since on the website,
it will remain publicly available associated with your
(45:38):
DDOI forever? As long no matter where that
work ultimately ends up, or if it ends up on a paywall, anyone
with Internet access will be able to read it and learn from
it. I was just going to add one more
thing, which is that in in talking about like open science
in general, Cdr is similar in that it really works when when
(46:00):
people are a part of that community, when people are
contributing results and when people are are going that there
to look for new results. We think CD archive makes sense
because we Cdr is a topic that covers a crazy number of
disciplines, like so, so many disciplines and the existing
platforms for sharing new knowledge are disciplinary.
And this makes them kind of new knowledge gets spread all over
(46:21):
the place. And it's really useful if you
want to be learning about Cdr across those disciplinary
boundaries to have things organized under a topic.
We also recognize that like not everybody is doing work in Cdr
that is going to end up in the peer reviewed literature and not
everybody is taking the time to write long format articles.
And so one of the things that makes CD Archive different from
other preprint servers is that we also have a data repository
(46:43):
feature. If you're producing a data set,
but aren't maybe going to spend the time to write a paper around
it or it's data that didn't fit for a paper or whatever it is,
you can submit the data to CD Archive and it can be
discoverable as as a data submission by itself.
And this is one of the ways thatwe're trying to make sure that
we are catering to the broader Cdr community and not just to
the people that are writing articles and papers.
(47:05):
And it's, it's not the end. We have a lot more things that
are kind of on the horizon that we want to think about that.
If there are ways that you thinkthat CD Archives can help cater
to the type of research that you're doing and help make your
work publicly available, we would love to hear from you.
We'd love to hear about it, Ross.
Maybe I can give you an e-mail address to put in the show notes
or something. Yeah, that sounds good.
(47:25):
Links to all of the things that we discuss are in the show notes
if you'd like to follow up and get involved.
Freya and Tyler, thank you for being here.
Very important topic. Respect very much the work that
you're trying to do and thanks for doing it and thanks for
being here. Thanks for having us.
Before we begin, I'd like to share a few words from our
sponsor, Arbonics. Thank you, Arbonics, for
sponsoring reversing climate change.
You helped make this show possible.
I'm so grateful to you and you deserve it.
I don't like taking sponsorship from people whose companies I
just don't believe I don't want to work with.
And thankfully I don't have to because they're companies like
(00:22):
Arbonics who are willing to comeand support reversing climate
change. If you don't know about them,
they're doing amazing forestry projects in the Baltic states in
Europe. Europe has over 14,000,000
hectares of underused land. A lot of it's abandoned or low
quality. Not a lot is happening on it.
It used to be forced, but it wascleared for farming as farming
intensified. And then a lot of that farmland
(00:43):
was later abandoned as the global food system move towards
lower cost producers. The land just wasn't worth
tending, and certainly not tending in a way that we would
respect as regenerative and carbon sequestering process.
It was just underutilized, maybeunloved Bionics uses technology
to help land owners even find this land, and once they do have
(01:04):
it, how to restore it back into carbon removing biodiverse
forest. If you care about carbon being
removed and you want to see Europe return to the forested
continent that it once was, you should be looking at our
bionics. Go talk to them.
I had Lizette Lewick, their founder, on the podcast.
The link is in the show notes ifyou'd like to listen to it.
(01:25):
We talk about a lot of the tricky issues that surround
durability and carbon removal and how does forestry fit in.
It's a very thoughtful episode. I really like talking to her.
They made it really easy to pitch our bionics on doing some
business together because I wantto see their work be successful
restoring biodiversity and making forestry, especially good
forestry, profitable again. Man, that is a game changer and
(01:45):
so important if you can pull it off.
Thank you again, our bionics. The link to check out our
bionics website is in the show notes.
You should listen to the show ifyou haven't heard it already
that I do with Lizette. It will teach you quite a lot
about how they think and what they're doing.
And now we will feedback in to the rest of the show.
Thank you for listening. Here it is.
(02:11):
Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change
podcast. I'm Ross Kenyon.
I've been involved in carbon removal for the better part of a
decade. I'm a climate tech entrepreneur
and I'm really excited about today's show.
Before I introduce the show, I want to take a moment to thank
everyone who has become a subscriber so far.
Your support is amazing to me. It really is incredible that so
(02:32):
many people want to contribute $5 a month to help make sure
that the show continues. The link is in the show notes.
It's done through Spotify. It's very easy.
It gets you ad free listening bonus content and my very
sincere gratitude. So please do that if you haven't
yet become a subscriber, give a great rating and review on Apple
(02:52):
podcasts and or a five star rating on Spotify.
That helps a lot too, is also very much appreciated.
And now I'm going to tell you about today's show.
If you're familiar with carbon removal, you've almost certainly
encountered the work of carbon plan.
Carbon Plan puts out an enormousamount of research on various
(03:12):
topics, much of which relate to carbon markets, and carbon
removal is very data-driven. Groups such as Carbon Plan serve
an extremely important role within carbon markets.
