Transcript

[Indistinct voices followed by music] Decretum mechiania by Loam Zoku – Composed and produced by Schuyler Lindberg and Y'honatex

 

Adam Huggins  00:05

As we face up to the climate crisis, it seems like two paths lay ahead, two distinct strategies for survival. A sort of Robert Frost poem for human civilization. Down one path, so we're told, we transform our relationship with nature, shedding the metastases of toxic heavy industries of intensive animal agriculture, and internal combustion engines for a simpler, slower way of life. Down the other road, we continue to do what humans have always done... invent and innovate, relying on our creative entrepreneurial spirit to improve our conditions, extend nature's limits, and tailor the planet to our needs. I'll lay my cards on the table right up front. I'm something of a technologically adept Luddite. I'll take the simple life.

 

Mendel Skulski  00:58

Whereas I can't take any version of the simple life that doesn't involve a fully-fledged internet. Technology may be a defining feature of humanity; other creatures use tools to build shelter, and some, like beavers, even manufacture and maintain whole ecosystems. But we are unmatched in our ability to copy, remix and improve, to pass designs down through generations and to embrace the solutions of others.

 

Adam Huggins  01:30

So in an era when a lone inventor or a team of engineers can touch billions of lives, what are the odds that someone, somewhere might just crack the code? They could discover how to pull all of our carbon dioxide from the air and save us all from disaster. Would everything else just carry on the same as it ever was? But what if they already did?

 

[Abrupt music fade]

 

Adam Huggins  01:56

What if it's not enough and what If they need our help? Dragons have been a part of our lives since ancient times, standing on the threshold between us and some kind of transformative change. In this series, we're on the lookout for a special sort of Dragon. While you can't see their bodies, you can see their tracks. These are the Dragons of Climate Inaction. Their habitat is in our minds and this podcast is your field guide. Welcome to Chapter Two, Technosalvation.

 

[Theme song] D7 by Loam Zoku – Composed and produced by Schuyler Lindberg and Y'honatex] 

 

Introduction Voiceover  02:34

This is Scales of Change: A field guide to the Dragons of Climate Inaction. Join us as we learn to spot them in the wild, and discover how they can be disarmed. Produced by Future Ecologies on the traditional territories of the Lekwungen and WSÁNEĆ​ peoples, with support from the University of Victoria.

 

[Music slowly fades out]

 

Adam Huggins  03:08

Welcome back. If you're joining us for the first time, and you're wondering... dragons? What dragons? This whole thing might make a little more sense if you go back and listen to the introductory episode called A Theory of Change. Today we'll be discussing the second of seven genera of Dragons. Ideologies. Ideologies are our core guiding principles, our filters for understanding the world, usually inherited from our families and our communities.

 

Robert Gifford  03:39

Ideologies are broad, I like to think of them as broad umbrella... constellations of attitudes and values and ideas, which don't all have to do with climate change.

 

Adam Huggins  03:50

Once again, this is Robert Gifford, environmental psychologist and collector of the Dragons of Inaction. Oh, and I'm Adam. This is Mendel.

 

Mendel Skulski  04:00

Hey!

 

Adam Huggins  04:01

And like Robert said, an ideology is more than just one belief. It's like the fabric that connects all sorts of beliefs together. And while the details will always differ from person to person, for the most part, these beliefs come packaged as sets.

 

Robert Gifford  04:17

You know, the obvious one is the kind of liberal conservative spectrum.

 

Mendel Skulski  04:22

There's kind of a conventional understanding that lefty liberal types have environmental values at heart.

 

Media Clip  04:29

[Unspecified interviewee] We can't allow this magnificent old growth forest to be logged. It’s a tragic mistake..

 

Mendel Skulski  04:34

While right wing conservatives are more concerned with private property.

 

Media Clip  04:39

[Unspecified news anchor] Loggers who showed up for work weren't happy about being blocked from their jobs.

[Unspecified interviewee] Gotta make your payments, earn a living. It stinks!

 

Adam Huggins  04:47

But in practice, this plays out all sorts of ways, at least in terms of ecology. I have two grandfathers who are very right wing ideologically, but they are much more attuned to nature and much better stewards of land than my more liberal parents.

 

Robert Gifford  05:03

There are some people who are generally political conservative who will look at the root of the word into conservation.

