Given deeply polarized domestic politics and insufficient international commitment to the Paris Accord, can we reduce greenhouse gas emissions and avert some of the worst effects of climate change before it's too late? It's an elemental question that warrants despair, yes, but plenty of hope too. Political scientist Leigh Raymond, a 2021-22 CASBS fellow, explores the implicated issues through a conversation about "Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere" with its author, sustainability scientist Rob Jackson. Jackson launched the book project as a 2019-20 CASBS fellow.
Given deeply polarized domestic politics and insufficient international commitment to the Paris Accord, can we reduce greenhouse gas emissions and avert some of the worst effects of climate change before it's too late? It's an elemental question that warrants despair, yes, but plenty of hope too. Political scientist Leigh Raymond, a 2021-22 CASBS fellow, explores the implicated issues through a conversation about "Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere" with its author, sustainability scientist Rob Jackson. Jackson launched the book project as a 2019-20 CASBS fellow.
ROB JACKSON: Faculty page | Stanford profile | CASBS profile | Jackson on Google Scholar | Global Carbon Project |
Publisher page for Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere (Simon & Schuster, 2024)
Media related to Into the Clear Blue Sky: KQED Forum | The Times | Scientific American | Aeon | Wired | Times Literary Supplement | The Conversation | Chemical & Engineering News | Civil Eats | more Scientific American | Literary Hub | Heatmap | Environmental Health News | Orion | Fast Company | Inside Climate News | The Wall Street Journal | Atmos | ACS Publications |
LEIGH RAYMOND: Faculty page | on Google Scholar |
Publisher page for Reclaiming the Atmospheric Commons: The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and a New Model of Emissions Trading (MIT Press, 2016) | 2017 book award announcement |
"What Climate Policies do Americans Want from Their Legislatures?" Good Authority (July 5, 2022)
"Building Support for Carbon Pricing - Lessons from Cap-and-trade Policies," Energy Policy 134 (2019)
"Framing Market-Based Versus Regulatory Climate Policies: A Comparative Analysis," Review of Policy Research (2022)
Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered.
It's among the elemental questions of our time. Can we restore the atmosphere enough to keep the Earth habitable? The 2015 Paris Climate Accord seeks to keep the rise in average global surface temperature below 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels.
To achieve this, global emissions need to be cut by roughly 50% by 2030 and net zero by 2050. But as you've likely heard and read, commitments and implementation thus far have been, well, not close and not good. 2024 was the hottest year on record, with a global average temperature above that dreaded 1.5 degrees C threshold.
Your pessimism is justified, but so too is optimism. And today on Human Centered, you'll hear reasons for both as we discuss the book Into the Clear Blue Sky, The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere, with its author, Rob Jackson. One of the most respected and cited climate scientists in the world, Jackson is the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Provostial Professor at Stanford University's Doar School of Sustainability, Chair of the Global Carbon Project, and a member of the CASBS Board of Directors
He launched work on the book as a 2019-20 CASBS Fellow. Into the Clear Blue Sky was named one of the eight best science books of 2024 by the Times and was among Scientific American's most recommended books of the year. You'll find a host of links related to the book in the episode notes.
Joining Rob in conversation is Leigh Raymond, a political scientist who is the Gund Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of Vermont and was a 2021-22 CASBS Fellow. Among other things, Raymond is author of Reclaiming the Atmospheric Commons, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and a New Model of Emissions Trading. It won the 2017 Linton Keith Caldwell Award for Best Book in Environmental Politics from the American Political Science Association.
As you're about to hear, Leigh expertly integrates insights from his own work into discussion of some of the core topics and themes of Rob's book. These include issues related to individual consumption and habits, particularly in wealthier countries, how societal institutions, including governments at various levels, can generate durable policies, mandates and incentives for energy-intensive industries and agriculture, the removal of greenhouse gases through existing and emerging technologies, the necessity of fairness at the heart of these solutions, the thorny problem of pain for mitigation initiatives, and yes, surmounting are impossible to ignore polarized political environment in service of climate action. So can we restore the atmosphere and make it great again?
Let's listen and decide for ourselves.
Leigh Raymond: Well, Rob, I just really want to start by saying how much I enjoyed your book.
Rob Jackson: Thank you.
Leigh Raymond: It's a really great survey of a lot of really important topics, technology for sure, but also a lot of other really important elements of the climate crisis. So I want to congratulate you on, that's a really great accomplishment. Got me thinking a lot about some of these issues.
Yeah, and I want to start, I think, by really noting one of the things that stood out to me from the book, which is this thing that you say about there, really there are three things we need to do to avert the climate crisis. So personal consumption and emissions, energy intensive industries like steel and cement and aluminum, and then the sort of greenhouse gas removal from the air. I really admired that for its conciseness, but also its scope.
And I wanted to ask you to say just a little bit, how significant do you feel like each of those three things are in terms of really achieving one of the 1.5 or 2 degree C global warming targets that we're aspiring to?
Rob Jackson: Thanks for the question. Everyone has their three legged stool, and everyone's stool is a bit different. I think my first leg starts with what we can do individually, and we can't fix the climate problem individually, but we can do a lot.
And I start from the perspective that the world is deeply unequal today, where 1% of the global population in the rich world is responsible for half of all greenhouse gas emissions to go to the atmosphere. So when I think about reducing consumption individually, I think about using less to start with, consuming less, buying less, throwing less away.