Having watchdog organizations make sure that what is being
claimed is actually happening isincredibly important.
(03:35):
I really admire what Carbon Planis trying to do right now.
Carbon Plan built and maintains CD Archive, which I think is a
great thing for them to do. CD Archive is a preprint server
that allows for material that will ultimately go through peer
review, or much of it will, but can be preprinted without review
(03:57):
basically immediately. This is great because peer
review can take quite a long time, and this is an area where
we really don't want to spend huge amounts of time waiting for
results to be confirmed before even discussing papers.
Obviously things need to go through peer review and make
sure that this work has been done appropriately and reviewed
(04:20):
with the correct amount of scrutiny, but in order for the
conversations to continue advancing at pace, preprint
servers do very important work in a number of other
disciplines. That Carbon Plan is now bringing
to carbon removal, and carbon removal is very famously
interdisciplinary. There are so many types of
(04:42):
scientists that I think before carbon removal, probably we're
not coming into contact with each other very often.
In fact, someone told me recently, and this was a
geochemist who told me this, that geochemistry was at
backwater until Cdr plucked it out of obscurity.
That's just now having it's, it's time in the sun, you might
say. I really like work that's trying
(05:04):
to break us out of competition. People always talk about how
we're too competitive and peopleneed to open up and share more
information and do more learningin public.
And it's one of those things where I hear a lot about it.
I don't see as much of it as I might like.
And this is a great illustrationof why nonprofits can be so
valuable in for profit spaces isthat they can make it much
(05:27):
safer, at least partially, for those who work at commercial
companies to go to their commercial colleagues and say,
hey, I'm doing this research. We should put our data that we
actually have a proprietary right to.
We do not have to share this, but we can put it up on this
preprint server called CD Archive that Carbon Plan runs
(05:47):
and that will allow us a forum to have discussions about our
work that brings legitimacy to what we're trying to do and
shows leadership that we are trying to do this work in public
so all of our peers can learn. It's good for all of us when any
one of our quote UN quote rivalssucceeds.
There is still a great deal of growth, I suspect, for so much
(06:09):
of carbon removal that even those working within the same
niche, I think there's plenty ofroom for everyone to go after
and still have a pretty nice chunk of the pie.
And I think efforts like CD Archive have the right values to
make that legible to those wishing to publish data and to
(06:29):
give them a forum to convince their colleagues.
If anyone wants to reach out to CD Archive wants to get
involved. Hello at CDRX iv.org they have a
clever way of writing Archive there.
Link is in the show notes. Thanks for listening.
I hope you enjoy the show. The guests that I have today are
(06:50):
both from Carbon Plant and both work on CD Archive.
Freya Che is the Carbon Removal program lead at Carbon Plan and
she is on the Advisory Board of CD Archive, and Tyler Kukla is a
research scientist of Cdr at Carbon Plan and the content
manager at CD Archive. Thank you, Freya and Tyler, for
being on the show. I'm really glad that you're
(07:11):
here, honestly. Thank you for being a voice for
Open Science. I hope others will hear what
you're doing and emulate you. Get in touch.
Thanks so much for listening. That's enough prologue.
Here is your show. Tyler and Freya, thank you for
(07:32):
being here with me. Thanks for having us, Ross.
Thank you. Tyler, does this feel weird that
we don't have beers right now? It does feel a little bit I I am
missing our Seattle area MCDR happy hour.
It's also weird that we're in Seattle and we're not together,
but I think that we're going to make it work.
I think we're going to make it work too.
(07:53):
I'm happy we're doing this show.We've been talking recently
about open science and how important it is, and also how
absent it is from so much of carbon removal.
Carbon Plan has a new initiativecalled CD Archive, which I'm not
sure I would have guessed from how you have it written out, but
it is a very clever way of of styling this new initiative.
Would one of you introduce CD Archive?
(08:15):
Sure. Yeah, CD archive is a preprint
server, so it's a place to shareearly research and data on
carbon removal. It's modeled off of other
archives. There's a physics archive and a
bio archive. Essentially, they are
infrastructure for open science values.
Basically, how do we do science in a way that is transparent,
(08:39):
that it's accessible to everybody and that is fast, that
really enables, I think open archives tagline is
communication to happen at the speed of science.
What does it look like when science is done without a
preprint server like this? What?
What does science even look like?
(09:00):
Something from the academic side, should you finish some
kind of project that you've beenworking on often for, you know,
a couple of years? It can take shorter than that,
but also it's a long It's a longprocess.
You want your results to be madepublicly available, or at least
available to the readership thatyou care about.
And you submit your your you write it up as a paper, and you
submit it to some academic journal.
Then it goes out for peer review.
(09:20):
The peer review process can takeanywhere from 3:00-ish weeks all
the way up to a couple of years,depending on how many iterations
happen, depending on how responsive the peer reviewers
are and often the culture of theacademic journal itself.