 

Adam Huggins  05:09

So there are plenty of folks who identify as fiscally or socially conservative, but are concerned with the over extraction of natural resources, or the environmental threats posed by the climate crisis.

 

Mendel Skulski  05:21

But by and large, strong beliefs in things like the primacy of free market capitalism usually imply other beliefs, like the idea that the only limit on the exploitation of the natural world is our personal desire and ability.

 

Media Clip  05:38

The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word is good. Greed is right. Greed works.

 

Adam Huggins  05:50

This sort of outlook is an example of a worldview, which is actually one of the Dragons in this genus.

 

Mendel Skulski  05:58

Another Ideological Dragon that gets in the way of climate action is a belief in superhuman powers, that forces beyond human control have relieved us of any agency.

 

Robert Gifford  06:10

I mean, there's not that many people now that think there's a kind of a god up in the sky who's controlling everything, but what I like to say is, there is a body of people who have the secular version of that, that essentially mother nature's in control, that's the other super human being and translated, this is a natural cycle. And so therefore, I don't have to do anything because it's a natural cycle. So that's pretty common, especially in denial or skeptic circles.

 

[Resonant music continues]

 

Adam Huggins  06:38

The Dragon of Suprahuman powers encourages us to avoid facing any possibility that our warming planet is of our own making, and the implicit fact that then we should have some responsibility to reverse the damage. Some might think that our survival is preordained,

 

Mendel Skulski  06:55

Or the kind of opposite, edgy flipside, which is that human beings are a kind of planetary infection, and that climate change and pandemics are just the Earth's immune system.

 

Adam Huggins  07:06

Right, which is an attitude that really bothers me. [Laughs]

 

Mendel Skulski  07:10

Yeah.

 

Adam Huggins  07:10

Like it's-it's a negative form of human exceptionalism and it has kind of an evangelical flavor to it. Right?

 

Mendel Skulski  07:18

Right. Yeah. It, it kind of rejects any call to mitigate the suffering that we are inflicting and reimagine the systems that are actually causing harm.

 

Adam Huggins  07:29

Totally. And that takes us to the next Dragon of ideologies, System Justification. Which is the belief that things are simply the way they are meant to be. That we are living in the best of all possible worlds.

 

Mendel Skulski  07:44

 Which is something you tend to believe if the system seems to be working in your favor.

 

Adam Huggins  07:49

Right. And for example, my father spent the last 15 years of his life as a climate activist. But he told me that before that he basically assumed that most leaders had everyone's best interests at heart, and that companies like the companies that he worked for, were serving the social good. That's what he was raised on and that's what he believed for much of his life. It took a major life crisis to cause him to take a closer look at our systems, and see how they weren't serving or even set up to serve the vast majority of people... which is something that the climate crisis exposes in stark terms. And that kind of trust in benevolent, powerful strangers, brings us to the fourth and final species of this genus, the Dragon of Technosalvation.

 

Robert Gifford  08:38

So, technosalvation means, I don't have to do anything, because the engineers will solve the problem. People have to buy the innovations that engineers are making and accept them. So no, you can't you can't escape your responsibility by putting all the onus on engineers.

 

Adam Huggins  08:58

The idea behind technosalvation is pretty well spelled out in its name, that through technology, we'll be able to fix the climate and maintain the status quo in the process. Because we'll swap out all of our dirty habits for clean look-alikes.

 

Mendel Skulski  09:14

Like with electric cars will all still drive everywhere. But hey [Laughing], at least it's electrons turning those tires and not exploding plankton from the Mesozoic era.

 

Adam Huggins  09:25

Exactly. Or an even more extreme version, we'll damn the risks and find a way to adjust the climate directly through geoengineering. Think, massive efforts to reflect the heat of the sun or to fertilize the ocean with iron.

 

Mendel Skulski  09:39

Or failing that will just bail on this planet and terraform Mars instead.

 

Adam Huggins  09:44

[Laughing] Honestly, the billionaires can have Mars if they want it. I think a one way ticket for some of these would be saviors might actually be a good investment from a planetary perspective.[Laughs] In any case, um for people who believe that any of those futures are realistic and practical, all of the action is just out of their hands right? The solutions are coming from engineers in lab coats.

 

Mendel Skulski  10:09

Or tech bros in T-shirts.

