Ask EvC Anything - 2024

Join David & Ed for a special end-of-2024 Ask-Us-Anything episode dedicated to your questions.

Thanks to everyone who sent in your questions - we couldn't do it without you!

Also, thanks to the Pembina Institute for help with an answer at 22:00 (reference link - Meeting the emissions cap-A feasible pathway for the oil and gas).

More show notes on our website.

About Your EvC Co-Hosts:

David Keith is Professor and Founding Faculty Director, Climate Systems Engineering Initiative at the University of Chicago. He is the founder of Carbon Engineering and was formerly a professor at Harvard University and the University of Calgary. He splits his time between Canmore and Chicago.

Sara Hastings-Simon studies energy transitions at the intersection of policy, business, and technology. She’s a policy wonk, a physicist turned management consultant, and a professor at the University of Calgary and Director of the Master of Science in Sustainable Energy Development.

Ed Whittingham is a clean energy policy/finance professional specializing in renewable electricity generation and transmission, carbon capture, carbon removal and low carbon transportation. He is a Public Policy Forum fellow and formerly the executive director of the Pembina Institute, a national clean energy think tank.

Produced by Amit Tandon & Bespoke Podcasts

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Energy vs Climate
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Transcript

Ed Whittingham: Hi, I'm Ed Whittingham, and you're listening to Energy vs. Climate, the show where my co host David Keith, Sara Hastings Simon, and I debate today's climate and energy challenges. On December 19th, David and I recorded an Ask Us Anything show based on your listener questions. We touched upon a variety of topics, ranging from direct air capture and carbon capture and storage technology, questions related to net zero by 2050, The oil and gas industry generally, Canada's oil and gas emissions caps specifically, and whether or not climate change poses existential risk.

We had a fun conversation, and though it's generally not a good idea to drink and record podcasts, in the spirit of the approaching holiday, We're only too happy to ignore that advice. A reminder that Sara's on medical leave for the time being. So it's just David and me again. Now here's a show. It was actually a carryover question from the show that we taped with David Wallace Wells.

And this one comes from Robert Goodof. Thinking of your background with carbon engineering, David, this is especially well tailored for you. His question is, how and in what use cases can direct air capture ever compete on economics with most other carbon capture processes? 

David Keith: I think the answer is it just doesn't compete because it is operating in a separate market doing a separate thing.

So maybe this depends on what you mean by carbon capture, but what I mean when I say carbon capture and storage is carbon capture and storage from fixed sources like cement plants or power plants or steel plants. Thanks. And in general, not in every case, but in general, um, it's going to be cheaper to capture the CO2 from this specific sources than do direct air capture.

To me, the purpose of direct air capture is really one of two things. It's either to remove carbon dioxide, so that's capture plus CCS, which does a fundamentally different thing than avoiding emissions. Or, It's to make synthetic fuels, which also does a fundamentally different thing, but I guess having said that, maybe I overstated it because in fact, the cost of capture from fixed sources varies a lot on their scale and location and so on.

In some places, it can be very expensive to capture from fixed sources because it's you need to add equipment on to an existing operating process and process engineers really don't like to have their plant messed with. So while. In general, for any big fixed source in a good location, it would be cheaper to do capture than direct air capture or some other carbon removal.

I think there are definitely going to be some cases where it would be cheaper to do the carbon removal than it would be to do the direct capture. 

Ed Whittingham: Yeah, and especially when we look at the cheaper forms of carbon removal that, you know, direct air capture, we CDR show. 300 a ton, 400 a ton. I recently looked at a receipt for someone who bought a bunch of credits from Frontier.

And let's just say it was on the order of 500 USD per ton. Roughly, real finger math. I know for carbon capture, in some use cases, you can get that down to say 65 a ton. But those are optimal uses when I think literally you can bolt on capture technology to the end of say, You know, a flu stack and capture it.

Those are typically not the carbon capture cases that we're talking about in Canada. And in some cases I looked at a cement plant rather than bolting on capture technology. You're actually looking at developing an entire new plant that would be an adjunct to the existing plant and a plant on the order of, you know, 1.

2 billion. 

David Keith: Got it. But then you're making a whole new train. So the fair question is the difference between the cement train that makes a given amount of product with and without CCS. 

Ed Whittingham: So the, the, the irony that I'll add right now is, and perhaps you've done this, I know in the work that I do on carbon removal, I've done this.

So for so long, carbon removal has been coupled with carbon capture and seen as a substat. They, as you say, serve fundamentally different purposes. So, the carbon removal community has tried to disentangle the two for years. With the changes in the US and the new administration coming in. There's an opportunity to keep existing policy for carbon removal, as long as it's seen by the administration as a subset of carbon capture, because they've got people like future Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who's really bullish on carbon capture and, and, you know, his application in the oil and gas industry.

David Keith: Yeah, but it's not clear to me that he wouldn't also want to support carbon removal. It's really hard to tell how it'll play. As a senior colleague in the U. S. Environmental Administration said to me recently, we have no idea what will happen. We just don't know. 

Ed Whittingham: Yeah, I agree. And I think I can name his name because he's no longer with the Department of Energy, Noah Deich.

Who, uh, as of this recording, his last day with the Department of Energy working on carbon removal in the U. S. was four days ago. I talked to him yesterday, and let's just say that the administration in the Department of Energy, which has been leading U. S. work, is going to stay quiet until we get past the inauguration, until they figure it out, until, you know, the incoming administration rediscovers the executive bathrooms.

