Replace Remove Recover Episode 8 - For the Love of Trees
Release Date: 07/18/2023
Episode 11 - How Biocraft cat food and cellular agriculture will stop Climate Change
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This episode is exciting for me personally because it introduces two concepts that are, in my opinion, the largest solutions to climate change. The first is cellular production, bioreactors, and farm-free meat. The second reason I’m excited is because our guest today, Dr. Falconer, discovered a shortcut to solving climate change... with cat food. That's right. And we’re counting on it sounding ridiculous and flying under the radar. It turns out the simple act of producing farm-free cat food in a bioreactor might solve all of the world's meat and agriculture problems at once. Listen and see...
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Episode 10 - Part 2 - How Ammonia Will Save the World, Again
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The journal Nature receives 10,000 scientific papers every year, but in 2023 they picked just five as the technologies most likely to make an impact on society. Jupiter Ionics was one of them. Specializing in making ammonia from electrolysis instead of fossil fuels, it is poised to revolutionize not only agriculture but our energy and transportation sectors as well. It is our pleasure to have Douglas MacFarlane, founder of Jupiter Ionics, as our guest. Hopefully you've just listened to Episode 9 so you've you got a pretty good picture of how we arrived at the predicament we're in, how...
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Replace Remove Recover Episode 9 - Part 1 - How Ammonia Will Save The World, Again
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You might be surprised to hear it phrased this way, but you are a fossil fuel product. Half of the nitrogen atoms in your body are artificially synthesized. They are a product of the Haber-Bosch process, a process that requires fossil fuels. The world's population relies on fossil fuels powering the Haber-Bosch production of ammonia, used in fertilizer, to grow the food that keeps us alive. You are what you eat. In fact, without fossil fuels you probably wouldn’t exist on earth today. When we talk about our carbon footprint, the only real question is which foot – the right or the...
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Replace Remove Recover Episode 8 - For the Love of Trees
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Today we're looking at trees. This was not the episode I wanted to do next. I had a few others planned, but everywhere I looked for replacements to fossil fuels, people thought trees were the answer. Architects specifying timber to replace concrete in low-embodied-carbon buildings, companies buying carbon credits from forests to reach net-zero, biomass replacing coal in coal fired power plants. Every solution I heard felt... weird. Trees don't strike me as a 21st century high-tech solution to climate change. Maybe I'm crazy. You tell me. Listen to these voices and tell me if you...
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Replace Remove Recover Episode 7 - Reinventing Cement
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Today, we're looking at one of the world's largest sources of emissions - cement. How do we make cement, and why are emissions so intense? Hint: this time it's not fossil fuels. To find out, we'll look at how the world's second largest cement manufacturer, Holcim, is reducing the embodied emissions of their product. But then we'll go further. We'll talk to Zarina Bazoeva and Matt Kennedy-Good, the founders of Neocrete, a company poised to replace cement and eliminate emissions altogether. But first, we have a party to attend. Let's go! For more on Holcim, visit...
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Replace Remove Recover Episode 6 - Wave Energy with Heikki Paakkinen of Finland's Holvi Energy
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In this episode, we'll focus on wave energy. We're speaking with Heikki Paakkinen, CEO of Finland's Holvi Energy. Three billion humans get their energy from coal. To replace coal and other fossil fuels, we'll need to find an alternative. What if we could solve this by harnessing an energy source that never stops, a technology that rivals wind, enjoys 30 years of little to no maintenance, with no environmental impact? We can. It already exists. It's floating off the coasts of Taiwan, Spain, Barbados, and Scotland. Holvi Energy developed a device that produces power from wave action...
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Replace Remove Recover Episode 5 - Now You're Cooking With(out) Gas
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In this episode, we'll focus on induction cooking. We're speaking with Glen Rockhouse, Chef of 30 years and a kitchen designer at Reward Hospitality. Imagine you're out for a nice dinner at that restaurant everyone's been ravign about. As you enjoy a meal with your friends, somewhere, deep in the bowels of the kitchen, a gas burner flares, cooking your food. When you look at how much gas that equates to, in every kitchen around the world, it's staggering. To replace all that gas, we now have the technology to cook with... magnets. Induction isn't a new technology, but it's taking over....
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Replace Remove Recover Episode 4 - Unintended Consequences
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In this episode, we'll focus on unintended consequences - Jevons Paradox, Goodhart's Law, and the Cobra Effect (perverse incentive). For the last few decades there's been a push for energy efficiency, meant to be a stopgap, a way for the world to slow down climate change until replacements for fossil fuels reached parity. But in the context of climate change, it doesn't matter how efficient we can ever make our fossil fuel use. We're still emitting. So let's look at how intensive programmes to stop climate change only make it worse, and why. To understand this perplexing...
