Do you want to make an announcement also

for next week's

Okay,

next week

>> on April 9th, the guest speaker.

Oh, sure. Yeah, that's right.

I am organizing that.

>> It's hard to look, you're not alone.

Hard to keep track sometimes.

which is good.

>> Yeah.

>> Hey man,

>> how are you?

I guess you could say that

>> I'm digging the

birds. It's uh you know, it's rare for

that to really work in this climate, but

I feel like if there's a day for it,

it's today. This weather's been all over

the map. Nope.

>> Um as long as it doesn't it can work in

the colder scenics.

>> Well, it is. So, I thought I'll consider

it.

>> Yeah, consider it. That's probably

better. Anything new at your house?

>> Oh, yeah. Body hurts all the time now.

>> Constantly doing

>> totally uh totally demolished. The super

crappy addition.

>> Nice.

>> Hold it all into one of those huge city

>> trash container things. We had them drop

off in front.

>> Nice.

Bunch of your neighbors threw a bunch of

other in there, too.

>> Not really. I mean there were some like

stray

toys alcoholic beverages people

>> but no

>> and uh

>> or like that but it requires somebody to

accept people to come in

>> right now it's just whatever Zoom link

ESU provides so it's I'm guessing it's

open

application

for the human.

>> Amen.

Okay to get started.

>> Hello.

So, good morning everybody. I think

majority of you know me, but I'm Dr.

Stephanie Ariza, assistant professor in

the school of complex adaptive systems

and also in the Thunderbird school of

global management

and I will be giving a presentation on

some of the work I've been doing which

is on carbon management

and on this topic I also would like to

let you know there will be another

seminar next week. Uh we have Asha

presenting her uh thesis defense on some

of the items we'll be discussing today

and we will have also a external guest

coming in uh attorney of environmental

law name is Jessica Dman and she'll be

speaking about some of the legal issues

that I'll be touching on today. So,

those are happening next week,

Wednesday, um, at 10 and at 100 p.m. So,

if you want more information, please let

me know. But today, we're going to be

talking about designing a carbon

management system, the progress and some

of the challenges to date.

And I will start with this visual.

What it's showing is that every year we

add a cube seven kilometers of length to

this enormous pile of carbon dioxide

that we have been producing since 1750.

This is equivalent to a pyramid that's

120 kilometers tall and 190 kilometers

wide. So this is enormous and every year

we add a block of 7 kilometers.

This addition of carbon dioxide to the

environment is of course causing climate

change and last year we saw global

temperatures exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius

for the first time. Um and this can be

shown here on this graph from the

European agency Copernicus. Um and

basically every uh relevant

materological organizations have now

confirmed that this has been the case.

And of course you might remember that

1.5° Celsius was the temperature limit

we had all committed to under the Paris

agreement.

This rise in temperature is of course

causing some of the extreme climate

events that we have been witnessing. um

>> exercise

>> frequently in the last decade or so and

will continue to do so for the

foreseeable future. But while there are

these negative consequences to that pile

of CO2 trash that we put in the

atmosphere,

there is actually an opportunity

underneath it all and this is the

opportunity of cleaning up that pile of

trash. So this is the business case for

it. It is trillions of dollars worth of

carbon management

um of which the current size is

minuscule compared to its potential. We

are investing and uh benefiting for

about $2 billion globally and some

consultants are expecting this to grow

to a trillion dollars

>> annually.

>> Annually yes.

Now, what this pile of trash really

tells us is that we only have three

options when we want to deal uh when we

want to deal about carbon with carbon

management. And our options are we must

either avoid emitting in the first

place. So, avoid adding to the pile of

trash.

We can also add to the pile of trash but

remove it. And so this is the concept of

net zero that has been dispensed in

international law. And then we can also

reduce the pile of trash that's already

in the environment. And that's negative

emissions.

And when we talk about negative

emissions, we're talking about uh

dealing with those legacy or historical

emissions.

So carbon management is really this

intervention to clean up the carbon

pollution

and additionally move towards a circular

carbon economy through that idea of net

zero. Carbon management is a set of

strategies and practices that are used

to manage carbon. And this will include

technologies that can measure,

technologies that can reuse carbon,

capture carbon, and store carbon.

