Episode 509 Hudson Bay Ice

Episode 509 Hudson Bay Ice

Metta Spencer  0:00  

Hi, I’m Metta Spencer. Let’s go to the Arctic today, shall we? Vicariously, thank goodness because I have no desire to go up there in the flesh – unlike my friends, who seem to really be experts on northern affairs and don’t mind getting cold from time to time. 

My friends are – actually, I have two experts with me, Professor Steven Salter, who is an engineering professor at the University of Edinburgh, a retired man who has been working on developing a nozzle to spray seawater, which we will get into in a bit. And in Turin, Italy, is Professor Peter Wadhams, who is one of the world’s leading authorities on Arctic sea ice. And they are going to help me understand some – Oh, here comes Paul Beckwith as well. Joining us, bless his heart, is Paul Beckwith, a Canadian climatologist who knows his way around the Arctic and climate affairs as well. Hello, Paul, how are you? 

Paul Beckwith  1:14  

Hi, I am good, thanks. 

Metta Spencer  1:15  

Good. Oh, you’re in outer space today. Good for you. And we are going to be doing something a little different. Today, we’re going to be talking about a particular proposal that I am going to be pitching, if you will, to the Canadian Pugwash group, which is an organization that I’ve belonged to for 30 – 40 years, maybe more. And, and this is a project that I’m hoping that the Canadian Pugwash Group will agree to investigate more closely, with the idea that if the organization and the committees investigating it, agree that it’s a worthwhile project and affordable and not too risky, then they will collectively try to encourage the Canadian government to take it on as a measure to reduce climate change in the planet. 

So in preparation for my conversation, proposing this to the Canadian Pugwash group, I’ve invited any Canadian Pugwashites who want to do so to join us today by zoom, so that they can also participate in the conversation and ask questions, especially of the of the experts that have invited who are in a position to answer these questions much better than I am. I am not a scientist and can’t begin to pretend to answer most of these questions. But I have had a number of conversations with all three of the experts who are with me, Stephen Salter, Peter Wadhams, and Paul Beckwith. So I am familiar with the idea enough to believe, personally that it’s a promising solution that should be worth exploring. And, if we explore it further, I think probably other people will concur with my judgment that it’s, it’s worth maybe actually attempting on a major scale. So, here’s the basic idea. 

Professor Salter will be able to explain how this works in a bit. But it seems that if the clouds surrounding the earth are white, they reflect light back into outer space and less light gets through to warm the planet than would be the case with dark clouds, which as we know, rain clouds are dark and heavy, heavy droplets of water, but white clouds have tiny, tiny droplets. So the idea is to change dark clouds into whiter clouds. And you can do this over particular area. So that the the surface of the planet below is thereby kept cooler. So, if we do this over the Arctic, it is possible to cool the Arctic Ocean or any other body of water that’s underneath. This is not something you would do over land, because there are too many other contaminating factors overland and besides which you probably want your sunshine to come in and be available for agriculture on land. That’s not the case so much over the water. 

So, the idea of this proposal is Let’s take Hudson Bay, which is a very large body of water that is contained entirely within Canadian territory. Therefore, Canada alone can make the decision about what to do there. And let’s cool Hudson Bay by spraying seawater, into the clouds above Hudson Bay and cooling it, and you can cool it enough if you spray it right with the right kinds of droplets. We can cool it enough to keep some of the ice on the, on the surface of the water throughout the summer. I suppose you could keep all of it frozen if you spray it enough, but we don’t need to do that much. 

Let’s do enough to retain some of the ice that is going to be desired by the the native people living around the shores because they make their living by going on to the water on ice and hunting and, and fishing and so on. So it’s their lives are very hard right now. And the wildlife and the seals and the polar bears and so on are in trouble. So we need to do something to preserve the ice on Hudson Bay. And my proposal is let’s see if we can do that and Stephen Salter is the man who would be able to put such a project into effect. 

And we have with us Adele Buckley. Dr. Adele Buckley is a physicist and a longtime member of the Canadian Pugwash movement, where she’s taken a leading role for many years. She was on the international Pugwash council for a number of years. She is a physicist who has done work, especially on water issues. And also has been engaged with all of the concerns about nuclear weapons that the Pugwashites have focused on and has been very engaged with studying and promoting the notion of nuclear weapon free zone in the Arctic. So good morning, Adele.

Adele Buckley  7:35  

Hello, everyone. I’m glad to be able to talk to you. And I want to say that I have a career experience quite a number of years in commercializing new technologies in the environment and that may apply to our discussion today.

Metta Spencer  7:54  

Yeah, indeed, your you know your way around the business end of things. Thank you. Okay, Steven Salter, did I mislead anybody with my little introductory pitch? EvnarAnd, in any case, I’d like for you to to pick it up and, and go forward with with that. I see that we have a newcomer joining us, Evner Taran.

Stephen Salter  8:16  

We need a few numbers, first of all, and the recent estimate of the climate problem is that we’re retaining about 1.7 watts per square meter of the earth too much. Okay, is a rather dim light bulb, but there’s a lot of square meters. Now the solar input coming in from the sun, you average it over the whole world and the whole 24 hours, that works out at about 340 watts per square meter. So, if you can do the arithmetic, you’ll see that our problem is just half a percent. Okay, half percent of the sun too much. Now, it’s uneven, of course, but that’s what the total average is. 

Now, the reflectivity of clouds ranges from about 75%, to about 25%, of which we acquired a dark cloud. So the swing of reflectivity of clouds is far more than we need to solve the problem. And it was a chap who was very interested in the cloud reflectivity, when they found funny long streaks of cloud after where ships had been. And his name was Sean Twomey. He was able to get airplanes to fly over clouds and measure the power coming down from above from the sun and the power coming up from below. So, he was able to measure the cloud reflectivity and he was also able to fly into the cloud, scoop up the drops, and see how big they were and how many of them concentrations were and he did lots and lots of work like this. 

And he produced the results, which boiled down to the fact that the cloud brightness depends on the size distribution of the drops. And if you have a lot of small drops, you get a white cloud. If you have the same amount of water in larger drops with a smaller number of them, then it’s dark. And you probably really knew that already, because you heard people say the dark storm clouds are gathering. And his work has been replicated, and it’s accepted. And you can do a lovely pocket demonstration here of two jars of glass balls. These ones here are four millimeters in diameter, and they look a bit gray, these ones here 40 microns, 100 times smaller. And you can see that these look white. 

But then, next thing you need to know is that you can’t just get a drop forming in the cloud just because the relative humidity has got up to 100%. It has to be a little bit above 100. And the amount by which it is above that was studied by a chap called Kohler. He worked out how much extra humidity you needed for different sizes or different ways of condensation nuclei, which you need to get the growth of a drop started. And you can’t just have a drop forming from nothing. It has to be given something to begin with. And if you have rather small nuclei that you’ve squirted out, then the size of them varies according to what the local humidity is. And if it’s above a certain peak lump, it can get over this, and then it’ll grow without any limits at all. And you’ll end up making a raindrop

John Latham, who’s another chap knew all about Kohler he knew all about Twomey. And he thought that maybe we could increase the number of condensation nuclei enough to get a larger number of smaller drops. And he worked out all the calculations from Twomey’s equations. And he was amazed at how little water you needed to solve the climate problem. And it was really about 10, maybe 20 cubic meters of water a second if you could spray them with very, very small drops. And what would happen would be that the small drops would evaporate, and they’d leave a tiny little salt crystal, and Kohler says that salt is almost the best condensation material that you can get to make a new cloud drop so that the idea was to, to spray to increase the number concentration of drops in clouds over the sea. 

You can’t do it over land because the air there’s already so much dirtier that you can’t really add any more nuclei;  there’s far more than you need. And at the time, I was working on a way to try and make the sea evaporate faster by trying to increase the area available for reparation with a spray. John Latham heard about that and telephoned me and said, Can you make the spray for my project? And I said, Yes, I think I can do that. I didn’t know how hard it was going to be. But I was overconfident. This was in 2004. And I’ve been working on the engineering of how to do that, more or less full time since then. 

Metta Spencer  9:30  

The idea is, you need to make a nozzle that will spray finer than any living creature has ever invented before?

Stephen Salter  14:15  

No, the viruses are smaller than this.  The size of salt, we want to make is 10 to the minus 14 grams and a COVID viruses is about a 10th of that. And we will be using technology which was developed to filter seawater to get rid of polio viruses, which were about 30 nanometers. So there are living organisms that are smaller than that.

Metta Spencer  14:48  

Okay, now, here’s my notion of the game plan. If everybody finds that this is a reasonable thing to do, we would ask the Canadian  government to fund a situation where you will finish developing this very special kind of nozzle so that you can spray seawater and we will set up stations like four different places around the coast or the shore of Hudson Bay where the ice melts throughout the summer now and causes a lot of trouble for the indigenous people. 

So we will ask the indigenous people where they would like to have this ice restored and set up places on the shore spraying seawater over Hudson Bay into the clouds so that we cool the water and retain some ice on the bay where they want it to be throughout the summers. And of course, then, of course it freezes in the winter. And as I understand it, you think that it would cost something like $30 million to do this? 

Stephen Salter  16:14  

Yes, I think, especially if we could do it from land rather than at sea. Eventually, we want to do it in the middle of Pacific. So we do want to do it where there’s clean air and where we can take ships. But we could do some experiments, if we’ve got a place where there’s clean air coming in, and we can add our aerosol to it. Making the ships is a bit more expensive than $30 million. But we wouldn’t need to. We could learn some useful stuff without that.

Metta Spencer  16:46  

Well, I think also, the idea is that this would be in a way a demonstration project. Because if we can show that it can be done on Hudson Bay, it can also be done in some places or throughout the entire Arctic Ocean. And that’s too big a project for Canada alone to undertake. But if it’s demonstrated to be workable, then other countries may collectively join together in an attempt to a much bigger project.

Stephen Salter  17:18  

Yes, that’s right. The key thing is that the people who live there have got to decide how much ice they want. When if they decided that they don’t like it, they’ll tell us where to stop and in a few days, really the next time it rains or snows, the cooling effect will fade away. So very, very soon you’ll be back to where you were.

Metta Spencer  17:40  

Okay, good. Let’s ask Peter Wadhams his thoughts about this, and then I’ll get to Paul Beckwith to comment on what we’ve decided so far. Peter Wadhams is an expert on Arctic sea ice. And so tell us why that might be desirable? Or what might be some of the risks or costs or dangers or downside if there are any, for such a project?

Peter Wadhams  18:15  

Well, I think one of the main problems as people have identified about the Arctic is the fact that we, we really don’t want the ice to disappear. Because it is disappearing. And that’s bringing about some really serious consequences for the planet involving thawing of permafrost, rising sea level, a whole kind of gigantic horror film of things that are bad, that are happening because the sea ice is disappearing.

So, the strong need is to stop the sea ice from disappearing, to bring to bring it back and or cool the Arctic to a point where it doesn’t disappear, and can therefore supply a permanent presence in the Arctic. Now, the difficulty of doing this is that most of the methods that people think of to do it are impractical, and can’t be scaled up to this to the scale that we need for for keeping the entire Arctic cool or cold or frozen. And some of them are actually well, one could say bonkers, but there are lots of other ideas which do require checking out on a large scale. 

The one that is I think most promising is this one, which Stephen has been talking about: marine cloud brightening, because all the other techniques talk about really trying to keep the surface of the Earth frozen. Bu marine cloud brightening is really consisting of simply trying to cool the atmosphere to the point where you don’t have the kind of rapid melt which is going to cause all of these really terrible effects. So, I think it’s a very good way to proceed and to try and put in a lot of experimental work on a large scale is which is needed to see if we can actually make this work. I mean, Stephen’s work has been so meticulous over the years that really one can almost see what is going to come out. And if one can see what’s going to come out and what’s going to come out is actually something that really will help to preserve the Arctic, then this makes marine cloud brightening something that really should be proceeded on with a high priority amongst all the spectrum of ice preservation methods that have been suggested. This is I feel, the one that is most sensible and most likely to be successful. So, I would say we should go on that with high priority.

Metta Spencer  21:54  

Let’s reinforce a certain point, which I think is that almost all of the other measures that have been proposed as ways of cooling the planet involve the reduction of carbon from the atmosphere. Now this is one of the technologies that will not reduce carbon from the atmosphere, it’s going to actually cool the planet directly by simply shading the planet. It’s not going to do a single thing in terms of reducing the carbon. We have to handle that in other ways. And we are handling it in other ways, or at least, maybe not as fast as we should, but we know what to do, right? This is a different method that will give us a little extra time to do that. I see two hands wanting to comment. 

Stephen Salter  22:52  

Just a quick thing, we need a few more numbers. The key thing is to work out how much energy is reflected by a cloud drop. And that depends on how much energy is coming into it and what its diameter is and how long it lasts. And you can compare that with the amount of energy you need to make the condensation nuclei, on which the cloud drops had been growing. 

That depends on the surface area of the cloud drop and the surface tension of the seawater. Okay, it’s not very efficient yet, but those are the two numbers you start with. And if you look at those two numbers, the difference, the ratio is enormous. I mean, it’s 25 billion. There’s no other mechanism that I can think of that has such an enormous energy ratio. I suppose you could think about a detonator that lets drop a nuclear bomb. But I’ve got number here. We’re trying to control an energy flow that’s 100 times the American electricity consumption. Okay. And you need to have this incredible leverage in order to do that. And we can do that because of the surface tension to reflection ratio.

Adele Buckley  24:21  

I have a hell of a long list of questions. But I might ask, once you had the artificial White Cloud in place, how long would it last? 

Stephen Salter  24:35  

It lasts until it rains or snows.

Adele Buckley  24:38  

I see. Well, I just read an article yesterday that there’s expected to be a lot more rain in the Arctic instead of snow. Because

Stephen Salter  24:49  

Yeah, it lasts until whatever washes it out.

Adele Buckley  24:52  

Yeah. Metta likes to envisage all of Hudson Bay as a kind of nice little place, but it’s actually huge. How many stations would you possibly need to even begin to deal with forming ice on Hudson Bay? And I wonder who is working on this area in Canada that can work with you? 

Stephen Salter  25:31  

Well, the calculation depends on how much energy is involved with the rate of melting of the ice. Now, for the Arctic, when I first looked at this, it was 25,000 tons of ice a second. It’s a bit lower than that. Now, maybe because there’s less just to melt. And if you know, the weight per second of the ice that’s being lost. And you know, the latent heat of freezing of ice, you know how many joules you’ve got to deal with. And then if you know what the solar energy coming in is, you can work out how much you need to change that by in order to give you the the missing joules. And fortunately, in that for a short time, there’s actually more solar energy coming into the North Pole and into the equator because it’s coming in over 24 hours. 

If you know those numbers, you can work out how many nuclei you need to spray to do it. I will send you the calculations, and you can adjust any of the assumptions that are put in and you will see what is it is, but you’ll be surprised at how small it is. And it’s because of its enormous ratio of the energy to make a drop, and then the energy that it will reflect. And there’ll be there, they fall very, very slowly. They will be there until they’re washed out by rain. And that will be maybe one or two or three days. In some parts of the world, it will be a bit longer, but that’s roughly the time so you have to keep doing it. And maybe that’s a good thing, because it allows you to control and stop when you had enough.

Adele Buckley  27:22  

I wonder if these clouds are near the shore? And can you then envisage, they’re there for a long time, and there’s  no sun in the communities near the seashore. And they don’t like that?

Stephen Salter  27:41  

We’re trying to change the reflectivity by probably 5%. Because we can’t do it everywhere. We’ll say we got to get it for 5%. Now, if you draw a series of bars of different gray, I can send you one where I’ve got 20 bars, and they’ve got a 5% difference in contrast between each bar. And the test is how many bars do you have to see which way the gradient is and most people need three or four bars, which means that they can’t detect a change of less than about 15 or 20%. So you wouldn’t notice at all that the clouds were a little bit whiter.

Metta Spencer  28:33  

Okay, and I think she asked how many stations. I think you were suggesting maybe four different stations. And these can be simple things like you could bring in shipping container things and plant them on the shore with some sort of wind turbine to power the nozzle and, and the other electronic equipment and hire local indigenous persons to monitor each of these stations, which would be placed wherever it would be appropriate in order to freeze the local ice that the local people want to have restored. Am I correct about that, Stephen? 

Stephen Salter  29:25  

Yes, well, you’ve got the wind blowing the spray along a long line, quite a narrow line. And you’ll be getting cooling all the way along that line. And that could be halfway, maybe more, across the bay. And when the wind changes direction it will cool somewhere else. And what we would do would be to look with a satellite at the patterns of clouds. And we would need to get perhaps 100 different images of a satellite and we would align them to suit the wind direction. And then we would just add them up and you can then see by averaging at least 100 satellite images that there’d been a change in the reflectivity. And I can send you some calculations where we’re simulating this, and you wouldn’t see it on any one of the images but you would see it if you could align them and add them together.

Adele Buckley  30:23  

Okay. I just wanted to ask: Is anyone in Canada working on this, or working on something similar that you might work with? Obviously, you’re not located here. And if you were to set up some kind of trial, that would involve you doing lots of travel to remote parts of Canada, that doesn’t sound very flexible.

Stephen Salter  30:52  

It’s got it’s got to be done by Canadians. And there will be some work that will need people who are actually living there all the time. And what we’d need to do would be to train them how to look after and check and report on how the spraying was going. So we’ll be doing a bit of engineering training as well.

Metta Spencer  31:18  

I know that this would be largely indigenous people, and it be great to give them some jobs because most of them are unemployed now. But Peter Wadhams, I think you were instrumental in setting up a very sophisticated Marine Laboratory in Churchill, Manitoba. Right? And if you’d speak to that as a location to be the headquarters for this research project.

Peter Wadhams  31:45  

Yes, because if we’re talking Hudson’s Bay, then the only sea ice laboratory in the Hudson’s Bay area is this one that was built quite recently, in fact, they haven’t finished building it yet, for the University of Manitoba. So I think my only role was to vote in favor of spending Canadian government money on that, rather than something else. And the first director was a real ball of fire, called David Barber. Very, very good scientist. Unfortunately, he died this year. I’m hoping that they can get themselves sorted out so they can carry on.

 But it’s a wonderful lab. It’s open to the bay. So you can do experiments, where you’re, you’re doing things to the ice, doing things to water in the bay, and it’s linked in with the rest of the water of the bay. So it’s very nice laboratory. It’s owned by the University of Manitoba, but they have lots of visiting scientists coming in. So I think that if they can be persuaded to make that one of their major projects, that will be a very nice base for some of the work that

Stephen Salter  33:18  

We’d want to be far enough away that we didn’t get any contamination from whatever power generation they’ve got. So if you can think of long plumes of smoke coming out of the lab, we want to be to one side of that.

Peter Wadhams  33:35  

Right.  Yeah.

Metta Spencer  33:37  

Well, they certainly have a large staff. I looked it up on their website, they have a lot of professionals working there. Okay, I want to go on and talk to Paul Beckwith, because, although I’ve had conversations about this topic with Stephen and Peter, before, I haven’t really talked to Paul about it, but you’re certainly the expert on the Canadian Arctic, among other things. So chime in and give your thoughts about this matter, Paul.

Paul Beckwith  34:07  

Okay. Well, first of all, I think this is a great idea. I think this is a great project. I think we could learn an awful lot from it and actually even preserve some of the ice in Hudson’s Bay. A couple points I’d like to make is, you know, we’re marine cloud brightening has gone on for years and years inadvertently, because any commercial ships that traverse the ocean, put up aerosols and particles from their smokestacks. And these aerosols and particles from the ship tracks modify the clouds and the radiative forcing in the lines of clouds. 

A recent paper which I just did a video on, called, “Oops, global dimming is a lot more significant than we thought.” Okay, the idea of global dimming is that we know that the radiative forcing from greenhouse gases is somewhat offset by the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere, both through a direct effect and an indirect effect. So, the direct effect is that these aerosols block some of the sunlight coming in and cause a cooling on the surface. And the indirect effect is these aerosols act as cloud condensation nuclei, increasing the low-level cloud cover, blocking some sunlight, causing some cooling. 

The net effect of these two direct and indirect radiative effects is thought to be something like minus 1.2, or 1.4 watts per square meter. Now, that number is often determined by these experiments on these ship tracks. Because we can measure the water vapor in the atmosphere from satellites, we can measure the clouds, and we know where the ships go, okay, they’re there, their passage is very well known, their course. So if we take their course, and then we use the prevailing winds to move the ship tracks to a different location based on the prevailing winds at the time that the satellite passes overhead. So, we can take the location of the advected cloud tracks, and we can correlate them with the satellite data, which measures the reflectivity so we can get a number on how much radiative forcing is being offset by the so-called global dimming or aerosol effect. 

Now, a recent paper that just came out, which I discussed in detail in my video I posted just a couple of days ago, says that number, what we thought the negative radiative forcing was, is actually a lot larger than we thought. And the reason is, is because they were only using visible ship tracks that they could see on the satellite, but the ships are moving along their course. And they’re putting out these particles. And more often than not, there’s no clouds, above the ship tracks, the particles are put in the air, but no clouds develop. So when you account for that effect properly, the radiative forcing offset or the global dimming effect is about 40 or 50% larger than the mainstream number, the present sciences. This is a huge factor, because what it means is the climate models need to be readjusted with the proper numbers. It also means that the equilibrium climate sensitivity, which is the warming we would expect with a doubling of co2, it means that that number is worse than we thought. 

The temperature will go up more. The really good thing is that it means that the work that Stephen Salter is talking about — the deployment of these aerosols will have an even larger effect than he even expects, perhaps, but certainly more than mainstream science expects. 

Now this is one paper, but it was very well done. It needs to be confirmed. The aerosol cloud interaction is one of the largest uncertainties in climate science in terms of getting decent models. So I would argue that an experiment, the work in Hudson’s Bay, for example, the deployment of such systems would allow us to get much better numbers on the aerosol cloud interaction. And it would allow us to greatly improve all climate models and it would allow us to get a much better handle on equilibrium climate sensitivity. 

The other thing is that, having a shipping container type lab that could be with a twin turbine to power it, could be put on a location and could actually be moved if we wanted, you know, by say a heavy lift helicopter or something. So it could be moved to whatever location we wanted as part of the experiment. Also, clearly you want it to be upwind of Hudson’s Bay. So typically the prevailing winds, blowing from west to east. You would want to locate these labs, these four units on the western side shores of Hudson’s Bay, farther north in remote regions. But they’re remote to us. I mean, there’s indigenous people living up there. 

So, I think it’s a fantastic idea. And I think it will improve our knowledge of aerosol cloud interactions, which is the largest uncertainty in climate change. And, you know, it will, I think, First Nations people that have their lifestyle restored by sea ice, you know, and the seals and the polar bears, etc, you know, would be a very good thing. 

I’d also like to point out one other thing. Going the route of the indigenous people is a fantastic idea, because we don’t necessarily have to get the buy-in of the Canadian government. We just have to get the buy-in of groups of First Nations that live along Hudson’s Bay, and the source of money. And I would argue that there has been there’s a precedent for this in that, in 2002, Russ George had contracts with First Nations people of Vancouver, Haida Gwai. And he they got funding, they got all the permits and approval from the Canadian government. 

They put  iron in the ocean off the coast of Vancouver, which stimulated phytoplankton. Salmon was at record levels of runs the year after, and then the Canadian government decided that they wanted to close this thing down. But they didn’t need money or approval, they just needed permits. It was the actual First Nations groups that wanted the project to be done to restore their salmon fishing. So, there are precedents of this being done through that mechanism — using First Nations buy-in. There are much less people you need to convince that this is a good project, assuming you can get get the funding from somewhere.

Stephen Salter  42:12  

You can also leave the wind turbine behind when we finish. 

Metta Spencer  42:18  

I’m hoping to get in touch with some leaders of indigenous people living on the west side of the Hudson Bay, Somebody told me yesterday that you could take the entire British Isles and put five of them into Hudson Bay. It’s that size! So the people living on the east side are not necessarily familiar with the people living on the west side, but I expect it’s the people on the west side, in Manitoba and Ontario, that we would want to deal with most and who would be asking us to put the ice where they want it. And so we would need to be in touch with them. 

I’m not acquainted with any leaders, I hope that there is some sort of network or movement or organization of indigenous people already existing so that we could contact them rather than  — we’re not in a position obviously to organize their interactions or to deal with them separately. So Paul, or anybody else, if you’re familiar with any organization that is working with groups of people in that area, then let me know.

Paul Beckwith  43:35  

I do know some people in the Winnipeg area that work a lot with First Nations in all different regions of Manitoba. Of course, Churchill’s in Manitoba. The other thing, there’s a lot of other benefits of trying this project. And there’s huge amounts of coastal erosion from increased wave action in Hudson’s Bay with lack of ice. So if you restore ice along bays and some coastlines, you can prevent this coastal erosion from occurring, which is actually destroying some First Nations settlements, etc, along the coast. And I’m talking about huge amounts of coastal erosion, like, like  even hundreds of meters per year in some cases. A big storm comes through Hudson Bay, and then it does tremendous coastal damage because of the lack of sea ice on the bay.

Metta Spencer  44:37  

Well, there’s an additional thing that Steven sent me a couple of weeks ago, an article with a map showing that the coastal region around the southwest part of Hudson Bay is a wetland, largely peat, and it has recently been emitting large amounts of methane. So that is another reason to believe that if we did freeze the coastal area of the bay, that this would reduce the melting of the permafrost in the wetlands and reduce the terrible emissions of methane. Does anybody know? I don’t have that at hand today, but I might be able to find that map if anybody knows anything about that movement, because it is apparently quite alarming.

Peter Wadhams  45:39  

Now, just an aside. If you want to get a feel for the size of Hudson Bay, it’s just off the corner of Paul’s armchair.

Paul Beckwith  45:50  

(pointing to the map behind him). Churchill’s up here. Churchill is where I’m pointing the pen. This is James Bay. And, you know, the winds are mostly west to east. So you’d want stations spaced here, maybe one in Churchill, maybe one just south of Churchill on this stretch? It depends. I don’t know if — Stephen, have you looked at the aerosol concentration, typically over Hudson’s Bay at all?

Stephen Salter  46:24  

I don’t have a number for it, but I will get it.

Paul Beckwith  46:28  

Because, you know, from the satellites, it isn’t a viable place. You might have to spray with a lot more aerosols, because there might be some aerosols blowing naturally off the land.

