Crystal: I’m Crystal DiMiceli and welcome to the Forces for Nature show.

Do you find yourself overwhelmed with all the dooming gloom you hear of these days? Do you feel like you as just one person can’t really make a difference forces for nature cuts through that negativity. In each episode, I interview somebody who’s doing great things for animals and the environment. We talk about the challenge they’re addressing the solution.

They have. What keeps them going, and we’ll leave you with practical action tips so that YouTube can become a force for nature. Today’s guest is James Lawler, the founder of climate. Now a multimedia resource that distills the science and economics of climate change. Today’s format is a little different in that.

James is here to help answer questions sent in from listeners about this beast of an issue in a way that’s understandable and relat. He even brought things to my attention that I didn’t realize. And I feel like I’m always personally immersed in this topic. I bet you too will learn something new.

Hi James. Thank you so much for joining me on forces for nature. It’s so great to have

James: you. It’s great to be here, crystal. Thank you.

Crystal: Thank you. Before we really dive in. Tell me a little bit about yourself, who you are

James: and what you do. Sure. So. My name’s James Lawler. And I am the founder of climate now, which is climate now.com.

Climate now is a multimedia resource, which consists of podcast and video series and other content to explain key topics related to the energy transition and climate science. So it’s a resource for people who want to kind of. Below beneath the headlines and kind of get into the weeds a little bit and, and understand these ideas that we hear talked about so frequently and are often a little bit mystifying in that, you know, they rely on sometimes hard science to really sort of explain and unpack.

And we try to do that for an. That is interested and, and interested enough to kind of get into the weeds, but doesn’t necessarily have a PhD in the relevant science. So it’s a place to go for those who want to learn more and, and really understand what is happening in the world right now. It’s a

Crystal: really great resource.

And I’m excited to have you here today to talk about this really big issue of climate change, and we’re gonna do it a little different than usual in that we’re gonna center around listeners questions. How does that sound

James: great? Yeah. Sounds good. All right. I just wanna add for, for listeners that I, myself am not a climate scientist, but I will do my best to answer these questions.

And I think for those who want more, plenty of resources are available to dig deeper on climate now.com where everything we do is thoroughly cited back to the academic literature and back to the scientists who actually unpacked the data about the. Technology or principal, et cetera. So just a brief disclaimer, to make sure that we’re all on the up and up here.

but the good

Crystal: thing is because you don’t, you’re not a scientist per se. You might be able to explain things in ways that us non-scientists are better able to understand. So I hope so. That’s a, that’s a good

James: thing. sounds good. Here we

Crystal: go. Here we go. So John asked, what’s the difference between. Daily weather

James: and climate.

Sure. So daily weather is what is happening in a specific location on a specific day, you know, weather is highly local. So the weather for you is different from the weather one or two towns over climate. The, the concept of climate is a bit more flexible in that you can talk about a local. Meaning the climate in your region or in your area, or you can talk about global.

And when you hear people say that the climate is warming, it means that global temperature, the average across all locations on earth is increasing. Now, in some places it’s getting lethally hot and there are far more, extremely hot days on earth than there were even a few years ago. And you know, this trend will continue.

So if we, if we want the world to be habitable for really ourselves, our children, our children’s children, we, we need to do something about it. we’re in

Crystal: the middle of the summer right now, as we’re, as we’re recording this. And it is the hottest summer that I can remember. And mm-hmm , I, I remember somebody saying something last year when I felt it was super hot.

They’re like, yeah, but it’s gonna be the coolest summer from now on. And so that’s, uh, that’s kind of a. Jolt when you, when you hear that. So yeah, we’re experiencing it now.

James: And I think that the challenge is that human beings have evolved as creatures that live in one place. Right. So we’re kind of used to the patterns in a specific location.

It’s very hard for us to kind of imagine this concept of a global average, right. Or what that means. And that I think is the challenge with a lot of climate sort of communication and, and, and sort of getting this message about the changing climate. Out there is challenging because it’s outside of our direct experience as human beings.

