Ethan Zuckerman: So, when take on issues of the scale of hack­ing the entire plan­et, we need a rather extra­or­di­nary mod­er­a­tor to take us through the con­ver­sa­tion. We are lucky to have just such an extra­or­di­nary mod­er­a­tor. We have Stewart Brand, who is a fan of tak­ing on prob­lems of the whole earth, as one of the founders of the Whole Earth Catalogue, and a man who favors the long view with his work on the the Long Now Foundation. So, Stewart.


Stewart Brand: To segue between the pre­vi­ous pan­el and this one, the things that make peo­ple feel that some of this stuff should be for­bid­den or slowed or encour­ages sus­pi­cions, with the biotech stuff, my fel­low environmentalists—I’m an ex-environmentalist at this point because of how far they’ve gone with what they call the the pre­cau­tion­ary prin­ci­ple. And the pre­cau­tion­ary prin­ci­ple was invoked to the point where if any­body can imag­ine any­thing that can go wrong with some­thing that’s sort of new, just don’t do it. Which means that by the way not only don’t do it, don’t do research about, don’t talk about it, because ter­ri­ble things might hap­pen that would be irreversible.

Ryan [Phelan] men­tioned the more recently-applied argu­ment which is called moral haz­ard”. Moral haz­ard has the pret­ty for­mal def­i­n­i­tion lack of incen­tive to guard against risk where one is pro­tect­ed from its con­se­quences.” The idea here being that if you talk about, research, or even think about apply­ing geo­engi­neer­ing to cli­mate change issues, you would be treat­ing the symp­toms of cli­mate change, as one pub­li­ca­tion said, and there­by giv­ing peo­ple per­mis­sion to ignore the caus­es. One cli­mate sci­en­tist in Germany said oh, It’s like a junkie fig­ur­ing out new ways to steal from his chil­dren.” And a very good book on all of this—there’s been now three books on geoengineering—a very good one is Oliver Morton’s The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World.

A few years ago, when I was prepar­ing this book Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary, I asked Al Gore about geo­engi­neer­ing. And he says, Oh! Right, Stewart, let’s just exper­i­ment with the whole plan­et.” He has zero use so far for geo­engi­neer­ing. That may change. He she used to say the same about nuclear, but he’s come a lit­tle way toward nuclear on that.

Our two pan­elists (which should prob­a­bly come up here at this point), David Keith and Gernot Wagner are the real sub­stance of this and will be sure to be get­ting lots of dis­cus­sion with you guys. David Keith will begin and what I think that David Keith has done that is unique is besides being a cli­mate sci­en­tist here at Harvard focus­ing on these mat­ters, he’s looked for what is a way to be real­ly incre­men­tal, prag­mat­ic, reversible, and less over­whelm­ing­ly scary. Because the way that geo­engi­neer­ing is often put is it’s a Damocles sword. We’ll do the whole plan­et and then we’re absolute­ly addict­ed to doing that for­ev­er. And mean­while we’ll keep on burn­ing all the coal that’s in the ground.

David’s got a bet­ter approach on that. Go ahead.


David Keith: Thank you. Solar geo­engi­neer­ing rests on a sim­ple idea that it is tech­ni­cal­ly pos­si­ble to make the Earth a lit­tle more reflec­tive so that it absorbs a lit­tle less sun­light, which would part­ly coun­ter­act some of the risks that come from accu­mu­lat­ing car­bon diox­ide in the atmos­phere. When I say tech­ni­cal­ly pos­si­ble, it appears that at least doing this in a crude way is actu­al­ly easy, in the sense that it could be done with com­mer­cial off-the-shelf tech­nolo­gies now, and it could be done at a cost that is real­ly triv­ial, sort of a part in a thou­sand or a part in ten thou­sand of glob­al GDP.

More sur­pris­ing­ly, there is real evi­dence that it could reduce many of the risks that peo­ple care about most. So, it’s almost axiomat­ic. It’s a fact of ener­gy con­ser­va­tion, more or less, that if you warmed up the plan­et by adding car­bon out­side, you could bring the glob­al aver­age sur­face tem­per­a­ture back to some­thing like say, pre-industrial, if that was our choice. That could be done for sure. And that’s not been real­ly doubt­ed. Reports back to the 1960s have talked about solar geo­engi­neer­ing and made it clear that that was possible.

What has­n’t been clear is the extent that it would deal with risks we care about. Extreme events like the big destruc­tive storms that cause some of the most dam­age, heat waves, ris­ing sea lev­els. And while we cer­tain­ly don’t know very well how well it would work; while there are lots of risks that are unex­plored part­ly because we have in a sense col­lec­tive­ly decid­ed we pre­fer ignorance—we have no real research pro­grams; nev­er­the­less in the last espe­cial­ly five years, this has been tack­led by the state of the art cli­mate mod­els, by basic the­o­ry, by obser­va­tion­al ana­logues. And there’s now a lot of evi­dence that solar geo­engi­neer­ing could on a region-by-region basis, if used appro­pri­ate­ly, reduce many of these risks. Reduce intense storms, reduce peak tem­per­a­tures, increase the pro­duc­tiv­i­ty of crops worldwide.

The big ques­tion is how we might con­trol it, how we might learn more about it. Now, I’m sure many of you are think­ing why would­n’t we just stop emit­ting car­bon diox­ide? So. Suppose we did. Suppose that tomor­row, we stopped. No cars, no air­planes, no pow­er plants. Forget for a sec­ond the con­se­quences of that for our civ­i­liza­tion. Just sup­pose we did it. Would it get warmer, or would it get cold­er? That’s a test. Think about it for a sec­ond. I’m not going to ask for a show of hands. But what hap­pens like, in the next few months or years?

It gets warmer. And the rea­son it gets warmer is that we are putting a lot of aerosols into the atmos­phere now, not the car­bon diox­ide which in the long run is of course warm­ing the plan­et, but we are putting aerosol pol­lu­tion in the atmos­phere now. Which kills three or six or so mil­lion peo­ple a year now. You know, it cuts sev­er­al years off your life if you hap­pen to be unfor­tu­nate enough to live in Beijing. But even here you know, I live a lit­tle less long because I moved here from Western Canada than I would have had I stayed there. 

