Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / “The Climate Change Solution So Crazy it Just Might Work” with Quico Toro

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“The Climate Change Solution So Crazy it Just Might Work” with Quico Toro · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Get a humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
• 0:07
  And let's be honest, however uncomfortable we say that we find conversations around
• 0:14
  climate chaos and renewables and nuclear and the future of the planet.
• 0:19
  The reality is that in general those conversations are taking place within a fairly comfortable
• 0:25
  elite consensus that says that the problem is there's too much carbon in the air.
• 0:30
  We have to stop producing so much carbon, we have to stop emitting it.
• 0:33
  The correct way to figure out how to do that is through international institutions
• 0:36
  like the United Nations, we have to electrify everything and embrace renewable energy.
• 0:41
  All well and good.
• 0:42
  There has always been a subset of cranks who want to have more uncomfortable conversations
• 0:47
  about this, about the possibility of geoengineering the planet so that we can mitigate the worst
• 0:53
  effects of climate chaos, whether or not we are reducing carbon emissions, there's carbon
• 0:59
  capture and storage, there's a whole bunch of hair-brained ideas and I usually don't want
• 1:03
  to give huge credence to anything that smells of denailing the underlying problem.
• 1:10
  Today's guest does not do that.
• 1:13
  He's a fascinating individual, his name is Kiko Toro, he's the director of climate repair
• 1:18
  for the Anthropocene Institute and he has an idea, an idea that could revolutionize
• 1:24
  the way that we think about climate change.
• 1:27
  Kiko joined me on a sub-stack live from where he lives in Tokyo, he's formally a journalist
• 1:32
  by training, he's written for foreign affairs and the Atlantic, he wrote the latitudes column
• 1:38
  in the New York Times and it was a global opinion columnist for the Washington Post, he's
• 1:41
  now a contributing editor for persuasion.
• 1:45
  He is from Venezuela, so I spend the first 5 or 10 minutes of this conversation just
• 1:49
  picking his mind about democracy and Venezuela's descent into dictatorship and any lessons
• 1:54
  that we might be able to learn from it, feel free to skip through that if that's not your
• 1:57
  cup of tea, but this becomes a fascinating conversation about what is and isn't possible
• 2:03
  in extracting carbon from the atmosphere and one extraordinary plan that Kiko's team
• 2:07
  is working on that might just be crazy enough to work.
• 2:11
  I hope you enjoy as much as I did the one I don't like, Kiko Tora.
• 2:21
  How did you get out of Venezuela, what made you decide that it was time to leave?
• 2:26
  Well, I actually left pretty early but like in 2003 I was already out but it was running
• 2:32
  a journalistic website about Venezuela, it's still around, it's called Caracas Chronicles
• 2:37
  from Canada for quite a long time and those exciting news from Caracas, we had journalists
• 2:45
  in like 5 in the city writing for us but it's just a dictatorship got more and more authoritarian
• 2:52
  over time, just became more and more dictatorial and at a certain point it just wasn't safe,
• 2:57
  like I just couldn't be sending kids to take chances going to protest that I wasn't taking
• 3:03
  and at some point we were having to count kids on the way back from protests at the end
• 3:09
  of each day during the hardcore protest years and one day they didn't all come back and
• 3:16
  then you're trying to figure out where one of your journalists is and of course in that
• 3:20
  kind of regime when somebody gets arrested they don't announce that they've arrested
• 3:23
  you right, this disappears.
• 3:27
  So terrible times trying to find out where our guy was, they took him to a torture center
• 3:34
  but they didn't torture him but it took many days to figure out that he was safe and to
• 3:40
  get him out and it just became really too much, it just became clear that it wasn't really
• 3:45
  possible to do journalism about Venezuela safely anymore so I stopped.
• 3:51
  Did you see that incredible Argentinian film this year about the dissident who was disappeared,
• 3:58
  it was a true story in Argentina, do you know what I'm talking about?
• 4:02
  It was great anyway, I think it was I think it was a nominee for our best foreign language
• 4:08
  film at the Academy Awards and yeah, chilling to see how just they're just an ordinary middle
• 4:14
  class family and all of a sudden there's a late night knock at the door and then he's
• 4:18
  gone for just months and months and it's absolutely horrible yes yeah yeah, do you have
• 4:26
  friends back there of course of course and finally my uncle my godfather who I love is older
• 4:35
  now and in Garagas and you know no it's gonna happen it's a terrible situation right can
• 4:42
  you explain the decline of that country to people who don't understand what went wrong?
• 4:47
  I mean they spent 20 years doing that it takes it takes a bit of time but in some ways
• 4:52
  it's not that difficult you get a very charismatic strongman takes power promises people that
• 5:00
  if they give him all the power and undo all the checks and balances and all the institutions
• 5:04
  that could that could limit him from doing something their lives would be better they believe
• 5:08
  him he concentrates power and once he has enough power it doesn't need them anymore and that's
• 5:13
  really the the story that we've been through so it's Democratic bike backsliding it's not
• 5:18
  just Venezuela we've seen things like that no in Hungary it seems something like that and then Turkey
• 5:24
  has seen this process like that too and certainly in what Russia we've seen things like that and
• 5:30
  how in the US you see things that have quite some similarities it's really freaky for me reading
• 5:36
  American news he says yeah I was gonna ask you about that is it reminiscent yeah yeah I mean
• 5:43
  especially things like these authoritarian regimes they often they say really really crazy things
• 5:50
  that they don't believe such as you know Donald Trump is the most physically fit president the
• 5:57
  United States has ever had they you know they say things like that that they know are not true
• 6:02
  but the purpose is that they become a loyalty test to see if you're you're willing to
• 6:07
  base yourself by saying something that is obviously nonsense but it just becomes a way of like
• 6:12
  proving that you're willing to humiliate yourself rather than then then go against the regime and
• 6:19
  that's something we signed Venezuela all the time when we see stories like that in the US now it
• 6:24
  really it creeps me out it's yeah and so one of the dynamics that is happening in America that a
• 6:30
  lot of non-Americans find baffling and a lot of Americans find baffling is that those loyalty
• 6:35
  tests have succeeded such that the legislative branch is now completely occupied on the conservative
• 6:41
  side of well don't even want to say conservative because they're not conservative on the right
• 6:44
  wing side of politics by people who are in perfect lockstep with the leader and are pledging their
• 6:51
  fieldy on all of these loyalty tests about the crowd size at his first inauguration or whether
• 6:56
  their 2020 election was stolen and so on do you have an explanation from your experience in
• 7:01
  Venezuela why the parliament becomes co-opted by the leader why doesn't parliament do its job
• 7:08
  I mean it it becomes a problem of of negative selection right so you're selecting for people
• 7:14
  willing to obey and and and in the US you saw this very explicitly who's selecting it's supposed
• 7:20
  to be citizens who are selecting it during the primary process and during the election exactly exactly
• 7:25
  but citizens are selecting for this or Republican primary voters indeed are selecting for this
• 7:30
  because if Trump attacked you you would lose your primary as I became very clear to Republican
• 7:35
  politicians that if they wanted to have a long career in politics they would have to do this this
• 7:39
  was a surprise of entry but yeah the underlying issue here is that you have a hardcore of highly
• 7:47
  ideological brainwash people willing to go along with this nonsense and it's it's just painful
• 7:53
  yes I saw it in Venezuela that you had large sections of the population that could see that this
• 7:58
  was a bus careening off of the cliff and but you're sort of stuck in the back and cannot get
• 8:04
  to the driver's seat yeah I thought we're gonna talk about something else we are we are we are
• 8:10
  but no no I'm sorry but this is just you know we just have conversations which go wherever
• 8:15
  my interests take me and I hadn't thought about this you don't have to answer these questions if
• 8:19
  you don't want to if it's too sort of triggering but I am intrigued like what were the underlying
• 8:24
  conditions in Venezuela that led to the majority of people being so ideological because in the
• 8:32
  states we can talk about social media we can talk about globalization the decline of manufacturing
• 8:37
  you know whatever explanations you might want to give a backlash against workness what was
• 8:42
  happening in Venezuela at the time that left people susceptible to a strong man okay so there's
• 8:48
  a difference between sort of the initial conditions I think the initial conditions are really mostly
• 8:53
  about unfulfilled expectations. Venezuela was one of the world's fastest growing economies if not
• 9:00
  the world's fastest growing economy between 1925 and 1975 and after the olatrice is that mechanism
• 9:08
  of middle-class formation kind of stopped and a lot of people who had grown up seen you know their
• 9:14
  parents soon better than their grandparents and expecting that kind of investment found themselves
• 9:18
  shut out of a middle-class lifestyle that bred a lot of frustration I think you can see something
• 9:23
  similar to that in the US with unfulfilled expectations but that's the thing that that's
• 9:29
  how to go and once it's going the process feeds on itself right because the the populist machine
• 9:35
  creates its own rhetoric and its own culture and then it's it's very difficult to to get it to
• 9:42
  stop I mean in Venezuela we spent 25 years trying to stop it and we I mean the reality is we fail
• 9:48
  a quarter of the country had to leave the Venezuelan diaspora is now huge and it's not just numerically
• 9:54
  huge is that it's the young people the people who have some get up and go the high-agency people
• 10:00
  the ambitious people are left and so who you have left in Venezuela it's older people sicker
• 10:06
  people are kids people who are really ended up becoming dependent on remittances from their
• 10:13
  relatives abroad and what do you make of the current conflict or blooming conflict or and
• 10:21
  you know aggression from the United States towards Venezuela I mean what can I tell you it's
• 10:28
  it's absolutely shocking is it's very plain to me that they're they don't then the US
• 10:34
  administration doesn't really have a plan different spokespeople seem to have like different goals
• 10:39