Which means a bit of a month's long pause on kind of anything proactive rolling out. 

David Keith: Yeah. Step back to the highest level. Carbon capture from fixed sources is fundamentally a way to make a product, whatever the product is, cement or steel, whatever, without emissions. And so it should compete with other ways to zero emissions, which might be solar power or nuclear power, what have you.

And carbon removal does something different, it, it removes carbon and allows us to go backwards. And my view is there's lots of reasons why in the long term we might want to do carbon removal, because it's the only way to reduce long term climate risk, but over the next decades, my view is we should be spending kind of more than 90 percent of the total effort on those two on cutting emissions.

Ed Whittingham: And we'll see how much carbon capture actually factors into that, and we've got a question further down that we'll talk about. It'll elude to carbon capture in Canada's oil and gas industry. Okay, let's get to our second question. This one comes from David Cooney Jr. And he asks, what are the three biggest obstacles to achieving significant reduction in GHG emissions between now and 2050, and for each obstacle, what are the three What must people do to overcome it?

That is not a small question. 

David Keith: Selfishness, short term thinking, and corruption. 

Ed Whittingham: Selfishness, short term thinking, and corruption. Well, so to honor the questioner, what do we do to overcome selfishness, short term thinking, and corruption? I have no idea. Um, that's fair. Yeah, and, and, at the risk of being agreeable, I would agree with all three.

Here, let's, let's approach it a different way. The U. S., the new U. S. administration, in unseeing things, you can't even have carbon or climate in any kind of title or any kind of document. So people might think that it's a significant barrier between now and 2050 when we talk with David Wallace Wells, we actually thought not.

So maybe we can just replay a little bit of that conversation. 

David Keith: The questioner asked, what are the barriers you're achieving significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050? I think at this point, significant reductions by 2050 are extremely likely. They're basically in the mainstream expected forecast.

So I think the answer is. Nothing much more than what is already happening. 

Ed Whittingham: Why will the Trump administration not get in the way of that? You can say, you know, it's got the world's biggest economy, he's got control of the world's biggest economy, uh, he's pretty clearly anti climate. Why won't he stop progress?

David Keith: Why won't Trump stop progress? Well, I mean, he might stop progress if he triggers a nuclear war, which is, you know, a higher probability, probably in a Trump administration than otherwise. But other than something insane like that, I think first of all, Trump isn't in control of the U. S. economy. He's a very powerful president with a strong mandate, but his ability to change things still really has limits.

And there are a lot of reasons why solar and battery electric vehicles are likely to continue, among them the fact that Elon Musk has a powerful voice and wants them to continue. But aside from all that, the U. S. is an important country, but it's only one of many countries, and the U. S. presidential term is only four years long, and probably more realistically, only two years of full power.

Because for me, midterm elections and climate cares about integrated emissions. So like two or three years don't matter that much. Two or three years on one country, even the U. S. doesn't matter that much. 

Ed Whittingham: Yeah. Again, echoing some of what we talked with David Wallace Wells, China has invested massively in the clean energy economy.

A significant portion of that 1. 2 trillion going into the clean energy economy is coming from China. It's retooling parts of its economy. Now it has this vested interest in ensuring that the world continues its progress. 

David Keith: As the mix of China's exports are shifting to have more and more of them be basically clean tech, solar, battery, electric vehicles, it means China has a bigger and bigger incentive to push for climate policy in the rest of the world because it wants to sell stuff.

And I think that's an underappreciated and likely really powerful, you know, ratchet for climate policy in the next decades. 

Ed Whittingham: So in your, your three point initial answer, the third one was corruption. What do you mean by that? 

David Keith: I was kind of being glib. I mean, I guess, I mean the fact that in some respects to accept that climate action is a kind of utilitarian good that a wise benevolent government would do the extent to which it doesn't do it is because there's corruption as part of it.

That special interests have too much power. You know, that's not so clear cut because arguably we're actually cutting emissions about as fast as the utilitarian optimum would say we should. 

Ed Whittingham: And I could actually, for a corruption tale, we could direct the listener to the conversation we had around carbon removal about this time a year ago about the problem with threesomes.

And that, that problem, uh, still very much exists. Okay. Code Clements has got another two parter. How quickly are we headed to conditions in your book? And then, uh, second part, uh, we are on the way to three degrees Celsius, three degrees Celsius above pre industrial, uh, of warming. Given lack of leadership, what happens if we reach five degrees Celsius above pre industrial?

David Keith: So, first of all, I just don't think we're headed to three degrees centigrade. So, the kind of estimates from The International Energy Agency from The Economist, etc. suggests that kind of rough extrapolation of current policies takes us to temperatures that are probably under 2. 5, probably just a little over 2.

And if you kind of count the inertia of things getting better, it's probably better than that. So I think. You know, to get to three, you'd have to either have the climate sensitivity be very high, that is, climate be much more reactive to CO2 than we expect, or things to really turn around, that is, the world to actually gonna actively stop transition and go backwards, which both of which seem pretty unlikely.

Ed Whittingham: At what point, because we were talking about 5 degrees of warming just 10 years ago, at what point in the last 10 years was there this consensus that actually this worst case scenario we'd envision, it's very unlikely to happen now? 