Stephen Salter  46:40  

The air will be very clean if it’s just been raining or snowing. There may be times when it’s too dirty and times when it’s fine. Right. Another interesting thing is that the water in Hudson’s Bay is less saline. And that actually is to our advantage, because what matters is the massive salt in the nuclei. So if you have fresher water, you have bigger drops. And it’s making very small drops that’s the technical challenge. So we’ve got a nice reason why we would like to use rather fresh water. We need the salt in the end, it must have some salt, but the less we have, the easier it is to make the drops.  

The number of nozzles that we need is really enormous. We make them in a silicon wafer like a microchip and we get 200 million nozzles in an eight-inch wafer. And the chips I’m using will have 30 of those wafers. So let me tell you, we got an enormous number of nozzles. But not replication, people don’t mind very big numbers provided everything is very flat.

Paul Beckwith  47:52  

There are islands here. Okay, there’s Belcher island down here. There’s an island down here, there’s some islands up here, I don’t know if there’s some islands up in this region. But you don’t necessarily have to put the stations on the coastline. You know, if they were pretty autonomous, they could go on an island and that would be probably a better thing to do.

Stephen Salter  48:14  

As long as the air is clean it doesn’t matter. It could be iced over and snowed over.

Paul Beckwith  48:21  

Right. So it’s just another thought.

Metta Spencer  48:24  

Your idea is wind turbines that would power the whole thing, right? You spray these things using the energy from wind turbines that you can just tow in there. I know Adele has questions so I’ll defer to her. 

Adele Buckley  48:47  

Well, I guess I’m interested in the timeframes. Will it be anywhere near soon enough and supposing that miraculously you raise money for a demonstration project, you can’t really start until you know you have the money to build multiple nozzles, which, you know, certainly, it seems to be many, many of them. Who will make them?  Then how long before in the ideal world from the day you have money till the day you are actually spraying on Hudson Bay?

Stephen Salter  49:32  

I would guess about five years if you had plenty of money. And if you got zero it takes a bit longer. But five years is is a guess.

Adele Buckley  49:45  

That’s the first the first trial. It’s not a satellite station

Stephen Salter  49:49  

And you would probably have most of the answers in the first year. Because we want to do this in the summertime.

Adele Buckley  49:59  

Okay, we’re going to do a lot more of them. So now we get to the point where perhaps the 10 years have elapsed.

Paul Beckwith  50:10  

Depends on the resource. 

Unknown Speaker  50:12  

Someone says, Yeah, let’s try this in the Pacific. Anyway, time is marching on. And by this time we’re not we’re at, you know, 2035 or something. And is it too late to be doing this?

Peter Wadhams  50:28  

What do you mean too late, I guess?

Stephen Salter  50:31  

Well, the longer we leave it, the more important it is to do it. I suppose if there’s a complete collapse of civilization so that we can’t do it anymore, then that’s one of the boundary conditions. But I’ve been working on it since 2004. And please don’t blame me if it’s late. The progress-to-cost ratio, which is what really matters in these things, is infinite. Because I hadn’t had any money.

Adele Buckley  51:08  

Local people would continue repeating the spraying as they see the conditions. And as the satellite information comes to them, I think I think that’s approximately right. But I wonder if the ice is sort of stable in the sense that you could actually use it in the traditional Inuit way? Would it be dangerous, because obviously, there would be times when the ice wasn’t stable, it was continuing to try to warm, there would be a lot of concern, in my view of like going out on the ice to do anything. 

Stephen Salter  51:56  

The guys who live there will be very good at judging whether it’s safe to go on the ice. I mean, they need that to survive. I would let them decide whether it was thick enough to walk on.

Adele Buckley  52:14  

They’d have to rely on their colleagues, if you’d like to, okay, we have to keep doing this. Or the people that are out on the ice will have trouble.

Stephen Salter  52:25  

I think we could find a way to measure the ice thickness, perhaps even measure it from a satellite. Maybe Peter Wadhams would tell us about that. But it ought to be possible to tell them what the ice thickness is and let them decide.

Paul Beckwith  52:39  

We can measure the thickness from satellite. So latest satellites, the thing that throws it off is when there’s melt lines on the surface of the ice. That can throw those numbers off. So as ice is, you know, in the spring, perhaps the accuracy is not as good as it would be in other times. The satellite can measure freeboard, for example, you can measure the distance to the ice, and then the distance to open water right next to the ice. And from that difference, you know, can measure the freeboard, it knows how thick the ice is.

Metta Spencer  53:14  

The native people already are having a lot of grief because of the melting ice, that’s, of course, it’s frozen in the winter, and then then it’s not behaving the way it used to 30 years ago, and therefore it’s more dangerous for them. 

Also, there are other things about their livelihood being affected adversely. Because of the salinity of the water or temperature something, the seals used to float. So they’d  harpoon a seal and then drag it into the boat. But they can’t do that anymore, because the seals now sink before they can reach it. And another detrimental thing has to do with the polar bears, which are not reproducing normally. Most of the pregnant polar bears don’t give birth anymore. I don’t know what happens but it’s it’s detrimental. So we need to restore ice for the livelihood of the people living in that area. They have a strong claim for that and we have to work closely with them. It’s not our business to tell them what they need. They tell us what they need and where they want their ice and we’ll see what we can do.

Paul Beckwith  54:32  

And another factor is, if you’re cooling large portion of Hudson’s Bay, that cold airmass does move over land. Right? So you will actually cool surrounding land areas. 

Adele Buckley  54:48  

There’s something about what happens to the sun during all of this. Because human beings need sunshine for their own mental health and are we anticipating not seeing the sun? Or what are we doing?

Stephen Salter  55:05  

The difference would be undetectable. They won’t know. There’s an enormous difference between summer and winter, so the tiny, tiny, difference in the half a percent, maybe one or two, maybe 5, is not detectable.

Adele Buckley  55:23  

That sounds reassuring. How many stations around Hudson Bay, just roughly, would you would you think would would be desirable? In the best of all worlds?

Stephen Salter  55:35  

Well, we need to do it in the mid summer. That’s when we may get the best effect from increasing the reflectivity.  So we’ll be doing it May, June, July.

Paul Beckwith  55:50  

So, I’d say one station to start off. So you need one station, one station is to reactivate difference. And then there’s a scramble to make as many stations as possible because it works so well.

Stephen Salter  56:02  

Yeah, yeah. Well, my very first one.

Paul Beckwith  56:06  

So one station would be  — you said we’d be about 30 million. Would you say about 10 million for one?

Stephen Salter  56:16  

I don’t think it’s proportional to the number at all. I think doing anything is going to be 20 or 30 million. And whether you want five or 10 stations really isn’t much extra.

Peter Wadhams  56:32  

But those those costs are actually very tiny. That was it. They’re big for science, but they’re tiny compared to say, the money being squandered every day by the British government on various weirdo projects.

Metta Spencer  56:48  

I hope that we can talk the Canadian government into this. I don’t see myself going around with a can hoping people will put their pennies into it and collect the money for this independently. If the government isn’t ready to support it, we can’t. I don’t see the Canadian Pugwash group doing it. 

But I think it’s very reasonable thing if we show the financial and other benefits and in fact, since Biden has put through this Inflation Reduction Act with a lot of money for climate change interventions in the US, all of a sudden, there’s new pressure on the Canadian government to step up and do more as well. Canada has not been putting that kind of money into trying to reduce the climate crisis. And this, plus three other measures that I have chosen in my own infinite wisdom about these matters. I have chosen ones that I think can be done within five years. And all of them could be sponsored by or promoted by the Canadian government. This one would probably be one of the most expensive, but it’s something like $30 million is affordable. The Canadian government can handle that without any trouble. Right?

Stephen Salter  58:18  

The biggest money return would be moderating hurricanes.  People in Florida would agree with this at the moment. And what we would do would be to have ships cruising in the Atlantic between the Gulf of Mexico and Africa. The Hurricanes start over on the African side. And they would be cruising around and measuring the sea surface temperature and trying to reduce it to the point which was a temperature set by the the joint views of all the governments in the Gulf of Mexico. And if you look at the benefit-cost ratio of this, knocking the sea surface temperature down by about two degrees would have prevented the recent hurricane that they had in Florida. And the benefit for that is absolutely enormous compared with the cost. So you know, it’s 1000s of times cheaper to have these vessels cruising around and moderating hurricanes than to pay for all the damage.

Metta Spencer  59:22  

Absolutely. Okay, I want to suggest that those of you especially Canadian Pugwash group if your people Pugwash, as you’re watching this, and you have thoughts or questions, go to our website as soon as I get this thing posted. I edit these shows and there’s hardly anything to do to this one to edit it. I’ll put it up tonight on the website — tosavetheworld.ca — and you can find it there. I think 509 is the number of the of the show. I’ve done 508 shows before this, and you can search for 509. And look at this, watch this video if you if you haven’t had a chance or if you want to see it again. 

If you have questions or comments, there’s a comments column below. I suggest that you post your ideas, your comments there and we will get people answering because there’s a way you can reply. So, you can have a real conversation on that Comments column. Is there anything else quickly that needs to be said before I say goodbye?

Paul Beckwith  1:00:41  

I would just like to say that shoreline erosion, if it is a good and large effect could be a very important way of promoting this.

Metta Spencer  1:00:54  

Okay, thank you all. I think this is extremely helpful. And let’s hope that other people agree with us that it is a really worth exploring. At any rate, I think the Canadian Pugwash group would do well to look into this and make sure that we have not missed anything that is relevant to making decisions. Thank you all. Bye, bye. 

Project save the world produces at least two of these shows each week. This one is number 509. You can watch them or listen to them as audio podcasts on our website to save the world.ca people share information there about six global issues. To find a particular talk show it or its title or episode number in the search bar, or the name of one of the guest speakers project say the world also produces a quarterly online publication piece magazine. You can subscribe for $20 Canadian per year. Just go to pressreader.com on your browser. And in the search bar. Enter the word peace. You’ll see buttons to click to subscribe

Saving Antarctica’s Ice

Saving Antarctica's Ice

Project Save the World Podcast / Talk Show Episode Number: 284
Host: Metta Spencer

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

ice sheet, antarctica, glaciers, icebergs, curtain, people, greenland, ice, melting, warm water, ice shelf, antarctic, glacier, ocean, flow, engineering, deep, troughs, benefit, water

SPEAKERS

Peter Wadhams, Paul Beckwith, Metta Spencer, John Moor



Synopsis: Roald Sagdeev led scientists in Gorbachev’s USSR; Frank von Hippel was his counterpart in the US. They worked together to reduce the risk of nuclear war.

Please note this transcript has been edited. 

Metta Spencer  00:00

Hi, I’m Metta Spencer, Well, should we go to Greenland? Or do you want to go to Antarctica today? You get your pick, because we’re going to try to save some ice. It seems that the ice cover of Greenland and Antarctica has been melting way too fast and we have to do something about it. So, we have today a conversation between specialists on this topic. There’ll be a third person joining us in a bit. We’re going to talk about how we can keep all of that ice from melting and running off into the ocean. The person who thinks he knows how to do that is John Moore, who is based right now in Lapland in Finland, and normally teaches at a normal university of Beijing in China, where he was directing a program of geo-engineering. And he sounds sort of Canadian with a British accent. I don’t know. Where are you really from, John?

John Moore  01:55

I’m from Britain,

Metta Spencer  01:56

I thought there was a little British in there. Well, you got another Brit here with you. And that’s Peter Wadlow. He’s not in in Britain, either. I think he’s in Turin, Italy, aren’t you, Peter?

Peter Wadhams  02:09

Yes. I left for the past three years. Ever since Brexit.

Metta Spencer  02:20

Good thinking! Peter Wadhams is a professor at Cambridge University, but he spends a lot of time climbing around on the glaciers in Greenland. And I think he’s also seeing some glaciers out his window in the Alps of northern Italy. Isn’t that right? Yes. Well, now the thing that intrigued me was that somebody sent me a copy of a column by Gwynne Dyer, a wonderful journalist that I’ve met several times in the past and like very much. He wrote about an innovation – or at least a proposal for an innovation – by, I think, John Moore. I’m going to ask John Moore to tell us how you propose to save the ice and keep it from running off from Greenland and Antarctica. Please give us a little preview of this and then I will ask Peter what he thinks.

John Moore  03:32

Okay, thank you. I will just introduce the idea with a few slides. So this was the start of the idea. Everybody has probably come across these kinds of curtains that are used to separate rooms with different temperatures, like a cold room or something like that. But you can go in and out with a vehicle or walking without needing to open the door. And this is how it would work, actually, in the ice sheet. So you have a glacier. And you have a curtain that’s anchored with concrete at the base to the sea floor and floating in the water column. And the interesting thing is that the ocean is stratified, and the warm water is at the bottom rather than the top because it’s salty. So it’s very heavy. 

So you have a glacier and of course it’s it can calve icebergs. We want something that is flexible, like a tree branch or something. It’s not destroyed by any physical thing. So yes, an iceberg can come along and push this curtain aside. And after the iceberg is gone, it springs back into its original position. 

Now, why this works is that the ice sheets – I’m talking about Greenland or Antarctica – lose ice, mostly through narrow outlet glaciers that are incised deeply into the bedrock. And if you can basically put the plug back into the, into the bathtub, which is the ice sheet, it’s a lot easier to keep that water in the bathtub than constantly filling it up with a watering can. And so, this is the idea: that you would have leverage by applying an intervention to perhaps a few percent of the entire coastline of Greenland or Antarctica, where most of the ice is flowing out, and which is the most susceptible for catastrophic loss of the ice sheet. So, you have enormous leverage by focusing on these particular areas. The kinds of material that we would use are rather similar to what’s called geo-textiles that have been used in buildings fairly commonly for a long time. Now, for example, there’s a material called high modulus polyethylene, which is 15 times more resistant to abrasion than steel. It’s effectively inert in water, and very low coefficient of friction. 

Metta Spencer  07:10

That’s what you’re going to make these curtains from?

John Moore  07:14

Yes, that’s right. So, you have a concrete foundation. And then you have this plastic thing. There’s no structural strength, this is not holding back the ice sheet. This is simply slowing the melting by blocking access,

Metta Spencer  07:29

And you hold it in place with balloons or something that can easily be pushed aside.

John Moore  07:36

Exactly. Not balloons but, for example, fiberglass pipes that can be filled with air. They supply a lot of buoyancy and have tremendous tensile strength. So where would we do this? We wouldn’t need to do it all the way around Greenland, all the way Antarctica. You focus on the particularly vulnerable areas. On  this map here you can see highlights in red. Those areas are losing mass rapidly in Antarctica, and in fact, it’s confined to a handful of glaciers in this sector called the Amundson Sea around here. And if we zoom in in this box, we can look at the flow speeds in red and blue – fast-flowing glaciers. The key areas are Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers. People may have heard of Thwaites glacier; it’s been called the Doomsday Glacier in some articles because it’s actually on bedrock that is below present sea level,so, if you remove the ice sheet, you wouldn’t have a continent. You’d have a few islands poking out of the sea. That’s an unstable configuration for the ice sheet. We’ve got the continental shelf here, the deep ocean, and the continental shelf actually gets deeper as you go inland. These blue colors are deeper than this kind of yellow.

Metta Spencer  09:27

Excuse me. Now this yellow area, that’s still ocean, right?

John Moore  09:31

Yeah, this is the sea floor.

Metta Spencer  09:35

On this map, where’s the edge of the ocean? Where’s the land?

John Moore  09:40

Well, this is the coastline. We’ve got the glaciers in white, and the floating parts of the ice shelves are in this kind of translucent color here. Yes, and so this glacier over here and Pine Island place here, up here.

Metta Spencer  10:06

All of the colored area is underwater?

John Moore  10:10

That’s right, the whole colored area’s underwater. It’s been mapped by ships and sonar and submarines that can go under the ice. So, what people have found only very recently is that the warm water that’s flowing on the bottom, as I said, because it’s very heavy and dense with salt, that is largely confined in these troughs. And they are relatively narrow. These pink arrows show the warm water pathways underneath the floating glaciers, ice shelves to the parts where the glazier goes off the land and starts to float. So, if you can somehow stop that warm water in these deep troughs, from accessing underneath the glacier, you will slow down the rate of melting very dramatically. So now, if we have a look at cross-sections, through these warm water pathways, when you’re outside, when you’re far away from the from the ice out here, in the continental shelf, it’s quite a sandy bed, you could say, quite smooth topography, and these troughs, of the order of 50 kilometers across, something like that – 50 to 100 kilometers. The closer you go to the ice, the more sharply incised the bedrock topography is. But that means that the warm water is confined in narrower channels. 

And you can see that if we zoom in again, on this area here, what people call Trough Two is only four-and-a-half kilometers across. And this is the warm water pathway that is melting the most vulnerable ice shelf on the planet. So, this is something that would seem to be a target for potential intervention. You gain this massive leverage I talked about, where you’re putting the plug.  This is the plug hole, basically, that we want him to try to fill. There are other pathways. It’s not necessarily clear that if we blocked just Two, you would solve the problem. I’m not saying that, because maybe the warm water would find another pathway – maybe this T Three. If that’s the advantage of pulling a curtain further out, you would protect more of the glacier. It would be more challenging from an engineering point of view, but you would get a bigger benefit in terms of the ice that’s protected. So, if this trough over here, you would protect Thwaits and Pine Island, and a number of these smaller glaciers as well. So, this kind of summarizes the idea. You have this warm water, you have a sea bed curtain over here with reinforced tensile fabrics and variety of different kinds of foundations. We’ve looked at it.  I won’t go into detail now about all of these details. We’ve made engineering models about how the forces would be on this curtain. We know the kinds of materials that would be needed. We’ve also argued that there’s a duty of the signatories to the Antarctic Treaty System to proactively protect the ice sheet. Things like the Madrid protocol govern the preservation and the maintenance of the status quo. But if people did not do active conservation, effectively, the ice sheet would disappear relatively quickly because of these greenhouse gas emissions. So, there’s this kind of moral – and actually arguably legal – imperative to act.

Metta Spencer  14:37

May I ask one question here? I’m not sure where the warm water comes from. Is it that the ocean in general, all over the world, all the ocean has the cold water at the top and there’s warmer water at the bottom?

John Moore  14:55

No, the warm water is, in ultimate terms, generated in the tropics. That’s heating the global ocean.  93% of the incoming radiation rises due to greenhouse gas, 93% of that energy has gone into the ocean, and it’s heating the ocean. That’s been going on since the Industrial Revolution. That’s why it’s very difficult to do anything about it. It’s this huge amount of energy that’s stored in the ocean. Now, on this figure here, you see this blue, this deep blue that’s at the edge of the Antarctic continental shelf? The waters there are cold by normal standards, but warm by the standards of Antarctica, which of course, is in contact with all of this ice and those deep waters, heated by the atmosphere way up in the tropics, those contain a lot of energy. And they are periodically kind of pumped onto this continental shelf by climate, by weather variability. And those warm waters flow over the continental shelf through these deep, deep troughs. And that’s something that has increased since the early part of the 20th century. We know there’s a lot more warm water being pumped onto the continental shelf than there was 50 years ago, for example.

Metta Spencer  16:47

Well, I’ll be quiet and let Peter – 

John Moore  16:50

I can’t finish this?

Metta Spencer  16:56

I beg your pardon. I thought you were through.

John Moore  16:58

No, I’m just going to point out that when we cost this, we look at who would benefit. So, we estimate there’s roughly 200 million people that would be forced to move by the collapse of Thwaites glacier around the world, because their living conditions would become untenable in terms of flooding. And you will have a knock on effect. If you remove ice in one base, you’re lowering the ice sheet, and that will tend to destabilize surrounding basins as well. So, the costs of doing this are something like $5 per person per year for those 200 million people, so we’re looking at something like $50 billion for the construction, and about a $2 billion – one to $2 billion per year  – maintenance cost for periodic replacement of these curtains and foundations. 

If you compare that with things like the Stratospheric Aerosol injection, which costs at the order of seven to 70 billion, depending on how much protection you would need to do for the, for the temperature rise. So, and

Metta Spencer  18:29

With a stratospheric injection, you’d be talking about this 70 billion indefinitely, not just as setup, right? So, 

John Moore  18:39

Well, for perhaps at least 100 years. You know, it takes time to remove the CO2 from the atmosphere by afforestation or artificial trees that you could somehow lower the CO2 concentration and store it long term in rocks. Yeah. And coastal protection.

If you said, pkay, we won’t stabilize Antarctica. We will just pay for berms and dikes and things like that, which, sure the rich part of the world could do,  the developing world is much less able to do. And that’s estimated to cost about 50 billion per year. So, it’s probably 50 times more expensive than this intervention that we’re talking about, for the Antarctic. 

So that’s basically the overview. There’s a ton of details that I have not gone into but, by all means, let’s have a discussion about it. I would say that we are not planning to go straight to Antarctica. We are at the moment working with Greenlanders and in Greenland trying to do some kind of a learning experience to explore how would Greenland feel about protecting its ice sheet. What benefits to Greenlanders are there from doing this kind of work, if any? Perhaps they don’t care.

Metta Spencer  20:13

Fascinating. Thank you. Okay, let’s turn this off and let’s see what Peter has to say.

Peter Wadhams  20:24

Well, first thing is, I can see that this vertical barrier concept is a good one because it’s been already thought for another project, which is preserving icebergs and towing them around to places which need water. So, there’s a project to take icebergs from Newfoundland, tow them to Tenerife, which has got zero water, by having a geotextile and vertical barrier, and woven fabric. It’s the same fabric as is used to preserve ski lands in the Alps. And that then surrounds the iceberg close in, so that it’s more or less like a wetsuit, and the layer of water between the iceberg and the fabric is warmed by the fact that it’s close together and this was not warmed. Actually it’s preserved and that keeps the iceberg from melting quickly when it’s going being towed through warmer seas. And the effect seems to be great enough that you can in fact get at least two-thirds of an iceberg from Newfoundland to Tenerife. So okay, that’s, that a similar concept. It’s not quite the same, but it’s the same idea – that you’re using a vertical barrier to prevent heat flow to vent heat. And I’d be happy to do that and to see that being deployed. It could very well be useful. The only thing that concerns me – because I I haven’t worked on the spacecraft series – is, a bit like Metta, I sort of wonder where does the warm water come from? Because all the glaciers and ice sheets that I’ve looked at have got the warm water above cold water. So you’ve got to have a source of warm water right down at the bottom of the ice sheet. I’m wondering, where does that come from? And how is the flow of warm water preserved?

John Moore  23:42

Okay, well, you know, it’s interesting what you said about geotextiles around the icebergs. But we do know that in reservoirs, they do use curtains of about 100 meters thickness to separate warm and cold waters for the ecological benefits downstream for salmon habitats, for example. So, in a sense, that’s a surface floating rather than a bottom anchored. There is warm water when looking at these temperature salinity profiles that are available from the area and also in Greenland, in for example, Disco Bay. In the summer, the surface layer 100 meters or so certainly does warm up. But over the longer term, the deeper waters are warmer than the surface. I’m talking about 500 meters deep and deep at the thermocline – this temperature change where you get this increasing temperature – is quite deep in the Amundsen Sea sector. I can say usually it’s been between about 500 to 700 meters deep. So that’s why these troughs, which can be up to 1000 meters deep – they are very deep troughs. Those are where that inflow of water from outside Antarctic is coming in there. 

Obviously, the deeper the trough, from the engineering point of view, the more difficult it is to work. So, the things that we’ve looked at are how the costs change. Or how do they scale with the height of the barrier above the seabed, with the length of the barrier, and the depth that you’ll have to work out? So, we did a kind of a cost-benefit analysis where we guess the costing compared with the amount of ice in terms of sea level that is protected by these barriers. Then you can estimate what height is the best to have the top of the curtain at. And without fairly crude color and cost-benefit analysis, it’s about 550 meters. So, we’re not going really anywhere near the upper part in the Amundsen Sea sector. 

In fact, the icebergs that are calving from Thwaits and Pine Island are less than 500 meters deep. So probably they would mainly go completely over the barrier without even hitting it at all. But yes, where the glacier comes off the land, it’s 1000 meters deep. So that’s how the warm water is melting rapidly at the base.

Peter Wadhams  26:48

Well, is that process something that’s changed over the years? Or is it continuous or discontinuous? Because that would surely get rid of the Thwaits glacier here in pretty short order.

John Moore  27:06

Yes, you’re right. And if you look at the pictures of the the Western Thwaites, I it’s in terrible state. I don’t know that anyone’s got a real solid estimate of how long it would survive but I think some alarming estimates are as little as five years. Ice shelves are notoriously difficult to predict their lifespan. They can disappear virtually overnight when they go. But certainly, there’s a lot of damage there. You can see that the shear margin where the edge of the glazier is flowing very rapidly. It’s very chaotic. Looks very weak. You could say it’s being torn apart; it’s tearing itself apart and accelerating. And this is something that seems to have happened in the early part of the 20th century, maybe 100 years ago, maybe 80 years ago. At least it seems to be related mostly to the tropical Pacific, to the heating in the tropical Pacific that finally makes its way down to Antarctica. It’s not so much the local sort of Southern Ocean circulation or the atmospheric circulation around Antarctica that’s driving it. It is more a global ocean sort of driving force there.

Peter Wadhams  28:47

So do you have estimates of how fast the melt is going? I mean, that is left to itself? How long would it take before the glacier here is significantly degraded?

John Moore  29:07

Yeah, we have one critical thing: the buttressing, that’s really the key thing. How much back force, the ice shelf where it’s grounded, is supplying to the inland ice? So, the amount of buttressing depends on how rapidly the ice shelf can calve away into icebergs, and that is one of the classic deep and unknown issues in glaciology. A good calving relationship. People have done very nice, high resolution models that require enormous computer power to solve. Cracks propagate at the speed of sound. Glaciers flow very, very slowly. This is a super-difficult computational problem because you’re trying to span so many different scales of velocity that it’s difficult to do. But we’ve looked at different formulations, different kinds of calving, and you get rapid retreat downslope of the Thwaites Glacier over the next hundreds of years and it continues for quite a long time into the future. The speed at which that glacier retreats is still very difficult to say, though,

Peter Wadhams  30:37

That will be really a question. Is this some kind of emergency or not? There’s a –

John Moore  30:46

Yes, I would say that we could handle this, basically, reasonably well over the next 30 years. The longer you leave it, the more difficult it is. It’s like a ball rolling down a hill. If you do it at the start, of course, it’s easy to stop, the more speed it’s got, the more momentum the more difficult it will be.