And while some authors consider emission

avoidance to be part of carbon

management, I consider it a indirect

consequence of managing

for reasons that will become apparent

later.

Now this problem of CO2 into the

atmosphere has been contextualized and

reframed as a problem of waste. Um this

was done by several authors but the idea

is that we have added this pile of trash

in the environment and now we can manage

it. And

when it comes to the waste analogy some

of the questions we might be asking are

what are the features of this waste

management system?

Oh sorry this is in the wrong. What are

the features of this management system?

What drives managements?

We might also be asking questions like

my recycling gets recycled right and how

leaky is the system and these questions

can now apply to carbon management and

this is how I will structure the rest of

this talk.

So let me walk you through some of the

features of a global carbon management

system and give you a bit of a status

report.

So as I mentioned we have technologies

that are required for global management

to reduce capture store and measure but

then we also have socioeconomic systems

that are necessary for this

carbon management industry to even

operate. And here we're talking about

standards. We're talking of the buyers,

innovation, policy, the workforce, and

the public. And I'll touch briefly on

many of those in the following.

Starting off with the technologies.

The main form of technology to know

about is technologies that capture CO2

from the environment. And here the

colloquial name for this is carbon

dioxide removal or carbon short. These

types of technologies can be broken down

into two categories. Um one would be

what are called conventional carbon

removal. And here you might think about

uh technologies like a forestation,

reforestation, the restoration of

ecosystems. These have been described as

conventional.

Locally, we have examples of this. For

example, the forest restoration

initiative. Part of the reason for doing

so is restoring the forest so that they

would be less prone to fires which would

be releasing the carbon into the

atmosphere.

The other type of carbon removal are

more novel. So that's the other

category. And here you might be

considering technologies like direct air

capture of which we have very old on

campus. If you haven't seen it yet, it's

next to the light rail in that red kind

of fencing area. And these technologies

are using chemical and physical means to

capture um CO2 and they do not as much

rely on the biotic um systems.

Carbon removal projects are

proliferating around the world. This is

a map that shows possibly just a

fraction of them. We don't have very

good data for um

Asian countries and Australia. But as

you can see, there are multiple

very multiple very many projects of

carbon right now. And in total, carbon

removal has already sequestered about

two billion tons of CO2 just in 2024.

Now, the vast majority of that two

billion tons is actually from

conventional carbon removal. So, all of

the forest and the restoration of

ecosystems. And a very small proportion

um is from those novel carbon removal

technologies like direct air capture.

But as you can see we are already doing

quite a bit of it.

Now another set of technologies that fit

within carbon management is the idea of

capturing CO2 that comes out of power

plants or other industrial sources. This

is often referred to as point source

capture and storage. Sometimes it's

called CCS. But the idea is that you

have um a supply of fossil fuels to some

form of industrial process. Let's say a

coal power plant and on this coal power

plant you have a carbon capture

technology.

The techn the the CO2 that's captured is

then hyped to a storage reservoir. And

here we're seeing one particular case

where it is piped and shipped to these

offshore platforms and it is then

injected very very deep under the

seafloor.

One example of this particular type of

technology is the lightner gas field

which has been in operation since 1996

um and has already sequestered 1 million

tons of carbon per year since then.

There are quite a few CCS projects

worldwide. Again, mostly centered in the

US and in Europe.

And at present, we are capturing about

40 million tons of CO2 per year

globally.

Now, the carbon can also be used in

products. It doesn't have to just go

into disposal. Even though the majority

of the carbon will have to go

Some of it can be used in useful

products. You may think about um using

CO2 from the air to make fuels or

chemicals or building materials um or to

use in other processes.

The current scale of utilization is

quite small. uh we're talking about 250

million tons per year in three and it is

expected to rise um to to continue

increasing. The majority of that CO2 is

actually used to produce fertilizer

and the other um significant portion is

actually used to push out more oil. So

there is some um contradiction in some

of the test or or the use cases of

carbon utilization.

Now the other type of technology

necessary are measurement systems. So

ways to track carbon throughout this

entire chain. And here we're talking

about mostly carbon accounting and the

standards that um this carbon accounting

relies on. There are multiple scales at

which this can be done from the global

to the national to the organization to

the individual and each scale requires a

different type of system to make it

work.