Certainly we can feel a hot day. We can feel a cold day, but registering sort of global changes is much harder right. To, to actually wrap your head around. So, but yeah, I agree.

Crystal: And gene asked there, there’s a saying, April showers bring may flowers. So are we seeing a shift in weather patterns by month? For example, are now March showers bringing April flowers and what are the consequences of this?

James: So that’s a really good question. And I’m gonna take sort of one angle on it. So the, the question of how the global climate is changing plant life right, is, is really interesting. And there’s several things going on. The big changes underway as far as plants are concerned, you know, vegetation on earth are number one, temperature, right?

Number two, water. And number three carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. So the amount of CO2 that plants have available for photosynthesis, et cetera. So if the question is what the changing climate is doing to plants and trees, you have to ask about the impacts of each of these effects. So overall a rapidly changing climate is not good for vegetation in that species of plants have taken many millions of years to adapt to their local conditions.

And so if you have an organism that is perfectly tuned to its current environment, Which depends on many other organisms to survive and to thrive. And then you rapidly change the conditions of that ecosystem. It really doesn’t matter, you know, does it get colder? Does it get warmer? Does it get, you know, but if there’s a big perturbation in that system, those relationships between all of the elements of that ecosystem will be stressed and will start to break and species will die.

And so this is what we’re seeing, like in the oceans, for example, You know, you asked about rain, springing flowers earlier. And the answer to that is, well, Maybe, and yes and no. Right? So in some places, spring is coming earlier, but guess what? In some species of plants, higher concentrations of carbon dioxide actually affect which genes in those plants get turned on and off.

And in particular genes that govern like reproductive organs in the plants. The CO2 concentrations, the greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere being much higher, actually affect plant reproductive cycles and their ability to reproduce. So that’s one of many potentially unintended negative consequences.

Lastly, water patterns are also changing, resulting in some places getting very, very dry, which affects the plant life that can survive and other sort of elements of the ecosystem. You know, one, one interesting thing. We’ve had some droughts where I live and that’s contributed to the loss of a fungus that keeps the population of a certain kind of moth low.

So the fungus gets into the caterpillars and it keeps the population down. When the population explodes, you have horrible infestation of these caterpillars that defoliate Oak trees and other kinds of trees, which is a major stressor on those species. So. It’s not really as simple as well. It’s warmer.

It’s gonna be better for the plants earlier. No, that’s not how it works. So I think it’s a great question. I’m so glad that, that you asked that.

Crystal: And also just the trickle effect of how everything is connected. Mm-hmm when plants aren’t behaving the way that they have always behaved the animals that have evolved.

To respond to certain things with those plants, like at the time of flowering or the time the leaves fall, or what have you then the whole cycle for the animals gets thrown off too. And so if things for the plants are off, then things for the animals are off and it’ll trickle down to us eventually. Yeah, absolutely.

Or quicker than we ex we expect. So not, not just

James: eventually. Right, right. I think humankind and animal kind has always, really always depended on sort of these connections between species and the earth and plant life, et cetera. And everything does exist in a balance. The balance is. Is pretty resilient, but the more stress we add and we are adding a huge amount of stress right now, those linkages begin to break.

And the ability for us to benefit from the services that these ecosystems provide, like clean air, like clean water, et cetera, begins to diminish. So that’s, that’s really what we’re facing at the moment.

Crystal: And that directly affects everybody. Okay. Maria asked, what are the potential effects on water?

James: The effects of a change in climate on water supply are also local in some regions that have traditional propensity to drought, that drought will be longer and more intense.

And in those places, the availability of water will be lessened in other regions, you know, that are perhaps more coastal the impacts of flooding could contaminate water supply. In parts of California today where agriculture has traditionally been one of the key economic drivers because of water scarcity fields have had to start to be followed, or farming has had to stop in certain places because of water availability.

Now you have to ask what will happen when that trend continues and. Certain farming has to move to other places. Well, it could be that if farming moves to new locations where traditionally there is sufficient water, that would then impact water availability in those places. So, so water availability is going to be dependent on where you are and what happens, not just where you are, but in other places that might change kind of the mix of activities that happen in your area.