And what that means is that something that you discovered or
something that some new progressor new step forward that you
have made in the lab or in your models or in any discipline can
(09:44):
take a very, very long time fromthe moment that you make that
new result and that step forwardto the moment that other people
have access to that information.And the the process of peer
review taking, you know, up to ayear and or more is, is a real
challenge when you want science to be moving quickly and when
science itself is moving a lot faster than the stuff that
actually ends up on your feed ofnew results that are making it
(10:06):
in the published literature. Do journals like services like
these? You should ask them.
I mean I think a lot of if the culture around preprinting
varies by discipline. So in some disciplines like
physics, most of the activity isreally around archive and
(10:28):
preprints, sharing preprints, reading per prints, That's where
people are really tracking progress.
In a discipline like biology, there is growing activity around
bio archive. A lot of that work will
eventually also go through the peer review process and end up
on a journal. So bio archive is a place where
you can see those results early,disseminate results early,
(10:52):
foster a faster conversation between an intellectual
community, But it it's not replacing the peer review
process, it's just speeding up the conversation.
I think a really great example of that was during COVID where
you had, for instance, the COVIDGino ending up on by archive
(11:13):
within a couple of days of it being sequenced.
Like that was a conversation that needed to happen fast.
There was a lot of academic follow up to that work, but the
preprint server was really a place for a quick conversation
among an intellectual community to happen.
That then went on to go through the peer review process and and
show up in journals. Does preprinting ever have a
(11:36):
dynamic where sensational articles get more attention than
they would if they had been through the peer review process?
It's a really good question and I think it actually is best
answered by maybe taking a step back and talking about the
culture of open science. So preprinting is 1 tool for
(11:57):
open science, but you really step back the.
The value that is underpinning preprinting is that science
should be transparent, it shouldbe inclusive, and it should be
effective. When you really cultivate a
culture of open science, you may.
(12:22):
You end up using something like preprint servers, but it comes
alongside the recognition that it's your responsibility as
someone consuming that material to bring your own judgement
about what a valuable contribution is.
You're not relying on a journal stamp of approval.
Something's not more valuable because it ends up in nature.
(12:44):
It's really a a conversation among peers.
So yes, it does require more discernment.
And I also think that's actuallyreally constructive dimension of
the culture of open science thatis supported by other practices.
Yeah, I would add that there's there's two sides of that coin.
So on the one hand, like the things that end up on the
(13:06):
preprint server, usually by the time that you're looking at
them, it hasn't gone through peer review yet.
You can of course update the next version of your of your
manuscript to a preprint server after the has been around or to
a peer review. So that doesn't mean that
everything that you read inherently hasn't seen the touch
of peer review. But on the flip side of that
coin, like a lot of the feedbackthat we've heard from folks who
(13:27):
had been using preprints for formany, many years, they'll tell
us that, look, some of the best feedback that I get on the
results that I make available happen because I put it on a
preprint server. The peer review process often
engages 2:00 to 4:00 if you're lucky or unlucky, other peer
reviewers to take a look at the the research that you did.
And as research becomes more andmore interdisciplinary, it's
(13:48):
hard for those two to four people to have the expertise to
span all of the stuff that you did in your paper.
Which means that there is definitely stuff that slips kind
of through the cracks through the peer review process because
nobody that looked at it in the process of peer review might
have the specific expertise needed to to assess something
that you did. But if you make something
available as a preprint for everybody to look at, you have a
(14:08):
better chance of, of catching all of the relevant people along
the way. And that tends to to lead to
better outcomes. One of the things we want to
encourage more of this feedback and communication around these
preprints because that's what you really need for that
mechanism of of more. Comprehensive set of feedback to
work. Does one reviewer always have to
be mean or is that is that not the case?
(14:31):
I know that's the reputation. Yeah, it's usually we say it's
reviewer 2 or whoever was the last reviewer, they get numbered
like 1234. The last one to turn it in is,
is the last number. And then usually the last one to
turn it in because they really didn't want to read the paper
that they got sent. And so no, you do not need to
have a meme reviewer. And I, I wish that peer review
(14:51):
was a nicer process, but it can have these mean elements.
And it's usually that last reviewer that you want to be
emotionally prepared to read. I think the benefit here is
pretty clear why we would want to engage in science in this
more rapid way, even though peerreview is clearly a very
important part of empiricism andthe scientific method.
We're talking about open science, and I think people
(15:12):
could probably infer parts of what you're saying as being
constitutive of open science, and maybe we should define it
clearly and contrast it against what might have closed science
look like. Yeah, that sounds great.
So as I said before, I think open science is really rooted in
(15:32):
some values and so and the culture, and in my mind, the
easiest way to talk about that culture is kind of expanding
your understanding of who is on your team if you are a
researcher. So I think that really starts
with the process of research. What does it look like to create
(15:56):
collaborations in which people can really understand and
participate in what you're doing?
What tools do you reach for if that's your goal?
What kind of documentation do you make around your methods?
Then there's this like next layer out, which is how do you
share your findings? How do you share your findings
early, quickly, and in the open?How do you share them in a way
(16:19):
that people can give you really good feedback?