  is it's really about drug trafficking is this about regime change is this about democracy like
• 10:44
  Marco Rubio seems like as a Cuban-American started off on that side but it's very difficult to
• 10:49
  believe that the Trump administration is going to bring democracy anywhere so it's not clear what
• 10:56
  their goals are or what their endpoint is and and it's very easy for me to imagine a situation where
• 11:03
  you know you start a bombing campaign I didn't spend the so that this this meant to trigger some
• 11:08
  kind of uprising from the military but if you don't do this carefully that uprising you you
• 11:13
  might just be fleshing out fleshing out then the traitorous people are the non-reliable people
• 11:20
  that the regime is going to want to purge right so this is a high states and like highly delicate
• 11:26
  thing that you would want done by people who know exactly what they're doing and who are
• 11:31
  careful and thoughtful about this and I don't hear anyone accusing the Trump administration of
• 11:36
  being careful or comfortable well paid heads that I mean and Donald Trump surely you know
• 11:42
  masses of diplomacy right last question but then yeah just just just just to put a presentation of
• 11:48
  that if you are a lieutenant lieutenant colonel in the business just in light of America every
• 11:54
  military revolt is junior officer sort of frustrating it's never the generals as always
• 11:58
  sitting your officers very junior officer who's frustrated with Meludo and wanting to see
• 12:03
  the back of him and you see the America's doing this well do you trust this administration
• 12:09
  enough to put your literal life on the line because if this goes badly you will end up in a dungeon
• 12:13
  they will torture and you will die right do you have enough confidence in them they are in the
• 12:18
  take a risk on these guys I don't think so I don't uh lastly is there were there any off ramps
• 12:29
  that were not taken in Venezuela that in hindsight you would recommend that we be mindful of in
• 12:35
  this situation that Americans be mindful of levers that we could be pulling that we're not pulling
• 12:41
  that if you'd pulled in Venezuela during its descent into dictatorship things could have gone
• 12:46
  differently I mean we I could spend a very long time talking about that it was always difficult
• 12:53
  in Venezuela to get enough consensus around one theory of change for how we would get the regime
• 13:00
  to to to alter its behavior or to let go so that the opposition was always quite disparate and
• 13:07
  like not really united and that really made it difficult for us to to be as effective as we might
• 13:13
  have been like if everyone had decided on the hardcore resistance grab some guns get to the hills
• 13:20
  strategy that might have worked ain't everybody had agreed on their peaceful resistance go to
• 13:24
  elections um resist that way that might have helped but what really didn't help us so we kind of had
• 13:30
  both and we didn't really have a way of uniting an approach to pushing packing us a regime and that
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  well fortunately the Democrats are perfectly united so there's no problem there
• 13:41
  I say with a hint of irony um okay climate change the let I read your piece which is entitled what
• 13:52
  we're doing for the climate won't work here's what will um the you make the point that there
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  are certain zombie paradigms on issues like climate change that stay dominant because people control
• 14:06
  the terms of the debate and define what isn't isn't acceptable to be to being said uh any pushback
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  that I give you here is definitely not coming from my attempting to enforce a dominant paradigm
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  because I agree with you on that the name of the show is uncomfortable conversation so I think we
• 14:20
  should be able to talk about everything and certainly scientists should study everything um including
• 14:27
  geoengineering and you know we'll get into all of the possible solutions to climate change
• 14:32
  but you also write that the current mantra of climate activists which is that we should electrify
• 14:39
  everything and embrace renewables is obviously not working because emissions keep rising
• 14:45
  every year at a faster and faster rate but my bullshit detector goes off there and I think but
• 14:51
  that's because we're not really implementing we're not electrifying everything and we're not
• 14:55
  embracing renewables really not to the extent that you know energy engineers say that we should
• 15:03
  be so why is that not a straw man well I think we need to think about the energy mix in a society
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  not as something that uh somebody in a controlling room at the head of the state gets to like push
• 15:18
  button and decide it's it's the outcome of a series of dynamic processes where there are thousands
• 15:24
  and actually millions of decision makers deciding how they're going to power their houses how they're
• 15:28
  going to power uh their cars how who they're going to elect to congress or to parliament to to make
• 15:34
  these key decisions right and so that is quite a complex system and that you know you put all those
• 15:39
  inputs into the system and on the other end that's yours of decisions are made on the other end you
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  get a certain number of tons of carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere what we have now
• 15:50
  conclusively seen after 30 years after the original um United Nations framework convention and
• 15:56
  climate change was was agreed was that the outcome of those cumulative millions of decisions
• 16:03
  is more and more carbon dioxide every year we wish that it wasn't we wish that there was some
• 16:07
  lever that we could pull that would make that difference but that is obviously not the case
• 16:11
  if it was the case it would have happened already right so this moral situation this idea that
• 16:17
  if you feel bad enough about it or if we'd like posting of things on on Facebook or if we are
• 16:22
  like more virtuous that the outcome the equilibrium outcome of all those decisions is going to change
• 16:27
  seems to me like obvious lunacy and it is because in part but is killer okay yes no sorry I was just
• 16:35
  going to say isn't that a collective action problem that would apply to any solution including
• 16:40
  the solutions of geoengineering I mean we have failed to do there are some very simple things that
• 16:45
  we know we could do to dramatically reduce carbon and we have known for 30 years we could put a
• 16:50
  price on carbon the simplest way would be a carbon tax we could subsidize you know in jurisdictions
• 16:56
  which subsidize rooftop solar and make it easy to get permits for rooftop solar like Australia
• 17:01
  there's the highest uptake of rooftop rooftop solar in the world you could subsidize you know
• 17:07
  home batteries and have interest free government loans for them and you could you know you could
• 17:12
  facilitate the transition in ways that governments have refused to do partly because there's a lot
• 17:18
  of money in fossil fuels and those lobbyists give lots of money and people haven't quite gotten
• 17:23
  on the same page about what needs to be done and but all of the all of the reasons why the big
• 17:28
  levers aren't being pulled would it strike it strikes me would apply to any alternative solution
• 17:34
  I know they destroyed as well but I mean there are a couple there are a couple of things to
• 17:38
  start it out with the right framework which is that this is a collective action problem right if
• 17:42
  you had the world government if you had a way of like instituting decisions at the global scale
• 17:48
  then yes the carbon carbon price would absolutely solve the problem but for that you would need a
• 17:53
  world government which we don't have in the absence of a world government where you have this
• 17:57
  piecemeal decision making such a you can institute a carbon price in the European Union or in
• 18:03
  Japan or wherever it is but other countries are not going to do that and because we have an
• 18:08
  internet economy what you end up seeing is production moving to the jurisdictions where it's
• 18:14
  still cheaper to to pollute right and so why are carbon emissions still rising well it's not
• 18:20
  because the developed countries the countries where there's some massive of voters are actually
• 18:25
  concerned for a far enough along the mass low pyramid of needs care about this stuff it's not
• 18:30
  because they're not doing something they are like in the developed countries emissions are falling
• 18:34
  slowly but they are falling but for every one ton of carbon dioxide that developed countries
• 18:39
  have stopped putting in the atmosphere developing countries have added five right because they have
• 18:44
  the political economy decisions in those developing countries the pressures on the decision makers
• 18:49
  are very very different right particularly out of those five about four from from China so we
• 18:55
  to have a moment of sanity of realizing that we can control what we can control but there is
• 19:00
  no world government we cannot have to China in the in Indonesia uh Brazil South Africa into into
• 19:08
  having different political economies than they have they you know those decision making processes
• 19:14
  are what they are and we've seen what the equilibrium outcome of those processes is and
• 19:18
  is rising emissions so I just think 30 years after the original rear summit we should at least have
• 19:27
  the presence of mind of realizing that doubling down on a new NF triple C project that has already
• 19:33
  failed and that will continue to fail is simply wasting time and that we need to be doing something
• 19:39
  quite different and we need to be looking at solutions that in fact don't face those same kind
• 19:44
  of action what's NF triple C United Nations framework conversion for climate change all this
• 19:51
  cops right these are the talkfests that we do every year where we try to get towards a I mean
• 19:56
  just to push back on what maybe a straw man in that we would need a world government to implement
• 20:01
  a carbon tax you know we got rid of chlorofluora carbons to save the ozone layer we got rid of
• 20:07
  whaling uh you know we got agreement on a nuclear weapons framework that works has been working
• 20:13
  okay up until recently perhaps um there are all kinds of ways that we can come together
• 20:19
  if that if parties are coming in a sense of goodwill and compromise like if it's a constant
• 20:27
  low it's a constant low the point is that you can get rid of chlorofluora carbons
• 20:32
  rel it it's chlorofluora carbons I don't know how you say that um rel it's chlorofluora carbons and chlorofluora
• 20:38
  carbons yeah uh those are you you connect and there were technologically feasible solutions and
• 20:45
  alternatives to that to those that that didn't put a giant hole in your budget if you're the
• 20:50
  finance minister of Indonesia or or of China which are where they actually relevant decision
• 20:56