This is what the system looks like for

carbon removal technologies. What you're

seeing here in the blue band are all the

different organizations that have

created standards for carbon removal of

which there are over 30 organizations.

They have produced over 150 different

standards to do carbon accounting for

carbon removal.

And this kind of situation is also

evidence when you're talking about other

aspects of the carbon management system.

So if you're thinking about global scale

accounting, personal accounting, they

all have multiple carbon accounting

methods available.

So hopefully now that you've seen what

these technologies entail and the

various facets that will come into play

into deploying them, you might get a

sense that very diverse actors are

already involved in this management

system. We're talking from NOS's to

governments to private sector and

everything in between. And as you can

imagine, each of these actors also have

their own priorities and motivations in

how the system should run.

And this leads us

to the question of what drives waste

management which is fundamental to the

carbon management.

When we look at the analogy of waste

management, we see that historically it

becomes necessity

as population grows in a particular

location and the environment no longer

can absorb the amount of waste that the

population is producing. We can think

back and look at New York in the 1800s

where the streets were absolutely filled

with coarse manure. So much so that

people thought this was the the

environmental appropriateness and it is

the car that actually cleaned up the

city. We can also think about what was

happening in London in the 1950s with

the London smoke which caused millions

of deaths.

Now this both of these are examples of

the environment no longer being able to

absorb the amount of waste produced.

The other two observations we can draw

from the waste management analogy is

that waste management is never free.

There's always somebody that pays for

it. Whether that be through financial

means or because we are enslaving people

to collect the trash. So there is always

some kind of payment.

Waste management is also not done

voluntarily.

It requires regulation

and

this has been shown time and time again

throughout history. For example, the

sanitation reforms in the 1900s actually

required regulation to stop people from

throwing their trash in the street and

to throw their um human waste in the

backyard.

And what these regulations actually did

was revoke the right to dump. it was no

longer

legal to dump the waste.

Now when we talk about recycling, of

course that is still voluntary in many

locations but this is also rapidly

changing

and what we are seeing is that as

countries move up the development levels

and become wealthier there is greater

emphasis on the cleaner environment

because now the means make it possible

to think about our environment right at

lower development levels. We think about

sustaining ourselves, right? But food

and shelter. And as countries develop

and get more money and have more space

to think about other things, the

environment becomes more and more

important.

Now, if we apply all of this to carbon

management, we are seeing a industry

that's mostly run by volunteers. So we

have these volunteering organizations,

volunteering people who are paying for

carbon management in some form. Now this

was very good PR, right? It it looks

very good to be trying to do something

good for the environment and therefore

uh it paid for itself.

The current the the major current buyers

of carbon removal are mostly software

and professional service companies like

Microsoft, but they also include um

fossil fuel companies, right? So we are

starting to see a bit of a

diversification of buyers.

Now the government is heavily involved

in carbon management but mostly through

conventional removal. A very few uh

frameworks currently include novel

technologies but this is starting to

expand the industry and I'm talking

about mostly fossil fuels cement

fertilizers they are heavily invested in

CCS but they don't want to pay for it

but they're they're hoping the

governments will put the bill for the

research and development and other

investments

and this is what we are seeing for

example in the US with the tax credits.

Now, some of the research has suggested

that the level of carbon management that

will be necessary for our climate goals

uh would result in consuming a third of

general government expenditures in

advanced economies if the buyer of

carbon management was to be the

government. Right? So we are talking

about significant restructuring of where

money is going to.

Now we can take a look at how much

carbon removal costs and right now the

weighted average price at least for 2024

was around $300 per ton. But this

greatly varied between different types

of technologies with some technologies

more on the closer to a 100 and some

well over a thousand. Now there is

expectation that these prices would come

down the learning curve but we are not

quite there yet.

And the other part we are seeing is that

we are already hitting the limits of

what voluntary carbon management looks

like. There are now fewer new buyers

entering this space and um

yeah so there's fewer new voluntary

buyers entering the space. Some

consultants expect that by really

pushing it, we could reach uh something

like 800 million tons per year if we

expand in Asia. But the goal is orders

of magnitude smaller uh the present

situation sorry is orders of magnitude

smaller than the goal. So what this

tells us is that relying on a voluntary

system is not going to cut it.

