932: Mike Kelland | A Planetary Approach to Fixing the Climate Crisis

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24:20You can find the course at jordanharbinger.com slash course. Now back to Mike Kelland. It's almost a carbon tax, but then instead of the tax going into the pocket of the dictator of the country or some stupid other scheme, it has to actually go to removing that same carbon that you are putting into the atmosphere. Otherwise, it's the whole like, hey, the schools are underfunded. Let's make the lottery. Oh, actually, let's take that money and build a new stadium because screw public schools. We'll pay them later. Maybe. Just kidding. It can't be that. It can't be that. And, you know, we have what's called carbon finance, which is actually a really big industry right now.

24:59So it's hundreds of billions of dollars are going to pay for carbon in various different ways. But like you say, there's different goals of those things and there's different ways that they work. So a lot of the money that goes into carbon right now, you're trading your allowances. It's called an offset. So it's like, okay, you were allowed to emit 100 tons. I was allowed to emit 100 tons. You only emitted 80. I emitted 120. I've got to buy 20 from you, right? So that's an accounting exercise, which is great for lowering emissions, but it doesn't do anything to take carbon out of the air. And it's a very different thing.

25:30And that's where most of it goes right now. And then in the removal side, we have what's called land use and natural solutions, which is like, oh, let's go plant a bunch of trees and let's plant some seagrass and reforest something, which is great, super helpful, but has limited global scalability. And it's very impermanent. We've seen in Canada, we had a quarter of Canada's emissions went up in smoke in the forest fires at the beginning of the summer. So all of that stored carbon that was in all those trees is suddenly back up in the atmosphere. And so it's really susceptible to climate risks, fundamentally, of that stored carbon going back.

26:07And so it's not really very permanent. So Canada is basically going to release 25 % more emissions just because of giant forest fires this year? They're lucky that they've managed to lobby the international community not to count that within their emissions. So they don't count any land use emissions and things like that within their budgeting. But yeah, basically Canada emitted another 170 million tons this year because of all these forest fires. So when we talk about that carbon removal at the massive gigaton scale, we can't just do it by planting trees. And we can't do it with the current sort of what they call offsets and the trading of credits and things.

26:39We have to do it by permanently removing carbon from the atmosphere. And there's a lot of different technologies for that. They're not scaled yet. There was big news yesterday. One of the big direct air capture firms, so one of these big companies that puts fans and pulls air through and then sucks the carbon up and puts it in a tank and then buries it back underground. They were bought by Occidental Petroleum for$1.1 billion. So there's definitely some interest and some growth in the space, but it's still emerging for sure. And the scaling up of that's going to be a huge endeavor. Like it's going to be a really, really hard thing for us to do in the timeframe we have.

27:12Well, it's good that the technology actually exists because I didn't even know that until I started researching this. And I also didn't know that most of the carbon on the Earth, on the Earth's surface actually, lives in the ocean. And there's natural processes that do this. Rock weathering, which I suppose is like a version of what planetary actually does. And then there's ways that it can be dissolved out of the air to balance. But then your oceans become acidic. Isn't that just kind of like when you use the SodaStream and you put carbon dioxide in the water and it sparkles? We don't want that to happen to the ocean.

27:43Sounds delicious, but it's not good for the fish. That's exactly right. So the way we explain it is there's two processes that put carbon into the ocean. And the ocean does store, like, you're absolutely right. It stores most of the carbon on the Earth's surface, 88 % of the carbon on the Earth's surface is in the chemistry of the ocean. And that means it's not in plants or in animals or in rocks. It's actually dissolved in the ocean water. Yeah, I didn't know that. I thought you were going to make something that sinks to the bottom. I'm like, this is a terrible idea. But it's just in the water.

28:11You can't tell that it's even there. That's right. And it's essential because everything in the ocean that forms a shell or a bone or anything like that makes it out of this carbon that's in the ocean. So all this what's called calcium carbonate, which is the same stuff that's in your toothpaste or in the cement in your house or whatever, that calcium carbonate is what oyster shells are made out of, crab shells, corals, all this kind of stuff. And so the way that it gets there is on Earth, we've got this cool little thermostat type action that happens where you get rain, dissolves all the CO2 out of the atmosphere, and then that rain falls down onto rocks around the world.

28:46And because CO2, when it's in water, is an acid, it weathers off the top layer, it dissolves the top layer of that rock and then neutralizes the acid and forms carbon salt. It's called a bicarbonate. The exact thing, you've got it in your house, it's baking soda. I was gonna say, isn't baking soda bicarbonate? Yeah, so it's basically just creates baking soda and then washes into the water. Yeah, and then that's been happening for millennia, millennia, millennia. And it really has been on really long timescales, like hundreds of thousands of years, moderating the amount of carbon dioxide that's in the atmosphere.