How do you not just share your findings, but share the data and
the code and the tools you builtwith permissive licensing that
let other people on your scientific team, which is this
whole community, use them and build upon all the work you've
already put in? And how do you be transparent
both about your methods and about things like conflicts of
(16:40):
interest? I think all of those practices
underpin this culture of like, really seeing science as a team
effort that's in the public interest.
How can a broadly commercial community like carbon removal?
(17:03):
Maybe you disagree with that characterization, but it
certainly has a number of commercial interests that
interweave through the process of science.
Is carbon removal an example of an open science community?
Are parts of it openly scientific?
Where is it and where is it not?You can take it any way you
want. Yeah, it's a great question.
So I think, I think it's interesting to talk about the
(17:27):
academic community working on carbon removal and the kind of
industry or industry adjacent community, as you know, very
interrelated but maybe separate states.
So I think in the academic community, it's not a norm to be
participating in open science. I'm not sure there is really yet
a single Cdr kind of like topic area academic community.
(17:52):
Instead you have kind of still disciplinary communities who are
thinking about particular types of Cdr.
You certainly have certain Pis or labs who are very committed
to practices like preprinting, But Cdr as a topic area in the
academic world, I don't think has the type of culture you
might see, for instance, in physics where everyone is is
(18:15):
using preprint servers. A lot of Cdr research will just
end up in in journals. So I think there's room for
growth there. But examples of of leadership
certainly from some labs in the kind of industry and industry
adjacent NGO funding space. I think we have so much room for
(18:36):
growth. Again, I think you have examples
of people pushing in the right direction.
We can go into those people who are trying to share data from
industry LED field trials, who are either doing those field
trials or trying to facilitate the data sharing.
(18:56):
You have examples of funders whoare starting to ask for data
sharing. But if you just think about how
much we are learning through industry efforts in the field
and what fraction of that is publicly available to anyone to
build upon and learn from, I think we have like a pretty big
(19:19):
and clear area for growth. How do you feel about all of
that, Tyler? I think that feels right.
And I think that it's worth thinking about like, OK, there's
this room for growth, but what is like the prize at the end?
And when you make more information openly and publicly
available, I think that there are a bunch of great reasons to
do it. And one of them is that when,
(19:41):
you know, we talked to folks in the in the Cdr community, it's
pretty clear that a lot of folksare in agreement.
Pretty much everybody's in agreement that we want to figure
out what works and do more of the stuff that works.
And we want to do it quickly. We want to do it as quickly as
we can to keep up with the pace of climate change really.
And, and open science is a way to do that.
It helps us, you know, get over the things that don't work
(20:01):
faster. It makes the, the mistakes and
the missteps, just little hiccups along the way, rather
than like big entrenched problems that grow into
something that can erode or create challenges down the line.
It, it serves a lot of the purposes of what we're trying to
accomplish as ACDR community. And I think that that spans both
academia and industry. And I think that.
(20:22):
It's worth keeping that in mind as we're talking about what is
the right way to build an open science culture in in Cdr.
Ross, I feel like you've thoughtabout this too.
What's your answer to that question?
I can tell you a funny anecdote about it.
Maybe, maybe this will partiallyanswer it.
I've had so many conversations with project developers or
(20:43):
people that are working on the commercial side.
Yeah, why? Why aren't we more transparent
about pricing or about the science that we're doing
internally? I'm like, yeah, why don't you
just publish that information? You could just do it
unilaterally, like, well, not alone, like, OK, I can't just do
that all by myself. What if no one else does it?
But clearly then you just have, you know, bad prisoner dilemma
(21:05):
dynamics. The the game theory of it
prevents anyone from doing anything.
And we end up in this sub optimal equilibrium here where
none of us learn and it's all private.
I don't even think that the privacy is that valuable either.
Everyone is so focused on IP, and that's often driven by
venture capital dynamics. But I don't think a lot of this
IP is going to be, in the case of wind down, super valuable.
(21:27):
I don't think that we need to beas focused on patenting as we
are. I don't think that being
secretive is that valuable of a Moat either.
Tito Jankowski of Air Miners hasa line that I've heard him say
so many times, which is that ourchief rival is obscurity, you
know, not one another. It's more likely that carbon
removal will just fade out into nothingness.
(21:48):
And So what, Like if you're in enhanced rock weathering and
Mati wins the grand prize of X prize, are you really worse off?
In fact, you probably raise the profile of everyone in the
entire space by that happening. But yeah, I think we end up
being competitive in ways that are actually not even smart if
you're a Machiavellian. They're just sort of suboptimal.
Even if you're a ruthless self interested person, it's still
(22:11):
bad. So I've always tried to lean
that way and encourage people togo that direction.
I think unilateral action can look like great leadership and
be commercially valuable for companies to do.
Yet no one takes my advice on it.
I don't know why. Yeah.
I mean, that all really resonates with me.