Those aerosols are cool­ing the plan­et. Now, they’re off­set­ting part of the warm­ing ten­den­cy that’s there from the car­bon diox­ide; mask­ing it. So if we just stopped now, it would get warmer, and it might get warmer for more than a cen­tu­ry. We don’t know how much cli­mate feed­back there is. We don’t know how much the warm­ing would trig­ger more car­bon diox­ide emis­sions over the century.

Solar geo­engi­neer­ing pro­vides a thing that is dif­fer­ent, that is com­ple­men­tary, to emis­sions reduc­tions. In the long run, if we want a sta­ble cli­mate we must bring emis­sions to zero. Solar geo­engi­neer­ing does­n’t get us out of the need to bring emis­sions to zero, but it does a dif­fer­ent thing. It par­tial­ly, imper­fect­ly, deals with the risks of the CO2 we have admit­ted in his­to­ry. So unless you’ve got a time machine as an alter­na­tive, you need a way to deal with those emis­sions. And geo­engi­neer­ing is a way to do that. And so in that sense it is a com­pli­ment to cut­ting emis­sions. The two things can work togeth­er to pro­vide much more abil­i­ty to reduce cli­mate risks than can be done with cut­ting emis­sions alone.

So there cer­tain­ly are aspects of this that raise these ques­tions about future behav­ior. And ques­tions about whether we should tie our hands some­how to the mast with respect to future behav­ior. And there are ques­tions about mess­ing with nature.

Now, I want to end there. How should we think about whether this is some­how an out­ra­geous manip­u­la­tion of the nat­ur­al world? There’s no sim­ple answers, but let me just pose a ques­tion. Because you can look at this as some­how increas­ing the weight of human action on nature, the way we’re push­ing the nat­ur­al world, or decreas­ing it. So the case for increas­ing it is that obvi­ous­ly some glob­al extra sys­tem we’ve added to try and delib­er­ate­ly con­trol the plan­et is adding some­how to the com­plex­i­ty of the sys­tem, the com­plex­i­ty of the inter­ac­tions between humans and their envi­ron­ment, and in some ways makes the whole world more of an artifact.

But it’s also true that one of the most basic mea­sures of how much we are mess­ing with the cli­mate is what we in the cli­mate sci­ence world call the radia­tive forc­ing, the mea­sure of the kind of total force by which our accu­mu­lat­ed green­house gas­es and the oth­er things we’ve done to the cli­mate are chang­ing it. 

And the fact is for any giv­en amount of CO2 in the atmos­phere, in say 2050, that atmos­phere with also a lit­tle bit of solar geo­engi­neer­ing has less radia­tive forc­ing. And so in some basic mea­sure, we’re actu­al­ly doing less to alter the cli­mate than we would have done if we had­n’t done solar geoengineering.

And I think that real­ly is the core ques­tion about how to think about the trade­off between how we mess with nature. There’s no way that we can avoid the fact we are doing it. The ques­tion is whether we do it delib­er­ate­ly, with inten­tion, in a way that is demo­c­ra­t­ic and open.

Brand: David, would you intro­duce your col­league Gernot?

Keith: I’d love to. Gernot Wagner has joined our effort at Harvard to build a real­ly sig­nif­i­cant geo­engi­neer­ing research pro­gram that would be cov­er­ing things from sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy right through to pub­lic pol­i­cy. He spent six or eight years ris­ing as one of the young stars in envi­ron­men­tal defense, and has come here to help build a new pro­gram with what we hope will be glob­al reach. And [inaudi­ble] say, he’s an economist.

Gernot Wagner:am an economist—

Keith: You can still lis­ten to him.


Wagner: Thanks David and Stewart. So, sci­ence is one thing, and it’s amaz­ing. Now, so often of course, this is going to stand or fall not just by virtue of the sci­ence but of the social sci­ence. Social con­text, gov­er­nance, every­thing around it. And as an envi­ron­men­tal­ist who car­ries around the reusable water bot­tle (I would nev­er touch the oth­er one here)— Full dis­clo­sure, I’m a veg­e­tar­i­an, all the rest of that. But of course first of all, none of that makes a dif­fer­ence. Of course we know that. And we do know that we must cut emis­sions. Yes, we do, right?

But then there is this thing out they are called moral haz­ard. What if think­ing, talk­ing, about solar geo­engi­neer­ing gives us license to pol­lute? That would be bad. Now, for­get about cli­mate for a moment. Think about statins. Lipitor. If you’re a man of a cer­tain age, cer­tain girth, you’re sup­posed to pop a pill of Lipitor every­day. Now, here’s the prob­lem. If you’re a physi­cian, and you have some­one walk into your office with high cho­les­terol, you know that per­son needs to diet and exer­cise. That’s a giv­en. Chance is pret­ty good he has­n’t been diet­ing or exer­cis­ing, oth­er­wise he would­n’t be there. So, what does the intro­duc­tion of that pill do to that person?

Well, one sto­ry is, ratio­nal­ly ([points at self] homo eco­nom­i­cus; econ­o­mist) ratio­nal­ly we should all be exer­cis­ing let’s say thir­ty min­utes a day. Now you get the pill. Rationally, now you should be exer­cis­ing twenty-nine and a half min­utes a day. Turns out no one is actu­al­ly all that ratio­nal, right? So, people—you know, the nut cas­es, that exer­cise nine­ty min­utes a day. [waits for show of hands] Or zero, plus/minus ten min­utes. [waits for show of hands]

So, the ones who do nine­ty, pre­sum­ably you’ll keep exer­cis­ing. It floats your boat. Maybe lit­er­al­ly if you’re sail­ing out there for exer­cise. The ones who do zero, well, if you tell them now about Lipitor, one reac­tion is moral haz­ard. Which is to say right, I was exer­cis­ing zero plus/minus ten, now I’m doing even less. I’m eat­ing the dough­nut and the bacon and what­ev­er else,” right. Another reac­tion is to say, Holy shit, I need to take a pill to stay alive? Maybe I should be tak­ing the stairs more often. 

Back to cli­mate. Very ear­ly evidence—I’ve now been with David for six months—so very very ear­ly evi­dence on this, and actu­al­ly not from us. Someone else who just pub­lished a study month or so ago. When you tell peo­ple about solar geo­engi­neer­ing, are they more or less like­ly now to vote for what is actu­al­ly nec­es­sary to cut emis­sions? Carbon tax, price on car­bon. If it’s moral haz­ard, less like­ly. If it’s anti”-moral haz­ard, more like­ly. Turns out what hap­pens to dom­i­nate is the, Holy shit. Serious peo­ple are talk­ing about what? Maybe there’s some­thing to this cli­mate prob­lem after all.” 