So, a lot of work has been put into

identifying what could be some of the

policy and legal frameworks to enable

such a carbon uh management system. And

the one that I'm going to particularly

focus on is this one highlighted in red,

which has been the focus of most of my

research.

So, what are we talking about here?

This policy basically connects supply to

demand through something called an

expanded producer responsibility. So let

me explain this to you. Right now when

we purchase energy and if that energy is

fossil energy we are paying for

extraction, transport and processing and

some rent. Right? So this is what

constitute constitutes the cost of

fossil energy.

Now if we were to put a fourth pillar

into that price cost into that business

operation we would be paying for carbon

management.

And the way this policy would look like

is that for every ton of carbon

extracted from fossil fuel operations

the cost of sequestration would be added

on and this would be on a onetoone

situation. This has been socialized

under the name carbon takeback

obligation and the seminar next week

that Asha is going to be defending at um

Asha explores a carbon takeback

obligation um for the US specific case.

Now why do we call this an expanded

extended producer responsibility? We

call it be that because the fossil fuel

industry would pay for essentially the

waste management of the products that

they are selling to us. There is plenty

of evidence that these types of policies

work. We even have some in Arizona. For

example, if you change the car battery,

you are paying for a fee. That fee is

paying for the recycling of the car

battery. This is the same thing, but

we're expanding it to the whole fossil

fuel system.

And one of the major benefits of such a

policy is that not only would it start

up a carbon management industry, but it

would also mean that everybody who

purchases fossil fuels would be carbon

neutral, not just the people who can

afford to switch to ease or the or

switch to renewable energy. It is

everybody. It would also have the

benefits that it would make fossil fuels

expensive and indirectly possibly

influence behavior to switch to non-

fossil fuel energy and products. So

that's ongoing work that I've been uh

pushing.

Now

a question that often gets brought up

when I talk about carbon management is

that well when we think about recycling

does my recycling even get recycled

right there is that skepticism that

recycling even works. So let me give you

um some information about that because

it really applies to carbon management.

So when we actually look at recycling,

what the evidence is telling us is that

60% of the plastic that has been

collected for recycling does get

recycled. So this is a significant

share. Of course, it's not a 100% but

it's still pretty significant.

Now some of the headlines

have been talking about the fact that

only five to 15% of plastics are even

collected in the first place. So this is

a small amount of plastic that does get

recycled. Um but it does have some

pertinent uh

connections with carbon management

because a lot of the conversations that

have been happening in recent years is

around this question of are my carbon

credits real? And unlike recycling, here

we actually have quite an issue because

recent

studies have suggested that less than

20% may be real. Uh if we look at

studies that looked at um a forestation

deforestation projects in the Amazon set

by the voluntary market, only 10% of

those credits were deemed to be real. If

we look at the clean development

mechanism which is run by the United

Nations only 50% of those might be real

and when we look at the California

regulated market um only 70% of those

may be real. So we do see a progression

of more wheel when we're talking about

regulation, right? But we are still um

kind of low efficiency when it comes to

the uh to the system.

Now to understand why this is happening,

we need to understand some of the

underlying uh systems that create those

credits. So what we have is that we have

uh people who want to do some kind of

carbon project. So think about making a

direct air capture project or maybe

they're doing stationation or maybe

restoration

and they set up this project and then

they go to a standard developing

organization

who will have a standard a carbon

accounting methodology to determine the

carbon uh the carbon outcome of the

project. Okay. So the project applies

this measurement technique

and they then apply for certification by

another entity. This other entity says

yes you've followed the protocol and

here is your credit. The credit then

goes on some platform or sorry some

carbon market um situation and there is

somebody on the other end who wants to

purchase it because they want to make

some kind of claim about their

environmental

action. Okay. So this is how it works.

Now there are a couple of points in this

chain where the problems start to occur

and I have been spending a lot of my

research on identifying those points of

uh entry.

One of them is that the projects that

are allowed to enter the system are not

carefully vetted for the purpose of

being verifiable.

So a lot of projects that come in they

seem to be good they seem to do good and

so they are allowed and then a

methodology to try and make them work.

Like there is a a decision process that

does not vet what the project is going

to be doing and what can and cannot

actually be measured. It is very

possible to have a perfectly good

project that is simply impossible to

measure. And because carbon credits are

based on measurement, this simply should

not be allowed into the system. But this

has not been the case so far.

