Could Climate Engineering Do More Bad Than Good for the Environment? (Your Radical Questions with Professor David Keith)

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1:43Gabriel Gatehouse:Hello, I'm Gabriel Gatehouse and welcome to Your Radical Questions, where we put your questions to one of our guests. It's your chance to engage directly with the radical people that we have on this podcast and to ask them about their ideas for the future. Professor David Keith from the University of Chicago joins me again. He's one of the world's leading researchers on geoengineering, the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the Earth's climate systems to counteract human-made climate change. If you haven't heard our conversation from Thursday, do go back and have a listen. It's a pretty radical, pretty controversial, deep dive into the issues.

2:22Gabriel Gatehouse:We focused a lot on the idea of dimming the sun. How you might do it, what the consequences might be, whether we should do it at all. And if we do, who gets to decide when and how? But we touched on other possible tech solutions to climate change as well, such as carbon capture. And Professor David Keith is here now to answer your radical questions. Professor Keith, hello.

2:48David Keith:Hello there. Happy to be here.

2:49Gabriel Gatehouse:It's very good to have you here again. And I think we've got a lot of engagement from our audience. Our first question comes from a former guest on this podcast, Gaia Vince, who's written about the approach that we'll need to take to migration as climate change displaces populations. And she sent us this voice note. Hello, David. My question to you. While I'm broadly in favour of research into geoengineering and potentially its deployment, which may well become inevitable. I ask you, what are you doing to protect this environmental technology from being co-opted by the dangerous political and corporate entities who are also pushing for more fossil fuel use and therefore furthering climate breakdown?

3:36Gabriel Gatehouse:I think this is the moral hazard question, David.

3:39David Keith:Yeah, so I'm doing the best I can, which is not that much is the answer. So maybe I'm doing less than I used to in the sense that when I was at Calgary earlier in my career, I was more kind of directly fighting against the fossil fuel powers. I mean, broadly, I've tried to speak to political elites and environmental elites about climate dangers forever, and I've tried to point directly to the political power of the fossil fuel world. Maybe it's helpful to say on a personal note that I've actually really had this up close and personal while I was a professor at Calgary. One time I had a full-page ad taken out against me by the so-called Friends of Science, and I've been part of a confrontation about the oil patch at University of Calgary that actually is part of what led to me going and confronting the president on the national CBC broadcaster.

4:33David Keith:So I've seen the fossil fuel companies do their thing up close and personal, and there's no question that they are fighting hard to try and block action on climate. But I actually don't think they're succeeding. I'm very optimistic about emissions cuts these days. The world is spending almost$2 trillion a year on clean energy now, and I think the politics of climate have changed. And although it's not as visible as it was a year or two ago, I think that there's much broader agreement that climate action is needed than there was. And I'm pretty confident we will gradually cut emissions down. And I think that's what we should focus on doing and then talk about supplementally doing these other things like some like the fact.

5:18Gabriel Gatehouse:David, you mentioned your earlier brushes with the fossil fuel industry. and we talked on the main podcast about the company that you founded and that was then sold to Occidental Petroleum. Did you feel uncomfortable about doing that? Was that a difficult decision?

5:36David Keith:Yeah, I certainly felt uncomfortable. I mean, as a decision, actually, as a board member at Carbonite Sharing, but a small shareholder at that point, it was more a Canadian nationalist concern. So us, me and some other early board members were really sad that it was sold to an American company. So just primarily, that was actually our principle.

5:53Gabriel Gatehouse:You were more worried that it was sold to an American company than a fossil fuel company.

5:56David Keith:Yeah. I mean, yeah. Canada's a small country. We want to keep clean tech and stuff in Canada. So if we'd had a Canadian buyer that was reasonable, we would have done that. That's separate, but as in practice, what, you know, given my duties to, as I saw them, to employees in Canada, that was how I thought about it. But yes, I, of course, had concerns about the oil company sale. But I also ultimately think it's reasonable in the sense that there is an element to greenwash. But fundamentally, the reason they're spending the money is because they believe there's a market for carbon removal. And the reason there's a market for carbon removal is because of environmental pressure forcing that market.