And then whatever we use individually to choose low carbon and low polluting options. And so for electricity, that would be renewables over gas or coal wherever we can, EVs over electric vehicles over gasoline powered cars, things like that. And especially I look to homes. I do a lot of work in people's homes, measuring the pollution associated with fossil fuel use.
And a clean electricity home is a home with cleaner air to breathe, less asthma, the evidence shows, less cardiopulmonary disease. So, there's a lot we can do individually.
The second leg of my stool deals with institutions and governments. We can't fix heavy industries like steel, cement, and aluminum smelting on our own. Policies have to do that. Carbon pricing or incentives or regulatory mandates have to do that.
There's a place for the voluntary markets. I chronicle the first company in the world producing green steel in my book. And that green steel production was made possible by a carbon price of $65 a ton. One of carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere and two tons of CO2 produced for every ton of steel. So by saving that $130 fee, the company was able to replace coal with cleaner hydrogen.
And then on top of what institutions and governments can do, I have come to believe reluctantly that we will need to, what I call, hack the atmosphere. We will have to pull some greenhouse gases out of the air, particularly for long lived gasses like carbon dioxide that lasts, they last for thousands of years. And there's already a trillion tons swirling around up there that's not going anywhere. And to reduce the warming potential of that pool of gas, we'll have to pull some out at higher cost and more energy use than it would have taken to keep it out of the air to start with.
Leigh Raymond: That's great. So just to push you a little bit on this, would you say one of those is sort of more important than the other two? I know you want the stool metaphor, but how would you kind of weight them, right?
Rob Jackson: Yeah, the legs of the stool are not equally thick. The first and second legs are more important than the third leg. In my view, we want to rely on hacking the atmosphere as little as possible.
It's expensive, it's riskier. So we want to do everything we can individually. I think leg two, the institutional leg is probably the most important, whether that's regulation, carbon pricing, whatever the incentive or mandate is, that's where we really need the most. You've done a lot of work on this yourself.
Leigh Raymond: So as a political scientist, I love that answer. In it, I wanted to explore one other element of that, which you actually bring up in the book, which I really also appreciated. So you make a really persuasive argument about the need for policy, institutional reforms to bring about something like that Green Steel example.
I'm just curious to hear your thoughts about the role of government institutions, carbon price, on these individual behaviors, where I didn't see as much, right, you know, again, like you, I like to ride my bike. I also eat a vegetarian diet for all the reasons that you share. And I really appreciate the urging on personal consumption, but interested in your thoughts about whether that institutional piece also has an important role, right, for those personal sort of behavioral decisions and consumption decisions.
Rob Jackson: It certainly can. Some of those levers can be through incentives or government programs for individuals. I think honestly it depends on which population we're talking about.
Poor people in countries like the US can least afford to make the kinds of changes that you and I can make. Poor countries around the world can't do it either. So I feel like even at the individual level when we're talking about a broad population across the US., not just the wealthy population, those individuals will need help or incentives from the government to be able to make changes for clean energy.
So I don't think, and I do a lot of work in Bakersfield, California on greenhouse gas emissions from oil and gas fields, air quality in the city and in people's homes. Bakersfield is the city with the dirtiest air in the United States. And so you can't open a window in summer when it's 115 degrees outside and the air is polluted and get fresh air into your home. And those many people there whose homes are working are lower income neighborhoods and they can't fix, even individually they rent, they can't afford new appliances and they rent, they can't really change them themselves. So people will need help.
Leigh Raymond: Umm, well, let's move to your favorite topic, which is methane. So, and I really, I want to start by, by saying again, like many people who study climate, I've been always very focused on carbon, carbon dioxide, and not methane. And your book really made me question that decision. And it really made me want to ask you, so why do you feel like methane has been so overlooked?
Rob Jackson: I think it's been overlooked because carbon dioxide is the most important greenhouse gas. And I think until recently when people looked up and realized, you know, we're not going to make 15C or 2C thresholds by reducing carbon dioxide emissions. It's not a strong enough lever in the near term.
This is the reason why I have come to spend so much of my intellectual time on methane. It's the only greenhouse gas that you could see restored in the lifetime of anyone listening to this show, where if we could eliminate human emissions, which are responsible for two-thirds of all methane, the atmosphere would go back to pre-industrial levels within a few decades. Because methane is so potent and relatively short-lived, that decrease would save us half a degree C of warming, and we could realize that quite quickly and much faster than we could for carbon dioxide.
So I work in natural systems. I'm going to the Amazon this weekend to study emissions in Brazil and Peru, worried about evidence suggesting that those systems are starting to release more greenhouse gases now. I work in oil and gas fields, as I mentioned, and all through the built environment, I have a chapter on methane leakage from pipelines and things like that. So methane is the strongest lever we have to reduce peak temperatures over the next few decades.
Leigh Raymond: Yeah, and I hope that message gets out there. I think that's an important message that does get a little bit, I think, overlooked sometimes. So your discussion about methane, and especially both those two harrowing chapters, the one about detecting all of these methane leaks underground in Washington, DC, and then also auditing people's homes and noting how much really just health risks they're experiencing from all the other emissions coming from their natural gas stoves, and how really these appliances were never designed to be run in a house without a flu that vents them the same way we do with a furnace or a hot water heater.
That really got me thinking about some things I've noticed in my own work, which is that when we talk about climate, we often have to be more persuasive, talk about things that are more immediate, sort of tangible benefits for people, like co-pollutants, which ironically we call co-pollutants. But for many other people, they're the pollutants, right? And CO2 is the co-pollutant, right?