David Keith: I think it's moving slowly. I, I, I noticed that people seem very slow to appreciate just how quickly things are changing, that we actually may get to peak emissions next year.

I think it's just an amazing fact. Sorry, peak global emissions or peak Chinese emissions? So, so peak Chinese next year seems likely. And peak global emissions by the end of the decade seems quite likely, and that's a stunning, uh, just a stunning result. 

Ed Whittingham: Yeah, it does seem, it's a real turnaround compared to just a few years ago when it doesn't seem to be something that is very well appreciated yet within people who pay attention to climate.

David Keith: Maybe it's wrong. I mean, that's, you got to say that, you know, a skeptic would say, show me, you know, we haven't actually seen emissions go down yet, but I think you look at the emissions models are not that complicated. If you're just looking a few years ahead, it's hard to do anything and predict emissions 30 years ahead.

If you're just looking at a few years ahead, you're looking at economic projections and flows into capital stock. And there's not. It's not so hard to predict. 

Ed Whittingham: Okay, let's get to our next question here from Ivana. I don't actually have Ivana's last name. Sorry about that. Hi team, long time listener and fan here.

Thank you, Ivana. I'm a sustainable finance professional with nearly a decade of experience in asset management in London, UK, before family circumstances brought me back to Calgary. three years ago. And my question is a tricky one. How do you engage with the deeply entrenched and influential cohort in the oil and gas industry that often looks down on sustainability or green initiatives?

David and I both have lots of experience with this and David, maybe it's a chance to work in your University of Calgary story with IC and some of the shenanigans there. But, uh, the question is, yeah, how do you engage with these deeply entrenched and influential folks in the oil and gas industry? 

David Keith: Maybe I have two kinds of answers, but I'd like to hear what you think, Ed.

I mean, one answer is just talk to them. Then in fact, people are willing to talk about it now and are willing to engage. I think. The other answer is that at some level, the core oil and gas companies have such a strong Self interest in trying to avoid action just for really obvious reasons that the companies are never likely to turn around very much.

People aren't the same as companies. The answer is people are leaking from those companies. If you look at where employment is going, which, you know, more or less will track capital spend. So the capital spent on clean energy is now much larger than the capital spent on oil and gas. So the answer is people are moving out and so you can talk to lots of oil and gas people about renewables because they're working in renewables companies.

Ed Whittingham: And but with the caveat there that the renewables industry still like if you look at Alberta really only has a fraction of the absorption capability of the oil and gas industry. So people are moving out. Which, and by some estimates, the oil and gas industry in Alberta employs 300, 000 people directly and indirectly.

Renewables? Someone's gonna email about this, but I think maybe has about a tenth of that. And will probably, even if we completely green our grids, won't have a significantly higher absorption rate. So we still have this problem with this industry that employs a ton of people that is shedding jobs. 

David Keith: For sure.

So first of all, I want to kind of hit myself for saying renewables, because I don't think it's just about renewables. It includes nuclear and other things. So it's broadly decarbonization or clean tech. Alberta is a very different situation. Uh, we have a renewables industry, but it's mostly an industry of installing renewables, which doesn't produce big value added.

I mean, you know, people make profits, but the big economic value added goes to people making the core technologies. So people actually developing the machines that build the, that are, that. The machines that are needed in the solar plants or the machines that are needed in the battery plants, those are people making really huge profits.

And Alberta has, I'm not going to say zero, but a pretty small number of those jobs. And unless Alberta kind of magically creates them, the answer is it won't. And as, as employment goes down and eventually in oil and gas, it's going to go to somewhere else in Alberta, but it might not be somewhere else in energy at all.

Ed Whittingham: So for this, and from my experience as trying to engage the oil and gas industry. I think we've turned a corner and we've turned a corner for the worse. I'm going to talk about the oil sands corner of the oil and gas industry because While it's only one part, um, it's a very significant part on a per barrels of oil produced basis.

Back, you know, when I was doing this work 10, 15, 20 years ago, to your point, David, you would have good people who really believed in it. And let's say some CEOs as well. It's like, we can do this and, uh, we're going to spend money on it. We're going to have VPs of sustainability. We're going to do all the right things, and I wouldn't say it was just window dressing.

I think where we're at today, and from the intel that I get, a lot of especially the companies in the oil sands, they've looked at and they've invested a lot of money on social license, and they realize that it is always this mirage on the horizon that they'll never get it. And they've thrown everything in the kitchen sink at it, they'll never get it.

And they're also, they're looking, they won't grow. So what you have, the operations now and the oil sands and what's built out, largely that's going to be it. So then they're looking, what do you do when you're not growing and you don't throw anything at sustainability? You operate kind of like an income trust.

And that's the talk. So by that you pare down costs. You kick out dividends and you operate that for 30 years. And when you're done, you close down shop. This is the what's at completely at odds. And we'll get to it a bit with these massive investments in decarbonizing the oil and gas industry, like with carbon capture.

If you're operating on an income trust model. And to operate like that, you don't actually need these decarbonization technologies. 

David Keith: So this is absolutely fascinating. And this is, in a sense, what I felt like for even decade and a half, or almost two decades ago here, I was saying, in a sense, should happen.

