Latest / PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast / What is Sustainable Geoscience? Preview to Interview with Professor Chris Jackson (GeoShort)

Transcript

What is Sustainable Geoscience? Preview to Interview with Professor Chris Jackson (GeoShort) · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

• 0:03
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, this week we got a really special treat.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_02: We had the great pleasure of interviewing Professor Chris Jackson, who is the chair of sustainable geoscience at Manchester University in the United Kingdom.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_02: Chris is just one of these super inspiring individuals and maybe one of the most fun interviews that we've had.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_02: So today we are releasing an excerpt from that interview as a little bit of a preview.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_02: The full interview will come out next week, so make sure to join us there.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_02: But in this preview, we ask Professor Jackson what sustainable geoscience really is.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_02: Sustainable is a little bit of a buzzword in our field right now, and we have a discussion about what that means and what it means for our field going forward.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_02: So tune in next week for the full interview.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_02: Enjoy.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_02: So to kind of transition back to sort of your personal path here, you're now the chair of sustainable geoscience at Manchester University.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_02: And to me, uh, my interpretation of sustainable geoscience is not somebody who worked in the energy sector a while back.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_02: And I think you maybe you still consult for oil and gas.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not sure if you still do.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_02: Like, what is this role?
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_02: How, you know, what led to this transition sort of out of industry for you into academia?
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_02: And and how do you view this position?
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_02: And how do you view sustainable geoscience?
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_02: Now, that's a rambling question.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_02: So feel free to what the heck?
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: Feel free to break it down however you want.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my gosh.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: I've got a way through it.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's all right.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, okay, okay, okay, good.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: I went when I finished my PhD, I went to worked in Norway in a place called Bergen for three years working in the oil industry for a company at that time called Norskedro, now called Equinor.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: I left there, did it, you know, I did a bunch of exploration geology there, a bunch of production geology and research there, and then I left and went to Imperial College.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: And during my 17 years at Imperial College, I worked on a number of industry, oil industry funded research projects, primarily related to exploration production, with the aim of trying to optimize those processes, right?
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: So you can drill less wells to find more hydrocarbons.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: So when you're producing an oil field, you need less wells to produce the same hydrocarbon amounts for hydrocarbons.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: And clearly, in that, there's issues to do with um the contribution of those fossil fuels to the you know the carbon, you know, carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere and global warming, warming planet.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: So there's clearly a reckoning to be had for myself there in my contribution over 17 years to that.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: However, having then thought, well, you know, I'm gonna go and take this position as chairing sustainable geoscience, I'll come back to kind of define what that is in a moment.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: I've become more aware of the fact that that transition, as we call it, the energy transition is going to happen at different a different pace in different parts of the world with different alternative energy sources.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: Now, a lot of the conversation is like tomorrow we need to stop oil and gas production, tomorrow, and we need to do that globally, and that's all we can do.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: But that doesn't take into account that certain nations are going to be still reliant on fossil fuel-based economies for longer.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: And there's certain economies in the world which could more rapidly and more sustainably make a transition to alternative energy sources because it's a global problem, of course, right?
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: We it sounds like we should all be doing things at the same time, but actually it's likely that things will change at a different time.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: So I think I've I've kind of made my piece that oil and gas-based research is still a piece of that puzzle.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now, whether I'm doing that or somebody else is a slightly different thing, and I've got to choose morally for myself whether I still want to engage in that, but I will not be heavily critical of some people who are still contributing in those areas.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: Now, to what sustainable geoscience means, I think that the general public, or hopefully people on your podcast, if we talk about sustainability first, that's the idea that we humans as a species can live in a sustainable way using the resources we have for our generation and future generations.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: So we're interacting with the biosphere, the lithosphere, the solid rock, the atmosphere.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: We can do that in a way which will allow us to basically thrive in the future.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what sustainability means in itself, is a behavior or set of behaviours that allows you to continue and survive and thrive for a long time, multi-generational, not success, but multi-generational um well-being.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: I was just gonna say then, if you take the geoscience bit of it, it's then how does geoscience help with that?
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: So geoscience helps with that sustainability piece by allowing us to understand how the earth works, how are resources distributed around the Earth's planet, how might we access those resources and use them in a sustainable way?
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: How do we live on a planet in which the dynamics are very complicated?
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: Earthquakes, volcanoes, these things, uh tsunamis, right?
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: These threats to life, how do we allow our urban centers to expand as we have an ever increasing population in a safe way that that population has access to clean water, it has access to energy, and it is safe from natural hazards, right?
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: So, or geohazards as we call them.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: So geoscience is feeds into all of those things.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: So that's how I break down sustainable geoscience it's kind of looking at the bits of geoscience which allow us to live sustainably.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: That is a such a broader answer than what most people think of when they think of sustainable geoscience.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: They think of resources, they think of climate change, they think of those kinds of things, you know, resources.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: But it was interesting.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: I wrote this question and then I asked Jesse, how do you think he's gonna answer this question?