Metta Spencer  31:16

Didn’t you say a while ago that the Thwaite Glacier might collapse within five years?

John Moore  31:25

That’s not my opinion. But I’ve certainly read articles that say that. That give timescales. So, it’s, as I said, it’s very difficult to know how quickly it will go.

Metta Spencer  31:38

So if you’re starting a project that’s going to take 30 years, but within five years, it’s already failed – I don’t know? This doesn’t sound too easy to sell people on. 

John Moore  31:51

Well, the thing is that, even if the ice shelf disappears, it can come back. The point is that, if you stop that warm water coming in, and you turn off the melting from rates around 100 meters a year to 10 meters a year, or even zero. That ice, coming off 1000 meters thick from the land, isn’t going to be thin very quickly. It’s going to stay thick, and the ice shelf is moving rapidly off the land. So it will very quickly grind on to these seabed highs again. Of course, we don’t know for sure. It’s certainly easier if the ice shelf is still existing while you are trying to do this kind of an intervention. And if it’s disappeared completely, we want to keep the thing as close to the status quo as possible. But the point is, if you’re slowing down from 100 meters a year to one meter a year or zero, you’re gonna get a difference.

Metta Spencer  33:03

Okay. Here we are being joined by Paul Beckwith. Hello, Paul, how are you?

Paul Beckwith  33:10

Hello, Metta. Sorry, I couldn’t make it right at the start. But I’m here now.

Metta Spencer  33:15

You’ve missed a slide show. John Moore here has been showing us pictures of Antarctica. Do you want to do a quick quick quick replay of that slideshow and show Paul what we have already been looking at at greater length?

Paul Beckwith  33:38

Thank you. That’s okay. I can just sort of listen to you guys for a few minutes. I’m sure I have a few comments to make. Okay.

John Moore  33:46

Yes, if you have any questions and I can maybe show the relevant slide to explain the concept. So where were we?

Peter Wadhams  34:00

Yeah. Firstly, this phenomenon of warm water underlying cold water, which is obviously going to lead to an unstable situation, and how long that has gone on for, and whether it will carry on like that, and whether that’s going to be the root cause of the disintegration of the ice shelf. Some big questions really.

John Moore  34:28

Yeah, well, as you know, Peter, there is a plume of fresh water that comes out from the base of the ice because most of the Antarctic is at the melting point. So, this comes out of a kind of a sub-glacial river, and that pushes out under the ice shelf. And as this flow, this river, is coming out, it’s entraining the warmer ocean waters within this plume. And those warm waters are the things that’s causing the rapid melting underneath the ice shelf. As those warm waters are brought up by this rising plume, then they are cooling. Of course, they’re melting the ice. Eventually, there’s a compensatory flow outflow of this cold water at the surface or near the surface – let’s say in the 100 meters depth – that is replenished by this deep flow off the continental shelf of waters that are this global ocean. Deep waters which are relatively dense because they’re at the bottom of the ocean, and warmer than these waters that have been freshened and cooled by contact with the ice. And

Paul Beckwith  36:10

This warmer water is also more of a problem when the bottom is sloping, not towards the ocean, but sloping inland, right? In the warm water, when the glacier starts receding, then it has to move back a long distance, right? James Hanson, have you talked about some of his work? Because he was talking about the warming waters around Antarctica in papers many years ago. And, you know, even a few years ago, he’s had some major papers on how this is a factor that is not included in the climate models. 

People still talk about ice on Antarctica lasting thousands of years, right?  I’m always amazed that when I hear that sort of thing. NASA has, interestingly, started to do some Facebook posts – people with different groups at NASA, where they’re presenting data. And just yesterday, or even this morning, I saw a number like that: it’s still going to take 1000 years or whatever. No matter what type of warming there is, you know, the Antarctic ice is going to be there for an awful long time. I don’t know how they can say that. Actually, I’m always surprised.

John Moore  37:59

Some parts of the Antarctic – a lot of the Antarctic – actually is relatively stable. So that means, sure it will melt, but it takes time. Like surface melting from the top downwards. It’s very difficult to get more than about a metre a year, because the air is not such a very good conductor of heat. Of course, it’s actually –

Paul Beckwith  38:23

It’s heat capacity is low. And also, ice is a very good insulator, right?

John Moore  38:29

Right. But if you are melting from the ocean, you can have melt rates at the order of 100 meters a year underneath these ice shelves where the ice is coming afloat. So the problem is that this marine ice sheet instability that you were talking about, where you have this reverse sloping shelf of sea floor underneath, that is a geometric instability. As I said, it’s like a ball rolling down the hill. If you erode away something that’s stopping that ball, it will roll down the hill. And that’s the situation that we are in with things like Thwaites glacier. So even if we basically stopped emitting CO2 now, those glaciers that have had that buttressing force removed because the ice shelf has thinned and floating free, that will continue. You need to physically restrain that ice from flowing off the land. Now building a concrete wall, for example, that’s what originally what we thought we would need to do. But the it doesn’t make any sense. What you need to do is let the ice do its own thing. It knows where those buttress things used to be and it will find them if the ice shelf is thick enough. 

The way to get the ice shelf thick is to turn down that ocean melt rate from 100 meters a year to as close to zero as you can. And that’s what this concept of a curtain blocking access to the deep, warm waters is all about.

Paul Beckwith  40:29

So, this curtain would have to be clear, would have to be massive, right? Would it be anchored to the sea floor?

John Moore  40:35

Yeah, it’s anchored to the seafloor with concrete foundations. The length of the shortest length – that is the channel that is funneling water underneath the most vulnerable life shelf on the planet – is four and a half kilometers wide. I mean, four and a half kilometers, that’s a lunchtime stroll, really. The whole width of the Thwaites ice shelf is something like 100 kilometers, but that’s kind of irrelevant. The key thing is putting the plug in the bathtub. We’re not talking about how big the bathtub is, just where the water is flowing. And that’s four and a half kilometers across. 

Paul Beckwith  41:26

How high would it be? What’s the water depth?

John Moore  41:31

The water depth in those deep channels is up to about 1000 meters. the top of the curtain should be around 500 meters. So it needs to be something on the order of a few hundred meters, and on the order of 10 kilometers across. In reservoirs, people use surface floating curtains to separate warm waters on the order of a kilometer across and about 100 meters thick, deep.

Paul Beckwith  42:06

In the case of those reservoirs, that would be to reduce evaporation. And you’re talking about

John Moore  42:14

Oh, no. It’s to separate water of different temperatures. So it’s doing exactly the same kind of job. And the idea is to manage the temperature of the outflow of the reservoirs to better preserve fishing, salmon habitat.

42:30

Okay. So there are reservoirs where that technology is being used right at the moment?

John Moore  42:37

Well, those are crude approaches, okay. With the kind of materials that we’re talking about – we’re talking about high modulus polyethylene, for example. It’s the kind of technology that is employed in things like deep ocean drilling, or laying communications cables in the deep ocean, or even offshore wind turbines installations. So, if this was in temperate waters, we would have all of the engineering ability to start tomorrow. The difficulty is, of course, you’re in Antarctica. You’ve got the polar night, you’ve got these massive icebergs calving from Thwaites and Pine Island and places like that. Undoubtedly it would be the most challenging civil engineering project that humanity has ever done. But it’s not science fiction. We know how to do it. It just requires funding and political will.

Paul Beckwith  43:50

You also have the tidal changes and very rough wave action.

John Moore  43:58

Well, that’s the thing. Because the top of the curtain is about 500 meters deep, it’s well below tidal. We have thought about things like tsunamis: Would that make an impact? There’s a lot of unknowns; we need to do more. Looking at the interaction of the curtain with the aspiration flow up and over the curtain. There will be some flow like that. The most disastrous thing that we could think about was, if you get the thing flapping like a flag for some reason, then we can imagine it destroying itself. There is clearly a ton of engineering to go through. We’re not talking about being ready to install this tomorrow or next year. There’s at least a decade of engineering to go through. 

We would start in manageable places. You wouldn’t need even to have a glacier. You can do it where there are the kind of ocean currents where you could learn. You could start in a river. The Cambridge University engineering department actually are quite interested in doing a simple project in the Cam with this kind of curtain just to see how would it work in practice. You can learn a lot and scale, step by step, up the difficulty ladder, going through Greenland, and then finally towards Antarctica and Thwaites.

Paul Beckwith  45:44

Okay, now, you may have covered this already, but a couple more technical questions .The curtain would be anchored to the ocean floor, there’d be buoys on the top to lift it upwards, right? Would it let some water through or would it be completely opaque to water flow? Or would it block, say 80 percent? You know, a mesh sort of thing.

John Moore  46:15

This is a good question. We were talking about panels, because expect a 30 year lifespan for these kinds of plastic panels. They would be hinged at the foundation so they could rotate in different directions if the icebergs and things hit them. These panels would overlap. Where you would have two layers of panels, of course, in the aspiration over the top there will be some kind of an exchange flow. But the details of that can be controlled by engineering. You can have spoilers on the top of the curtains, for example, that determine how the separation goes over the top. As I say, there’s a ton of engineering that needs to be done. The concrete foundations can be installed by a variety of techniques, depending on the material, on the sea floor conditions. Our favorite design, the one that we’re able to cost most easily, is actually a longer curtain about 80 kilometers across, that’s out further away from the ice. It protects more glaciers and it’s in shallow water. And it’s in these eluvial sort of deposits, so the engineering is a lot easier. We’re firmer on the costs that would be required to do something like that.

Paul Beckwith  47:57

Now would you have some sort of power generator there to provide power to run sensors or actually run motors if you installed them to control the movement of the curtain? I guess you could use underwater turbines.

John Moore  48:21

We don’t want to have a lot of complicated things that can break down, so they’re basically passive. Obviously, we would instrument the shit out of them so we’d know what’s going on. And there is certainly power from these currents and available. We certainly will be using power but there are sources of power from the ocean there.

I’m not an engineer. Our stupid idea when we started this was, okay, let’s just block these passages with a pile of rocks. So we started talking to an engineer in in Vancouver, Barry Kiefer, he contacted us and says: “This idea is just plain stupid. Have you thought about these curtains? These curtains are a much more sensible way of doing it.” Of course, he’s absolutely right. He’s an engineer. There is other engineers and fluid mechanics people for example, in UBC in Vancouver, there are people in engineering and in glaciology. We have groups of people around the world – very small scale at the moment. Alfred Vader Institute, the engineering department in Cambridge University. One or two companies are starting to think this is an interesting idea, should we be investigating this? 

Metta Spencer  50:22

You make it sound as if maybe private industry could find a way to make a buck from it. I can’t imagine how that could be.

John Moore  50:31

Well, I think you’re absolutely right. And this is a key part of the greenlab work that we’re trying to do is, how do you monetize the AI sheets as a global good?  It is a global good in the same sense that old growth rainforests are, or the Amazon rainforest. It’s something that benefits everybody, but it only benefits that while it’s in existence. You might consider something like the payment for ecosystem services that the United Nations runs. Or the kind of funds that tell people not to cut down old growth forests. We also may consider the insurance industry, a levy on flood insurance globally. 

No one’s wanting or expecting guys in Kiribati or Bangladesh to pay for this thing. For sure, they would be the main beneficiaries but, obviously, the rich West causes most of this problem and, by right, a guy who buys a condo in Miami should be paying a hell of a lot more for this kind of thing than a guy in Bangladesh. 

As I said, we estimated if it’s 200 million people that would benefit, it’s of the order of $5 a year per person of those 200 million. But there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be limited to 200 million people because it’s a huge worry in Europe, you know: climate, refugees, climate migrants. It’s actually worthwhile for countries like Switzerland, for example, to pay for this kind of thing to avoid people from the developing world coming and wanting to settle in Europe. 

Peter Wadhams  52:28

It will be suddenly true that acceleration of loss of ice is one of the big problems facing the world because sea level rise is accelerating. And that’s coming from increased melt of ice sheets, especially in the Arctic, but also potentially in the Antarctic. So, if you can find a way to reduce the rate of loss, then that’s going to be really beneficial for the world in terms of reducing the rate of global sea level rise. 

John Moore  53:15

That’s what we hope. And that’s why for Greenland, it’s very important. Greenland wants to do something good. Is Greenland happy that the ice sheet goes away> In fact, they care about what happens to people in Bangladesh. I’m sure they do, like any rational human being does. It’s just that they never considered the ice sheet as being anything particularly worthwhile. They work on the sea ice, they benefit from the ocean resources. I’ve been telling them that the ice sheet is their ice treasure, this is what they’ve got. This is something that world cares about. They can gain enormous soft power and influence by being the good guys and conserving their ice sheets. So they can do that and benefit if we can control some of the outlets from Greenland. But also, they can be applying pressure to the Antarctic Treaty signatory people and saying, Hey, you guys, we’re doing our bit to conserve Greenland. We really need to do the same kind of thing in Antarctica. You guys need to step up and put your hand in your pocket.

Metta Spencer  54:38

Countries have some sort of pact to protect the Antarctic. Which countries are they and what’s the nature of the of the contract?

John Moore  54:52

The Antarctic is governed by something called the Antarctic Treaty System. There are 29 voting members of this system, which are actually the 29 richest countries on the planet, more or less. All of them except Switzerland have a coastline, so all of them will benefit by reducing sea level rise. The duty of the signatories to the Antarctic Treaty is to preserve the ice sheet as it is. And usually that’s taken as meaning you can’t drill for oil or mining minerals. That kind of thing. What we are arguing is that legally it means that you have to actively conserve that ice sheet because if people do nothing, even if people just turn off all of the CO2-burning motors in the world, the ice sheet will go away, because it’s this ball that’s rolling down the hill. In order to keep that ball, the ice sheet, you have to stop it. You have to provide the buttressing. You can’t just say, well, this is a bigger problem; it’s not just our 29 countries. No, this is something directly that the people governing Antarctica can do independently of all of those greenhouse mitigation measures.

Metta Spencer  56:36

What other things would be impacted by it? I don’t imagine there’s any shipping lanes around there. There probably are whales and fish. To what extent would other life forms be affected by the change in the currents of the ocean there?

John Moore  56:59

This is an excellent question. I’m glad you asked this. And it’s only recently that we’ve been talking to ecologists, and actually they have started to become interested in this idea. There will be some local impacts, both through the construction process, which won’t be 100%, clean, you know – it’s an engineering process. And as for changing the currents. I always say, Well, you have to compare risk for risk. The question is, what would happen if you didn’t do this? Not, what is the case now, but what will be the comparable situation? 

For sure, hundreds of kilometers retreat of the ice will change the marine ecology a hell of a lot more around Antarctica than just doing an intervention like this. At least that’s my feeling. I’m not an ecologist, I would love to have an ecologist say this, but that study needs to be done. 

The wider issue is: What happens to the waters that you stop going to the Thwaites? Are they just going to melt the next place here down the line, the next Domino, if you like? That’s why I was saying to Paul that, in fact, a lot of the Antarctic is stable in that it’s not vulnerable to this marine ice sheet instability. Those waters will melt the ice, but melt it in a more graceful way. You will get melt rates locally. The catastrophic thing with Thwaites is not the local melting, but the massive calving of the icebergs that are then carried away and then melting in the global ocean, not just locally. What you want is a managed situation, rather than this catastrophic collapse.

Metta Spencer  59:08

Okay, I am interested in putting people together who have some way of benefiting from collaboration. So I’m wondering: Are you looking for partnerships? Are you looking to form a connection with Peter and Paul, if their network can be of any value to you? Here’s my opportunity to invite you people to become friends.

Paul Beckwith  59:43

Yeah (smiles). Well, this is the first step. Right. One of my biggest concerns about Antarctic ice melting is, is actually Greenland melting. If there’s an overall rise of sea level, that’s going to push up the ice shelves in Antarctica. And the two poles are definitely connected. We see this in the Paleo records. But in Antarctica, the ice melt is solely from underneath, right? There’s very little ice melt on the surface, because, if we raise the temperature on Antarctica from minus 40 Celsius to minus 30 Celsius, nothing’s still going to melt on the surface, whereas Greenland is a different situation. We’re starting to get lots of air temperatures, well above zero over the surface of the ice, even three kilometers high at the surface of the ice over Greenland. So, we’re getting lots of melting on the surface. As we get more melting on the surface, the debris, the dust, etc, that’s in the ice becomes more concentrated at the surface and the albedo drops. It leads to even more and more melting on Greenland. It’s melting from above and below. So I would say it’s a lot harder to stop the Greenland situation than Antarctica.

John Moore  1:01:27

You’re absolutely right about that. At the moment, it’s about half and half from the air and from the ocean. We expect by the end of this century it will be something like 80%, from the air and 20% from the ocean. That is not an issue that you can solve with the seabed curtains. This is not a panacea for for everything. This is trying to put a band-aid on the worst thing. The sea level commitment from Greenland is likely to be a lot less than from Antarctica. Yeah, the pipe, the outlet glaciers in Greenland, are relatively confined in these quite narrow fields – a bit different from the situation in Antarctica, which is the wide base and much broader outlets. 

But yes, if you want to manage Greenland, yeah, maybe you want to be thinking about this. Geoengineering by other methods, whether aerosol injection or marine cloud brightening or something like that. The point that we are making with the Greenlanders is: You might want to do this for local benefits. For example, fishing is very important, and the fish species have changed radically over the last 30 years. And you may want to let the Greenlanders determine the ice and the fiord configuration that’s optimal for their way of life. There’s local benefits/

Peter Wadhams  1:03:42

I have to leave because I’ve got another meeting, which is a similar topic. It’s a cruise that we’re planning for going to Patagonia. It’s been a very interesting presentation. 

John Moore  1:04:09

Lovely to chat with you, Peter. It’s been it’s been a few years since we spoke. 

Paul Beckwith  1:04:16

It’s been fascinating to me also. I’ll be going to the COP climate conference in November in Egypt. It might be interesting to cover these ideas in one of the press release presentations there, so we should touch base about that possibility. John.

Metta Spencer  1:05:20

Thank you, John, for this presentation. You can count on hearing from somebody as a result because you’re going to stimulate some kind of conversation, I’m sure. Bye.

T248. Werbos, Computers, and God

T171. Electric Grids

T171. Electric Grids

 

Project Save the World Podcast / Talk Show Episode Number: 171
Panelists:  Craig Smith
Host: Metta Spencer

Date Aired:  26 January 2021
Date Transcribed and Verified:  14 May 2021
Transcription: Otter.ai
Transcription Review and Edits:  David Millar 

Metta Spencer  

Yeah, hi, I’m Metta Spencer. And today I’m going to learn a few things because I almost failed physics. Maybe I did fail physics in high school. And I really never got it. And I, I’m very sorry, that poor teacher tried his best, but he just didn’t make it with me. But it’s, you know, all this time, I’ve been thinking now I just need to learn about electricity and things like that. And today, I’ve got an engineer who’s going to explain things to me, he’s going to tell me all about electric grids. Now, I’ll tell you why I particularly need to know, that is I’m running this thing called Project Save The World, which is why you’re listening to me because you want to save the world too, right?  And we have this thing called the Platform for Survival, which is 25 planks… if we managed to accomplish all of them, we would very much reduce the risk of six of the world’s worst global threats to human survival. And one of the planks… was written by somebody else… because I couldn’t have written it. And here’s what it says: … to reduce global warming… all states shall… accelerate research and development of high voltage, direct current electric grids, energy storage, and demand-system management. Well, I’ve been trying for years now to get somebody to explain that to me. And Craig Smith is here to do the job. Craig is not here. He’s actually in California, where it’s warmer than here. I’m getting a lot of snow today. So, Craig, hi, how are you today?

Craig Smith  

Well, fine. Good morning. And thank you for having me on your show. As always a pleasure. And,

Metta Spencer  

And we’re, I see in the background, the name of your book “Reaching Net Zero”. Let’s give it a plug before we get into other business. Okay. So, Craig is an engineer by training, but he became the CEO of some sort of big conglomerate or

Craig Smith  

[Craig Smith Consulting Engineers.] an architecture and engineering company. My original background actually was electrical engineering. So —

Metta Spencer  

okay, so you knew a thing, you couldn’t even explain to me what voltage is or something like that, right?

Craig Smith  

Yeah, I’ll be happy to talk about —

Metta Spencer  

Okay. In the upshot of this, of this plank, which I am committed to, because it’s, you know, the thing I work for, I’m committed to this, but I don’t know what it means that we are supposed to develop research, research and development for the research and development of… high voltage direct-current grids. And we’re supposed to develop in better energy storage, and something called demand-system management. Right. Okay, go for it. Tell me what I didn’t understand all these years.

Craig Smith  

All right, well, first of all, if we’re, if we’re going to solve the global climate crisis, there are a number of things that we have to do. And, you know, besides reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and generating electricity from renewable sources, like wind and power, getting more electric vehicles, so on, there’s some very important things that have to be done that one might say are less, less sexy. And I think the electrical grid probably falls in that category, because you don’t hear people talking about it. But that’s a good example. It’s a critical thing that has to has to happen in the future. I’ll tell you why in —

Metta Spencer  

Just a second, because before we plunge into this sexy part, the part that really grabs people’s attention, is when you talk about the possibility that some cyber-attack might knock out our electric grid and leave us in the dark for a year or two. I mean, address that before we go on to more spiritual matters.

Craig Smith  

Well, I don’t know about a cyber-attack leaving all of us in the dark. Certainly, cyber-attacks have shown themselves to be a new threat and a new problem. However, the utilities and transmission… companies, people that deal with transmission of electricity, the interconnection of different utilities, have dealt with a similar problem for many years. And that is weather outages. So, they have the ability to switch things around quickly in response to something that interrupts the system most of the time 99.99% of the time, with great success, there have been some admirable failures that were caused by weather, which led to one system, having too big a demand for power, trying to meet it, drawing power from somebody else, causing it to go down, and causing a giant blackout in the northeast United States a few decades ago, as a result of that,

Metta Spencer  

And here too.  

Craig Smith  

It is a concern, but I don’t think that’s the it’s such a heightened area of concern that I think the… utilities and the managers that handle the interconnection between states and regions are worried about it and will be taking steps.

Metta Spencer  

Okay, so I really have to focus on the development of a better system.

Craig Smith  

Yes, where do we go from here and of course, dealing with that is one of the one of the steps. But first, let’s talk about what’s there today… most of the countries, the developed countries that have had electricity for a long period of time, their systems were originally designed and been not really changed very much in the last, say 100 years, they were developed basically to take a big generator, like a big nuclear power plant or a big coal fired power plant. Take that electricity through a transformer, increase the voltage, ship it over transmission lines and distribution systems, to customers… then the voltage was lowered by a different set of Transformers to the area or the voltage where people used it in businesses, appliances.

Metta Spencer  

Now, that’s what you said something about direct current and alternating current. And that’s what you’re talking about here. Now, that yes,

Craig Smith  

this is all alternating current… I’m referring to now. And in the basic historic system, the alternating-current / direct-current argument goes back to George Westinghouse and Edison, Edison promoted the use of DC, Westinghouse promoted the use of alternating current… alternating current won out because it was so convenient to distribute and increase the voltage, lower the voltage for different uses, and you couldn’t do that with DC. So… but now, we have new demands on the electrical distribution system. Also, I don’t want to make this too complicated, but to clarify, we talk about two things –transmission and distribution: transmission is getting power from point A to point B from Canada to New York for example; distribution is taking power that’s been delivered to say Ottawa and moving it around the city to the various different users. So, in general terms, transmission operates at higher voltages, distribution systems are lower voltages. Now, what we have the situation is not… getting rid of the big single generating stations, what we call base-loaded stations, because they operate continuously. And as the load increases and decreases, smaller units in the traditional system would be brought online to generate more power, or taken offline if the load decreases. Well with the new system with depending on renewable sources, like solar and wind, their power output is variable, as you well understand. The solar doesn’t generate power at night… also during the evening, during the year with sola, the days are shorter in winter, longer in the summer. So, there’s a lot of things that can affect the output of solar. And likewise… wind: can generate power at night, it all depends on when the winds blow. But both of these sources are subject to… variations, weather variations, cloud cover, lack of wind, high win, and so on. So, the first major difference of a big dependence on renewable energy is we have to accommodate that variability. And if we’re going to go away from base-generating plants like large coal-fired plants, then we have to have a way to store the energy that’s being generated by solar and wind. So it’s observable even today… in California, we have a lot of solar. We’ve had times during the summer, when the solar output was so great, that it couldn’t all be used. Some of it was shipped to other states. But some of it basically couldn’t be used. And what do you have electricity that you can’t use, you can’t do the ocean, you have to turn off some of the plants.

Metta Spencer  

It keeps, suppose you don’t turn it off, and you get an overload what happens?

Craig Smith  

Well, that could be bad, that could be a problem for the system operator. But they have means to protect against that. But it’s an economic loss, if you have to turn off a plant that’s. generating very inexpensive electricity, and you suddenly just can’t sell it, you can’t use it. So, you have to disconnect it from the system. So, storage is important. And there’s a lot of research going on to develop, improve batteries, we’re talking about utility-size batteries, these are giant installations. And the costs are coming down rapidly. And so that’s part of your plank… R&D to develop improve storage systems, we actually have had for decades one type of storage system, which is exists in Canada, you may not even think of it this way, but the largest actually existing storage capacity today is something called “pumped hydro”. … So, this is when dams are available to generate electricity, water flows over the dam turns the generators and provides power. Now, during times when the power is not needed… particular types of generators specially designed for this purpose… can operate in reverse as pumps. So, let’s say at a time when the electricity is not needed, they pump water back up into the dam and effectively are storing energy so that when the demand increases, they turn the flow around, water coming back through the “pump/generator” and generates electricity.

Metta Spencer  

Don’t you lose a lot of energy that way? I mean, just sounds like a I don’t know kind of a funny way of doing things is it efficient? Or do you lose a lot of your energy by doing it that way?

