Klaus Lackner: Hello every­body. Thanks so much for hav­ing me here. I’m delight­ed to talk with you about a top­ic I have been work­ing on for the last twen­ty years, actu­al­ly more than twen­ty years, and this is about how to man­age car­bon. And real­ly this is about cli­mate change and hav­ing ener­gy at the same time. We need to fig­ure out how to bal­ance our car­bon books. 

So for this the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist here it seemed actu­al­ly very sim­ple. It’s a con­ser­va­tion law. If you take car­bon out of the ground and you put it into the sys­tem it will stay there unless you take it back out. From a soci­etal per­spec­tive, this is much much more com­pli­cat­ed because as we fix it there will be win­ners and losers. On the oth­er hand, we also need to have an engi­neer­ing response to it we don’t have yet ful­ly developed. 

So our ques­tion then is how to do that, and I start­ed on the engi­neer­ing side. So I start­ed to work on the idea, how can we pull the CO₂ back out of the atmos­phere? Over those two decades, we all talked a lot about cli­mate change and how seri­ous an issue it is. But we end­ed up talk­ing. There was very very lit­tle action. And I think in part that is because we thought of the prob­lem as we have to reduce ener­gy con­sump­tion, we have to stop doing what we are doing. And we should real­ly think about it as a waste man­age­ment par­a­digm, which actu­al­ly I think will help us to make it an eas­i­er problem. 

Think what my neigh­bors would say to me if I sim­ply got out and dumped my garbage in the street and left it there. They would prob­a­bly call the cops on me. And they would­n’t take it for an answer if I came back to them and say, ​“See I real­ly thought about this prob­lem. I worked very hard on it. And over the last two years I man­aged to reduce my emis­sions, my garbage, by 20%. Aren’t you proud of me?”

But if you think about it for a moment this is exact­ly how we think about the prob­lem in the terms of cli­mate change. We pat our­selves on the back by hav­ing a 10% reduc­tion. Which by the way we nev­er had. So, we have to clean up after our­selves, right? And we have to fig­ure out how to do this. 

The oth­er neat thing about hav­ing a waste man­age­ment par­a­digm is that you actu­al­ly don’t have to think of it as some­thing you can’t have. Sewage is unavoid­able. We know that and there­fore we deal with it rather than say­ing we can’t have any, right. And so we are work­ing on this on water. We all under­stand we need water. We all need food. And we want a clean envi­ron­ment, too. For ener­gy, we actu­al­ly have to also come to the point to admit that we need it. It gives us clean water. It gives us food. It gives us raw mate­ri­als. And by the way if we want to clean up after our­selves, we also need energy. 

So, maybe we can solve the prob­lem by sim­ply avoid­ing fos­sil fuels com­plete­ly. Well, per­haps. Perhaps over time. But not in the time we have. So we are not run­ning out of fos­sil car­bon. And cli­mate change is not self-limiting. And there always will be an excuse. So we have to fig­ure out how to do this dif­fer­ent­ly. And I think the answer is we have to demand that we can­not wait. We have to demand cleanup. And then the neat thing of hav­ing many dif­fer­ent options is the mar­kets can fig­ure out which of these options are the most cost-effective and which ones we follow. 

So, how much time do we have left? Is it a few years? Are we already too late? I think the best anal­o­gy to have there is to think about it like a car­bon cred­it card the world is charg­ing to. And the prob­lem is like the old American Express, we don’t real­ly know what the over­draft lim­it is. We don’t quite know where we are, but we do know the account bal­ance. Because when we start­ed, in the pre-industrial times the CO₂ in the atmos­phere was sta­ble at 280 parts per mil­lion. And we start­ed to get wor­ried about it in Rio in 1992. We were at 356 parts per mil­lion in the atmos­phere, and by the way we had a spend­ing habit of 1.3 parts per mil­lion per year. Right now we’re at 404 parts per mil­lion, and our spend­ing habit has gone up to 2.5 parts per mil­lion a year. So we are high­er than we ever were, and we are rac­ing up in the amount of over­draft faster than we ever had. 

