Reversing Climate Change

If we don’t learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it. Yet when it comes to reducing carbon in the atmosphere, the current solutions fail to recognize what has worked in the past. So, what can we learn from the pollution reduction success stories in our history? What can those successes tell us about the shortcomings of existing strategies like cap-and-trade and carbon taxes? Why do our curre...

John Elkington is most comfortable when he is least comfortable, most engaged when he is making it up as he goes along. A pioneer in working with businesses toward sustainable development, John has been a proponent of the triple bottom line for 40-plus years, making both his corporate clients and other environmentalists uncomfortable and earning a reputation as the ‘grit in the corporate oyster.’

Mark Stevenson is a self-proclaimed ‘reluctant futurist’ and author of the bestsellers An Optimist’s Tour of the Future and We Do Things Differently. One of the world’s most respected thinkers, Mark supports a diverse mix of clients including government agencies, NGOs, corporations and arts organizations in becoming future literate and adapting their cultures and strategy to face questions around...

What if we could develop a currency backed by the living health of ecosystems? A sort of ‘life currency’ with a robust verification system that would incentivize practices that promote ecological health? What if we could use technology to regain the capacity to understand the consequences of our day-to-day decisions and act for the health of planet Earth? And what would it take to build this infra...

Today, Keith sits down with Ross and Christophe to share his path to the study of soil carbon sequestration. Keith explains what happens when we convert land for agriculture and what we can do to recover the lost carbon inventory. He offers insight into COMET-Farm, discussing how the tool’s models quantify changes in soil carbon and greenhouse gas emissions.

Today, Klaus joins Ross, Christophe and Paul to offer his feedback on the Nori whitepaper. Klaus explains why he likes the idea of breaking the carbon offset model and offering compensation based on actual carbon removed. He also shares his concerns around Nori’s customers, the verification challenges they face, and the issue of permanency.

The construction industry will never reach carbon zero. And while we have made great strides in the way of operational emissions, we have only begun to think about reducing the embodied carbon emissions associated with the manufacturing, transport and construction of the necessary building materials. In most cases, it takes 250 years of operation to match the emissions related to the building proc...

Today, Joe sits down with Ross, Christophe and Paul to explain how seasteading facilitates innovation and Blue Frontiers’ role in establishing such floating islands. Joe discusses the benefits of seasteading for coastal and island nations impacted by climate change and Buckminster Fuller’s concept of pollution as ‘resources we’re not using.’ They talk about what’s next for Blue Frontiers, includin...

Initiatives designed to reverse climate change generally lack funding. Yet there are investors with large pools of money who are increasingly interested in the space. How do we bridge that gap and promote impact investing? How do we support regenerative agriculture projects that will restore the soil and reduce the amount of carbon in our atmosphere?

Today, Amanda sits down with Ross and Christophe to share the vision of the Buckminster Fuller Institute and its namesake’s legacy as an early environmentalist, humanitarian, and techno-optimist with a global vision of the future. They discuss how Nori fits into that vision as part of the ‘design science revolution’ and how the transparency of the blockchain aligns with Fuller’s ideas.

Reversing climate change goes beyond the math and science of reducing the greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. It’s also about economic justice, social equity, and increasing the standard of living for all people across the planet. That’s the beauty of the approach presented in Drawdown. Not only does the suite of solutions tackle climate change, its co-benefits uncover a path forward that address...

Carbon is not bad, in and of itself. The problem is that it’s currently in the wrong place. The Center for Carbon Removal (CCR) is on a mission to accelerate the development of scalable, sustainable, economically-viable carbon removal solutions that capture excess carbon from the atmosphere and put it back where it belongs—in soil, building materials and underground geologic formations. The Center...

Dr. Friedmann joins Ross and Christophe to define his role as a carbon wrangler and why it’s important, walking us through the current climate math and sharing his insight on reframing carbon in the atmosphere as a resource to be mined. They discuss the best approach to inspiring progress around climate change, the fundamentals of carbon capture and storage, and the differences among offsets, onse...

