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Matt Katz: It is The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Welcome back, everybody. I'm Matt Katz hanging out in Brian's seat today. It's our climate story of the week. Now we're joined by Rob Jackson, a leading climate scientist and chair of the Global Carbon Project. His new book, Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere offers a hopeful vision for addressing the climate crisis and an argument for redefining our most urgent goals. Jackson argues that simply stabilizing Earth's temperature isn't enough. We need to actively restore the atmosphere to pre-industrial levels of greenhouse gases. It won't be easy.

"If my dreams were easy," Jackson writes, "it wouldn't be a dream, but this could be achievable within our lifetime." We'll hear more about what it'd take to restore the atmosphere and we'll learn about some of the bold solutions on the way. Rob Jackson is also the chair of the Global Carbon Project. He's a senior fellow at Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment and Pre-Court Institute for Energy, a professor of Earth science at Stanford University, and his new book Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere. Professor Jackson, welcome to WNYC.

Rob Jackson: Hi, Matt. Thanks for having me.

Matt Katz: Oh, it's our pleasure. I'm so interested in talking to you about this. Let's start with some basic definitions here. What would it mean to restore our atmosphere?

Rob Jackson: What I mean by restoring the atmosphere is returning concentrations of greenhouse gases back to pre-industrial levels before we started loading the atmosphere with greenhouse gas pollution and such. Doing that, I focus on methane because methane is a super potent greenhouse gas. It doesn't last very long in the atmosphere, so we could see that returned within a decade if we could stop emissions today. Doing so would save us half a degree C of warming, and there's no greenhouse gas that provides a stronger lever for us to slow warming in the next decade or two.

Matt Katz: What led you to shift your focus here from just reducing emissions to talking about restoring the atmosphere? Was there a particular moment of realization? What happened?

Rob Jackson: I think it was the years, and honestly, the decades rolling by like floats in a parade. I chair this group, the Global Carbon Project that you mentioned, and each year we release a budget of emissions and concentrations for gases like carbon dioxide and every few years for methane. Seeing those years just roll by going up and up and up and not making progress, I don't think people understand what abstract temperature thresholds like 1.5 or 2 or heaven helpless, 3 degree C really mean. In a practical sense, they don't understand or have the knowledge to understand what it means in a paleo in a million-year context.

I don't think they sound very big, so I think we need a new narrative or a new story to reach people, to motivate people to change behavior and clean up our air, not just to help our grandchildren, but to make us healthier today.

Matt Katz: What would that new narrative be? What would that sound like?

Rob Jackson: I like to break problems up into bite-sized chunks, actionable chunks, and starting with methane, methane is the primary constituent of natural gas or natural gas really is methane. Starting with methane allows us to see a partial victory, something that we can accomplish, and start to see the concentrations in the atmosphere drop very quickly if we were to act. There is a new global methane pledge that was signed a couple of years ago, the first such agreement. 150 countries have signed on to cut methane emissions by 30% by 2030.

If we reach that goal, we'll see concentrations of methane start to drop in the air, and there's no greenhouse gas yet that we have seen that for other than the ozone-depleting CFCs.

Matt Katz: Where do we begin if we're going to start to pursue this path of methane reduction?

Rob Jackson: I like to think of beginning in our homes. I've done a lot of work sampling indoor air pollution from gas appliances, furnaces, water heaters, and stoves. Just last year, we were sampling in some public housing in Harlem, for instance, and there we documented, not just methane leakage into the air of these homes, but asthma-triggering NOx gases and carcinogenic benzene being formed in the air of residents.

They understand that the pollution that comes from gas stoves contains these dangerous gases, but they don't have the ability to do anything about it, and that frustrates people. You would never willingly stand over the tailpipe of a car breathing in the exhaust and yet we willingly stand over our stoves breathing in the same pollutants meal after meal, hour after hour, day after day.

Matt Katz: Listeners, we can take some phone calls. Anybody working in the climate solutions industry, tell us the work that you do. Do you have any questions for our guest, Stanford climate scientist Rob Jackson? Any questions about restoring the atmosphere and reducing emissions to pre-industrial levels? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. You can give us a call or just shoot us a text. Rob, you mentioned that there was this pledge, international pledge to reduce methane emissions. What's the status of that? You said 150 countries had signed on?

