Can Technology Fix the Climate? with Adam Dorr

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: and welcome to climate chat i'm your host dan miller and today we our special guest is adam dore who is the director of research for rethink x and we're gonna learn about that in a moment he is also the author of two books brighter and the degrowth delusion and we're going to be specifically focusing on those books uh today but first of all let me tell everyone please like and subscribe so more people can hear this content it really helps us a lot and also leave a comment uh in uh below and uh there's also links to rethink x and to adam's home page in the video description so first all adam welcome to climate chat thanks so much for having me and why don't you start off by giving us a little bit of your background like what did you study and what led you to becoming the director [00:01:05] Adam Dore: of research at rethink x so so many so many folks have asked me if it's possible to replicate the the sort of career path that i've had and it's pretty challenging the fact is that i'm a little bit like the cat that fell in the cream i got very very lucky so i did my master's degree at the university of michigan's school of natural resources and environment which is now seized the school for environment and sustainability so i'm an environmental scientist originally by training phd at ucla at the luskin school and um right as i was completing my dissertation filing my dissertation getting ready to to exit out of ucla i was on the academic job market and the founders of rethink x tony ciba and james arbib um got in touch and pulled me into an entirely different career path uh they had um they'd seen a couple of the papers that i'd written while i was still a student while i was still a uh a phd student and they convinced me to join them instead of going the academic uh the traditional academic career route and i was very skeptical at first but i i already knew about tony and i was already a big fan of his uh work on uh disruptive technologies he'd written a famous book called clean disruption so i was already quite a big fan of his and they um they made me an offer i couldn't [00:02:31] Speaker 1: refuse and the rest is history so great so i met i met tony 10 years ago at a small event where he actually gave a summary of the clean disruption i think which was fascinating to me and then of course i watched all his videos and everything like that after that uh but many people don't know what rethink x is so can you just give us a brief overview of rethink x sure so we are a non-profit non-partisan [00:02:57] Adam Dore: independent think tank and the mission of the organization is to understand disruptive new technologies to lay out what implications they hold for society and the choices that they present for us and so we've done uh i think we've done some some really great work in energy in transportation in food and most recently in the healthcare space we've also started to do work in ai and robotics and i'm hoping that we'll be able to publish some more results on that front um well probably within the next six months i would say and uh there are again our our core expertise is in understanding technology as a phenomena so we're not experts we don't we would certainly never claim to be experts in a domain like energy experts or uh transportation experts our core expertise is in understanding the dynamics by which technology has advanced and in the moment today is continuing to advance and that spans all of human history so our teams documented nearly 2 000 examples of technological transformation over the course of human history and what we see is that the underlying system dynamics um are very similar in in most cases even if the technologies themselves are really rather different so we see the same fundamental patterns of improvement uh of costs of adoption how swift the adoption takes place and and so forth whether the technologies in question are neolithic arrowheads or fabric dyes or car tires or digital cameras or smart or you know the the ai now uh and so forth the the dynamics the system the way that the way that we embrace technology when it arises um uh is a consistent pattern throughout human history even though the technologies themselves are very different and this gives us a lens to with which we are able to understand some of the dramatic technological transformations that are happening in [00:05:02] Speaker 1: our present moment and we're going to talk about a big one the energy one in just a moment is is rethink x sort of philanthropically supported is it do business consulting to businesses how do what's the [00:05:13] Adam Dore: business model for the group it's no so we're purely philanthropically funded by the founders and um so i it this is probably the the best part of of the cat in the cream falling into the cream for me personally is that um as a scientist i have complete freedom at uh rethink x to focus on on the uh focus on the research itself and where that takes us so i'm not uh pulled in any direction by the needs to generate revenue i i don't write grants um or chase grant funding or anything like that this is uh quite an extraordinarily um rare privilege for a scientist to be in and i think that that freedom has shaped uh shaped the work that we've done and it's allowed me to be more unorthodox than i ever would have been able to be in uh in an academic environment or in another environment where funding were were a consideration okay so we're going to talk [00:06:10] Speaker 1: about like your two fairly recent books one is called brighter which talks about the energy revolution it does actually talk about degrowth in there but then you wrote a more extensive book called the degrowth delusion and we'll cover that a little bit that those aspects that's in brighter too we'll cover that a little bit later but uh but in in brighter you and by the way links are in the description to your home page which you can find the books anyone's interested there in brighter you you posit that technological revolution in energy production transportation and agriculture will uh allow us to fight climate change and actually restore the climate can you give us a brief overview what's your [00:06:51] Adam Dore: thesis on on that the core thesis is well first of all that are are all of our environmental problems are real and all of them are serious and climate change of course being the elephant in the room there it's the it's the largest and most uh challenging and intractable of the environmental problems we face and so the thesis is that the problem is real and if anything it's bigger and worse than is widely imagined in the public uh consciousness the scientific community of course understands the the scale of the challenge very well but the public is under the misapprehension that if only we stop doing quite so much harm to the planet and especially in terms of climate change impacts that the world will quickly heal that the world will quickly sort itself out and this is not true and the scientific community has known that this is not true for at least 30 years so part of the position that i'm coming from when i look at this problem is that it's actually a bigger and more difficult problem to solve than most people in uh in certainly in the public are aware we cannot simply stop harming the planet and expect that things will go back to a healthy stable sustainable condition instant overnight that's not the case what we have ahead of us is not just a challenge to get to get to zero or net zero as it's sometimes um uh uh as the point at which we're no longer harming the plan the planet and causing climate impacts impacts is known but rather uh we must do much much better than that we have to restore uh the climate and the that larger pattern the idea that mitigation alone is not enough to solve these major problems but that restoration is the other half of the challenge that is widely misunderstood neglected and ignored this is this applies fundamentally to most if not all environmental problems but it is especially true for climate change we will not escape the worst impacts of climate change if we do not uh have make a proactive effort to restore the climate system to something closer to the pre-industrial condition if we don't if we simply reach net zero if we were to snap our fingers and you know or wave a magic wand and stop all emissions tomorrow most of the of the worst of the climate change impacts that the scientific community understands so well would still clobber us over the course of this century that means we have to get into a regime of negative emissions or our carbon withdrawal from the atmosphere and from the oceans and so if i was animated by that concern in the mid-2000s when i began my uh career uh my scientific career and when i was first studying this as a master's student and it was very clear to me that we were there was a bit of a masquerade or a charade going on that we were pretending that uh lifestyle change and policy change would be able to somehow get us to a situation of negative emissions and that seemed to me totally implausible on the basis of human psychology and the way that the economies around the world are set up and that our only viable path to solving that problem would be with uh technology would be some um getting in hand some new technologies that were not present in the early 2000s some way of pulling gigatons of carbon out of the atmosphere not just no longer emitting uh carbon but withdrawing it out as well the analogy i use uh to describe this problem is a burning house right if your house is on fire you're it's a crisis and your first challenge is yes of course put out the flames but you are not done when when the fire is extinguished and the fire trucks are pulling away from your house and you're standing there staring at the smoldering ruins in many ways that's the easy part getting the fire out that's the in this analogy that's halting ongoing emissions the bigger challenge is probably the challenge of rebuilding the house fixing all of the damage that was done and there is no way to do that uh logically by by um by focusing on less harm so there's the again to continue the analogy there is no way for the fire department to fix your house by hosing it down with water no amount of fire fighting will repair a single brick or board that is a totally different job and requires a completely different set of tools so that is the that is the fundamentally that's the that's the the premise and the thesis for how this problem can be solved um at a conceptual level and then in the details it's which technologies and [00:11:36] Speaker 1: when okay well for on this channel by the way we we certainly talk about all that i mean we we talk about how uh mitigation is not enough but let's focus on mitigation for a while because you're very optimistic about it and so far even though renewables have been growing tremendously and there you see all these charts how it's beating coal and everything so far a hundred percent of renewable energy so far has gone to add to energy uh supply and has not replaced fossil fuel emissions because we know this because fossil fuel emissions are at a record high so when uh and if and it's very exciting to read in the book about the the how renewables are dropping in price dramatically you know order of magnitude every decade in some cases and and that's continuing and that's what's going to fuel this but what kind of time frame do you see us and and also i should also say of course when we talk about renewables we're typically talking about electricity which is like you know 25 of emissions and they're still industrial emissions process heat which you know not renewables not very good at and and other and of course there is transportation and evs which tony ciba did a great job of predicting the rise of a long long time ago but with all of that what kind of time frame because climate change is not like we have whatever time we have to fix it right there's there's certain limits to that so what what do you see in terms of time frame for this uh energy transition to to put out the fire well [00:13:19] Adam Dore: i'm very hesitant to give to lock in specific predictions about the time frame like down to uh uh an individual year certainly um even even even predicting to the decade is is uh i mean it's necessary from pal from a policy stand make a standpoint and planning standpoint yes uh logically of course it is but the but it's easy to miss the larger picture which is that it this is a um