 

Adam Huggins  10:12

Any kind of magnanimous expert really ready to swoop in and save the day in the third act.

 

Mendel Skulski  10:17

It's a real deus ex machina.

 

Adam Huggins  10:20

Yeah, a literal God in the machine.

 

[Upbeat electronic music]

 

Mendel Skulski  10:26

Technosalvation is easily one of the most dangerous dragons, not just that it discourages systemic change, but also because it's future-focused. It neglects proven technologies, and some game changing innovations that are just coming online, now. They aren't enough to save us on their own, but they're critical to any realistic response to the climate crisis. And here's one that may not be so far-fetched. Pulling all of our excess co2 directly from the air.

 

Adam Huggins  10:57

You mean like trees do?

 

Mendel Skulski  11:00

Uhh yes, except the problem is that trees just may not be able to do it fast enough.

 

Kevin Caners  11:08

What we're doing by in our industrial age is we're taking the result of millions and millions and millions of years of basically trees, mostly, we're using organic material that over tens and hundreds of millions of years got buried and we're burning that. So to think that we could just take the current land today and solve the entire problem by planting more trees as the population is growing still is a bit unrealistic.

 

Adam Huggins  11:11

Okay, who's that?

 

Mendel Skulski  11:36

That's Kevin Caners. He's actually another podcaster. Uh, a Canadian living in Berlin. His show is called The Elephant and he did a four hour long deep dive into exactly what we're talking about. Negative Emissions technologies.

 

Adam Huggins  11:51

Negative Emissions. So, like, subtracting Co2.

 

Mendel Skulski  11:54

Exactly.

 

Adam Huggins  11:55

Got it.

 

Mendel Skulski  11:55

And what Kevin is saying is that we simply have a scale problem. Photosynthesizers spent millions of years collecting and condensing all of that carbon. And it's only taken us a few centuries to put it all the way back into the atmosphere.

 

Adam Huggins  12:10

Right, so, if we want to make enough of an impact on the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air we'll have to accelerate that process somehow.

 

Mendel Skulski  12:18

Yeah, and there's actually two big challenges there. One is pulling it out of the air and, the other one is storing it somewhere safe... forever.

 

Adam Huggins  12:29

And at scale too.. right? Like trees and wetlands and peatlands are slow but they do operate at scale and run entirely on solar power. If we wanna speed up that process technologically we need something similarly scalable but that doesn't require more energy hence more emissions than it can sequester, right?

 

Mendel Skulski  12:50

Bingo! And its not like people haven't been trying. Scientists have seen carbon dioxide and climate change coming a mile away. There have been lots of breakthroughs but the pace has been a lot slower than you'd expect, especially given how clearly important the problem is. Kevin states how some scientists who have been working on direct air capture since the 1990s. And what he points out is that this kind of sluggish development wasn't actually a technical issue.

 

Kevin Caners  13:20

But the bigger challenge I really found was uh, economic. In that there's no one really paying anyone to take carbon dioxide out of the air. So there's no real economic driver that would kind of be pushing this technology and helping it to develop in the way that solar or wind did, where it you know, gets a lot cheaper over time, but just pure refining of the-of the technology and the manufacturing processes.

 

[Music fades out slowly]

 

Adam Huggins  13:48

Okay, so you can't make a business case on carbon like you would on electricity. But that's what research grants are for, right?

 

Mendel Skulski  13:56

Yeah, you think so. But for a long time, the idea of negative emissions technologies sat in this funny kind of ideological limbo.

 

Kevin Caners  14:06

Yeah, exactly. I think that's a good way to put it. The green groups tend to not like carbon capture because they see it as being a friend of fossil fuels. Kind of like the indulgences that the the Catholic Church used back in the day, we can just like pay for our sins. And that is kind of against the the messaging that they've used in the philosophical belief that most have had. And on the other hand, well, if you don't believe climate change is real, then we definitely don't need a technology to take co2 out of the air. If you're someone who is too pro on technology, and then you're not worried because everything will magically happen somehow, I guess.

 

Adam Huggins  14:40

So for the environmentalists carbon capture was seen as a kind of get out of jail free card. And by funding it and pursuing it, the fear was that it could imply that it's okay for everyone to keep using fossil fuels.