Thank you.


Brand: So let me you ask you guys about sort of the cur­rent state of play. When I did this book back in 2009. Ken Caldeira said there’s been no pub­lic fund­ing for this at all. Everybody’s doing it kind of as a hob­by on their own time in their own back­yard, and that was that. And ear­li­er than that, I remem­ber Jesse Ausubel came out with the a paper around 2000 talk­ing about adap­ta­tion. And he was pun­ished severe­ly for talk­ing about adap­ta­tion when every­body knows what you’ve got to do is elim­i­nate these green­house gas­es, and if you even talk about adap­ta­tion that peo­ple will relax and that’s ter­ri­ble. And he got a pro­fes­sion­al hit, just for say­ing out loud that you could think about that, and do that, and do research on it.

But here we are, 2016. We’re over what, 450 parts per mil­lion. It’s mov­ing right along. Are we mov­ing right along? Is there mon­ey for research­ing geo­engi­neer­ing now?

Keith: It is stun­ning. In a nation that [has] in many ways led the world in open sci­en­tif­ic research, we have real­ly noth­ing in the way of orga­nized research. And that’s despite the fact that the National Academy dis­cussed and rec­om­mend­ed some research in its 1982 report. Also for­mal­ly in detail in a report on solar geo­engi­neer­ing last year, even say­ing that—actually, now it’s the year before last—even say­ing that field exper­i­ments might make sense.

I per­son­al­ly got involved in this first around 89 or some­thing, when I was a grad stu­dent here at MIT. I think I first got to speak to an acad­e­my com­mit­tee some­time in the late 90s on a very hot day in DC. And peo­ple nev­er real­ly argue back. I mean well, some do. But in gen­er­al, the kind of elite opin­ion is, Oh yes, it would make sense to know more about this, but some­how we just can’t.” And incred­i­bly, that’s still true.

So at this point there is a for­mal Chinese research pro­gram. There are sev­er­al research pro­grams in Europe. Now, there’s lots of peo­ple in North America doing research. We are and oth­ers by divert­ing mon­ey, or by phil­an­thropic mon­ey. But we need a seri­ous, open, inter­na­tion­al, no-nonsense research pro­gram, and we don’t have one. And that is in my view a kind of polit­i­cal cowardice.

Brand: So, are we talk­ing about— What kind of research— You know, are the Chinese and oth­ers doing? Are they scur­ry­ing around with cli­mate mod­els, or what?

Keith: So far, almost all cli­mate mod­els. There’s talk about doing field exper­i­ments, but almost noth­ing is hap­pen­ing. Our group and a few oth­ers at University of Washington and a few oth­er places have sort of been lead­ing in think­ing about how we could do very small out­door exper­i­ments. Not terms that would alter the cli­mate. Experiments that would help us under­stand some of the key process­es, so we’d bet­ter be able to judge the risks and efficacy. 

But at this point I’d say it’s almost all cli­mate mod­el­ing, or actu­al­ly social sci­ence. So, in this case, because this is such a polar­iz­ing top­ic— (With good rea­son.) In fact, there’s evi­dence that there’s been more social sci­ence and gov­er­nance papers pub­lished by some mar­gin than there has been sci­ence. And we go to meet­ings and we most­ly talk about whether it’s okay to talk about it not actu­al­ly talk­ing about it.

Brand: Gernot, are there eco­nom­ic mod­els being explored in rela­tion to all this?

Wagner: Oh, in some sense too many. There’s too much of that going on. But just maybe two quick points. One, just to be clear when we say small-scale exper­i­ment. Sort of the most ambi­tious exper­i­ments in a sense, are talk­ing about emit­ting as much sul­fates as one com­mer­cial air­line does in one minute of flight. And there’s what, thir­ty thou­sand up there right now? These are tiny, tiny exper­i­ments. Yes, they are out­door, but still, they are not going to do any­thing to the plant. 

Now, a sec­ond bit is actually—and this is now over the last year, too, a very recent devel­op­ment. It is in fact a cou­ple major envi­ron­men­tal groups. So, EDF, where I was until six months ago. NRDC, the Natural Resource Defense Counsel, are the two most promi­nent ones that have in fact come out in favor of small-scale, care­ful, out­door research on the topic.

Brand: Is that a flip for them? Did they used to for­bid it?

Wagner: Not a flip— I mean, it’s the first time they’re com­ing out, right. It was always sort of EDF’s posi­tion on nuclear, for exam­ple, does­n’t exist; that there is none. Price CO2 and get out of the way, right. On solar geo­engi­neer­ing, very sim­i­lar. In some sense, there was no for­mal posi­tion at all. But now in fact they are com­ing out in favor.

Brand: So, David describe the kind exper­i­ment you’d like to see done on the whole planet.

Keith: Well, in the short term, no exper­i­ments on the whole plan­et. But I think what we’d like to do, what we’re try­ing to dri­ve, is a real research effort that you know, with­in a decade or so deliv­ers in an open way, to some lev­el to the world, real­ly deep knowl­edge about how this might be done in a tech­ni­cal sense. How you’d mon­i­tor it. What are the most like­ly fail­ure modes? How you would test those fail­ure modes. And some ideas about how we gov­ern this thing.

So in terms of indi­vid­ual exper­i­ments we’re think­ing about? So, we’ve worked most­ly into the tech­ni­cal work on stratos­pher­ic aerosols. There are plen­ty of oth­er ideas, but that’s the one we work on. And the main idea for­ev­er has been the idea you could put sul­fu­ric acid in the stratos­phere because we know vol­ca­noes do it, and we know that it cools the plan­et. It does­n’t have huge side-effects. But there’s lots of ideas for things beyond sul­fates. We’ve been think­ing actu­al­ly about bases; cal­ci­um car­bon­ate, lime­stone. Which actu­al­ly turns out to be bet­ter opti­cal prop­er­ties than sul­fates. And it also looks like it would restore the ozone lay­er. So actu­al­ly, instead of dam­ag­ing the ozone lay­er fur­ther, it would actu­al­ly slight­ly restore it, coun­ter­act­ing some of the destruc­tion of the ozone lay­er that comes from chlo­ro­flu­o­ro­car­bons, chlo­rine com­pounds that we admit­ted over over the indus­tri­al era.