Now, it’s not clear where exact­ly the lim­it is. If you talk to the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, they feel it’s around 2 degrees warm­ing, which is equiv­a­lent to 450 PPM or so. We are about six­teen years away from that. So we are near­ly there, and some peo­ple like peo­ple who sub­scribe to 350​.org think we’re already in over­draft and we just haven’t quite fig­ured out how much this will hurt because it takes anoth­er hun­dred years to real­ly hurt. 

So here, we need to do some­thing. Here at ASU’s Center for Negative Carbon Emissions, which I start­ed a cou­ple years ago when I came here, we are tak­ing this seri­ous­ly. And we are work­ing on tech­nolo­gies to pull car­bon diox­ide back from the atmos­phere. Technically that’s not all that dif­fi­cult. If you think about it every tree can do it, and by the way there are machines in every sub­ma­rine and every space craft to do the same thing. 

So we know how to do it. The trick is to make it afford­able. So we designed arti­fi­cial trees which lit­er­al­ly stand in the wind. They have leaves which are made out of a plas­tic, sort of have the breeze blow over them, and they bind the CO₂. And they do this about a thou­sand times faster than a nat­ur­al tree could do. This plas­tic binds CO₂ when it’s dry. So out in the wind it picks up CO₂ after it dries. And then it releas­es it when it’s wet. So the process is actu­al­ly very sim­ple. Think of this like leaves or a fil­ter, where the air blows through for about forty-five min­utes to an hour. Then it’s loaded up and you pack those fil­ters in a box, make it wet inside the box, har­vest the CO₂ which comes off. Process it fur­ther on. And once the wet leaves are fin­ished and have giv­en up their CO₂ you sim­ply put them back out­side. And in the when they dry again and the cycle repeats itself over and over. 

So what do we do with the CO₂ once we have it? Well, first of all we can store it, right. And we are work­ing on min­er­al seques­tra­tion and we’re now using min­er­al you find here in Arizona to bind up that CO₂. We can also make that CO₂ back in to fuel. We are again work­ing on a project where we are tak­ing the CO₂, feed­ing it to algae, which make bio­fu­els out of it. We could also chem­i­cal­ly take water and CO₂, rip the oxy­gen out with elec­trol­y­sis or some oth­er process, and then bind it with process­es which have been around for a hun­dred years back into a fuel, or alter­na­tive­ly into plas­tics which you could store. So if you look at the infra­struc­ture we have, it could hide a lot of carbon. 

So in a way, our air cap­ture becomes on the one side the street sweep­er which cleans up the CO₂ lit­tler. And on the oth­er side, it becomes the car­bon min­er which pulls resources back out of the atmos­phere for new mate­ri­als. And of course mak­ing prod­ucts is much more sat­is­fy­ing than just dump­ing it into a dis­pos­al site. But on the oth­er hand we are all respon­si­ble for between fif­teen and twen­ty tons of CO₂ a year. We don’t con­sume that much. So we will have to be hon­est about it, in the end in order to bal­ance the bud­get we will have to put some of the CO₂ away in disposal. 

So car­bon tak­en from the ground must be put back. Some peo­ple are doubt­ful that this can be done. They are skep­tics and they say you can nev­er get low enough in costs and you can nev­er reach the scale you need to get to. So let’s ask the ques­tion, how big would we have to be? If you want a ton a day of car­bon diox­ide back, you will have to build a device which is rough­ly as big as a trail­er truck or a standard-size ship­ping con­tain­er you can see in a har­bor. If you want­ed to get all the CO₂ back we pro­duce right now by this means, you would need 100 mil­lion of them. That sounds like a hor­ri­bly large num­ber but on the oth­er hand there are a bil­lion auto­mo­biles on the plan­et and we build about 80 mil­lion of them a year. So we have the indus­tri­al capac­i­ty to get there if we choose to do that. So, indus­tri­al pro­duc­tion can make that happen. 