  makers here and not whatever corporation in uh the United States or whatever municipal or
• 21:02
  or national government in in Australia or or in Japan you're talking okay so um so the
• 21:08
  the problem is that you know when you're dealing with carbon dioxide you're dealing with combustion
• 21:12
  and combustion is at the center of so much of what we do right so so we are told that there are
• 21:19
  these easy costless solutions but it's obviously not true if it was true that um renewables were
• 21:26
  just a cheaper better simpler way of of powering societies than than fossil fuels you would need
• 21:34
  subsidies for them you know they they Indonesia's and the militias and the brisels of the world would
• 21:39
  be rushing to to adopt these solutions simply to cut costs the reality is that that is not happening
• 21:45
  because these these technologies have fundamental limitations to how large a portion of the grid
• 21:52
  they can take up because or weather dependent because they depend on expensive batteries for a
• 21:56
  series of reasons and so that entire way of thinking about the problem to me is is a data and then
• 22:05
  it's difficult because you do have this United Nations system you have chief sustainability officers
• 22:12
  in most large companies in the west now you have a cadre of people you have millions of people
• 22:17
  who live in the sustainability industry and in this UN framework and that's how they've
• 22:23
  built their careers that's how they've been trained to think about it and there's this inertia
• 22:28
  towards continuing to try to deal with these problems through these obviously limited solutions
• 22:35
  that that blinkers us that keeps the the overton window of possible solutions quite narrow
• 22:42
  and that excludes from from the conversation other responses that I think technically just seem
• 22:48
  much more promised so the the resistance that the the the the the steel manning of the resistance
• 22:55
  to considering those other options which will get to in a second yes the the straw man version
• 23:02
  of the opposition to your point of view is that people have vested interests in their own way
• 23:07
  of doing things and it obviously hasn't worked the steel man version is at some point in
• 23:14
  the future we're going to have to have a zero carbon economy regardless of what hacks we might
• 23:20
  be able to undertake in the short term to mitigate the effects of climate change so we're all going
• 23:26
  to have to get on the same page about this somehow in some way when I hear conservatives or
• 23:36
  right wingers talk about how well really the most of the growth in carbon emissions is coming
• 23:41
  from the developing world so anything we do is just shooting ourselves in the foot in Australia or
• 23:46
  the UK or the United States because we are a vanishingly small proportion of the growth in carbon
• 23:53
  emissions anyway and you can't expect poor people to care about the environment because they have
• 23:58
  to care about where how to put food on their table I hear buck passing and an unwillingness to
• 24:05
  step up and be the bigger party and have the moral credibility to construct a framework which is
• 24:12
  likely to get buy-in from developing countries because no developing country is going to make any
• 24:17
  sacrifice if Australia and the UK and the US and the EU continue to belch out as much as they want
• 24:24
  to the point of a country like Australia for example you know putting itself on a path towards
• 24:31
  zero carbon or towards renewables is not that our 2% of global emissions is going to make a
• 24:36
  difference it's that it gives us the credibility to go to international conferences and say we're
• 24:43
  tightening our belts we're copying a bit of pain here's a framework in which you guys can also
• 24:47
  copy a bit of pain and will help you out in any way we can to transition towards that future
• 24:54
  why is your position not just a hand waving like let's forget about having to make difficult
• 24:59
  sacrifices because we're not the ones to blame they are no no it's a look already this blame
• 25:07
  firmware to me is meaningless you're proposing a world where when the finance minister of Malaysia
• 25:16
  sits on with the energy minister of Malaysia and with the industrial industry interest in Malaysia
• 25:21
  and with politicians who will go to election and who have to respond to I electorates who have to
• 25:27
  pay power rates right when they're sitting around and they're making those difficult strategic
• 25:31
  decisions about how Malaysia is going to get his power five years from now where what happens in
• 25:37
  Australia matters to that at all and that is a fantasy world that is just not the way the real world
• 25:45
  in the list of criteria that decision makers in developing countries having in front of them when
• 25:51
  they're making these decisions how virtuous or un virtuous Japan or France is is like a very
• 25:59
  distance consideration it would make a difference if they were bound to an international agreement
• 26:06
  that they had signed which was only able to be signed because yeah but they're not going to
• 26:10
  sign an international agreement that goes against their national interest and that is what John
• 26:16
  Kerry found out after 10 years of trying to negotiate with with the Chinese is that you can be
• 26:23
  as virtuous as you want the Chinese have a clear understanding of what their national interest is
• 26:27
  that national interest does not go through abating carbon power generation anytime in the next 15
• 26:34
  years and they're just going to send you to suck on the pickle because nothing you can say at an
• 26:38
  international conference will change the calculus that the Chinese Communist Party has about what
• 26:43
  it will take to make China prosperous and stable over the next 20 years so I just think we're
• 26:48
  working on the basis of a very very wrong mental model of how these kinds of decisions are made
• 26:54
  and who makes these kinds of decisions and it's locking us into a conversation that is honestly kind
• 26:59
  of hopeless right and that is why there is this much hopelessness in the air is because we we have
• 27:05
  this idea that we can Hector and morally shame developing countries into putting their all national
• 27:12
  interests in second place to to our concerns and that's that's just never going well I'm not sure
• 27:19
  I'm not sure that that's the point of view though I think that the objective is to create a
• 27:24
  framework of carrots and sticks in which they see their long-term interest as being consistent with
• 27:29
  a certain amount of short-term pain yes I think that yeah you could you can try to do that but
• 27:36
  the point is that you've been trying to do that for 30 years and this has been failing for 30 years
• 27:41
  so at one point do you say okay this thing that we have been trying for 30 years we need to stop
• 27:46
  doing because it's clearly not working right haven't tried very hard no one's ever been
• 27:50
  pulled to pulling on the same page at the same time and we've never had a US administration
• 27:54
  and the European administration and you know all coming together saying that's what the
• 28:01
  Paris agreement was and and and as hard as you can pull the reality is that in the absence of
• 28:07
  a world government which would be great if that but we don't decisions at the UN have to be made
• 28:12
  by consensus which means that Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and Venezuela have to sign on the dotted
• 28:18
  line right and so this is the wrong conversation this is this is deepening our our commitment to
• 28:26
  a conversation that will not lead us to where we want to go that's a planet okay what is yeah
• 28:33
  finished it's also put it it's also putting the interest of that kid in India whose parents
• 28:40
  farm two acres of land and break their backs and cannot get enough food because now it's too hot
• 28:47
  now we're saying to that to that kid who's going to go hungry at night to the actual like victims
• 28:52
  of climate change now that it is more important for us that our feelings of what is morally correct
• 28:59
  that does take precedence over your actual climate outcomes and their climate outcomes are not
• 29:04
  decided by how successful the UNF triple C is their climate outcomes are will be decided in
• 29:11
  large world by the actual concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and we can
• 29:17
  lower those without going through this entire process so this fail for yet right yet I mean that
• 29:25
  this process will have to be gone through at some point do you agree no no and it is it's also a
• 29:31
  question of time scales it is happening in the world in the rich countries this is happening is
• 29:36
  happening slowly but if you if you follow the curve of where the developed countries are by the year
• 29:45
  21 20 or so in 100 years or now we would get to to net zero right the developed countries are behind
• 29:51
  that curve they're still developing countries are still raising emissions year on year they
• 29:56
  will eventually reach a level of development where it becomes feasible for them to then to start
• 30:01
  lowering their their climate to footprint but that is going to take 150 years and we don't have
• 30:07
  150 years so we need a solution now that that gets us that that lines up the time scale at which
• 30:16
  decarbonization can actually happen in the real world in which those equilibrium outcomes of all
• 30:21
  those decisions about energy point us toward net zero with with the need to have a basically
• 30:28
  stable atmosphere in the meantime Kiko you have some experience as a reporter of actually
• 30:34
  sort of living with and reporting on people who live on the front line of the climate crisis can
• 30:40
  you give us your estimation of where the climate the current trajectory of the climate is taking us
• 30:49
  this is our hardest question because there are huge uncertainties people don't realize we don't
• 30:58
  actually understand how particles in the atmosphere interact with clouds and how clouds form and how
• 31:04
  much clouds in what circumstances shield the earth from solar radiation so there are these like very
• 31:10
  wide error bars around the international panel on climate changes estimates of where we could be
• 31:17
  heading so we could be heading anywhere sort of between 2.5 to maybe 3.5 maybe four degrees of
• 31:24
  warming by the year 2100 so we don't know where we're going to land there is most people think
• 31:29
  around three but then there's also a lot of uncertainty about what that will actually mean in
• 31:34
  terms of the climate the people face day-to-day in different places and if three sorry if three is
• 31:41
  the estimate then where are we now what if we what are we already what we're already at 1.5 we're
• 31:47
  at 1.5 so we've sort of blown past the Paris Agreement target already although nobody wants to admit
• 31:55
  that people are you know the proverbial coyote who ran off the cliff and hasn't realized this so
• 32:01
  hasn't quite started falling it but the reality is that we're at around 1.5 now so we don't really
• 32:08
  know how livable a three degree warmer world is it's it's sort of simple to create climate models