Brand: So instead of sul­fate par­ti­cles, it’s what that you want—

Keith: We’ve looked at cal­ci­um car­bon­ate. We also looked at dia­mond and so on. But to give you a sense of what these exper­i­ments would be, they’d be be below— 

Brand: Diamond.

Keith: Yeah.

Wagner: Diamond dust.

Brand: That sounds like an expen­sive program.

Keith: Well, you can— Before we pub­lished that paper, I actu­al­ly took the time to go to a deep source, aliba​ba​.com, and you can actu­al­ly get LPCVBD, low-pressure chem­i­cal vapor depo­si­tion bulk dia­monds, or sil­i­con car­bide for about a hun­dred bucks or so a kilo. And actu­al­ly do the math, that turns out to be afford­able, even at that price, for solar geo. But if you talk a lit­tle bit to the ven­dors, I don’t think there’s any­thing that hard about mak­ing them at that scale. Making big gem-quality dia­monds is hard. But mak­ing half-micron dia­monds is not that hard.

Brand: So say more about basi­cal­ly the chem­istry that’s sup­posed to hap­pen in the stratos­phere between the car­bon­ate, the sul­fate, and the diamond.

Keith: So, it turns out— Well no, I think those are dif­fer­ent ideas. But what we’ve start­ed to do is think a lot about the ways that the exist­ing ideas have weak­ness­es. Which are many. So, what’s bad about sul­fates? Well, sul­fates are bad because they absorb light, and they warm the low­er stratos­phere, and that house all sorts of prob­lems. Actually let­ting more water vapor in, which coun­ter­acts the effect and has oth­er bad implications.

Brand: And this is what Pinatubo and oth­er vol­ca­noes do nor­mal­ly. They put up tens of tons of sul­fate into the stratos­phere and do what they do. 

Keith: So that’s what we know nature does. So, a big vol­cano will put mil­lions of tons of sul­fur com­pounds in the stratos­phere. They last for a cou­ple years. And we’ve seen the cool­ing. We know that it will cool the plan­et. But we also know that it can dam­age the ozone lay­er, actu­al­ly, by mak­ing the chlo­rine we put their more active. And so we’ve been think­ing about ways that we could coun­ter­act that. 

But in the end, all of this is talk until we do a real exper­i­ments. So we are, are our lab, we actu­al­ly have now a lab exper­i­ment look­ing at some of the key chem­i­cal inter­ac­tions. Because com­put­er mod­els are great, but the com­put­er mod­els depend on actu­al knowl­edge of chem­istry we don’t have well enough. But to give you a sense of what the flight exper­i­ments we’d like to do would be, these would be very much like what our group has done before as nor­mal sci­ence. They be be small balloon-board field exper­i­ments would be up in the stratos­phere for a day or two, with a bal­loon and a bunch of sci­en­tif­ic instru­ments, and you’d release sort of that much [indi­cates his fist] of some com­pound, and then look at what it did in a lit­tle puff or cloud in the stratosphere.

So, what I think we need is a whole set of those, as well as devel­op­ment of a broad set of engi­neer­ing tech­nolo­gies, in a kind of sys­tems engi­neer­ing sense, to build up the capac­i­ty to do this and to mon­i­tor and ver­i­fy it. That real­ly is the kind of capac­i­ty we need to, I think, deliv­er to the world. Which does­n’t say it should be done. It says there’s enough evi­dence that this might be use­ful that we need to seri­ous­ly devel­op the knowl­edge of how to do it, so we can bet­ter make good informed decisions.

Brand: When you talk about the sys­tem engi­neer­ing, you’re engi­neer­ing a sys­tem that is not ful­ly under­stood in terms of its com­plex­i­ty and all the rest of it. Is that the respon­si­ble thing to do?

Keith: Well, we are com­mit­ted to that. So, with what we’re doing with car­bon diox­ide and the exist­ing aerosols, we are manip­u­lat­ing a sys­tem we don’t ful­ly under­stand. There’s no way out of that, save the time machine. 

I think the ques­tion is how we go about doing that. How we do it in a way that cou­ples human gov­er­nance with some lev­el of plan­e­tary man­age­ment. But I don’t real­ly see there is an alter­na­tive where we’re not alter­ing the system.

Wagner: Just to add a lit­tle bit of eco­nom­ics to this, right. So, in many ways it’s not a ques­tion of if, it’s a ques­tion of when. And of course if it’s a ques­tion of when, then it’s a ques­tion of how intel­li­gent­ly are we going to do this. Now, what I mean when I say this is, the most expen­sive thing of course is not mit­i­gat­ing cli­mate change, right. That costs us tril­lions of dol­lars. Mitigating cli­mate change, cut­ting CO2, is much much cheap­er than not act­ing. But of course, it’s in fact expen­sive. It’s also in the tril­lion dol­lar category.

Keith: Per year.

Wagner: Per year, yes. Now, we’re talk­ing about research now, which of course is right in the tens of mil­lions of dol­lars. But even at full-scale deploy­ment, solar geo­engi­neer­ing would be around single-digit bil­lions of dol­lars per year. Now, that’s not—

Brand: To accom­plish what lev­el of cooling?

Keith: To stop the warm­ing. And I think the con­cern is that this isn’t peo­ple— You may think this is a thing that big coun­tries like the US do. But as Oliver Morton’s book and oth­ers play at, the peo­ple most affect­ed by cli­mate change are many of the trop­i­cal coun­tries that feel the heat the most. And any of those coun­tries or a coali­tion have the tech­ni­cal capa­bil­i­ty and mon­ey to do this. And the pres­sure to do it will be large. And the moral pres­sure to actu­al­ly pro­tect real humans whose lives are in dan­ger will and should be large. And so, part of what you could look at— what I think not just our group but the larg­er research com­mu­ni­ty is doing is giv­ing peo­ple more knowledge.

Brand: Well, it sounds like part of the moral haz­ard here is that for a bil­lion dol­lars, a cou­ple bil­lion dol­lars per year, we can off­set what is cost­ing hun­dreds of bil­lions of dol­lars to do in the world’s econ­o­my in terms of mit­i­ga­tion of green­house gas­es. Well, that’s a pret­ty easy eco­nom­ic deci­sion to make, right?

Keith: Well… But, you can’t get out of the moral haz­ard. You define moral haz­ard (which is the right def­i­n­i­tion) as if you don’t feel the risk con­se­quences of your actions. So, that’s exact­ly the prob­lem with CO2 emis­sions. Because CO2 emis­sions build up very slow­ly over time, that the moral haz­ard is absolute­ly cen­tral to this, but it’s actu­al­ly about CO2 emissions.