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um and you did, you answered it in a much broader way, which I appreciate.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's I think it's a great answer.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: You do a lot with, or you've done a lot anyway, in the past on volcanoes and what lies below volcanoes and so on.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: But I think the that fits into or feeds into your sustainable geoscience background.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: I think so.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I think I think another bit of the sustainable geoscience piece, because you know, a lot of what I've said there is all about the kind of G and G, the geology and geophysics, all about the rocks, right?
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: But actually, sustainable geoscience, the really the bit that I'm kind of growing into and I'm finding more and more exciting is what aligns with my kind of belief about social justice is is how we communicate with people who are non-specialists.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: So, how do we, if we come up with this brilliant thing about you know forecasting when volcanoes might erupt, how would we wish to go and communicate that to a population on the other side of the planet who have a different belief system and a different relationship with a volcano that they're not going to respond to saying you've got to leave tomorrow afternoon or something from this area?
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like that requires geoscientists who are aware of those cultural differences and are able to communicate those, you know, across those differences of viewpoints, or geoscientists who aren't trained themselves but are willing to go and engage with social scientists and are willing to go and engage with policymakers and politicians to ensure that the great science they've done is actually being put to work, it's actually being used for the benefit of the global society.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not the first person to say it.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: Like, whenever people ask me this, they're like, Oh, you're the chair of the Sustainable Geoscience, Chris is going to redefine the society of geosciences.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: There's been a bunch of people saying this for a couple of decades, at least, you know, about the importance of geosciences being repurposed for the betterment of the planet, geosciences being this amazing tool, which will be even more amazing if we can talk to different communities who need us to go and you know work with them, not for them or you know, against them, but we need to go and train people in different countries so that they're you know there's increasing weapons.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: And and so geoscience, the role of geoscience is is going to get much more broad, I think, and we we're gonna be more demanding of what we're teaching people, I think.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: To be clear, Chris, I love the way you you redefined sustainable geoscience to me.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: I watched what you did in Niragango or at Niragango, and then the impact on the nearby town, Goma, right?
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: Is it Goma?
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: And when I was watching that, that's where my question came up about sustainable geoscience, because that's exactly what your team was doing.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: No, and exactly.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: I think that TV show, which had the hazard of being like whiz bang, there's a big volcano with lava rushing around everywhere, which is what you know, sometimes the science shows can be about.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: What I think they did really well there in that production is they did spend a lot of time talking about how interlinked the physical earth is with the society living around it and biodiversity, and how the biodiversity, you know, the gorillas in the second episode, how that related to the people who were, you know, pledged their lives to protect these gorillas from poachers.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: But the reason there was poachers and there was this civil conflict, of course, in that area was because partly of mining, right?
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: So access to a range of minerals which are used as uh component or to make components in all of the things we're using for this call.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: So there's this incredible thing, isn't there, where you know you've got this incredible resource because of this particular part of the earth's crust.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, people are fighting over it, you've got this war-torn area with this really problematic colonial history.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: And let's not forget that geosciences has its roots in colonialism.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know, one reason geoscience is developed as a science is because of um resources for empire-building uh nations like my own.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um so there's this, yeah, there's this really tragic but very complex and interweaved in an interesting web that there is.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's what makes me excited about sustainable geosciences, you know, kind of going into the future, is partly how we redefine ourselves and how we bring in a broader corpus of of subjects to really make our science as impactful as virology and immunology has been in the last 18 months.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, right.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_02: No kidding.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_02: So I I mean, I feel like I'm in an echo chamber here right now, because I'm like agreeing with everything you're saying, uh, you know, about the energy sector.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, there's this integration with the economy and like sort of realistic approaches to when countries sort of develop and and how they develop and how expensive it is for them to develop.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_02: So, how are you gonna bring uh sort of more links with industry?
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_02: Not maybe hydrocarbon industry, but mining sector, you know, critical minerals, things like that.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_02: Is that is that sort of on the horizon?
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was absolutely so today.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: I was in a meeting talking to somebody about doing some rock deformation experiments in in evaporite rocks, because evaporite rocks are gonna be used for hydrogen storage.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: So hydrogen is an energy source.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: So I have this long 10-year love affair with salt rock, evaporite rocks and salt tectonics.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_02: And now that's the question we cut out for time, isn't it about salt tectonics?
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: That's so true.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry, it's it's it's my I'm gonna give you an editing headache there, aren't I?
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: You know, trying to use that now towards something else, which is hydrogen storage.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: There's also nuclear waste storage that can occur in these sorts of evaporite rocks, which have low permeability, meaning that nuclear waste and water can't flow out of them.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um, geothermal, you know, heat provided by you know the rocks beneath our feet.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I love structural geology.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: So structural geology is really important when you're thinking about drilling geothermal worlds.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: So it's taking a lot of the things not only am I interested in, but also things I have some like vague, I won't say expertise, but some like vague sort of, you know, I've done it in the past is probably the best way to say it.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I can apply those to new arising energy challenges.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: And and it sounds a bit sappy to say it, but you know, I'm a bit of a bedwetting lefty, right?