 

Mendel Skulski  14:53

And for everyone else, climate change just wasn't a pressing issue. So why spend money on things like pulling carbon out of the sky. So only really a handful of scientists dedicated themselves to the cause, piecing together whatever funding they could.

 

Adam Huggins  15:09

The Dragon of Worldviews was definitely playing both sides here.

 

Mendel Skulski  15:12

[Laughs] Yeah. But then just in the last decade, there was a reckoning. And it's actually one that I bet most listeners won't be familiar with.

 

[Gleaming synthesizer in background]

 

Adam Huggins  15:23

I'm actually not sure that I know what you're referring to either. Uh Can you fill me in?

 

Mendel Skulski  15:27

Well, you remember the IPCC report in 2018, right?

 

Adam Huggins  15:31

I do remember that. It felt like that report finally made everyone sit up and pay attention for a hot minute anyway. The IPCC,

 

Mendel Skulski  15:40

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

 

Adam Huggins  15:43

Yeah, they spelled out just how much more carbon we can afford to emit and how long we have to get on budget. And... it was chilling! All the headlines were about how serious it was for us to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

 

Mendel Skulski  15:59

Right. But what didn't really seem to get as much attention and wasn't in any headlines that I noticed is the fact that practically all of those carbon budget calculations are counting on us bringing some kind of gigaton scale carbon capture online by 2050.

 

[Synthesizer morphs dramatically]

 

Kevin Caners  16:19

Every single pathway that they identified involve carbon removal from the air in some capacity, and even the least generous ones included it or like the ones that assume that we will overshoot 1.5 degrees and then come back somehow, i.e. through negative emissions. But even the ones that don't have overshooting 1.5, which means that like, we need to cut at unbelievable rates in order to get to zero emissions, they still assume removing carbon from the air.

 

Mendel Skulski  16:48

Every projection from the IPCC for a 1.5 or 2 degree future calls for large scale carbon dioxide removal before mid-century. Negative emissions technologies aren't a get out of jail free card anymore. They're an indispensable part of the solution.

 

Adam Huggins  17:07

I guess being a luddite is no longer an option.

 

Kevin Caners  17:11

In no way do these technologies mean that uh, we shouldn't mitigate. In fact, it really only makes sense if you do mitigate, because we're right now we're releasing something like 40 billion tons of co2 each year, which is just a massive amount to deal with. And there's still so much low hanging fruit.

 

Adam Huggins  17:27

So ditching fossil fuels as fast as possible is still the name of the game, right?

 

Mendel Skulski  17:32

Yeah. And on that note, there's another thing that I want to point out. Something else I think, isn't as widely known as it ought to be.

 

Adam Huggins  17:38

And what would that be?

 

Mendel Skulski  17:39

Well, uh, I-I actually have a little pop quiz for you?

 

Adam Huggins  17:44

[Laughing]

 

Mendel Skulski  17:44

If I burn a kilo of gasoline, how much carbon dioxide do you think I'm releasing?

 

Adam Huggins  17:50

Like, how much does the carbon dioxide weigh?

 

Mendel Skulski  17:53

Yeah, exactly.

 

Adam Huggins  17:54

I can't believe you're putting me on the spot for this. [Laughing] Um...a kilogram of gas. I-I can hardly even think in metric Mendel.

 

Mendel Skulski  18:03

[Laughing]

 

Adam Huggins  18:04

It's, it's probably, this feels like a trick question. Would it be all of it? Like if if I burn a kilo of gas? Wouldn't I just release one kilo of carbon dioxide?

 

Mendel Skulski  18:16

It is kind of a trick question. Because for every kilogram of gasoline burned, 2.3 kilograms of co2 goes into the atmosphere.

 

Adam Huggins  18:26

What? How can it weight more than double what you started with?

 

Mendel Skulski  18:30

It's kind of a cruel joke, right? Most of that weight is actually that O2 and that's coming from the air. It's oxygen from the air bonding with the carbon from the gasoline.

 

Adam Huggins  18:40

That-that's not fair.

 

Mendel Skulski  18:43

Nope. That's combustion.

 

[Drum machine beat]

 

Kevin Caners  18:46

We're not going to change every single machine in the world in the next 12 years. Every single ship, every single plane, every single locomotive, you know, every single home that is heated with gas. So the only way to really imagine that We can't get to zero emissions, either, you know, by 2050 or 10 years from now is through some sort of negative emissions.