Like really, I'm more concerned about my kid's asthma, or right, that I'm breathing benzene in my bedroom. So just curious about your thoughts about the power of that public health argument in getting people to move away from natural gas.
Rob Jackson: I think it's increasingly important, and I'm with you. You've written a lot about tangible benefits in beyond or in addition to climate and greenhouse gases in your Washington Post editorial recently, for instance. I think to reach a broad cross-section of people, we need arguments and tangible benefits beyond climate.
There are perhaps half the population in the United States whose eyes glaze over when you talk about greenhouse gases alone. When we can link it to health, everyone wants cleaner air and water for their children, for themselves, for the elderly. So I think health is a common denominator that bridges political party, age and many other factors.
So I work increasingly to understand and measure the health benefits. When we're working in homes, for instance, measuring methane emissions, we began to study NOx pollution. We did the first studies of benzene emitted by people's stoves, and they released dangerous levels. We measure concentrations indoors regularly that would prompt new stories when they're outdoors like in Colorado or in Los Angeles that have happened. And yet, we willingly accept this. You would never stand over the tailpipe of your car just breathing in the exhaust, and yet we willingly stand over a stove hour after hour, meal after meal, week after week, and breathe the same pollutants with no exhaust and no catalytic converter on our stove.
So we know that it harms people, but you can't see it, and it's very hard to convince people that it's important, but it is important. And a clean energy, clean electricity, stove and appliances make us healthier.
Leigh Raymond: And again, that's a great message, I think. And so it'll be great to see how that plays out going forward. I hope we'll hear more of that. I know there's been some activity around trying to promote building codes that phase out gas or at least discourage it. And there are also some obviously pretty important companies and interests that are not really wanting to take that on right now.
But it really does raise this just fascinating element about how do we talk about climate, I think. And that frequently the way we talk about climate, at least for a lot of audiences, is actually to not emphasize climate so much. So I really enjoyed that.
Rob Jackson: One of the guiding principles for me in writing this book was the notion of restoration. As imperfect as that is, we're used to thinking about restoring species and habitats. The Endangered Species Act requires us to restore endangered species, not just to keep them alive, but to restore them to health.
That's the legal mandate, the legal requirement. And I believe that that spirit applies to the atmosphere. I would love to see methane restored to pre-industrial levels in my lifetime. I'd love to see the climate benefits and health benefits of that. That's not likely, but that's my dream. And that's something that we could accomplish.
And I think the narrative of restoration provides an opportunity to reach people in a different way. This notion of sort of an intermediate step in fixing the atmosphere, putting it back to restoring it back to health, I think is an added way of reaching people that I hope resonates. So the notion of restoration is a central part of my book.
I opened the book with a chapter on the Sistine Chapel and the restoration of the painted sky there and use that as an analogy for the actual atmosphere. So restoration is something I think a lot about and I believe it applies to the atmosphere the same way it applies to peregrine falcons and bald eagles.
Leigh Raymond: Yeah, I also really appreciated your many comments about carbon pricing and that, you know, how difficult it is for a company like the company in, I'm going to get the country wrong, Denmark, that was making green steel.
Rob Jackson: It’s Sweden.
Leigh Raymond: Sweden, sorry.
Rob Jackson: SSAB is the company name.
Leigh Raymond: Who really said quite clearly, you know, there's no way it is a little more expensive, right, to make this, I'm going to call it sort of carbon neutral steel. And without substantial carbon priced, even the playing field, right, we would never be able to do this. As somebody who also has studied, right, carbon pricing and thinks it's a great tool, one that's actually gotten a fair amount of negative press, I would note, in the last five or 10 years, and has a growing number of critics.
I would really like that analysis, but wanted to ask are there other ways, right, that you came across or that come to mind? I think many policy scholars are advocating much more now for more of a government investment approach, right? So what we really should be doing is investing in R&D or investing in other ways or infrastructure, right, to allow for these new technologies to become adopted rather than just only working with that kind of price mechanism, which has its own political controversies and other limitations.
So just curious about, you know, the Inflation Reduction Act had actually very little in the way of carbon pricing, but clearly was going to do a lot to reduce emissions. So just wondering your thoughts about that.
Rob Jackson: I think in the United States, we like incentives. We like carrots instead of sticks. And that's typically what we use. They're easier to get through through Congress.
There was a recent paper that some European scientists did. They looked at 50 years of climate policies. And what they concluded was that carrots didn't really work that well long term. They weren't very sticky. And the only thing that worked well long term over decadal time scales was some sort of price or other other mandate. That was their conclusion, looking at climate policy across many countries.
And the Swedish Steel example is a nice one, I think, because there's an activation energy to redoing a technology. And the carbon price, the fee of $130 per ton of steel, was enough to get them over that activation energy. But now that they've done it, they believe that the price will eventually be close to neutral. They believe that consumers and other companies will want green steel. So some companies and people might be willing to pay a small premium.
But they think that now that they've developed it, they're over that hump, eventually it will be as cheap as coal-based steel. And so it isn't just about maintaining that fee long term. It's about getting over that activation energy to give incentives for company to develop new technologies.
And I'm not an economist. I don't know what the alternatives are to carbon pricing. There's cap and trade, obviously, and other market-based approaches. But you could probably comment more about that than I.