Economics isn’t all about money. It’s about human action, decisions and choices. In fact, economists and environmentalists could be natural allies in solving climate change. Unfortunately, a good number of environmentalists take a hardline stance on geoengineering, arguing that any further human manipulation of the environment is a bad idea. But with CO2 levels reaching more than 400 PPM, mitigati...

Mark Herrema is the Co-Founder and CEO of Newlight Technologies, an advanced biotechnology company using carbon capture to produce high-performance polymers that replace oil-based materials. Newlight was founded on the idea that carbon could be used as a resource, and today it operates the world’s first commercial-scale greenhouse gas-to-AirCarbon manufacturing facilities, producing bioplastics us...

Today David joins Ross and Christophe to explain why civilizations that degrade their soil don’t last. We discuss the troubling numbers around soil degradation and loss and the three simple farming practices that would restore our soil. David walks us through the residual benefits of regenerative farming and the factors that inhibit widespread adoption.

Andrew Himes is a partner at Carbon Innovations, currently working with the University of Washington’s Carbon Smart Building Initiative. The project seeks to transform the built environment from an existential threat to a net carbon sink that absorbs more than a billion tons of CO2 each year by converting captured carbon into useful building products and creating market demand for carbon capture.

Professor Dowlatabadi joins Ross and Christophe to share his frustration with the lack of evidence-based policy employed by governments as well as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change temperature targets. He offers his insight on geoengineering, explaining why he is so confident in its inevitability. We debate the ‘unobtainable goals’ of Elon Musk and compare Nori with Professor Dowlataba...

When it comes to climate change, the mining industry is typically seen as a ‘bad guy,’ depleting the Earth’s natural resources and emitting CO2 in the process. So you might be astounded to learn that carbon can actually be captured and stored using the waste produced in the mining process. Indeed the potential exists for scaling up this carbon capture process to remove billions of tons of CO2 per...

Ross and Christophe are joined by Dr. Klaus Lackner, the director of ASU’s Center for Negative Carbon Emissions (CNCE) and professor at the School of Sustainable Engineering. The CNCE is known for advancing carbon management technologies to capture carbon dioxide directly from the air in an outdoor operating environment. Today Klaus explains how he conceived of the windmill-sized structures that c...

Today Ross and Christophe are speaking with corporate environmental attorney and blockchain enthusiast Mike Denby of Arizona Public Service, the largest power company in Arizona. APS is a vertically-integrated utility, both generating and selling power to its customers. They discuss how blockchain technology might be utilized in the energy sector and how the conservative business culture of the ut...

In a world where ideology informs decision-making and policy-makers have little understanding of what is plausible when it comes to negative emissions technology, challenging doesn’t even begin to describe the task of reversing climate change. In this top-down approach, a small number of academics, activists and politicians are making the decisions for 7.5 billion people—and spending a lot of time...

Carbon sequestration is an integral part of reversing climate change. The question becomes, where can we permanently store all of that CO2? One possibility lies in the basalt rock under the ocean floor. In fact, Earth science researchers at Columbia University have a project in the works that could scale up to capture millions of tons of carbon dioxide annually.

Today Ross and Christophe are joined by Propagate Co-Founders Jeremy Kaufman and Ethan Steinberg to discuss the fundamentals of agroforestry and how the Propagate model works to provide farmers with capital for planting trees. They walk us through the process, explaining how an analysis of crops appropriate to the bioregion and the farmer’s goals work together to determine the specific tree crop a...

Today, Ross and Christophe are joined by Sophia Mendelsohn, Head of Sustainability at JetBlue to discuss the incentive to offset carbon emissions at the personal, company, and global levels. They speak to how the industry is addressing climate change via the CORSIA deal and why limiting carbon exposure and liability makes good business sense from a financial perspective.