A second point of entry is in the

standards. So the protocols to calculate

the carbon outcome. And here I have

identified a few

aspects that are creating um this entry

for manipulation. And here I'm talking

about the fact that every organization

has its own methodology.

Sometimes you can have 10 15

methodologies for the same type of

system. So for example there are 12

methodologies available online for

carbon accounting for forests of the

same type. Right? You can pick and

choose which one is going to work the

best for you.

Each standard looks different,

right? So, you can really choose what

your what your what you want the outcome

to be. And when you pick the standard,

the types of practices that it contains

are oftentimes very complicated,

relying on counterfactual and modeling.

And this leaves a lot of room for

manipulation because of the size of the

uncertainty. that gets introduced into

the carpet accounting.

And then there is this whole can of

worms that is happening because this

entire system has been built for credits

of emission reduction and they haven't

this system hasn't been built for carbon

management and as a result some of the

problems are baked in. They are part of

the DNA of the system.

Now others have also identified immense

conflicts of interest in this chain

where the certifier is also the standard

developer is also the seller and the

conflicts of interest here are enormous

financially

and so through these points of entry we

have a system that is basically built

to not be robust.

Now, some of the work that I've been

doing on trying to assess how pertinent

or how pervasive, sorry, this problem

might be is through this network

analysis that was part of the um second

edition of the state of carbon dioxide

removal report. And what I did is that I

looked at every standard that exists for

carbon removal and I tried to find upon

which standard it was developed. So you

have a standard and in it they say well

we develop the standard uh to be aligned

with this other standard and usually the

other standard is a more established

more respected standard and therefore by

association they could get more traction

or more buyers. Now when you actually

follow this chain, you start to identify

uh six

or sorry five very important standards

which are highlighted in those big

boxes.

And

the ones that are now gray are the ones

that were involved in some of the

investigations that showed that the

carbon credits were not. When we

actually calculate how many of the

standards this might apply to, that's

70% of the entire city,

right? So if only 20% of carbon credits

are real and this applies to 70% of the

whole system for carbon management, we

we're in big trouble. This is

potentially a house of cards that's just

waiting trouble.

So some of the work I've been advancing

over the last couple of years is to try

and identify what could be a system that

is purpose-built

for carbon management for the purpose of

actually managing the carbon uh

globally. And so some of our research

have led us to develop some new

frameworks and principles uh to try and

have universal method agnostic

principles that can apply to any

technology that simplifies the carbon

accounting and reduces the possibility

of manipulation.

At this point uh we are currently in the

phase where we are trying to develop uh

some of the process that underlies the

decision making of these principles and

the ways we will be vetting projects and

the ways we will be deciding on whether

a project can move ahead and um be part

of the system. And this is work that my

postoc Victor which is sitting right

here is helping me advance

and test because we don't know if we're

right with these right and we want to

find where the the holes and the

problems are so that we can make a

system that's as tight as possible and

so with Victor's help we are applying

some of the learnings that we have

developed uh on different types of

carbon removal one is ocean iron

fertilization

uh which we had a guest talk on about.

Um so this is a form of marine carbon

removal. It involves spreading iron on

the oceans and hoping that biotic

systems will bloom and sink and trap

carbon in the water column. So we're

exploring that and then we're also

exploring

saline aquifers as a reservoir. And this

we're doing

um the northern part of Arizona where

there is a complex um stack system of

geological storage that's been developed

by the department of energy.

Okay. So now I've described to you

what a system could look like, what the

technologies are, what the um

measurement techniques would need to be.

The next question that often comes up

when I talk about all this is that how

leaky is this going to be? And when you

think about waste and waste management,

people often will say, well, we are

producing so much trash and we are

mismanaging it so badly that it all ends

up in the oceans, right? We are not good

at waste management. So why would we be

good at carbon waste management? And so

that's a fair question that we should

consider it.

So when we look at how good we are at

waste management generally um I was able

to find some data about plastic waste

management and here we see that about

23% of the total plastic waste is

mismanaged and that's on the order of

110 million tons per year.