So I think the changing climate is really going to reinforce that none of us are. Living in a bubble, like none of us are going to be isolated from the connected impacts of the, the changes that are a foot. And the sooner we realize that the better, because it’s going to take kind of the, the concerted.

Will power of the global community to really change course to the degree that we need.

Crystal: Also, something that just came to mind is what’s it called snow pack. So many places that are accustomed to receiving the slow melting. Of water off of mountains and whatnot throughout the summer. So they always have water supply, but now that things are so much warmer, the snow melts so much more quickly.

And by mid to late summer, they have no water left. And, um, that is gonna happen earlier and earlier. Yeah. If they’re, if regions are reliant on the snow that had accumulated over the, the winter.

James: Absolutely. And for those that want to go deeper here, we actually had a conversation on climate now with a water expert named will Sarney and we talked about water strategy and climate induced drought, you know, how to mitigate and prepare for, you know, impact climate impacts to the changing, changing availability of water and what that actually looks like on the ground in some places in the United States.

So for those that are interested in a deeper dive, there’s a, an episode that we did on. Ah, great. I’ll

Crystal: include that in the show notes. So just send it my way now, Sabrina asked, I wonder if what we do as individuals can really help or is it really up to businesses and governments?

James: Most devastating impacts of the changing climate can still be prevented, but we have to stop emitting carbon dioxide, which is the gas that traps heat, and what’s causing the warming and devastation that we, that we’re witnessing and everything that we’re talking about.

It all comes down to greenhouse gas emissions. What’s really interesting though. And what gives me hope personally, is that the cost of making that transition away from fossil fuels, so away from oil and gas and toward renewable sources. Is cheaper than sticking with them now in many parts of the world and because of the dramatically plummeting costs of solar energy and wind power, making that switch in many parts of the world is cheaper than sticking with the CO2 producing alternatives.

And what’s also interesting is that a group of researchers looked at. A basket of technologies. So I think they looked at about a thousand technologies or so that shared the, the changing cost profile of solar and wind. So looking at sort of what are other technologies where the price dropped over time in a similar way to the dropping price of solar and wind.

And then how quickly were those technologies adopted as, as a result, right? How quickly did they displace the prevailing ways of doing things? They found that the speed at which society is likely to adopt solar in wind is much, much faster and more extensive than. Is fully accounted for in the climate models today.

Right? So this is maybe a rare note of hope that that’s really no matter what mistakes and bungling we, we have on the policy side. Right. It’s very, very hard to say no to the same service provided at a much lower cost. Right? Mm-hmm , at some point people choose the thing that’s cheaper that gets them the same result.

And speaking of

Crystal: renewables, becoming cheaper with the inflation reduction act that the us Congress recently passed incentives and subsidies will be available for the purchase of energy efficient appliances. And for things like heat pumps for your home. I’m not sure if geothermal energy is also included in that, but overall, there’ll be ways to make your home and business more energy efficient while lowering costs.

James: Indeed the, you know, inflation reduction act has so much in it. And there’s so much to talk about there. You know, we actually at climate now we’re releasing an episode next week with, um, Jesse Jenkins from Princeton university who breaks down sort of everything that is in that, that law. But, but yeah, you know, another thing one, one can and should do is look at the insulation of the home. So how well does the home retain heat and retain cool. And there, there, there are interesting companies out there and I think they’re, they’re more coming that help people to lower their carbon footprint of their home. One is one is called sealed, which is sealed.

Do you can [email protected]. What seal does. You can, and they’re, they’re not operating everywhere in the country there, I think mostly in the Northeast right now, but they do have plans to, to expand. So seal does what what’s called a, a retrofit. So they. Look at your home, they will hire the required vendors to add insulation and perform other updates on your building envelope.

You do not pay them any money upfront to do this. So they do this at no cost. The way they make money is they take over your energy bill. So if you’re paying a certain amount in, in energy costs every month, you then pay that amount to sealed going forward for a period of time and they pay the energy company.

