July 22 was the hottest day on Earth on record. Emissions from burning fossil fuels trap heat in the atmosphere, contributing to global climate change. In his new book, ” Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere,” Rob Jackson looks at ways to reduce and remove climate pollution.
Jackson is a climate scientist and chair of the Global Carbon Project, which quantifies and identifies the sources of greenhouse gas emissions. The first part of the book focuses on personal choices, businesses, and policies that will cut emissions, and the second half examines restoring the atmosphere to pre-industrial levels. The Allegheny Front’s Kara Holsopple talked with him about it.
Listen to the interview:
Kara Holsopple: You write that you once thought that removing greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere, called drawdown, took away from the critical focus on reducing or even ending emissions. What changed your mind about that?
Rob Jackson: Lost decades? We’ve simply run out of time. There are a trillion extra tons of carbon dioxide floating around in our air. Most of that carbon dioxide will still be there in thousands of years warming the Earth. The lack of action has simply filled the atmosphere like a bathtub for pollutants. It’s one reason I focus on methane so much in this book. Methane is the only powerful greenhouse gas for which we could restore the air within a lifetime. If we had a magic wand and could end emissions from agriculture and fossil fuel use and landfills, we would see the atmosphere return to normal within a decade or so. Doing that would save us half a degree C of warming. There’s no other greenhouse gas that provides such a powerful lever for action today.
Kara Holsopple: I’ve heard this so many times as an environmental reporter. Can you explain what scientists mean when they say methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide?
Rob Jackson: Methane is fiery. It’s powerful. It is 90 times stronger at warming the planet than carbon dioxide is within a few decades of its release. So ton for ton, it’s a much stronger warming agent than carbon dioxide. It doesn’t last as long in the atmosphere as CO2, but while it’s in the air, it’s a dangerous greenhouse gas.
Kara Holsopple: I don’t think a lot of people, or a lot of our listeners really have heard a lot about drawdown. What are some feasible methane drawdown methods or technologies?
Rob Jackson: There isn’t a commercially available methane drawdown or methane removal technology in place today. It’s as much of a concept and an idea as it is a reality. It’s a field that I’m trying to help found because I think we will need it.
But my reluctance to discuss drawdown technologies is that it’s always cheaper and easier to keep a greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere than it is to pull it from the atmosphere once it spreads throughout the world. It’s like pulling a needle from a haystack over and over again. It costs more energy. It costs more money. We need to focus on keeping them out of the atmosphere. But then I believe we will have to apply some removal technologies. They’re coming into play for carbon dioxide. There’s a glimmer of hope for methane.
Kara Holsopple: What about carbon dioxide? Can you give me an example of that?
Rob Jackson: I chronicle a couple of examples in the book. One is a company in Iceland that’s taking carbon dioxide pollution that comes out of the ground from geothermal and essentially making seltzer water with it and pumping that seltzer water back underground. And the carbon dioxide in that water precipitates out almost like stalactites and stalagmites in a cave. So it stays underground for centuries, potentially, and perhaps permanently.
Another is when a company produces ethanol for biofuels. They ferment corn in the same way that people ferment sugars to make beer. Yeast is the microbe that does the fermenting, to produce ethanol for our cars. Lots of carbon dioxide is emitted to the atmosphere as the yeast chews away on the sugars that the corn contains. Companies like Archer Daniels Midland in my book, rather than letting that carbon dioxide pollution go to the air, are capturing it and pumping it back underground a mile or so to keep it out of the air and to store it permanently.
Those technologies work. They are more expensive. I think some of them are necessary, but we don’t talk enough about who will pay for the extra removal and storage when there’s not a price on carbon dioxide pollution. Then why should a company pay to do that? If there isn’t a price or a regulatory mandate to keep the gas out of the air? If the polluter doesn’t pay, then any climate solution will be more expensive than free.
Rob Jackson is the Chair of the Global Carbon Project and a professor of earth science at Stanford University.
Kara Holsopple: You were talking about ethanol and capturing carbon, putting it in the ground. A lot of people have raised objections to that or don’t think it really is workable at scale. What do you say to that?
Rob Jackson: Ethanol, in my opinion, is largely an agricultural subsidy in the United States. Having said that, done well, it can produce a lower carbon intensity, a lower carbon pollution fuel. I think we in the environmental community are trained to say no, everybody has a favorite technology and a climate solution that they don’t like. For some people, it’s no nuclear. For other people, it’s no carbon capture and storage. For still other people, it’s no new transmission lines.
We need to be better about saying yes and accepting climate technologies and solutions that are not our personal favorites. Biofuels and ethanol is on that list for me. It’s not perfect. Done badly, it can be almost worse than doing nothing. But done well, it can help reduce emissions.
Kara Holsopple: You talked to a lot of inspiring people in the book, a lot of interesting people. Who did you talk to that made you feel like we can turn this around? We can restore the atmosphere?
Rob Jackson: I talked to so many inspiring people and fascinating people. I talked to the CEO of the first steel company making, fossil-free steel. That conversation was inspiring because when I visited their plant, I literally held two kinds of steel, two kinds of ores in my hand. One of them is fossil-free, and one of them was made with coal. That one industry releases 10% of the carbon dioxide emissions worldwide. So that’s like holding a one-tenth solution to climate change in my hand. And that was truly moving.
But I met other people, too, working to restore peatland. I loved my trip to Finland, where I discussed peatland and wetland restoration with a person named Tero Mustonen, who runs a group called Snowchange. They are putting ecosystems back together, in this case, a damaged peatland. What was interesting about that conversation is that they weren’t trying to create a replica of an ecosystem that was there 100 years ago. They’re trying to make something that will function today and still be alive in 100 years as the Earth warms. So it’s not so much about recreating a very specific combination of habitats and species. It’s about making do with the best that we can right now. And I feel like that’s a lesson for climate change. The world will never be the same in any of our lifetimes. No climate solution is perfect. We need to do the best we can with the tools that we have and create some new tools. We need to make compromises.
Kara Holsopple: What would you like readers to do after they close your book or read the last digital page?
Rob Jackson: I would like readers to have hope that we can solve this problem. My first homework assignment in every class is for students to go home and find things that are better today than they were 50 years ago. That list is long. It’s cleaner air and cleaner water. Global poverty has been cut to a large extent despite the injustices that remain. I like students to see, acknowledge and celebrate past successes. It makes future successes like climate more likely.
I think optimism and hope are muscles we need to exercise. I want readers to see that we can solve this problem. More than that, I want them to be motivated to change their own lives and to work to change the system so that we price pollution and have clean energy that will give us all cleaner air and cleaner water in our lives.
Rob Jackson is the Chair of the Global Carbon Project and a professor of earth science at Stanford University. He’s the author of the new book “Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere.”