Craig Smith  

It’s no, it’s pretty efficient. It’s a little less efficient than just straight generation. But the main difficulty today is it’s limited in capacity. In other words, we’re not going to see much more pump storage built. And the reason for that is that the good dam sites have been used up. Generally speaking, people don’t want to dam up rivers anymore. So, we’re not going to have a lot of new opportunities for pump storage. So, we have to go to batteries and other methods. There are some more exotic methods that people have looked at storing energy underground by compressing air and pumping it into underground reservoirs and then… use compressed air to turn a turbine… or other things, but none of these —

Metta Spencer  

I saw something about not all of this is part of the same idea but molten salt, like some of these concentrating solar powered things, where they use mirrors in a circle and they make… heat and it goes into underground molten salt, which keeps it hot for longer. And then overnight, you can use it. Is that yeah, is that part of the same idea of sort of —

Craig Smith

— part of the same idea, yeah. But again, I think… without major technological changes in efficiency, and cost improvements, those are going to be marginal. The main thing is going to be the large battery installations. But I’d like to change the subject a little bit and say… we’ve got to modify the electrical grid… there are a number of things that can be done at the user end. And so, utilities are starting to do this, they’re starting to install things like so-called “smart meters”. So, imagine you had an electrical meter in your house, and you could open up your phone at any time and see how much electricity you’re using, and what it was costing you at that particular point in time. And say, you’re about to run… your clothes dryer, and you didn’t have any urgent need to do it. So, you could say… if I do it, right now, it’s going to be costing me 30 cents a kilowatt hour. But if I wait and do it tonight, at nine o’clock, it’s only gonna cost me 10 cents. And so those kinds of decisions are going to be available to people. The other thing is, all … house control systems are increasingly becoming available. So, you could be visiting your dear friend in some other part of town, and it started snowing and you got to drive home, you want to warm the house up, you get on your phone, you turn your furnace on, you turn the lights on, you do everything you do while you’re driving in the process of driving home. So those kinds of things.

Metta Spencer  

That’s what they call the Internet of Things, isn’t it? 

Craig Smith  

Yeah… the opposite side of that is you’re on a trip somewhere, you say oh my gosh, I left I left the furnace going and you want to turn it off, or you’re gonna be gone for four days or something. So dynamic pricing, smart meters, these are all part of elements of what’s coming with the improved electric grid. Another thing that… might be particularly of interest to some of your listeners in Canada, is the concept of “micro-grid”. We’ve been developing some micro-grids in California, and recently because of … the horrible fires last year. Our Energy Commission is funding more… demonstration projects… for example, the city of Paradise, which literally, that whole city burned down because the power wasn’t turned off when the indications [were] that a fire potential existed, [they] didn’t want to leave all those people without power. I mean, there are people with medical problems and you know, have medical systems at home they need to have operating. Well, a micro-grid would have solved that old problem. And there is a micro-grid… that I visited in the town of Borrego Springs. Borrego Springs is in the desert, east of San Diego. And it’s served by a transmission line that goes over the mountains from San Diego into this small town and in the desert about 100 miles. And that was that town’s only link to power. So, when there were fires or… earthquake or other disruptions, they were stuck. They had no power. So, what they have done and this has been a demonstration project put together by San Diego Gas and Electric. They built a micro-grid. So they have a number of homes there [that] have solar rooftop, solar generating stations. They put in two large solar farms. They put in a couple of diesel generators and a large bank of storage batteries, major utility-size batteries. And so now what happens if they have any fire problems… [if] that link to the coast has to be disconnected, their micro-grid flips on. And they’re self-sufficient. They can go for four or five days without having any need to be connected to the outside world… during the daylight hours are drawing power off their solar system, both the rooftop systems and the solar farms that are also charging the storage systems — at night, they draw power from the storage systems. And then they have some large diesel generators [so] that if all else fails… they don’t start running low, they can fire up the diesels and meet the requirement. So something like that might have saved the entire city of Paradise, California.

Metta Spencer  

So, this would take care of maybe 100 houses or a town of 10,000 or something like that. How big more than 100

Craig Smith  

more than 100. I forget what Borrego Springs is, it’s at least in the 1000s of people. I mean, there’s stores, a community, their houses, hotels, resorts, it’s a desert resort, among other things. So —

Metta Spencer  

They could vary in size, what a micro-grid is, might vary, from a little a neighborhood to pretty big city or how much? Well, I guess I’m looking for. Is there a standard notion of how big is a micro-grid?

Craig Smith  

No, I don’t think there’s a standard notion… Also, there are things like college campuses, multiple buildings —

Metta Spencer  

And they would have

Craig Smith  

and they have their own system. Yeah. Which is probably what I would describe as the lower end, or smaller end, of micro-grid. So, they’re connected to the main grid, but in problems… they can disconnect.

Metta Spencer  

When you say we should have more micro grids, are you saying that, you know, as a whole society might be better to decentralize and have a whole bunch of local… independent grids, than to have one big system?

Craig Smith  

No, I’m not saying that. Because that that will lead to tremendous interconnection, difficulties… coordination difficulties. Okay. But I think it’s very applicable for remote communities and areas where there are risks associated with natural disasters, earthquakes, huge storms, fires, something that we should look at. I think the main Yes, go ahead —

Metta Spencer  

Yeah, I another question occurs to me, something I read two or three years ago, which sort of contrasts with what you’re saying… so far, what you’ve been talking about is developing more capacity for a grid to keep functioning with what it’s got. But I read someplace, somebody said… one side of the world is dark, while the other side is light. So, we could have all of our, all of our electricity, or most of it being generated on the place where there’s sunshine, and use direct current to send it to the places that are dark, that would be an alternative to storage, wouldn’t it? And is there any merit to that idea? Or is that just a more expensive and and unreasonable alternative?

Craig Smith  

No, I think there’s a lot of merit to that idea. And let me tell you why. And this gets back to your original question about direct current. Direct current is important in the bigger sense of transmission of power, not distribution transmission, where you want to move large blocks of power from point A to point B with the minimum amount of losses. And so, losses… in electricity flow are proportional to the magnitude of the current. So basic physics in this case is that power is equal to the product of the voltage times the current, known as Ohm’s law. So, If you want to move large amounts of power, you have to have high currents. However, with alternating current, the higher the current, the greater the losses, through just the resistance of the conductors. Plus, as you get the very high voltages with alternating current, it begins to actually radiate out of the transmission lines into space, the transmission lines start acting like a radio antenna. So those two factors combine to increase the losses as you increase the amount of power being transmitted by alternating current.

Metta Spencer  

These goofy ideas keep popping into my head at the wrong time. I have to say them while they’re here. Well, I had a friend who lived right near a one of these huge transmission lines. And her son was not sleeping well or something like that. And there was some conversation about Could it be that there was seepage of, of electricity into their house from this transmission line and bothering this child physiologically? I mean, you know, it was a strange idea. Is that a completely silly idea? Or is there’s possibly something to that kind of thing?

Craig Smith  

I think that’s been disproved. I mean, there is radiation. I put that in the category of people saying that when you talk on your smartphone, you’re putting radiation into your brain.

Metta Spencer  

Yeah, well, I just count that or not. I mean, you do discount that, you don’t think it’s true?

Craig Smith  

I don’t think it’s significant. Let’s put it that way. And typically, our utilities keep the area under transmission lines clear. They may have farmers’ planted crops, you probably seen this, but they’re the broad right of way for transmission lines. So, people are maintained at a distance where that radiation or electromagnetic energy from the transmission lines is dissipated down to levels that are inconsequential.

Metta Spencer  

Okay, so I distracted you Sorry.

Craig Smith  

That’s all right. That’s all right. Don’t worry about that. Anyway, back to direct-current. So direct current has the advantage that it doesn’t have some of these losses associated with alternating current when you’re operating at very high voltages. So… as an example, in California, we’ve had for many years, a high voltage direct current line that comes from the state of Washington. The Bonneville Power Administration in the state of Washington, a federal project, operates large dams that generate huge amounts of electricity. And that power is converted to direct current in Washington. And then it’s sent down to California as direct current over a high voltage direct-current transmission line. It comes into an area just north of the city out in the San Fernando Valley where there’s a huge inverter station, receives the direct current inverts it (in other words, converts it) to alternate current and feeds it into the grid that supplies Southern California. And that’s been in operation for at least 50 years, I would say. So more systems like that would be useful. I did tell a little side story in… 1973 I believe, the San Fernando earthquake, I got a call from the Edison company. My company that times was doing a lot of work on seismic effects on power insulation. They said we need you to come out to the Sylmar Converter Station. This is… where the DC power from the Northwest arrives. So, I drove out there with some of my colleagues and some instruments and so on and we looked at this expensive equipment that was used to convert the direct current to the AC. Long giant insulators, ceramic insulators, poles and wires and cables. It was like a bomb had gone off. All that stuff was shattered in 30 seconds, that thing was just destroyed from this earthquake, took a year to get it back in operation. So that was one of my first real exposures to high voltage DC. Looking at the mess,

Metta Spencer  

Well, what happened during that period of time was everybody depending on it, and what they do instead?

Craig Smith  

Well, they had to get different… sources. Utilities usually have some backup generators; they keep them on standby. [They] borrowed power from other from Arizona and other places that didn’t hadn’t suffered damage. So yeah, there was a lot of scrambling to take care of that. At the same time, there are a lot of buildings, residences and commercial buildings, that were destroyed by the earthquake, and they weren’t needing power anymore for a while. So there were some offsetting things. But back to your earlier comment, I think is a very interesting thing. You know, we talk about fossil fuels. And what are what are the what’s the infrastructure associated with fossil fuels? Well, we have huge… proposed pipelines between Canada and the US, a controversial project, as you know, that just got canceled or stopped (supposedly, I don’t know exactly what’s gonna happen) by President Biden. The whole of North America is crisscross by pipelines that transfer gas and oil. So, we have refineries, we have huge plants that convert natural gas into liquified natural gas. And ships, special tankers that take it across to Asia, to Japan… another huge plant that converts it back to natural gas. And of course, huge plants that are oil refineries that convert oil. So giant infrastructure associated with the fossil fuel industry. Not to mention coal mines, and, and so on, not also to mention health hazards, the accidents that are contingent on these facilities. So now let me propose doing what you said we would, build solar huge numbers of solar plants in the Middle East, and transmit that power by high voltage DC lines, even underwater, under the ocean to Europe… people will say, that’s crazy, but it’s not crazy. And when you compare, compare the infrastructure investment that we have right now, this would be much less. So, there’s some very exciting things that ultimately can be done if we broaden our thinking, and start trying to be more creative. And I think those things are actually starting to happen right now. And the other interesting thing is, I don’t know that we need Mr. Biden to spend $1.9 trillion to make these things happen. I think a lot of it’s going to happen by industry and by investors and people seeing the economic opportunity. And there are things that… governments can do to create incentives. But I don’t think we have to honestly pay for it all, you know. Anyway, that’s a that’s a different topics. Let me see. I’ve got — 

Metta Spencer  

something else that this thing in our plank here that I didn’t understand, called demand system management. What’s that all about? 

Craig Smith  

Okay, well, demand system management… to control the demand for electricity. And that’s, that’s something it’s been around for a number of years. In fact, my former company… developed… a demand-side management program for a number of major American utilities. And this was helping utilities assist their customers in installing heat pumps, rather than gas burning heaters; more efficient lighting systems, better lighting controls. A good example is an occupancy sensor. So, in… buildings where you have public restrooms, you don’t have to have the light on the whole time, 24 hours a day, you have it set up so when somebody opens the door, the light goes on, when they leave 15 or some prescribed time later, the lights go back off. Those are all demand-side management things, all ways to control power usage. So you avoid waste —

Metta Spencer  

Well, and they’re worthwhile having it in one’s own home. I mean, if I if I, you know, I leave lights on all over the place, it’d probably be smart if something would turn it off behind me when I leave the room. But I don’t always do that by any means. Would that it? Is it economical to install something like in an ordinary household?

Craig Smith  

Oh, yes… it’s particularly economical if it’s done in original construction. In your case, I mean, if you want to do it in your house, [there are] actually devices, you can go to your own supply store and you can buy a little thing, you, you plug it into the wall, and you plug the light into it. And it will sense when you come into the room, or you clap your hands and it turns the lights on and turns them off. After a certain delay… today there are 1000s of those types of devices —

Metta Spencer  

That okay, I don’t think it would work here because I live in a condo, high-rise condo, and all of our electrical system is connected. In fact, a few years ago, somebody, one of the supers told me that they were going to switch it so that we each pay for our own … electricity, because now we just have a flat rate, we pay for all apartments. And they haven’t done that. But I don’t think that it would be easy to meter, my own apartment separately, would it?

Craig Smith  

It wouldn’t be that difficult. It’s hard to say because it depends how the building was wired in the first place. But a lot of a lot of apartments and condominiums and so on are recognizing that that’s, that would be to your advantage. Because right now, if somebody else goes off for a month leaving all the lights on, you’re paying for it. You’re helping pay for it, I should say. So [to] have your own control… generally results in everybody using less.

Metta Spencer  

So, everybody is good. This is a coming thing. We’re gonna see more of that.

Craig Smith  

I believe we will. Yes. Okay.

Metta Spencer  

And, and the, the question of storage now. I get things talking about lithium. Now is lithium. As I understand it, lithium is the main thing they use in batteries, right?

Craig Smith  

lithium, lithium hydride as one of the main types of batteries… there are other storage batteries. And there… is a tremendous amount of research going on finding and exploring other ways. I’m not an authority on all the new batteries that come out —

Metta Spencer  

I’m saying, you know, they were talking when one of those planes went down someplace. It said that may have been caught fire because somebody had a laptop computer with a lithium battery. And that lithium is, can start fires. Yeah. You know, which I put that in my memory bank thinking well, maybe I should think about that someday. Is lithium a problem? a threat?

Craig Smith  

Well, I wouldn’t call it a threat. I would say it can be a problem… it can cause fires. You know, we have today millions of advanced devices using lithium batteries. I’m talking to you on one of them. But yes, it can be a hazard. I never charge my phone or other things, leave them when I’m not around, or have them run all night or anything like that. Yeah. You don’t want them to overheat. The worst case of this happened — actually, I don’t know about a plane. I hadn’t heard about that. — But I can tell you a true real-life example was a boat in Southern California that took people over to the Channel Islands for diving and snorkeling and so on out of Oxnard. And so, this boat goes over there and anchors by the offshore island by Santa Cruz Island, they have about 30 people on board and they all have smartphones, cameras, underwater devices and they’re plugging these in to recharge them and if they go down below to sleep and… one of these devices overheated and caught fire and triggered the fire, and… 30 some people down below, two exits, one out of one end, one very hard to get up out of… climb out through a hatch; and one crewman down there, two crewmen supposedly on watch upstairs, both of them asleep. And the upshot is all the people down below died, the boat burned up and sank, the 2 crewmen above jumped in the water and swam to another boat, a terrible tragedy. And this boat’s electrical system was never intended to recharge, you know, dozens and dozens of devices like this. And then there were some safety features that weren’t proper. And it’s a terrible tragedy. But that gives you an idea of the risks. So yes, we have to be careful about that. 

Metta Spencer  

Well, now, if there’s trying to find things other than lithium, are there other things that are less risky that that wouldn’t have… that danger?

Craig Smith  

I am inclined to say yes. But frankly, I’m not up on all the latest battery developments. I haven’t paid that much attention to it. Well, let me let me just explain that when we’re talking about the utility-system batteries, which is what I’ve been primarily concerned about, you might you want to think of these like a giant… railroad car? Big, typically mobile, like a big van, and they’re brought on to a utility substation and parked there permanently. So they’re not gonna pose a risk to you or I.

Metta Spencer  

Okay, well, do we, I was hearing a couple of years ago that the real big quest was for the perfect battery… whoever comes up with the really better battery is going to, you know, be the giant of the… 21st century. It is there still a race for improving batteries? Or are they getting their it one by one a little bit at a time incrementally?

Craig Smith  

Well, I would say yes, there’s certainly a race, certainly a lot of work all over the world trying to find time to develop better, more efficient, bigger and cheaper batteries. So far, it’s very clear that costs have come down dramatically. The costs on lithium hydride and other batteries because of just making more of them, and the costs of manufacturing are, are dropping. So as far as any new I can’t tell you what the prognosis would be for a future winner as it were. I don’t know what that might be. But

Metta Spencer  

but we’re getting there in terms of improving the or maybe it does need one huge impetus from say the US government to overhaul the entire US electrical system, or is this something that you think can be done piece by piece? locally?

Craig Smith  

Well, I think the government can do a lot in any country because it’s like, when Eisenhower became president, after the war, he was instrumental in getting the US intercontinental highway system, establish the freeways, you know, he drives from Washington, New York to California. So, there is the need to have somebody that’s going to at the federal level to deal with all the crossing barriers of the different states, you know… making that happen. States have different rules, different laws, somebody has to make it possible. And so, there’s definitely a role for the federal government. I think it’s a serve them pay for it all. I just need to make it happen.

Metta Spencer  

That smooths the way you’re talking about infrastructure investing a lot of infrastructure in the US. And I presume that’s a good chunk of the infrastructure they’re going to improve, right? Or are they talking about sewers and things?

Craig Smith  

Well, there are plenty of other there plenty of things that need to be done. But certainly, electrical grid is going to be… one primary target. And there’s just a lot of what we call deferred maintenance, which means you just haven’t done anything to bridges. And highways are falling apart, and those things need to be fixed. That’s more of an economic issue rather than global warming issue. But the government also has talked about incentivizing the installation of hundreds of 1000s of electric-vehicle charging stations across the country, that will make people more confident about driving from California to Arizona to visit Grandma, for example, if they don’t have to worry about running out of electricity in their EV, their electric vehicle in the middle of desert. Sure, so —

Metta Spencer  

Well, I feel better already, Craig… you just made up for all those years when my physics teacher did his best but failed. Now I feel smart and ready to go out and tackle the world and fix our electric grid. So maybe the two of us can get together and cook up something.

Craig Smith  

All right. Well, as always, a pleasure talking with you. You stay safe. Okay, stay warm. 

Metta Spencer  

And listen, you guys in California are messing up with COVID though. What’s the matter with you guys? I mean, we’re not doing so well here. But wow, I hear about California is in big trouble. 

Craig Smith

It’s been really bad. I do want to let you know that. I feel fortunate my wife and I both received the first Pfizer vaccine a week ago. Oh, yeah. I think my next-door neighbors have also done that.

Metta Spencer  

Oh, yeah. Your next-door neighbors, my brother is that the neighborhood.

Craig Smith

And that’s the luck of the draw my co-author, his wife has gotten one but he has not yet had a approved appointment. So, he’s anxiously awaiting. I told him she was more important than he is. But he didn’t like to.

Metta Spencer  

Well, I think we you know, it’s a race now because they say this, these new variants. Today’s papers said that the British variant is something like 30% more deadly.

Craig Smith 

Yeah, I don’t know. Yeah, it’s just so terrible. Yeah, anyway, we just stay safe. Do what you’re doing. Don’t take any shortcuts. All right. I’m still doing exactly what I’ve been doing for the last 10 months I shelter in place. I don’t go anywhere. I always wear a mask. I don’t go out to strange places. I haven’t been out to any restaurants. Sort of a boring life, but I don’t think worth the risk.

Metta Spencer  

I have I have been out and I think 11 months now I just counted it up. And I because it’s been about 11 minutes, you know, and I haven’t been out of my apartment except I once went to the garbage chute. At one I

Craig Smith

Well, we have to make shopping runs obviously, to get food. Oh, no. You can do that infrequently. And we have some close supermarkets that have special hours at six in the morning only people. Elderly people are allowed in and we go in and we race to the door, fill two carts, checkout, get the hell home.

Metta Spencer  

I have delivered when I need it. But I also have a 12-year-old girl in my building who runs errands for me twice a week. Oh, that’s not my mail and my goes to the pharmacy and things like that. So, I’m fine. You know that I have the I have a better social life than ever. Because I do this every day. We do a lot of this. Anyway, it’s been fun. Thank you again. I really have another session one of these times soon. Okay,

Craig Smith

Great. All right. My pleasure. Bye bye.

T130. Climate as War

T130. Climate as War

 

Project Save the World Podcast / Talk Show Episode Number:  130
Panelists: Seth Klein
Host: Metta Spencer

Date Aired:  21 September 2020
Date Transcribed and Verified:  14 May 2021
Transcription: Otter.ai
Transcription Review and Edits:  David Millar

Metta Spencer  

Hi, I’m Metta Spencer, today I have a real treat, I get to have a conversation with an old friend that I haven’t really had a good talk with for 25 years, has it been, something like that. And this is Seth Klein. And when I knew Seth, he was a high school kid traveling around Canada, trying to tell high school students why they should oppose nuclear weapons. Boy, he did a great job of it, and with three of his high school friends, and I one time I had to go away and I was teaching at the university had a course, which I thought would be fun for him. So, he pitched it for me. When I went away, he taught my course for a while. And I got good reports on how it was that this high school teacher, high school kid! was teaching my undergraduate class. And really, they were lapping it up. Anyway, hello, Seth Klein.

Seth Klein  

Hi, Metta. Nice to see you. After all this time,

Metta Spencer  

it is wonderful to see you. And this is a time for us to get caught up. If you the audience don’t mind a little bit. I want to find out what’s happened to the last 25 or so years? Because I do know what you’ve been doing for something like 22 of those years. You were the director of what is it called the

Seth Klein  

Canadian Center for Policy alternatives in British Columbia?

Metta Spencer  

Yes, it has to be one of the great if not the greatest Canadian think-tank, right?

Seth Klein  

Well, I think so. Yeah, I finished up school University in Toronto, when you and I knew each other. And I very, very briefly taught high school in Toronto, and then I moved out here. And I I was a teacher fleetingly… and then went back to grad school. And I was hired to open up the BC office of the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives in the mid-90s. And I spent 22 years there, until I decided to leave a year and a half ago… and write a book.

Metta Spencer  

Yeah. Well, I’ve had a good look at your book. I can’t say pretty long book.

Seth Klein  

Did… here’s the book.

Metta Spencer  

Yes. That’s great. It’s wonderful. Love the title “A Good War”.

Seth Klein  

…I was nervous that you’d hate it. 

Metta Spencer  

Oh, no, I almost, I was going to write a book called the good fight.

Seth Klein  

Oh, here we go. Okay.

Metta Spencer  

But I never, I don’t think I ever did any of it. I was just thinking about it. But anyway, that’s a good title. And, yeah, because, you know, they, they talk about World War Two, as the “good war”. And you have to say, if there ever was a good war, a justifiable war, and we could spend our rest of our life talking about that World War II, it has to be one that is pretty hard to see how you could escape that.

Seth Klein  

Yeah. Well, and so I’m an unlikely person, as we both know, to have written a war story. And because as you said, in the intro, I, as a kid, I cut my political teeth in the peace and disarmament movement. I’m actually the child of Vietnam War resisters, that that’s why I’m Canadian, my parents moved to Montreal, pregnant with me when my dad was drafted. So I, I’m as surprised as anyone that I’ve written a war story. And I should say, I didn’t initially intend to, I left the CCPA intending to write a book on the climate crisis, increasingly alarmed about the climate crisis, and increasingly alarmed by this persistent harrowing gap between what the science says we have to do, and what our politics seems prepared to entertain. And what can we do about that? And how can we close that gap? I had always intended to include a chapter on World War Two. Because I’ve always just been intrigued by the fact that we retooled the whole economy so quickly during World War Two. And to me, you know, all of us who wonder, you know, can we really do this in time? You know, the answer is, yeah, we can, because we’ve done it before. In fact, we did it twice in six years, once to ramp up more… production and another time to reconvert. The peace time. But the more I delved into that research, the more I kept seeing these parallels all over the place, and not just with respect to that economic conversion, and ultimately decided to structure the whole book around lessons from the Second World War. So hence, the title, the good war, “a good war” mobilizing Canada for the climate emergency

Metta Spencer  

Well, a person actually could… get pretty good history, just you know, if you only read the book for the history, it would be an interesting thing.

Seth Klein  

Yeah, I enjoyed the history part of it. And so, every chapter jumps back and forth in time. It’s each chapter is really kind of one-third history book and two-thirds present climate emergency… but tries to pull out these lessons. And so as a structure, you know, how did we mobilize public opinion, for the second world war, lessons for today? How did we forge unity across Confederation, lessons for today? How did we organize the economy, lessons for today? How do we mobilize labor, lessons for today? What did we do for returning soldiers? …is that a model for just transition for fossil fuel workers today? How did we pay for it then, lessons for today? What was the role of civil society and indigenous people and youth, then and now, and importantly, because it is a war story, one of the cautionary tales? So… I spend the bulk of the book lauding what we did, and the speed and scale of it, we also have to go eyes wide open into this, about the things that happened that caused a [unclear audio – potentially ‘schism’] and that we wouldn’t want to repeat. And so, the book deals with that, too.

Metta Spencer  

But you know, because I am American, also. And I still have dual citizenship. By the way, I don’t know, what do your parents,

Seth Klein  

My parents are dual citizens…  I used to have dual citizenship. But I gave up my US citizenship some time ago.

Metta Spencer  

But you know, I was brought up during the war, I remember forward, I remember Pearl Harbor very well. And I remember moving around and working in the… army camps, and so on. So World War Two is very vivid for me, but it’s the American experience, and not the Canadian experience. And I think both countries were amazing in the mobilization, the rapidity of this extraordinary capacity that we built in no time. But then I learned a few things about Mackenzie King and CD Howe, who was unknown to me. So, I appreciate having this kind of little history lesson, which I never got, because we didn’t go school here.