I think there's such a strong argument that the nature of what
(22:32):
is trying to be sold in this industry has such intangibility
and such scientific uncertainty that the benefits of the
potential learning and making ittrustworthy and real so far
outweigh the potential losses toa business mode.
But I have also never run a startup, so I I recognize that I
(22:54):
have a limited view here. One of the resources I shared
ahead of doing this podcast was an episode that we recorded
probably at this point about a year and a half ago, internal to
Nori, about the direct air capture and storage methodology
that we created. And we decided at that time to
publish our methodological work,of which there were three under
(23:19):
a very permissive Creative Commons regime that allowed
others to remix our work, to reuse it exactly as written.
Other registries, isometric or reverse, could just pick it up
and issue credits through it, should they like it enough.
And I was hoping to see more of that, but unfortunately, as far
as I know, no one has taken thatup and run with it.
(23:40):
And I'm not even sure it's that great of an area to compete
against one another on 2. Like, does it make a lot of
sense for puro and isometric to be neck and neck on mythological
development? Is that actually in the interest
of our industry? I imagine you're probably going
to say no, but maybe you'll surprise me.
I don't think I'm going to surprise you on this one.
(24:02):
Yeah, I mean, I think historically when we've seen
competition on methodology development, it's created a race
to the bottom. How do you make a methodology
that you can still sell a creditfrom, but it's easier for folks
to comply with? And a certain amount of that I
think is useful. We don't want to create
methodologies that are are unusable.
(24:25):
That's an important thing to be attuned to.
But yeah, if if the story we're telling about methodologies is
that they accurately help us quantify real world outcomes,
then the idea that we should be sharing the ability to get the
best understanding of real worldoutcomes with each other feels
(24:46):
extremely obvious. And I might actually, you know,
extend your observation about registry licensing of protocols
to also the data that's on registries we we recently built
by tool at Carbon plan called offsets DB offsets database.
And it scrapes a bunch of project data from all of the big
(25:10):
traditional voluntary carbon market registries.
And one of the really tricky parts of that project was
navigating the licensing around data.
So yeah, you can go on their website and freely use it, but a
lot of that data is actually licensed in a surprisingly
restrictive way that makes it legally questionable to
repackage it, make it public, dowork on it.
(25:34):
And that seems to me like a pretty big problem if we're
talking about registries being amechanism for transparency in
this field. Wow, talking about this just
makes me feel like am I actuallya climate hippie and I've been
denying it this whole time. I thought I was a hard edged
businessman. Turns out I'm just like data, it
(25:57):
needs to be free. Yeah, yeah.
Come, come to the nonprofit side, Ross.
Carbon Plant has a reputation asbeing a very strong and powerful
watchdog and trying to make sureyou end up on the right side of
the science and are attuned to quality standards in a way that
(26:17):
allows you to claim that you're producing credible carbon
removal is actually genuinely difficult.
And so Tyler and I spend a lot of time talking about
fundamental questions of enhanced weathering are still up
in the air in some ways. And yet there's commercial
developers who are basically assuming that it works and
broadly works the way that it isintended to, even though there
(26:37):
are so many open questions here.And the tension is often between
how do you run a business that is reliant upon science when so
much science is still up for grabs and still being worked
out? I think even if you have good
intentions and you mean well, you can still face incentives
that are really difficult for commercializing in the face of
this uncertainty. The tension and the friction
(26:59):
between scientific integrity andcommercialization, it runs
really, really deep here. Does it create a fundamental
conflict of interest? What does it mean to be on the
non commercial side of this? Watching commercial developers
do things with science that you care a lot about, that maybe you
don't feel great about sometimes.
I think one thing that's interesting is in, in talking to
(27:21):
a lot of the researchers that are involved in these startups
think that they, their read on the literature tends to be
pretty similar to mine, which isthat like we still have
questions that we're trying to answer.
And, and also that our startups that that are, are have all this
wonderful funding and infrastructure to build out
monitoring systems and so on andso forth are really great
vehicle for starting to try to answer some of these questions.
(27:43):
And the challenge that we are faced with then is like, OK, you
might have orders of magnitude more data than I'm able to
access through what's available in the academic literature.
And in fact, that data is probably a lot more useful for
thinking about what an enhanced weathering deployment might look
like in the real world. Because academic studies don't,
aren't subject to the same constraints as a company trying
(28:03):
to operate and and do their own field study where we're, you
know, working with spherical cows often and kind of academic
land. And that's the on some spectrum,
some academic studies are a lot more close to what a real world
deployment looks like than others.
But at the end of the day, the question is, OK, if you've
generated new knowledge by collecting way more data than
anybody else has access to, do you have a responsibility to
(28:26):
share that new knowledge publicly to help pull the rest
of the field forward? And is it possible that you can
just share that new knowledge with funders and convince them
that this is all buttoned up? And do we have this world where
like there are people that are more compelled or convinced that
we about the state of knowledge and enhanced rock weathering
because the fact that some data is kept under closed doors and
shared internally than the rest of the public is.