That is, that if these industries aren't going to grow, we might as well, just as a society, start to decarbonize. I mean, the shareholders and, but also everybody else gets into wages and taxes. We just extract the wealth as best we can. And that means cutting out all the fluff of environmental BPs and so on, and just focusing on grinding it out, minimizing costs, maximizing return with the idea that you're just going to run it for some number of years and eventually shut down.

To have you say that you actually think that there, some of them are changing to do that, I think in some ways is a healthy sign that things are going in a sensible direction, but it also shows the complete incongruity between that. And this huge federal money that might come in through pathways. 

Ed Whittingham: Yeah.

David Keith: Because the point is, those two things don't fit together. 

Ed Whittingham: They do not fit together. And you need a shareholder base who actually thinks the world is going to get serious on climate change to justify the company's side of the investment. Not going to get the feds or the taxpayer to pay for everything.

And typically I find the shareholders investing in oil and gas companies because most of them think that the world isn't going to get serious on climate change. 

David Keith: Maybe what you said is backwards in the sense that shareholders who really think the world's going to get real on climate change and think that a big part of that is electric vehicles reducing oil demand, not precipitously, but we can reduce it.

I think they'll conclude that there's nothing to do in oil sense, except just take the money out. 

Ed Whittingham: So as one example. Suncor which is, you know, one of the biggest oil sands players. Recently just canned the Suncor Energy Foundation, which is this corporate philanthropic arm that was all about building social license through investing in communities and environmental groups and community halls and Indigenous groups.

All that, They canned it, they laid everyone off. 

David Keith: I think that's great, I got to say. Because that stuff never made any sense to me. This social license stuff was always a little bit nonsense. You know, no version of the world where they're going to put such a green sticker on them. Even if they did CCS at low cost that, that reduced eruption emissions.

There'd still be the problem of the actual product, which is the fundamental problem, the problem of burning the product, put CO2 in the air, and climate policy is going to push it out. And so, I'd rather that that money Gets returned to shareholders and hopefully can do something useful with it or to government and taxes instead of spent on stuff that makes no sense.

Ed Whittingham: The downside is I used to dine out for free, you know, free lunches, free dinners, because apparently as the head of PEM and I could dangle the key to social license in front of the eyes of these executives. 

David Keith: No, I'll share that. I mean, one of those years when I was at UCalgary and I was like the visible, most visible climate professor or whatever in Canada by some financial post measure, I went out to see Flames games at the expense of Suncor itself a few times.

Sure. Yeah, that was a fun junket, but it was stupid for that. They didn't get anything out of it. 

Ed Whittingham: Yeah. By the way, if there's any oil and gas executive that is stupid enough to think I still dangle the keys of social license. 

David Keith: Well, take a free meal. We just. are going to lie to you and tell you you're going to get anything out of it that will fundamentally protect your business because the fundamentals drive the business oil.

I mean, just to say the obvious oil is just not like beer or some other consumer product where really people care a lot about the label on it. It's a commodity and the commodity dynamics drive this and none of this salesmanship changes much. 

Ed Whittingham: I used to resist and some companies would think about it. Any effort to Brand their gasoline is greener than the next because people fundamentally that's just not a driver.

of why they buy gasoline. And, and then even just looking at the ridiculousness of it, at the refinery level, you have hydrocarbons from all over the place that are sloshing together. How can you separate one from the other? 

David Keith: And because it's a fungible commodity, even if 10 percent of end consumers really cared about which oil they bought, or 10 percent of countries cared about it, because it's It's a very efficient market upstream.

It just won't make any difference because they'll substitute. The point is it's driven by fundamentals. And right now, the fundamental is that through a combination of climate policies and real technological change on electric vehicles, we're likely going to see peak oil in maybe not quite this decade, but early the next, and it's not going to crash after that, but it's going to start to go steadily down.

And that's a different oil business. 

Ed Whittingham: We have a related question. This comes from Ed Brost. I don't know if you remember Ed. Yeah. Longtime Shell guy. Thanks, Ed, and obviously a listener. Is the federal government's oil and gas emissions cap, particularly on oil sands producers, aligned with the emission level that the industry has volunteered to meet via Pathways Alliance?

David Keith: That's a question for you, Ed. I don't know the answer. 

Ed Whittingham: That was actually a question for the Pembina Institute. So, I went and I'm going to give full credit to Janetta McKenzie, who, uh, is, uh, heads up the oil and gas program at the Pembina Institute. Thank you, Janetta. So, I'll, I'll crib a bit from her answer.

And in the show notes, uh, Pembina Institute has done. So, looking at it, the Pathways Alliance has set a public goal of reducing emissions by 22 megatons by 2030. And it includes 10 to 12 megatons from the Pathways CCS project. And Pathways, for those who don't know, it's a number of the operators. And they're looking to create a pipeline, a CO2 pipeline network, and where they are, collect that in the pipeline and ultimately inject the CO2 in pore space that is more suitable, which actually isn't close to where most of the operators are.

David Keith: A basic fact that's always been true that takes a while to sink in. The OLSATs are not a great for CCS because there are not good reservoirs there for disposal. 

Ed Whittingham: Yeah, yeah, for sure. So they need to pipe it to where Strathcona is. Strathcona resources is. where they do have the right pore space. And that I, last time I checked, I think it was a pipeline of about 200 kilometers, which I think is easy, but I don't know if any pipeline, even if it's not crossing provincial borders, but it's going through multiple First Nations reserves or traditional territories, I don't think anything is easy.