• 32:17
  that that show three of three degree warmer world is hardly livable especially in in the tropical
• 32:24
  band in in the developing world but you can also find there's also a possibility that it's actually
• 32:29
  not that bad because there are there are all these uncertainties about what exactly means for
• 32:35
  the inter-tropical convergence something you know it gets quite technical very soon but the
• 32:39
  reality is that we really don't know what the way to think about this is in terms of aggregate risk
• 32:45
  there is some sense of like the overall climate risks that we're taking and we know that that
• 32:50
  the higher the temperature goes the more that kind of a nebulous concept of overall risk the worse
• 32:57
  that gets but part of it so this is where we're getting at this idea of deep uncertainty we don't
• 33:04
  really know exactly what that will mean where you live or for your family or for like the family of
• 33:10
  farmers and this and this into we just know it's risky right I mean this is used by some people who
• 33:16
  don't want to take action on climate change as a way of saying look we have so much uncertainty
• 33:22
  about this people get these things wrong all the time so in fact the precautionary principle is
• 33:28
  just to keep on doing what we're doing basically you know for the best that's the counter I agree
• 33:32
  to that is is the one I first heard articulated by Arnold Schwarzenegger of all people I think when
• 33:37
  he was governor of California saying you know if I go to a doctor and they say that there's a 10
• 33:41
  percent chance that I'm going to die from you know eating skittles or something then I'm going to
• 33:46
  make sure that I don't eat like I'm going to do everything even if it's very costly even if it's
• 33:51
  my favorite thing I'm still going to make sure that I don't do it because I don't want that to be
• 33:55
  to be on the on the cards so I'm just interested in hearing from you what's the bad
• 34:00
  scenario because you've and where have you where have you been that you see it
• 34:06
  played out playing I did well I've done some some work on agricultural development in Uganda
• 34:13
  and South Sudan which are some of the most climate vulnerable places in the world and there is
• 34:18
  very serious in South Sudan who is one of the very poorest countries in the world it's always
• 34:25
  when hot like 42 43 degrees Celsius in the in the summer is normal but now they're hitting like 45
• 34:30
  and 46 and they're hitting thresholds beyond which the survival crops that people rely on to
• 34:37
  feed their families in these like subsistence farming economies they won't grow like millet will
• 34:44
  not grow after 45 degrees sorghum like even the hardiest varieties of sorghum just whether and
• 34:50
  die when you get to to these areas so we're talking around the places where the poorest people in the
• 34:56
  world live the Sahel Central Africa also parts of the India subcontinent and bits of Latin America
• 35:03
  this is where it's just becomes genuinely unlivable and so you're either going to
• 35:08
  see mass migration somewhere or just populations dwindling or who knows what we've never
• 35:14
  faced anything like that but that's just part of it because there is also this question about
• 35:19
  the the aim of the Atlantic meridian overturning circulation the ocean current that keeps Europe
• 35:24
  livable you could have a situation where the Sahel is unlivable because it's too hot but London has
• 35:30
  the the weather of Newfoundland as well so if you if you break down the ocean currents and that
• 35:36
  is happening right now if the ocean currents that bring warm waters to Europe stop within some
• 35:42
  period of time you will have a Europe that is possibly 10 12 degrees colder on average in the winter
• 35:51
  so the problem with the uncertainty about the possible impacts is that it runs both ways it could
• 35:58
  be less areas than we think but it also be much more serious than we think and so when you're
• 36:03
  dealing with risks on the scale and risks that are difficult to measure yeah really think you
• 36:09
  need to be very careful to be very pragmatic about lessening that changing the atmospheric
• 36:16
  chemistry in a way that will come as this yeah that North Atlantic current is a real doozy isn't it
• 36:22
  I mean when you look at a map and you realize that New York is at the same latitude as the south
• 36:27
  of Spain you realize what legwork the Atlantic is doing in keeping Europe warm with the with the warm
• 36:34
  water that comes up and some people are sort of quite cavalier about it and they think technology
• 36:39
  will get us out of this well if London had the same climate as Toronto well Toronto survives yeah
• 36:45
  but how much how much work and money do you have to put into London into those old streets to re
• 36:51
  furb London to cope with I mean there aren't even de-icing machines at Heathrow like you know
• 36:57
  well it's not like yeah and what about all the crops that people have been farming for centuries
• 37:03
  how do you suddenly where are you suddenly getting your food from on your German farms if they're
• 37:08
  in permafrost yeah it's but there's so much uncertainty about that because the other part of the
• 37:15
  AMOX that the God we used to call it the Gulf Stream when I was just called the other part of that
• 37:20
  question they said we really don't know how long it will take for AMOX to stop once uh
• 37:26
  once it goes into terminal decline and according to some climate models it's 25 years which is a
• 37:32
  major crisis but according to others it's 300 years and we just don't know so uh again it's just
• 37:39
  like deep uncertainty all the way down and when you start to take on the the reality that there
• 37:45
  are some very bad bad worst case scenarios and we can't really quantify their likelihood is when
• 37:50
  you start to think okay we need to do something kind of drastic to to to change atmosphere it's
• 37:56
  chemistry now to prevent this possibility one last uh worry that I've heard articulated
• 38:02
  Kiko has to do with the monsoons on the subcontinent and the possibility that if the monsoon
• 38:09
  stops behaving the way that it has for centuries in India and Pakistan and Bangladesh then the refugee
• 38:15
  crises that we've seen in the past will look like a cakewalk because you'll suddenly have hundreds
• 38:20
  and millions of people flooding across borders what does that do to Australian democracy and
• 38:26
  liberalism if you have thousands of boats of you know approaching uh so there are all these knock
• 38:32
  on effects I mean what happens to Malaysia and Singapore and um what's the probability do we
• 38:38
  currently know if how should I think about the possibility of disruptions to entire weather systems
• 38:44
  on which billions of people rely I mean you're talking about the Indian monsoon which is obviously
• 38:51
  a major problem but the the African Africa has a monsoon too which was already badly affected by
• 38:58
  by human activity in the 70s and 80s and there we're just talking about normal old air pollution
• 39:03
  from Europe deeply disrupted this a house monsoon in the 70s 80s into the 90s and you know many
• 39:10
  political scientists will tell you that the recent country like Burkina Faso and Mali and Niger
• 39:16
  keep having coups and and there's some of the most unstable and poorest interest in the world
• 39:21
  is that we've read their ecology by changing their climate already in the 70s 80s 90s through
• 39:27
  air pollution uh interestingly because of air pollution regulations in Europe making the the
• 39:32
  air cleaner in Europe that process has actually gone into reverse and now this the hell is is
• 39:38
  greening again you can actually measure this there's really interesting research on this but the
• 39:42
  mind is that once you've already displaced the generation of farmers out of their farms and sent
• 39:47
  them to live in these big sprawling unmanageable cities in the Sahel then all necessarily go back
• 39:53
  that the farming skills are forgotten those who grandparents used to farm there so people
• 39:58
  don't necessarily go back after you you repair the damage which we have done so we've already seen
• 40:05
  this it's not just that the Indian monsoon which is obviously very worrying there are weather patterns
• 40:10
  around the world there's a possibility that the the rains that sustain the Amazon will just stop
• 40:15
  right and there are models that show that also happening could end up the Sahara used to be a
• 40:20
  rainforest a few tens of thousands or hundreds and thousands of years ago so you could end up with a
• 40:26
  discerning result um if you ask me to put a probability to these how it comes I can't I just know
• 40:34
  that it's risky and it's risky and getting risky we're doing things that disrupting things and where
• 40:40
  to we don't have the capacity to understand in what way is exactly so if the conversation if the
• 40:46
  existing conversation around uh either unilaterally or multilaterally electrifying everything and
• 40:52
  going renewable is the wrong conversation to have in this state of emergency what is the right
• 40:59
  conversation to have um look I for me I've looked at this very carefully think we need to um capture
• 41:08
  carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at gigaton scale you know gigat you say gigatons a billion tons
• 41:14
  you say it really quick but it's a mind blowing amount of material right now humanity is adding about
• 41:21
  40 gigatons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere each year about 10 of those gigatons are absorbed by
• 41:28
  land carbon things on land and especially in the ocean um if we could expand the ability of
• 41:36
  land and especially the the oceans to to absorb carbon dioxide we could reach net zero much more
• 41:43
  quickly um people have some familiarity with this idea because everybody now said if you plant
• 41:48
  the trees trees absorb carbon dioxide so you get these forestation projects around the world that
• 41:54
  they help a little bit but as you research this more and more you realize that there's just not enough
• 41:59
  land like if you do the math uh in order to absorb all the extra carbon dioxide that we are um
• 42:06
  emitting in on land you would have to uh turn something around the size of all of Canada into
• 42:14
  tropical forest and there's just not enough land for that you would displays a huge amount of
• 42:19
  of agriculture people would go hungry you would displays um it's it's it's simply not practical so
• 42:26
  it doesn't really work so then the question is if you can't do it on land well where can you do it
• 42:30
  where where this uh photosynthesis work at scale it's in the oceans right so um i work at the
• 42:38
  Anthropocene Institute right now we deal with a lot of these projects the the center of our
• 42:44
  concern right now is looking at photosynthesis in the ocean as a potential way of absorbing this
• 42:51
  extra carbon dioxide how would that work well um there are several different approaches the one
• 43:00
  that we're more at most interested in is uh inspired by this research project that came out of
• 43:07