it is fundamentally a a systems perspective that that we're bringing here and from a systems perspective these are the these same patterns are repeating themselves over and over again and are are not surprising uh here one of which is that the the peak of the old system comes just before the regime shift and an abrupt change um so the i'll give you a couple of examples the um the years before the digital disruption of photography by digital cameras the years immediately preceding were the biggest years ever for film photography uh the same is true for uh uh video rental is another familiar example oh yeah um the biggest year for blockbuster video rental video cassette rental people are at my age and and older can certainly remember the days of renting videos from the from blockbuster if you wanted to watch a movie at home uh in the evening those sales peaked right before precipitous collapse of that market so what we sell what we don't see is a slowdown a slow um incremental uh uh uh transition into a new technological regime we see disruption and that's why it's given that name so the first thing to to say is that what we're seeing now continued uh emissions continued growth of fossil fuels higher than ever we're still at the peak that is exactly what we expect from based on the history of technological disruption this is what we always see um okay the so the direction of travel is absolutely uh what we would expect uh what we would expect if a disruption were coming the what we also see as you mentioned um the other sides of the disruption coming is that the new technologies that are that will be disruptive are continuing to improve in cost have a trajectory to become much much um uh cheaper and more capable so the cost capability function the cost capability presents an overwhelming value proposition and um past an inflection point and the inflection point itself is very very difficult to predict precisely when that will happen past the inflection point you get a uh a system um regime change a a a system flip and uh an abrupt transformation and that is when we would expect fossil fuel use for example to abruptly begin to decline now fossil fuels is a big term fossil fuel is a big word uh and it encompasses a number of different technologies and emissions is even bigger than that because it's not just fossil fuels emissions includes agriculture use and so on um uh so it does not it doesn't all happen simultaneously what we're seeing is that uh for example coal is already um uh nearing the point of uh that that that initial that inflection point and it's past that point in some specific markets already so coal is already starting to decline uh in some specific markets as a whole it's it's still equivocal we're probably very very close to the actual absolute peak in coal if not past it already but for all the whole for fossil fuels as a whole not quite there yet and for for emissions as a whole further yet what would i say if i were you know someone were pinning me down an exact time frame uh my uh i i would put a at least an 80 probability that we that peak emissions are reached before 2040. um that would be my i i would say that yeah okay that i i suspect that uh i mean again the wild cards are in that come into this are already in play so for example the big determining factor here will be how much uh energy demand from new sources and in particular artificial intelligence and robotics which are huge new sources of energy demand how much will those continue to prop up um the demand for fossil energy that is that is the biggest wild card that i'm aware of at the moment but none of this all of this is a roundabout way of getting to the larger point which is we're still on track to a disruption of fossil fuels on the basis that we all technologies are disrupted which is a new comp a new set of competing technologies has emerged that offers an overwhelmingly competitive value proposition and throughout history we simply never see an example where old technology continues to to hold its dominance uh in the marketplace or across the sector when there is a better alternative better meaning better being operationalized by cost capability we just never see that and that's because this incentive to economize is so strong the logic of economization is just overwhelming but peaking by now 2040 i mean yeah by the way i would [00:18:38] Speaker 1: agree with that i certainly hope by that i i was thinking that maybe by your book you were implying much sooner than that because that's peaking by 2040 that's not near zero or 80 reduction no and by that point we're already we've passed two degrees we're approaching three degrees in the 2050s 2060s so that that that's not rcp 8.5 but it's it's not a not a good one disagree that's where i would [00:19:06] Adam Dore: disagree uh so so the i i again i think that that there is there's a misunderstanding of what the the timing holds for the implications so i mean again just just just to be completely clear at the beginning of our conversation i said i'm concerned because i think the problem is actually worse than it's widely recognized yeah so i agree with you on that i'm absolutely not um under under playing the the severity of of the challenge that we face however the the presumptions the presumptions in the uh modeling about what crossing certain thresholds means two degrees one point five degrees two degrees three degrees four degrees and so on those those models those assumptions uh have embedded models they have a trajectory out to the end of this of the century that um uh against which our our concerns about impacts are calibrated what i mean by that is um when we hear well crossing two degrees would be a major problem crossing three three degrees would be a huge problem part of that is the concern is that if we cross that threshold then the assumptions that the models have for what the trajectory of emissions would be and the impact of emissions would be over the remainder of the century past a passed a uh threshold um that that that trajectory would be locked in and would not be something that we can alter here's what i mean okay the assumption is if you look at the bottom if you just look at the charts for emissions uh say which two degrees we passed the two degree threshold and then the embedded in the assumption is well if we pass that threshold uh the there will be a uh some set of plausible trajectories by which we can recover from that uh transgression overshoot and and what does an overshoot trajectory look like and even the most optimistic scenarios that are treated as plausible by the scientific community today um uh have us continuing to um emit as we descend towards net zero and then even in a negative emissions regime have the temperature the global temperature recovering very slowly and so it's a great deal of overshoot that's mapped into the assumptions over the remainder of the century that part so for example the trajectory of the planet post 2040 post 2050 especially post 2060. all of that in the conventional modeling is utter utter nonsense versus what so [00:21:55] Speaker 1: okay what do you think we hit 2040 and we're peak emissions what what temperatures what emissions play out over the rest of the century let's say okay so what happens over there what happens over the rest of [00:22:08] Adam Dore: the century is that is is that technologies come into play that are very difficult to to imagine today like cbr you're talking about and yes and the 2060s it's very difficult to to dial in to our expectations today it's very difficult to to get my fellow scientists to take seriously the capabilities they're actually going to arrive in the second half of the century okay now again this is not a oh hey there's nothing to worry about we're just going to have magic science fiction that's going to solve all of our problems so we don't need to take any action today again i'm not saying that what i'm saying is that the the the track record of um of the scientific community especially the the environmental science community to date of accurately forecasting what technological capabilities we're going to have in hand by a certain date is not a strong one so what this means is are we going to let me just recap are we going to reach uh uh peak emissions and begin a turn towards uh in the direction that we all know that we need to go yes is that going to happen tomorrow no is it it could it could optimistically begin to happen by the mid-2030s yes let's hope so would i be surprised if that didn't happen by 2040 yes i think there's a very very strong chance it will by 2040 entirely given where the technology is headed but after that i become increasingly optimistic about what our technology enables us to do and by the 2050s 2060s uh the technological capability again just looking at the trajectories we're on now it will be astounding by [00:23:51] Speaker 1: today's standards again in your book you talk about ocean alkalinity enhancement as being a very effective uh by then i mean it works a scientific thing today but you have to move a lot of rock to make that happen and you're saying in that the second half of the century we'll be able to draw what would you give as a gigatons per year uh number uh for that in the second half of the century what do you think we're targeting there so the i think you said 50 if in the book for with for for to put us on a track [00:24:26] Adam Dore: to recover towards the pre-industrial conditions we don't need to withdraw every kilogram of [00:24:35] Speaker 1: carbon that we've emitted over the last several centuries but we need seven trillion so far or something like that right but it's it's looking like we need to we're going we need to plan to pull a big chunk out [00:24:42] Adam Dore: yeah i agree um something like at least 500 gigatons could be twice that um so uh if if i recall correctly something on the order of 20 gigatons per year of negative emissions of drawdown for several decades puts us on a trajectory to get some net amount of um carbon withdrawal approaching uh half a trillion [00:25:14] Speaker 1: um so well i think i think if you did 20 and by the way this is a subject we talk a lot about here but if you do 20 10 is usually dedicated to get rid of the emissions you couldn't get rid of in the especially agriculture space and whether leftover fossil fuels and so that's considered 10 and now you have 20 you have minus 10 which is a the traditional number the i think that the ipcc assumes but i agree with you it's it it has to be way bigger in order to really make a dent but let's get i was going to challenge you a little bit on the the the speed of this disruption but if you're going to say peak in 2040 i'm not going to actually do that i'm going to say like you know even though the renewables are better and cheaper and all those things you still have the fossil fuel companies owning the politicians and we can just see in the united states what's happening here where it still is cheaper and and there's actually trying to stop it the stopping wind and solar from deploying really crazy stuff but we live in a crazy world so but i'm not i'm not going to challenge you on that if you're going to say 2040 but instead i'm going to say well wait a second uh you know we're going to hit two in around 2037 no matter what happens at this point so now we'll be at above two impacts are way bigger than people to see at 1.5 and those are pretty big already so we're dealing with that but more importantly perhaps we're dealing with tipping points such as amok collapse which is people say 2050 for that you know uh on the path we're on and uh and by the way i've already happened we don't even tipping points is something you also see after they occur just like the inflection points you're talking about so what what do you say about the tipping point because it won't matter how much you get your emissions down at that point and it won't matter also if you withdraw c co2 from the atmosphere any thoughts on amok antarctic tipping points and that kind of thing sea level rise for example i there are amok [00:27:18] Adam Dore: is probably the one that's the biggest concern um even abrupt sea level rise from melting is something that could conceivably be technologically technologically tractable for a much more capable civilization say for example in the 2050s i mean again i i i i have to remain sensitive to which audiences i'm talking to um and uh i'm well aware that for some audiences talking about artificial intelligence and robotics say for example increasing our um uh capacity to alter the physical