So, we know we can reach the scale. The sec­ond ques­tion is can we get to an afford­able cost? And the first ques­tion there is what is actu­al­ly afford­able? There are a few start­up com­pa­nies who want to sell you CO₂ they cap­tured from the air. And we all think we are around $100 a ton of CO₂. Some actu­al­ly think they could get a lit­tle low­er with the tech­nol­o­gy they already have. I feel we can get a lot low­er if we actu­al­ly advance the tech­nol­o­gy we have. 

If you look at how much raw mate­ri­als we need in the box itself, in the ener­gy we con­sume, in the water, it’s less than $15 per ton. Now is that a big num­ber or not? If you think about $100 a ton, that’s $0.85 extra on a gal­lon of gaso­line. If we can get it down to $30 a ton, you would have to pay one quar­ter per gal­lon more at the pump in order to be carbon-neutral. So think about that.

So the ques­tion then is can vol­un­teers lead the way to make it hap­pen, because we seem to have failed by reg­u­la­to­ry ways of doing it. Imagine you could push a but­ton at the pump where you say ​“I want my car­bon back,” and you pay an extra $0.30 or maybe $0.50 extra and that car­bon will be tak­en back on your behalf. If vol­un­teers start­ed to do that, you first of all start hav­ing a mar­ket. Once you have a mar­ket, it will get cheap­er. And so you can then make it happen. 

So the ques­tion then becomes how do we con­vince peo­ple that this actu­al­ly needs to be done? And that’s dif­fi­cult and will take time. But on the oth­er hand it exact­ly mir­rors the dis­cus­sion we had all in the 19^th cen­tu­ry about sewage. And even­tu­al­ly peo­ple got con­vinced that sewage is dan­ger­ous. It caus­es a prob­lem: cholera and typhoid. And once peo­ple under­stood that, they were will­ing to pay the mon­ey. Unfortunately CO₂ does­n’t smell so it’s hard­er to deal with. On the oth­er hand every gal­lon of gaso­line you put out puts twen­ty pounds of CO₂ into the atmos­phere. Think about this next time you dri­ve a car. And it will be there for thou­sands of years. 

So how do we get there if we start small? We have to build that first one-ton-a-today unit, maybe a few of them. That’s a $20 mil­lion project and you will have them. Then, you can start mass pro­duc­ing them. I would argue we scale up just like the car engines, in num­bers not in sheer size of indi­vid­ual units. Then that could actu­al­ly go quite fast. If you look at a pic­ture from New York in 1900, you are hard-pressed to find a car. If you look in 1925 they’re every­where. Jet planes, in between 1951 when the first one start­ed to fly, and by 1965 the world’s fleets were jet planes. So it takes a decade or two for a new tech­nol­o­gy to real­ly get in. Think of the cell phone. You see the same kind of thing.

So what we real­ly need is that you and I and every­body else have to demand a closed car­bon cycle. Which is a lit­tle bit like the recy­cling projects of the 1970s and 80s. You can con­vince peo­ple ulti­mate­ly to do that. And if we do that, the poli­cies will fol­low the vol­un­teers. In the begin­ning, recy­cling was entire­ly vol­un­tary. Today I don’t have all that much of a choice any­more because peo­ple accept­ed it, and it is a good thing, right. So vol­un­teers will nev­er change the car­bon bal­ance sub­stan­tive­ly because they will nev­er be enough. But they will give the politi­cians ulti­mate­ly the cov­er to make it hap­pen. So what we need is a well-designed ​“buy back the car­bon” cam­paign which sort of mir­rors the old recy­cling cam­paigns and in a way that gives the politi­cians the cov­er they will need. 

The last twenty-five years in my view have shown that wait­ing for oth­ers to first make this hap­pen will nev­er work. Top-down approach­es seem to fail mis­er­ably. So let’s begin at home. Ask for ways to buy the car­bon back. Demand that but­ton on the pump. And then, over time, things will come into bal­ance. And I think that’s what we will need. Thanks so much for your time.