  a French research team in the South Pacific it's published in science in 2023 they found these
• 43:13
  undersea vents like hydrothermal vents um you look like the level canals under the ocean
• 43:19
  that are shallow so they're adding chemicals to surface waters and what is it mostly
• 43:25
  it's phosphate and iron stuff that's in the earth's man uh it turns out that these uh sub yeah
• 43:32
  these sub sea vents uh fertilize very large like blooms of uh phytoplankton phytoplankton
• 43:39
  are just tiny marine plants right they're microscopic you can't see them without a microscope
• 43:44
  but they absorb carbon dioxide they're the base of the food chain in the ocean and
• 43:50
  there are very large numbers of them around the around the world um except in the center of
• 43:58
  of the earth's oceans if you're very far from land it turns out that you don't get enough dust
• 44:02
  deposition from from the continents to fertilize uh these phytoplankton blooms so the center of
• 44:09
  of the earth's um oceans tend to be very low in phytoplankton and it'll absorb nearly as much
• 44:15
  carbon dioxide as it could this undersea vent in Tonga fertilizes a phytoplankton patch the
• 44:22
  size of German okay it's 360,000 square kilometers and it's absorbing 15 million tons of carbon
• 44:29
  dioxide per year as millions we need to get to billions we need to get to gigatonscale but it
• 44:35
  it's like we see it as a kind of natural pilot project a natural experiment where nature is showing
• 44:43
  us what how we could move towards a solution that doesn't require 192 countries to agree and sign
• 44:50
  under dotted line where some countries in the South Pacific which are among the most exposed to
• 44:56
  to climate change in the world could take a lead in saying well we can develop our natural carbon
• 45:02
  sinks and then imitate what nature does and it uses it's a nature-based solution it's using
• 45:08
  phytoplankton which is the kind of being that initially put oxygen into the atmosphere in the
• 45:13
  first place there's a reason we have oxygen to begin so it's there uh where we want to study
• 45:18
  and do you need to seed phytoplankton or are you merely fertilizing existing tracks of the ocean
• 45:25
  for the existing phytoplankton to flourish yeah no you don't need to see it anything phytoplankton
• 45:31
  is there it's just not there in concentrations high enough to absorb enough carbon dioxide right so
• 45:38
  what's interesting about this is that this in principle could work in most of the world's oceans
• 45:43
  they could work in the north Atlantic and the south sorry in the north Pacific and the south
• 45:48
  Pacific it could work in the Indian Ocean and it could work in the south Atlantic Ocean it could
• 45:53
  work in the north Atlantic and the reason why it's quite interesting is that the north Atlantic is
• 45:58
  already naturally fertilized by dust from the Sahara so there's this simple the Sahara
• 46:04
  near layer which is a layer of dust-faring bearing um air from picked up from the Sahara that
• 46:11
  actually covers most of the north Atlantic and there's a reason the north Atlantic on that per unit
• 46:16
  basis captures about twice as much carbon dioxide as the other as there are other oceans um there's
• 46:24
  just more life in the north Atlantic there's there's always winter rich fisheries in the in the
• 46:29
  north Atlantic for for this reason so really the the proposal that that we're thinking if we think
• 46:36
  five ten years south is well what if we could bring the uh the world's other oceans to the level
• 46:42
  of phytoplankton productivity that the north Atlantic already has let's take it we're not talking
• 46:47
  about something that would necessarily be a visible change like to the naked eye who just look the same
• 46:53
  you would just have livelier um ocean ecosystems in these other in these four other oceans you
• 47:00
  probably is it's hard to say for sure but common sense indicates that if you have more phytoplankton
• 47:07
  you would also have more of all kinds of marine life soil plankton krills whales fish marine birds
• 47:16
  so one thing that we do know from looking at the the natural site in Tonga is that the natural
• 47:22
  site in Tonga does not seem to have a normal ecology in any way in fact is um when when nature does
• 47:28
  this naturally through through undersea vents you end up with um eco like biodiversity hotspots
• 47:37
  right and and very good fishing grounds so it does look like it could be ecologically
• 47:42
  quite benign it's not expensive because we're talking about very simple minerals in very low
• 47:48
  concentrations they're not really talking about a lot of iron we're talking about
• 47:53
  um the math we've done shows that the weight of a human eyelash per ton of seawater would be enough
• 48:00
  to raise the productivity of their self-specific to something close to what the north of the
• 48:06
  Atlantic has so honestly this to me it seems like a much better conversation to be having about
• 48:14
  a actually realistic way to to get to to net zero within a relatively short period of time
• 48:20
  short enough to give the world the time to decarbonize that that it would need which is
• 48:26
  on the different times and phytoplankton is not algae it's micro algae it's micro algae micro
• 48:33
  algae okay got it and then so just to clarify to paint a picture in people's minds are we talking
• 48:38
  about ships or aeroplanes spraying fertilizer into the south Pacific but that's all to be worked
• 48:47
  out there are lots of technical questions i'm sorry to answer but seeing we're backing a project
• 48:53
  called growing oceans i can go to growing oceans dot org and see all the the technical detail
• 48:59
  all of that is still to be worked out for example how exactly how much iron and how much phosphate
• 49:05
  delivered how what we need is like a three to three year research program to go to the self-specific
• 49:13
  to understand the ecology of phytoplankton and so plankton in the region in much more detail and to
• 49:19
  begin maybe then if it turns out to be ecologically safe and if the local people wanted because we're
• 49:26
  working in people's territorial waters right to then begin to experiment with with what nutrient
• 49:34
  additions would do so we don't know all the details a lot of the science remains to be worked out
• 49:39
  we just have this initial indication from nature that this could be done and this could be done
• 49:46
  so part of people's reticence i assume when you raise this is the past examples of humans trying
• 49:52
  to introduce something into an ecosystem uh you know Australia has a problem with a uh
• 49:58
  a floral pest called the prickly pear so the hawaians have a great idea of giving us a cane
• 50:05
  toad to eat the the insect that is going to get the prickly pear and it's just this cascade of
• 50:11
  of i'm maybe misremembering that or butchering it but you know now we have an intractable pest
• 50:16
  problem where the cane toad has no natural predators uh ecosystems function in complicated ways
• 50:23
  you know you have more phytoplankton what does that do to the coral reefs how does coral
• 50:28
  respond to the phytoplankton does the phytoplankton create more shade in the water so that there's
• 50:32
  less solar radiation for the fish at the bottom to get like all of these knock on uh effects
• 50:38
  what what do you say to people who say like this is not the right way we just need to
• 50:43
  what did you reduce the color there's a there's a couple of things about this first wouldn't be
• 50:49
  the idea is not to introduce any organism that it's not naturally in the water already it's just
• 50:56
  feed organisms that are in the water and in fact what we would be doing in many ways is just
• 51:01
  restoring the situation that we had 150 years ago so until 150 years ago we have good evidence
• 51:08
  that the center of ocean gires used to be more productive than it is now and the reason
• 51:14
  that was more productive is that we had lots of whales whales eat at depth where there's lots of
• 51:20
  nutrients in the water and then they come up for air and then when they come up for air they tend to
• 51:25
  do a number two and actually whale feces turns out to be an excellent fertilizer for phytoplankton
• 51:33
  and there's quite a bit of research. I appreciate your politeness in calling it a number two you
• 51:36
  can just call it a giant whale shade on this show that's so well that's exactly what they do
• 51:43
  when when they when you actually you could actually look this up it's called a biological pump or
• 51:48
  the whale pump and there's very good evidence that because of the legacy of industrial
• 51:54
  whaling we've lost the ability oceans have lost the ability to cycle nutrients from depth
• 52:00
  to the surface where phytoplankton can grow and that's one important reason why there's now
• 52:05
  less phytoplankton that there used to be so this we're really talking about recreating a situation
• 52:11
  that we used to have where oceans were a more higher performing carbon sink than than they are
• 52:18
  now that's one thing but the other thing to say about this is that of course you're right oceans
• 52:23
  and ecosystems are big difficult to model unpredictable things which is why the project that
• 52:29
  where they were packing growing oceans is being very careful to do this in a stage gated way so
• 52:36
  the model we have in mind is very it's patterned on the way that drug development happens so when
• 52:44
  you go to develop a new drug you start with laboratory experiments and you assess for safety and
• 52:50
  efficacy if it's safe and if it works then you go to a small trial and then you're going to assess
• 52:56
  and if it's safe and it works you go to a slightly larger trial and you keep doing that by each
• 53:00
  point you have a moment when you actually stop and you look at the data and you need permission
• 53:07
  from a regulator to go forward so you know we are not crazy people we are working with university
• 53:15
  based colleges who understand the issues at play and you know we don't know if it's going to work
• 53:23
  this is an idea at this point what we do know is that we should definitely be exploring whether
• 53:28
  this is a possibility because this could this kind of approach has a potential to get us to gigatons
• 53:36
  scale carbon removal that the UN process has already shown that it does have right when you say
• 53:43
  gigatons scale carbon removal you mentioned earlier that the natural Tongan hydro thermal jets that
• 53:50
  are doing this have covered an area of the South Pacific the size of Germany that absorbs 15
• 53:57
  million tons is that right but you were talking about needing 30,000 million tons does that mean
• 54:06
  that the difference in 15 and 30,000 is a lot does that mean we need hundreds of Germany hundreds
• 54:12
  of areas hundreds of Germany's worth of the South Pacific treated look potentially if we can what
• 54:20
  part of this is that we need to bring South Pacific nations along for for the right this needs to
• 54:25
  be something that is in their interests and that works for their coastal communities and for
• 54:29
  their people right so this cannot be us telling people in Tonga or in Vanuatu or anywhere else in
• 54:36