world by a factor of 10 or 100 or even a thousand over the course of the next several decades that sounds very implausible to to some audiences if i'm speaking in silicon valley then this is like no problem i don't have to make much of the case for them um but uh probably i'm sure our audience will be split on that particular subject there so but but but here what i mean to say here is that even invoking even invoking you know uh the the really quite quite aggressive technological uh scenarios and capabilities where we're talking about say several billion um human robots being deployed um uh alongside humans to fight um you know certain environmental challenges um it's still very very difficult to see uh how some tipping points um can be are are not fundamentally irreversible uh amok being one of them and this is the the so this is the the the the um uh the great conveyor circulation system of ocean currents around the planet if that if if we were to tip into a new regime it's very difficult to see even with with uh really pretty radical advances in technology how uh we would we would reverse that that would be extraordinarily challenging it's it's easier to imagine how we could for example um uh alter the albedo of the planet very quickly or address even some other really quite challenging um uh tipping points in terms of melt and uh melt water and that sort of thing but changing the ocean currents is that is the one that really concerns me very very very difficult challenge perhaps good news will come at some point um but uh for right now that is the one that that keeps me up tonight it keeps keeps me up at night the most and so the when we we don't seem to be getting good news about that it seems to be um uh something that's an increasing concern on the timeline and so yes even even uh even if we are even if we're fortunate and the peak for emissions comes as soon as the mid-2030s um we're still very short on time for um diving deep enough fast enough into a negative emissions receipt regime to um to have a plausible have to have a a a realistic uh shot at halting the momentum that's taking us towards a regime change in in ocean currents that is a very very big concern so that is something that i i don't want to dismiss at all but it is it is precisely those tipping [00:30:28] Speaker 1: points that i'm most concerned about so so one of the things i don't think you cover in and brighter i looked through it and i could have missed this but when we talk about the responding to climate there's sort of four four things there's adaption required no matter what i guess there's mitigation stopping our emissions there's there's cdr there's removing past emissions and then there's srm or sunlight reflection method solar geoengineering to keep us cool while we do those other things but you i didn't see anything on srm in your book what what are your thoughts on srm well i [00:31:09] Adam Dore: it's it's it's it's it's it's getting harder and harder to to see scenarios where there it isn't it it isn't necessary frankly and i haven't liked to talk about that because for for the first 20 years of my career so since the early 2000s there's been you know um i've been hope i've been optimistic i've been hopeful that uh it wouldn't be necessary because we were on trajectory to um uh reducing emissions and and then eventually heading into a negative regime fast enough but it is unfortunately now looking as though the the some of these tipping points are looming large um and that uh we may be we may get desperate and so here is where we i i then defer to uh the the crucially important work from coming on two decades ago the first i uh saw of it was david keith's work that argued for more rather than less research into solar radiation management srm geoengineering engineering because of the risk of rogue geoengineering specifically and rogue geoengineering to my knowledge david keith was the one who coined that term and um uh rogue engineering is the idea rogue geoengineering is the idea that a desperate nation will simply uh do it will simply start like india in the india or china or or or any major nation that that is threatened by the impacts of climate change and and so severely that they make the calculation that the blowback from the international community for simply acting on um in their own interests and emitting whatever it might be um the typical srm mechanism is um uh sulfur aerosols but there are other mechanisms that are being studied but the simple mechanism is uh uh sulfur emissions um that mimic uh the emissions we know and understand well from from volcanism that a nation will simply that's desperate enough that sees uh the writing on the wall that has low uh lying cities at the coast that will be uh threatened or destroyed by um a modest amount of continued warming and sea level rise for example that they would become desperate enough to simply do it and that rogue geoengineering is a real threat and that is a logical argument for why the scientific community needs to study geoengineering sure and understand it better so that the uh the any nation that would be tempted to do so would at least have the benefit of knowledge would at least have the benefit of not flying completely [00:33:49] Speaker 1: blind uh by the way if you do just india or just china you create big problem you don't regional srm it doesn't it's much more dangerous than coordinated global srm because it shifts the winds and everything and the wind patterns uh to other places just sort of in a haphazard way rather than focusing on the poles and moving down and things like that with and we've had david keith on a couple of times we've had doug mcmartin we have we have a whole playlist on srm i just wanted to ask you your thoughts on that we could spend a lot of time but i i don't want to do that then my my quick thoughts [00:34:22] Adam Dore: if the background backgrounder isn't quite so necessary are it unfortunately is it is looking to me increasingly as though that will need to be part of the uh part of our our strategy now i'm i mean it is it is possible that again it's possible that the dive into a negative emissions regime could be so steep from the from in other words that it could be that the time it takes to go from peak emissions into an aggressive negative emissions regime that transformation could happen much more quickly than is widely imagined i can i can chart plausible technological pathways by which over just the course of a decade we could go from peak emissions to negative emissions that is pretty extreme even by my technological standards but i can i can i can imagine scenarios where that's plausible but short of that it's very difficult to to see how we don't avoid the worst of these tipping points if we don't also utilize some solar radiation management to keep the to to um to keep the very very worst impacts at bay at least temporarily okay and it's also of course the the other piece of context here is that solar radiation management srm is low tech relatively speaking and cheap relatively speaking in other words it is very feasible it's a very attractive option as a band-aid on the on the pro we know that for for many reasons that it's not a complete solution it doesn't pull carbon out of the atmosphere it doesn't halt ongoing emissions it's just a band-aid um and uh once you start then you have to be careful about stopping and this is setting aside all of the other potential um unknown impacts that and and second and third and higher order effects that that uh uh one of the impacts by the way that [00:36:16] Speaker 1: people don't realize we have peter irvine on talking about this is that it's a great way to uh reduce emissions because warming causes emissions and cooling decreases emissions and so it reduces over not only do you stop the overshoot but it reduces the amount of co2 you need to remove with cdr to get back to where you want to go because it and you can see this with mount pinatubo the uh you know the co2 is going up and just flatlined for a couple of years as mount pinatubo cooled the earth by half a degree for a couple of years so so there's that aspect but i would why don't move away from that and uh let's talk about well i want to talk about two things before we move on to degrowth and that is uh agriculture uh which you cover a lot but let's continue on cdr just a moment one of your uh what you say in your book is that market forces are going to really drive these things like you don't care what the fossil fuel companies say when you know the electrons are so much cheaper from renewables with batteries so you have you know really good supply and everything uh 24 7 supply um they just won't be able to fight it eventually even though as we see only politicians you can that's that's why i'm saying 2040 okay if you said 2030 i would really challenge you on the political side of of the resistance and the friction they can cause but let's assume that goes great cdr is a very different thing there is no market for cdr no one what the reason by the way i've been in cdr for a long time now 15 years invested in it it doesn't grow for a very simple reason and that is no one wants to pay for it the market of voluntary credits is 80 one company microsoft and even they're backing off because they're building so many data centers they don't want to maybe commit as much as they did before and governments do subsidies a little bit yes more like r d kind of things so what are your thoughts since since it's not a market driven it's simply not a market driven thing how do you see cdr scaling and the price coming down just like we see with renewables but people want to buy those so that's a different [00:38:27] Adam Dore: situation so the simple answer is that cdr doesn't become plausible until we have substantially more technological capability so it is it is gated beyond it's gated uh past a um uh the present technological regime so we get to a the simple answer is that we get to a point sometime if we're very lucky late mid 30s uh uh uh sorry late 2030s mid to late 2030s okay um more plausibly by the 2040s where the cost of carbon withdrawal falls so low that it uh it becomes a no-brainer for human civilization to engage in this because the because inaction carries its own cost but that is not a regime so policy you're saying [00:39:14] Speaker 1: then we would have it'll be cheap enough that government would implement policies to require it [00:39:18] Adam Dore: or pay for it or something like that that is the the i mean again i'm hesitant to i'm hesitant to freight in to too much of the present day policy conditions and framework and even the any even the present day economy as we know it um into the the into this into the space where solutions to a challenge like like carbon withdrawal emerge okay so let me let me let me let me let me let me just recalibrate the sense of the of the basic conditions and premise you would be working from when you're talking about okay how would we pay for cdr for example right um it's fast forward 20 years it's 2046 um in that world we have a super abundance of clean energy at near zero marginal cost so we have somewhere between somewhere between 20 and 100 times more terrestrial production of energy than the planet does in uh today so we have an enormous amount of energy production energy production is going to continue to scale exponentially for some time this is wind and solar and batteries this is wind solar and other new technologies as well nuclear technologies on uh uh coming online over the course of especially towards the end of that period um so past 2040 we're in in a in a uh an extremely uh rapid acceleration um condition the other thing that we have in 2046 is hundreds of millions or billions of uh humanoid robots and hundreds of millions or billions of specialized robots in other forms uh human robots are going to come first but they won't be the the last word in robotics um ai will be immensely capable by that point at that point in the mid 2040s the entire f economic uh uh substrate the the foundational condition of scarcity that we've organized all of economic activity up or throughout human history up until now around most of that will be have been eroded away by 2046 and we will have a completely new type of economics mostly arranged around abundance because energy and labor which are the fundamental factors of production are uh they are the they are upstream of of all of the goods and services and if they become super abundant and near so marginal cost so does everything else the analogy that or the the operative parallel