So, part of a way to think about the rea­son that we’re not cut­ting CO2 emis­sions is that unlike local air pol­lu­tion, where we actu­al­ly have made lots of progress— The US Clean Air Act will add about a year and a half to the life of aver­age Americans, and it cost close to 1% of GDP at peak. So, we have made progress cut­ting local pol­lu­tion, and that’s because the gen­er­a­tion, the peo­ple, who spent the mon­ey to cut pol­lu­tion got the ben­e­fits. But for CO2 emis­sions, most of the risks are far in the future, and that’s the moral haz­ard, is the sim­ple thing to do is just keep putting CO2 in the air. 

Brand: So you’ve also got a slow ver­sus fast thing, in the sense that if you start doing solar radi­a­tion man­age­ment using some­thing the stratos­phere, you can get a pret­ty imme­di­ate response. And all this mit­i­ga­tion stuff has huge delays of actu­al­ly get­ting it to hap­pen, and the CO2 is still up there being a prob­lem. This isn’t just mon­ey we’re talk­ing about, this is polit­i­cal time.

Keith: Yup.

Wagner: Solar geo­engi­neer­ing works on polit­i­cal cycles. You can actu­al­ly see the ben­e­fit if you pull the trig­ger now, before you need to get reelect­ed, right? You see effects. Which you don’t do with CO2 emissions.

Brand: We fixed cli­mate change on our watch!” Yeah, I can see this right now.

Wagner: New RNC plat­form, right?

Keith: I think the key ques­tion is how the two things are coupled.

Brand: Good. Say more.

Keith: And I think cen­tral polit­i­cal chal­lenge is how to cou­ple efforts to cut CO2 emis­sions, which after all are still pret­ty weak, with con­trol of what’s done about solar geo­engi­neer­ing. And there are lots of ideas about this. Ideas that range from for­mal coali­tions of states in a kind of club sys­tem where the states that are mak­ing deci­sions about solar geo, to get access to that club,” you have to agree to be doing some­thing about cut­ting emis­sions. There are more dis­trib­uted ideas. But I think the inter­ac­tion those two things is the key.

But what I would urge, and it picks up direct­ly on what Gernot said, this evi­dence about peo­ple’s reac­tion to Lipitor, what I would urge is us not to assume that that nat­ur­al answer is that the pres­ence of the pos­si­bil­i­ty of solar geo­engi­neer­ing means we do less to cut CO2 emis­sions. That is by no means clear. There are ver­sions of the world that go both ways. And what we need to do is to do the best we can to tip it to a world where the pres­ence of solar geo means that we both get the ben­e­fits of reduced risk from solar geo, and do more to cut CO2 emissions.

Brand: So, is this still a hob­by? Are peo­ple still doing this out of mon­ey in their back pock­et? Is this a side­line for you guys?

Keith: For us, no. I mean, I had done this on and off. When I say I did it back to the late eight­ies, that was a hob­by. But, in the last few years, I have, and it’s part of what brought Gernot here, we’re a big group of us at Harvard, very much not just me.

Brand: How big?

Keith: Eight or ten pro­fes­sors. We’ve now got fundrais­ers to pay atten­tion to us, and we’re try­ing to raise phil­an­thropic mon­ey. They’ve built a real sig­nif­i­cant cen­ter. So that’s my entire effort. I Kind of put all my chips in the mid­dle of the table to do that. 

Brand: So there’s cou­ple of tens of mil­lions that have come into this kind of research?

Keith: No, that’s where we want to get to.

Brand: A cou­ple of mil­lions that’ve come into this research so far. From what kind of sources?

Keith: So, for us Bill Gates has been a sup­port­er for a long time, but he’s very clear that he does­n’t want the per­cep­tion or real­i­ty of a sin­gle per­son con­trol­ling that much. So he’ll match a sig­nif­i­cant amount of mon­ey, but most of the mon­ey needs to come from oth­er donors. We’ve got some oth­er promi­nent envi­ron­men­tal donors now to step up. And I think there’s rea­son to believe we’re going to get there. But we’re not…we’re not there yet.

Brand: How about China? Is that a gov­ern­ment program?

Keith: Yes.

Brand: Say more about what you know about that.

Keith: We know actu­al­ly quite a lot. The guy who runs the pro­gram, which is vis­it­ing us— We’re in the mid­dle of a two-week res­i­den­cy where we bring a bunch of peo­ple in. Young researchers and more expe­ri­enced ones on on solar geo­engi­neer­ing to our pro­gram at Harvard. So, John Moore, who’s not a Chinese nation­al but he’s lived there eight years or so, and he’s mar­ried and sort of estab­lished in China, he runs the pro­gram. I think it’s pret­ty open. He said there was very lit­tle push­back when he sort of final­ly got through the Chinese Academy of Sciences process. It’s a pro­gram that looks broad­ly at the using cli­mate mod­els to under­stand the effec­tive­ness and risks of solar geo­engi­neer­ing with a spe­cial focus on ice sheets, on whether or not it could be used suc­cess­ful­ly to reduce sea lev­el rise.

Brand: We’ll go to ques­tions from the room pret­ty short­ly. So far we’ve just talked about one whole vec­tor of geo­engi­neer­ing, which is solar radi­a­tion man­age­ment. But then there’s also good old car­bon diox­ide, the removal or reduc­tion. What’s going on in that? Because that seems to be sort of, well great, it means you get the car­bon diox­ide out of the atmos­phere; air cap­ture or what­ev­er the hell. Grow more forests. Everybody loves that, right? Or is there some for­bid­den­ness about car­bon reduction?

Keith: For both of them, there’s a moral haz­ard. So, you talked… Sorry, your won­der­ful spouse talked about the fact that the extinc­tion is for­ev­er” mantra is real­ly impor­tant in the envi­ron­men­tal com­mu­ni­ty. It’s a way to moti­vate envi­ron­men­tal action. And so there are con­cerns about chang­ing the real­i­ty on the ground, if we admit that extinc­tion isn’t for­ev­er. And the same way, the efforts to cut CO2 emis­sions have been sig­nif­i­cant­ly built around the idea of what’s often called com­mit­ted warm­ing,” the idea that it’s a one-way valve when we put CO2 in the air. And so, both car­bon removal tech­nolo­gies and solar geo­engi­neer­ing are ways that we part­ly break that one-way valve. They imper­fect­ly allow us to go back in time. And I think you get some of the pre­cise same concern.