  the region okay like we are here the foreign deal the white willing list we're going to tell you
• 54:40
  what to do that that that's just not going to work however if we can demonstrate that that
• 54:47
  this technique is ecologically benign that is good for fisheries maybe that's something that we're
• 54:52
  actively going to be monitoring it takes several years to see an effect on fisheries but in principle
• 54:57
  there should be what and if we can demonstrate that this is safe then what we hope to be able to
• 55:02
  say to our partners in the South Pacific is your islands are definitely threatened by climate change
• 55:09
  here's a way that your ecology and your coastal communities can benefit maybe if we manage to
• 55:15
  sell some of these tons of sequestration to on international markets or to other people maybe you can
• 55:23
  have a direct economic benefit as well the idea is that if we manage to do that then we will get
• 55:30
  an imitation dynamic around the South Pacific where Tonga might be first but then somehow I might say
• 55:35
  okay well we want in on this too and eventually you you grow and you grow until you cover
• 55:41
  enough of the South Pacific that you are beginning to get to optimize first of all the carbon
• 55:47
  sequestration because the volcano is not optimized as hydropower vent is just dealing now we think
• 55:53
  it might be possible to do better than than the hydropower vent is doing and where you can grow
• 55:59
  across the South Pacific and then eventually you can start to talk to partners in the South Atlantic
• 56:04
  Indian Ocean and in the North Pacific and within 10 or 15 years you could be looking at possibly
• 56:13
  tens of gigatons so tens of billions of tons of carbon dioxide if it if it all goes well can't
• 56:21
  promise that of course yet because I mean there wasn't a system yet but that's what we're doing
• 56:26
  one of the one of the risks keep going for the marine environment from climate change is not just
• 56:32
  the warming temperatures but also acidification of the oceans which many Australians are deeply
• 56:38
  concerned about since we have the world's largest coral reef obviously and it's already showing
• 56:42
  the effects of ocean acidification in terms of bleaching coral you know we also function I
• 56:49
  suppose geopolitically as something of a of a deputy sheriff to the South Pacific and they're
• 56:54
  the go to you know the go to rich democracy in their eyes big rich democracy that countries
• 57:01
  like that treat as an sort of an interlocutor to the rest of the world so the the queue the queue
• 57:09
  is running on that action too but yeah we're working on yes the queue is absolutely yeah yeah
• 57:15
  yeah well they do but they're they're a lot smaller so they it's harder for the New Zealand
• 57:21
  Prime Minister to get the president of the United States on the phone than it is for the Australian
• 57:25
  Prime Minister um so the question is what do we know what impact this might have on acid on acid in
• 57:31
  the oceans again because this has not been actually done this is just a project we cannot
• 57:39
  say for sure but as a matter of theory the thing that if acidifies the ocean is inorganic carbon
• 57:47
  so it's carbon dioxide that's just diluted in the water when you stimulate phytoplankton
• 57:52
  phytoplankton absorbs an inorganic carbon and builds it into organic particles organic particles
• 57:58
  do not cost ocean acidification so on a large scale this should combat directly combat ocean acidification
• 58:05
  we have to measure it but that's a theoretical question this is actually my institution
• 58:11
  answer to seeing is also an ocean conservation institution when we do protection for marine
• 58:17
  protected areas and we fight illegal fishing and krill fishing around the world and for us ocean
• 58:23
  acidification is the major one of the major reasons we're interested in this phase and we're
• 58:28
  interested in this solution this is directly what address ocean acidification as well as global
• 58:36
  right so it seems to me that something like this stands its best chance of success if it was paired
• 58:42
  with a strategy that also as you mentioned maybe enabled people to sell the carbon credits
• 58:49
  into jurisdictions that have carbon a price on carbon carbon trading schemes and so on it strikes
• 58:56
  me also that many of these governments might initially have a response of saying well this seems
• 59:02
  like a quick fix so that you don't have to do the hard work of getting carbon emissions down so
• 59:06
  let's see this when it comes paired with some sort of a global strategy to do both and we can trust
• 59:12
  that this is not just a way for you to buy yourself more time to keep emitting as much as you want to
• 59:18
  would bring me back to my original concern which is if we lack the ability to solve the coordination
• 59:24
  problem of doing something about getting emissions down how do we pair this with a context where people
• 59:31
  will perceive it as anything other than a stopgap that prevents us from having to face the actual
• 59:37
  problem I mean this has stopped that stopgap it's what we need to do it in the meantime while
• 59:44
  well we have time to to decarbon this but I guess my answer to that is that we have that framework
• 59:48
  that framework is called the Paris climate agreement I mean it's in Paris just a bunch of countries
• 59:53
  saying oh yeah you know we hope that we I mean making pledges with no mechanism no specificity
• 1:00:00
  no guarantees no penalties no anything it's just a bunch of countries saying yeah we can write
• 1:00:06
  down on a piece of paper that we're going to get to net zero by xdate but there's no there's no
• 1:00:11
  actual framework in which people are held accountable to doing particular things
• 1:00:17
  isn't yes and no yes and no there's not an international framework but many jurisdictions
• 1:00:23
  have created a legal obligation to meet the nationally developed determined contribution
• 1:00:29
  under Paris so under the European Union polluters are legally obliged to to meet to to lower
• 1:00:36
  emissions to meet the NDC under the Japanese green transformation system there is a legal
• 1:00:44
  obligation to cut carbon to breach that the naturally determined contribution so the you know
• 1:00:51
  my particular take on how this can these two things can be made to go together so the Paris
• 1:00:58
  agreement also includes article 6.2 this gets a little bit technical but article 6.2 is part
• 1:01:04
  of the agreement that allows countries to trade their mitigation outcomes so that if your
• 1:01:09
  country is mitigating more than their nationally determined contribution they can sell
• 1:01:14
  that extra mitigation to a country that is finding it hard to do that right so you can imagine
• 1:01:19
  the situation where countries in the South Pacific are drawing a lot of carbon down from the atmosphere
• 1:01:26
  and countries, Japan, Singapore, Switzerland, European Union, Canada, Australia,
• 1:01:31
  not the US for now but eventually the American still can can can go and and actually pay
• 1:01:40
  money to book those emissions reductions in their own books. Right now I'm no expert on the lore
• 1:01:48
  of the sea and who controls what and where international waters begin and end but why do you need
• 1:01:53
  the buy-in of small countries when the North Pacific and the equatorial Pacific is so vast why can't
• 1:02:01
  you just why can't one country just unilaterally go out into the middle of the Pacific a thousand
• 1:02:06
  miles from any country and just start doing this. There are a lot of there are a lot of reasons.
• 1:02:14
  I mean our reason for starting in the South Pacific is precisely that we do think it's important
• 1:02:20
  for integrity that there be a regulator right like we you know I wouldn't trust any group to just
• 1:02:27
  start doing this on their own. They are international conventions like the London Protocol and
• 1:02:33
  and other international legal instruments that mean that you do need to meet certain requirements
• 1:02:39
  so for example this has to be done afford a legitimate scientific basis and a non-commercial
• 1:02:46
  basis so that the approach that we favor is absolutely non-profit this cannot be a cash group.
• 1:02:51
  To the extent that there is money flowing it should be flowing to the countries that
• 1:02:56
  that actually have the water surrounding that that can make this work. It calls them small countries
• 1:03:01
  I actually reject that now these say as we don't call them small small island states we call them
• 1:03:07
  big oceanic states right they're the boss right they it's it's their territorial waters
• 1:03:12
  and this and the but also because the biogeochemistry of the South Pacific is particularly
• 1:03:18
  favorable to the approach that we are pursuing there's more phosphate in the water to begin with
• 1:03:22
  some phosphate it's less likely to become a limiting factor and because look when you try to do
• 1:03:29
  this very very far from land your cost rise very quickly because the logistics of getting that far
• 1:03:37
  into the ocean become very complicated when when you're in the South Pacific the island is
• 1:03:43
  the vessel you can use it the the string of islands as as a forward operating base
• 1:03:48
  it just becomes logistically much simpler so there are a lot of reasons to start in the South
• 1:03:53
  Pacific eventually you know you can imagine fleets of sort of sealed rounds doing something
• 1:03:59
  like this in more remote areas like they they aren't really a lot of islands in the South Indian
• 1:04:04
  oceans for instance so if 10 15 years from now we're at a place where we feel like that needs to
• 1:04:09
  have a in the South Indian Ocean too we'll be having a different conversation but this is all
• 1:04:14
  getting far ahead of ourselves I'll talk to the West Australian Premier and see if he can do
• 1:04:18
  something because probably this probably Perth is probably the best located city from which to
• 1:04:23
  a lot of things into the South Indian Ocean Coco silent would be perfect yes actually great
• 1:04:28
  it would be a great place to do it from so but that's a conversation for 10 15 years from now
• 1:04:32
  what we need to do now is establish the science establish the safety and establish the efficacy
• 1:04:38
  of the technique if five years from now we can have another conversation Josh and they can
• 1:04:43
  say look we know this is safe we know this works we know the cost is really really low
• 1:04:49
  then I think we would be having a very very different and much more hopeful climate debate
• 1:04:54
  climate debate that's not such a bummer where it's all about how we're all going to die and how
• 1:04:59
  kids in Africa aren't going to have enough to feed themselves I just think we need we need to change
• 1:05:06
  this conversation and the way to do that is to develop the techniques that will make this work
• 1:05:10
  because we've been talking about fight of plankton about microalgae there are other groups out there
• 1:05:16
  experimenting with doing things like this with seaweed with with big seaweed with you know our
• 1:05:21
  take at acid percentage that's less likely to work because it's just that the economics of it
• 1:05:26