to to think about there is what happened with the digital revolution so digital products information and communications they are now super abundant and near zero marginal cost it's not nothing you still have to have capital you have to have machinery machinery you have to have infrastructure but we no longer even think about what it costs on a per bit basis to send information store information copy information transmit it for communication we don't even think about it we will that is what is coming just by the numbers thanks to energy and labor super abundance so by the mid 20 mid 2040s in those conditions when you ask me who will pay or how will we afford or uh where will the market be for something like cdr that is a bit like asking well who is going to if we have this say we had a huge big challenge to um move into more in an enormous amount of data say we had a huge challenge we've got to move something like 10 petabytes of data from uh north america to europe and in the 1970s when all of that would have had to be printed out on paper it would have been an enormous civilizational scale challenge to do that and you'd have well who on earth is going to pay for this and where will how will market support this there's no market to move data across the Atlantic Ocean like that now we don't even it's it's it's trivial we've moved it digitally that is this that is the kind of situation we're going to be in when we are actually able to get a handle on and and solve a problem like climate change with carbon drawdown again it's not that we have nothing to worry about it's not that we can be complacent it's not that we can be complacent it's not that we can be complacent it's not that we can be complacent it's not that we can be complacent it's not that we can be complacent it's not that we can be complacent it's not that we can be complacent it's not that we can be complacent it's not that we can be complacent it's not that we are going to be to be complacent it's not that we can be complacent it's not that we can be complacent it's not that we can be complacent it's not that we can be complacent it's not that the problem isn't enormous it is the difference in my thesis is that it from from conventional views is that the technologies we're going to have in hand not a thousand years from now but 20 to 25 years from now are going to completely change the circumstances we normally operate in [00:43:54] Speaker 1: the solution space that we normally explore and we're going to need to think very differently about that well we should spend a whole hour and i'll invite you back to talk about it but there's there's the whole question of the unintended consequence you mentioned the digital revolution so now there's depression we're getting authoritarian people are you know uh uh hostile states are taking over uh and using uh the platform for misinformation disinformation by the way climate disinformation big time go on x and don't do your followers for a moment just do the recommended in the places assess pool of climate disinformation uh which is making it harder to to move forward like we need to so there's that and and uh you know the the watt steam engine reduced coal usage by 70 percent for a given amount of work that was an amazing advancement it also led to climate change i mean that's what scale what scale up coal usage is that's what scale up coal usage it should have gone down but instead of course it went off the charts and things and also by the way and we love to talk about rebound effect because when you lower the price of something it's used more and the two things that are insatiable and maybe not maybe not refrigerators you're not going to get 10 times more refrigerators if you make it twice as efficient air conditioners maybe by the way that might be true but but for data and for energy those two things are insatiable the right the right price people will use how much you can make i i i i think it's a whole program what are what are the unintended consequences of unlimited energy uh but rather than do that since you have these two books and uh uh you know you know you're optimistic about that we'll just leave it there let's get back to agriculture agriculture so the premise in brighter getting back to the book is that hey we're going to have solar wind batteries they're going to be so cheap it's just going to make fossil fuels uncompetitive we're going to switch over we didn't talk much about it here but there's also industrial there's cement and steel so we're going to have to figure out electric solutions for that but we'll leave that maybe for another discussion too but the other side is that there's a lot of emissions 10 gigatons ish or whatever 25 percent of the human emissions are related to agriculture and so your premise in the book is that we're going to have two amazing technologies one is precision fermentation where you can just grow foods uh starting with certain things and then just put in basic feedstocks maybe sugars or something and so you can make anything you want out of that and for other maybe more advanced foods like meat you use uh um uh what's what's it called it's cellular agriculture cellular sorry cellular agriculture to grow meat and when you wrote the book which was a while ago both those things were kind of shooting up but since that time they've hit a really rough patch you know uh impossible foods and beyond meats suffered greatly in the market uh several i think at least six states have a banned cellular agriculture so you're not even allowed to sell it so there's these and i would also point out that an electron is an electron but an artificial salmon is not a real salmon i've had artificial salmon and it wasn't real salmon but i mean you can get better and better at that but psychologically to people it's it's not really a pure substitute so with the updated information on how these are stalling at least now what are your current thoughts on precision fermentation and uh cellular agriculture becoming what you described in the book as being a substitute for many inefficient food sources i think it's the way to think about it is that we're sort of in the [00:47:50] Adam Dore: late 80s for digital cameras and it was it did but in the late 1980s for digital cameras they were still they couldn't compete on either cost or quality and so they were mocked it was like nobody's ever going to use a digital camera this is silly you know look at look at how how amazing film is more than a century of development of film technology film is beautiful it's fantastic works really well it's what everybody loves uh nobody's going to use a digital camera look at these dots and pixels it looks like pac-man this is silly this technology is going nowhere it'll never make any difference and uh it was a few more years until the mid-1990s before digital cameras became just fundamentally capable at all of uh performance at a anything like a comparable level still struggled and certainly couldn't compete with couldn't compete on quality with the highest end uh film photography and and in addition to that in 1995 they were still enormously expensive and well out of reach of of consumers for the top of the line digital imaging equipment in fact the top of the line digital equipment digital imaging equipment for many years was at nasa so if you wanted a good digital camera it was one of the ones that was on our our probes that were going to mars and elsewhere uh but that's that situation didn't last long and by the late 1990s the technology had improved the capability it improved the cost it improved uh getting us closer to parity but it wasn't until the mid-2000s um really probably probably 2000 pretty close to 2010 before uh digital imaging really reached parity in terms of absolute quality where it was very difficult to continue making the case that you could not achieve a result as good as uh a a field camera with digital technology and certainly now uh this is this is just a a an issue that's dead and buried uh for all but the the most die-hard purists of um uh cellulite film um enthusiasts okay with precision fermentation and cellular agriculture there's two different technologies and they're related to one another and they cross-fertilize each other but they're not identical precision fermentation fermentation uses microbes to produce specific target molecules so yeast and bacteria and and so forth to produce sugars and fats and proteins um so basically building blocks and ingredients from which you can produce uh food products um cellular agriculture is the use of animal cells to uh grow uh animal tissues um a little more perhaps uh tissue is perhaps a bounding term there are some pathways to use cellular agriculture to produce say for example um egg white protein and uh uh milk and dairy products and so forth but the the easiest thing to imagine is could you make a steak could you make a you know a salmon cut could you make a chicken breast out of um uh just by growing the cells and not growing the entire value of a real i just point out like a real [00:50:55] Speaker 1: you know it's kind of a real chicken breast and a real steak just not from a real animal i mean [00:51:00] Adam Dore: from right yeah right well and and at least in principle the conditions under which these would be produced would be laboratory uh conditions or at least at the very least the the ultra sanitary conditions of breweries um which are you know have to be ultra sanitary or they're contaminated because their biological action is involved in in brewing um and that those are uh well i don't know i don't know how many uh uh i don't know how many folks are familiar with the inside of of um abattoirs or um uh you know the the the inside of slaughterhouses but this is a it's much much cleaner and much much um more hygienic to produce uh uh food products using precision [00:51:44] Speaker 1: fermentation and celag than our animal industrial yeah i'm sure that's true um so humane too right yeah [00:51:51] Adam Dore: and and and then there's the of course the the um the uh the the unconscionable suffering um that's that's part and parcel with the animal food system as well so there's a lot to be excited about there but the the the truth is it is early days and in the early days as we're sort of approaching a disruption there are ups and downs and this is a again familiar pattern with disruptive technologies uh folks get excited investment rushes in turns out it's a bit uh early the the uh fruits of of that don't emerge quickly enough um just sort of mismatch between that and macroeconomic conditions this is often uh what happens uh investment drives up lots of companies go bust before they can get uh across the finish line and and uh reach the market with a commercially viable product and and so forth all part and parcel all things we see uh with all new technologies and in the lead up to every disruption so there's nothing here that concerns me the um uh like a hiccup on the way maybe yeah yeah i don't see anything fundamental any fundamental showstoppers and well human i mean the one last thing human yes the one last thing you were you you had mentioned that i wanted to touch on was whether or not people will accept it um this is where i'm i am a little softer on this than i am on other objections to other technology disruptions and the reason why is that food is primal in a way that you know electrons aren't right um in a way that perhaps you know transportation um uh isn't i mean food is something we put in our bodies and we're just fundamentally hardwired to be very sensitive and cautious rightly so just completely sensible about it and so i do think um uh perhaps uh more than some of my colleagues um i i i think that there could be more staunch resistance to this than than we've we typically see in a typical disruption where the logic is overwhelmingly economic it's overwhelmingly about cost now having said that um cost matters an awful lot if you could walk into the grocery store and you could buy a steak that you couldn't really tell uh was cellular agriculture or or um from an actual cow it was actually beef um and it was one quarter of the price how how uh many people would would you know dig in their heels and say nope you know what i still want um the traditional meat i don't want the this new technology thing um so price is probably going to change a lot of people's uh minds and overcome a lot of this this uh squeamishness uh i i think we should probably expect that however however um i am a little softer on that with respect to that objection that i am for other