29:17So if we just stopped everything and said, okay, we're not emitting another ton of CO2 and everybody go to sleep for 200 ,000 years, we'd be coming back and like this process would have rebalanced all the carbon in the atmosphere. And it would be all sitting in the chemistry of the ocean as bicarbonate. Wow. So that's the good way, if you will, that it makes the ocean slightly basic, sodium bicarbonate slightly basic. If you mix it with an acid vinegar, you get that neutralization reaction. So that's a good thing. But then what happens when you radically and rapidly increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is that it also dissolves directly in there.

29:49And that happens much faster than this rock weathering process. So you get CO2 built up in the air and CO2 is really good at dissolving into water. And so it balances out the concentrations between the air and the ocean. Put a little more CO2 in the air, you're going to get some portion of that, about a third of it is going to dissolve into the ocean. And so as that happens, that CO2, which becomes an acid in water, it acidifies that water, and it actually makes it harder for all those organisms to get access to those carbonates. So it dissolves the shells of plankton and shellfish and all these kinds of things.

30:22And that acidification is a really negative part of climate change as well. Is this why the corals bleach and then eventually die? Is that part of that? It is a little. You know, acidification certainly makes corals less resilient to heat events that would bleach them out and stuff like that. So usually it's actually marine heat waves. The ocean is like our climate buffer, right? So 90 % of additional heat from climate change has been absorbed by the ocean and 30 % of the extra CO2 is acid in the ocean. So it's a huge buffer. If we didn't have two thirds of the Earth's surface covered in ocean, we would have a way worse climate problem than we have now.

30:57So it's this big buffer for that stuff. And luckily, it's the majority of the planet, but it still can't keep up with what we're dumping into the air. So how do we speed up the rock weathering cycle or is that not possible? So that's exactly what we do. So if you think about it with that rock weathering, the reason it happens slowly is because you've got very dilute CO2 coming down in rain, and then you've got these rocks that are not very reactive, right? They're just rocks. If you can take a rock and pre-process it, turn it into a more reactive form of base or antacid, you can add that directly to seawater, and it can neutralize some of that extra CO2 that's dissolving directly in there.

31:37And that has a really cool effect because that bicarbonate you're forming while you do that neutralization stays in seawater for 100 ,000 years. So you've got this really long term permanent storage of CO2. Wow. Why suddenly after hundreds of thousands of years, then what happens? I mean, do we know? Yeah, we do. So it's part of the global carbon cycle. So basically, after about 100 ,000 years, I mean, it's really, you can't track an individual molecule and stuff. But on average, it ends up turning into carbonate. So bicarbonate carbonate, which releases some of the CO2 back to the atmosphere.

32:07And it settles out on the bottom of the ocean through either biological action or just through settling. That forms sedimentary rocks. And that's where you get limestone from that we get cement from and concrete and all that stuff. And eventually that'll subduct through tectonic action and over millions and millions of years, it'll come back to the atmosphere through volcanic action. It's a whole cycle, but it's a really slow, really long cycle. Yeah. Normally I don't go, oh, well, that's a problem for future humanity. But if we're talking about a hundred thousand plus years, I feel okay doing it.

32:37Hopefully by then they'll have figured out, they'll be like, oh, that's an earth problem. I haven't thought about earth in a long time. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. If you can put enough antacid into the ocean, you can slurp up a whole lot of CO2 because as you neutralize that, you're also making room for more CO2 to come out of the sky. So it sort of pulls it down and sequesters it within the chemistry of the seawater. So it really turns the ocean into almost like a sponge for CO2. If you're creating a situation in which it's almost like heat transfer, right? If the water is really cold and you have hot air, some of the heat is going to be absorbed into the water.

33:15So this is like, oh man, we really need these carbon molecules, suck it right out of the air, put it in the water, and the water regains its balance. And you're saying we dump a crap load of Rolaids into the ocean, and that is going to suck out millions of tons of carbon? That's pretty much it. Okay. Yeah, I mean, it sounds so simple. Yeah, I almost don't believe you. Yeah, let's just dump a whole lot of Rolaids into the ocean. I mean, the problem is, right, a couple of different things. One is producing Rolaids gives you a lot of carbon emissions. So producing that antacid is hard. This is a human thing.

33:47This doesn't really impact the way that the ocean works or anything like that. But if you want to be able to make this profitable, you also have to be able to measure it. And the ocean is super hard to measure, right? It's really big. It sloshes around a lot and stuff dilutes out really, really quickly. So actually understanding how to measure this stuff is an emerging space that we're doing a lot of work on. So that's a really hard part of the problem as well. But the fundamental mechanism is that simple. Add an antacid to seawater, you do it very carefully, and then you've got to measure it.