  are trickier but we could be wrong it could be that it's big seaweed that that does it there are
• 1:05:31
  lots there are lots of different people experimenting with things like this but now our hunch
• 1:05:37
  which were wait I mean I'm personally completely convinced is that the solution is
• 1:05:44
  photosynthesis in the water and just to clarify when you when you think about photosynthesis on land
• 1:05:50
  and planting trees yes those work to suck up carbon dioxide but only for the life of the tree
• 1:05:57
  and then you have to make sure that the tree grows into another tree and once the tree dies the
• 1:06:02
  carbon gets released unless it grows into another tree what happens what is the life cycle of these
• 1:06:07
  photo plankton and how do you when they die don't they just float to the bottom of the ocean and
• 1:06:11
  release the carbon again unless you keep fertilizing the ocean like is there any end to this um so
• 1:06:18
  that is one of the that's a very good question that is one of the key scientific questions that we
• 1:06:23
  need to answer our understanding and and what we hope to prove with growing oceans hopes to prove
• 1:06:31
  is that the mean length of sequestration for the the technique that we're proposing is around 3000
• 1:06:37
  years when phytoplankton falls to the bottom of the ocean it keeps it keeps the carbon dioxide
• 1:06:44
  with it at the bottom of the ocean that's what that that is the ultimate storage place is is
• 1:06:48
  the ocean depth or the bottom of the ocean in a way all we're doing is closing the carbon loop
• 1:06:54
  we have all this extra carbon dioxide in the air because we've been burning oil but what is oil
• 1:07:01
  oil is just concentrated ancient phytoplankton 99% of the oil that we have is actually used to be
• 1:07:10
  phytoplank so that's how the carbon got there in the first place just talking about closing the loop
• 1:07:15
  so just the phytoplankton sorry not decompose in the ocean and release the oxygen it floats
• 1:07:20
  that's another another question so this this is something that we are absolutely need more science
• 1:07:27
  on the hypothesis we're working on is that most of the phytoplankton when once it's fertilized will
• 1:07:34
  be eaten by usually zooplankton which are little microscopic animals when zooplankton eats them
• 1:07:42
  because well this this necessarily gets a little bit technical that's okay the technique that
• 1:07:48
  we're proposing fertile doesn't fertilize phytoplankton directly what it does is it fertilizes
• 1:07:53
  organisms in the ocean that capture atmospheric nitrogen okay what's really limiting the growth
• 1:07:59
  of phytoplankton in the center of of subtropical oceans is actually that there's not enough fixed
• 1:08:04
  nitrogen but there are organisms in the ocean that can capture nitrogen from the air and fix it
• 1:08:10
  into ammonia and fertilizer basically our approach is sent and what this French team that worked on
• 1:08:18
  the subsea vents in Tonga found is that what those fans do is stimulate nitrogen fixation okay so
• 1:08:25
  now you have you're adding nitrate fertilizer to the ocean except you're you're letting
• 1:08:31
  microorganisms already in the ocean through this nitrogenase process do that so yes you're right
• 1:08:38
  that the phytoplankton will be eaten by zooplankton and the zooplankton through cellular
• 1:08:43
  respiration will then release the carbon dioxide but they'll also release the added nitrate that
• 1:08:49
  those nitrogen fixers fix and so now you have both of the things that you need for a new cycle of
• 1:08:55
  sequestration right so now because there's nitrate and carbon dioxide in the ocean you'll have a
• 1:09:01
  new phytoplankton do that and that can continue happening it's like each time you do that it's like
• 1:09:06
  the the little phytoplankton is buying a lottery ticket and on one of those cycles it's just going to
• 1:09:12
  sink okay so how long will that cycling continue to happen what our team is trying to prove is that
• 1:09:19
  that will continue to happen until the nitrate fertilizer is pulled apart but what we
• 1:09:27
  understand that happens in very limited parts of the ocean mostly off the coast of South America
• 1:09:31
  and the mean time it takes for nitrate to get from the center of the Pacific to the west coast
• 1:09:37
  of South America it's about 3,000 years so right so we believe that the mean length of sequestration we
• 1:09:43
  can prove will be 3,000 3,000 years right so the idea just just to clarify the idea is that the
• 1:09:50
  carbon that is being consumed by the phytoplankton either remains in the life cycle of the ecosystem
• 1:10:02
  because the phytoplankton gets eaten by a zooa plankton a little tiny little animal and then when
• 1:10:07
  it dies its constituent parts then get repurposed into new phytoplankton or little bits of it
• 1:10:15
  will sink and then turn into a future oil that's exactly right is that right amazing um
• 1:10:24
  we have proof all this this is a few you gotta prove it all we gotta prove it but we're working
• 1:10:29
  on proving we have a really cool team we have scientists from the University of Southern California
• 1:10:33
  leaving this or University of Hawaii from the University of Alaska we have people from the
• 1:10:38
  University of the South Pacific this science led team working on this could be wrong we tend to
• 1:10:46
  and every meeting saying but it might not work yeah right right like what about this sounds
• 1:10:54
  moderately complicated in terms of the involvement of the ecosystem the marine ecosystem in
• 1:10:59
  absorbing carbon there have been other plans to mitigate the effects of climate chaos that don't
• 1:11:06
  address carbon directly but reflect sunlight for example back into the atmosphere people have
• 1:11:13
  talked about putting satellites up with mirrors on them that reflect some sunlight will many people
• 1:11:18
  have heard of the ideas of spraying self a dioxide or something white colored into the atmosphere
• 1:11:24
  or seeding clouds by just having ships go through the ocean and spray water moisture up to reflect more
• 1:11:31
  you know what do you make of those more ad hoc plans to not address the actual content of carbon
• 1:11:38
  in the atmosphere but to to slow down the warming of the planet yeah it's tricky I mean it seems
• 1:11:47
  like that's a question of science like a woodwork and and the scientists I've talked to think it
• 1:11:52
  would be possible to manage the the secondary impacts on things like rain cycles and the
• 1:11:59
  monsoon that we talked about like it seems like it would actually work we tend to be very skeptical
• 1:12:07
  of those for two reasons you talked about acidification this does nothing for acidification
• 1:12:12
  and in fact by creating an atmosphere where it's comfortable for polluters to keep polluting
• 1:12:18
  its threads to make ocean acidification much more for problems so that's the thing that
• 1:12:22
  concerns us a lot the other thing that concerns us is the collective action problems unlike
• 1:12:29
  these phytoplankton solutions where you just need one country in the South Pacific to to sign up
• 1:12:33
  and then it's territorial waters you can go really you would need an agreement minimally
• 1:12:40
  between the US and China more likely between several large countries that don't agree on anything
• 1:12:46
  and if you join without such an agreement then you you could be creating geopolitical tensions
• 1:12:53
  that you can imagine like going to a war I just get very but like I am not comfortable
• 1:13:00
  advocating a solution that could destabilize geopolitics in that way it is a last last last
• 1:13:06
  or sort me if this phytoplankton thing doesn't work and we start seeing really out of control
• 1:13:12
  climate impacts in two or three decades I can imagine you might be doing that as a really
• 1:13:19
  as a as a last resort but what do you do this if you do this it is for sure that the year after you
• 1:13:27
  you start a stratospheric brightening approach there will be freak weather somewhere right like
• 1:13:36
  because there's freak weather somewhere every year how are you going to convince those people
• 1:13:40
  they even do it to them and how are you going to prevent those people from going to war with you
• 1:13:45
  because now you're messing up their claim okay so now you're going to need some kind of loss and
• 1:13:50
  damage mechanism I suppose that's a concern Kiko but I can also imagine you know they're being an
• 1:13:56
  irregular year of fishing in Indonesia or the South China Sea and then blaming it on these
• 1:14:03
  huge phytoplankton farms off the coast of Vanuatu and and that causing diplomatic problems as well
• 1:14:11
  I mean I don't see why China putting up a bunch of satellites to reflect more solar radiation
• 1:14:18
  is necessarily more aggressive geopolitically than coating the South Pacific in phytoplankton
• 1:14:27
  in order for us a solar radiation management approach to be effective you would have to be doing
• 1:14:34
  globally really otherwise you would really threaten the in the radiation balance between the
• 1:14:40
  northern and southern hemispheres you could be making things very much worse I do think
• 1:14:46
  you need coordination for a stratospheric approach in a way that that is just not the same as you
• 1:14:52
  would get in with a phytoplankton basic approach but also you fundamentally the stratosphere you
• 1:15:00
  would not be bringing the atmosphere back to this condition where it was at before you'd be creating a
• 1:15:06
  new weird atmosphere that is both very high in carbon dioxide but also mess with in that you
• 1:15:13
  would have more reflected light which would have impacts on agriculture you'd be creating a
• 1:15:19
  completely new kind of atmosphere and there I do think that you're talking about introducing
• 1:15:24
  new risks especially geopolitically but also also physically and we don't know how to manage okay
• 1:15:34
  so I don't want to say that this is a no-go and that this will never work maybe it'll work scientifically
• 1:15:40
  it seems like it could work it seems like we'll be in exchange to me it is plainly a less desirable
• 1:15:48
  avenue than to actually address a root cause which is carbon I see so anything that basically turns
• 1:15:55
  the clock back on the amount of carbon in the atmosphere we should think of as being in one category
• 1:16:01
  and then another category would be things that don't address reducing carbon and just try to
• 1:16:06
  mitigate the climate effects alone what about carbon capture and storage that we were all hearing
• 1:16:12
  so much about 10 years ago and then not artificial ways of sucking carbon out of the atmosphere
• 1:16:20
  they are they cost between 10 and 100 times more than what we're proposing so they exist
• 1:16:27
  they're not economically viable and they face fundamental physical barriers to seeing quick
• 1:16:34
  drops in place because they just require a lot of energy some of them require a lot of material
• 1:16:41
  there some people who are wanting to increase the alkalinity of the ocean by putting alkaline minerals
• 1:16:47
  into the water that requires moving shifting huge like billions of tons of material and mining it
• 1:16:54
  which has its own environmental footprint but more than that it just becomes very very expensive