Now the mismanagement is uh oftentimes

leaking into the environment the rivers

and coasts and about uh 0.5% actually

ends up into the oceans. Now, of course,

waste that you can see, plastic waste,

red, because you can see it, it is more

striking. CO2, we cannot see it. And

that's why I've created that big pyramid

of trash to show you how massive the

problem is compared to um plastic

pollution. So, we we should be we should

be working on this. So, the point here

though is that there is mismanagement in

the waste system.

So how does this apply to carbon

management? So

to understand the possibility of carbon

leaking from the carbon management

system, we have to think about the

reservoirs, right? So when we do carbon

capture, we move carbon from the air or

from the environment into some form of

reservoir. And by reservoir I mean the

oceans or I mean uh the trees or a rock,

right? So it is the receptacle that

actually stores that CO2. Now what you

then might think about is well each one

of those reservoir types have an

inherent ability to retain carbon. Like

you might imagine that a tree is less

durable than a rock, right? And that's

pretty intuitive. Well, when we talk

about carbon storage in these

reservoirs, we can look at the data that

tells us how long these reservoirs on

average might store carbon.

And so this is work that I have been

leading for several years now um and

with multiple students involved. And we

have been collecting data from different

types of carbon storage around the

world. So these are mostly natural

analoges, right? We haven't we are

actually not looking at humanmade

reservoirs. We're we're looking at

analogs in the earth system. But what we

can see is that when we talk about

conventional types, so this the biotic

systems uh we are talking on the order

of thousands to maybe tens of thousands

of years solid carbon of course products

are much more short-lived and then when

we're talking about novel techniques

here we can start to extend into the

millions of years. So what you can see

from this is that not every technology

is going to store carbon for the same

amount of time.

And the problem with that is that when

carbon

goes into the natural system, the

natural carbon cycle system, this cycle

is extremely slow to get rid of it. So

what this table is showing us is that it

will take upwards of 1190,000 years for

the CO2 to get out of the system and

back into the lithosphere. Right? So

this is incredibly slow and because it

is incredibly slow it means that CO2 is

piling up. And so that's the reason why

we have this pile up of CO2. It's also

the reason why we even need carbon

management because nature is too slow.

Now the second part of this is that and

this is hopefully pretty intuitive but

is that if carbon escapes from storage

it simply is pollution once again right

so it will just continue to cause

climate change. Now the duration of

storage

what it does is that it delays climate

change from when the carbon comes out

again. So this is what this graph is

showing right. So we see global warming

and then the different lines are uh the

different global warming scenarios that

happen with different uh durations of

storage. So for example, if we have um

if we have carbon storage that basically

captures CO2, stores it for just one

year and releases it. And that's all we

did, we would have this red warming

scenario. If we have a 100 year, it gets

a little lower. If we have a thousand

years, it's almost flat, but as you can

see, it's still rising. And if we have

what we call permanent CDR,

now we have completely flat and

temperatures down. So the point here is

that the longer we can store carbon,

the better.

Now

the problem with that is that what I've

been showing you is just the physical

nature of carbon storage. Now we

actually need to socially make a

decision of how long is long enough. And

this decision is embedded in the

standards. The standards decide

this amount of years is long enough and

we will call it quits.

And what my student and I published on

last year. Yeah. Or earlier this year

actually um is that we did this

investigation of what do the standards

actually decide on? And what you can see

is that most of them say that a 100red

years is long enough.

And uh many more say that much less than

that is fine. And only two standards

actually say a thousand years is not.

But as we've just seen, even a thousand

years is very short climatically

speaking.

Now, how does this translate into actual

projects? Right? Because there there's

often a bit of a mismatch between what

the standards say and what actually

happens. And what we can see in this

analysis is that we looked at the

proposals that were made to Microsoft in

2021 and 2022. They received I think um

something like 150 or 200 proposals for

carbon removal. And what is novel about

that data set is is that Microsoft

actually asked every applicant to say

how long are you going to keep the

carbon storage for

and so what I'm plotting here is the

cumulative total of all the proposals in

terms of CO2

and how long they say they will keep the

carbon stored for.

And what we can see is that within 30

years

Microsoft would have lost already 50% of

that carbon.