Wagner: Just to be clear, CO2 removal very much looks and feels still like mit­i­ga­tion, right. It’s about CO2. And of course we have to cut CO2. But of course what that also means is it’s also as expen­sive. Maybe even more expen­sive than putting a solar pan­el on your roof. So in oth­er words, the… (econ­o­mist) the free rid­er effects led us into this prob­lem in the first place. It is and no one’s self-interest to be doing enough to decrease, nor could we even if we want­ed to. 

Well, for solar geo­engi­neer­ing, not for car­bon geo­engi­neer­ing. For solar geo­engi­neer­ing, it’s the free dri­ver effect, right. It’s so cheap that one coun­try could in fact go ahead.

Keith: I should say mar­kets play in fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent ways. I actu­al­ly found­ed a start up, Carbon Engineering, that’s involved in devel­op­ing direct cap­ture of CO2 from air. And for a tiny, crazy start­up that’s gone pret­ty well. We sort of go to $30 mil­lion or so of com­mit­ted spend­ing. We built real hard­ware. But in that case, it’s much less con­tro­ver­sial because we’re just try­ing to make ultra low car­bon fuels from solar pow­er, and there are mar­kets in the sense of like the California low car­bon fuel stan­dard market.

So it looks much more like, from the point of view of us in that com­pa­ny (I’m right sort of 20% time in that com­pa­ny), we’re not try­ing to engi­neer the plan­et, we’re try­ing to find bet­ter ways to cut emis­sions that we com­pete with bio­fu­els and elec­tric vehicles.

Brand: And do you have competition?

Keith: Yeah. There’s a com­pa­ny in Switzerland called Climeworks that is sort of sim­i­lar scale to us. We’ve both done kind of ton-a-day pro­to­types. We’ve both got kin­da twen­ty engineers. 

Brand: So these are com­mer­cial oper­a­tions that will get paid basi­cal­ly for the valu­able CO2 that you pro­vide, or the valu­able reduc­tion of green­house gas emis­sions that you provide.

Keith: Yup. So, Climeworks has been focus­ing on green­house mar­kets first of all, because you have to take the CO2 out of the air to do green­hous­es. We’ve been focus­ing on what’s called air-to-fuels, the idea that solar pow­er’s got real­ly cheap, but solar pow­er does­n’t make air­planes go. And so one of the path­ways is you take solar pow­er to make hydro­gen. You go CO2 from the air. Hydrogen plus CO2 to fuels that you could make as hydro­car­bons that were tru­ly carbon-neutral with­out a big land foot­print, say for aircraft.

So we’re not actu­al­ly, in the net, tak­ing car­bon out of the air. We’re just com­pet­ing with bio­fu­els. We use less land.

Brand: How valu­able is CO2 for green­house gas­es and putting in your soda and stuff like that?

Keith: Trucking CO2 is about a hun­dred and fifty bucks a ton most places. 

Brand: And is seques­ter­ing CO2 geo­log­i­cal­ly or in oth­er modes look­ing real­is­tic or not?

Keith: It’s cer­tain­ly real­is­tic. About fifty mil­lion tons a year of CO2 has been under­ground for enhanced oil recov­ery, and a very high frac­tion of that, maybe 99.99% of it stays for thousand-year time scales. So that’s cer­tain­ly tech­ni­cal­ly pos­si­ble. There have been some big CO2 dis­pos­al efforts, and none of them have had any real problems.

But it’s that clear that peo­ple don’t like it much. And it’s also clear that in elec­tric pow­er, where a lot of that was focused, the dynam­ics of solar pow­er get­ting cheap­er have real­ly changed it. So it does­n’t look as impor­tant as it did before that the big drop in the price of solar PV.

Brand: How about the nat­ur­al process­es of fix­ing car­bon. Forests, and the stuff that goes on in the oceans, and all of that. What’s the sort of state of play of under­stand­ing and poten­tial encour­age­ment of those processes?

Keith: Complicated, but I’d say there’s a way in which those fun­da­men­tal­ly don’t do the same job. So, at some lev­el the cli­mate prob­lem is caused by mov­ing car­bon from the geosphere where it’s been for tens of mil­lions of years into the active bios­phere, where then the car­bon can move back and forth between atmos­phere and land and ocean. And if what we do to deal with a car­bon prob­lem is take car­bon out of the air and build it up in the land, in forests, or wood, that’s a bit like build­ing a big stock of wood that could burn. And doing it in a place (I’m try­ing to get the anal­o­gy right) where there’s fires.

And that’s kind of lit­er­al­ly true. So, if we actu­al­ly manip­u­late the land bios­phere to get that much new car­bon in it, we don’t deal with the kind of millennial-scale cli­mate prob­lem. Because car­bon moves in and out of the bios­phere often on scales of well, in a for­est fire, hours. And nat­u­ral­ly typ­i­cal­ly decades. And so if you build up all that car­bon, and then you have a warm­ing world, the car­bon wants to come out. So, I think those things can be use­ful, but in some sense it’s a dif­fer­ent cat­e­go­ry of thing.

Brand: How about the oceans? There’s talk about adding iron dust to the oceans and being able to fix that, and it goes down the abyssal plain and stays there for­ev­er. How about that?

Keith: Short answer is no. And actu­al­ly known for a long time. So, ocean geo­chem­i­cal mod­el­ing back to the ear­ly 90s showed pret­ty clear­ly that even if you remove the iron lim­i­ta­tion on the entire ocean, which would mean manip­u­lat­ing the entire ocean bios­phere, you maybe get one giga­ton, or a half giga­ton car­bon a year of export to the deep? Which is like 10% of cur­rent emis­sions. And at some basic lev­el, why would any­body think that to cut emis­sions by 10% net, you manip­u­late the whole whole ocean. It’s just not…serious.

Brand: Okay. First ques­tion here.

Audience 1: So, we talked a lot about tem­per­a­ture, and we’re talk­ing about cli­mate change. It’s kind of a nice sin­gle num­ber that we can point out and talk about. And it seems like the geo­engi­neer­ing is large­ly, like a lot of the rhetoric around it is focused on reduc­ing the tem­per­a­ture. I’m won­der­ing how well we know that there’s kind of a causal rela­tion­ship that reduc­ing tem­per­a­ture will kind of undo some of the effects of cli­mate change that we care about, or whether it’s kind of like an easy to mea­sure proxy.