Leigh Raymond: Yeah, I think much as the technologies are complex, the policy designs are also, right, complex. And my own opinion, right, I worry, as somebody who studied carbon pricing, basically pollution pricing for more than 20 years, I sort of have watched it go through all of its stages, from being thought of as the craziest idea ever, to really going through a period which I referred to as the fetishization of sort of carbon pricing or pollution pricing. And now we're having sort of the backlash, right?
And so I think just important for us to recognize that it has some tremendous advantages. But there are, you know, there are limitations to only raising sort of the cost of those emissions. There are some other problems that might still come up around new technology emergence. And I think public investment in infrastructure and in a charging network for electric vehicles, right? Another big part of the puzzle that we need to not leave behind, right? That just getting the price right won't solve some of those problems.
Rob Jackson: And we could do, I agree with you, and we could do a better job of monetizing some of the benefits, like the drop in air pollution and the human health benefits, which we don't typically include in that price. There are savings as well as the prices.
There's another thing that you've written about that I agree with strongly in your tangible benefits framework, and that's whether a carbon price or lever needs to be revenue neutral, whether the money that comes into the government needs to go back to people so that it's supported more.
And I think that's a key element of carbon pricing too. There aren't many people who believe that our governments are very efficient in spending our money. And so, there's strong push to have as much of that money go back to people as possible.
And I'm, as a fiscal conservative, I'm sympathetic with that idea. So there's an interesting mix of factors, tangible benefits, what we do with the revenue, and a whole host of things that are as much behavioral and social as technological.
Leigh Raymond: Thanks. And I think the key message in your book, and with the carbon pricing discussion with the green steel and other examples, is that, again, you talked about that institutional stool and that we really need a policy lever to allow some of these amazing new technologies to really get that foothold that they need, right? And I think that's an extremely important point.
Yeah, so I guess I wanted to come back to another really strong theme of the book that I appreciated, which is this regular discussion about kind of the need to put fairness and equity kind of at the heart of these different solutions. As much as the book is really a tour through a lot of really incredible technology, you keep coming back to that idea. Just love to hear you to talk a little bit more about some ways that you felt like you saw that happening, or you could imagine that happening, right, since it was such a central part. And I think, and I agree with you, it's such an important part of any successful effort to fight this problem.
Rob Jackson: Yeah, it's, it is very important to me, and I think it should be important to all of us that a world with climate solutions should be a more equitable world in terms of fair resource use. There shouldn't be what commonly called sacrifice zones, people who bear the brunt of pollution that, you know, allow people like me to live the lifestyle that I have. Countries, like I write about Pakistan in the book, countries that admit essentially zero or very little greenhouse gases, but pay, literally pay a higher price for flooding and climate extremes and aren't able to cope or adapt to those things.
So there's just so many layers of fairness in this individually. Poor people in rich countries like the United States, poor countries across the world, and just an opportunity to make the world a fair place. And I think to be sticky, climate solutions need to be fair to have long lasting support.
Leigh Raymond: Yeah. And I wanted to mention, I think, another element of fairness, which is part of what I think about a lot in politics that I also, I think came out in your book when you were talking about some of these drawdown technologies, right? Air capture and storage, which as you point out quite correctly in my own reading and research confirms this is very much mistrusted by many of these same communities that have seen themselves as kind of sacrifice zones, right? And this is just another way that they're going to be kind of left out of the conversation and therefore a grave risk, right? Of what's going to happen.
I wonder, I think a lot more these days, I find myself thinking about not just distributional sort of fairness, but really what the environmental justice movement has been calling for decades, sort of, recognition fairness, like we need to be a part of this conversation from the very beginning.
I wonder if how that how you would react to that as being a part of how if we're going to talk about these controversial technologies, a key part of making those have more of that stickiness, right, is including the potentially affected communities from the very beginning, right, in the discussions about how they operate, how they could be or should not be operated, right? And even where they're going to operate. So I'm just, yeah, interested in your thoughts about that.
Rob Jackson: Absolutely. And I agree with that. And I think in recent efforts to look at new carbon capture or carbon removal projects, there has been a concerted effort, including in the last, the Biden administration, to engage local communities from the beginning to co-develop and discuss the projects, their benefits, to have frank conversations about what those projects might be for jobs, for pollution.
Will there be benefits for the local communities? How many jobs might be produced? Are there ways that carbon removal and those technologies might actually reduce air pollution that they breathe, for instance?
But I think there is deep trust. And I'll be honest, I write about these technologies because I have reluctantly come to believe that we need them. But we shouldn't have to use them.
We have to use them because we've left ourselves no time for some gases like carbon dioxide. And I think we're naïve to believe that our kids or the next generation will pay $250 a ton to remove carbon dioxide from the air when we weren't willing to pay $25 a ton to keep it out of the air to start with. It's incredibly naïve.
And I think carbon removal exists on a very wobbly foundation, almost of a spreadsheet type analysis. We can think about it at very large scales because we don't have to put those plants in particular places. We don't have to talk about who pays a trillion tons a year to remove carbon from the atmosphere for almost no other benefit than trying to restore the atmosphere or bring peak temperatures down.
So I think we're naïve in our expectations of support for such technologies. But engaging communities, local communities, from the beginning is a key step to acceptance and success of those projects.