 

Adam Huggins  19:08

Okay, so how are we going to do that?

 

Mendel Skulski  19:11

Well, in terms of actually pulling carbon out of the air, there are quite a few different technologies that are being developed. Kevin focused his podcast series on the work of Klaus Lackner out of Arizona State University. And as it so happens, there's another direct air capture project in our own backyard, here in BC. That's Carbon Engineering in Squamish. They're both demonstrating really encouraging progress in terms of energy efficiency, cost and scalability. But the more interesting question to me is, once we have all that carbon, hopefully, billions of tons of it, where do we put it? And that's why I reached out to Kate.

 

Kate Moran  19:50

I'm Kate Moran, President and CEO of Ocean Networks Canada.

 

Adam Huggins  19:55

Ocean Networks Canada. I'm just going to go out on a limb and guess that they're not looking to bury carbon in the desert.

 

Mendel Skulski  20:02

[Laughs] Ocean Networks Canada is leading an international research project called Solid Carbon. It's launched by the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions at UVic or PICS for short. Their plan is to demonstrate the feasibility of using what may be the best place to store our excess carbon dioxide, the basaltic sea floor.

 

[Melodic ambient music] Vale & Stone by Soda Lite

 

Kate Moran  20:25

If you if it took the water out of the ocean, and we're able to look at the planet. It's covered in basalt. It forms all the tectonic plates, so the edges of them are these spreading centers of formed basalt. So it's, it's a huge reservoir, just compare it to offshore oil reservoirs. They're only on the continental shelves. They're a tiny part of the ocean. This is huge parts of the ocean. So the reservoir is gigantic.

 

Adam Huggins  20:52

So what Kate is saying is that if we use basalt to store carbon dioxide, then we really have the room to sequester all of our atmospheric carbon?

 

Mendel Skulski  21:01

Yeah!

 

Adam Huggins  21:03

That's good news, I guess. But uh just backing up, how are they planning to use this rock to hold carbon dioxide in the first place?

 

Kate Moran  21:12

It's a bit complicated.

 

Mendel Skulski  21:14

Well, Kevin had a lot more time to go into the details. So if detail is your thing, you should listen to the five episodes of the Elephant from 2019. But I'll give you a quick overview.

 

Adam Huggins  21:25

Great.

 

Mendel Skulski  21:26

Okay. So, if the name, solid carbon didn't tip you off, they're going to transform all of that carbon dioxide gas into solid rock. Co2, either dissolved in water or injected as a pressurized gas gets pumped into the basalt, where it can react with the iron and magnesium and calcium in the rock. And then it turns into a kind of mineral called a calcite.

 

Adam Huggins  21:52

Uh, how long does that take?

 

Mendel Skulski  21:54

So this kind of chemical reaction is actually taking place all the time on land. It's called weathering. Under natural conditions, it takes millions of years for co2 to fall out of the sky as acid rain, and then react with the various kinds of basic rocks on the surface. But basalt has even more going for it, because it's full of all these tiny cracks and voids, little pockets all the way through the rock.

 

[Bubbles popping]

 

Mendel Skulski  22:23

By injecting co2 directly into basalt, there's so much surface area that the reaction can come to completion in just a couple of years.

 

Adam Huggins  22:32

That's wild. Is it? Is it theoretical or has it been proven?

 

Mendel Skulski  22:39

You could say it's rock solid.

 

Kate Moran  22:42

Four years ago, Icelandic researchers and engineers,

 

Mendel Skulski  22:46

A group called Carbfix.

 

Kate Moran  22:48

Injected carbon dioxide into basalt on Iceland and Iceland is part of the Mid Atlantic Ridge.

 

Mendel Skulski  22:54

Which means that the island is made of basaltic sea floor pushed up by tectonic movement.

 

Kate Moran  22:59

This happens to stick above the surface of the ocean.

 

Mendel Skulski  23:02

Making Iceland especially suitable for a land based proof of concept. Carbfix partnered with a geothermal power plant to inject co2 underground and track how it mineralized.

 

Kate Moran  23:14

They demonstrated that the co2 would become solid rock in two years. So it transformed from this gas it's in the atmosphere causing us problems to permanently removed.