Seth Klein  

Right… the book is very much written for Canadians and rooted in our history, and the realities of Canadian Confederation and realities of indigenous rights and title here, and, and the realities of our current political context. But you’re right too that there are … similarities and important differences around the US and Canadian mobilization… what they have in common, I think… — because in the context of climate… so many people think like our politicians, just seem to be in denial about this, and nothing ever seems to happen. And so, I took some solace from the fact that in both Canada in the US, our leaders then too were not keen to do this. And were really blind to the threat before them until the 11th hour. And even more so in the US. So… people will often, when I would tell them, I was writing this book, they would say, Oh, well, back then everyone understood the threat to be clear and present. Well, no, actually, they didn’t, especially not if you were in North America and — Canada, interestingly, didn’t wait on the United States. So, Canada declared war two years before the United States, and for a long time was the only country in the Western Hemisphere to have declared war. The US did require an attack on its soil… before they did, I think… that we, the US would not have entered the war except for Pearl Harbor. Well… who’s to know in hindsight, it I do in the chapter on how we mobilize public opinion. I note that, that, you know, there’s a section in there about the role of the media and the US media, particularly the CBS news crew with Edward R. Murrow, certainly played an important role in shifting us opinion about entry into the war, even before Pearl Harbor. They are… largely credited with a 20% shift in public opinion about entering the war, even before Pearl Harbor. And that helped lay the ground — 

Metta Spencer  

no one news channel or broadcast. —

Seth Klein  

— CBS News. And you know, because back when you were a kid, everyone listened to the same news, right, and would gather around the radio and would hear those reports. And, in fact, throughout the book, I tried to make a point of these amazing people who, in the face of a crisis, decided to break the rules. And there’s an interesting story about Edward R. Murrow in that regard, which is that on the eve of the Nazi invasion of Poland… the bosses at CBS headquarters in New York had decided there had been too much bad news. And so, they cabled Edward R. Murrow who is the CBS man in London, and they say look, all the European bureau chiefs… you’re gonna have a big song and dance show… highlighting all of the popular music across Europe, you know, liven things up a little. And Murrow calls his counterpart at CBS office in Berlin, and he says, look, we’ve just been told by headquarters that this is what we’re going to do, and we’re not going to do it. And instead, they were there on the ground, covering the Nazi invasion of Poland, and then spent the next two years shifting American public opinion. But also, the US, you know, it’s I’m sorry to spend so much time on the US, but they were planning all through those two years. And so, when you think about the speed of the change, consider this. Pearl Harbor happened in December of ’41. And the US declared war in February of 42… two months later, the last civilian automobile, came off the assembly line in Detroit. And for the next five, four years, the production and sale of the private automobile in the US, the center of car culture, was effectively illegal. Now, those plants were all busy. And all those workers were busy doing something else. But that’s… what I’m trying to get out of the book… what does it look and feel like when we actually treat an emergency as an emergency?

Metta Spencer  

Well, already, you’ve given the answer. There was already work for them, there was something for them to do, you didn’t just lay off. That’s right. I think maybe that’s, that’s something we’d better think about it… it can’t be done in a haphazard way. You can’t just lay off people and hope somebody else thinks to hire them. 

Seth Klein  

That’s right, you got to plan, you got to plan. Now, the good news with the climate emergency is that there’s a great deal of work that’s going to need to be done. But it needs to be coordinated, needs to be planned. And we need to make sure that… it’s not all the same jobs in the same places, and so that people are supported through that transition. But again, let me come back to Canada to give a sense of why I think we can do this. In World War Two, Canada was a population of a little over 11 million people –of that base, over a million people enlisted. And more than that were directly involved in military production. And they all had to be trained up, and they all had to be reconverted back to peacetime afterwards. That is far, far more people than are currently employed in fossil fuel production in Canada today, with a population more than three times larger. So, we need to approach it with the same level of ambition, but actually, it’s not as big a job. Hmm.

Metta Spencer  

Okay, talk about the money too. By the way, did you major in economics or some because your work has always been, at least at the [CCPA] you’ve been dealing with economic issues more than anything else, right?

Seth Klein  

Yeah, well, my undergrad was in International Relations at your university, and so that was partly economics. And I did my MA in political economy. So… it was a major focus of my work at the CCPA.

Metta Spencer  

Good, because you can actually add and subtract, and I have a little trouble with that. But I do have some questions about cost, you know, if we are wanting to make this emergency… react to it as an emergency, which I we’re not going to have any argument about that… And I think that public opinion now is coming around to seeing that, Oh, my God, the forest fires are going to get us if nothing else, or the floods or whatever.

SK]  

I don’t know… I did some polling as part of my book research, which affirms what you’re saying, the terrain has shifted in the last two years in public opinion in Canada, and a majority of Canadians do see climate as an emergency. And I actually think are ahead of our politicians on this front.

Metta Spencer  

I tend to agree, I don’t know why that happens. I mean, we live in a democracy. And yet sometimes it sure doesn’t look like it. You know, the responsiveness of our government…  usually leaves much to be desired, I think somehow. But I also was talking to, by the way, last week, I did an interview with two people about Project Drawdown. So, I’m very much thinking about these days about climate change and about things like the various things that need to be done to get us there, to the point where we have this inflection point and start having less carbon in the air.

Seth Klein  

You were asking about cost?

Metta Spencer  

Yeah, the first thing I asked them, I knew the answer, but I asked them anyway, at to tell me how much this is going to cost if we actually do this stupendous effort. Now, let me ask you.

SK]  

Well, I have a figure that I proposed in the book, Nicholas Stern has said that what we need to spend is something on the order of 2% of GDP, specifically on climate mitigation measures and infrastructure. I think we should be spending more than that, because I actually think we should be embracing something like the Green New Deal for Canada. And that’s not just climate infrastructure, it’s also the social infrastructure. It’s also the… childcare and the housing that tackle inequality. So, let’s double that. Let’s say it was 4% of GDP. In the Canadian context, that’s about $100 billion a year. And we can absolutely do that for a number of years. Interestingly, in it, all of this pales, again, in comparison to what we had to do in the Second World War. In the Second World War, Canada’s GDP doubled out of… that spending, and Canada’s debt-to-GDP ratio at the end of the Second World War was 108%. So… that remains an historic high, and yet it… presaged this 30-year period of record economic performance. So let me compare it to COVID. Right. So, in response to COVID, we are seeing… the government acting like it’s an emergency. And what happens in an emergency is you spend what you have to spend — CD Howe famously said in World War Two, when pressed about the spending, if we lose, nothing will matter. And so the government is spending what they need to spend… the federal deficit this year is going to be over $300 billion, the debt-to-GDP ratio is going to increase about 15%, from about 35% to 50%. But that’s still half what it was at the end of the Second World War. But the other thing that’s happening now, in response to COVID, which we haven’t seen since the Second World War, the role of the Bank of Canada: the Bank of Canada has been buying up $5 billion in government securities a week, since the start of the pandemic. And their holdings of Canadian government debt have increased in just the last few months from about 15% of the total to almost 35% of the total.

Metta Spencer  

Alright, so don’t leave here. I hear you. But I really don’t know what that means. Why would they what it means is we’re

Seth Klein  

well, what it means is that the Bank of Canada is effectively creating money hand over fist, and that all of this government deficit spending, we’re seeing in response to COVID is effectively us borrowing from ourselves — the Bank of Canada is our own crown Corporation, which will mean inflation. Well, so the risk of it, of creating money in that way is that it would produce inflation, or that it would collapse.

Metta Spencer  

What I’d heard, that’s almost the definition of how you get inflation.

Seth Klein  

Yes… except that no economist right now believes inflation is a threat. Because… the other parts of the economy are battered so badly. It only becomes a risk of inflation, if the creation of money exceeds the capacity of the economy. But there’s so much slack in the economy right now, because everyone’s been so battered by COVID, that there’s no risk at all, the only other risk would be that your currency becomes devalued… but the good news is because everyone’s in the same boat, that’s not happening either. So … they’re able to issue bonds and securities at incredibly low interest rates that we haven’t seen since the Second World War. All of which means there’s actually zero reason not to be spending like gangbusters right now. And I would say the good news, actually, is that as we turn our attention to COVID recovery, I think there’s actually fairly wide agreement across the political spectrum and among economists, that the recovery is going to have to be state-led for the simple reason that the private sector is going to be in no position to do so. They’ve been too whacked. And the only real debate is going to be what form will that government investment take? Will it be investment to rebuild or restore the old, or will it be to catapult us into the new? That’s really the only debate.

Metta Spencer  

Well, let me move back and answer the question that I left dangling what they said about, you know what Drawdown? And his answer was, it won’t cost a cent, we’ll make money from it.

Seth Klein  

Well, these private sector —

Metta Spencer  

He… acknowledges, of course, that there’s money upfront, but that the long-term effect of all of these 100 interventions, or almost all of them, I think there are one or two exceptions, refrigeration being one. But almost all of the things that can be done… to solve the drawdown situation will actually save us money in the long run. And… they’ve got numbers, you know, for what it’s worth… I can’t calculate with them. But they do … make an effort to estimate how much the cost will be, and what the long-term effects will be.

Seth Klein  

So it depends…  there’s truth to parts of this. But I also think that we shouldn’t try to, you know, sell a false bill of goods to people, it is going to cost up front, we are going to have to spend, and our governments are going to have to spend, to expedite the transition, just as they did in the Second World War. Am I worried about that? No, I’m not worried about that at all. Now, it’s also true that a bunch of the spending has to be at the private level… whether it’s businesses or households spending themselves, to change how to electrify everything, basically. And it is true that some of that actually saves you money down the road. And so you know, I’ll give you personal… examples. I don’t drive a fossil fuel car anymore. I have an electric car, an electric bike. And I’ve gotten all the natural gas out of my house and replaced it with electric heat pumps. And with solar panels. Now the solar panels were pricey upfront, but to your point, they will save me money over time. They’ll pay for themselves three times over in reduced electricity costs. The switch off of natural gas to the electric heat pumps, is not going to save me money. Because electricity is pretty cheap relative to natural gas, and it was expensive to get it done. The car costs money upfront, but it definitely saves money over time, and savings from having to buy gas and maintenance. So, are there savings… over time? Yes. — The bigger picture at a societal level, the argument I’m trying to make in the book, is that it’s a better life. You know, when… we build communities where you don’t even need cars, because everything that you need is closer by and… you save on insurance and all of those things. When… your health is better, when you’re eating better. The savings to the healthcare system are better. And… it’s a good life. But I don’t want to be an ingenue about the fact that we do require billions of dollars up-front investment. And where I get a little worried about, you know, some there’s definitely a school within the climate movement that basically says it’s a money-making opportunity, and the private sector is going to lead us out of this. And I disagree with that strongly… this is going to have to be state-led. And again, that was the key lesson out of the Second World War, the private sector had a big role to play in military production in the Second World War. But what it wasn’t allowed to do is to determine the allocation of scarce resources, because we don’t do that in an emergency. CD Howe, who you mentioned off the top who was no lefty… I mean, he was on the right wing of the Liberal Party. But he created 28 crown corporations to get the job done. He was carefully controlling and coordinating all the necessary supply chains to… prioritize military production,

Metta Spencer  

I noticed that… you recommend the creation of at least one crown Corporation in each sector. Explain what you would mean by that. And… how many sectors are there. And what would these crown corporations do for us? Why do we need?

Seth Klein  

Well, so let’s go back to what CD Howe did… a private sector guy. He’s happy to give contracts to his private sector friends, but he’s an engineer in a hurry, and he’s seized with the emergency of the Second World War. And so anytime the private sector couldn’t quickly do what he needed done, he created another crown corporation. But… also remember there was nothing in the way of military production to speak of in Canada before the Second World War. And so, he’s letting all these contracts out to the private sector and nobody actually knows what it costs. Now, the risk when no one knows what it costs, is that these private sector contractors are going to bilk you. So, what does he do? He creates a crown basis. In each major defense sector, in airplanes and ships… in arms production, in vehicles, so that he has a public sector comparator and knows what it actually costs. And you know, that was the same logic behind the government’s creation of Petro Canada… in the 70s, you want to have a public competitor to kind of keep an eye on these things. And make sure some of the returns go to the public. So, when I looked at… how it was done in the Second World War, I kind of went through this exercise of saying, okay, by the same logic, what would those new- generation crown corporations be today. And I think we should do what CD Howe did, we should first of all take an inventory of everything we’re going to need to decarbonize our society, how many electric buses, how many electric heat pumps, how many solar arrays, how many wind farms, and then you do a survey of what production capacity exists. And then you figure out how to fill the gap. And… often that will, that should take the form of a crown Corporation — to maximize the benefit. I’ll give you another personal example. I mentioned before that we just went through the process my wife and I have of getting the natural gas out of our house and getting electric heat pumps. Now it was expensive. And it was, frankly, more expensive than it should have been. I had lots of contractors in the house giving me prices and this kind of thing. And you kind of feel the same way you do, every time you try to take a car to a mechanic and you never know what you can believe. So, what-if, and it’s all expensive, because it’s all important. So what if we had a crown Corporation, that was mass producing HFC-free electric heat pumps in Canada, get the profit margin out, get the economies of scale, have an army of installers who go to your house and tell you how to do it, where you can have confidence that nobody’s trying to pull the wool over your eyes, you could shave 1000s of dollars off the cost of making this switch, at a household level?

Metta Spencer  

It’s gonna be hard to sell.

Seth Klein  

You think?

Metta Spencer  

Well, in the capitalist society,

Seth Klein  

Yeah. Well… it’s interesting, you should say that… one of the barriers to change, I think we face… (I spend a section of the book talking about it) is the legacy of neoliberalism that has sapped our imagination and our ambition. And so, when you think well, why isn’t the government spending what it needs to spend? Why aren’t they investing? Why is it that even NDP governments in Alberta until recently, and here in British Columbia where I am, aren’t creating new crown corporations like they used to, to tackle this emergency? And it’s because, you know, neoliberalism is hard. And… it’s there, like a shadow over all across the political spectrum, telling these governments that the only thing they can do is incentivize change. But here’s the point about an emergency, we’ve all just experienced it with the pandemic, in an emergency, you’re liberated, you spend what you have to spend, you create whole new institutions like the CERB. And that’s what we need to do for climate.

Metta Spencer  

But look, in terms of the downfall of neoliberalism, I’m going to predict… I think there are really… two issues that maybe you need to speak to, because it’s becoming conscious in the in the general public, population. One is that corporations are not exactly democratic. Not exactly accountable to anybody, and you know, pretty, pretty too big for their britches. So we have to do something to tame corporations. And I think more and more people are aware of that as a real problem, which they wouldn’t have been 15 years ago. And the other is the question, which I don’t think you’ve addressed yet. Is all of this going to, or is the progress of technology and automation that, kill the jobs that already exist? And what do we need to do to create jobs or at least to create the income that jobs have? There’s… the COVID experience and the government payout for helping unemployed people, or people in feeling the pinch, has demonstrated that there can be there can be something like a universal basic income. And that I think is going to happen. I just predicted something like that will happen. It makes sense. So we have you know what that leaves you with? What do you do about corporations anyway? Regardless of whether it’s an emergency or not, we’ve got a threat to democracy on a lot of fronts. Not just that, but one of them is corporations.

Seth Klein  

Right, we got to do the solution. Well, and it’s interesting… just today, actually, my old friends at the CCPA published a little report that the 20 wealthiest Canadians have seen a jump in their wealth since the beginning of the pandemic, of $37 billion dollars. So, inequality is a theme that runs through all of this, and it is a barrier to mobilization as well as a threat to our democracy. And so, this… is, again, one of the areas where the more I started to learn about that World War II history, the more fascinating I found it. So, let’s go back even further in history. In… the First World War, much like in this pandemic, there had been rampant and grotesque profiteering. And that profiteering had undermined social solidarity and had undermined recruitment efforts in the First World War, and it had led to the government having to bring in conscription. Because what did it mean, to have some people volunteering their lives, while other people are making a killing? Mackenzie King was acutely aware of all of this at the beginning of the Second World War. He had lived through it, he had been in Laurier’s cabinet, he had seen how the conscription crisis had torn apart the country and his party. And so one of his principal political objectives… at the outset of the Second World War, was to avoid mandatory military conscription. So, he has this formidable challenge, then, how do you get hundreds of 1000s of people to voluntarily offer up their lives. And you need social solidarity for that, and he knew it. So, he starts to bring in these incredible measures to tackle inequality. And to prevent profiteering, the corporate tax rate in World War Two went from 18 to 40%. They brought in an excess-profits tax, that was extraordinary. You know what, this is how they did it, they went back to the four years before World War Two. And for every industry, they looked at the profits in those four years, still Depression years, right, they averaged it out. And they said to every business big and small in the land, that’s your annual limit until the end of the war. Really, it was meaning, not only did the corporate income tax rate go from 18, to 40% — but once you hit that average from before the war, your marginal tax rate was 100%. And businessmen at the time, you know, gave speeches to their colleagues about why they had to suck it up and accept this, because this is what it means to confront an emergency. And then on the flip side, World War Two also saw even though we were dealing with all of the spending needs of military production, and all these other things, …. shades of a Green New Deal, they also brought in the first major income transfer programs in Canadian history, unemployment insurance comes in, in 1940. The family allowance comes in, in 1944. The Marsh report, which is really… the report, that is the architecture of the whole postwar Canadian social welfare state is written during the Second World War. And it becomes part of a promise that the King government has to make frankly, or they’re going to lose an election to the CCF… to all of these people who they’re asking to enlist and all of these soldiers overseas, we promise that you will return to a different country than the one that you left. That’s how you mobilize people. So I think we need to do that, again, as part of this, and that means tackling inequality, it means we need excess-profits taxes.

Metta Spencer  

Again, the Green New Deal.

Seth Klein  

… something like a Green New Deal. And by the way, in the opinion poll I referenced before you see the power of this. So not only in the polling I did with Abacus research, do you find very high levels of support for bold climate action in Canada? But when you ask people additionally — well, would you become more or less supportive, if we increased transfers to low-income households? If we offered a good-jobs guarantee to fossil-fuel workers, if we increase taxes on the wealthy and corporations — support for that bold climate action doesn’t go down, it goes through the roof.

Metta Spencer  

Well, my friend, explain Donald Trump to me then,

you know, well,

Metta Spencer  

I mean, my friend Airlie Hochschild… her book “Strangers in their Own Land” was the really the thing that that made me rethink everything I kind of assumed about political allegiance? I mean, yeah, she shows very obviously, she starts off with the point that the red states in the US are the states that need the most government support… and help and they are the most opposed to it. Yeah. And here you have a large proportion of the electorate deciding that they are voting for things that are absolutely diametrically opposed to their own interests. So this is why irrational and it’s based on nothing, but some sort of, you know, joining a, you know, you do you support this baseball club, or the other one,

Seth Klein  

You know… not completely irrational. This is, this is why I think the power, this is the power and importance of the Green New Deal. It’s why tackling the climate emergency has to be linked to inequality. And it speaks to the failure of the US Democratic party establishment. When you fail to link the need for these things to inequality, then you allow climate change, to be presented as an elitist project, which is exactly what Donald Trump did.

Metta Spencer  

yeah, but it’s worse than that. I mean, these are people who know that out in their backyard… people are dumping wastes that have killed the members of their own family, and they know that, that has died because of it. And if you say, don’t you want the EPA to come in and clean this up? They’ll say no. So, this is this has to be irrational, in any sense of the word.

Seth Klein  

Yeah. Well, if people are hurting, you know, I see these parallels, again, to this pre war period, right? We live in this moment, where things can go either way. And look at the 1930s and the economic despair across the world, then, the economic despair that gave birth, both to the New Deal and Roosevelt in the United States, and elected Hitler. Right, in the same way, that we live in a time that that holds up the promise of a Green New Deal, at the same time as it elects Donald Trump and Duterte and Bolsonaro, and all the rest of these guys, and Modi, and all of the rest of these people… they’re all speaking to the same anxiety. And this same feeling of alienation and rejection that so many people feel — one set of people are offering up scapegoats the other and animating our worst selves, and another set of people are trying to animate our best selves,

Metta Spencer  

I would have to say probably, the Democratic leaders are not completely crazy when they say we can’t try to promote Bernie and or the Green New Deal. We have to go with some moderate, like, Biden, and Biden, as you know, is trying to still win over the folks who voted for Trump.

Seth Klein  

I hope they’re right. I hope they’re right. But I I’m somebody who believes that Bernie could have won four years ago.

Metta Spencer  

I know that he could I’m sure that he could have won against Hillary.

Seth Klein  

I mean, they’re never against Trump. And Trump isn’t the point. If he hadn’t won. If he had won, then

Metta Spencer  

he could have beaten Trump.

Seth Klein  

But that’s the point. Because

Metta Spencer  

now I don’t know. I mean, maybe they’re right in choosing Biden now, rather than —

Seth Klein  

What’s done is done. And I hope you’re right. But… that’s sort of ancient history now four years ago, but partly what made Hillary Clinton an awful candidate, is that the things that were said about her and the elitism and the fact that the Democratic Party didn’t give a hoot about ordinary people, were true… But if it had been Trump and Bernie Sanders, who both were speaking to that feeling of alienation and inequality and corporate power, people could have voted for the real deal.

Metta Spencer  

Yeah. Okay, we’re gonna find out some things. And I don’t know, the other question is whether the pandemic is going to change public opinion in any radical way. And I don’t see it happening yet. Oh, well,

Seth Klein  

This is where, you know, just to bring it back to my book… the timing of all of this has been so weird, Metta. I wrote my book before the pandemic; I had shipped my book off a final copy… three days before the pandemic. And the whole premise of my book was that we needed this historic reminder of how quickly we’re capable of moving when we see crises as the emergency as they are. And then the pandemic hit, and now we’re all living through that reminder in real time, we’re all experiencing it. And it’s been brutal for a lot of people. But I actually think in some ways and it has put… the climate emergency for now, at least off the front burner, I did quickly write a new epilogue to the book about COVID and all the parallels between the climate emergency and the pandemic and the war. And I think there are many. But I think in some ways we can, we will come out of the pandemic, well placed for the fact, that we all come out with a renewed appreciation for the importance of the role of government, we have a level of social solidarity and national unity that we haven’t had in a generation, we see the connections between inequality and these emergencies… and in terms of that government spending and the role of the Bank of Canada that I was talking about before the cat’s out of the bag… now, what we’ve been shown is what was possible all along, f the government had chosen to see these things as emergencies,

Metta Spencer  

well, that people say that about the basic income idea to, guaranteed annual income. But now we see that could have done that, you know, 10 years ago. And I don’t know whether that, but I haven’t seen any poll results showing remarkable changes now. It’s been six months, we’ve had this pandemic, so far. And I don’t know of any dramatic changes in public opinion. I do know that there’s, I’m really happy about the fact that people are actually, I think, instead of a less social interaction, I think there’s more social interaction. Now,

Seth Klein  

I know mic’s better than I ever did.

Metta Spencer  

Yeah, and zoom, I spend two, three hours a day on Zoom. And I’m not alone, you know. So, and, and I think this kind of conversation going on, is really a very important thing. I think too many people until recently have rushed out into the streets. It’s easy, you know, to mobilize people with Twitter or something, I say, come to such as a corner at such and such a time, and people will come, but they don’t know each other. And they don’t get acquainted, really, and they don’t build a movement that way. And the only way you can build a movement is by talking to each other, a long time together. And with these webinars, I think it’s happening. Yeah.

Seth Klein  

Some of that’s happening that way. And, you know, as we’ve seen, with this whole explosion of the Black Lives Matter stuff in the middle of the pandemic, sometimes when these crises intersect, people get out of the house anyway.

Metta Spencer  

I don’t see quite I mean, there’s no particular reason for me to think that the Black Lives Matter movement would have surged exactly when COVID did. 

Seth Klein  

Oh, no, I don’t mean that. I just mean that… when a crisis like that comes to the fore, even though we were all told to stop, shelter at home. 1000s of people came out of their homes to protest anyway. And have that face-to-face contact,

Metta Spencer  

and they can’t, so far, they don’t seem to have caused any upsurge. I think it’s because it was all out of doors.

Seth Klein  

It was outside. And I mean, I went to a couple of these protests and people wore masks, and they were pretty good.

Metta Spencer  

Mm hmm. Tell me what you think is going to happen by about automation? Because I don’t think you’ve really, I don’t remember seeing a lot of discussion about it in your book, that, you know, there’s a real discussion among my friends about whether or not to believe that we’re going to have a huge loss in jobs, or whether as with other changes in technology, and in throughout the period, period of industrialization, there will be new jobs that emerge to fill a teacup, for where the old ones left off. And I wonder what, what you think, are we going to have to find, make work or give people handouts? Or at, which I’m not necessarily opposed to at all. But or…? Do you think that that the economy will actually create conventional sense occupations?

Seth Klein  

I’m, I don’t pretend to be expert in this area. But I would say this is not an area that I’m hugely worried about, at least not for the next 30 years. Because actually converting our economies and societies for what we need to do, to get off fossil fuels is such a big job. But it’s going to involve a lot of work. I actually think our larger problem, once we get serious about a Green New Deal, our larger problem will be a labor shortage. And at least for a couple of decades. And then the other part of the Green New Deal is to say it isn’t just about electrifying everything and you know, switching technologies. It’s also about the caring economy, and valuing the things we’ve come to value in this pandemic, the care for children, the care for the elderly, all of these forms of work that we traditionally leave to women… immigrant women, we pay crap… but interestingly produce almost no carbon, no GHGs in the service economy that those operate in. And they are by definition, jobs that that that are done by humans. That’s how we care for each other.

Metta Spencer  

Okay, and you put a lot of emphasis out really, it’s important, the question of denial, and how we get people psyched up for this challenge. That’s something that I, I spend a lot of time trying to do. But I wouldn’t say I’m a roaring success in changing public opinion. And I just don’t really think we have a handle on that yet. This is where we need real leadership from our governments. The thing about World War Two is that you have to have a clear and consistent message. Whereas what we’re experiencing with climate is a lot of very confusing message.

Seth Klein  

You know, when Justin Trudeau passes a climate emergency motion in the House of Commons one day, and reapproved the Trans-Mountain pipeline expansion the very next day, that’s confusing to people. In fact, why do we even, you know, one of the points I make in the book, why do we allow advertising for fossil fuel cars and gas stations? We don’t for tobacco, because that’s confusing. What does it mean to tell people that it’s an emergency, and then they see these ads? And… overall, what our federal government and provincial governments have been saying to people, unlike what they said in World War Two, is you don’t have to choose, you don’t have to decide, we can tackle climate. And we can still double down and expand tar sands production and LNG in my province. And that’s not being straight with people. But it’s an attractive message, right? Because nobody wants to make hard choices. And so that perpetuates that sense of denial, and the mainstream media play right along with it. None of which is what happened in World War Two. In World War Two, we were much clearer about it. And the media was clear about… you want the media to be factual and science-based. But when you’re facing a global civilizational threat, the media should pick a damn side. And, and too often they don’t. And too often they look, I mentioned some a poll that I didn’t do, but someone else did in the book. Even though the majority of Canadians say they want bold climate action, only about half of Canadians understand that the principal source of climate change is the combustion of fossil fuels. The level of who knows… often they just go right to plastics or recycling… the the level of basic literacy is atrocious. But that’s on the government and our other public institutions. If that’s true, they have to fix it. Right. In World War Two. We saw maps every night on the news. And on the radio where you saw you saw the battle lines, you knew what the threat was. Every night we gathered around the radio in Canada, you are in the States and Canada, everyone gathered around radio every night to listen to Lorne Greene, before he became a Hollywood actor. You know, in Bonanza and Battlestar Galactica, Lorne Greene was the voice of the CBC. Right through the Second World War, that great deep voice, it was called the voice of doom. And every night, Canadians across the country got the latest update from him. Where is that? Right? That’s how you start to tackle that confusion and that denial.