Leigh Raymond: Yeah, and I would even go so far as to say, again, from a politics perspective, I think– I'm sure this is not new to you– negative emissions were a thing that we had to come up with because, right, it was just clear after 20, 30 years of political failure, there was no way we were going to meet the sort of, right, the CO2 concentration goals that we needed to meet. Like, as those targets went just by the wayside, negotiators said, okay, well, so that's okay because we're going to come up with this way to pull carbon or methane out of the atmosphere. And so that's not a great way to start your sort of big project, right, for solving the problem is out of that kind of sense that we couldn't come to an agreement to do the much cheaper reductions. And I really appreciated that part of the book as well. But the needle in the haystack problem is a great way to talk about it.
Rob Jackson: And it's even harder for methane and not clear that we can do it for methane yet, but we're working on it. I once was quoted in the Washington Post calling carbon removal voodoo because, and that's how I felt at the time, because it was things that we couldn't do. And it was almost like we had an eraser, some sort of magic eraser that we could take greenhouse gases out of the air. And it still feels a little bit like voodoo sometimes, but I have come around a bit.
Leigh Raymond: Well, and if I may, your math is relentless, right? I mean, we simply have to do this. I forget the numbers, right? But you tell me, how many billions of tons of carbon do we really need to actually remove at this point to have any chance of getting even to a two degree target?
Rob Jackson: Probably hundreds of billions would be the estimates, them two, three, four hundred billions at a minimum. Or future generations may just choose to adapt instead, or do something else with their money. So I think because we think something has to be done, does not mean the people who will actually do it have to do it.
And I think we're unrealistic about several aspects. I was just visiting a company in San Francisco that does carbon removal, a good company, and their energetics were, to get into the numbers of the weeds a little bit, about 1,500 kilowatt hours per ton of CO2. So to remove a billion tons of carbon dioxide with their technology would be a billion and a half megawatts.
So that would be one billion ton one year. That's approximately five times California's retail electricity generation, for one ton. So that's the new, that's the level of new infrastructure that we're talking about. And it's not clear to me that that's going to happen. And especially, I keep coming back to it, who is going to pay for this?
Leigh Raymond: Of course, it's well known that the AI boom, right, is creating a tremendous demand, massive demand, for electricity that is especially green, right, renewable electricity. So, ironically, we literally don't have enough renewable electricity, so we have carbon storage projects moving because they can't get the renewable energy that they need at their original site, in part because of competition, right, from AI operations, which we need more sobering in terms of, right, the challenges in front of this this air removal technology. And yet, it seems like we're going to have to find some way to do that.
Rob Jackson: As a sustainability scientist, I think one of the most important questions that we don't ask is, can we use less energy? Because as energy keeps growing exponentially, we build new renewables and we mostly just keep everything else running because we need more and more energy. And the International Energy Agency, when they do projections, they have energy going up another two-thirds over the next few decades.
But when they do a zero emission scenario, they have global energy flattening or even decreasing slightly. So there's a radical inconsistency in what they think is going to happen and what needs to happen for us to reach a safe goals of 1.5, probably too late, or 2 degrees C. So we don't really talk about a scenario where we use less energy, carbon capture and storage, AI. It's very hard to envision a world where that happens, but we should talk more about it.
Leigh Raymond: That's a great point. And I'll come back to again my work on carbon pricing. The way that the most enduring carbon pricing policies have managed to stick around, I think, is also by offering that kind of investment.
So, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, right, the cap and trade program that I've written about in the northeastern US got around a lot of the political opposition to carbon pricing in terms of the notion of higher energy prices for consumers by saying, oh, no, no, no, but we're going to use this money to lower your energy usage. So, we're going to pay for energy efficiency. We're going to pay for you to install your own solar panels on your house.
These programs are very popular. When you told governors and state legislatures in those states that this program is going to give you money to give to your constituents to lower their energy usage and therefore energy bills, that was a really winning political formula. So I think you're on to a really critically important point, not just from the sustainability perspective but also really helpfully from the political perspective as well.
Rob Jackson: Yeah, that's a great example. I appreciate that.
Leigh Raymond: Well, I don't want to stop our conversation without talking about another really remarkable chapter in the book, which is really where you're spending time in Finland on that. I want to say restored, but that's really not the right term, right? Really the rewilded peat wetland. That stayed with me for a lot of reasons.
But I wanted to ask you about the comments of your host that we're not restoring this ecosystem to the way it used to be. That's just not possible, but we are creating a really valuable ecological community here, right? An amazing wetland and doing a lot of really important, good ecological work by getting away from the sense that we have to make it the way that it was.
That really got me thinking about climate change and some other books that we could talk about that have kind of made a similar argument, right? That we need to start thinking about how do we make sure that the world is one that is still one that is different, because it's going to be different, but still allows for a flourishing, right? For humans to flourish and also for other ecosystems to continue to do well in a warmer world.
So, your comment about the future generations got me thinking about that chapter. I wonder whether that insight from that restoration effort in Finland made you think about the ways we have to think about sort of climate mitigation kind of versus adaptation.
Rob Jackson: It does. And just as a brief background for listeners, it's a chapter in my book called Repeat. It's a peatland restoration project. And my host is a scientist, an advocate named Tero Mustinen. And Tero heads an international organization called Snow Change that unites people across the Arctic to fight climate change and advocate for action. And I think of Tero as Yoda.
And I also think of Robert Carrow, the famous biographer, he has this famous quote to himself of “shut up”. You know, when Tero is talking, I have to remind myself to shut up and let him talk, because whenever he keeps talking, I hear something that fascinates me.