34:19Those are the complexities around it, really. But the mechanism is really simple. How do you start this process? Because you've got to figure out creating all that antacid creates carbon. What phase are you at with testing that? Are you able to dump a bunch in and go, hey, look, this actually worked? Yeah, for sure. So we've been doing this now for just about four years. And we're getting to the point now over the next few months where we're doing our first what we call field trials. So they're basically net removals from the atmosphere. So we're able to say, even counting the emissions to produce this stuff, we've managed to remove additional CO2 beyond what was produced.

34:54So we're putting all the pieces in place. The science of this has been around for several decades. A lot of people have been working on this. My co-founder, Dr. Greg Rau in the company, is one of the pioneers in this. And he's been working on it for probably about 20 years, all told. And so there is a lot of science and background and basis for this work. We started four years ago in the lab. You know, you're in test tubes, you've got your little bottle of Rolates, and you've got your seawater, and you're putting one in the other, and you're measuring the pH, and you're measuring how much carbon's in there.

35:20And we've scaled that to big swimming pools, and then scaled that to plastic bags in the ocean, so you've got an isolated environment that you can work in. And then last year, we did the very first actual ocean trial of this, where we did a small amount was like four tons that we removed from the atmosphere in the ocean. It's not a lot, but it's also a lot. That's really something. Well, and by the end of this year, what is crazy, isn't it? We won't have run it continuously, but if we did, the scale of the projects we're doing this year will remove 6 ,570 tons per year. And we're doing two projects at that scale.

35:58So we're only going to remove net, I think, about 200 tons total this year. But the scale of the additions that we scale up to by November 23 will be in that 6500 range, which is pretty huge. And this is the thing about the ocean is that if we do make this work, and we can show that at larger and larger scales that it's super safe, and that we can measure it, and we can show that carbon is removed, because the ocean is so huge, and because it stores so much of this carbon, it has just the most massive scale potential. So if you talk about that gigatons and gigatons scale industry we need to build, this is the biggest thing we have by almost double any other technology.

36:38Yeah, this makes sense, right? Because otherwise you've got to build wind turbines that suck carbon out on everybody's roof, literally the whole world. But the ocean is so massive and it doesn't require machinery. I mean, you need machinery for other parts of this, but the machinery that takes the carbon out is the ocean. You can't beat that. There's just nothing larger on the planet than the ocean. So turning that into one giant test tube, essentially, or beaker is amazing. And I know people are like, no, it's not. You're going to destroy the ocean. We'll get to that in a second. But I want to start from earlier in the supply chain here.

37:11Where do you get the antacid? Because if you can't just buy it because it makes more carbon than it absorbs, are you recycling it? Is there just massive amounts of this stuff laying around somewhere from something else? So there is. It's a really interesting thing. and this has been a big part of our exploration over the last four years. There's a lot of different people working on this problem. So there's people out there who are building kilns, for example, that will capture the CO2 off the top and produce a low carbon antacid, essentially. There's people that are using electricity and using electrochemistry to do that with renewable energy.

37:44There are approaches where you can use a natural mined material that doesn't require a lot of emissions because you can use it directly out of the ground. and that's pretty limited. It's pretty expensive. But I think the biggest one, the most interesting one is that there's roughly a billion tons a year of what's called waste alkalinity produced by heavy industry every year. The problem with that is that some of it's okay, but some of it's pretty dirty. It's got metals in it, whatever. And we're looking at different things and different ways that we can clean that up. And we're making a lot of really good progress on it.

38:14So if you can pre-treat it and clean it up, then you can actually use it in a very low cost and high scale way. So it's out there. It's just processing it very carefully so that it's safe to use in ocean settings and things like that. Yeah. Using mine waste or tailings or whatever they're called would be great. And it's, yeah, mine tailings. Hey, all right. Oh, it's got mercury in it. Oh, OK. But we can take the mercury out. Yeah, we want an emotional roller coaster here. And I'm glad you didn't say, yeah, we just need to figure out how to do that. Because I was thinking if the answer is, OK, we need nuclear fusion that doesn't exist yet.

38:46And then we can use that to clean up the antacid or make it and then pull the carbon out of the air. It's like, man, we've really messed up this planet. But if science fiction is still the solution, then that's not good. But you love to hear good news in this space. Really, I feel like it is so rare to have good news. And this seems certainly good news. And so the mine tailings, you can clean those up. And then is it already antacid or it's just there's antacid as a component to that? So it's mine tailings is one thing. There's also waste from things like steel manufacturing and stuff. There's a lot of stuff out there that has different types of profiles, but it all starts as an antacid or that some component of it is an antacid.