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a bit of a I'm a bit of a a green bean.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so like emotionally and morally, I feel like, you know, better doing it, you know, and I sure sure.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't, you know, people think scientists should be these dispassionate sort of robots who just like press buttons and do this stuff.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: But actually, we are citizens and human beings, and and trying to disassociate yourself from that for the love of science isn't easy for me at least.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so it will it will at least partly guide, I think, what I do in the next well, I was gonna say 20 years of my career, but somebody else might decide otherwise.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I don't know about that.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I don't know.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: Chris, I just want to follow up um on something you just said about the energy sector, Chris.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know, so in your role as the chair of sustainable geoscience, have you thought about the dwindling, let's say, petroleum industry?
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: And is there a roadmap for these people to transition?
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: Their skills have to be transferable.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I would think that this is something you've probably thought about.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: I have, I have thought about.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: So I think there's two things here, right?
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: One is what do we do with the people who are currently working in the industry?
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: So they're working in an industry which is this size, you know, which is kind of you know, which is quite large, and then suddenly there are these arising sectors which are considerably smaller even when you add them together.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: So they won't all fit in, right?
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: So the question is is what happens to that group of people?
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: And that's quite a complex question, right?
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because those people will be in different stages of their career, they'll have different opportunities to retrain.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: And even then, there's a much smaller job market available to them.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: So there's that piece of the puzzle.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: The other piece of the puzzle, which I think is easier to solve, is that the training side.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: So the people who've yet to enter the industry.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the question there is do we need to train as many geoscientists in, let's just say, petroleum geosciences as we historically have done?
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: Because my friend Matt Hall, our name drop, um, is a is a good friend of mine.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: He made this point once on Twitter and he kind of said, Well, nobody defined how big the oil industry should be.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: So all these people who are running around saying, we need to defend the oil industry, we can't let the oil industry die, we can't be any smaller.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: Matt was like, Well, you know, who decided it was going to be this big, you know, X anyway?
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's grown to this size and now it's getting smaller and there's cycles in everything.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: So then, you know, going back to that point I was making about the second group of people, then we can start to train the optimal amount of geosciences as those are rising industries grow.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: So instead of having 55 students on a petroleum geoscience degree, we may only have 20 students on a sustainable geoscience degree or an environmental geosciences degree.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: So we could actually end up in a situation where we have the same number of students that split across a number of different disciplines, which are more in the sustainability sphere than the oil and gas courses are.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: So, does that make sense?
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there's these two groups that people decide what, and like the first one, you know, what do we do with all these people who are like 60 years old and are shouting on LinkedIn about the fact that you know the green bedwetters are all coming to take away this industry that's so brilliant and important and quite you know, global warming doesn't exist.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: You know, some of them say that.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not entirely sure how to deal with that, right?
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because partly because partly you've got to deal with like some attitudes around that, and even if people do believe it's very hard and it's a very emotive subject.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: But we well, I think that's why I originally asked the question.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: They're gonna resist that if there's no path forward for them.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: Which is fine, which is fine, they can resist it.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you can't grow those arising industries any quicker because there is a certain growth rate of those things as defined by historical industries that grow, right?
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: So we have an idea about how big they or how fast they can grow and how big they may ever be.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's just a reality of where we are.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now, none of that is to say, well, to keep these people in the jobs for the next 20, 30 years, we need to preserve this industry, which is demonstrably contributing in an incredibly negative way to climate change.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we can't do that, or at least where a lot of these voices are loudest, which are in the global north, like the US and the UK, which is where I hear it from anyway.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I have I have probably less sympathy with them than I do if I was talking to somebody from sub-Saharan Africa, like some of the students I've taught before, where they are desperate because that's one of the only careers they could ever get, and one of the only training opportunities they could ever receive.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, there is a difference in how we need to listen to people about this.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: We shouldn't just be dismissive, which is why I'm trying to give quite a considered answer here, that it is quite a difficult thing with the people who are in the industry.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: But I think the, I think the other bit of the pipeline we can we have more control over.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, it's gonna be a uh a very interesting time because we have this sort of industry that has been very mature for what, a century and a half, and it's gonna go away quite quickly, not as quickly as some people might think, but it's gonna go away pretty quickly.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: Just think about the conversations we're gonna be having in 20, 30 years.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's what I always think when we're having these difficult conversations.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: If we are still here having conversations where we're like, yeah, we need to maintain this industry because there's a bunch of people who want to be employed in it.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, no, you we don't we can't pre-propping up uh dinosaur industries.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's not true.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's hard to justify that from a governmental point of view, from a justice point of view, because you know the disproportionate impacts of climate change are being felt away from the places where the carbon footprint is the largest.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_02: For sure, for sure.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a there's an inequality issue there at play.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: So we need to we need to weave that into our discussions too.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_02: All right, that's a wrap.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_02: Remember to tune in next week for the full interview with Professor Chris Jackson.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_02: You can find us on all the social medias.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_02: We are at Planet Geocast and send us an email.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_02: Planet Geocast, that's PlanetGo C A S T at Gmail.com.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_02: We love your feedback.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_02: Take care.