(28:48):
And I think that those are hard questions to answer.
But I do think that one of the things that you get from like
one of the prizes of open science is that you start to get
data synthesis. You can bring a bunch of
different data sets together to paint this picture that nobody
else can see from the specific experiments that they're working
on or that the point sources that they're looking at.
And this is where we often see across fields like big steps
(29:10):
forward in scientific progress and understanding.
And I think that if we really think, you know, as I think
people agree that there are barriers to understanding right
now, there are knowledge gaps. We need to fill the, the, the
potential for big data synthesislike this by making those data
available, can I think do a whole lot of great work at
plugging those knowledge gaps up.
(29:31):
The challenge is how to do it, of course, but I do think it's
challenging to, to walk that line around, you know, how much
data is being produced and how do we make that data useful for
public learning at the same time, I'm going to.
Add in response to your question, Ross, one of the
things that really strikes me isa piece of this puzzle that
(29:54):
makes things really hard is the offsetting claim that comes at
the very, very end of the chain.And if we were operating in a
world where we weren't trying tomake claims about physically
undoing the harms of a fossil emission, the leeway for
uncertainty and the consequencesof being wrong at any given time
(30:19):
step, they're dramatically lower.
So part of my curiosity is like,wow, in what other world?
Like what other levers do we have, policy levers, private
sector levers to allow learning by deployment without the
pressure of the offsetting claimat the very end.
(30:39):
And this is a curiosity I've hadfor a long time and I think it
matters for all sorts of things like soil carbon and forest
carbon and uncertain long duration Cdr.
Not, not an easy answer, but I think will be really interesting
to see how that evolves over thenext five years.
That's such an uncomfortable space, though, where so many
people in our sector come from STEM environments where there
(31:03):
often is some amount of objectivity or presumed
objectivity, and you don't want the questions to end up in.
Well, it ultimately comes down to political economy yet again,
where we're telling stories about what these credits are
good for and how does that impact what corporations and
governments are allowed to do inthe meantime, The amount of
indeterminacy in a solution likethat, I think makes a lot of
(31:25):
people uncomfortable. That's a really hard question.
Unfortunately, it may just be the truth.
Yeah, Yeah. I guess my, my lighthouse is
always like, we've got to learn how do we tell the truth about
what we know all along the way? Because I think as soon as you
start overstating what we know, which I think offsets ask us to
(31:45):
do for a lot of these technologies, if they're the
only funding vehicle, then I think we're, you know, really
counter to open science values. We're like creating this, this
obscurity that really doesn't allow the full community to seek
truth together. And I think that's a really
(32:05):
counterproductive dynamic over the mid to long term do.
You have some alternative in mind relative to the offsetting
paradigm. I mean, I, if I had the perfect
solution, I would have tried to write about it or convince
someone to do it by now. I mean, there have been lots of
(32:25):
experiments. So I think there are experiments
where you're still fundamentallythinking about carbon credits,
but you're using an expenditure model and not supporting
offsetting claims. So that's one kind of pressure
relief mechanism. I think the whole conversation
around beyond the value chain mitigation, imperfect, but
(32:48):
another example of someone trying to release that pressure
valve. I think there's a blossoming
conversation right now about policy mechanisms that could
support Cdr activities in a way that doesn't require offsetting
claims made by the government ormade by regulated private
(33:09):
entities. I think all of those are really,
really interesting. There's not a clear answer yet,
but worth continuing creativity,I think, especially on the
policy front when we're thinkingabout how we invest public
resources and developing high potential but deeply uncertain
carbon removal approaches. There's some line.
(33:30):
It's either told about A Brief History of Time or The Elegant
Universe, one of those pop physics books about how for
every equation that was added tothe book, sales would drop an
order of magnitude. And that always makes me laugh.
But Nori, when we were active, we, we only ever felt
comfortable guaranteeing 10 years of carbon storage in
(33:51):
soils. And that was such a hard story
to explain to buyers who've beencoached since Kyoto that they
just buy a ton and they don't have to think about it again.
And instead we have to explain different types of stacking and
why verticals not really considered that great, but
horizontal maybe. And you just lose people because
it's really complicated. They just want to like, what do
I pay? And then can I move on to the
(34:12):
next thing of 100 that is on my To Do List.
And this is part of the, the tension here of, of doing good
science and having rigor versus just selling the thing that
moves the, the ball along. And I'm not sure that we ever
figured out a great solution to it because it, it bedeviled us
and was a really hard problem tosolve.
A customer education making surethey actually understand what a
credit is good for. Yeah, it's tremendously hard.
(34:36):
The real world has a lot of details and details are hard to
organize ourselves around. I hear that.
I. Think another challenge that
emerges is that like even if youmade all the data that companies
are collecting publicly available, that still might not
get you exactly as far as you want to go in terms of feeling
really good about how effective a given removal method is.