Metta Spencer  

Okay, now, I have to say there were two, three things that if I were writing your book, I would have done differently. Okay. As you know, I’m much more oriented toward International, doing things that are naturally transnational. I’m very interested in organizing activists around the world and bringing people together. That’s why I have these town halls in these meetings, like you, you know, I interview people in India or Russia all the time, that sort of thing. So I think that I would love to see a future effort to link Canada much more into the world and look at Canadian policies, income, in… the context of global trends. Another thing that I’m I was, I wasn’t opposed to your title for the book a good war, because I think that’s great. But I have to say that neither you nor the Green New Deal people in general, make any major reference to the importance of demilitarization as a, as a component of the kinds of reforms that we have to do. I don’t think we can solve climate change without cutting back on our military. And I think that not only for the reason that that’s where all our money is going. But… it’s a stupid way to waste money. But also, because military production and the maintenance of a military force, it creates a lot of greenhouse gas.

Seth Klein  

Yeah, absolutely do it.

Metta Spencer  

So, I wish that we could hook up, hook your concerns up to some other concerns that I think… form more of a system, I mean, with our Project Save The World, we look at six different global threats, because we think they’re all related. And then we can’t solve any one of them without addressing at least one or usually two or three of the others, war and weapons, militarism being one, global warming being the other biggie. And then we have things like famine, pandemics, radioactive contamination, and cyber-attacks. And all of those together require economic changes of the kind that we’ve just been talking about. So it’s this, our economic issues are not irrelevant, what whatsoever, but they are these things, I think, are causally linked. And we should address them as such. Because there’s the solutions have to be as a system to

Seth Klein  

Yeah, I mean, well, so maybe I should have spent more time than I did on all of those things. Although I do think I actually spent some time on almost all of them…   — having lauded the creation of these 28 crown corporations — I do talk in one. of my favorite chapters in the book… on indigenous leadership and the climate mobilization. And, and importantly, a number of those crown corporations left this terrible, poisonous legacy on indigenous territory in Sarnia, and (into your point about nuclear radiation for the DNA) people in the Northwest Territories who were poisoned, is part of the… uranium they extracted for the Manhattan Project. And so the book does talk about that. Look, I wrote the book for Canadians, and about how we mobilize our country. But I do speak to the fact that this obviously is a global endeavor. And we have to do it… knowing that millions of good people around the world are doing the same thing in their countries, I was trying to speak directly to this voice that a lot of Canadians have in their head, which is… we’re just a small country, a small population, what we do doesn’t matter. And I want to say, first of all, it does matter. We have the highest per- capita emissions in the world. And that’s not counting what we extract and export to other countries. And to guess what, that’s not what we did in the Second World War, we entered two years before the United States, and before anyone else in the Western Hemisphere, and we were only 11 million people then. And at the end of the war, nobody doubted or questioned the importance of our contribution. So, let’s just do this.

Metta Spencer  

I love that that notion that you know, because in fact, I think Canadians are a little bit parochial. We couldn’t really be the leaders in the world. But we should.

Seth Klein  

But I, but I do want to reinforce what you said before… why is it that this… federal government that claims to get climate, and yet still doubles down on pipelines and tar sands expansion and so on. And they literally basically say, Well, if we don’t do it, if we if someone else is going to do it. And so, they’re all you know, to put this in international relations terms, they’re all caught in this classic prisoner’s dilemma of nobody wanting to be the chump… and doing what should what needs to be done only to be a sucker and have somebody else occupy that space. So, I speak to that in the book. And I actually mention something in the book that I’m now actually working on, you’ll be happy to know. We’re on a little bit of contract work on the side, which is this new initiative for a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty. I don’t know if you’ve heard about this. You will be hearing more about it. It is modeled on the original nuclear non- proliferation treaty and is an international initiative. And it is trying to speak to the fact that the Paris agreement has a fatal omission, which is that nowhere in the Paris agreement does it mention fossil fuels, oil, gas or coal.

Metta Spencer  

That is the realize that

Seth Klein  

— that’s the result of years of successful lobbying from those industries. And so the Paris Agreement only speaks to the demand side, how do we lower demand, and it doesn’t speak at all to the production side. And so, this initiative is saying we need a new international treaty, a companion treaty to the Paris Agreement. That is about ramping down production in a cooperative way. That gets us out of its a path out of the prisoner’s dilemma, effectively wonderful. And so, people can look, look up fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty online, you can find the web page. And I do also in the book, speak to the fact that one of the key lessons of the Second World War is that Canada is not an island. And we don’t do this alone. And we also have to see these international connections, the biggest of which is as a wealthy well, to really, first of all, is a wealthy country. What does this mean in terms of financial and technology transfers to the poor countries that are hardest hit by climate change? And secondly, you know, when I spoke earlier about the cautionary tales from the Second World War, one of which is how Canada responded to refugees before, during and after World War Two. And it was abysmal, as, as anyone who’s looked at this knows, right, and so what does that mean is we now face down the issue of climate migration? And that will be a defining issue of the next 40-50 years. And will we react? Will we replicate that shameful history again? Or will we act honorably this time?

Metta Spencer  

Yeah, if I hadn’t even gone there. That’s a hard one. a hard one to predict. Yeah. And in I had not heard about this fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty. I love it. But I wonder how it connects with something I have heard about, which is a campaign against subsidies for fossil fuels. And I don’t know whether you link the two but I was told that $5 trillion a year is spent a globally on subsidies for fossil fuels. That is, that is a place where we should publicize that number, you know, we should say this is how much we’re actually paying to keep the damn thing going.

Seth Klein  

Yeah, well, I do speak to that issue in the book. And that is a key piece of it. I mean, like all things you grab hold of this thing wherever you can. So, one piece of it is divestment. And other piece of it is getting rid of subsidies. I mean, whatever it takes to make these companies pay the full cost of the garbage they’re producing and, and make it on economic.

Metta Spencer  

You’re, doing well, my friend, I’m, I’m very, very happy about how you’ve spent your life so far. So, congratulations on your book.

Thanks. Oh, so I shouldn’t say people can go to my website, it’s just sethklein.ca. And you can order the book or just call your local bookstore

Metta Spencer  

In there, says…

Seth Klein

No, just sethklein.ca. And, you know, I think the book endeavors to be realistic about how serious this crisis is. But I also think it’s one of the more hopeful books on the subject. You will read.

Metta Spencer  

It’s one of the most fun to read I’ll tell you I mean, not Ha-ha, fun, but it entertaining in that you find things that you haven’t long before. The lovely, wonderful talking to you. Good. Let’s stay in touch. All right, no, no more 25 years in between. Thanks so much, Seth. Oh, good wishes. Bye bye.

Adam Wynne (Intro/Outro)  

This conversation is one of the weekly series talks about saving the world produced by peace magazine, and project save the world. Please visit our website at to save the world.ca where you can sign the platform for survival. A list of 25 public policy proposals that if enacted, would greatly reduce the risk of six global threats to humankind. Come back next week for another discussion of a serious global issue.

T236. Carbon Capture and Storage

T236. Carbon Capture and Storage

 

Project Save the World Podcast / Talk Show Episode Number: 236
Panelists: Michael Barnard
Host: Metta Spencer

Date Aired:  29 April 2021
Date Transcribed and Verified: 15 May 2021
Transcription: Otter.ai
Transcription Review and Edits: David 

Metta Spencer  

Hi, I’m Metta Spencer. Today we’re going to go to Vancouver. Because I’ve just made a new friend who’s in Vancouver, it’s Michael Barnard. He is a man of many parts. He obviously knows his way around technology, all kinds of technology, kind of a renaissance man of technology. And in fact, he’s so sophisticated that I wouldn’t dare try to introduce him and say what he does, because I would be sure to mess it up. So good morning, Michael. And would you be so good as to tell us a little bit about yourself. So, you can sort of do a self-introduction, if you don’t mind? What is this thing in the background?

Michael Barnard  

Thank you very much for having me, Metta, I’m very pleased to be here. The thing in the background is actually a project I’m working on. With my firm distance.com, distance technologies and a local architecture practice, human studio architecture and urban design, focused on increasing sociability in the built environment. That’s a five-storey office building, or five-storey residential building with a courtyard, what we’re doing is using 3D agents in a virtual environment, to run around the building and encounter one another and determine which designs of the building are more sociable versus less sociable. And, and that’s in line with my focus on public health. And, you know, social good projects, you know, which is the reason I’m here today. The public health stuff, I mean, we’re doing in the middle of COVID, which Metta, you know, in our chatted about an original conversation week or two ago. But COVID is actually being managed in Canada by the Panorama public health surveillance project, something built in British Columbia, I had the privilege of working on for 18 months.

Metta Spencer  

These days, I see little green lines, zigzagging around this building. Is this kind of graph of where people move inside the building complex?

Michael Barnard  

Well, no, that’s two agents in space, who can see one another, the green line is the laser between their eyes.

Metta Spencer  

And then why are they trying to see each other?

Michael Barnard  

Well, just because when you walk out of your building, you see your neighbor, you say, Oh, you start learning to recognize them, you’ll say hi. And then eventually you’ll establish familiarity with your neighbors. And at a certain point, you say, Well, you know, we haven’t seen Fred for a while, I wonder if he’s okay. So, there’s just a creation of community, creation of social environment. But that’s not what we’re here to talk about today. Today, we’re here to talk about another big part of my brain, not technology, not public health, but something that has strong implications for both technology and public health, and that’s climate change solutions.

Metta Spencer  

Do you mean by a man of, a Renaissance man, an English major, who’s also doing climate change?

Michael Barnard  

whether certain solutions will scale or not, and whether they’ll be a substantive part of our solution set. But the point there is more that I spend time thinking about how people internalize behavior. And I’ve spent time looking at behavioral psychology, and behavioral economics to determine what things will actually work in terms of being acceptable to people and will actually get past that barrier of human nature. And so,

Metta Spencer  

boy, it sounds like you are dealing with some of the things that absolutely keep me awake at night. And I mean, literally, I spent a lot of time in bed, thinking about how we’re going to break through some of the human problems that I see are wrecking democracy, frankly, making it impossible to make good political decisions. … climate change is the most obvious example. Because COVID as well, you know, people who … don’t want to wear masks, or that’s what we came to talk about. So, we know. Today we’re going to talk about carbon capture. that’s big enough topic.

Michael Barnard  

Let’s talk carbon capture because I’ll share, a I’ve got a couple of slides here. One of the things I am you know; carbon capture is touted as one of the big solutions for climate change. Now, this is a map of all the largest carbon capture sites in the world.

Metta Spencer  

Hold on. Right off the bat. I think we have to be careful about when we use the word “carbon capture and sequestration” because there’s there are things that trees do and then there’s what I guess is generally called DAC “direct air capture” from the from the air with machinery,

Michael Barnard  

and that’s multiple types. Yeah… these are not direct air capture. I’ve spoken to the leading people in direct air capture globally, but these are specifically… So, there’s … three levels to this, the first level is at source. So, emissions from smokestacks and coal plants and stuff like that. Or emissions from normal oil and gas extraction processes. That’s what these are these are “at source capture and sequestration” facilities —

Metta Spencer  

is that, are you saying those little blue dots are the only ones in the world or these are just happened to be the big ones

Michael Barnard  

— as of 2019, these are all of the ones that were sequestering, above a million tonnes a year, which sounds like a lot. I’ll get into the context for that in a minute. The second type is “direct air capture”, which I’ll talk briefly about. The third type is “biological pathways”. My thesis is very simple. mechanical and chemical, direct carbon capture doesn’t work, it won’t scale. There’s no value proposition for it. The scale of the problem is vastly above the scale of the ability of those technologies to scale —

Metta Spencer  

So you’re saying direct air capture and smokestack capture kind of thing. Neither of them can be scaled.

Michael Barnard  

Nope. And it’s pretty simple to explain why. But you know, the, the one that will scale is biological mechanisms. And I’ll talk more about the biological mechanisms. We’re going to start by being dismissive of the mechanical and Industrial processes. So, these are the sites. I’ve looked at all of them, I’ve assessed multiple technologies… for sequestering carbon. I’ve done a case study on carbon engineering, which is the big Canadian “direct air capture” solution… spoken directly to David Keith, he was unhappy with my coverage of his approach. I spoke to Graciela Chichilnisky and Peter Eisenberger, who were behind the Global Thermostat “direct air capture” thing a decade ago.

Metta Spencer  

But there’s one there’s something in Switzerland, Climeworks.com

Michael Barnard  

I haven’t… talked to any of the Climeworks people, but I’ve assessed their technology haven’t published on it. The problem is multiple fold. So, let’s just start with the scale of the problem. Okay. We’re over 1000 billion tonnes of excess CO2 in the atmosphere that we’ve put there. And we are good at putting in 30 to 40 billion tonnes a year… billions with a B, so 30 to 40 billion tonnes a year. The biggest facility in the year captures a million tons — a year. That’s

Metta Spencer  

okay, what a billion is… a billion is 1000 million,

Michael Barnard  

right? Yep.

Metta Spencer  

Okay. And so, we’re talking about totally different scale of magnitude.

Michael Barnard  

It is a scale of magnitude problem. Exxon claims to have the most sophisticated and the best track record for carbon capture sequestration industry. And they do but that, so that’s problem one — is just these facilities just are tiny compared to the scale of the problem. The second problem is that… all of these dots, 90% of them are used for enhanced oil recovery. Enhanced oil recovery means you pump CO2 down into a tapped-out oil well, and the chemical properties of CO2 mix with the oil and loosen it up, they basically turn tar into liquid, and they pressurize it so then it can be pumped out the other end. For every tonne of CO2 you pump underground in enhanced oil recovery, you get a quarter of a ton, a ton of new petroleum. And a ton of new petroleum turns into three tons of CO2.

Metta Spencer  

So, for one ton of co2, you get three tons of co2 at the other end. Hey, go.

Michael Barnard  

And that’s not the end of the shell game. Let’s take let’s take Exxon’s… the facility that they really love to talk about… the Shute Creek processing facility in the Permian Basin in United States. It’s one of the ones over here.

Metta Spencer 

Yeah,

Michael Barnard  

The Shute Creek facility… pumps up natural gas that has too much CO2 mixed in with it to be saleable. It separates the CO2 from the natural gas. It sells the natural gas. It pumps the CO2 over to the tapped-out oil well and pumps it back underground. So, it … It puts it back underground and gets more oil. And it gets more oil than it pumped out.  So, there’s no net benefit at all from Exxon’s facility, it’s actually a shell game… they’re pumping CO2 out to put it down somewhere else to get more co2.

Metta Spencer  

Okay… already you know, me, I’m not very good at arithmetic. And grade four was about my, my, my level, but I think I can, I can figure that

Michael Barnard  

— one’s pretty easy to figure out. Another one, which is a great facility is the Sleipner facility over here on the North Sea. The Sleipner is… Odin’s horse or something like that, you know, but the Sleipner facility is run by Equinor, which is the Norwegian National Petroleum Company. It’s a natural gas facility in the North Sea, and they pump out natural gas. And once again, it has too much CO2 in it. So, they strip off the CO2, and they pump the CO2 back underground. And when they pump the CO2 back underground, they get a tax credit for carbon sequestration. And so, they’ve avoided about, by my calculation, about $1.7 billion US by taking CO2 from underground and pumping it back underground. So, yeah,

Metta Spencer  

now that right there, you just made the slam dunk case, for carbon pricing as the carbon fee or carbon tax, rather than a cap-and-trade kind of deal, right there —

Michael Barnard  

… there are different ways to sort out all of these types of things. But the reality is that all of these blue dots, 90% of them are just oil and gas companies creating more problems, rather than less. If we take the natural gas… from when the Sleipner plant puts CO2 underground, that natural gas goes on to be burned. So, the CO2 they extract, and then put back under ground is a 25th of the CO2 that’s created when the natural gas is burned. You know, so there is no net benefit… I call carbon capture a fig leaf for the fossil fuel industry.

Metta Spencer  

But they’re doing this they’re getting credit… like a cap-and-trade bookkeeping system, not because if they had, if somebody had to actually pay for every bit of greenhouse gas that was produced and emitted, then this couldn’t happen, right?

Michael Barnard  

— if they actually had to pay and they had to… add it to the price… the economics of oil and gas would be very problematic. If we think about the North America, oil sands that you and I contend with as Canadians as a concern. Let’s take carbon capture sequestration and use — there’s a global market of 230 million tons a year for all carbon capture, use and sequestration. So, 230 million tons a year,

Metta Spencer  

global market for? What do you mean by a global market for it?

Michael Barnard  

CO2 is a commodity, it’s like, you know, it’s like baking soda or oil or water. It’s something that gets purchased in bulk and used for various things…

Metta Spencer  

There’s so much more of it that that we, it’s amazing that anybody would pay to get it would have no problem is trying to get rid of it.

Michael Barnard  

I’m not gonna disagree, but there’s a $230 million market for it. People pay for its use enhanced oil recovery is 70 to 80 million tons of that global market. So right there, you’re sitting there. And remember, the scale of the problem is 1000s of billions of tonnes and we’re talking 230 million tonnes. Right. So the so people, people talk about carbon use, they’re talking about… 230 million and trying to make that two billions. There’s no use for all that CO2. But people do buy CO2, greenhouses use CO2 to enhance growth.

Metta Spencer  

So, factories, presumably —

Michael Barnard  

Soda pop companies use it. A lot of it’s used to create fertilizers… And fertilizers we need, but we don’t need billions of tons of fertilizer. So… if you think about the oil sands… I calculated the total emissions from extraction and processing of oil sands petroleum, the, you know, the thick crude that the Alberta produces. Alberto’s annual emissions alone — not for using the oil, not for burning, though — just for extracting and initial processing, are as much as the global use of all CO2 for all enhanced oil recovery. Just one province of one country already blows the budget for that. And so, this is the scale problem. If there’s the scale problem, and there’s the bait-and-switch problem, the fossil fuel companies are doing a lovely bait and switch, they get their social license to continue to extract oil. And they convince everybody that all we have to do… [is] capture it, and we can put it somewhere. But there is no place to put it that’s big enough, and there is no use of CO2 that big —

Metta Spencer  

Now, if they just pump it into an abandoned oil well, or you know, any other kind of mine underground, coal mine or something, and they can seal it. So, it isn’t going to get out. That’s pretty good burial, you know, enough holes in the ground from old wells, to be able to pump a lot of that stuff under there are no —

Michael Barnard  

not a chance, not 1000s of, billions of tons. Okay, that’s the scale of the problem. We don’t have room for it… there’s nothing mechanical that can deal with that. There is a solution, though. So, I do, as I said at the beginning, I do want to show you this chart that I created. So, one of the things I did in 2019, when I was looking at these sites, I did an assessment, saying how much had actually been captured. And the 45 million tonnes for the global carbon capture and storage market, from 1973 to 2019, includes the most generous calculation I could do for the enhanced oil recovery people. So, for the enhanced oil recovery, I asserted that they would get .25 tons of oil for a ton of CO2, which is the low end of the scale, the minimum end, and then that turns into .8 tonnes of CO2 when it’s extracted, so I’m giving them a 20% credit for enhanced oil recovery. In reality, as I said, it’s typically going to be two to three times the CO2. But I was trying to be generous, right? And being generous. They’ve captured 45 million tonnes of CO2 since 1972. Remember, the scale is billions and 1000s of billions of tonnes, they’ve captured 45. Now, what I also said was, huh, what else could we have done with that same capital expenditure — not the operating costs, not the salaries, just the money spent to build the facilities. And I applied that in each… year that money had been spent to build one of these carbon capture plants. I said, let’s build the amount of wind energy we could have built in that year, with the capability of wind energy in that year, because every megawatt hour of wind energy or solar energy avoids a megawatt hour of coal or gas. And so, you can say, I’ve got a megawatt hour of wind, energy, electricity from wind, I’ve avoided a megawatt hour of coal and gas, and that’s an average of about 750 kilograms of CO2. From those sources, it’s about a tonne of CO2 from a megawatt hour of coal… about 500 kilograms of CO2 from a megawatt hour of gas. And so, you can average those out, right. So, what I did that,

Metta Spencer  

comparing this gas and coal, say it again.

Michael Barnard  

So, coal is a lot more; carbon gas has some hydrogen in it. So, the coal when it burns produces more CO2 than the gas does. about twice as much. So, you get about a tonne of CO2 from a megawatt hour of coal, that’s how much it produces. And you get about a half a tonne of CO2 when you produce a megawatt hour from gas generation,

Metta Spencer  

Megawatt hour is you’re talking like a measure of electricity production.

Michael Barnard  

Yep. Now you’ve got a home and you… you’ve got a condo. But if you had a detached home, the average Canadian gets about 10.7 megawatt hours of electricity they use every year for their home for their homes. Right. So that’s your carbon data. If you got 10.7 megawatt hours, and you’re in Alberta, you know where the total CO2 per kilowatt hour is 790 kilograms per megawatt hour. You’re creating like eight tons of CO2 just from your electricity in Alberta. And then… much lower in BC and Quebec and Manitoba and Ontario,

Metta Spencer  

but my apartment is producing about that much?

Michael Barnard  

Your apartment, probably not because you’re in a condo in in Toronto, you’re probably in the… six megawatt hours and you’re on the Ontario grid. So, the entire grid is about — because of nuclear and the wind energy that hasn’t been shut down by the Ford administration, and the solar that’s in there that hasn’t been shut down by the Ford administration — it’s actually a pretty reasonable CO2 per kilowatt hour. It’s like 200 kilograms for a megawatt hour. So… your carbon footprint for electricity, you’re probably about 1.2 tonnes a year, just for your electricity… it’s better than Alberta. Okay, now, and there’s a couple of reasons for that, you’re in a condo, so you’re sharing heating and cooling with your neighbors. Right. And so that’s an energy efficiency matter. And secondarily, you have a smaller space. So that’s an efficiency matter. And third, you’re on a grid that’s not as dirty as Alberta’s. But point of that is: we can actually make a comparison; we can say we know that every megawatt hour we produce with wind or solar displaces fossil fuel generation. Yeah. Right. And so, I made some —

Metta Spencer  

bad that way. But yeah, you can put those on the same graph. If I did

Michael Barnard  

Yeah, here’s the graph. So, this one basically says, given the most generous reading of the enhanced oil recovery, and given the most conservative capacity factors and ability and costs for wind energy, we could, we would have avoided about three times as much CO2 emissions just by building wind energy, instead of all the carbon capture that’s being built globally, everywhere in the world.

Metta Spencer  

Okay, now, I’m trying to imagine what my friend, I have a friend who’s enthusiastic about the idea of carbon capture, not direct air capture, but carbon capture. She thinks that… we should put more into it. Now, the question I’ve imagined she would ask is… How difficult is it to create such facilities for carbon capture at source, as compared to the wind? Building a wind turbine, for example? I mean, if it’s a whole lot easier to put some sort of little gadget on a smokestack, then it might be worth doing anyway, even while we’re trying to switch over to wind energy, because, as they say, inevitably we’ll take a long time to make that transition over to solar and wind. And now, I don’t know …  I’m imagining what she might say. But is that the kind of argument that you would have to answer.

Michael Barnard  

Sure, and I’ll answer it very clearly. So, in Saskatchewan, we have the Boundary Dam project. That’s a coal plant that had carbon capture and sequestration bolted onto it. And the carbon that was captured was pumped underground for enhanced oil recovery in Saskatchewan. The idea was the enhanced oil recovery revenue was going to pay for the carbon capture. The problem is, there were two problems. One is it ran at 40% of projected efficiency for a year and a half and nobody noticed. Second, it cost a lot more than they expected. So now, every megawatt hour of electricity has a… wholesale cost of $140 per megawatt hour. Now I’ll turn that into kilowatt hours, because you pay about 12 cents per kilowatt hour in Ontario, well, in Saskatchewan, the wholesale but that’s your retail cost with all the other adders. The wholesale cost of electricity for this Boundary Dam facility was above Ontario’s retail cost and close to Saskatchewan retail cost, it was just too expensive to operate. So, while they’re keeping it running, the Saskatchewan Power Utility, the premier said they’ll never build another one and they’re not expanding carbon capture in Saskatchewan. So that’s a Canadian example, now give you the Petra Nova example down in southern United States. There’s a big coal generation facility, they have, I think, 12 boilers on the facility, and they bolted on carbon capture to one of them. The idea being that they would, you know, test this out. So, this is only one boiler out of 12. So, they’re already down at 8%. But then they’re only capturing about 30% of the CO2 that was coming out of the boiler. And this is actually fairly standard efficiency. For at-flue capture, it’s easy to capture 30% of it. It gets… increasingly expensive to capture 100%. Right. And so that place, they spent billions of dollars, and it failed, they’ve actually removed the Carbon [capture], they actually had to set up… a natural gas plant to create the energy to capture CO2 from the coal plant. Because capturing and running a carbon-capture process takes energy. The big part, which I learned a decade ago, is that every CO2 capture process uses a chemical or sorbent-based technology, which requires a bunch of heat, then, to separate the co2 from the thing you’ve captured it with. And that heat has to come from energy. And typically, that comes from natural gas. And so, you kind of sit there and you look at this and go, so we’re gonna spend a lot… we talked about David Keith and Carbon Engineering, their initial process as defined and as explored, uses natural gas to power the process, they create a half ton of CO2 from the natural gas for every tonne of CO2 they capture from the air. And so, then they actually have in their design process, they have three different carbon-capture technologies, they have one for the air, and then two for the natural gas emissions. It’s, once again…  more and more and more to try and get to that 100%, they have to do two separate carbon-capture processes on the seat and the gas emissions, to capture all the CO2 to get up to that, close to 100%. And so that’s the problem. We have a scale problem and the carbon capture doesn’t get anywhere near the scale. We have an enhanced oil recovery problem in that it’s used to create more oil and hence more CO2. And we have a shell-game problem in that most of the stuff that people are claiming value from the CO2 was already sequestered underground, they pulled it up and put it down somewhere else. And then we get to the air carbon capture problem. The air carbon capture problem is Houston Astrodome. It takes one point you know how big the Houston Astrodome is, right? It’s one of the biggest enclosed spaces in the world. It’s this enormous building, it takes 1.1 Houston Astrodome’s worth of air to get a single ton of CO2. Because CO2 is really diffuse, it’s a great space blanket that makes making your atmosphere warmer. But I did promise and we only have 28 minutes left. So, I want to start talking about the solutions. Because I’ll make it really clear, the technical and chemical solutions that people are touting, especially the fossil fuel industry, are not fit for purpose. But there are solutions.