So they’re making money on the lowering of energy costs. Right over a period of time. So from your, your standpoint as the homeowner, you’re, you’re, there’s no economic change to you. You’re still gonna pay basically the same amount only you’re paying it to sealed instead of the energy company and sealed their incentive then is fully aligned with yours, which is improve the efficiency of your home.

And they make money only if they do. Cost is the biggest impediment to, for many people to make this switch. And so I think sealed is coming to the market with a really interesting offering. It’s a great business concept. Yeah,

Crystal: for sure. I think we have an opportunity in this moment for so many innovative business ideas that aim to do good.

James: That gives me some hope, but we do need stronger climate and energy policy to accelerate us in that direction and to provide like important stimuli for. Industries that are harder to abate where it’s harder to move away from fossil fuels. We, we need the help of policy to help technologies advance. And for those who are listening, that don’t like the idea of subsidies.

It’s important to understand that fossil fuels oil and gas are probably one of the most subsidized commodities that we have in terms of the amount of money that, that supports those industries from the government.

Crystal: That actually leads me directly to my next question. Daphne had asked how can I pressure the ones in charge to take action?

Because yeah, this legislation may have passed in Congress, but now it needs to be implemented on the state and local levels.

James: I think that as people increasingly look to solutions that produce less carbon dioxide that use renewable energy and as more and more of the population demands, those services policy makers will take note.

It’s, it’s very hard for policymakers to do things that are not being demanded by the people that they represent. And only when that demand is ringing through. In a tremendously loud and clear way. Can we really count on policy to kind of steer the course for society in terms of resources to, to get involved?

There are several, and there I’ll just mention two of them that I think are worth checking out. One is citizens, climate lobby, which lobbies for a price on carbon. And they’re, they’re a really impressive Nat. This is us based national organization. You can become part of and you can volunteer and they, they make it easy to engage with your community and with local representation to advocate for a price on carbon.

Which is one policy mechanism that would go a long way to helping us move away from fossil fuels. And we at climate. Now, we actually have an explainer on key policy mechanisms that can help us in this transition. So I’ll, I’ll share the link crystal with you. And for those who wanna. Really unpack what are the policies that could make a big difference?

So there’s citizens, climate lobby. Another one that, that is really cool, that supports politicians on the local level, who wanna make an impact on the energy transition. And climate is climate cabinet action.org. And their position really is that climate and energy. These are local issues, right?

Ultimately they have local impacts. And so they help people who are running for office or people who are in. Understand what they can do and how to formulate a climate and energy platform that can work for their, for their community. So for, for those interested on sort of how to get involved, those are two really good places to start.

I think. Citizens climate lobby and climate cabinet action. And

Crystal: you were saying to demand from them and you can do that through like, like you said, joining these kinds of groups, mm-hmm, through voting, but also through your dollars. So if you’re buying things that are high efficiency or yeah. If you’re asking your energy company to switch you to renewable sourcing, then all of that trickles.

Into the political world. And so on one hand, you wanna ask, like, what comes first, the chicken or the egg policy or individual action, but mm-hmm, , you know, and sometimes the policy comes first to change individual action. Mm-hmm . But many times, if you look back through history on any kind of subject, the individual action became such a ground swell that policy had

James: to follow suit.

Exactly. That’s that’s really well said. And I think that’s the situation that we’re in. mm-hmm and

Crystal: oh, so Sabrina had also asked, is it more effective to try to use less or recycle more?

James: Yeah. So great question. I think the answer is, is definitely use less, right. And the reason for that is there’s this concept that’s called life cycle emissions.

So what it means. The total CO2 emissions that are released during the full life of a product. So you have emissions that are released when the materials are the original materials for the product. Like let’s say, let’s say a can like a tin can. Right. So what you’re talking about is you have to mine the, or to produce.

The steel and then that process of, of, of producing the steel and then flattening the steel into sort of increasingly thin sheets is heat intensive. It’s emissions intensive because you have to run powerful motors, et cetera. So it’s an incredibly emissions intensive process. So produces lots and lots of CO2 for that tin can that you use.