technology disruptions just because food is food is special food is there is there is there is there is just a psychology behind that that is absent for many many other products many other goods and services that have been disrupted many different ways over the course of history and so for this one i think it could be a little different i think it could be a little a little um a little slower a little bumpier ride now in the longer term in the longer term will we will we uh cease to obtain our food from from animals it seems pretty obvious that that's where we're headed in the longer term i think also when return mean yeah on a on a i'm still optimistic certainly that that this this this disruption will be well underway by the mid-2030s so 10 years from now mid-2030 okay well well i do think that also of amok collapse i mean one of the big [00:55:38] Speaker 1: things is going to impact food regions around the world especially north northern hemisphere with less rain and things like that so i could see where food scarcity also drives it if you can supply the population with food this way it might be a little squeamish but when you're hungry i guess you'll go for it too so we'll see what happens maybe it's all kind of tied in it's a not it's not a one-way thing the climate impacts it it impacts climate we could again spend an hour on this so but i want to get to degrowth uh you wrote another book so we're gonna again now all these subjects deserve an hour on their own uh but uh the degrowth delusion so you say in this book that obviously lots of people climate people environmentalists others say hey you know climate change and not just climate change the uh breaching planetary boundaries of all kinds it's because we're just over consuming and uh so we got to scale it back you say that's uh a really bad idea what's the word you use for oh truly terrible idea right and why don't you tell us briefly and then we'll get into more of the details why is the idea of degrowth a true truly terrible idea so it's you know it's a it's a bad idea to [00:57:01] Adam Dore: cut your own hair it's a bad idea to get like a drunken tattoo right i mean it's just bad ideas um and okay i mean it you you know lawn darts were a a children's toy in the 1970s those are a bad idea and in retrospect it was obvious that they were a bad idea um but some ideas are worse than that some ideas are not just sort of oh i mean obvious in hindsight should have known better some ideas are are much much um uh more challenging to to see through and so truly terrible ideas they have a few properties one of which is that they you know superficially they make sense this is sort of a superficial logic that that makes them sound plausible um that's sort of the powerpoint effect i mean everything looks great in a powerpoint presentation um they uh they come from good intentions certainly so truly terrible ideas um don't come from mustache twirling villains they're they're well intentioned that's one of the things that makes them um that makes them terrible um they uh they can't be tested at at scale so they're sort of unfalsifiable um in in least in principles warners and why they look great on paper um they uh they're infectious so they spread really easy easily they sound they you know they they they have a uh they have a sort of a great automatic meme ability they have a virality to them they're easy to pass on um and that's often because they uh they lend themselves well to grand promises and platitudes like oh this is this is just a simple solution to this enormous problem and oh yeah well that's great i guess i'll just embrace that idea that it's very easy for a concept like that or an idea like that to go viral and then of course the last thing the thing that that wraps all that up that would be you know those things wouldn't be terrible than themselves what makes uh an idea truly terrible is if it has all those properties and it doesn't work it backfires okay so if it so if if if if the idea were valid if it worked then having all of those other properties would be fine if it was if it sounded great and it made big promises and it actually delivered on them and it made people feel great and felt noble and and virtuous to um to embrace uh and it worked well that would be fantastic you know it there were plenty ideas in the world like that the truly terrible ones are the ones that have all of that sort of superficial all those superficial accoutrements they look good they sound good they feel good and they don't work they backfire and it's the backfire that that that inverts all of that those other properties and makes bad into terrible and um there are other truly terrible ideas um you know a few of them throughout history are things like racism um and communism and safetyism and prohibition there's a number of ideas that are just where where they they they sound really great on paper um to the people who adopt them um whether historically some of them we've outgrown pretty darn well although unfortunately we haven't escaped racism as well as we would like but i mean you know in past centuries in centuries up until now racism seemed like a great idea to most people in most places in the world and it wasn't because everybody was fundamentally evil it was the opposite it was that it these ideas had uh all of those properties that make them seductive but they backfire the promises are not delivered um so degrowth isn't is is a an idea that has that matches to text all those boxes it matches that same profile being truly terrible where um the it can't fulfill its promises it would backfire and it's the backfire that's so tragic and it would be in our present moment such a catastrophe if it were actually implemented and again the easiest way to see the easiest way to see why it would backfire as opposed to actually working is through the analogy that i mentioned earlier uh this is the way i always illustrate this or communicate this and it is with the the analogy or the metaphor of a burning building your house is on fire and this is the way to see that degrowth is is a disastrous idea it's a catastrophically bad idea if you're standing in front of your house and it's on fire degrowth so shrinking the problem is not a solution in fact it's it's it's it's it's it's an absurdity when you make the the when you make the example that stark if you're standing in front of your house and it's on fire dousing 50 of the flames is not a solution so putting out half of a fire putting out 90 percent of a fire it doesn't solve the problem of having a fire your house is still on fire if only 10 of it's burning you cannot logically degrow your way to solving the problem of a burning building it doesn't make sense you have to extinguish the fire completely and as we spoke about before even then you're not done you're not done when the fire department's pulling away even if you degrow to zero even if you in other words even if you if you reduce the amount of harm that is being incurred by a some activity in this case the analogy is the you know the building's on fire and uh it's it's it's an ongoing source of damage even if you remove that completely you're still stuck with all of the damage that that that problem has caused up until now you still have a the ruins of a smoldering house that you have to fix that you have to repair so degrowth it can't be a little confused because way to solving that [01:02:33] Speaker 1: problem i i'm not aware of anyone who just says uh we just need to use less and that will solve the i mean i'm sure there are some but i mean not who are really engaged in serious climate study i mean i think the one i mean i think degrowth is viewed by may i first ask you what do you mean by degrowth because i i'm it's not maybe not the same idea of degrowth that i have in my head what what [01:02:56] Adam Dore: do you mean by degrowth oh well this is actually another thing that i discuss in the book there's a whole chapter on it but the the um the there's a difference between how the public perceives degrowth which is in a fairly common sense way and then there's the there's the you know the the more radical way of thinking of it where degrowth scholars and advocates um freight in a whole bunch of other much crazier ideas and assumptions um but we can we can treat either i'm perfectly happy to deal with just the common sense version the common sense version is we're we're whether it's one specific activity or our activity writ large across the whole economy if you're doing something and it's causing harm then won't just doing less of that be better it's a basic common sense principle okay this is this is this is one reason why the idea is is truly terrible it's seductive it's commonsensical it makes sense superficially right if you're doing something that's harmful just cut it out do less of it won't that isn't won't that be better okay i mean that is that's the common sense position people don't by the way [01:03:59] Speaker 1: i do think one of the fundamental problems we have dealing with climate communications is that people think climate is like other kinds of problems like let's say a polluted river where you know you stop the pollution and the next year you go swimming and fishing again that's not climate change because the co2 lasts for essentially ever in the atmosphere unless you do cdr and things like that so yes i agree that uh they think they're just doing less of a bad thing like but if we're serious about climate change there's two ways to stop emissions let's leave agriculture out of it just energy for a moment there's two ways one is to use less energy and to switch to clean forms of energy and it would seem logical that if you do both of those things and and also you're making it sound like we just degrowth the entire economy and i don't think from what i know the people serious about degrowth don't say that you take the numbers that what the top 10 of emitters put 50 of the emissions in the air the top one percent uh emit twice as much as the bottom 50 so i think when we're talking about degrowth we're either talking about degrowth of over consuming populations and and we're talking about really over consuming populations and um over polluting industries like fossil fuels so degrow the fossil fuel industry do things like stop subsidizing it maybe have rules to phase it out and require renewable energy which even if it has an advantage in the marketplace that will certainly make it happen faster so there's different kinds of degrowth that are not everyone goes live as lives in a cave i'm not i'm sure there are people that say that by the way don't get me wrong but i think that people are serious about climate say hey the problem is by the way we can have as much renewable energy as you want it won't do anything to affect climate change unless it also re reduces fossil fuels renewals have they actually have a negative impact on the climate because there's fossil fuels involved in making them hopefully we can get away from that but put that aside make them neutral you can have 10 times more tomorrow it won't change anything as long as the same amount of fossil fuels are being emitted so degrowth to me is let's what the degrowth to me is let's scale back fossil fuels let's get the super emitters to stop doing what they're doing a little bit they're not going to suffer they're not going to live in a cave they're going to live in only four mansions instead of 10 or something um and that so what what's your thoughts when people bring that up instead a different kind of degrowth than what maybe you assumed yeah i mean [01:06:41] Adam Dore: that's not the that isn't the the degrowth that that the folks carrying signs and protests mean and that's not what the degrowth literature and academic uh well there's the donut disciplines well-being [01:06:55] Speaker 1: economy donut economics those kind of things are the growth in a way the way degrowth is used in in [01:07:03] Adam Dore: informal terms dick rossals and the way it's used in the scientific literature is pretty unequivocal it means a reduction in all economic activity it means a a reduction in in all uh of the human activity that has any conceivable kind of footprint at all so picking and choosing cherry picking which aspects of the of society or the economy are going to degrow um because they make some sense and oh well we're gonna do less less of this but oh we can still do plenty of that um then you're you're you're into a a morass of of crosstalk about oh i don't mean this i mean that oh i don't mean this i mean that you get into no no true