So there's that little issue to contend with. Uh, and then she says the technical feasibility analysis of the emissions cap released in last year's regulatory framework. was closely aligned with those industry commitments. The framework found about 20 megatons of technically achievable emissions reductions in the oil sands by 2030.

To go back, Oil Sands or Pathways Alliance has promised 22 megatons, and then the Fed said, we think you can get 20 megatons. 

David Keith: All right, that's comparing a reduction versus a cap, or no, these are reduction to reductions. 

Ed Whittingham: Yes. So the feds looked at it and said, Can companies do this? Can they meet a cap? And they said, and pathways said, we'll do 22 megatons.

And the feds said, Yeah, we think you can do 20 megatons. And that would allow you to stay within the cap. That's the bottom line. 

David Keith: Important caveat listeners will have heard me say this before. But there's something very different about the structure of talking about a cap on something which is an absolute number compared to a reduction, where The person making reduction owns the baseline because reductions like that.

It's very hard to be sure what they need. So if I say I've got a hard cap, I'm not going to drink more than three beers a week. That's an enforceable measurable thing. But if I say I'm going to cut my beer consumption by 14 beers a week, that's really easy for me to do. Because I could say, Okay. Oh, my beer consumption was going to be 38 beers a week, and I just cut it down because I felt like it, and so I won in my great, uh, beer reduction.

Ed Whittingham: Mm hmm. So, and again, going back to our CDR episode, remember using the analogy of paying me, when normally that night I was going to drink 50 beers, instead you paid me to drink 47 beers less. And then you took that credit. 

David Keith: Huge credit for reducing your beer consumption. I'm really proud of it. 

Ed Whittingham: Yeah, I'm really proud.

I'm really proud. I've cut down. These days I'm only drinking 40 beers a night. All of this, you know, meeting the cap, what the Fed says is technically feasible, what the Pathways Alliance is promising, it is all predicated on CCUS. Not everything. So they have other things that they're doing, particularly around solvents.

But as we are looking at the numbers here, 10 to 20 megatons, uh, would come from CCS. So, we just talked a little bit about CCS. It's technically feasible, it's doable, but again, in order for companies to pony up their share, you really think that it's going to be worth the investment. And as we just talked about, that is anathema.

To a business model in which you're operating like an income trust. 

David Keith: And, and you got this fundamental problem that let's say, you know, imagining that we're all playing just as Canadians, the Canadian national interest, or maybe better to say just as Albertans. So somehow imagine it's all one pool of money.

You're trying to be efficient about maximizing the wealth of Albertans. If you spend these tens of billions of dollars to cut emissions, Maybe you do get some benefit of actually being able to sell a little more oil because it's lower emission oil, but the problem is for how long you've built this, these high capital cost projects, which given delays, you're probably not going to be operational for at least a decade.

And then at some point as oil production rolls down, some of those plants are just going to get closed down because they're uneconomic as oil prices fall. So it's just not clear it's going to win strategy. 

Ed Whittingham: Uh, and to be clear, the feds. They've signed some sort of agreement with Pathways Alliance around, yes, they want to negotiate something, but this is now with the Canada Growth Fund.

Which is the fund that the Fed's capitalized with 15 billion to go get emissions reductions. And from what I hear, no deal is imminent anytime soon.

David Keith: So Norm asked a very natural question, which is, is the kind of climate warming effect of CO2 kind of local, just tied to where the CO2 emissions are? And the answer is, it's not local at all. It makes absolutely no difference where in the world the CO2 is emitted. To its warming effect because CO2 is very well mixed in the atmosphere.

And the same is true of methane and, um, some of the other long live greenhouse gases, like N2O and the chlorothorobarbons. They're all really well mixed in the atmosphere. The things where local climate depends on emissions are for aerosols. So aerosol pollution, these fine particles that do reflect sunlight and cool the planet.

Those. tend to have a much shorter range, just ranging from tens of kilometers to thousands or more, but, but they are more local. 

Ed Whittingham: Okay, let's keep a question sort of in that vein, comes from Shirley. So Shirley, let's hear Shirley's question. 

Listener Question: Hello, my question is, if or when we get to net zero, what is likely to happen to the warming curve?

Ed Whittingham: David, if or when we get to net zero, what is likely to happen to the warming curve? 

David Keith: Most important single fact to know about climate change is warming this century is roughly proportional to cumulative emissions. That's the total amount of emissions. And so if net zero is the point where we're not making any more emissions, then the cumulative emissions are not going up in the same sense as if you're like putting water in a tub.

Once you stop putting the water in, the level stops going up. And at that point, temperatures stop rising. So the short answer is a net zero temperature stop rising. That's not precisely true, but in terms of. Thinking about public policy, that's the right answer. 

Ed Whittingham: Gotcha. Using that tub analogy again, so the tub doesn't get any more full with water, in this case CO2, that level could be an unacceptable level.

You know, the tub's too high, someone gets in, it spills over onto the floor, it ruins your house. So then, missions don't, they stop rising, what then pathways exist to actually then lower the level of the tub? 

David Keith: So if you want a lower level of tub, you have to do carbon removal to take the CO2 out, or you have to do solar geoengineering to reduce some of the climate change effects for giving them out of CO2.

Those are the only two choices. 