39:24So it might be only 30 % of this stuff is an antacid and the rest is junk you got to get rid of. It might be that 60 % of it is antacid and the rest is junk you got to get rid of. Depends on the source. You have to be really careful about what you use and how you use it and how you characterize it. So that's a big activity that we undertake. Cleaning them up, characterizing them, making sure we can use them, them, all that kind of stuff. Are we just creating another bad byproduct though? Because it's okay, great. We get the antacid. And then also there's this toxic waste that comes out of it too.

39:50We got to figure out what to do with that. What ends up becoming of the rest of this stuff? Where's the catch is I guess what I'm asking you. There's always that, right? So managing the waste of a process that is going to be important. There's no question. We're not talking about forever chemicals. We're not talking about plastics or anything like that. We're talking about metals. We're a little In the sources we're looking at today, early on, they're already pretty clean. So they're not going to actually be a big percentage of it that actually has to be managed. But it definitely has to be managed.

40:19There's no question you have to be very careful when you characterize these sources as to what happens to it. A lot of these sources are being landfilled anyway, already. And so you're really landfilling less. It's higher concentration. So you have to be a little more careful with certain different things. But it becomes a little bit easier to manage from that perspective. I guess I'm trying to tease out some of the other positive byproducts that you have from this too. I read that you get hydrogen out of this, you get some battery materials. Is that not a thing anymore? No, it's not a thing anymore.

40:46We're still working on that process, which is what I call the electrochemical process. And it's a really interesting process. It may be actually more applicable to getting rid of waste for things like nickel mines and stuff like that, making them more profitable and producing the antacid as a byproduct. But that's a long cycle for us. It's going to take a long time to get that up and running. And so these sources of alkalinity that are out there that we can clean up today from heavy industry wastes are nearer term. And if we can find enough of them that are clean enough, it gives us the time to build up that technology into the future.

41:16So we're just taking a little emphasis off that and putting the emphasis on, hey, what's available today? Because that'll get us there faster. And frankly, with the scale of the problem and the speed we need to scale up this industry, we have to be moving as fast as we can.

41:32This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Mike Kelland. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by The Gist Podcast. If you're looking for a news podcast that is smart, unfiltered, and doesn't just echo whatever side you already agree with, check out The Gist with my friend Mike Peska. Mike's been doing this longer than just about anyone. It's actually the longest-running daily news podcast. It's earned that spot on Apple's top charts for a reason. Each episode's around 30 minutes, so it's perfect for your commute or while you're making breakfast. It's always packed with sharp, thought-provoking takes.

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42:56You can also email me. I'd love to surface a code for you, especially this holiday season. Those annual renewals are coming up for the show. start that e-commerce train rolling. Thank you for supporting those who support this podcast. Now for the rest of my conversation with Mike Kelland. In an earlier article, it was like the tailings, they give hydrogen, you can sell that. And then there's cobalt. So the cobalt doesn't need to be mined and release carbon and be mined by child slaves in Africa. We did an episode 807 about all of that. But I do agree. I mean, if you can get 20 years worth of this done with stuff that's sitting in massive piles outside of an old mine, that's a good way to kick this thing off.

43:34And then, I don't know, fingers crossed when there is fusion, it's like, okay, now we can make an absolutely enormous, ridiculously large quantity of this stuff. It's been tested out. The environmental impact has been measured and we can still remove it because people are saying, oh, fusion, fusion, fusion. And it's like, okay, fine. But even if fusion existed tomorrow, it's not going to get the carbon out of the atmosphere unless we have a machine to do that. And that machine is the ocean. Absolutely. I know some people are going to hear this and they're going to say, okay, we can remove all this carbon from the air.

44:05Why bother lowering the emissions or not building coal power plants? If we can just remove it and you're scaling that up, why bother scaling the emissions down? It is a matter of that word scale. The amount of removal that we can do, like we're already staring down the barrel of building this insanely large industry around carbon removal and having to do that in an incredibly short timeframe. frame, every additional day that goes by that we don't start cutting emissions, it becomes bigger and harder. When you think about carbon removal, it's one of these things that I wish we didn't have to do.

44:37I've been a canoeer my whole life. That's what I love to do. Get out in the backwoods as deep as I can. Try not to kill myself, that kind of thing. But from my perspective, as an environmentalist, everybody I know was yelling about this 30 years ago. And if we had actually started making a difference 30 years ago, instead of essentially doubling the amount of CO2 that's in the air over the last 20 years, we wouldn't need this. And I'd be perfectly happy not to be doing this. Carbon dioxide removal, it's not a valuable industry, right? It's something we have to do, not something we want to do. It doesn't give anybody energy and it doesn't feed anybody.