(34:58):
You know, it like companies in enhanced rock weathering, for
example, are collecting soil samples that are, I don't know
how deep they are, but because we don't have the data, but I, I
have to guess something around 30 centimeters or so, maybe 50cm
deep on the high end. And that's, you know, a very
small fraction of the total distance of that carbon is going
to travel before it ends up in some durable storage reservoir.
(35:20):
And so we have this other question around like how do we
support not only just making data available so that we can
drive and accelerate learning, but how do we develop mechanisms
for doing the work that also directly support the learning
process? How do we develop mechanisms for
doing the work that help us sample places that we might not
be sampling otherwise, if all that we need to do is
demonstrate that something happened in the top 30
(35:42):
centimeters of the soil profile?And I think that that's a hard,
the hard thing to do. Like funding that supports
learning is difficult kind of across all sorts of different
funding models. If you could guarantee
compliance with your wishes, what would you design so that
this was no longer a problem? Oh, can you say, say one click
(36:05):
more? Well, just assuming that you
don't have to face the game theoretical issues of people
having to opt into this. What if we just knew they were
committed to to doing the right thing?
What do you mean is the right thing?
Is it as simple as just publishing all of this data all
of the time and giving you access to it so experts can
parse it in the open? Yeah, it's a great question.
(36:29):
OK. So we're saying basically,
assuming business models didn't create big barriers to
participating in open science, what would it look like for Cdr
companies to really implement those values in practice?
Yeah, it's a climate hippie question.
Climate hippie question? Yeah, I mean, I do think one
(36:51):
piece of the puzzle is really thinking about how to share data
and tools publicly and quickly. I think part of the mindset of
open science is that you don't know who your findings will be
useful for and you don't know when they will be useful.
(37:11):
And the idea that you are creating more surface area for
collaboration and for unexpectedinsight by sharing stuff, even
if you don't have a super clear story about who exactly is going
to use it for what, that's really core to the open science
project. So yeah, if I was waving a magic
wand, and I do think there are important caveats around data
(37:34):
quality, data interpretability, data provenance, but I think we
would be seeing a lot more data sharing with no restrictions.
So CD Archive is one place that you can put a data set, you can
get a DOY, it can be clearly linked to you.
If someone uses it, they have togive you credit.
But there are no restrictions. Anyone with an Internet access
(37:55):
can see it, they can ask questions about it and they can
reuse it. That kind of data sharing I
would love to see a lot more of and I would love to see that not
only for positive results, but for null results.
So I think this is another kind of deep tenant of of kind of
traditional academia that's tough is that you get credit and
(38:17):
you get shiny papers when you publish exciting results and
null results are super importantto figuring out what doesn't
work, which is a huge part of the Cdr project.
But they don't get you papers inacademia and they don't get you
credits in carbon market land. So what does it look like for
startups to be sharing more information about what didn't
(38:40):
work with each other and with the science community?
And then I guess the the last thing I would say is right now,
even if we're not in that perfect world where you've, you
know, sidestepped all of the incentives that make sharing
hard, transparency about what exactly is making sharing hard?
(39:03):
I mean, I think the collective action problem in general is
floating around and I understandit's really tough.
But beyond that, like we have lots of general conversations
about transparency. How do we make it more specific?
How do we disclose when you choose not to share exactly why
in ways that help other people problem solve around that as a
(39:24):
community? Those would be kind of my my
three top ideas. Anything to add, Tyler?
Yeah, I I agree with all of that.
And I would just add that like if we live in a world where you
can just throw all of them in there and make it publicly
available, I think it would be, I think it would be better.
I think that sounds great. And also what you really still
(39:47):
need is that culture of open science, like a lot of what
makes open science work, happensbefore anything actually is made
publicly available. It happens in like the culture
that you develop in your lawn, the tools that you use to share
your files across all of your collaborators to make sure that
everybody sees what you're up toand can contribute and pitch in
in ways that, as Freya said, might end up being a little
(40:08):
unexpected. So that you have all of that
infrastructure in place so that you can make your information
publicly available when when thetime is right, when the project
has concluded, or whenever that is.
You in order for open science toreally work, you can't just
throw a bunch of stuff for the wall and like hope that
everything is going to like stick or find like a place that
that they can add more value than it otherwise might if it
(40:29):
just lived and died with the thing that you said about it,
You, you need to build infrastructure around that as
well. And that's why like we think
about open science as a culture,because when you think about
there's the culture of open science, it implies that you
have some like additional building of infrastructure and
nourishing of the broader systemthat goes along with it.
And so that makes it easier to, you know, if you are making all
(40:49):
of your data publicly available,the infrastructure around it
makes it easy to direct your attention and find the stuff
that you're looking for and makesure that it's not an inundation
of, of information, but it's a totally navigable sea of
information. And then that is a tough thing
to build, but it does require that culture.
It takes time. There are a lot of great tools
to do that already, and we don'tsee the archive in large parts
(41:10):
that it is a place for that, like one example of
infrastructure to support open science to take place.
And I think there's a lot more that we can do.
If you have someone's attention who is a project developer
working in carbon removal, how might you convince them?