6:36David Keith:And the idea that's going to kind of magically protect their old oil business, I think, is just not correct.

6:42Gabriel Gatehouse:Do you think they believe that's going to magically protect their old oil business?

6:46David Keith:Not clear. You can look at a piece I wrote in The Economist giving both sides of this. I don't think I really know. When you talk to senior people, you get different answers. It's hard to know. What I would say, just taking Oxy, but it's true of any of these companies, the kind of old main oil part of Oxy obviously profits from a world with high oil prices and low carbon prices. But Oxy Low Carbon Ventures that owns now Carbonized Shearing and a bunch of other things, lithium plays and so on, that company does well in a world with strong climate policy with high carbon prices, and it's lobbying for that.

7:22David Keith:And so my personal view is these things won't actually coexist in one company forever. They're just forces of the market that will break them apart into what investment people call pure plays. And I think that carbon removal is quite expensive. It costs hundreds of dollars of ton CO2. And the only way that it happens at scale is if people are paying hundreds of dollars of CO2 carbon price. In a world like that, oil is going out even faster because that's accelerating the transition to electric vehicles. So I absolutely think there are people inside those companies who somehow believe they can get through it.

7:59David Keith:And Vicky Holub, the president of Oxy, has made some statements like that.

8:03Gabriel Gatehouse:They're not in the room to speak for themselves.

8:07David Keith:Yeah, but I think the long-term forces are that these are pretty independent things.

8:13Gabriel Gatehouse:Okay, and thank you, Gaia, for your question. The next question is from listener Duncan Nickel. I would like to ask David, technologies like carbon capture are often presented as a breakthrough solution to the climate crisis. However, they can also risk giving the fossil fuel industry a reason to continue operating as usual, rather than accelerating meaningful change. The priority should be to speed up the transition to cheaper renewable energy sources, supported by battery storage and other proven clean energy infrastructure. Expensive technologies that may extend dependency on fossil fuels should not be a distraction from addressing the root cause of the problem.

9:00Gabriel Gatehouse:So I think the question basically boils down to invest your energies and your money in renewable tech and not tech that sort of mitigates continuing to pump out carbon into the atmosphere.

9:13David Keith:So I think broadly 100 % agree. If I was some kind of global czar setting the ratio of money spent on carbon removal to money spent on decarbonization, mostly with solar batteries, I'd go for like 99%, 98 % on solar batteries and 1 % or 2 % on carbon removal because we will need that in the long run to do something that solar batteries cannot do, which is take CO2 back out of the atmosphere to restore the climate. But I mean, big picture, I think I agree with that view. But I think it's important to say that's also what's happening. So despite all the talk, the actual flow of money into carbon removal is quite tiny, less than a few billion a year in a world where we're spending a few thousand billion a year on clean energy.

9:59David Keith:So I appreciate Duncan's concern. I agree, absolutely, the focus should be on clean energy. I do think that there are ways in which carbon removal and carbon capture can be useful. Carbon capture can work in things that renewables can't do directly. Cement is the most obvious one.

10:16Gabriel Gatehouse:I suppose this, and just to drill down into one part of Duncan's question was, is it giving the fossil fuel industry a reason to continue operating as usual? I mean, I suppose that's a continuation on from Gaia's question.

10:30David Keith:Yeah, I think this kind of misunderstands it. The reason that the fossil industry operates is because people are still buying fossil fuels. And the way to get out of that is to drive fossil fuels out of the electric system by mostly solar and batteries and maybe some other things. And to begin to decarbonize transportation by electric vehicles. And that will decrease the market for fossil fuels.

10:50Gabriel Gatehouse:I suppose the question is, are things like carbon removal making it easier for the fossil fuel industry to ride that out for longer than it would otherwise?

11:00David Keith:Everybody says that in the climate activist community, but I'm not really getting functionally why that's true. In the big market for oil or fuels, the real fight is about decarbonization. Some companies saying they have carbon removal doesn't change the incremental reality that solar and batteries are beginning to win in electric markets.