45:10And there's no value associated with it. We just got to do it now because it's too late. And we've squandered the time we had to fix the carbon problem. You want to do as little of it as you possibly can. And we already know we need to do a whole ton of it, pardon the pun, but you want to do as little as you can. How much does it cost per ton now versus what are you aiming at with scale? Most of the carbon removal stuff in that industry right now is pretty expensive as that emerging industry. Like I say, we're at like 0.04 % of what that industry has to become. I think the average price is about$400-ish a ton, which is way too much.

45:47It's just way too much. And the range is even higher, like up to$2 ,000 a ton for some pathways and stuff like that. We think with our approach, we can come in well under$50 a ton and maybe even under$25 a ton. And at that rate, you're sort of getting to a point where it's in line with the numbers that we need to be at to actually get this to the kind of scale we need to get it to. It seems like you almost have to get to negative cost per ton and make it profitable in order to get to the scale that you need. I assume that's occurred to you? It has. I mean, I think that the bottom line is it's not going to happen.

46:21They've got this thing called the abatement curve. So the abatement curve, if you look across everything the economy does, air travel or making steel or driving to work or whatever across the board, it assigns it a cost per ton of CO2 to abate that CO2. And so when you look at some things, some things actually have a negative abatement cost where it's like, oh, now solar energy is cheaper in some places than fossil fuels. So now putting in place solar is actually cheaper than fossil. So you've got a negative abatement curve. You make money by taking CO2 out of that system. Whereas other things have incredible abatement costs.

46:57Air travel right now is$1 ,400 a ton. So if you go out there and somebody's like, oh yeah, offset your flight for 30 bucks, that does nothing because the air travel emissions, if you actually want to get rid of those and use sustainable aviation fuel, which is really the only way right now,$1 ,400 a ton. And so when you look across that abatement curve, the only things that are negative in terms of CO2 abatement cost are the things that are actually going to be profitable to decarbonize. Everything else is going to cost us money to decarbonize. And that's just the reality of how this stuff works.

47:26What other problems are you expecting as you scale? So we're expecting a lot. It's a lot of work, right? So we've knocked out, I think, all of the baseline things, like the sort of check marks to say, can you actually do a project at all at any scale? And we've knocked all those out. We're actually doing projects now. We've managed to work our way through the regulatory environment so that we actually have permission to do this with existing permits and all that kind of stuff. We have a framework to measure the carbon so we can actually account for it and sell, you know, removals to companies and stuff like that and make money as a company.

47:59We have got these sources of antacids so that we can have a net carbon benefit. The big things that we need to continue to work on are scaling things. How much carbon can you actually safely remove within this local area, for example? And how do you measure that? And how do you go out and have the good biological understanding that it's not affecting the local sea life at certain scales and certain limits? We know really well that it's safe way down here. You know, at billions of tons scale, we have no idea, right? So there's a lot of work to do to get there. Yeah, I was going to ask, and I know people are just clawing at their phone for me to ask this, are you not worried this is going to destroy the ocean somehow?

48:39And what risks are there? Because dumping a bunch of mine tailings, for lack of a better word, into the ocean, that's what a lot of people are hearing right now. I know the most dangerous place for CO2 is actually in the air where it currently is now. We're all breathing it in and it's doing its thing with the greenhouse effect. But I think a lot of people are going, maybe don't dump a bunch of crap in the ocean and just keep your fingers crossed and hope that works, because that might be the only thing that's left. Yeah, absolutely. You have to be incredibly cautious with the ocean and how you work with it.

49:11We have, as a company, implemented all kinds of guardrails around us, right? So we've got a code of conduct that we follow at the board level. Every one of our projects today is partnered with an academic institution where they're monitoring everything that we do. We're working under the careful eye of local regulators who understand how this stuff works. The question of like, is it safe? Is a scale question. Is it safe at this scale? Because is it safe is the null statement. It doesn't really mean anything. So at the scales we're working at now, it's absolutely safe. We're working with products that are used all day, every day in wastewater processing to moderate the pH of the wastewater that goes out into the ocean already.

49:49So the regulator understands what safe levels are. We are doing massive amounts of testing for things like trace metals. We're looking at shading effects. So when you put the stuff out there, if it's not quite dissolved, you don't want it to overly shade the ocean so that plankton and seaweed and stuff doesn't grow. So we're looking at all that kind of stuff and we're keeping ourselves at very low levels compared to what the existing permits in wastewater processing already says. So we're at that very low level. And then we're layering on top of that a huge amount of monitoring, right? So we're doing like biological surveys and we're sampling bacteria.