 

Mendel Skulski  23:25

And you can find pictures of the rock cores that they made. All the bubbles in the gray basalt have been filled by white calcites from the CO2. Kate and Solid Carbon are trying to take it to the next steps. Demonstrate how we can scale this system up and bring this huge reservoir of oceanic basalt into play. Which means proving it can be done at sea.

 

Kate Moran  23:47

If you, if people who are listening can picture you have a floating platform you have renewable energy on it is likely a lot of its going to be offshore wind because of the dominance of power that it can generate. You have a drill string, basically a tube, three kilometers long from the platform to the sea floor and the pump that captured co2 through the water column down about 300 meters beneath the sea floor. And that too, would then have perforations in it that go into the formation. And then in sure amount of time becomes rock.

 

[8-bit crystallizing sound effect]

 

Adam Huggins  24:23

You know, by the sounds of it, this project is ironically going to look a lot like an offshore oil well... except that instead of tapping fossil carbon from millions of years ago, it'll be running in reverse pumping carbon back into the ground.

 

Mendel Skulski  24:40

Totally. And I think you've hit on a funny kind of tension there. If we're going to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees. It looks like we have to include these solutions that in some ways, look a lot like the heavy industry we're trying to replace. Although, the upside is that we might even be able to recycle some existing oil infrastructure, or at least the tooling and the know how.

 

Kate Moran  25:08

We have the ability then to demonstrate that, in fact, we can take our extractive industries and transition to non-carbon intensive industry. And so not only is it a technology development, it's a social construct that could demonstrate to the world that this is possible.

 

[Melancholic electronic music] Waves by Pictures of the Floating World

 

Adam Huggins  25:28

I encountered this dynamic in my work in ecological restoration all the time, like when there's been damage to an ecosystem caused by heavy machinery, that same machinery is often the best and most efficient tool to undo that damage and, and to set the ecosystem on a better trajectory. But, um, before we get into, like, too good to be true, maybe a little close to technosalvation territory... we are seriously talking about a planetary intervention here, right? Like, how sure are we that this is safe?

 

Mendel Skulski  26:03

Well, that's part of what solid carbon is planning to find out. According to smaller studies, the risks of leaks and seismic disturbance or any other disruption to life on the sea floor, besides the drill string itself should actually all be minimal.

 

Adam Huggins  26:20

Besides the drill string itself… kind of begs the question how much drilling we're actually going to have to do?

 

Mendel Skulski  26:28

Yeah, so exactly how much carbon dioxide they can pack into one 300 meter deep well, is yet to be determined by tracking how much that plume of carbon dioxide spreads out or not. But...

 

Kate Moran  26:42

What happens now in the oil industry is that you can have one wellhead and then you can actually be drilling horizontally into the reservoir from that one location.

 

Adam Huggins  26:54

You know, despite myself, I'm actually getting into the idea of co-opting all this oil technology to fight climate change. But this is all still in the planning stages, right? I mean, how far off is this really?

 

Mendel Skulski  27:07

At the moment, they're working on the details and getting approvals to go ahead with a field trial, hopefully in 2025. The hope is not only to prove that the system works and can affordably pump carbon back into the crust, but to actually stress test the system, try to force a CO2 leak and see what happens. And that's part of why Ocean Networks Canada is leading the project. They're already set up with extensive deep sea monitoring systems. So if anything happens, they'll know about it.

 

Adam Huggins  27:39

Right? But for now, we just, we don't know.

 

Mendel Skulski  27:43

Well, no. And we won't really know until we try and even then, you know, maybe not for a long time. But even if we don't try, it's not like we've opted out of transforming the planet.

 

Kate Moran  28:02

What we're doing right now, by burning all this fossil fuel is the biggest geo-engineering experiment that we've ever done. Like... you're in it, you're part of the lab team, doing the geo engineering experiment. Stop it.

 

Mendel Skulski  28:15

The sooner we can get off fossil fuels, the less we're going to be dependent on projects like solid carbon to push that carbon back into the ground.

 

Adam Huggins  28:24

Yeah, and I agree with Kate. We've been making planetary scale interventions unintentionally, for a long, long time. And it's clear where that's gotten us. Which says to me that we need to think very carefully about how we intervene going forward and why responding to the Dragon of Rechnosalvation means that we can't place all of our hopes in heroic, untested technological solutions. But in this case, it-it also means using the tools currently at our disposal.