Right now we can conclude with this make make your plea to the
carbon removal community. One thing that I'll say is that
(41:34):
like coming from an academic world, when we talk about open
science, it's almost entirely talked about as like a
grassroots thing. And then it should be like it is
a cultural thing, as I mentioned.
But in large part of academia, we talked about it as like this
is a grassroots driven movement in part because the institutions
are so slow to respond. You need to build like a lot of
(41:54):
momentum before you get top downsupport for the resources that
are needed to make open science work.
And I think that we're lucky that like that's not really the
world that we live in in CBR, the, a lot of the, the top down
institutions and buyers and funders are really dynamic and
they're keeping up with the science and they're trying to
understand what is going to helpresearch and knowledge and
understanding progress quickly. And when you have those elements
(42:18):
of the system, I think it's really easy for the the top down
institutions to not be followersof a momentum, but actually be
leaders and, and push things forward.
And so I don't know exactly whatthat's going to look like.
And I would love to see you no more requirements around data
sharing as as one example. But I think it's just important
to note that we don't have to rely on institutions that are
(42:39):
moving slowly here. I think that the the top end
institutions are really dynamic and flexible and thinking hard
about this. And so I would place a call to
action there as an opportunity to to lead a shift toward a more
open science culture in the community.
Yeah, plus one. I think what I would add for a
project developer is I really think this project of carbon
(43:03):
removal is only going to work atscale and fast enough.
If we expand our idea of who's on our team and if we work
together and if we learn a lot. And we recognize that not all
the incentives are there and notall the infrastructure is there.
But you can lead by example. You can help start breaking the
(43:24):
collective action problem. And I think you will get credit
for that. I think you will be respected
for that and you will contributeto the type of collaboration and
external examination that ultimately I believe will give
you a path to, you know, long term project development in a
(43:46):
sustainable and trustworthy way.So I recognize it's not easy,
but this is 1 opportunity. CD Archive is 1 opportunity.
There are other ways to embrace those values.
And I just really encourage people to to lead by example
and, and start conversations about the specifics of like how
do we translate these open science values and the potential
(44:08):
benefits they bring into our industry in a more granular way?
If someone is writing a scientific paper that may be
applicable to the server, how dothey get involved with CD
archive? How do they submit what's on
there now? What's the status of it?
So right now I think there are 13 preprints on CD archive.
(44:34):
The process is really simple, soyou can show up on CD Archive,
you make an account and there's a pretty simple submission
process where you can upload either an academic style
preprint, A preprint plus data, or just a data submission.
That submission goes through a very light touch review process,
(44:54):
which relies on a really awesomeset of external scientists who
really are just checking to makesure that a new research result
is presented. It's not a peer review, it's
just a, a, a light touch check to make sure it's about carbon
removal and there's actual research there.
And we commit to communicating back to you within three days.
(45:18):
And assuming that submission meets CD archives criteria, it
will be posted publicly with theDOI on the website.
And after that you have the chance to update or change your
submission. And there's a version control
system. But what since on the website,
it will remain publicly available associated with your
(45:38):
DDOI forever? As long no matter where that
work ultimately ends up, or if it ends up on a paywall, anyone
with Internet access will be able to read it and learn from
it. I was just going to add one more
thing, which is that in in talking about like open science
in general, Cdr is similar in that it really works when when
(46:00):
people are a part of that community, when people are
contributing results and when people are are going that there
to look for new results. We think CD archive makes sense
because we Cdr is a topic that covers a crazy number of
disciplines, like so, so many disciplines and the existing
platforms for sharing new knowledge are disciplinary.
And this makes them kind of new knowledge gets spread all over
(46:21):
the place. And it's really useful if you
want to be learning about Cdr across those disciplinary
boundaries to have things organized under a topic.
We also recognize that like not everybody is doing work in Cdr
that is going to end up in the peer reviewed literature and not
everybody is taking the time to write long format articles.
And so one of the things that makes CD Archive different from
other preprint servers is that we also have a data repository
(46:43):
feature. If you're producing a data set,
but aren't maybe going to spend the time to write a paper around
it or it's data that didn't fit for a paper or whatever it is,
you can submit the data to CD Archive and it can be
discoverable as as a data submission by itself.
And this is one of the ways thatwe're trying to make sure that
we are catering to the broader Cdr community and not just to
the people that are writing articles and papers.
(47:05):
And it's, it's not the end. We have a lot more things that
are kind of on the horizon that we want to think about that.
If there are ways that you thinkthat CD Archives can help cater
to the type of research that you're doing and help make your
work publicly available, we would love to hear from you.
We'd love to hear about it, Ross.
Maybe I can give you an e-mail address to put in the show notes
or something. Yeah, that sounds good.
(47:25):
Links to all of the things that we discuss are in the show notes
if you'd like to follow up and get involved.
Freya and Tyler, thank you for being here.
Very important topic. Respect very much the work that
you're trying to do and thanks for doing it and thanks for
being here. Thanks for having us.
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