50:21We're looking at this really cool thing that you can do in the ocean called eDNA, which is where you take a big sample of seawater and you say, what's all the DNA fragments that have been left here? So what species have been going through this water over the last couple of days? And you You can track and see whether that's changing based on what you're doing. And then we're doing very small scale processes with this to learn all that as we go. And the responsible thing at this point is to work within all of those guardrails and very carefully understand everything about that at this scale and then try it at the very next scale and then try it at the very next scale.

50:56That's how it'll work. But one of the things about this, what's really critical to understand, right, is that, first of all, the ocean is not this pristine, untouched environment. Just because we don't live there and we see the surface and it's like, oh, it's beautiful. It's being hit with climate change so much harder than the land is. And we are losing an incredible amount down there. If you sit there and say, OK, don't put stuff in the ocean, but then right behind you, billions of tons of CO2 are dissolving directly into the ocean. Are you really preventing harm at that point? You're not really.

51:28So that's one thing. And the other thing is that acidification is going crazy. If you're on the West Coast of North America, the acidification in the ocean because of climate change is so high now that you can't really grow an oyster. If you have an oyster farm, you can't just go and grow oysters unless you do exactly what we're doing. You have to add an antacid and lower that acidity or else your oysters won't grow because it's just too acidic because of all the CO2. So we're sort of at this point where what we're doing actually can have a pretty positive restorative effect. It doesn't mean we can be any less cautious.

52:02You can't use that as an excuse, but you start with the idea that if we actually could turn back some of this extra acid, we could do some positive restorative effects. And there's been some really good science on that. There was a study they did process identical to ours on the Great Barrier Reef. It was a really shallow area, so they could actually really adjust the pH and the acidity of that water. And they saw that as they added an antacid to that water, they had a 7 % increase in the growth rate of the corals. And so you had these corals essentially regrowing that had been damaged because of this antacid coming back in and giving them more of a ocean environment that they were used to.

52:40That's super interesting, man. Look, you're still going to have to manage thousands of people who think that you are coming to their town to dump laxative in the bay outside their home and all the whales and dolphins are going to die and water's going to turn pink. So hire a good publicist, I assume, at some point during your process here. But I'm glad and I think a lot of us are really glad that you are actually paying attention to this because I would understand it if you were like, yeah, it's going to screw up tons of stuff. But here's the problem. This is an extinction level event and we don't have a choice.

53:09And I would be like, oh, OK, this might be a dumb question. But if this bicarbonate or this antacid is taking carbon out of the air, does the water that this chemical is dissolved in have to be in contact with the air? Or does it dissolve so much in all the water uniformly that that just sucks the carbon out of the air? Because I know some parts of the ocean, there's a downward flow of the water. Do you have to figure out what sites where it's just going to stay on the surface because of the temperature? It's not a dumb question. It was a super good question because that is the hardest part of measuring your carbon and how much carbon you actually get out of the air.

53:41The ocean has layers, essentially. You know you go swimming in a lake and you jump in and it's all like nice and warm at the top and then it's like cold right underneath and your feet are freezing. That's called stratification. That's where you get layers of water. And in lakes, it's just temperature based. In the ocean, it's temperature based and salt based. So the salinity or the level of salt actually sets up these layers. What happens with that global ocean circulation is that some areas of the ocean won't cycle back up and touch the atmosphere for like a thousand years. Wow. So it's a really long cycle.

54:14What you have to be really careful with as we do this and do this process is that you can only count the effect when that reacts with CO2. And then when that water that now has less CO2 in it gets more CO2 out of the atmosphere. So that's what has to happen. That's what's called flux. And so the CO2 has to come out of the air and refill that surface water to bring it back into equilibrium or into the same concentration as the atmosphere. And so that's one of the things we track. We look at that. We go, OK, well, was this region better than that region because it has less of that stratification or it's going to have the alkalinized water, the CO2 depleted water is going to be at the surface for longer.

54:57And so some sites are better than others from that perspective, for sure. man i didn't realize the water would stay down in some places for a thousand years and it's still moving that whole time right it just shows you how massive the ocean is that something can be moving and this is going to pop up a thousand years later i mean i know it doesn't exactly work like this but if you could float a little test molecule that had a tracking device on it you would need a thousand year battery to look at the cycle of this thing floating through the ocean it's really incredible i i take it also you're just not going to dump all this stuff in from three or four sites around the world, but it's got to be spread out all over the place, right?

55:30So each area would have a relatively small impact, but collectively there's just this massive aggregate carbon removal. Yeah, that's right. Here's a sense of scale for you, because I think this is a wild stat. Say you wanted to be able to measure this effect anywhere in the ocean. So you wanted to be able to put a little probe in the most sensitive equipment that we have on earth and be able to actually measure this effect. You would have to add 37 billion tons of antacid to the ocean in one shot, and then you would be able to instantly measure it on the most sensitive equipment we have, and then it would dissipate, and you wouldn't be able to measure it anymore.