Ed Whittingham: Got you. And just to belabor this analogy, Carbon removal would actually lower the level of the tub. Solar geo wouldn't lower the level of the tub. 

David Keith: Reduce some of the risks of the tub at the level it is. So one way to think about it is carbon removal is building a time machine.

It's the only way we could go backwards. So we human industrial civilization have driven CO2 levels up fast in a natural way. If we wanted to pull them back down, we have to do carbon removal. 

Ed Whittingham: Okay. Um, and then we've got another question here from Paolo. 

Listener Question: Hi, David. Ed. Sarah. I had two related questions for you to consider.

First, if the world is to reach net zero by 2050, does the world currently have the correct materials, such as alloys and polymers, that it needs to do so? Or do we need to create new materials with better properties, such as better electrical, thermal, or magnetic properties? The second question is do we need to advance physics further to unlock new technologies required for a net zero 2050 world?

Or is our current understanding of physics sufficient to get us to net zero in 2050 at a cost that people are willing to pay? 

Ed Whittingham: So that first part of the question, David, if the world is to reach net zero by 2050, does it currently have the correct materials, alloys, polymers, et cetera, or do we need new materials to be created?

David Keith: I think it's certain that existing technologies in new forms and combined in new ways, but existing kind of underlying like material technologies and fabrication technologies could be used to build things that would get us to net zero 2050. I think there's no question that's true. There's multiple pathways to do it.

Having some new materials would be nice. They would make it cheaper or better in some ways or make us able to do it with less environmental or social costs, but they're not necessary. 

Ed Whittingham: So I'm going to try to channel my inner Shirley Meng here who we had on the pod talking about battery technology. Can you speak specific to batteries?

Like what's the, what advancement, what innovation do we need in batteries for them to play a larger role? 

David Keith: Well, I mean, getting sodium batteries to work really well, getting maybe some really long duration battery technologies that would make sense in the commercial market, um, getting solid state batteries to work for faster charging and higher energy densities for cars.

There's a whole lot of things that would make it easier. 

Ed Whittingham: An interesting follow on question here from Paolo. Do we need to advance physics further to unlock new technologies required for a 2050 world? Where is our current understanding of physics sufficient to get us to net zero? 

David Keith: So I don't think understanding of physics is a limit at all.

I mean, from my perspective, one of the reasons I drifted out of physics is it's kind of a solved problem for the areas we care about. So not to get too physics y, but Quantum electrodynamics, the basic way that we can now calculate chemical bonds and so on from essentially first principles, uh, works, uh, uh, basically perfectly except for like extreme endpoints we're trying to find in the physical world.

But from the perspective of using physics to solve problems of chemistry or science or other things, we have the answers. We're done. 

Ed Whittingham: Those three barriers that you talked about earlier on in this recording, short term thinking, selfishness, and corruption. Those aren't physics problems. 

David Keith: And all these 

problems about the 

batteries and stuff, physics helps you make progress on those, but it's not like you need new physics to solve, to make better batteries.

So making better batteries nowadays is probably mostly not about inventing wholly new batteries. It's about figuring out some of these already invented new batteries, figuring out how to manufacture them. at scale cheaply enough to matter. 

Ed Whittingham: Last question, and this was, uh, came out of the show that we did with David Wallace Wells when we talked about climate alarmism and sort of the service or disservice it's done for the climate movement and where it is now.

So, Joe Vipon is well known to many listeners. He was at our live CDR show, uh, played a huge role in, uh, Alberta's commitment to phasing out coal by 2030, and it's met that target six years in advance. What did he say? 

David Keith: Um, so I'm going to quote some pieces because it's a really interesting, concerned question.

So, so first of all, on IPCC, he says, I don't think anywhere in the 1. 5 report was a suggestion that civilization would collapse the moment we crossed the threshold. I think that's a fair statement for the report text itself. But the IPCC, working with various other NGOs and agencies to do PR, let PR happen.

And I'd say the IPCC leadership had an active role in encouraging PR to happen, that used that N years to save the planet. Formalism. And I think it's really quite fundamental that that was not IPCC's job. And at least in my view, and the view of many scientists, weakened IPCC's credibility. That is a great thing to do for an activist.

And we absolutely need activism to get actions. Uh, as, as Joe knows, and as the IPCC text said, this 1. 5 was not a scientific number. They were asked to evaluate a policy target, and they did. And the basic core of the report is, it's a lot worse to be it to the 1. 5, which is a true and valid statement. What was brought out of that, and the IPCC allowed to be brought out of that, was the idea that scientists said we had to do this thing.

or the correct statement of scientists we said. Said we had to do this thing to meet our political commitment, which is not scientific, which is an entirely different statement. And by IPCC allowing itself to be portrayed in that kind of objective sign to say we have to do this, I think it weakened its stature as an independent assessment organization.

Ed Whittingham: And why do you think the IPCC did that? 

David Keith: Because they really care about solving the climate problem. And it's very tempting. I mean, I think this is natural. It's a perennial thing in any problem that we're talking about, where we have people doing more clear assessment than people doing advocacy. We need advocacy and we need assessment.

But if you've got this enormous credibility that comes from being assessment, once you gather the political capital of credibility that comes from being an assessment organization, it's very tempting to kind of cash in those credibility checks and say, this means we must do X and sort of become an advocacy shot, then you've weakened your credibility as an assessment job because they're different jobs.