And Tero is in charge of a very large restoration project in Finland. It started with a site that had been used for industrial peat mining, which is peat is the carbon that builds up over thousands of years when plants grow and then die in very cold systems and the material doesn't decompose. It just gets thicker and thicker. Peat is what we use in scotch, for example, to flavor scotch.
But why we care about peat from a climate standpoint is that there is as much carbon locked away in permafrost in the Arctic and boreal forest as is contained in the atmosphere. And the north is the place on earth that is warming the fastest. So if we put in motion warming that starts to liberate and thaw this permafrost and microbes chew it up, then we're putting in motion a very powerful positive reinforcing factor like melting ice that reinforces additional warming.
So taro has this wasteland. It's like a mortar like slag heap. And he and his colleagues look at this and think, what do we do? And the first thing they try and do is fix a short term problem. And the short term problem from that peat site was that because of all this exposed and damaged soil, when they had warm conditions and thunderstorms, a very, very acidic water would leach from the site into the river nearby and literally killed all the fish in the river. This is a fishing community. I would say it literally killed all the fish in the river two years in a row. And so they said, you know, stop this, enough was his word literally. And they sued the company doing it.
And the company lost the suit and eventually paid for a restoration project at that site to establish ponds that turned it into a wetland that covered essentially the exposed soil with water, turned it into a wetland. So Snow Change and Tarot take over this site, expand it, make it bigger to the point where it's now one of Finland's largest wetlands and home to thousands of bird species.
And Tarot talks about how I can't fix it. But he said it took 10,000 years to build this peatland and 25 years to destroy it. There's no putting it back. And he's trying and they are trying to create something that will last. But it's not trying to go back to something from the 1950s. They're asking what will survive long term and what can make do and last.
And I think that idea of rewilding applies to other things in our lives. We're not going to be able to keep things the way they are now or the way they were 20, 30, or 50 years ago. We're going to have to make do. And they are making do in Finland with a beautiful site.
Leigh Raymond: Yeah, which is inspiring. And we need inspiration like that, it feels to me.
Rob Jackson: Yeah, my favorite chapter in the book and my favorite, perhaps the favorite place that I visited. And he's traveled all over the Arctic documenting permafrost cliffs along the ocean collapsing and all kinds of things. So there's an element of catastrophe that he's witnessed to firsthand and that indigenous people see on a daily basis. And yet there's this undercurrent of hope that I hope underlies my book and was my motivation for undertaking this book.
Leigh Raymond: This is maybe like asking people what's their favorite child. So maybe this is unfair, but you cover an incredible array of just remarkable entrepreneurs and also remarkable technologies. So which one really stands out for you? Is either the most inspiring or just that really kind of caught your attention or was the most surprising to you or?
Rob Jackson: Yeah, great question. Maybe if I may turn the question around a little bit and let's talk about inspiring people as much as inspiring technologies. The technologies are great and they are inspiring and people are doing amazing things to solve climate problems.
But the key to all of those technologies are people, people who care, people who are smart. And I think the best thing about writing this book was to travel all over the world and meet people doing amazing things. And it includes CEOs from companies, the steel executive I mentioned, the team in Iceland turning carbon dioxide pollution into stone that stays underground permanently, keeps it out of the atmosphere or pulls it out of the atmosphere and stores it.
But it's people building social movements. I met Rev Yearwood, who was a co-founder of a group called the Hip Hop Caucus. And the Hip Hop Caucus, as you might expect, uses music to draw people together and to fight poverty and pollution. And in a way that we in the academic world don't really think about. So it's people like that.
I met Mats Karstrom in, also in Scandinavia. He's a high school teacher who has devoted 40 years of his life to saving forests. And he has saved forests that are as large as national parks in Finland. And he built coalitions of hunters and his high school students taught them to identify rare species. And by identifying rare species across these forests, he provided incentives, almost requirements, for the companies to stop cutting old growth forests, which they were still doing. So he used local people. He built local knowledge and just created this amazing network.
So those people and many, many others in the book, again, keep coming back to it, inspire me and give me hope to see everything that they're accomplishing.
Leigh Raymond: So how do we advance some of these solutions with the new US administration that is actually canceling government programs left and right, and literally trying to claw back government-appropriated funds for the Inflation Reduction Act for climate?
Rob Jackson: Right now, our policy is like a yo-yo or a ping-pong match where we incentivize climate action, walk away from it for four years, incentivize it again, walk away from it again. It's destructive for the environment. It's bad for business and bad for image too.
Leigh Raymond: Yeah, very much agree. And here I give a shout out to another colleague of mine, Barry Rabe, the University of Michigan, who really helped me very early going to think about this idea of policy durability. And really, so the key to this notion of providing these sort of tangible benefits to people when you enact a climate policy is that it is great insurance. It's a way to make those policies stick around. And Barry has also done a lot of really great work about what are the qualities that make a policy durable, which is a really helpful term.
Rob Jackson: That is a helpful term. I like that. Here's the policy durability, as long as there are good policies.
Leigh Raymond: Well, yes, there is a lot of work also on not so helpful policies that can be durable. And some of the same principles, unfortunately, but they're still important.