56:02So 37 billion tons, that's kind of the number. So when we talk about the scale of the ocean and the scale of the carbon in the ocean, like it's that huge, like it's massively, massively, massively huge. Some of the estimates are that we could do 100 billion tons a year of carbon removal with this process, which is crazy. But the problem, as you're pointing out, is that you can't do all that in one place. Can't throw it off the dock of a pier in San Francisco and have it do its thing. You can't overload one ecosystem with it, right? Because that local effect or that local spike is just going to be way too much for anything that you could do, but it's going to be safe.

56:36And so exactly our strategy is small amounts at lots of places and try to mirror that magic wand so that you can get an even distribution at all of these various places around the world. I'm afraid to ask this, but who is going to pay for this, right? Because in the United States, you might be able to say like, hey, if you are producing something, you have to pay for this. And maybe there are government owned or cooperations where it's like a cement plant, but it's doing this. But what about in India and China, where they're going to be producing the most carbon because they're modernizing quickly?

57:09And I'm not blaming India and China. I don't want people to be like, how dare you? We already went through our industrial revolution. We've already dumped a bajillion tons of carbon and we continue to do so. But now we're outsourcing a lot of our carbon pollution to those places who might go, yeah, I'm not paying for that. We're trying to figure out how to feed everyone. We'll deal with that in 100 years. Oh, we'll be dead by then. Oh, well, sorry. It's a super interesting political question right now. We're already trading hundreds of billions of dollars in what are called offsets, which is this sort of accounting exercise to reduce emissions.

57:40Eventually, ideally, fingers crossed, we get to 2050. those offsets don't matter anymore because like I was saying with offsets it's kind of like well you've got 100 tons I've got 100 tons I went under you went over I buy yours right or you buy mine by 2050 nobody has any we're all at zero you're not allowed to emit anything and so what that means is the money that's currently going into those offsets can actually move into removals and it becomes a really interesting thing from that perspective but it's a huge international conversation, there's things like what's called Article 6, which is about trading carbon between countries.

58:14And different countries are picking this up. I think it was India that recently said we're not allowing any carbon removal credits to be sold to the rest of the world. They have to stay in India for our own contributions to international accords. There's countries in Africa that are saying the minimum price we'll sell it at is 10x the price of typical forestry credits. So there's a lot of that kind of stuff that's happening right now to get those markets moving. Today with permanent removals, a lot of what we're seeing in the terms of the funding is what is called a catalytic buyer. So it's really similar to what happened during COVID, where companies would go out or governments would go out and say, okay, I'm going to place an order for 10 million doses of your vaccine.

58:52And then the company would be like, we don't even have an idea for how it's going to be made. And they're like, it's okay, here's an order we're prepaying, we're doing it at risk. That model is actually emerging right now. And there's a few different companies that are getting in on it. Shopify in Canada, it's an e-commerce firm that you probably know well. Yeah, they sponsor the show actually. Oh, do they? Right on. They did an AMC. They were one of the very first ones. Stripe was another technology company that did. And then they teamed up and they created this thing called Frontier. And Frontier is the billion dollars of advanced market commitment for permanent carbon removal.

59:21So it's a really cool initiative that goes out and buys and pre-buys for this to accelerate things. But we're seeing more and more companies getting in and buying into the space. I actually believe that we're going to move to a point with removals that's going to be more about what's called insetting. So offsetting is like I'm buying carbon credits from somebody else. Insetting is I'm doing projects of my own to reduce my own carbon footprint. So I'm going to use those removals to reduce my own carbon footprint. So there's a bunch of different ways that that comes in. Some of it's regulatory, some of it's market-based.

59:53Everybody's got their own scheme for how these things get funded. I expect it to grow up to a point. I think if we hit all of the IPCC goals, it'll be trillion dollar annual industry by 2050. That's the scale of it. Good news or potentially good news in this space is so rare. And I'm glad that this exists. I'm glad we're having this conversation. And yeah, fingers crossed for this to work at scale. The stakes are really high. You can't overstate that, right? It's just it's very difficult to explain. It is an extinction level type of thing for at least much of humanity. And even if we had fusion tomorrow and infinite energy, we still have to figure out how to get the carbon out of the air because we have to undo the mess that we have made.

1:00:36Even if everybody gets an electric car this evening and the electricity is free, which it isn't, we still need this technology. So my future is 1 % brighter, I suppose. My hypothetical future is 1 % brighter. That's good, man. And, you know, we all have to do whatever we can. I think one of the biggest takeaways I have after getting into this, right, because I was in software before and getting into climate, total world change, right, trying to figure out what to do here. It's a huge problem. It's really hard to get your hands around. It's really hard to figure out what you can do that's productive and helpful.