11:24Gabriel Gatehouse:OK, thank you. And thanks, Duncan, for that question. I've got another question from a listener, Steve Lyle. He sent us this voice note. Hello, Professor Keith. My name's Steve Lyle. Can you tell your listeners how it would be possible to know what the unintended consequences are from your research, unless it's done at sufficient scale to create them? Thanks.

11:48David Keith:Maybe this will be a disappointing answer to Steve, But the answer is it will be impossible to know for sure what all the unintended consequences are. And it would be impossible even after it was done at scale. This is just a world of uncertainties. And you can think about this thinking about carbon dioxide. So we now have put so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that we are certainly changing the climate. There's no question whatsoever that carbon dioxide is warming the climate. But there are actually still lots of detailed questions about exactly what CO2-driven warming is doing. In the climate science community, there are lots of uncertainties still about exactly how CO2-driven warming is working.

12:26David Keith:So, for example, we see drying out of Western U.S. that we actually see in the reality but don't see in the climate model so much. And we don't know why. That's just one of many examples where the models aren't predicting exactly what happens. We don't understand exactly. And that's true even after we're doing a huge amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. And so the same would be true of cooling. If you started cooling with sunlight reflection, if you ramped up slowly the way I've suggested, then in some decades you could be confident the world was cooler from the sunlight reflection. But there'd be a whole bunch of things where you would just be beyond the knowledge of science to be able to say for sure what the consequences were.

13:07David Keith:That's just the reality of the situation.

13:09Gabriel Gatehouse:And can I ask a supplementary question that we didn't get into in the main interview podcast, which is that if we went for your modest proposal, as it were, of putting, I think it was one and a half million tons of sulfur into the stratosphere and producing a 0.1 degree centigrade of cooling per decade. if after the first decade it looked like there were lots of unintended consequences that we really didn't like the look of, how quickly could we stop it?

13:41David Keith:Ah, great question. Sulfur lasts in a stratosphere for about two years, and after that it's gone. So, you know, you'd start this slow ramp, you'd watch the way sulfur is moving around the stratosphere, you'd watch some stratospheric chemistry, and if you saw things that you didn't expect that were outside what the models suggested, then you could easily stop. Now, to clarify, I'm suggesting a tenth of a degree a decade, and after 50 years, where you were then cooling by half a degree, you'd need something like 1.5 million tons a year, 50 years out. So 2070, 2080.

14:13Gabriel Gatehouse:And one more question on that. How long would we have to keep doing it for? Are we talking centuries?

14:18David Keith:There's no have to. It depends on choices and balancing risks. So one could, after you did say half a century like that, you could begin to ramp it down again, slowly turning it down. It's better to do that when you've removed the carbon from the atmosphere, but you don't have to do that. You could still get the benefit of just slowing climate change.

14:40Gabriel Gatehouse:Okay, thank you. And thanks to Steve for that question. I've got another question from Anthony. He says, in tackling climate change with a techno tweak, unless we tackle economic growth, we won't deal with the resource use, waste, and pollution with resulting environmental and quality of life impacts. That's more of a statement than a question, but I'd like you to respond to it.

15:01David Keith:Yeah, it's a statement that I don't think is correct. So I think historically we've seen that we have had economic growth along with reduced environmental impact in many cases that we've been able to manage. So in where I am now in the US, but in lots of developed countries and now in China too, the air is cleaner than it was. Water is cleaner than it was. And there are still certainly problems in both those areas for sure. And environmental campaigners are working to prevent those problems and industry's fighting against it. But the objective truth is there are lots of measures in which we have much bigger economy than we did, but we actually have a smaller environmental footprint in some ways that matter, say in air and water pollution.

15:46David Keith:And I think it is absolutely possible to transition the world away from fossil fuels to, let's say, a solar or solar nuclear world and still have economic growth. So I don't buy the view that it's sort of impossible to have economic growth and environmental protection. But I want to be careful. I also don't buy the view that somehow capitalism will just magically supply all this. I think the way we got that environmental protection was by laws and by government action that forced industry to reduce its environmental harm. And we need more of those laws and stronger laws.