Rob Jackson: I believe 155 countries have now signed on and if the countries, it was led by the United States and Europe, if all the countries participate in it as they have pledged to do, it will make a substantive difference and we'll see the benefits within five years or so. Having said that, the discouraging part of it is that methane concentrations in the atmosphere now are rising faster than at any time on record, and we don't completely understand why. It's a bit of a scientific mystery. There were some interactions during COVID with NOx pollution and reduced industrial activity that can lengthen the lifetime of methane in the air, but it could also be that we're starting to see natural systems accelerate.

I work in the Amazon and tropical wetlands are the largest natural source of methane. Many people have heard about permafrost thawing, and when natural systems start to increase, if they start to increase as temperatures warm, that warming boosts microbial activity. We have no technology to stave off those. I can turn a wrench in an oil field to quench methane emissions. I can't turn a wrench in the Amazon.

Matt Katz: What would those countries, the signatories to that agreement, what are they actually doing? What are they pledging to do?

Rob Jackson: It is up to the countries to decide the most efficient and the cheapest way for them to reduce their methane emissions. They are looking at things like landfill emissions, for example. Landfills are some of the largest point sources for methane emissions. You can cover landfills with plastic, capture the methane, burn it and turn it into electricity, but there are low-tech solutions too. You can stop organic matter like grass clippings and plant material from going into the landfill. By eliminating that organic matter, you eliminate the substrate that microbes chew up to emit methane.

There are low-tech solutions and high tech, and then countries are tackling agricultural emissions. The biggest source is from cows, cow burps. They're also clearly looking at the oil and gas and fossil fuel industry. That's about one-third of global methane emissions around the world.

Matt Katz: You introduced readers in your book to innovators who are working on these bold climate solutions. Could you share a story about one of these individuals that maybe moved you or inspired you in your research?

Rob Jackson: Thanks for the question. There were so many people who inspired me. Really, I think of this book as a repair manual for the planet and it highlights the ideas and people working to solve the climate crisis. I think of it as a how to guide for restoring our air and our health as we move from climate despair to climate repair. It was a step for me to find optimism, to meet people making a difference. I found fantastic people, individuals, a person named Matt [unintelligible 00:08:56] a high school teacher who devoted 40 years of his life to preserving the forests around him and built a coalition of hunters and disparate groups to support that effort all who aligned around the idea of habitat protection.

Mike Chronicle, other individuals, Rev Yearwood, who co-founded the Hip Hop Caucus and has been a strong advocate for cleaner air and for disaster planning and relief for communities, especially vulnerable communities. Then I also met industrial people, CEOs. I traveled to Sweden and visited the first steel plant making fossil free steel in the world. They're using local hydropower to generate clean hydrogen, and with that hydrogen, they can release or remove all of the coal that formerly went into steel production. Their CEO, Martin Lindquist, was a real inspiration.

He talked about the process of how they got there. Carbon pricing was very important, but how now they're making steel a new way, and he said something like, what once was impossible is now happening today. Ultimately, these new processes will be better, and not just better, but cheaper too.

Matt Katz: You wrote that if steel were a country, it would be the third biggest polluter on Earth. I had not been aware of that. That's remarkable.

Rob Jackson: Yes, it's true. It's 10% or 11% of emissions, and this is primarily carbon dioxide emissions in the case of the steel industry. It was amazing for me to be at this site. First of all, there's this giant blast furnace with the sparks and everything going just like in a normal steel plant. Steel is tough, cement is tough where you need furnaces at thousands of degrees. You have the old way of doing it, and then you cross the plant and you're seeing the new way, the cleaner way. You can literally hold in your hand steel or iron ore with the old way and the new way and you're holding a one-tenth climate solution in your hand. It's really quite moving and remarkable.

Matt Katz: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm WNYC reporter Matt Katz filling in for Brian today. This is our Climate Story of the Week. My guest is Rob Jackson, professor of Earth science at Stanford University, and the author of a new book called Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere. Rob, you've spoken about the need for the environmental community to be more open to a range of solutions, even those that aren't personal favorites. Can you elaborate on this idea why you think it's crucial for progress?