1:01:07We have to get beyond the anxiety of it, like, oh, my God, it's going to take us all out and all that kind of stuff. You have to get beyond the kind of like, I'm not doing enough in my own life, so I can't push others. And get to a point where you find your own way to have leverage on the problem, right? And you want to keep eating beef? Go keep eating beef, but go lobby your local utility board to put more renewable energy on the grid for you, right? Because that's going to actually have a bigger impact than you stopping eating beef. Go out and do something helpful. It doesn't have to be go start a carbon removal company.

1:01:38Well, you don't want any competition? Is that what's going on? I can't run an industry the size of the oil industry by myself. I'm just saying you don't have to. There's a lot of different ways to make a really big impact if you get past the enormity of the problem and get yourself into a mode which is like, what's the little things I can do that have leverage and that matter? Mike Kellen, thank you very much. Right on. Thanks, Jordan. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger Show with Rory Stewart. He walked across Afghanistan post 9-11 in the winter, which is incredible, but even more interesting is his philosophy on charity.

1:02:13He's president of GiveDirectly, which gives cash with no strings attached. I walked across Afghanistan just after 9-11, and it was an amazing time to walk across the country. It was the middle of the winter. I was walking with a giant dog, and the Taliban government had just fallen, but the new government hadn't emerged. And it changed my life. Really, what kept me alive and safe were the villagers. I remember feeling for the first time so lucky to be with them. I was so tired. I'd been walking then for nearly 28 days without a break, living on bread. And I felt a kind of wonderful sense of brotherhood.

1:02:50It was a very humbling experience. I think the biggest lesson I took from the walk is about global poverty. I was staying with some of the very, very poorest people in the world. And I was seeing a lot of really bad aid programs, really kind of crappy development programs. and a lot of these villages I went to, and such a deep level of cynicism from the local villages about what on earth these foreigners thought they were doing, spending all this money and delivering basically no benefit to these villages. Basically, their phones are their bank accounts, which allows us now to deliver money directly to people's phones without going through governments or middle people.

1:03:28Turns out if you give people cash, it's better than almost any other program for nutrition, for education, for health, for shelter. The truth is that we're not yet in a world in which it's realistic to expect people from Global North to pay every month to support the income of people in the Global South. To learn why cash charity is best and what's wrong with foreign aid, check out episode 867 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. So this is fascinating and way better than those fans that somehow blow tons of air over some membrane and it collects the tiniest bit of carbon. And after like a week, you've got a little tiny, a little dollop.

1:04:09I just don't see that working. You need like a trillion of those. The thing that I don't love, well, in general, really, because there are always unforeseen consequences, but it just kind of seems like we have no choice. I guess we can always put carbon back into the atmosphere if we take out too much, but that seems unlikely, and that's not really the problem that I'm worried about. I worry about our oceans if we are dumping in millions of tons of a substance in there, no matter what that substance is, unless it's water. That's just, it freaks me out a little bit. There's something to worry about here.

1:04:39Oceans are incredibly complex ecosystems. Do we really want to dump 10 million tons or whatever of baking soda in there? I just don't know. I'm glad that Planetary's goals include healing the ocean, not just using it as a giant machine to offset the damage done to the rest of the planet by humanity. Last year, Planetary won a million dollar XPRIZE for the work backed by the Musk Foundation. I think it's great that a lot of what's needed is actually also industrial slash mining waste that needs to be processed and moved, not something that needs to be freshly manufactured. It seems almost like it's killing two birds with one stone.

1:05:12Any bird killing, of course, requires energy, which is always going to be the bottleneck here, at least for the foreseeable future. So we really need nuclear and or straight up fusion. Take me to that fusion future where this is all totally possible. I think nuclear could still do it. We just, you know, got to build infrastructure. Might take us longer to build the nuclear infrastructure we need than to actually generate nuclear fusion. Again, what do I know about that? By the way, Planetary's already sold a lot of carbon removal to Shopify, who sponsors this show. All things Mike Kelland will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com or ask the AI chatbot on the website.

1:05:45Transcripts in the show notes. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support this show. Don't forget about six-minute networking as well over at jordanharbinger.com slash course. I'm at jordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting.

1:06:18The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. Now, if you know somebody who's interested in geoengineering, the environment, global warming, science in general, definitely share this episode with them. It might make their day or, you know, their day 100 years in the future whenever we get this tech going. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Everything Everywhere Daily. You've heard the phrase learn something new every day. Sounds nice, but do you actively do it?

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