 

Adam Huggins  29:03

All that being said, for those of us who don't wear lab coats, how do we address this Dragon of Technosalvation? It seems like the issue here is that we have a tendency to be so focused on waiting for some technological silver bullet in the future, that we neglect to embrace existing technologies.

 

Robert Gifford  29:22

We certainly need engineers and other technical people to come up with the solutions on the mechanical side or on the science side. But those solutions aren't always well accepted by the average person in terms of tax dollars to pay for grants or in their own households or whatever. So uh, the natural scientists often asked me how they can make some of their good technical solutions more acceptable to the general public.

 

Mendel Skulski  29:51

I think that comes back to the main problem that Kevin identified. The reason why it took so long for direct air capture to be taken seriously for research and development. No one wanted to invest in carbon capture because carbon itself has no value. No one was gonna pay to take it back out of the air. But that's finally changing.

 

[Hopeful melodic ambient music] Start as You Mean to Go On by Daniel Birch

 

Kate Moran  30:13

Just this last week, Microsoft is now committed to actually repaying back all of their emissions for the entire lifetime of the corporation. They're gonna need negative emission technologies in order to fulfill that commitment. BP did that yesterday. They finally get it that we need a livable planet to grow your business. So I just think that mark is going to grow.

 

Kevin Caners  30:34

I think that is really cool. And if that idea could spread not just like from one or two businesses that are, have now made that pledge to universities or to, you know, even provinces or states or countries, then I think that would be a really huge step that normal people could make potentially.

 

Mendel Skulski  30:56

It's going to take that kind of social pressure making our institute recognize their responsibility for this pollutant and pay for its cleanup. We need negative emissions just as much as we need to stop releasing co2. The sooner we can accept that, the sooner we can normalize it as part of the solution, then those technologies will become cheaper and more diverse.

 

Adam Huggins  31:20

And for all of my fellow luddites out there, at least those of you who are in the Venn diagram of luddite and podcast listener, it's cool, we can still keep planting trees. Please keep planting trees. Whatever you're in a position to do, do that thing. And together, we'll save each other.

 

Kate Moran  31:40

When you're in a position where you can do something, you better do it.

 

[Bass and percussion  enter]

 

Adam Huggins  31:54

This has been chapter two of Scales of Change- a field guide to the Dragons of climate Inaction. We'll be back next week with chapter three. Writing on The Wall.

 

Mendel Skulski  32:05

Whether or not we can avoid climate collapse is still an open question. But we know for sure, one thing is inevitable: Change.

 

Mendel Skulski  32:20

Scales of Change is a production of Future Ecologies with support from the University of Victoria.

 

Adam Huggins  32:27

In this chapter, you heard Robert Gifford, Kevin Caners, Kate Moran, myself, Adam Huggins

 

Mendel Skulski  32:34

And me, Mendel Skulski. Huge thanks to Susanna Hearn and Maclaurin, Anya Krieger,

 

Adam Huggins  32:40

Simone Miller, Ilana Fonariov

 

Mendel Skulski  32:42

And Leslie Elliot.

 

Mendel Skulski  32:44

Besides discovering the Dragons of Inaction, Robert Gifford is literally the author of the textbook, Environmental Psychology: Principles and Practice.

 

Adam Huggins  32:53

Kevin Caners is a journalist and the podcaster behind The Elephant.

 

Mendel Skulski  32:58

Which is a must listen if you're interested in the intricacies and history of carbon capture and storage. There are just tons of fascinating details that we had to skip. Kate Moran is Solid Carbon's principal investigator, and President and CEO of Ocean Networks Canada, a UVic initiative. You can learn more about the project at solid carbon.ca.

 

Adam Huggins  33:24

Our theme song and composition for this chapter was by lone zoku other music was provided by Jack Hertz, Parallel Park, Blear Moon, Sodalite, Pictures of The Floating World, Daniel Birch and Sunfish moonlight.

 

Mendel Skulski  33:39

You can tweet at us or follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Future Ecologies.

 

Adam Huggins  33:45

To learn more about each one of the dragons of inaction, including silly things like the Latin names we gave them, go to futureecologies.net/dragons.

 

Adam Huggins  33:55

All right. That's it. We'll see you next week.

 

[Music intensifies and slowly fades]

 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai and edited by Madhurima Basak