And. Recycling. That is good, but not using it in the first place is way, way better because you avoid all of those emissions. So definitely use less is the, the easy answer to that. Yeah. But keep recycling yes. Yes. Definitely keep recycling,

Crystal: but use less for sure. Now I have one last topic I’d like to touch upon.

That’s actually from me and not a listener, but I think it’s something that could be unclear for people who aren’t immersed in this topic all the time. I’m increasingly hearing about carbon offsets, carbon dioxide removal, or negative emissions technologies, or, or even all these net zero pledges that various companies and governments are committing to.

Can you start with talking about what these terms mean?

James: Absolutely. First, I think in order , to appreciate why these terms are being used and what they mean. I think it’s important to understand the background, which is the concentration of carbon dioxide, which is in the atmosphere today and why it’s alarming because really.

All of those terms connect to this idea. So the concentration of CO2 specifically in the atmosphere has been increasing exponentially since the late 17 hundreds, when the industrial revolution started. And the industrial revolution was really when humans started to burn increasingly large amounts of fossil fuels like wood and coal at first, and then oil and gas to, to power the, the machines that power our society.

So just to give a sense of how quickly our use of these fuels to run our society has increased the amount of CO2. I think it’s interesting to think about in 1970, the world released about 10 billion, tons of CO2 gas in that year. So this is a gas, but we’re talking about weight, right? And we’re talking about 10 billion, tons of gas.

This is a huge amount of co. Huge amount. It’s almost, it’s impossible, really for a human brain to fathom how much that is now. That was in 1970. Today we released between like 35 and 40 billion tons, three and a half to four times as much. As we did in 1970. So we are just spewing this stuff out, right. At an unimaginable sort of almost inconceivable rate.

Now we can tell from several different forms of scientific measurement that the CO2 concentration today. Is higher than it’s been in many millions of years. We have not put the planet in a good place and we’re facing really severe jeopardy as we look forward into the future.

Crystal: There’s a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere.

And for anyone who hears that, oh, this is natural and has happened before these concentrations have never been reached in such a short period of. Ecosystems and species just can’t adapt that quickly, including humans.

James: Exactly. Now that’s the backdrop for thinking about how can we remove some of this CO2 from the atmosphere?

Yes. We’ve talked already today about how do we use less? How do we lower our footprints at least on an individual level, but there is innovation in the space of actually removing the CO2 that we’ve put up there and we can remove CO2 in several ways. Costs of doing this vary pretty significantly from around of hundred dollars to maybe a thousand dollars per ton of CO2.

Now keep in mind, we have 40 billion tons per year that we’re releasing and we have all of the stuff that’s up there already. There are other challenges as well besides costs. So in order to run many of these technologies, you need a lot of energy. So. In order to not kind of defeat your purpose. It’s important that this energy come from renewable sources like solar and wind, et cetera.

And then you’re talking about land use. How much land do you want to convert to installing solar installations? So that you can power huge amounts of carbon dioxide removal. These challenges are very complicated and kind of intricate, right? How we combine all these elements. The, the punchline, really, when we’re talking about CO2 removal and we’re talking about net zero, meaning reducing the, the net amount of CO2 that companies.

Release meaning the amount they, they send up into the atmosphere and the amount they pull down using negative emissions. The important thing to do is it’s much, much better to reduce, right. It’s much, much better to reduce emissions because CO2 removal. Is costly and it takes up a lot of space and it’s, and it requires energy.

So that’s a bit of the backdrop. Now, there are a lot of different kinds of carbon dioxide removal technologies, negative emissions technologies. You have one that you may have heard of is direct air capture. Basically, these can be very, very large physical footprints, so large installations of fans, essentially, and the fans blow air over assort or material of, of different kinds and their, their different technologies that that can be used that actually capture the CO2.

Then that CO2 is. Released from the Sott and concentrated into a stream. And, you know, it can be liquified under pressure and it can be pumped down underground and stored safely in old oil Wells and in other places underground under pressure. And actually we’ve been doing this for a long time in drilling for oil.

