Reversing Climate Change

Climate data is overwhelming. And being inundated with numbers can make you feel disconnected or even hopeless, especially if you’re not a mathematician or a scientist. So, how can we help people connect with important data sets like the Keeling Curve or the satellite record of Arctic Sea ice? Is there a way to transform the data into art, giving people a new way to talk about climate change?

“We’ve got to nurture the land, nurture ourselves and nurture each other. That’s really what being human is about, and if we can get into that essence then we might have a future on the planet.” Healthy soil is key in restoring biodiversity, protecting against pests and disease, and improving water use and photosynthetic efficiency. Healthy soil supports healthy animals and healthy humans. And healthy soil sequesters carbon from the atmosphere, effectively reversing climate change.

Our current agricultural systems produce food with little nutritional value. And even the products labeled organic are not necessarily more nutrient dense. We assume that every carrot is as healthy as the next, but in truth, there is enormous variation and our existing standards assess process—not quality. So, is there a reliable way to determine the nutritional value of a particular food? To compare one carrot with another and make an informed decision on what to buy?

To maintain annual agriculture, we wipe out perennial vegetation and effectively destroy everything on the landscape in order to plant crops every year. The negative consequences of this ecological disaster include soil erosion, loss of organic matter, and loss of nutrients. What if we shifted to a perennial crop system that regrows from year to year without having to be reseeded? And what impact would perennialization have on reversing climate change?

The processes of building material extraction, manufacturing, transportation and construction are ALL responsible for carbon emissions. So, how do you compare these embodied costs to make the best choices around which materials to use? How do you know whether it’s better for the environment to retrofit an existing building or build a new, passive one? How do you determine whether a building truly qualifies as zero-carbon? The primary tool we use to measure environmental impact is the life cycle assessment

The need for energy innovation has never been more urgent. To effectively reduce climate change, we need to implement new technologies at scale quickly. Yet, the politics and regulations that dictate the energy industry make it incredibly difficult to put new ideas into practice. Despite the challenges around change, the use of solar energy continues to grow as production becomes more and more affordable. So, how do we navigate public policy while brilliant ideas can take a decade to adopt on a large scale?

No-till agriculture promotes soil health and sequesters carbon, so why isn’t everybody doing it? The practical reality is that farmers are limited by their infrastructure and financial obligations. Making a change is not always profitable and often means fighting against a father who’s mastered the conventional system. To facilitate large-scale change, we need a market that allows farmers to get paid for growing crops unconventionally.

We typically think of value and ROI in monetary terms, but what about the social value of an investment? Or its environmental return? The field of ecological economics is built around the idea that the health of our land serves as the foundation of our economy, and we know that assigning a monetary value to ecosystem services helps us to be better stewards to these resources. So, how do we put carbon sequestration on the balance sheet?

Sustainable energy is a wicked problem. As we solve one aspect of the challenge, others arise—and the very definition of the problem evolves over time. Yet admitting uncertainty is unpopular. No one is holding a picket sign that reads, “It depends on a number of factors that are mutually interdependent.” So, what should we be thinking about as we work toward a sustainable energy future?  

About 65% of Washington voters support action on climate change. But after six years of working to pass legislation for a carbon tax, the state has yet to put a price on emissions. How do political divisions make the mission so challenging? What alternative solutions are advocates exploring? And how might the Nori marketplace fit into a broader policy framework? 

To make Nori work, the data of carbon removal must be somehow transferred from a model like COMET-Farm to the blockchain—and that is precisely the infrastructure that Jaycen Horton is building at Nori. So, how does communication between the software work, exactly? Why did Nori choose to build on the Ethereum blockchain? And what is the benefit of building in an open-source community?

Nori has ambitious plans to reverse climate change by using the blockchain to pay the people who draw down CO2 from the atmosphere. And the team is in the process of building the infrastructure necessary to make that happen. But how do they go about talking farmers, for example, into using the platform? How do they convince companies to buy CRCs? How do they make the business case for carbon removal?

With the Industrial Revolution and the development of a mechanistic mindset, we have come to view ourselves as entities separate from the earth. This attitude has led to industrial farming practices that destroy the land and an industrial food complex that strips the nutrients from the foods we consume. What if we adopted—on a large scale—the regenerative agricultural practices that produce nutrient-rich foods, restore the soil, and remove carbon from the atmosphere?

“The man who says it can’t be done should get out of the way of the woman who’s doing it. We focus all the time on politicians and what they’re going to do. Meanwhile, we’re becoming more energy efficient every day. We’re using fewer resources every day. We’re finding a way to do more with less, quietly, every day. But [the free market is] where the solutions are coming from.”

How do you talk to leaders in Washington DC about the climate challenge? Is there a way to frame the risk that will inspire policymakers on both sides of the aisle to take action? How might a carbon tax work—and would that be preferable to a regulatory approach?