So what this means is that the

durability

the sustain the the sustainability I

guess of the global carbon management

system is very short. Right? If if this

is what the whole world does for carbon

management within 30 years we will have

to do it again. Right? And now I have a

a high school student actually Matang

who's been helping me compile an

enormous data set of every single

project that has been sold worldwide to

see what is the global sustainability of

this carbon management system. So I

don't have the answer right now but I'm

guessing it's going to be uh very short.

Now,

this is the point where I'm going to

tell you what I think about all of this,

and this is in a paper that I've been

trying to publish for quite a few years

and has been meeting some resistance.

But what I'm arguing is that if we care

about the future, care about the future

of the the if we care about the

well-being of future generations,

whether that be humans or species and if

we care about making the polluter pay

for the waste that they have produced

and if we care about stopping climate

change and getting to net zero then we

need to rethink how we are defining

permanence. What this graph is showing

in a simplistic manner is where

different agents, different actors in

the carbon management space define this.

How long is long enough? The experts say

it's long enough if it's greater than 10

years. The carbon man markets say

anywhere between one year and 100. The

DOE, Department of Energy, has been

flip-flopping between 100 years and 999

years. And now they they don't even have

anything.

Corporate buyers actually want a

thousand years. And what I'm suggesting

is that to be climate relevant,

we should be thinking about technologies

that are 10,000 years and greater. Now,

there's a lot of questions that come up

with that and I'd be happy to talk about

them. um maybe as a as a discussion but

I won't raise them here.

Okay. So to wrap up I have a few slides

about where I think this whole

enterprise of carbon management is going

and the first one is with this question

of who is going to lead this. uh the US

was the world leader on carbon

management uh both in terms of projects

but also in terms of government spending

and research development. Um but the

government has decided to shift

priorities and so

that is likely to to seed the leadership

to other countries that are not far

behind. So right now we're seeing a lot

of action in Europe especially with

their new uh regulation that's coming in

where they are trying to implement

carbon management into their envir into

their emission trading scheme and if

they succeed this would be enormous

but also Asia China is really really

advanced in their carbon management

technology and especially in their

expenditure.

Now that's not to say that the states in

within the US could not continue to lead

um but this does raise question about

the place of the US

space. Now there is also the question of

well could industry just step in and

there is some evidence that this might

be happening but whether it would happen

at the scale that would keep the need.

The other aspect to think about is the

workforce because this carbon management

industry is not going to run by itself.

it actually is going to tremendous

amounts of people manning the system in

various ways. Some of the research has

been suggesting that uh up to 100,000

jobs could be created in the US um over

the next few decades through a

commitment to carbon management. But of

course there's uh geographic variations

and of course it may not be congruent

with the fossil fuel losses. the jobs

and fought the fuel um that that we

could be expected

and who is going to be training the

people working in this space and there

are only a few um universities and labs

in the US currently providing that

platform.

Right now, opposition

to carbon management is low, but so is

public awareness and this for now is a

good benefit to try and set up a system

that will be efficient and also

equitable. Um, but we may not be able to

count on that very long and public

awareness and information

um information engagement are going to

be quite important.

Because at the end of the day we need to

move beyond public acceptance. We need

to not just accept it but we need to

have people and communities who embrace

this right otherwise we will have

nimiism and we will have the blockage of

this industry and how do we get there I

think is an enormous question to be

answered and I hope the uh

interdisciplinary nature of carbon

management will bring in more social

science more um investigation of is this

even possible where do we do this in the

most responsible way and uh how do we

share all of the benefits and reduce the

cost?

Just a few other things that are

necessary for this industry to work. But

we're talking about enormous investment

in research and development still

because everything is still too

expensive. Everything is still using too

much energy. We don't know the risk on a

lot of these technologies. So we need to

be investigating this um in depth.

We need a lot of coordination and

collaboration to standardize carbon

accounting and carbon measurement. And

I'm involved in a movement uh that

started by the National Institute of

Standards Technology in the US to try

and get people to at least talk about

what is necessary to standardize what

should be part of the standardization

process.

As I mentioned, we also need continued

efforts to inform and engage with

communities meaningfully in order to uh

share benefits, reduce risk, um

and also train this workforce. And we

need to involve decision makers because

at the end of the day, as I've been

trying to show you, this carbon

management industry does not rest solely

on volunteers. We actually need

regulation. So, how do we get regulators

to think about energy policy in a

different way? And with that, thank you

very much and I'll take questions now.