scotsman uh sort of fallacies and and and and issues with um that that allow you to to sort of hide in the gaps of the of of of all this and that isn't really what that isn't that that it sort of invokes a a a invokes a common sense uh uh set of reasoning to defeat a straw man of the idea and that's perfectly fair i mean you know that of course it makes sense of course it makes perfect sense to um uh uh target the most egregious uh sources of our problems that's just common sense but the overarching strategy the overarching um uh uh concept of less will save us just doing less will save us this is the real problem it's not that oh well well targeted uh uh prudent uh policy measures and uh perfectly intelligent um uh increases in efficiency and reductions of waste isn't that sensible isn't that what we mean by degrowth well yes it's sensible and no it's not what most people mean by degrowth what most people mean by degrowth is uh humanity's grown too big for its britches uh some all of societies uh of the societies around the world are operating in in just an overall unsustainable manner and we have to dial back all of human activity or uh we're because we're up against planetary boundaries boundaries and we're gonna drive the train off the cliff and um the uh the worst offenders are not specific individuals or specific industries yes that's all that's a problem but it's entire societies all of the united states so is offending all of the united states has to uh for just for example um therefore has to reduce has to withdraw has to has to dial back has to do less and again the logic of that superficially makes sense the morality of it makes sense um so there's a there's a sense in which the injustice of all of it is is you know perfectly perfectly sensible to be concerned about and then the the uh the footprint on the planet whether it's for self-preservation whether it's for you know you've got sort of a conservation um mindset where it's if we'd ruin the planet there's not we're not gonna be able to survive um or if you have a preservation um uh ethic and it's no the planet has its own right to exist and we don't get to steamroll it just because it's convenient for us even if we could survive um uh that kind of damage no the okay the law the fundamental logic is that that if we try to do all of this if we try to act on this if we try to reduce human activity it it doesn't work it would backfire in the same way in the same way that just trying to trying to save your burning house by reducing the flames wouldn't work it won't save your house you don't have the [01:10:45] Speaker 1: resources to rebuild you said if we if we degrow we don't have the resources to fight climate change do cdr or or these kind of things um that's correct okay by the way the number one thing you about to me in your book you mentioned one one reason this ain't going to happen is that no one will ever vote for it and i agree with that like no one's going to voluntarily vote for it but you do say like authoritarians can come in and do these things so my question to you is what do you think of trump's uh uh um attempt for doing degrowth he seems to be really on a degrowth agenda here by the way not saying that's what he wants to do or thinks he's doing but he's certainly doing it he's dismantling science he's raising the price of fossil fuels in a dramatic way which is hurting all economies he stopped travel to the united states by a tremendous amount so he's stopping international trade put tariffs he's he looks like he's implementing a degrowth agenda i'm just wondering what you think of that [01:11:48] Adam Dore: well it's i take your point and it's funny to to to it's the greenest president we've had in a long time so well but again it it's the the irony is that it makes the point for us it makes the the point for the the the degrowth delusions thesis which is that uh this is chipping away at the margins on this problem so did it so if if if any president or any leadership's policies resulted in a slowdown a five percent or a ten percent or even i mean get crazy about it say the policies uh cratered the u.s economy by 50 percent which would be an absolute catastrophe absolutely the worst economic catastrophe in the modern era was the great depression and that was a 25 reduction in in the scale of the of economic activity across the board 25 um coveted was five percent so um the great depression was 25 it was temporary it was i mean that was the peak that was the maximum amount um and and it didn't last very long it didn't last for decades it lasted for for a number of months really so imagine we cratered the economy by 50 this is putting out 50 of the flames on your house fire your your economy the size united states that's that's degrows by 50 is just the economy of the united states from a couple of decades ago it is still an enormous problem from an environmental standpoint right it's it's it you have not solved any environment problem by reducing the ongoing impact by even what what by all other measures would be a staggering amount 50 decline in economic economic activity the consequences of that would be apocalyptic for the social consequences the political consequences the ecological consequence i'm sorry the economic consequences the health consequences of it it would be apocalyptic on every level it would also reduce emissions quite a bit but it wouldn't but reducing emissions by 50 percent doesn't do it does very very very little to what would it what would a reduction of 50 percent in emissions do for the amok challenge that we have [01:14:05] Speaker 1: um well i i it would help if on top of that by the way i i don't think it's just because of time frames really srm is the only thing that acts quickly right by the way reducing all emissions by 50 all it does is decrease the increase in cumulative emissions by correct um less than a percent or that's right yeah 0.8 or i i can't remember it's like 1.8 i think we increased by 1.8 1.9 a year 50 gigatons over 2.7 trillion tons you know uh so the point the point is that it's very small the [01:14:42] Adam Dore: point is that your house is still burning yeah yeah it's you it's you and not from the annual emissions it's burning from the cumulative emissions yes it's your your house is your house is already damaged it's continuing to burn it's getting more damaged it's just getting more damaged slower you are you have not put out the you have not extinguished the flames and halted the the damage let alone gotten anywhere close to repairing the damage that's already been done so again yeah but again you could you could [01:15:14] Speaker 1: switch away from fossil fuels through renewables at the same time you'll get there a little faster this [01:15:19] Adam Dore: is the this is the pivot this is the pivot which is can't we do both at the same time perfectly logical question to ask so admitting that the degrowth can't be a solution again the house on fire is is that admitting admitting that that can't be a solution the logical pivot from there is well why not both why not why not reduce uh the the especially the most egregious sources of harm exactly and and the most egregious sources of harm that's that's you know that that's that's a separate conversation in many ways but why not do why not do some degrowth while we're uh still trying to innovate and advance and progress our way out of this problem why not do both and the answer is uh and i think that you can well you could show a little bit this mathematically but the answer is that there's no amount of compromise there that actually pencils out unfortunately i wish that were the case but the problem is that every uh every bit of the advancement everything that gives you the tools that you need to actually solve the problem is undermined by any amount any non-zero amount of [01:16:34] Speaker 1: degrowth that you do even at the egregious side or you can leave that as a separate discussion well [01:16:39] Adam Dore: again that that is the egregious side is something you can you can tackle on a case-by-case basis and anywhere where there's waste waste is fair game anywhere where there's waste well i mean there's [01:16:49] Speaker 1: fair game some people have a literally a thousand times the carbon footprint of the average person [01:16:54] Adam Dore: right right and and we and do we do we need that no no and it adds up it adds actually adds up to a sizable chunk of it all so the but i prefer not to focus on it on individuals it's it's too easy to scapegoat those folks and then slip past the real work that we actually have to do okay so again i like like to dial in our to calibrate our concerns here should we do a little bit of degrowth along the way wouldn't that help if we did it well what amount of degrowth that's a question what about five percent what if we down what if we just what if i mean never okay let's not try to extinguish half of the flames here um let's what if it's just a small amount won't that be won't that help while we're trying to you know ramp up clean energy and all and so that they can uh uh disrupt and obliterate fossil fuels uh and electric vehicles and and autonomous transport so that they can um displace and disrupt combustion engine vehicles what about precision fermentation and ca so that they can you know obsolete animal agriculture wouldn't it help to be degrowing just a little bit while we were trying to ramp up those grow and and develop and advance those technologies and those industries wouldn't a bit of degrowth at the same time help well what did five percent downturn what did five percent degrowth of the global economy do what would five percent this is a little amount well the answer is five percent less emissions five percent was coveted yeah yeah that's what i meant yeah yeah five percent is what that if that's recent enough that people can remember what their lives felt like economically in the depths of the pandemic 500 million people around the world lost their jobs and the global economy contracted by i think the the latest estimate is a little bit less than five about 3.9 percent 3.8 3.9 not even five percent so the question is do we want is that is is that is the whatever benefits come from that very small amount of reduced overall impact from overall economic activity from from all of humanity from the global economy is is whatever that small percentage buys us in terms of in terms of reduced activity and therefore reduced overall impact does that does that is that worth it for the the slowdown that would happen on the technological advancements the growth of new industries and the progress towards real solutions which are technological again clean energy disrupting fossil fuels clean transportation disrupting combustion engine and fossil fuel based uh transportation the you mentioned it it's there's material in my book about it but the the disruption of other forms of emission like the electrification of production of cement the electrification of the production of fertilizer we can we know how to electrify those things uh right now we use fossil fuels for them they're major sources of mission we can there are technological solutions for those too uh and in the food space we the the the overall picture here is it is unfortunately the math never works out it doesn't pay to try to degrow while you're also trying to accelerate on the technological front you only ever shoot yourself in the foot and it it's it's terrible because it runs so contrary to to our intuitive common sense we don't want to continue riding this train that is causing any harm at all wouldn't it be helped god can't we just hit the brakes wouldn't it just make more sense to hit the brakes and the answer is no we did it during covet and it was a disaster it's that all of those it set all of that technological progress back it cost us more in the slow down on our race towards real solutions then it bought us in terms of buying us more time by making the problem less bad right now okay the math never works out so let me ask you one one last question [01:21:07] Speaker 1: before we go into stacy and eli and then maybe some audience questions as well um and this is not directly addressed in your book but it's kind of an overlay i think of both issues and that is the the issue of income inequality because when you have super abundant we are having super abundance in some things and what's happening is that there's certain people you know the elon musks of the world and whatever um who seem to be controlling the robots and will own the robots and or own the ai or on and on and on