When we know a lot about how the CO2 can be safely stored underground, and this is a viable path. We, we can do this and it is being done safe. , but again, it takes up a lot of space and it’s energy intensive, the direct air capture. There’s other kinds of technologies. Mineralization is one where, you know, the CO2 is, is reacted with various kinds of minerals and forms, a solid, which can then be safely stored away.

People also talk about natural solutions to carbon dioxide removal. There are agricultural techniques such as no till and others that are believed to pull more CO2 out of the atmosphere. Also, trees are often mentioned as, as a way to pull more CO2 out of the atmosphere. Natural solutions are important and they’re important for the multiplicity of benefits that they confer.

No till is better for carbon, but it’s also better for the health of the soils, et cetera. The, the challenge though, if you are looking at these natural solutions through just a pure climate lens and how much carbon they remove, it’s hard to quantify the impact. Again, is not going to be as great as reducing emissions in the first place.

That’s by far the best. Finally the topic of offsets companies and countries are setting these net zero pledges, which, which means that they are trying to get to a place. Typically you’ll hear net zero by 2050, or in some place more accelerated where the amount of CO2 they’re releasing the amount of CO2 they’re capturing through some of these negative emissions technologies gets to zero, right?

So the total CO2 is zero now. Many companies can do a lot to reduce their emissions from improving the efficiency of their operations, to really looking at their supply chain and choosing vendors that are thinking about how to make the same materials with less emissions. But. Even in the best case scenario, they would get to a place where there’s certain amount of emissions that they really can’t get rid of in their supply chain.

And it’s really at that point that they should be buying offsets. So they go to the marketplace and they say, we will pay. X number of hundreds of dollars per ton, CO2 for someone else to offer us a solution to remove it. And that’s called an offset, right? So they’re offsetting the CO2. And so there are people who are offering forest based offsets.

Those are a little dicey. Are they actually going to remove the tonnage of CO2 that they say. What happens if there’s a forest fire and the forest burns down, what happens if there’s an infestation of a, of some kind of beetle and the trees just don’t absorb as much carbon, right. And there are mechanisms in these marketplaces to kind of adjust for that, but it, it’s not necessarily fully straightforward when you’re talking about natural solutions.

Other technologies and companies that, that do mineralization, where what you’re getting is actually the CO2 fixed in a rock, and you can actually measure that. And yet it’s not going anywhere. Those are by far the most expensive credits to purchase, but you do get what you pay for in the sense of you get the CO2 that’s locked in and you know it, and it’s gonna be locked in for hundreds or thousands of years.

There’s also far less supply of those things than there is than demand, demand, far outstrips the availability of that kind of removal technology at this point. So anyway, this is a, this is a, there’s a lot of other things to go into, but I don’t wanna, I don’t know. Should I, I can keep going or stop

Crystal: well, move on regarding the mineralization, I recently just, just saw there’s a company that will make lab grown diamond.

For you as you’re offset because diamonds are pure carbon mm-hmm and, and so they take the carbon out of the atmosphere and they’ll create a diamond for you. So I think that’s a really cool way to go about offsetting your carbon emissions. Just. Dress yourself in diamonds. dress yourself in diamonds, right?

Lab grown

James: diamonds, lab grown diamonds. we actually have a video, a climate now all about mineralization. So if you’re interested in that, I just put the link in, in our chat crystal for, you know, carbon dioxide removal through mineralization. So those that are interested can, can look at that.

Crystal: Okay, cool.

This has been super informative. James I’ll include the rich list of resources that you mentioned in the show notes for our listeners. And thank you for all that you do. You’re making a difference.

James: Thanks so much, crystal. That was really a pleasure. Great to great to chat with you today.

Crystal: Climate change is. It’s scary, but we can get ahead of it once we understand what we’re facing and what our options are through climate. Now, James is helping to distill this issue down in ways that we can all understand and providing us with ideas on what we can do with this knowledge. I’d like you to let me know.

What did you think of today’s format? Do you have questions about any eco or animal related issue that you’d like to learn more about? Send me a note at crystal forces for nature dot. I personally respond every inquiry I receive. And I wanna be sure that I’m addressing the subjects that you are curious about.

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