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Replace Remove Recover Episode 3 - Parkinson's Law and Loss Aversion
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Climate change may be caused by carbon emissions, but it's humans who made that happen. Until we learn how to manage... us... we won't solve climate change. While science focused on the technology, the statistics, the parts per million, we should have focused on the pscyhology, the economics, the humans per billion. So in this episode, we'll look at how we're not as rational as we think, and how we even sabotage ourselves. We'll be looking at the economic models that explain human behaviour, models like Loss Aversion and Parkinson's Law. These starting points mightl help us avoid...
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Replace Remove Recover Episode 2 - The Grief Cycle
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In many ways the climate crisis mimics the death of a loved one, causing us to experience the Grief Cycle. It may even feel like the doctor has handed you the diagnosis of a terminal illness. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross wrote of the inevitable and natural way humans deal with grief, cycling through denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. If these sound familiar, it's because we all experience this with climate change. Of course you're familiar with denial, but what about the others? Each stage has a corresponding action. It is impossible for us to solve climate change until we...
info_outlineToday we're looking at trees.
This was not the episode I wanted to do next. I had a few others planned, but everywhere I looked for replacements to fossil fuels, people thought trees were the answer. Architects specifying timber to replace concrete in low-embodied-carbon buildings, companies buying carbon credits from forests to reach net-zero, biomass replacing coal in coal fired power plants. Every solution I heard felt... weird.
Trees don't strike me as a 21st century high-tech solution to climate change. Maybe I'm crazy. You tell me. Listen to these voices and tell me if you sense the weirdness.
There are approximately three trillion trees on earth today. That sounds like a lot, but there used to be more. Before human agriculture, there were twice as many, about six trillion trees. Humans removed 46% of all the planet’s trees since the dawn of agriculture, and half of that happened since 1900. So pervasive has human intervention been that only about 34% of the world's forests are primary forests, you know, the kind we think of when we hear the word “forest”. That's 34% AFTER the 50% we've already removed. That means 85% of the world's original forests are currently serving human use.
Half of them serve us by no longer existing at all.
The truth is, whatever we use timber for, timber is not renewable. It is a finite resource, one that competes with all of our other resources, and one we've already half depleted.
When you see it like this, you realize so many of our attempts to use trees are absurd. The ideas that we’re pushing to make more, to use more, to burn more, to bury more are such consumerist concepts. They’re anathema to all environmental beliefs and scientific understanding, but it’s environmentalists and scientists proposing it.
That's weird.
How unnatural are we willing to make nature in order to clean up our mess? More correctly, how much MORE unnatural than the 85% we already have.
This obsession of ours for the regenerative beauty of trees, this timberpunk view of returning to a yesteryear we've long since depleted, this puerile faith in nature to clean up our adult-sized mess, our love of forests may yet be the end of them.
This podcast is called Replace, Remove, Recover, and as you can see from trees, we get so motivated by Replace Remove that we often forget about Recover. We need to stop looking at nature as a renewable resource and see it for the finite and closed system it is. The next time you’re looking for a low carbon alternative, don’t look at trees. Don’t ask nature to solve this for you. Recover means we need a plan for the next million years.
If you want to make a difference, contact the Rainforest Action Network to see how you can protect a forest, not for carbon credits, but for survival. Talk to your local Climate Change Commission to treat biomass the same way we treat coal. Tell your local Emissions Trading Scheme to divorce forests from carbon, forcing funds to be spent on anthropogenic solutions to anthropogenic emissions.
We need solutions that don't involve trees.
Rainforest Action Network: https://www.ran.org/
If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with someone you know who needs to hear it. If it made you feel, made you angry, made you cry, let someone else feel the same.
Music in this episode provided by Artlist.io
Theme Song - "The Best Thing" by Paper Planes
01:10 - "Sero" by Crest
03:30 - "Many Persons in His Head" by Max H.
06:10 - "What We Have Lost" by David James Terry
10:06 - "Many Persons in His Head" by Max H.
11:59 - "Four on Five" by Yehezkel Raz
13:05 - "Vacuum" by Buddha Kid
15:00 - "Sleeper Valley" by Ardie Son
19:18 - "Erased from My Mind" by Kevin Graham
24:31 - "Less Than Tomorrow" by Raphael Angelini
25:39 - "Four on Five" by Yehezkel Raz
27:58 - "Less Than Tomorrow" by Raphael Angelini
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