Rob Jackson: If I were to write the book now, I would be more forceful about policy durability. And as far as, I mean, it's, if I, when I get discouraged, if I, when I'm in a doom and gloom mood, which I do go through, of course, it's hard for me to see national climate action, the consensus for national climate action. I mean, I'm old enough to remember, I mean, most of the major pieces of environmental legislation in this country were bipartisan and are signed by Republican presidents. You know, George HW. Bush signed the Framework Convention on Climate Change. Reagan signed the Montreal Protocol. And even the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts go all the way back to the, you know, to the Nixon administration, which is a little before my time even. But so it didn't used to be that we had this, this dichotomy. I regret that more than anything else, the polarization of the environment.
I think literally the way we advance climate solutions is at the state level. We're a federalist country and states experiment with things. And, you know, we live in a fortunate to live in a state, California, that's relatively wealthy and that has some of the most progressive climate policies in the world and is the size of a, of a country around the world.
So we can get things done in California that then propagate to other states and even other countries around the world. So, so keep staying active locally. We can do, accomplish a lot at the city and county level. Reach codes, building codes, efficiency codes. So there's a lot we can do. It doesn't have to be, to be federal policy.
Leigh Raymond: So I think part of the answer, right, to the question of how, how does the message change in the current political climate, at least in the US. But I would say even more broadly, right? You know, right-wing populism has clearly targeted climate as sort of a bettenoir, right?
So we have the Yellow Vest, right, protests in France. We had very strong protests in Canada following kind of Doug Ford, another right-wing populist. So to me, the question there is, how do we make climate and climate communication not such an easy target for right-wing populists? Partly, we do that by being a lot more careful about the economic impacts. We don't sound cavalier about higher fuel prices and everybody can just ride their bike. That's not a good answer.
We need to talk much more seriously about how do we design our policies to really take care of a whole wide ranges of people who live in rural America and need to drive all the time to get wherever they're going to get to. You're not going to build a light rail system to get people around Montana, things like that.
But to me, the good news is that you can do that. And this is a really good reminder that we need to actually speak and have a more effective message and better policies. And to be honest, Rob, many of the technologies that you described in this book, electric motorcycles, right? Other sort of decentralized energy systems that could actually be a real boom to rural America, to the working class.
Rob Jackson: I just wanted an excuse to go test drive an electric motorcycle.
Leigh Raymond: Well, that was clear.
Rob Jackson: Let’s be honest.
Leigh Raymond: Yes, that was clear for me in the book. So I do think that it's sobering. And I also think we shouldn't draw too many conclusions from six weeks of history. And we should put it in the context of really that this is a bigger issue for the climate movement more broadly, right? Is it needs to not just be one sort of group of people talking to themselves. And I think there are people who are out there working on that problem. And clearly there are models and ways to get around that problem.
Rob Jackson: I stand by my answer that when the federal government is unresponsive to climate, we act at other scales and other levers. And those scales are our local cities, our counties, the states. There's a lot that we can accomplish in those things.
But there is an undercurrent of sort of despair that goes with seeing the changes of the current administration as a climate and environmental scientist. And one of the other interviewees in my book was a woman named Rosa Bromhoff who protested and chained herself to some gates at airports, eventually lost her job with the Department of Energy. And it was fascinating and a little disconcerting to be honest, the interview rose because those conversations force you to ask yourself, am I doing enough?
What more should I be doing? Is worrying about my grant like fiddling, just sort of wasting time when the world is potentially falling apart for climate? So should I, what should I be doing beyond what I do in my comfortable academic nook?
So those people like Rose push us to ask, what more? And I'm not ready to chain myself to a gate, but I appreciate that she and people are.
Leigh Raymond: Well, Rob, I really want to give credit to you in this book. It did two things that I didn't think would be possible in the same book. One, it made me even more worried about climate change, and yet it also made me more hopeful about the possibilities of really solving this problem. And I think that was a really important combination and not an easy one to pull off. So I thank you.
Rob Jackson: That’s a wonderful summary for me as an author. If I could accomplish two things in the book, those would be the two things to help people see why it's important and help people see what the benefits are to climate action and that we still have efficacy and that a clean energy and a climate-solved world is a healthier world for us from air and water quality and longevity and many other factors. So that's a great, that's really great to hear. Thank you. I'm, it's a difficult time for environmental scientists and, you know, I think maintaining optimism and hope is hard for us to do. I think it's important to practice hope.
My first homework assignment in every class I teach is for students to go home and find something that's better today than it was 50 years ago. You know, and that list is really quite long. It's air and water quality, a reduction in global poverty, many things.
But then there are specific regulatory decisions we made that have long lasting benefits. The phase out of leaded gasoline saves us trillions of dollars a year and has literally made us smarter by reducing lead levels in our kids' blood by, you know, 95 percent. The Montreal Protocol saves skin cancers and cataracts and a lot of warming. The greatest environmental agreement ever signed, in my opinion.
My personal favorite, the Clean Air Act, which, bipartisan Clean Air Act, I would say, which you know, saves hundreds of thousands of lives a year at a 30-fold return on investment. So we, every dollar we spend to reduce pollution, we get 30 back because we're more productive workers, we're healthier.
So those kinds of successes help us celebrate new successes. I hope we can add restoring the atmosphere and climate action to that list.
May I ask you a question? What makes you optimistic?
Leigh Raymond: One thing that makes me optimistic is a sense of humility. You don't have to be a social scientist for very long to understand that we are really, really not very good at predicting the future. So even as things become more and more discouraging, I do feel that we have seen other times in history where things have looked really discouraging, and we have found a way out. And I do think that, much like you said, I'm very inspired.