and on and have political power and uh things like that and so it it when you have talk about super abundance it's like who's going to benefit from that and and how is it going to transform our world from the one that we think we play a role in controlling the world and at least in democracies for example so how do you um and of course you and you just imagine as you scale up these things that concentration could continue unless we do something so what's your thought and i should add that by the way that income inequality when it's really bad collapses civilizations all throughout history it's like as bad as climate change can be so what are your thoughts on that before we move on to other [01:22:21] Adam Dore: questions well fundamentally again this is an enormous problem uh they the it's going to be a choice for how society societies have a choice of how to deal with this uh challenge i don't know if there's a clear single solution to this problem we probably have some experimenting that we have to do we don't know how to handle uh disparities of power and um political influence and control amidst abundance material abundance we don't know that's a new that's a relatively novel situation it may be that it may be that they're they're it's it's familiar territory and this old levers and mechanisms are still um the the ones that will be operative or it could be that this is a very new situation and we'll have to think very differently about it the the simple fact is that we don't know we have never had a situation uh like this fundamentally in the past we've had some some approximations of it um like the you know that the the post-world war ii world war ii boom in the united states was a period of extraordinary prosperity relative to virtually all of human history the country but it still isn't um it still isn't a fundamental shift in the nature of economics itself born on the super abundance that i talked about earlier so we don't know how to handle social uh inequality amidst uh extraordinary abundance on a material basis that's a new challenge it's it's it's it's one that we're probably going to have to learn through experimentation it's even it's difficult to even see what viable pathways there might be for modeling this um uh so it's it i i i fully i mean i i don't have a an answer for oh here's how you solve this problem it's only an admission that this is an enormous problem it's not going away it's very likely to get um to get worse now having said that having said that the one thing i will say for context is that um prosperity fundamentally makes all problems easier to solve that's number one um so you want to trade up to problems of of prosperity and abundance from problems of scarcity and want that is the general direction of travel that you want now again it doesn't mean there's no problems it's not like there's no problems in the united states today for example even though there were very bi-historical standards compared to 500 or 5 000 or 50 000 years ago the united states is a fantastically prosperous society and we live lives that our ancestors would have thought you know only only god above kings you know at the time right yeah but that doesn't mean we don't have problems of course we do with terrible problems and we don't have solutions uh easily easy solutions for them there's no reason to expect that we'll have no problems in a future where energy and uh artificial labor from from machines uh make other material goods and services even more um abundant and than they are today and that we have a higher level of material prosperity but what it does is it it changes the playing field raises the floor and it makes um it creates the circumstances by which we have we can explore entirely new approaches to solving problems we're probably gonna have a new set of problems and we're gonna have new solutions that that we can pursue does that mean we're gonna have no problems no is that is it still something a condition we ought to aspire to as as a better condition than today absolutely and then the last thing i'll say is that it's not entirely it's not entirely uh it's not completely obvious to me that the con that the consolidation of these technologies continues to make sense right now enormous corporations and if you know led by a few individuals do wield an enormous amount of power and influence um ai is probably a quintessential example here but um it's it's it's also for example pretty clear that these these technologies are going to be um uh they're going to be available to on a widely distributed basis as well so no not every individual is going to have a data center in their backyard this is you know this is not something that folks are going to um that everybody's going to have the benefit of necessarily there could still be consolidation of power over the major um uh the major pieces of infrastructure and capital that are necessary um to deliver the goods and services of the future but we're already seeing the extraordinary impacts and the extraordinary reach of open sourcing some of these technologies they're already extraordinary um open source uh successes uh and and open source you know deployment and utilization of artificial intelligence for example we're already seeing uh extraordinary advances in the open sourcing of medicine we're already seeing the extraordinary advances in the open sourcing of um robotics for example now does that mean that that in 2045 um even a small country or small society could have its own ai and its own robots and its own solar and its all of its own technological basis for prosperity as opposed to being completely beholden to a handful of you know huge corporations or or even individuals who control all that technology that's [01:28:02] Speaker 1: a possibility it's not something you look at china and as an example where they're trying to do it but you could also look at grok where you know elon musk didn't like the honest answers it was giving and it decided to give it a right-wing bias to it you know these kinds of things and so so so this is all an hour or plus a discussion all on its own so i just wanted to get your overall thoughts on that because oh gee i mean so much i mean the whole idea of the societal impacts of super abundance let alone ai is the one thing i mean it deserves incredible amount we actually once did a show uh with will right you might know the creator of the sims and uh with uh the title was which will kill you first ai or climate change that was the debate yeah so uh anyway so wait but there's so much in your book that we covered and and that's really ancillary it's it's kind of embedded in there but uh but uh thanks so much for talking about again the books of everyone uh is brighter and also the degrowth delusion links in the description we're now going to bring on stacy or command to ask her question and we'll maybe uh let's get let wait we have to see the cats we we try to get cats in our videos to increase viewership since we know cat videos get far more play than climate videos so we try to right just just [01:29:25] Speaker 3: just rocky today poppy somewhere else but um oh my word adam i don't even know where to begin adam um dan took my how do you define degrowth question um because i um i mean i've never like called myself a degrowther it's more like just use less stuff like reduce reuse recycle that whole thing i totally buy into that and i mean and again i know we're not going to solve this through each person doing their own thing we have to have collective societal global shifts in how things are done but part of it is not using any more than what you need and not using the bad stuff right i mean we we have to [01:30:12] Adam Dore: stop with fossil fuels right well of course the the the question is how and the you and the level of analysis unfortunately isn't the individual i mean as much as we would like to as much as all of us want to have agency and feel that our own personal choices are ultimately what are going to add up to making the difference that is that isn't the right level of analysis for support for tackling a problem like climate change which is planetary which is global so i the the this is not to say that it's a bad idea to be less wasteful or less profligate uh that just goes without saying you know i mean you don't want to leave your faucet running in your kitchen uh just for the sake of like stimulating water demand so that you're stimulating economic activity so that you're you know that now that's crazy so nobody that's again this is that is not the idea here is it isn't okay to be wasteful the the the point is that um downsizing and curtailing and degrowing economic activity as a whole shoots yourself on the foot because you're undermining the one force the one thing that can actually deliver system level solutions for our entire civilization and the planet and that is the economic prosperity the economic conditions that can continue to to uh fuel to power technological advancement and for all the reasons that i already explained technology is the only way the only way we get we wrap our arms we really wrap our arms around this problem the only way we're withdrawing half a trillion tons of carbon from the atmosphere before 2060. the only way is with ultra advanced technology there's no way that no amount of shorter showers and bicycling to work or or or any of the other things we can do on our individual lives withdraws a single one of those half a trillion tons right but out of the atmosphere we have to it's like if we are going [01:32:18] Speaker 3: to fight the flames we also have to take the oxygen away from you know it's like right now we are pouring gasoline on everything that is that has to stop and and we we can't be um moving forward to this glorious day when we with we pay for all our sins that we have done or our generations before us have done i mean it's like when i think about my footprint compared to you know like what well it's hard because my grandfather wasn't flying around necessarily you know um but there's um they it we have inherited this you know my kids are inheriting my sins you know my footprint and everyone else is around them and we're we'll be asking them to fight it off and to wait for this magic day when we can extract all of that out of the atmosphere it's like we're gonna cook in the meantime if we don't stop start taking [01:33:25] Adam Dore: some of the oxygen away no or well again the the train has already left the station so so you you could you could you could sell your house and go live on the lawn in a tent and so could everybody else in the world and and and climate change would still clobber the planet because of what we've already done it's too late that's what i said when i was talking uh earlier at the very beginning with this the problem is bigger than people typically understand it's too big to solve by by slowing down and cutting back now even if we slowed and cut back to zero all of us right now tomorrow morning it wouldn't solve climate change it wouldn't be enough but the only the only way we can solve this is to get the technology that can actually get its arms around this problem as soon as possible and everything we do that delays the day where we have that technology is that it is delaying the day that we get a actual an actual solution to climate change and these other problems well climate change is the big one local ones are different local ones are different so yes i mean if you want less air pollution and soil pollution you stop right now that that that's different but i'm talking specifically about climate change and it's it's again it's it's profoundly unintuitive because it just doesn't feel right it does it feels it feels like geez we i can't i just make a difference by just stopping won't that [01:34:57] Speaker 1: help and unfortunately the answer is not really no but can i just follow up with that because i have a and i've covered it on the on the program a a 20-point plan to fight climate change that is like just all in one place and one of the first things is you stop all new fossil fuel infrastructure which has already been recommended by many others and you you start phasing it out that will automatically get renewables which are cheaper and better to fill in do you agree with that i don't that's not exactly the growth but if you agree with policies that push the transition faster absolutely if we can get them passed well if we can get them passed and that then you get into the friction and the fossil fuel industry only anything [01:35:42] Adam Dore: that we can do anything that we