Ed Whittingham: I mean, it's one thing is reassuring. So often with these big organizational cultures that they'll get paid. captured that people working for them will develop more loyalty to the organization itself rather than the organization's mandate. And you've seen it from the Canadian Armed Forces in Somalia in the 1990s.

Some would say you see in Parks Canada where people then do all sorts of twisted, contorted things to protect the organization itself, even if it comes at the expense of the mandate. This is actually the opposite of it. 

David Keith: In some sense, it's the opposite. The other thing that, that Joe says is weather and social impacts appear to be much higher than expected by scientists.

I'm not convinced that's true. I'm happy to go back and forth with you, Joe, but I, I, I don't think so. If you look at some of the older estimates of economic impacts or mortality impacts, I don't see evidence that we're way outside them. I do see some evidence that we're seeing some unexpected climate outcomes.

Uh, there's ways in which we don't predict that the Southern Tropical Pacific well, there's a bunch of ways in which climate models are not predicting things that we think they should, that are concerning. But I don't see a kind of systematic view that, that weather and social impacts are actually much higher than expected.

Ed Whittingham: So in short, the science is fundamentally sound. That going back, my impression, I think this came up in our conversation with Zeke Housefather, that we had, uh, the last season. The climate scientist is that if you look back to what was predicted by the models and by the scientists in the early 1990s for what would be happening today are roughly accurate.

David Keith: Yeah. And I mean, again, I mean, totally respect to his point of view, but he says that my first concern was the use of terms like alarmism to blame people who are communicating actual science, which is alarming and realistically does show there's an existential crisis. So. I don't see it that way. Um, to me, existential means, I don't know, killing half the people or potentially killing everybody, ending civilization.

I do see existential risks from cascading events through nuclear war, through versions of biological war, through A. I don't see a version of climate that has anything like existential risk. I mean, the upper end scenarios for climate damages under, say, a 2. 5 C world, which is now kind of the upper end of where we're headed, or even three, uh, have.

Uh, monetized economic damages that are a few percent of GDP and have big environmental damages, which I'd hate to see, but I just don't see a version of them that can be credibly called existential. 

Ed Whittingham: What about, but as we talked about with, um, Michael Greenstone, it might not be existential in climates like ours that by some models, Canada does well in a world with a changing climate.

But as Michael talked about, if you're hot and poor already, then it just compounds that and it's existential if, you know, you have a, a heat event in which, you know, hundreds of thousands or KSR, Kim Stanley Robinson talked about millions of people die. 

David Keith: Yeah, but, so, okay, so is air pollution an existential crisis?

As of now, it's unequivocal that more people are dying from air pollution. Remember that number is not hundreds of thousands. It's hundreds of thousands. fought many millions a year. And, and even with Michael Greenstone's great calculations of, of heat induced mortality late in the century, they're actually still lower than air pollution impacts now.

So, I mean, maybe this is just a different definition of existential. So I guess if, if, if you want to call that existential, then we certainly face an existential threat right now from air pollution. And especially depending 

Ed Whittingham: on where you live. So like with David Wall Wells, we talked about in Delhi. where air pollution might shorten lifespans by five to ten years.

If you're looking at it from a resident of Delhi, you would say it's an existential risk. 

David Keith: Maybe I have a high threshold for existential. Maybe I grew up thinking a lot about nuclear weapons. I take them very seriously. I think the risks are bigger than other people think. I think if you're thinking existential risk in Delhi, you're thinking Pakistani weapons.

Let's just be honest here. There's a chance that Delhi gets burned in the next decade. And there's a chance that New York gets burned. And that's what existential means to me, a megaton bomb. And if people really thought that was likely to happen, there would be panic streaming out of the city. People are not panic streaming out of Delhi.

It's awful. It should be fixed. It's a complete environmental and social failure that we've allowed air pollution to be that bad. I'm not saying it's not a problem, but something that shortens lifespans by quite a lot of years. Is not existential, especially not in a country where there are hard tradeoffs where remember, overall lifespans are still going up and where there are tradeoffs because poverty was also shortening lifespan and some of that, uh, economic activity that's making the air pollution is reducing poverty.

Now, we could be doing it smarter. The Indians would be better off if they were doing better air pollution regulations for sure. But I still, I just. I think we're losing the word existential, 

Ed Whittingham: right? And that's, I think we're, we're nailing it. And perhaps part of the disagreement with Joe is that we don't actually have a universally accepted understanding of what is existential.

Is it existential for an individual? Is it existential for a group of people living in a city? Or are we talking about a species color? 

David Keith: Yeah, or even a species. I mean, the Soviet Union figured out in detail how to make it. more virulent forms of smallpox and worked on Ebola as well. They weaponized anthrax in ICBMs.

Anthrax isn't transmissible, so that's not existential. But, you know, there's versions of, uh, genetically modified smallpox that are not going to kill everybody, but it is going to make the pandemic look like a minor joke. And, and, and I think to me, those are things that feel existential. I just don't feel climate's in that category.

So, Ed, I realized I gave a long answer about existential, but you worked on this just about as long as me, and I really want to hear what you have to say. 

Ed Whittingham: Yeah, and I think my opinion has evolved. And I think the words that I now choose to describe the climate problem, that those two have evolved. So, I think I, I fundamentally agree, David, with what you say around the severity of the existential risk associated with climate.