Keith: Which effect are you par­tic­u­lar think­ing about?

Audience 1: I guess a lot of the…like, the ris­ing sea lev­els, weath­er, extreme weath­er events. I don’t know.

Keith: So, the answer is we don’t just think about tem­per­a­ture. Part of what I said in the intro is that in fact glob­al tem­per­a­ture is too easy. It’s sort of irrel­e­vant. So, it’s cer­tain— in a sense geo­engi­neer­ing is per­fect for glob­al tem­per­a­ture, but that’s a trick. So the ques­tion is exact­ly what you said. How well it actu­al­ly works for extreme pre­cip­i­ta­tion events, extreme tem­per­a­ture events. The things that actu­al­ly dri­ve a lot of the human impact. Crops, and sea lev­el. And because there isn’t a seri­ous research pro­gram, we don’t know as well as we should.

But the ear­ly evi­dence is actu­al­ly pret­ty promis­ing. So it looks like in fact for extreme pre­cip­i­ta­tion events, it’s rel­a­tive­ly more effec­tive (small amounts of solar geo­engi­neer­ing) than it is for tem­per­a­ture, in a way. And in fact there’s a recent arti­cle we’re try­ing to get a New York Times op-ed in that point­ed out that hur­ri­canes are being sup­pressed now because of the aerosol pol­lu­tion, because they’re par­tic­u­lar­ly sen­si­tive to that. And so that’s an exam­ple of an extreme event. So, short answer is you’re ask­ing the right question.

For ice sheets, the uncer­tain­ty is deep. So if you go down to the West Antarctic— And indeed, those pic­tures up weren’t just stock pho­tos. One of them was tak­en for me in a kayak in the West Antarctic. And the ques­tion is, will we trig­ger the West Antarctic ice sheet col­lapse, or have we already done that, which is actu­al­ly in the realm of pos­si­bil­i­ty. And the ques­tion of the extent to which solar geo­engi­neer­ing could counter that, I think is a research ques­tion. We just don’t know very well.

Brand: This [dim­ming?] ques­tion is pret­ty inter­est­ing to me, because pre­sum­ably China is in the process of clean­ing up its air enough so that peo­ple can breathe in Beijing and so on. And the num­bers I got a while back [were] that basi­cal­ly coal burn­ing and what­not is putting up about a hun­dred mil­lion tons of the stuff into the low­er atmos­phere, which is keep­ing the plan­et maybe two or three degrees Celsius cool­er. And if that keeps clear­ing— I mean, this… Paul Crutzen start­ed talk­ing seri­ous­ly about geo­engi­neer­ing when he looked at that very issue back in 2006. So, how severe is that change, and how rapid­ly is it com­ing? And should we stop clean­ing up the air because of all these prob­lems that will come with it? 

Keith: So, in that— [to Wagner:] Why don’t you go for it? 

Wagner: No, we should not stop doing it.

Brand: Oh, okay. [writ­ing in note­book] No…”

Wagner: Europe, 70s, right? Acid rain, enor­mous prob­lems from sul­fates in the tro­pos­phere, the low­er atmos­phere, start­ed clean­ing up in a seri­ous way, as did the US right around then. And in the 1990s with the Clean Air Act amend­ments and cap and trade for sul­fur diox­ide. Now for Europe itself, just Europe alone, decreas­ing tro­pos­pher­ic aerosol pol­lu­tion has like­ly increased tem­per­a­tures in the Arctic by half a degree Centigrade. Almost a degree Fahrenheit. So that’s the real trade­off, right. So, should we in fact be… Should we not stop killing peo­ple? Well, of course we should— Sorry, that’s a dou­ble neg­a­tive. Should we stop killing peo­ple? Yes, we should do that.

But, then there is the trade­off, right? Tropospheric aerosol ver­sus stratos­pher­ic aerosol injec­tion, where lat­est cal­cu­la­tions are a fifti­eth of the amount that is necessary—

Keith: Yeah. It’s actu­al­ly real­ly fifty times twenty-six. It’s an even big­ger num­ber, because for every ton of sul­fur we put in the low­er atmos­phere, putting a ton of sul­fur in the stratos­phere is about twenty-six times less health impact. And you need fifty times less sul­fur to get the same radia­tive effect.

Brand: So change is clear­ly under­way any­way and what we’re try­ing about is how we’re respond­ing to these changes that are occur­ring. I think there’s a ques­tion over here.

Audience 2: So, in the last pan­el there was lot of talk in kind of the ethics of deploy­ing these sci­ences in the actu­al field and like, get­ting con­sent from peo­ple and how do you go about get­ting that con­sent. So I’m won­der­ing, in this case, where you have a full-scale glob­al deploy­ment where it’s no longer an island of a hun­dred peo­ple. It’s lit­er­al­ly every­one in the entire­ty of nature. How do you go about get­ting con­sent to actu­al­ly go about one of these things if you want to, and if some­thing went wrong who would be at fault here? Who would you blame?

Keith: So, I think it’s…that that’s the big ques­tion. I think it’s both hard­er and eas­i­er. Let me first say why it is eas­i­er, because there are some ways in which there’s… Wonderful to have both pan­els back to back, and we actu­al­ly had a geo­engi­neer­ing gov­er­nance meet­ing at Asilomar delib­er­ate­ly echo­ing the old Asilomar meet­ing on recom­bi­nant DNA.

Brand: With way much less productivity—

Keith: Yeah yeah, no kid­ding. But there’s one way that they’re real­ly dif­fer­ent. And this is a bit of a glib phrase, but I like to say it. Sulfur does­n’t have sex. So, if you do a tiny thing like an exper­i­ment, a field exper­i­ment, or you did a tiny test deploy­ment of sul­fur in the stratos­phere, it is cer­tain that if you stop putting sul­fur in the stratos­phere, after year or two you’re back where you start­ed. That’s real­ly dif­fer­ent. We can argue about how much, but there is at least some risk that lab­o­ra­to­ry or tiny field exper­i­ments with genetically-modified organ­isms could have glob­al impli­ca­tions. I’d say there’s no equiv­a­lent risk for solar geo. There’s no way, because none of these things self-reproduce. They don’t have sex. There’s no way that some tiny lit­tle lab­o­ra­to­ry thing has a glob­al implication— 

Well, except one, I sup­pose, which is the idea. So, except for this moral haz­ard, the fact that the very idea that it’s pos­si­ble might change behav­ior. Yes, that’s true. But then so is speech.