• 1:17:02
  the other part that is important about the phytoplankton approach is that it's uniquely low cost
• 1:17:09
  and it brings a ton of carbon sequestration down to maybe $10 a ton whereas these other
• 1:17:15
  approaches are between the hundreds and the wealth thousands of dollars per ton okay so then let's
• 1:17:21
  just end by talking about how we generate energy because as you say this is only a stop gap before
• 1:17:28
  we have to deal with the carbon emissions themselves a lot of people will receive this kind of a
• 1:17:36
  proposal as you know what it reminds me of a bit Kiko is often governments and the Australian
• 1:17:43
  government does this and has just done this again to combat the unaffordability of housing
• 1:17:50
  will provide a first homeowners housing grant to young people where you know they'll give them
• 1:17:57
  a certain amount of cash in their pocket to help them buy their first home which is great in the
• 1:18:02
  short term and in the long term of course increases property prices more because this you know
• 1:18:07
  it makes the problem worse and so the concern with a solution like this is that all it does is just
• 1:18:13
  buy us however much more time it buys us that will just get banked in by professional fuel industry
• 1:18:21
  and governments as a way to continue stalling until the shit hits the fan and all it really does
• 1:18:27
  we're just gonna we're gonna absorb the benefit keep pissing our future up against the wall
• 1:18:34
  for as much longer as we can and then we're still gonna have to face the music at some point
• 1:18:40
  anyway so can you just address that and then talk about the energy electricity generation side
• 1:18:45
  of things and I mean we absolutely do need to decarbonize as well it's just that from our point of
• 1:18:54
  view an answer presented we think a lot about this question of the green halo now there are
• 1:19:01
  certain technologies that have just this aura of saintly that's when I'm thinking about
• 1:19:07
  solar and when they just they look great on a billboard they make us feel good they have this
• 1:19:12
  like feel good sense of like wow this is such a low impact thing and because they have this
• 1:19:17
  green halo is prevented us from being quite critical enough in understanding some of the limitations
• 1:19:24
  of some of these weather dependent renewables when you actually go and do the mathematical modeling
• 1:19:31
  you realize that these technologies are affordable as long as they represent a relatively small
• 1:19:38
  portion of your energy mix when you start to hit 40 50 60 percent now you have a very
• 1:19:45
  variable source of electricity that is all correlated with each other because if it's sunny
• 1:19:50
  here it's probably sunny over there and if it's nighttime over there it's probably nighttime all
• 1:19:54
  around your system so to you end up with a highly variable source of power that can create
• 1:20:02
  big swings in the price of power for one thing but but also just brings fragility into the system
• 1:20:08
  as well as requiring quite quite a lot of land so I think we've been less hard headed than we
• 1:20:13
  should have been about asking hard questions about what it will really take to to get to
• 1:20:20
  reliable stable predictable firm sources of zero carbon power and from our point of view
• 1:20:28
  clearly the superior answer to this is nuclear energy nuclear energy is cost competitive with
• 1:20:35
  other forms of energy now even though the nuclear energy that we have is built is based on
• 1:20:42
  these reactors so we're designed in the 1950s is boiling water reactors or pressurized water
• 1:20:48
  reactors that were designed without computers with like people with slide rules and without
• 1:20:53
  advanced materials so they're shit like these are not good energy technologies but even those are
• 1:21:00
  cost competitive but the next generation of nuclear reactors of these small modular nuclear reactors
• 1:21:07
  that are being researched now being developed now all right fundamentally safer some of them are
• 1:21:14
  incapable as a matter of fundamental physics cannot melt down produce up to 99% less nuclear waste
• 1:21:24
  and the nuclear waste that they do produce can be reprocessed into new fuel and could if they were
• 1:21:32
  manufactured at scale if they were manufacturing the factory and cranked out one after the
• 1:21:37
  other after the other eventually just have a clear cost advantage over both weather dependent renewables
• 1:21:44
  and fossil fuels we have seen that this sort of nuclear Shangri-La has been promised for a long time
• 1:21:50
  it hasn't quite come because it's difficult to get enough and it is expensive to develop it's not
• 1:21:55
  expensive once it's going but it's expensive to develop and it's turned out to be quite difficult
• 1:22:00
  to get a demonstration plant running and and to get us to the place where you do start cracking
• 1:22:05
  them out we believe that by 2030 is what's going to happen is that one or two of these advanced
• 1:22:11
  small modular designs will prove itself to be the superior choice then we're going to start
• 1:22:16
  building them at scale and then we're going to realize that this is just the obviously better way
• 1:22:20
  to produce zero carbon then when you say that these newer designs are incapable of melting down
• 1:22:27
  I think a lot of people either find that fishy or unaware of it do you understand the physics of it
• 1:22:35
  I remember reading something about how some of them are actually suspended over like a water
• 1:22:41
  plant or something and like when they melt down they like drop into a basket of you know they're
• 1:22:47
  a pebble bed reactors I don't understand but can you just give us a sketch of what we're talking about
• 1:22:51
  or do you do not know I am not a nuclear physicist so I don't understand this in detail at all
• 1:22:58
  but what I do now is that after the Fukushima accident here in Japan there was a moment where
• 1:23:02
  that people in the nuclear industry understood that passive nuclear design it passive safety design
• 1:23:09
  or what is sometimes called walk away safe designs would be necessary in any future nuclear design
• 1:23:15
  so the design principle became how do you design a reactor such that even if everybody in the plant
• 1:23:23
  goes crazy and walks away and just like mid centers leaves the thing shuts down of its own and
• 1:23:28
  it is possible in fact to create designs where if the design is intended and begins to get too hot
• 1:23:35
  then the the thing changes state and then the the nuclear reaction stops as far as I know
• 1:23:41
  every single advanced small modular nuclear reactor design that is that is being done right now
• 1:23:48
  incorporates these aspects of walk away safe design some of them do have mechanisms where
• 1:23:55
  if it gets too hot then it triggers a mechanism that is fat that nobody has to activate
• 1:24:02
  just triggers something so that makes the reactor core fall into a into a substrate that will stop
• 1:24:10
  the reaction there are different ways of doing this that people who are way smarter than we have
• 1:24:14
  been working on for a decade and a half understandably regulators have been like
• 1:24:21
  very eager to double triple and quadruple check that these designs are actually going to be a safe
• 1:24:26
  as they say they are and yeah regulatory concerns have also slowed down the development since these
• 1:24:34
  designs but because it's taken a long time and it is taking a long time we've ended up in this
• 1:24:40
  weird situation where people kind of feel like they already know about nuclear like they've seen
• 1:24:44
  their opening credits in the simpsons and they know what a nuclear power plant where it looks like
• 1:24:49
  they know that it's dangerous and they they just think it is that one thing and this
• 1:24:54
  message that there are much better designs that are being worked on that are fundamentally safer
• 1:24:59
  and fundamentally less polluting or that they produce it much much less nuclear weight
• 1:25:06
  waste that's a message that hasn't really gone through over the next few years as companies
• 1:25:11
  like Oakville and Terrestrial Energy and Terrapower and Altua and Bicala and a lot of their around
• 1:25:21
  the hundred companies now right now developing these small modular reactors many of them will go
• 1:25:27
  bankrupt and they just won't make it to production stage but some of them will not and the
• 1:25:32
  state becomes begin to come online and we're going to have a moment of realizing that this is just
• 1:25:37
  a clearly superior way of getting to to stable reliable zero carbon electricity and so at answer
• 1:25:45
  we are advocates for nuclear power very angry that this this is not happening more quickly
• 1:25:51
  so we want to change the conversation so the strategy basically is
• 1:25:59
  would you say we need to continue attempting to solve the collective action problem of meeting
• 1:26:04
  and having gapfests and talking about things or do we just go full steam ahead with trying to get
• 1:26:10
  as many jurisdictions to be as friendly as possible to an energy mix that has a minority of
• 1:26:15
  base load nuclear a majority of renewables for the rest and an aggressive collaboration on carbon
• 1:26:24
  absorption technologies like Shadow Plankton as a possibility is that is that the model there
• 1:26:30
  there is no stopping the UN process the UN process is now has a moment of it of its own it has
• 1:26:36
  a bureaucracy of its own it they are in every single capital in the world they are
• 1:26:40
  diplomats who specialize in this that is not going to stop it has the limitations that it has
• 1:26:46
  but what we think is that we need to refocus from considering this UN process as the center of
• 1:26:51
  the solution to understanding that the UN process hasn't advanced quickly enough because the
• 1:26:56
  technologies that would unlock the problem haven't been there so if we were having a conversation
• 1:27:04
  we're responsible to get base load power from nuclear energy with zero carbon that was affordable
• 1:27:08
  and reliable and fundamentally safe and it was possible to absorb carbon dioxide add gigatons
• 1:27:14
  tail into the ocean then you would be putting the video game on the very easy setting for the
• 1:27:20
  UN climate diplomats won't make their lives easier so that reaching these agreements doesn't become
• 1:27:26
  we began this discussion by me telling you that you cannot convince a policy maker from Malaysia
• 1:27:34
  or from South Africa to commit political suicide by agreeing things that will cut their career
• 1:27:41
  short because the lander people and they'll stop their development prospect if we can create a
• 1:27:45
  situation where it's easy for them to say yes because they don't have to be a development
• 1:27:50
  price in order to agree to zero carbon technology then the UN process will be unlocked but the
• 1:27:55
  problem is technological it's not the problem. Kiko it's fascinating stuff I look forward
• 1:28:01
  to the day when you and I sit down with the premier of Western Australia and the leader of
• 1:28:06
  Samoa and and gaze out over vistas of Fato Plankton in the South Pacific. I cannot wait. Thanks for your time.