Rob Jackson: I can. We, in the environmental community, are very good and almost trained to say no to things. Now, if someone says no to nuclear power, it might mean yes to a lot of something else. Many people say no to carbon capture and storage, for instance, with fossil fuel plants because it might prolong the life of fossil fuel use. People want to say no to new transmission lines in many cases. I believe that to beat climate change, to solve the climate crisis, we will all have to accept technologies that aren't our favorites. Nuclear technology is an example for me.

I'm not a booster or an advocate of nuclear, but I believe that we need technologies like nuclear that provide, in terms of emissions, clean and reliable baseload power to anchor our grid.

Matt Katz: Let's check in with our callers. Muck in Carrboro, North Carolina. Hi, Muck, thanks for calling back in.

Muck: Hi, Matt. Hi, Professor Jackson. I was just wanting to follow up on what you were talking about before about how it starts in the home about trying to reduce methane emissions. In my family, we ate rice every single day. I think I've eaten rice every day for the past 30 years. I've been learning more about the environmental and methane impacts of rice production, particularly when the fields are flooded and the water use leads to a lot of methane emissions. I was curious if you had any innovative approaches for trying to reduce rice production or clean up the system.

I've also been experiencing with other types of ancient grains which have less methane pollution, but curious to hear if you have any more tips for us to try to reduce these. Thank you.

Rob Jackson: No, thank you for the call and great question. Rice contributes about 30 million tons of methane to the atmosphere each year, about a tenth of the human-based emissions. It comes from flooded environments. Methane is generated by microbes in low-oxygen environments, so it comes out of wetlands like the Amazon. It comes out of rice paddies where you have standing water and the soil and sediments become low in oxygen. A cow's gut is the same way. A cow is really a walking wetland. That's why cattle emissions are so high.

There are lots of scientists and companies trying to reduce emissions from rice paddies and the most productive way so far seems to be temporarily drawing down the water levels, at least for a while. You might ask, "Why is rice flooded to start with?" It's partly cultural, it's partly for pest management. The most promising technology seemed to be temporarily removing the water. That knocks back the methane-emitting microbial community and you can cut emissions by about one-half by doing this. It's not a complete solution. Food-based emissions are the most difficult part of the climate puzzle to solve in my view.

It's very hard to do things that might reduce production for people, especially in the poorer countries around the world, but there are good things happening for rice. Thanks for the question.

Matt Katz: From North Carolina to Arizona, let's go to Valerie in Tucson, Arizona. Hi, Valerie.

Valerie: Hi. Good morning. I'm so happy that you mentioned emissions from cattle because one of the things that I felt so very hopeful about lately was learning about the work of Blue Ocean Barns. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but it actually comes out of the DCI Program at Stanford where they have figured out that giving a supplemental size portion of red seaweed to cattle, both dairy and meat cattle, can reduce emissions from burps by up to 80% just by a tiny little supplemental size thing. They're working to scale up production at this point so that they can meet demand and really make a significant impact on the methane emissions across the world.

Rob Jackson: Music to my ears, Valerie. Thanks for the question.

Matt Katz: Wow. How about that, Valerie? Thanks.

Rob Jackson: I do know Blue Ocean Barns and its founder Joan King Salwen. In fact, I have a chapter in my book that I interview Pat Brown, who was the founder of Impossible Foods, the plant-based food company. He talks a lot about reducing demand for beef and trying to reduce the number of cows on Earth almost in a profit-like way and he's been very successful. Then I stepped back and interview Ermias Kebreab from UC Davis, he's a scientist from Eritrea in Africa. For him, meat and cows and animals are very different. It's part of their culture. It's almost a banking system for them.

He told me that the first suit he ever owned when he graduated he got because his uncle sold a cow or sold an animal to pay for it. He's very interested and is leading this research with his colleagues there at Davis to reduce methane emissions. They're working on algae seaweeds that do exactly what you said, Valerie, that can cut emissions 80% or 90%. I'm excited about those technologies. The trick is to reach 1.5 billion cows all over Earth. If they're in a dairy or feedlot, we feed them every day. If they're in a California rangeland or a Montana rangeland, we don't, so we need to think about cost-effective ways to reach those billion cows.

One last point is that these feed additives don't just seem to cut emissions a bit. They can also help the cows grow a little faster or produce a little more beef or milk. That's an added incentive for ranchers to do the right thing. If you think of all that methane being lost in the cow burps, that's energy that's literally lost to the cow for growth. If the cow can recapture some of that energy, they'll grow a little faster, and then a climate solution is also a productivity win.