Metta Spencer  

Oh, there you go. You’re gonna make me happy now because I’ve been saying forestry and agriculture, re.

Michael Barnard  

And… this is the agriculture side of that. So right now, we’ve got a bunch of the Earth’s surface under agriculture, and that agriculture is pretty crappy… it’s emerged out of subsistence farming, globally. And they figured out, they break up the earth… remove the boulders and stuff like that. I personally dug up a garden in North Bay when we moved into a new house and moved all the boulders down, and all did all that stuff for my mom, because I was a teenager and I had lots of energy. And it was easiest way to keep me from breaking stuff that was useless. And that’s good. The first time creating arable land, the first time you have to break the soil, you have to get rid of the stuff, the roots, the stumps, you have to get rid of the rocks and stuff like that. But after you’ve created arable soil, we’ve gotten into the habit of high tillage agriculture. And everybody’s seen that you run a plow across and it tears up a furrow of ground that it throws off to the side. Well, there’s three or four problems with that, first of all, is that plow-pan thing over here. Basically, you end up with this compaction layer in the soil, because you keep running heavy equipment across it. That prevents stuff from going through it as easily. And you end up with that problem. The second problem is your —

Metta Spencer  

these diagrams are fascinating. On the one hand, you’re talking about, well, the kind of farming my grandfather used to do. He ran a plow up and spit out his whole life 60 years with a plow. Now, but now this, you’ve got rocks, layers of all things, but this plow pan, the thing that you’re saying is, it’s hard is way down there. It’s not up towards the top. Is that right?

Michael Barnard  

That’s 20 centimeters down. It’s like a, almost a foot down.

Metta Spencer  

I didn’t know that. So, the top part is still fluffy enough that way down there that it gets packed in.

Michael Barnard  

So that’s problem one. Problem two is you can see the root network on the right. What happens is that every time what I’ll do… Statement two is, every time you run a plow across that top 20 centimeters of soil, what you’re doing is you’re ripping it up, and you’re turning it over. And then the biomass that’s in the soil, a lot of it immediately decomposes, emitting the CO2 that it had captured. So, if you got some corn roots in that top 20 centimeters, or some roots from some grain or something like that, what you’re doing is you’re enabling it to decompose rapidly. And when it decomposes, it emits CO2. And so, when you till… one of the first things you’re doing is you’re automatically getting rid of the CO2, that the root structures of your plants had put underground, at least for a while, right? Because underground, they still decompose just more slowly and differently. And there’s different things that processes go on. But the third problem… it’s kind of a bigger problem, when you when you till you’ve got that plow-pan, you don’t allow that network of bio pores to draw the carbon down underground where it can be sequestered for the long term. So, you’ve got a short-term carbon sequestration problem. Every time you tell, you throw a bunch of CO2 that was captured… since previous tillage into the atmosphere, but to there’s this lovely thing called glomalin…. Now glomalin is a protein which exists on fungus threads underground… I don’t know how much time you spent talking mushrooms with people, but mushrooms are a huge deal. This mycelium networks underneath the ground are this massive alternative layer. If you read “The wisdom of trees” or what is it, this great book by a Canadian about trees?

Metta Spencer  

I think I did I read a book like what you’re describing whether same title, I don’t know but about trees having a social life.

Michael Barnard  

Yeah, part of it is the types of fungus that exist underground. Now, the value proposition here I looked at the CSIRO, I rarely say that acronym out loud. But that’s the Australian primary scientific research facility that has done a lot of work on climate change and climate action… the equivalent of NASA in the United States, for example, and in you know, most of the work that gets done on climate gets done at a CSIRO. And they did a lot of work on soil carbon-capture techniques… assessment after a bunch of time and I did a lot of research and I published on this… what I found and I talked to experts around the world and advocates and non-advocates… it came down to glomalin. So, there’s, once again, there’s that short term thing. If you don’t tell that short term thing is really nice because you don’t automatically release the CO2. But if you get rid of that hard pan… the second problem is when you till, you disrupt the mycelium network, the fungus roots under the soil, and the fungus roots under the soil have this glomalin and that’s what binds carbon into long-term chemical depositions under the soil. So, it takes about 150 years for the glomalin pathway into long term sequestration to occur, but every time you till you disrupt that pathway — and so when we move to low tillage agriculture… from a carbon sequestration perspective, we automatically get the short-term benefit, which is useful for a decade or two, which is good. But we also… when we go to low tillage, we also start enabling this long-term pathway to occur. And so, all of the land that’s under agriculture, we want to turn into low-tillage agriculture to allow both the bio pores to get the glomalin process going, and to prevent the biomass that’s under the soil from just automatically turning back into CO2. The good news there is that’s a big win. We could get… all the agricultural soil, we get 20-30 years’ worth of stuff because soil stuff scales, and mechanical industrial stuff doesn’t scale. But we have a lot of land under, under agriculture. Right. And there’s two aspects to this that are worth thinking about. Three or four actually, the first one is about 80% of the land in the world is under control of corporate agribusinesses.

Metta Spencer  

80% Yep. Oh, wow

Michael Barnard  

Smallholder farmers are a rounding error. I people get annoyed with me because I … don’t really care about family farms. Unless they’re —

Metta Spencer  

all right. All right. I’m, I’m, I’m following you with enthusiasm. Good. I’ll tell you why. But go on.

Michael Barnard  

Yeah, because it’s much easier to change an agribusiness practice than a family farms practice. There are only a few hundred agribusinesses that control the vast majority of the land under agriculture in the world. And the nice thing about agribusiness, corporations is they’re sociopathic. They’re highly rational. And they seek maximum value. And they do it with spreadsheets, and things like that. They do cost-benefit analyses. They don’t do it based upon what they think is nice, they do it about what maximizes their value. And that’s good, because that means policy levers that provide carrots and sticks will actually change their behavior very rapidly, you can go to those several hundred … agribusinesses. And you can incent them to go to low-tillage agriculture. And you can penalize them for not doing it. And you have a small number of actors. And you can get a large benefit from it. You can also institute corporate-monitoring programs with mandated monitoring of fields. And then you can put in place penalties for false monitoring. And you can do that because you’ve got a small number of of actors again, right, if you wanted to go to the second problem is a lot of the smallholder farmers are subsistence farmers or close to subsistence farmers. And subsistence farmers are calorie strippers. They stripped every calorie they can for heat and food out of the atmosphere. If you look at Haiti versus the Dominican Republic, down in the Caribbean, they’re the same Island.

Metta Spencer  

I’ve seen pictures, one half is brown, and the other half is green.

Michael Barnard  

And that’s because on one half, it is a very poor country… and they’ve got subsistence farmers everywhere and they strip every calorie including cutting down every tree… take heat, water for their family to be able to cook food so they don’t die of food poisoning. And so we’ve got to move all the smallholder farmers, the subsistence farmers off the land, we can’t prevent them from being on the land, we have to move more to agribusiness, which really sounds is contra-indicated, counterintuitive. But we’ve got we actually have to give those subsistence farmers, those people in poverty who are stripping calories, something other to do — our universal basic income, guaranteed jobs, something so they stop stripping the calories and that land can go fallow again. And that’s the third part is a lot of the land that we have under agriculture today is wasted. The land that’s in agribusiness, land is highly productive. The Green Revolution is almost entirely an agribusiness revolution. And that’s been a massive advantage over the past 100 years. And smallholder farmers, a lot of them are subsistence farmers and…  they have very poor yields per acre. And it’s hard to change them because they speak 500 languages, and they’ve got to feed their families and they’ve got to feed them today. Right And so, avoiding that means giving them something else to do and giving them sufficient, enabling them to feed their families and moving to agribusiness

Metta Spencer  

Um, let me say where, I mean you are setting me up to have such fights with all kinds of people. All my friends are going to say no, the way to go is to try to give land back to small, small farmers etc. Okay, but the other thing is, I have done a couple of shows with a guy named Tom Newmark, who is the head of something called The Carbon Underground. He has a farm in Costa Rica, kind of a demonstration project of how to do it well. It’s a wonderful… speaker, I mean, a very fun, fun person to talk to, but a very smart. And some of my, the people of my, my community, my network who watch this, say, well, that guy is a greenwasher, because his argument was very similar what you’re saying, He says he works with going out and trying to, to deal with government officials, but also corporate leaders in the food industry. Because he says they are the people who are going to make the difference, they can put pressure on the people actually on the ground… digging holes, or whatever. And that they, they know that we’re ruining the soil. And we don’t have that many crops left in the soil before we’re all going to starve to death from depleted soil. And so, they are aware the corporate industry and food… that they’re going to have to make some changes. So, they’re the ones they’re the place to go to get some changes made. And so, you know, my friends say no, this guy is giving a justification for this corporate world [to]… take power away from ordinary citizens, the good yeoman farmer was a backbone of democracy… Jeffersonian theory, and so on. All of that is, you know, he’s undermining that. So, you’re just making a situation where I have to walk in and talk to these people. I don’t know, for it.

Michael Barnard  

Couple of last couple of things about this, I’m going to talk directly to this point, in 1800 95% of everybody were involved in agriculture directly, or in secondary roles related to food distribution. Today, it’s 3%. Those… 92% of people are people who go to universities, make computers, who do financial… banking stuff, who are the knowledge workers and who have leisure to create art. You know, the art of history is the art of the 1%. The art of today is the art of the 80%. The agricultural revolution has been tremendously valuable in terms of enabling us to flower as a species, well beyond the people who have to get up at dawn before dawn, you know, 11 months of the year, and do crop and animal husbandry-related activities. That’s the efficiency of agribusiness in corporate scale. And to be clear, we’re keeping ahead of a Malthusian problem. Because of agribusiness and the green revolution, a study came out recently, I read a couple of weeks ago, basically… we have achieved since in the past 40 years a very substantial increase in efficiency per acre. Because of the agribusiness and green revolution stuff we’re doing — we’ve lost 21% of that to climate change disruptions. Right. And so, if we had not been moving the needle in terms of efficiency per acre, we would have gone backwards in terms of efficiency per acre. In the past 40 years, we’ve taken a billion people out of abject poverty, into what by our standards is still abject poverty, but they’re actually able to make ends meet much more readily. We’re taking people being out of the position of being calorie strippers, and making them able to have more leverage jobs with a higher value for them and their families. We’re helping people stop living nasty, brutish, and short lives. But we only have 10 minutes left, and I do want to talk about treats. So, let’s talk about the best possible carbon capture technology. Let’s imagine we’re in 2100. We’ve got this nanotechnology, right. It’s a small compact thing, and you throw it on the ground. And… if there’s water and soil, what it does is it absorbs some of the water and it starts to grow. And it shoots a solar panel above ground to capture the sun and it shoots little pipes down under the ground, builds them underground to get to water, and it builds it up and then it builds out these pipes to give a scaffold to keep the solar panels erect and it drives the solar panels upwards to maximize the amount of light that hits the solar panels. And it has this structure that it builds and it harvests carbon from the atmosphere to make the pipes and to make the solar panels and to make the mass That it grows up and this amazing nanotechnology device. We there’s a hundred of different varieties of them that exist in different temperature and water and sunlight conditions, that some are better on slope, some are better on the flat, some are better for… some types of, you know, there’s some natural predators who like to eat these things. And we have those today. They’re called trees. This amazing nanotechnology, which is vastly beyond anything we can do. That self-assembles itself into a store of carbon for long term sequestration. All we have to do is plant seeds and seedlings

Metta Spencer  

and water them and weed them. And —

Michael Barnard  

No, no, no, no, no, you just have to plant them and step back, because they’ll figure out how to survive because that’s what they do. You have to plant the right type of tree for the right area, you have to plant multiple types of tree in an area. And you have to leave them alone for a long time. But if you leave them alone, they just turn into a mature forest. Life survives. And so if we take this as an example, let’s talk about scaling. I planted 12,000 trees with a friend on 25 acres in one weekend.

Metta Spencer  

Okay, how’d you do that?

Michael Barnard  

Well, he rented a tractor and it had a trailer behind it and the trailer opened up the soil. And we had racks of seedlings and I sat on the trailer. And I reached over and I put a seeding down into that opened up piece of soil between my legs. And then it closed it up behind me and we just kept driving all over his farm planting black walnut, and pine and beech and oak, and maple. We planted 12,000 seedlings — two guys, two days. And we drank a fair amount of Creemore beer in the evenings.

Metta Spencer  

It sounds like your truck was compacting the

Michael Barnard  

soil. Oh, not saying it’s perfect. But the nice thing about a tree is that it breaks through those pans. Because it’s turned, it’s taken the soil and it turned it in it took a farm area a quarter acre 25 acres, a quarter section, I think it amounts to north of Creemore, south of Collingwood, we turned into a forest. I took a picture of that forest the last time I was up in that neck of the woods, and I sent it to my friend who now lives in Australia, Rob Large, I’ll have to tell him and his wife who… studies parasites that I meant that I dropped their names. But that’s two people, two days 12,000 trees — and 12,000 trees means oh, a tree consumed after about 40 years a ton of CO2. So that’s 12,000 trees. Oh, that’s 12,000 tonnes of CO2. This is a big part of my own personal carbon offset that in my climate action, that and living in a tiny apartment and low carbon electricity and not owning a car because I live downtown so I can walk and bike everywhere. But that’s scalable. Now let’s talk scalability. Let’s talk about the numbers, a study out of Switzerland did a machine learning study of the world — we’re gonna get into big numbers again, Metta, my apologies but some of your friends some of your guests are going to be some of your viewers must be numbers nerd so I’m gonna give them some numbers. We used to have 

Metta Spencer  

I met these Zurich people… the trillion trees people.

Michael Barnard  

Yeah, I spoken to the lead researcher on that I was part of a study I did… I published a big report. Last year, Paul Werbos wrote the foreword for it… we’re talking on machine learning, as applied to clean technology and climate solutions. So that was one of my big reports from last year. But the Swiss guys, you know, there’s three or four big numbers here. First of all, we used to have 6 trillion trees on the face of the earth. Now we only have 3 trillion trees, we’ve cut half of them down. And a lot of them were cut down by those subsistence farmers. Because they stripped the calories off the land. Right? It’s just we were locusts. As if human beings were locusts. We cannot… avoid being locusts with intelligent practices and the right stuff. So we need the machine learning people said, the Swiss people said, if we planted a trillion trees, we’d get a bunch of carbon benefit. That’s about equivalent to changing agriculture. We could get like a couple of decades worth of emissions captured. Before we lose ground again, right? And once again, that turns into the glomalin pathway, it exists in forests as well. Once we have that long term, carbon 150-year, long term permanent carbon sequestration, as well. But a trillion trees is a lot. I recently ran the numbers for Pakistan, because I did.

Metta Spencer  

I also you got to really plant 2 trillion because half of them are going to die.

Michael Barnard  

Oh, but the other nice thing about forests is once you plant a tree, once you plant a tree, it’ll plant other trees by itself. Right? And so you don’t really have to plant 2 trillion because you plant a trillion in the right way.

Metta Spencer  

No, you’re not gonna get more than half of them survive.

Michael Barnard  

Oh, the point is, but the point is, if you plant a trillion, another trillion will get planted by the trees themselves, they’ll just be a year or two behind.

Metta Spencer  

Except that that those that trillion trees have to survive and plant the next trillion. And half of them don’t.

Michael Barnard  

I know, I’m not disagreeing point is that, you know, if we get to a trillion trees, we’ve got a win.

Metta Spencer  

Oh, sure. Yeah, it’s certainly better than nothing.

Michael Barnard  

Now, Pakistan has made a commitment to plant a billion trees.

Metta Spencer  

Now, look… a trillion is 1000 billion. So, a lot of countries go around saying, oh, we’re gonna plant a billion trees. Hmm. Well, you and 1000 other countries, we might get there. But well,

Michael Barnard  

This is the point of scaling. Right? So how do we scale? So, what is the scale for Pakistan? So, I did a calculation, I said, let’s assume that we have three different numbers that we would apply in some blend to figure out how many trees a country should plant. And so, I said, maybe the gross domestic product, compared to the gross domestic product of the world, that would be a good ratio. Right. And Pakistan has 216 billion annual GDP, and there’s about … 80 trillion annual GDP. And so that one says they should probably plant two and a half billion trees. So, a billion trees aren’t far off. From a population perspective, there’s a different ratio. And from a landmass perspective, there’s a different ratio, you kind of add those up. So, they should be planting somewhere between three and 10 times as many trees given those ratios, now, but the bigger the country, you know, and the more GDP, probably the more trees they should plant. Right. And so, Canada with our massive wheat fields, and our, you know, on… some semi arable land, we got a lot of trees up there already. But we clear-cut a lot of trees, too. I’ve walked through, clear-cuts are nasty places. All that non arable land in … Haiti, which is currently stripped for calories, that brown land, we should be planting with trees, we should you know, it, I worked it out, it would take about 8% of the total landmass of the earth to plant a trillion trees. It’s only 8%. That gives a lot of trees. Right. So that’s not bad.

Metta Spencer  

Yeah, but a lot of this, that 8% is in places like the top of a mountain where there are no roads, and you can’t get people in to do the planning and say, oh, but that’s trivial now,

Michael Barnard  

because now we have tree planting drones. Got these industrials, yeah.

Metta Spencer  

But I looked into this tree planting drones and they’re not nearly as good as I would wish. I was so excited when I heard about tree planting drones. But their survival rate, it varies from what kind of tree you’re talking about. But I’ve been the people I’ve talked to have actually done some studies of it. First of all, the companies won’t tell you what their mortality rate is. They won’t even they don’t even want to talk to me. But the people who’ve done some research, also don’t want to talk about it, because it’s not very good. The results 

Michael Barnard  

Point so do we care if we plant 10 seedlings to get three to survive? Personally, I don’t because seedlings are cheap. We can over-plant to your point. Similarly, in let’s just take China because we only got like a minute left. So, let’s take China. As of the last as of 2016. China had been planting trees as an intentional practice for 26 years. It started in 1990. At that point, they planted an area of the size of France with 38 billion trees. So, they were almost 4% of the way to the trillion trees by themselves. And then, in 2019, they actually diverted 60,000 soldiers from the Red Army to plant trees. So, China, and once again, this is a calorie-stripping story during the, you know, mistakes of the Mao era, they did. They devastated the landscape. They devastated the environment. And now they’re making up for that. And in part, they’re doing it for the secondary benefits of trees. They’re doing it to reduce air pollution, because trees make the air clean, and they’re beautiful. And they provide natural place, habitat for all sorts of things. And they provide durable wood products for engineered hardwood construction. And for other durable wood products, which sequesters the CO2 permanently in a different way than the glomalin pathway. So, we can plant a trillion trees, we can plant 2 trillion trees, we can we have the technology, we can do this, we can change agriculture. And those are scalable, effective ways that actually have marvelous secondary benefits for humanity. But the entire mechanical and chemical stuff. It’s just nowhere near a tree or a field.

Metta Spencer  

You know, I’m 1,000% in favor of everything you’re saying. And, you know, I I’ve seen some issues about how hard it will be to do. But I really do think this is the way to go. And my concern is with people who say, we don’t really need to do that all we really need to do is reduce carbon emissions. And we and I say, Ah, it’s way past the point where carbon emission reduction will do the job, we have to do we have to actually take stuff out of the air. And the trees and agriculture are easily the most promising way to do it

Michael Barnard  

For sure is and the last thing I’ll say on this is that I did a read a study recently of case studies of policy globally, seven case studies of country policy, and all those case studies, almost all of them except for oil producing countries, were focused on biological pathways for carbon sequestration. The world’s governments get this we get a lot of PR from the fossil fuel industry of a carbon capture. The average citizen doesn’t get this but government policy advisors do get this.

Metta Spencer  

Well, these little videos going to help move the public opinion that this has been not only fun, but very, very enlightening. Yeah, you’ve brightened my day for sure.

Michael Barnard  

Thanks so much.

T230. Is the Arctic Sending Us A Message?

T230. Is the Arctic Sending Us A Message?

Project Save the World Podcast / Talk Show Episode Number: 230
Panelists: Craig Smith
Host: Metta Spencer

Date Aired:  21 April 2021
Date Transcribed and Verified:  15 May 2021
Transcription: Otter.ai
Transcription Review and Edits: David Millar

Metta Spencer  

Hi, I’m Metta Spencer. And I tell you, I’m looking out there at snow and here it is April the 21st. And I am shivering, but I’m not gonna shoot her long because we’re going to go to sunny California, where my friend Craig Smith is living on a house, which is about to vacate. Hello, Craig.

Craig Smith  

Morning. Hi, nice to see you.

Metta Spencer  

Yeah, well, this is going to be… maybe the last time I see this particular room, I see in the background that again, that great big poster about your book “Reaching Net Zero”. And I see up on top of the cabinet, your hard-hat days when you were in charge of a construction company. Right. So, I wanted it on but you wouldn’t you wouldn’t put it on for the camera. Anyway, this is the last year of your current series of talks, about that book that you and Bill Fletcher did together. I think he’s going to be with us next week. For another conversation, then we’ll let you have a little holiday for a few weeks as you move from Northern California from Southern California to even more Southern California. Right. You’re moving from Santa Barbara… moving northward. You

Craig Smith  

— a little bit north, right. Yeah.

Metta Spencer  

to Santa Barbara from Newport Beach, is that that’s the town where Balboa Island is located right? That’s correct in the Newport… Okay, so I hope you have a good, a good move. Anyway, here we go. We’re going to talk about the Arctic today. And as I just mentioned, of all the things that give me nightmares now, the Arctic. So, the topic of our conversation, is the Arctic sending us a message. And I want to know, is it yes, or no? Is that the answer?

Craig Smith  

Well, I believe it is. And I’m basing that on lots of new reports coming out in the last year or so about with data on ice melting trends in the Arctic and in Greenland and Antarctic. So, I’d like to discuss with you today that topic and try to answer the question is the Arctic sending us a message? So, what are what are some of the signs so you know, obviously, as we see less sea ice, there are stories — one of the dramatic ones I remember from 2019 was the situation where polar bears with less sea ice… that impacts the polar bears’ hunting because they use the sea ice to catch seals, their primary game — so starving polar bears were desperate and they invaded Russian town. Novaya Zemlya and the Re –.

Metta Spencer  

That’s wow, you know, that’s the island where they tested the nuclear weapons up in the Arctic.

Craig Smith  

Big bomb yes it was. And so, there were reports where there were about 50 bears, they broke into houses, in some cases, they attacked people, they were starving. So, they went up to whatever they could find. That continues to be a problem, the sea ice disappearances affecting wildlife. The other thing is that NASA’s recent temperature measurements of the planet by satellites show that the Arctic is warming more than twice as fast as the average of the globe… something called — the scientists referred to it as — Arctic amplification. And I’m going to come back to that in a minute. And we’ll discuss that a little bit later. But also, as you’ve noted, I think in your previous programs, … that permafrost is melting. And permafrost melting is an ominous sign, it means that the methane can be released and is being released. And that’s a very critical factor for future global warming. So why is this happening today? Or now I should say? Well, weather systems transport heat from the latitude and southern latitudes to the north. The heat is moved by ocean currents and air currents. And the poles warm, and dissipate this heat into… space. So, they lose heat at the poles, while in the middle latitudes, we gain it. And as that temperature differential changes, in other words, as opposed to getting warmer, then we have a situation where the currents of both sea and air are modified. And that can cause a number of different changes, very complex meteorology, affecting the jet streams. But it’s causing things that we’re all beginning to notice. Now, droughts in one place, too much rain and other places flooding, heat waves, wildfires, due in part to droughts, and in other parts to release of methane from melting of permafrost, which then causes fires. So, these are all things that are involved in the mechanism that end up in melting ice. Now, there’s a typical pattern of ice build- up in the Arctic. And it follows a pattern: it goes up in the winter, and then it goes down in the summer. So, in other words, around February or March, near the end of the winter, the ice mass area is at its maximum. By August, it’s at a minimum because of melting. So, there’ve been very careful satellite measurements beginning in 1979, of this phenomenon of the total area of the ice. And satellites provide means to make multiple passes and determine the area that is covered with ice. So going back to the first year, such measurements in the winner, there was 16, almost 17 million square kilometers of ice. By the summer of the following year, that had decreased to just about 7 million square kilometers. So about 10 million square kilometers of ice became uncovered. Now fast forward to now this winter, which we just ended, we had 14.8 million square kilometers, so it was about 2 million less than when the measurement started in 1979. And the low, which would have been last summer, 2020, was 3.7 million square kilometers. So now compared to when these measurements first began, we’re seeing only half as much ice left covered or land covered with ice left during the summer period. So dropped from about 7 down to 3.7. Last year. And the low point actually was in 2020… as low as 3.4 million square kilometers. So that is a trend that’s continuing. It’s gone up and down a little bit, but the overall picture, it’s going down. Now sea ice, you know it’s white or light gray and its surface reflects the sun back the energy from the sun back into space. About 80% of the incoming energy is reflected back. But as that melts, less ice is present, the dark surface of the sea absorbs that energy and causes more warming. And naturally, it causes more melting of ice, which leads to more warming. So, we’re concerned that this decrease in sea ice is a positive-feedback effect. It could lead to what scientists refer to as a “tipping point” and what we’ve discussed in the past… suddenly things no longer are linear, they start changing and the effects become more rapid, and potentially irreversible. Now another concern is that sea ice is getting younger. What that means is that the sea ice survives three or four years, builds up in and its height, and it’s thicker and more less likely to melt. But now the ice is thinner, doesn’t have a chance to build more, and so it’s more likely to melt. Other signs of warming. Again, you know about the opening of the Northwest Passage. These days is summer, during the summer months, large vessels can traverse that, they don’t have to go around to the Panama Canal. There are some consequences of that which are kind of intriguing from your broader perspectives which have to do with world peace. And that is a big Russian… military buildup in that area. What do they want to do with that? Maybe that’s a defensive measure, or maybe they intend to control shipping… who knows what the Russians could be up to with that? Alaska’s frozen rivers and other parts of the frozen North are starting to flow earlier, a very clear sign things are changing. Another important effect is that the loss of sea ice leads to more damage on the coast: coastal erosion. So, we have villages in Alaska, that are now not inhabitable. The sea ice acts as a buffer to protect the coast against the onslaught of winter storms. With that changing, some of these villages become uninhabitable, and occupants have to relocate to higher grounds. There are also effects on fisheries, changing of fish migration patterns with warming water. The consequences of melting permafrost are several folds. One is observed in many parts of Siberia today — in Siberia and towns in the far north — is subsidence. Roads subsiding, building foundations collapsing, buildings collapsing or becoming uninhabitable. And, and then as I mentioned earlier, some forest fires were triggered by leaking methane. So, concerning subsidence, Svalbard is a group of islands north of the Arctic Circle halfway between Norway and the North Pole. And the largest town there has a population of about 2100 people. It’s a good example, where the arctic temperatures increase now about 4 degrees centigrade versus the lower parts of the globe… 1.1-1.2 degrees centigrade. Now the permafrost is melting, and you’re seeing landslides, seeing buildings collapsing or being undermined, … foundations. Remember reading even… they had to relocate the cemetery, really. So, these are more examples that demonstrate that the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the world. And the other thing about that, is that more precipitation is falling as rain rather than snow. So, the Svalbard estimates, the last two months of winter, they have two months less than they had in the past…m and you might think that would be nice, but on the other hand, it has other consequences. So, another thing with satellites. Scientists have satellite observations during the same period and mathematical models. calculate the total mass of ice that’s lost. It’s a huge number. It’s so huge that it’s very hard to relate it to anything. 28 trillion tons of metric tons of life is lost since 1979. Actually, that’s in 2017. So, there’s, it’s ongoing. But what’s significant about that is where is this happening? So Arctic sea ice is about almost… 8 trillion metric tons. So that would be roughly a fourth of the total Antarctic ice shelf…. Glaciers mountain glaciers are in the same league, about 6 trillion metric tons. That’s from glaciers all over the world, the retreat of glaciers that we’ve seen all over the world. And the Greenland ice sheet is about half of… that amount (compared to the Arctic or Antarctic), about 4 trillion tonnes. And then the Antarctic… ice sheet is smaller, only about 2 1/2 trillion metric tons. But that rate of loss has increased by about 50-60%… since the 1990s, so in 30 years. And it’s continuing. And the estimate is that, from that melting occurred, that’s occurred today, we’ve seen about 1.4 inches of sea level rise. Now, you’re gonna have to remember that the primary effect on rising sea levels is when the ice that’s supported on land, melts… and adds to the level of the sea. Floating sea ice doesn’t have a significant effect. But it does have a small effect, people oftentimes forget the fact that ice has a less a lesser density than sea water, otherwise, it wouldn’t flow. And so, when it melts and becomes water, it’s, it’s an effect, a denser *layer…. And so, there is a minor effect of floating ice as well…  

Metta Spencer  

When the water in the ice melts, it’s freshwater. And this is denser than salt water…?