can do to accelerate the arrival of clean technologies of clean alternatives and to to to obsolete and move away from the older and more damaging uh things that that that we do okay you know especially possible fuel emissions from industry from our energy system from our transportation system absolutely the question is what are the things that we can do to accelerate that what policies really make a difference and the so yes categorically i'm a huge fan of any policy that can that can act as an accelerant an accelerant that brings the real solutions to us faster but my again my my standpoint is the real solutions are technological because of the only things that are the only tools that are powerful enough to actually solve them solve the problem that we've gotten ourselves into we're in a the only thing that can get us out are immensely powerful technologies okay so now we have a question [01:36:44] Speaker 1: from eli who's one of brother comod uh eli welcome thanks dan and that was the perfect segue adam uh the tail [01:36:53] Speaker 4: risks of climate disruption are systematically under accounted and under observed acceleration of temperature rises might not be as improbable as the cmips six models would have suggested um i'm afraid that mitigation projections with inflection points at 2040 or 2060 uh risk missing the mark uh in very consequential ways you've touched on post scarcity my work has involved developing and applying exponential manufacturing paradigms to cdr and to srm which can break expectations to the point of being dismissed as unrealistic uh so i'm wondering do you have any thoughts on shifting the overton window to accelerate the necessary r d uh or investments when those are the actual bottlenecks when this is likely the best insurance that's available uh that would buy us uh inflection points ahead of 2040. [01:38:02] Adam Dore: that's a great question like shifting the overton window chain but by that meaning uh change what is reasonable to have in conversation what what will people take seriously what can you talk about with a straight face where folks won't um uh sort of uh disregard or um uh you out of hand that is a really really good question great question you mentioned that earlier how people don't take cdr seriously yeah right um well i'll tell you one thing that works the one thing that works tech uh in a hinge in the what what's the right way to say this over and over again historically we see that that society at all levels general public policy makers investors decision makers of all kind they won't take a technology seriously until they see it for themselves they won't take something and as you know it's true it's true bigger than just technology people don't like a won't take a problem seriously until it starts to impact them right so the uh so perhaps perhaps the a strategy to focus on will be is there a way to is there a way to make the technology or make the policy intervention concrete and real to demonstrate it in a way that's totally compelling is there a way to is there is there a way to pull an idea from the realm of abstraction from just being an abstract idea into something that you can make concrete and do a demonstrator of it so that oh my gosh this is suddenly real i get this i feel this now that would be my my i would say my my my intuition is that that would be the most powerful lever for opening the overton window is if you can do a demonstrator that will that will pull this out of the realm of abstraction into the realm of the concrete and so then it's a question of what kind of demonstrator could you do what kind of what kind of what what ways could you really illustrate this to to so that the the people you're trying to convince and have dialogue with they have something concrete that can look at and understand rather than just a an abstract idea on paper um short of that i don't i wish i i'm that's a great question i'm gonna have to go away and think about that but that's my my immediate response is find a way to make [01:40:31] Speaker 1: the to to to to to do a concrete demonstrator okay thanks um thanks eli and stacy do i i see we have uh i guess there's some audience questions one is for me uh was the artificial salmon tasty and the answer is they put it in a sushi form and they put a lot of soy sauce on it to be honest with you in order to it was a little little strange it wasn't horrible but it wasn't like the best salmon [01:41:01] Speaker 3: i ever had to be honest with you so that's one uh let's see adam uh well the one one thing i wanted to mention and i think i said this uh a little mashed up in my own comments um yes well it said re reuse repair recycle is not dousing half the flames it's more cutting the oxygen concentration so the flames are less active less active which i totally agree with and probably co-opted a bit yeah um now what do you think about um someone uh the nbt or whatever uh said something like just regrow the amazon which also sounds like a simple fix but i know would help a lot is that a piece of the puzzle absolutely absolutely one of the um [01:41:51] Adam Dore: most promising well the two pieces of the amazon actually they're worth mentioning one is that um reforestation although it's not enough reforestation alone uh again our problem is too big at this point so reforestation even at its at its at its maximum wouldn't be enough to completely solve climate change but it would really really help for us to be planting hundreds of billions of trees it would be i mean this this would be a uh a huge win on every level right um the question that has always been where where's the land going to come from to do reforestation afforestation uh ecological restoration on where is that land going to come from this is the the you know one of the the the longest standing questions i think the still the most promising source of land for repurposing is going to be from animal agriculture and so this is the thing i'm most excited about the the environmental implication i'm most encouraged and excited about and hopeful about for the impact of precision fermentation and cellular agriculture is if those technologies mature and are socially adopted we talked about both of those um so if they get to the point where they're cheap enough and high enough quality and they get past some of the social stigma then they will disrupt in the disruption economic disruption sense they will disrupt the industries around animal agriculture so that means livestock animal farming intensive intensive animal farming and then also easy to forget seafood production so the oceans are taking an enormous clobbering as well and precision fermentation and cellular agriculture can disrupt that industry too but on land grazing uh and um ranching and the production of crops for animal feedstock are the the the uh an enormously in staggeringly enormous uh source of land use right now the absolutely immense amount of land plant on across the planet is used for the support of animal agriculture to produce food overwhelmingly animal food products if we disrupt those something like 80 percent of that land could be returned for other purposes you do need to keep you you would need to use some portion of that the land that's currently used for animal agriculture you would need to produce feedstocks for the new technologies so if you want to if you want to make animal products with cellular agriculture instead of within animals you still need to put inputs into that process you need to put sugar into it you may need to put fats into it you may need to put other nutrients and so forth into it so that that means you don't get a hundred percent of all of the land we currently use for animals back but you might get eighty percent of it back that's still an enormous amount of land and what should we be doing that with that land well we shouldn't be paving over it with with suburbs and and highways and parking lots and and gold courses and i mean maybe maybe we could do a little bit of that but what we really need to be doing is returning to the land to what it was before we were we were we had paid over with agriculture and so reforestation a forestation is sort of a no-brainer from an ecological perspective it will be a social choice of course but from an ecological perspective it's yes we should we should we should we should um uh uh not just let the land go fallow by the way we should proactively uh engage in reforestation and um forestry efforts to so that it so that recover is recovery is more rapid than it would be if we just left the land alone we know how very much we know very well how to do ecological restoration with stewardship to accelerate um the return to um to a uh uh healthy ecological system that would be enormously valuable and it would and the potential there is is is uh really exciting for carbon with you know withdrawal and other benefits other ecological benefits other ecological restoration benefits so i'm super super stoked about that um uh the other thing that the amazon does is you forget is it does an enormous amount of cdr right now so the animazon river puts about well i i think the river um cdr i mean uh that these the the i'm i'm i'm not i'm actually not talking about the the forest per se i'm talking about the erosion okay and uh the amazon basin right transporting uh silt and fines and sand into the atlantic ocean the deep ocean and and what that does is exactly the uh enhanced weathering and well it's the unenhanced it's the it does the weathering and the carbon withdrawal that is naturally part of the carbon cycle and so right now the amazon river delivers about a billion tons about one gigaton of material to the atlantic ocean and then that is part of the natural carbon cycle that that uh reacts with with the carbon that's in the oceans ultimately interacting with biology precipitates that out into sediments on the ocean floor but it locks a lot of uh carbon up in bicarbonate which is more or less personal uh permanent storage in the oceans and because it changes that balance the ocean can can pull carbon out of more carbon out of the atmosphere and so the the huge rivers like the amazon are already doing the carbon withdrawal that we model uh uh artificial human carbon withdrawal uh mechanisms on that's what we're trying to emulate that's what we want to copy is what the amazon river is doing but we need to we need about 20 new amazon rivers around the world in order to withdraw 20 gigatons of carbon out instead of just one or or the equivalent for the material that's being delivered by the river into the into the atlantic so the land so the amazon is doing us doing enormous work right now for us and we need more amazon forest or the equivalent around the world and we need more amazon river and the equivalent around the world [01:48:09] Speaker 1: yeah and there's all that and the amount of land devoted to animal agriculture i heard it described as a third of the non-ice covered land on earth is devoted to animal agriculture you gave some other numbers in your book that's right staggering line several countries combined yeah huge amount so that could be very big and there's so much again as i said several times like there we could take each one of these subjects and expand on it for now we're going to have to have you back to pick a few of these and go into depth anytime i'd love to actually the one thing that's really great and should read the book the brighter book is the ex there's real excitement about this idea that renewables really can scale a lot more than people think uh because of the price 10 years from now will be a very different [01:48:54] Speaker 3: world it already is a different world aren't we going to see some of that playing out like you know we are [01:49:00] Speaker 1: batteries this year are dropped in price tremendously so it's very exciting subject we only touched on it a little bit so we'll have to do uh do it again sometime but thank you so much for spending time with us again links in the description to find the books uh certainly you're not shy about taking on controversial subjects and uh things like that so uh that makes it more entertaining as well at the same time very important subjects as well so thanks for all you're doing and uh thanks everyone for joining us again like and subscribe uh leave a comment uh probably get more comments on this show than we typically get i'm looking forward to that and adam again thank you so much for your time today i really appreciate it always a pleasure thanks so much for having everyone we'll see you next time bye bye bye Right.