And I have lived through, I think, You know, colleagues in the environmental movement who I'd say were, you know, justifiably accused of being alarmist and using that because that could produce short term responses, whether it be from policymakers or be from friends and neighbors to get people really fearful of something.

And frankly, fear is a motivator. And you can go out and people are very compelling and convincing around climate saying, sure, it's an existential risk or people are dying. Uh, my definition of existential is, you know, a species killer or a near species killer, something that would stop the advancement of, you know, this wonderful enlightened prod, enlightenment project that we have that brings us all benefits.

And of course we need to do more to lift. You know, a billion people are more out of poverty and give them reliable access to electricity and clean water, etc. But if you look, we've accomplished incredible things for many people in humanity and we need to keep doing that. Will climate then fundamentally impair our ability to do that?

No, I don't think so. Not at a species level. Will nuclear war impair that if we bomb ourselves back to the stone age? Well, just by saying bombing ourselves back to the Stone Age, a hundred percent, a lot of people will suffer and then the Enlightenment Project will fail to advance. 

David Keith: It is really good to have this conversation.

And we've been mostly here talking about people and with people, you think about trade offs with all sorts of other political things. There's all sorts of awful things that are harming people right now, but of course you and I and lots of people care. a great deal about non people, about the natural world.

And I think there's a way in which climate feels almost more acute there. So the way I see it is human appropriation of land, uh, you know, the, the way that we're just sprawling over the landscape and dividing it up that, you know, like our friends at Yellowstone to Yukon are trying to fight. That is a huge impact that is, you know, likely causing a, a, a, another great extinction or will.

And climate also will have a big impact, but the combination is particularly bad. The point is, if you just had the land use impacts, There's lots of ways ecosystems might evolve. If you just had climate change, species could move around, they could evolve to some extent. The combination might really be lethal and make a much less rich ecosystem to leave to our great grandkids.

And that's another reason I really care about climate. But that's because I love it and I want to leave it to our great grandkids. Not because I feel like We're all going to, our civilization will crumble if we don't protect 

Ed Whittingham: it. And, and the reality with climate, and again, say looking at Canada and looking at something, I care about birds.

So in some places, and I remember seeing actually one of your UFC colleagues, uh, whose name I can't remember, who was an ornithologist talking about Arctic turns and in a climate, in a changing, a warming world, Arctic turn habitat shifts. And in some cases it increases. So in some scenarios, Arctic turns do well.

In a changing climate world, just like our growing seasons will extend and you could say, controversially, people like Joe might push back on that Canadians do well in a climate changing world, not to say everyone does their places. Some Canadians do well, so it just isn't a simple answer. When it comes to existential threats to the birds I care about, I really care about habitat loss.

I care about fragment, habitat fragmentation. I care about the inane hunting that happens of songbirds in places like Italy. That, it's so easy to stem. Those are the, and, and they are, when you combine those, they pose existential risk to entire species of birds. And so in terms of climate, it's a factor, but compared to those other things, it's a much lower factor 

David Keith: Now, though, again, if the world I mean, this is partly where things are changing in a world where we think the peak is more like two and a half degrees C in a world where we really were looking at over four degrees C and the habitat fragmentation, that's a that's an environmental you know, Holocaust and it Gets Fair to Scott really is a huge impact.

Well, it's good to have a conversation and thank you Joe for asking us these hard questions. 

Ed Whittingham: Climate could pose or contribute to existential risk. If you think of Gwynne Dyer's thesis, and he's not the only one, but the book he wrote, Climate Wars, the fight for survival as the world overheats, it can cause such disruption and dislocation in places not just that are already hot and poor, but other places.

If you have, for instance. a migrant crisis, and especially in the politics in the United States right now, where parts of Mexico over time become uninhabitable or precipitation is disrupted to the point where they have crop failures, then you're going to have a bunch of people dislocated and potentially more people trying to pour over the southern border in the U.

S. That could cause a lot of problems. And just in the way that in places, mid latitude states or equatorial states, That, again, precipitation is disrupted. People leave, they don't have enough to eat, and as Gwynne said, you know, people would choose war and attacking one's neighbor sooner than they would watching their children starve.

So it's not a direct cause, but then it contributes to war, which then can contribute to very bad things happening for all of humanity. 

David Keith: I think we can agree. Climate's really bad, and we're debating whether it counts as existential, but I think the main point is, who, who cares? We agree there should be a lot of action and efficient action to cut emissions and protect the environment from climate.

Ed Whittingham: Thanks for listening to Energy vs. Climate. The show is created by David Keith, Sara Hastings Simon, and me, Ed Whittingham, and produced by Amit Tandon. With help from Crystal Hickey, Vinuki Arachchi, and Haris Ahmad. Our title and show music is The Wind Up by Brian Lips. This season of Energy vs. Climate is produced with support from the University of Calgary's Office of the Vice President, Research, and the University's Global Research Initiative.

Further support comes from the Trottier Family Foundation, the North Family Foundation, the Palmer Family Foundation, And you are generous listeners, a big thank you from David, Sara, and me to all those listeners who generously donated during our 2024 fall annual appeal, sign up for updates and exclusive webinar access at energyvsclimate.com and review and rate us on your favorite podcast platform. This helps new listeners to find the show. We'll be back with a new show, looking at climate philanthropy in early 2025. Until then, see you next year.