Matt Katz: Wow. How cool. We got a text from a listener, "The solution is to stop buying stuff, but people don't realize there is a problem until their house burns down." Is consumer consumption a critical piece of this, Professor Jackson?

Rob Jackson: It absolutely is. I think everyone has their own three-legged climate stool and my three legs begin with using less, consuming less. That's not a popular message in our growth-driven economy, but we have to reduce what we use and we use a lot more than most other countries around the world. Then on top of that, we need to decarbonize whatever polluting infrastructure is left. Then the third leg of the stool is to hack the atmosphere a bit to remove greenhouse gases from intractable sources. I have a chapter in the book where I talk about how much we consume.

I published a paper a couple of years ago with colleagues where we studied 150 countries or so and looked at energy use per person and looked at a number of outcomes, everything from childhood mortality to longevity to happiness to pollution, and many things. In all cases, using three times more than the global average as we do in the United States, doesn't get us anything. We're not healthier, we're not happier. We could slide down that energy consumption line, and apparently, not hurt ourselves in any way, we might make ourselves healthier by decluttering our lives and helping us mentally. I do strongly agree with you that using less is part of the solution.

Matt Katz: Let's take one more caller before we let you go. Ben in New Haven, Connecticut. Hi, Ben.

Ben: Hi, good afternoon or morning rather. Thanks for taking my call. I don't want to strike a pessimistic note, rather the opposite, ultimately. It's wonderful to hear of all the ways that science can benefit society. We're learning more and more every day. Unfortunately, we're also learning all the ways in which things are falling apart. I recently learned that ecosystems were a net positive carbon adder recently to the atmosphere as opposed to being a sink. All that said, that being that technology and science can be a great boon to society, I think the elephant in the room here is not that people aren't able to make individual efforts to combat their consumption.

Or we just haven't come upon the right technology or the market won't distribute those technologies or political actors won't come to the table. I think the real issue is that we organize society based on profit such that the most powerful political actors right now are held bent on destabilizing the world and pushing us towards global concentration. Ultimately, I think that we should be optimistic because we have the right tools. I think it's becoming clear that this capitalist system is only going to end in destruction of the world, either through war and social inequality or global climate collapse.

That being as clear as it is, I think, I think people are going to learn soon that it will take really a revolution in social terms, in political terms, to reorganize society to benefit everyone which will enable us to take care of this climate issue once and for all.

Matt Katz: Thank you.

Ben: Honestly, I really think it's secondary. Thank you.

Matt Katz: I appreciate it. Thanks for calling. Ben says it's got to be revolution. That's the only way to address this, revolution against capitalism. You end your book on a more hopeful note, right, Rob? You see that you look to the future and you think there might be some critical steps we need to take short of a revolution. Can you leave us with those thoughts?

Rob Jackson: Yes. First of all, thanks, Ben for your thoughts. I'm not ready to throw out capitalism and lead a revolution. I'm ready to promote the benefits of climate action, not just for future generations, but for us today. A couple of days this month were the hottest days ever recorded. 2023 was the hottest year ever recorded. The last decade was the hottest decade ever recorded, and we're already paying for climate change now. We're paying $50 or $100 billion a year in the US more for mega climate disasters, so there are financial incentives for acting and there are financial costs for not acting.

The final thought is I think optimism and hope are muscles to exercise. My first homework assignment in every class is for students to go home and find something in the environment that's better today than it was 50 years ago. That list is very long. Lifespan and poverty and the benefits of the Montreal Protocol, the Clean Air Act, that's my favorite, a bipartisan bill that saves 100,000 lives a year. It saves it at a 30-fold return on investment. Targeted regulations have eliminated 96% of the lead in our children's blood, made us smarter. They've saved us from cataclysm, from the ozone hole, and they've cleaned up our air, made us healthier today, not in some a 100-year or century future timescale.

Matt Katz: Wow. Thank you for leaving us on a positive and optimistic note. I really appreciate that. This was our Climate Story of the Week with Rob Jackson, professor of Earth science at Stanford University. His new book is called Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere. Rob, thanks so much for coming on WNYC.

Rob Jackson: Thank you so much for having me. The website is intotheclear.com. Take care, Matt.

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