A number of my graduate students, young people who have been also very actively working on climate and the climate problem, studying youth movements and also even participating in them. That's, and that energy is, I think, going to be critical and dispositive in the long run, politically.
You just can't stop that, I think. So that gives me a lot of optimism, which feels like a cop-out for an old guy like me to say that. But I still, at the end of the day, the power of young people and as you point out, their sense of the unfairness of all this and their right sense of the need for real immediate action on this problem is something that I think is going to be very hard to stop.
The other thing that gives me optimism is for all the talk about how challenging climate politics are and they are, I feel like we have a lot of examples of governments at all levels who have really actually adopted and enacted and are implementing pretty ambitious climate policies. The key now is to find ways to sort of identify and take apart those innovations, right, and then make sure that they spread more broadly. So, I do find a lot of inspiration in policies like Reggie, but many others as well.
I think there's a lot of progress out there. There needs to be a great deal more, but I also think that there's some great models politically, right, for how to make progress on this problem.
Rob Jackson: And that progress needs to be sustained.
Leigh Raymond: Here we are at CASBS, right? And we were both lucky enough to have one-year fellowships, this amazing center where so many great people have done amazing work and where there's such a great intellectual community of such diverse people, right, different backgrounds and perspectives. Love to hear your thoughts about how, I saw it a little bit in the acknowledgments, but how CASBS, how did this book change from your time at CASBS? If it did, or did it strengthen some ideas that you had, or did you get some new ideas from your time here with the book, or inspiration that you want to share?
Rob Jackson: Yeah, sure. No, I do have some things to share. I think CASBS didn't change my book, it birthed my book. I did not come here to write a book. I'm a physical scientist. I use data to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I work on technological solutions, and I think behavior is the limiting step to climate action. And I came to CASBS to learn about behavior, to learn more about behavior. Writing books is not the currency of my realm in the science or engineering department.
So I came here. I had some ideas percolating. I do love to write, and I love to write poetry, and write op-eds a fair bit and things like that.
But I had this idea of restoration incubating in my head, and it was really being around everyone, talking about books all the time, the fact that CASBS brings agents here, and it sort of lowers the, again, it lowers the activation energy for getting into a project. So I did it because of my colleagues here, and because of the, sort of making it easier to think about doing one.
We had a great climate group while I was here. We had 15 or 20 of us that met regularly, and talked about all different aspects of climate, everything from technologies to migrations, to urban design, and so that group was inspiring to me too. And some of them will be here in the next few days for our climate conference back at CASBS. So the book, yeah, CASBS did more than change the book, it formed the book.
Leigh Raymond: So you and I are both trying to really expand our understanding of this very complicated problem of climate change. Is there something you've read in the last year or two about climate that you feel like everybody really needs to read or at least you would really recommend to the listeners?
Rob Jackson: A few things about climate and maybe a few other things. I liked the recent book Fire Weather. I don't know how you pronounce his last name, I think it's Jean Vaillant perhaps. But it's about wildfires that burned Fort McMurray, Alberta, which is one of the tar sands area. And it was a fire that sort of became an inferno much faster than anyone had expected or seen before.
And the first half of the book is a thriller essentially about the people who were caught in town unexpectedly. There was a press conference at 10 o'clock in the morning that the city put on and that press conference said, okay, this is a problem, but we think we might be able to keep things under control and there's time and by one o'clock, three hours later, the fire had jumped the Athabasca River, this huge river and thousands of homes burned. There were only a couple of roads out of the city.
So, this book really describes the terror and the amazing occurrence of that fire. Very, very few people died. I don't remember the exact numbers. It was almost miraculous in that sense.
And then the second half of the book talked about why climate played a role in that fire. It was hot and dry in Alberta and other policy decisions. So, I really enjoyed that as a science book-née thriller.
And then just briefly, I read Robert Macfarland's book, Underland, which may be the most beautiful non-fiction book I've read in the last decade. It talks about many things that happened underground, not surprisingly.
I found this book reading an article about the catacombs in Paris in a very quirky magazine my wife and I get called Stone Nexus. So he writes about the culture of people who live and party in the catacombs under Paris. He writes about people in salt mines studying fundamental particle physics, you know, because they're deep under the earth looking for, you know, that magic particle that makes its way through and they can detect.
He goes to cenotes, to caves, ancient burial grounds, and it's a wonderfully lyrical book, spiritual and a marvelous read. And then I went on to read some other of his walking books. So I would recommend that to people, too. That's not climate. It's just good writing.
Leigh Raymond: Yes. And I will jump in to say that I'm also a very big Macfarlane fan, and that book is a great book. So excellent choice there. And I look forward to looking at the other one that you're recommending.
So Rob, thanks a lot for writing this book and thanks for being here today.
Rob Jackson: Thank you, Leigh. Thanks for your work on carbon pricing and policy. And I'd also like to thank CASBS, the amazing people here, the fellows who we each were fortunate to share a year with, and the institution itself.
So I'm grateful to be back here and grateful for everything that I was blessed with while I was here.
Leigh Raymond: Here here!
Narrator: That was Rob Jackson in conversation with Leigh Raymond. As always, you can follow us online or in your podcast app of choice. And if you're interested in learning more about the Center's people, projects, and rich history, you can visit our website at casbs.stanford.edu.
Until next time, from everyone at CASBS and the Human Centered team, thanks for listening.