Brand: Gernot, what do you got on this? 

Keith: But. Just one—

Brand: Oh.

Keith: On the oth­er side, how we actu­al­ly make a glob­al deci­sion like this is in some ways unprece­dent­ed, and I think the answer is we’re mak­ing it up as we go along. It’s a deep question.

Brand: Gernot, how do you han­dle the glob­al con­sen­sus question?

Wagner: So, one way it has been han­dled in a dif­fer­ent realm, where frankly there is no glob­al gov­ern­ment, right. We know that, for none of these glob­al prob­lems. For oceans, there’s the World Ocean Commission. Ex-politicians, fif­teen or so wise men and women. Now, they don’t have any—this is not the world gov­ern­ment here. They don’t have any pow­er. It’s a talk­ing shop, if you will. But it is a place to give guid­ance. I mean frankly, step one in some sense is if it comes to decid­ing where to set the knob, take that deci­sion away from the scientists.

Brand: Agreed.

Wagner: So, the sci­ence can pro­vide the tech­nol­o­gy. It’s every­body else—literally every­body else—who needs to be there when the deci­sion is being made where it to turn the knob. And just to be com­plete­ly clear about what we are try­ing to do, we’re not try­ing to deploy this. We’re to research it. We are try­ing to find a way to fig­ure out if the ben­e­fits to cost—since the ben­e­fits to costs turn out to be sort of in the realm of vac­ci­na­tions, sort of a thou­sand to one. Well, maybe we should be look­ing at this. Maybe there are real ben­e­fits there, giv­en that what we know at the moment there are real ben­e­fits there, well maybe we should be look­ing [at] even even­tu­al­ly deploy­ing this kind of tech­nol­o­gy if the ben­e­fits out­weigh the costs to the tune of a thou­sand to one.

Brand: Is there a rea­son to think that the sort of major green­house gas emit­ters; Europe, North America, China, and South Asia, might them­selves come to, among them­selves, some agree­ment that they are the major caus­es, they have major respon­si­bil­i­ty, and that agree­ment among them—which you’ve already got pieces of in rela­tion to cli­mate diplo­ma­cy already, that they could in cahoots basi­cal­ly set some­thing like this going at scale? With the full knowl­edge and com­pli­ance of oth­ers, but that they’re tak­ing the respon­si­bly of mak­ing it happen.

Keith: Certainly it could hap­pen. I think the con­ven­tion­al view is that it’s the big coun­tries that dri­ve it. And at some lev­el, if the big coun­tries real­ly don’t want some­thing to hap­pen, they have ways to do that. But I think this is in all tech­nol­o­gy, because there’s noth­ing actu­al­ly tech­ni­cal­ly that hard about it. Because it’s cheap, it’s real­ly unclear where the lead­er­ship in deploy­ment might come from. And it might well be coun­tries that see the biggest risk.

So, in our group and oth­er groups, we’ve begun to engage. So we had a won­der­ful stu­dent who works now at Harvard’s Center for International Development who around the Philippines talk­ing to both lay peo­ple and pro­fes­sion­als in the Philippians, giv­ing them a pret­ty neg­a­tive, actu­al­ly, ini­tial video about solar geo­engi­neer­ing and ask­ing them what they want to do. And the result is, they’re so eager to engage they may end up pay­ing us mon­ey to engage. So it real­ly is different.

And like­wise, some­body in the last day was telling a sto­ry about inter­act­ing with peo­ple in the Sahel region, who have such con­cerns about cli­mate vari­abil­i­ty, if they hear there are ways to man­age that, they are deeply inter­est­ed. So it’s very unclear what shapes the pol­i­tics of this. And it may not be what you expect.

Brand: So, is it…hm. There used to be great fears that there would be uni­lat­er­al geo­engi­neer­ing. So, China sud­den­ly decides to geo­engi­neer, and those of us liv­ing down­wind across the Pacific decide that’s an act of war, and bad things hap­pen. What’s the state of wor­ry about uni­lat­er­al geoengineering?

Keith: I think it’s still there. I think there is an under­ly­ing abil­i­ty and ten­den­cy to uni­lat­er­al­ism. But on the flip­side, this is a world where pow­er is dif­fus­ing. States in many respects have less pow­er they did have a cen­tu­ry ago. And I think real out and out uni­lat­er­al action seems to me an unlike­ly thing. I think more of coali­tions, and don’t for­get the role of of civ­il soci­ety. States are not the only actor here. There are lots of ways in which non-governmental orga­ni­za­tions, or things like a glob­al ocean com­mis­sion, which is part­ly estab­lished by NGOs, can shape what hap­pens. We’re not liv­ing in the 50s any­more. It’s not all sim­ply what states do.

Brand: So, can some of the research with the actu­al atmos­pher­ic exper­i­ments be done uni­lat­er­al­ly? Can you guys go up basically—

Keith: Yup.

Brand: —over North America with planes, put stuff in the stratos­phere and see what happens?

Keith: Yup, for sure. 

Wagner: So, it’s just not planes, right. It’s bal­loons, to draw a line between real line between deploy­ment and—

Keith: And I mean, a flip­side is if we get real­ly extreme restric­tions on research, which haven’t hap­pened but might hap­pen, will you see kind of civ­il dis­obe­di­ence? So, there are won­der­ful videos all over the Internet of some­times just par­ents and chil­dren who’ve got a look with their own tech­nol­o­gy and hands and mon­ey, at the black­ness of space, and the curve arc of sky. This amaz­ing thing that most of us nev­er see. And you can do with a weath­er bal­loon and an iPhone. And it’s real­ly small technology.

So it’s not that expen­sive to get to the stratos­phere. A thou­sand bucks. And could imag­ine if there real­ly are restric­tions that say no exper­i­ments ever, peo­ple will do stunts, art stunts, as a way to show how odd a restric­tion that would be, because it would be restric­tion on inten­tion, not on action.

Brand: There you go. We are at the end of this hour. Thank you very much. Thanks for fix­ing the cli­mate for us. This is going to be a great relief in this cen­tu­ry, to solve cli­mate change. But it’ll take a cen­tu­ry, won’t it?

Keith: Thanks for lead­ing the way in think­ing about it.

Brand: Alright. Thank you.