Craig Smith  

Less, less dense. So, the otherwise it wouldn’t float. 

Metta Spencer

Freshwater stays on the top.

Craig Smith

Correct. 

Metta Spencer

Okay, that is connected to this. I don’t understand it too well, but I watched, I watched several of… Paul Beckwith’s videos. He’s a guy in Ottawa that I know a little bit and, and he’s… a meteorologist and climatologist. And he talks a lot about this overturn of the current because when the fresh water comes out of the Arctic sea into the Atlantic, it comes to where there’s, there’s normally an overturn of the water… that water sort of goes from top to bottom there [thermohaline circulation]. And that has something to do with the rest of the currents. Whether it’s the you know, the [Gulf Stream] current that warms Europe, what do you call it? That would have something to do with the addition of more fresh water from the melting ice…

Craig Smith  

That changes the salinity. Obviously, more fresh water, right dilutes the salt water. So, the changes the salinity, and I don’t, I’m not at all an expert on ocean currents at all. I just like to sail on top. But the currents, the ocean currents are extremely complex. You have levels at one height in the ocean going north [Gulf Stream] and down below much deeper —

Metta Spencer  

That’s the word I was trying to find… Gulf Stream… a good example. Finally, into me, guys, oh –.

Craig Smith  

They’re affected by salinity, by temperature by other phenomena too — it’s just very, very complicated, but it can apparently happen very quickly, when you get to a certain threshold, there can be almost within a year or two, or 5-10 years, a very quick change of ocean currents… it’s kind of like a ratchet effect. It’s irreversible, or at least would be very, very hard to reverse… very hard to change. Yeah, yeah. So that you’re you want to stay away from that, that point where, you know, and but nobody exactly knows what the point is, or how we’re close to it. Yeah. I was talking with… Paul Beckwith about that, because he’s pretty good at explaining it. But I need to have him slow down —

Metta Spencer  

Go on? 

Craig Smith  

Well, I was just gonna say that, that concern has been expressed by other people much more knowledgeable than me. And he may be one of them. That we don’t want to see the Gulf Stream, suddenly reverse direction, that would have a lot of various effects on Europe, you know, it would radically change the temperature of Europe, because of the Gulf Stream –Temperatures are moderated in the northern parts of the globe — carrying warm water. So, if it suddenly reversed, I don’t know if anybody can even predict what all the… consequences would be, but there would certainly be a lot of concern. And, and like you say, if it reversed, it’s not going to get back to the normal very quickly, because we have all this greenhouse gas inventory in the atmosphere. And till we do something about that, we’re not likely to be able to change things. 

Metta Spencer  

Well, another prediction he does make is about what you mentioned, the albedo effect of the of the melting sea ice. Yeah, he says that, he would predict that within 10 years, and maybe as soon as within four years, there’ll be no summer sea ice in the Arctic. And that, of course, and then, you know, that really has ramifications. Because as you say, there’s a tipping point where the dark black ocean water absorbs the heat more and more. And then we have to talk about clathrates. But go on, because I’m waiting for you to talk about methane at the bottom of the ocean. That’s scaring me most. Yeah.

Craig Smith  

Yes, and you’re right about that the clathrates keeping methane trapped in that chemical, physical form. There’s a huge inventory. If it’s released, even a small part of it, it’s gonna have a very severe effect on global warming. So, the other question that people began to ask more, more frequently. Now. I don’t want to add to your worries, but I know you and I are both worried about this is, are we actually at a tipping point in some of these phenomena, and the one that comes to mind is Greenland. Like… the Arctic, Greenland’s ice melts in the summer and is rebuilt in the winter… primarily by snow fall. But now, you know, there’s increasing evidence that the winter renewal of the Greenland ice is not sufficient. It’s less than what melts in the summer and this if this goes on and on, then eventually there will be no ice in Greenland. So, for a number of years now… the summer melt has exceeded what’s replaced by winter snowfall, and graphs you’ve seen in some videos, I’ve done some programs that were quite interesting, where scientists went on the Greenland ice sheets and looked at the crevices and undermining of the ice… under-ice rivers flowing out the sea. And that, in turn, accelerating the melting of the Greenland ice. Deep canyons are covered with ice becoming hidden rivers underneath them, from the melting and undercutting of the ice. So that’s something else we certainly need to be keeping an eye on and if we… didn’t have any other incentive to take start taking action on curtailing greenhouse gases, I mean, I think that would be enough right there. Maybe on that negative note?

Metta Spencer  

Okay, I think I’m even more pessimistic than you are. And that’s hard to be. Maybe you’re not exactly, you know, ball of laughter and fun thinking about these matters. So, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t say you’re exuberant about the future of the Arctic. But I think I’m even more scared, because I really do not believe that reducing emissions is still sufficient to do the job. If we cut emissions instantly… a huge amount, it’s not going to be enough. And that, you know, I’ve spent most of my adulthood working against nuclear weapons, because I have felt that the threat of nuclear weapons is the most serious… danger… confronting humankind. And now, I think it is not as serious as this problem of the Arctic, I think that even nuclear weapons are not as serious because the severity of the problem, I think, has to be measured by… how bad the consequences would be of a disaster, multiplied by the probability of the disaster, and the length of time we have to fix it. Okay, all those need to go in the equation. Well, the disaster of having the melting sea ice, or … a huge amount of methane in the Arctic is… just as bad if not worse, than the threat of nuclear war. Because the number of people who be killed, it could be an extinction event. You get that they say that, you know, something like .6 degrees, they expected an increase of about .6 degrees for… just the melting of the sea ice. And that can happen within a few years, we’re talking four or five years. So, an event that’s that quick, multiplied by the severity of the thing. And the fact that is so fast, we do not have enough time to, you know, whatever solution there might be, we’re not going to have enough time to do it. To prevent that, that’s what’s scary to me. And because when you get 2.6 degrees additional heat on the planet, globally, within four or five years, that is enough, it’s gonna run… the rest of it all, you know, you’re going to really release the rest of the methane because it’s all going to melt slower, but it’s going to come out and it’ll be irreversible. So that is, to me, the scariest thing that I can imagine and we just didn’t have enough time to fix it. So… the permafrost on land is going slower than this the undersea methane. And these clathrates, which are kind of crystals of methane and hydrogen, and water…  are down in the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, especially. Now, they’re apparently the Arctic Ocean is generally so deep that by the time this stuff… releases, it gets absorbed in the water. So, you don’t, it doesn’t get out for a long time, it will eventually get out in a long time. But… on the Siberian shelf, the East Siberian sea is a very shallow shelf of the… Russian landmass… Siberian landmass. So that’s only 30 or 40 meters deep. And it doesn’t have time to get absorbed… So that stuff is coming up. And I saw images of a ship going through this stuff. And it was like, you know, when you’re in a plane is going through clouds. I mean, it’s, you look out the window, and all you see is white cloud, you know? Well, it was like that. It was exactly like that, on this ocean. The ship was plowing through miles and miles or hundreds of miles, I don’t know, of methane boiling up out of the bottom of the ocean. 

Craig Smith  

It only wanted a match.

Metta Spencer  

That’s right, exactly. It would blow up. And, but the thing is, you know how it is so extensive, and it’s coming up out of this bottom of the ocean, apparently the bottom of the ocean. There are clathrates down there, and it is sort of held down by… permafrost that came from the last ice ages, and it slid down there. And it’s, it’s like a lid holding some of it down. But there are holes in it. And it’s, it’s escaping through the holes. And even the permafrost contains methane itself. So, you have this stuff coming up. And it is really dangerous. And the worst is under the Laptev Sea… There’s a huge reservoir of methane, like a just an enormous concentration of methane. And there’s way more than … is in the atmosphere or on land or anything in the in the in the world. So, it needs to be kept down. And they think that this thing could blow like a giant explosion. And it could happen instantly. And the people that I’ve seen, I’ve interviewed Peter Wadhams, and he’s going to be on another one of my shows in about two weeks. And Peter Wadhams is the maybe the leading you know, he’s among the top leading people studying the Arctic for the last 40 years. He goes there constantly. And he has a book called farewell to ice, which is about this, the melting of the sea ice and the probability that this is going to come out that it is coming out. But there’s a woman as a Russian woman, who leads a regular expedition to the Siberian sea. Every year, she goes through this area where there’s these plumes of, and yeah, plumes of methane coming out. And she is very apprehensive about the possibility of an explosive event of a huge proportion, which would be catastrophic beyond belief. It would be an extinction event, I’m afraid, most likely. So, I was asking Peter Wadhams, what, what are the possible remedies? I don’t see who are here we have time if you’re if you’re, if the timeline is that, that urgent, but if it’s, you know, if we had the time, what would we do about it? Well, nobody’s quite sure. And there are various things that they propose, like he said, No, of course, for once, if you just burn this stuff, it’s not good, because you sure don’t want that much to add that much CO2, but methane, if you burn, it turns into CO2. So, burn it, rather than allow it to go into the atmosphere, because 28 times as bad a greenhouse gas as CO2. So, if nothing else, just burn it. And that could be done. I gather, if you go through, and I don’t think I’ve wanted the job doing it. It’s dangerous… but I don’t know, I think it can be done. But the other thing is he says fracking, you could you could go down and do the sideways drilling, you know, they can drop. So, if they could drill into some of these concentrated… pockets of methane if they knew where it was, and pull it out… You could use it, then you could, it’s a better fuel than some of the other fuels. 

Craig Smith  

It’s basically natural gas.

Metta Spencer  

Yeah, it is. It is a fossil fuel and it would have bad consequences but it’d be better than… what we normally use a lot anyway. So, but that would be, you know, a real big operation, having fracking in that in that area. But the thing that he didn’t want to talk about is, because I asked him before we did this interview, I said, Can I ask you about this project to use iron salt, iron salt aerosols? Because I’d read about it. And he said, … let’s not talk about it yet — because, he said, we don’t know enough. And… if it doesn’t work, you don’t want to necessarily get people hoping. But I did. I have read and there is… a link to it. If I can find it at the end of the show, I’ll put it on the page where I sometimes put references to things. So, people can go look at this thing about iron salt. aerosols, where you would spray iron salts into the atmosphere, or maybe on the ground too, or something, on the ice anyway, it combines with chlorine. I don’t understand chemistry worth a hoot. But it then would create a combination that would then take some of this stuff down to the bottom of the ocean. Again, I’m not, don’t believe what I just said, because it’s all probably wrong… I don’t understand the chemistry. But it looked like iron salts could be the most. And it’s and that kind of stuff is very available. And salt is everywhere, it is not scarce at all. And you could spray it around, and that could be a solution. So, I got in touch with some people, there’s a man named [Renaud K. de Richter] in Montpellier, France, a university there. And he’s going to be on my talk show eventually, if I can find another person to join him. But he’s one of the two people who authored this proposal for the iron vault salts, and the… website they have is like a PowerPoint slideshow… with plenty of evidence about their reason to believe that this would be a pretty feasible thing to do, I think you could run around spraying quite a bit of the stuff… and I believe it would have a good effect. I think it’s not that different from the whole principle (well, it is different, but there, but there are also people who believe in and I’m sure you’ve read about this) of putting iron filings in the ocean to create phytoplankton, which then are going to absorb CO2 and go to the bottom of the ocean. To carbon. Yeah. So, I don’t know how I don’t understand the chemistry of any of it. But I really want to know more about this iron salt thing, because it except for those two things that I don’t know, of, of anything else that could be proposed as a realistic solution to this problem.

Craig Smith  

Yeah, well, I, I don’t know a whole lot about these different concepts that go under the broad name of geoengineering, I would be very hesitant to implement one on a broad scale, without having some kind of structured pilot project there, you could actually see what the efficiency is, or effectiveness. And then what are the side effects? I mean, you’re tinkering with forces, that we really don’t know —

Metta Spencer  

And I think they would agree with you. I think any of the geoengineers would say, well, we would be apprehensive about doing it — except, look at the alternative. If we think that the alternative is something like an extinction event where life forms, not just human but everything else, gets destroyed, then you’ve got to do something. Now!

Craig Smith  

I don’t know you have to do something. But I thought it was very interesting what you said about drilling. as, for example, fracking, oh, well, this would be a different type of drilling. Early in my career, we did some work for Philips Petroleum on their offshore oil platforms in the North Sea. So, I spent a number of weeks out in the North Sea on the Philips platform is fascinating that they’re drilling under very deep conditions. And the platform I was staying on, actually supported 50 wells, as I recall. So, they had 50 wells from this one platform down and slanting off in all different areas.

Metta Spencer  

Oh, so from one platform, they go out in different directions. Right.

Craig Smith  

So… this is like an interesting concept, then the oil companies certainly have the expertise to go to the Siberian. What did you call that?

Metta Spencer  

East Siberian Sea…

Craig Smith  

Yeah, they could go there. They could set up some platforms and slant drill and collect the methane… if it’s in a form or it would flow on — me, I don’t know, no chemistry or that. But that technology is certainly known and proven and in shallow water they could do. It would be even easier. And they could, that might be something that oil companies would be interested in, because it would give them a stake in the future that they’re not going to have otherwise by —

Metta Spencer  

Well, now then. But you know, there’s also the problem of politics in Russia, because that part of the ocean is mostly… defined as part of Russia because of the shelf of the Russian is that’s where they say Russia ends where that shows them 

Craig Smith  

their economic zone.

Metta Spencer  

That’s right. So, we would it would have to be with the permission of or with the cooperation of the Russians, maybe they would want to do it themselves. Who knows? But the problem with the Russians is they’re in denial. You know, they aren’t I don’t think they out say there’s nothing to it, officially. I mean, they are part of the IPCC, aren’t they? But they’re not. I don’t know whether. But the Russians, I’ve talked to, with certainly with the exception of this woman, I haven’t talked to her. But I’ve seen her talk, and she certainly is very pessimistic. And but most of the Russians, I know, more or less poopoo it, you know, they talk about global warming as if well, it might even be an advantage. Because look at all that we could get. There was an article in The New York Times, it’s stupid, New York Times people, how could they possibly have printed a thing like that, but they have an article about… six weeks or so ago, where they talk about… Russia is going to benefit from global warming, because look at all that land, that’s going to be no longer frozen, and they can… raise crops there. And it’s huge amount of land… that’s true. But imagine what really, do they listen to what’s going to happen when that permafrost melts? I mean, it’s catastrophe. And they don’t even mention that, you know!

Craig Smith  

So, one thing that the Russians do like to do is they like to sell gas to Germany and Europe. And… they finished that second pipeline [Nord Stream] now. Right. So, I don’t know what the logistics would be to connect Siberia and methane fields, to their natural gas pipeline system. But there really might be a market potential there. Who knows? I don’t know.

Metta Spencer  

Yeah, I think could be a market. And maybe, but give it enough time. But how long it takes decades to build a pipeline at least doesn’t it? How long does it take?

Craig Smith  

takes a while. Yeah. I don’t know where the closest connection point would be. I can’t visualize

Metta Spencer  

and the distance from Europe. I mean, I don’t know what maybe there’s another place they could… get rid of it. I don’t know. But

Craig Smith  

I just have been so impressed with what companies did in the North Sea. I mean, this is like 40 years ago, or 30 years ago. I mean, they have underseas pipelines, they have pumping stations underwater. And… they move the oil; I forget which way it went. They moved the oil to I think…  from the North Sea to England and the natural gas went to Europe, something that was —

Metta Spencer  

Doesn’t Norway have most of that or I don’t know, I know that Norway has a lot, money from Norway and the UK. 

Craig Smith  

Yeah. Basically, when we went there, we went to flew to Norway. Then we flew from Norway out onto the platform, that helicopter is quite an experience that I will never forget. tell you one little story one of my engineers asked the pilot he said we had to put on these survival suits to get in the helicopter. And so, he asked the pilot is as you guys ever have crashes and the guy says “yeah, we had a few” and, and he says, “well do these survival suits work?”. And the pilot hesitated for many looked at my, my engineer. He said, “Well, you know, we don’t really know because everybody was killed on impact.” He says that as we’re boarding the helicopter getting ready to take off. Anyway, we had no problem. But the other thing that was fascinating to me was, once a week we had a lifeboat drill. And… on top of the platform… four lifeboat stations… on each side and you had your assigned station. And these boats were in close. So, they were designed… to be lowered into the water in the event of an accident. And one person was stationed inside the boat with an axe. So, the lowering system wasn’t where he chopped this rope and the boat dropped in the ocean from about 60 feet up. And they were supposedly able to cruise through burning oil on the water. But thank God we never had any experience like that, anyway —

Metta Spencer  

The platform? Is that similar to this… Deep Horizon thing? Or whatever was in the in the Gulf of Mexico? Same kind of facility? Is that right?

Craig Smith  

Yeah, exactly. Now,

Metta Spencer  

… in the Mexican thing did they also have slanted drills that they were going in different directions? Or what? No. Wonder Yeah. Well,

Craig Smith  

yeah, it’s amazing how they do that. I don’t understand how they did it. But they, you know, they can go in different directions and know what they’re doing some,

Metta Spencer  

you know, environmentalists are just horrified at the idea of drilling in the Arctic. And I mean, I my instinct is the same as, as yours, that and geoengineering give me the creeps. But, you know, if you got to do it, some maybe, maybe, maybe that will be driven to it?

Craig Smith  

I don’t know. Well, yeah, I mentioned we need to stop emitting. And you’re right, it’s good. That’s gonna take, that’s a long-term solution. But I put stress on that right now. Because unless we get people woken up to the fact that we have to stop the emissions, we’re not going to get anything else done, in my opinion. But the sad thing about it would be — you recognize and why you’re concerned is — that we have this huge inventory of greenhouse gases up in the atmosphere. And even when we stop, if we stopped 100%, tomorrow, those gases are there. That’s more, “glass” in the greenhouse, and the temperatures are not gonna stop, not gonna fall instantly. In fact, they’re going to keep increasing for a while. And it’s going to take dozens, maybe 100 years before that gas is gone by natural causes. So, people say, well, we’ll suck it out… carbon capture. That’s all fine. But we don’t know how to do that today. We don’t know if we can do that today. We don’t know how many 1000 plants around the world that would take to do that. And how much energy it would take… trying to suck a very dilute substance out of the atmosphere is gonna take a lot of pumping power. And then what do you do with it, you got to store it underground somewhere. And our experience with storing things underground has not been 100% perfect. Anyway, you could lay awake nights worrying about it. And then people know you, you do worry about it, and I worry about it. Right. And again, more people committed. That’s the bottom line.

Metta Spencer  

Well… you don’t want to alarm people unless you have solutions. And I think… they’ll say, “Well, we know what to do, we have the solutions.” I don’t think the solutions you have are fast enough. And certainly, they’re not being adopted fast enough. And I think that there’s more needed that in terms of actually sucking it out of the atmosphere one way or another. I don’t have much faith in the economics or the feasibility of this “direct air capture”… by machines. But… I think the most promising… for reduction is major agricultural change. But… it’s not only for the sake of global warming, but because we’re not gonna have any food unless we do. The very thing that is needed to change to improve the quality of food production. And the amount of food that we’ll be able to keep on producing is exactly the same thing that will help us with global warming. So, putting more carbon into the soil is the way to go. And I talked to one guy my friends have one of my friends said, Well, he’s a greenwasher. Greenwashing is anybody who’s gives room for private enterprise to… who believes that private industry and so on can make a beneficial difference. So, I’m not predisposed to believe one or the other, I think I don’t see any reason why corporations couldn’t make a good contribution if they wanted to. So, I don’t rule that out. And this man, named Tom Newmark, is the head of something called “The Carbon Underground”. And he’s given a couple of talks for me … he understands the, the, the soil science of, of how these, they’re discovering more and more things about fungi. And, you know, things on the roots of plants, and how it all works. And that, that you can, you can do a hell of a lot more sequestering of carbon, by agriculture, if you know what you’re doing. And he has this carbon underground. The reason I brought it up is that he says, I said, well, who’s going to push farmers to change? You know, why, why do you expect farmers would make this very drastic change in the technology that they’ve always used. My grandfather was a farmer who plowed by, by hand, you know, until he got a John Deere tractor, which was a great day, you know, he can plow, but he was tearing up the soil, you know, and exposing all this carbon and releasing it to the atmosphere, and he didn’t know any better. But anyway, what this guy says is, yeah, farmers will change, because… big corporations now know that the handwriting is on the wall, they can’t keep on producing food from the, the soil that way, we’re ruining it. And then we have to do something to replenish the soil and restore it to the condition that it was in. So, you know, he says that these companies are the most powerful source of influence, to force farmers everywhere, to make some real changes in the technology of farming, and to do more. And, and I know that the French, about five years ago have a project called [4p1000.org]… 4 per 1000, … a small amount every year, their goal is to… increase the amount of carbon in the soil by that much. And then if that is done, there’s a, you know, very significant amount of, of influence that will be made on the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. So, again, that takes a while though, you know, all these things gonna take a while. And I don’t see how with the clathrates melting, these methyl hydrate things… melting in the Arctic… I don’t see there’s going to be enough time. And I think we got to do something like iron aerosol sprays or something that can be done quickly, and would have an immediate effect.

Craig Smith  

You said earlier that our recommendations in our book [“Getting to Zero”], we’re going … to help fast enough. And, and of course, Bill and I agree with that. And we I think I hope we made that clear in the book, we outline a very ambitious plan that could be done with current technology, that’s economic and all that. And by 2050, all we did was get back to where we were by 2020, or… 2000. But our point was, we need to… make a start. And, frankly, our hope was that by getting people to recognize it’s a problem, then it’s going to be easier to try to do some more far-reaching things. So basically, thank you, you’ve outlined what our next book should be, how do we do it fast? What do we do to have an immediate effect? You need to really start thinking about that but if we can’t get the world woken to the fact that this is a problem, I have to do something we won’t have any luck trying to sell faster approach because people don’t believe it’s a problem, though. Well,

Metta Spencer  

Yeah. And getting people conscious… I lie awake at night thinking about how to break into this system of denial. You know how to break that system of denial. And… I think we have to make people talk about things more. And it’s really hard because don’t people don’t want to think about it. Yeah. And people want to believe what they want to believe. So, they’ll listen to somebody who’s saying what they like to hear. And, and they’ll believe it and no evidence or rationality, I’m very I’m getting so old, you know, it’s showing, I tell you I’m getting to be very, very cranky and old and mean, I, I don’t I don’t trust people anymore. Because I see these people making such stupid decisions. And I think, what’s wrong? 

Craig Smith  

What’s wrong?

Metta Spencer  

I have to go here in a moment. But I thank you for all that you do. And you should not be discouraged. And I think your voice is a light in the wilderness and bless you for doing what you do. And if we had 1000 more people like you, we’d have probably more people waking up to this, but keep on and don’t get discouraged. What is wrong? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And, and, and it’s so the whole thing is, you have to blame it on human beings, because too many of us… yeah, there we go. Isn’t this an update to our little conversation, Craig, we’ve had these little visits for months now? And I’ve enjoyed it so much. But I must say, this is not the way to end it. Think of something cheerful to say, Well, thank you, you too. And you say you’re gonna get ready for your next book. Well, okay. I’ll pre order a copy today.

Craig Smith  

All right, take care…

Metta Spencer  

take care of your health and have a great, a lot of fun moving out. All right. All right. You take care. Bye Bye. Take care. Bye.