Episode 220: Ketan Joshi
Today's guest is Ketan Joshi, a writer, data analyst and communications consultant working on climate and energy.
Ketan Joshi has been at the forefront of clean energy for eight years, starting out as a data analyst working in wind energy, and expanding his knowledge base to community engagement, climate science and new energy technology. He’s written for the Guardian, The Monthly, ABC News and has penned several hundred blog posts digging into climate and energy issues, building a position as a respected and analytical energy commentator in Australia. Ketan is also the author of Windfall: Unlocking a Fossil Free Future, and has a large following on social media.
Before coming on the show, Ketan and Jason had a few heated exchanges on Twitter. Despite what appeared to be opposing views around climate, this conversation shed light on an important lesson about the polarization of social media platforms. When we actually take the time to meet and discuss these topics live, we might find out that we’re in agreement more than we think.
Enjoy the show!
You can find Jason on Twitter @jjacobs22, @mcjpod (podcast) or @mcjcollective (company). You can reach us via email at info@mcjcollective.com, where we encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.
Episode recorded July 7, 2022.
In today's episode, we cover:
Ketan's background and personal climate journey
His experience working in data science, communications, community engagement, and climate policy within organizations
How his feelings about climate and theory of change have evolved over time
The level of urgency of the climate crisis and the level of disruption we should expect in order to adequately address it
Our dependence on fossil fuels
The rate of change in emissions reductions and some of the impacts associated with it
Benefits of engaging community members in climate solutions
The role of corporate decision making in heavily fossil reliant companies
How society impacts individual decision making
Benefits of reducing carbon emissions and examples where it's not easy to do
The role of natural gas in the clean energy transition
Carbon removal and its role in the transition
Transforming carbon offsets
Ketan's thoughts on nuclear and if we should be deploying it at scale
Who he'd like to hear from
-
Jason Jacobs (00:00:00):
Hey, everyone. Jason here, I am the My Climate Journey show host. Before we get going, I wanted to take a minute and tell you about the My Climate Journey or MCJ, as we call it, membership option. Membership came to be because there were a bunch of people that were listening to the show that weren't just looking for education, but they were longing for a peer group as well. So we set up a Slack community for those people, that's now mushroomed into more than 1,300 members. There is an application to become a member. It's not an exclusive thing, there's four criteria we screen for, determination to tackle the problem of climate change, ambition to work on the most impactful solution areas, optimism that we can make a dent and we're not wasting our time for trying, and a collaborative spirit. Beyond that, the more diversity, the better. There's a bunch of great things that have come out of that community, a number of founding teams that have met in there, a number of nonprofits that have been established, a bunch of hiring that's been done, a bunch of companies that have raised capital in there, a bunch of funds that have gotten limited partners or investors for their funds in there, as well as a bunch of events and programming by members and for members, and some open source projects that are getting actively worked on that hatched in there as well. At any rate, if you want to learn more, you can go to MyClimateJourney.co, the website, and click the become a member tab at the top. Enjoy the show.
Jason Jacobs (00:01:34):
Hello everyone. This is Jason Jacobs, and welcome to My Climate Journey. This show follows my journey to interview a wide range of guests, to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change, and try to figure out how people like you and I can help. Today's guest is Ketan Joshi. Ketan has a decade of experience in the renewable energy industry, ranging from data analytics to communications. He's worked in corporations, government and freelance for NGOs, and has built a large following on Twitter, providing commentary on social media. Now, I didn't know any of this prior to inviting him on the show. The only thing I knew was that he did, in fact, have a large following on social media, and he seemed informed and mission driven, but also someone that seemed to take issue with some of the views that I was expressing on Twitter. We had some spats, and most recently had a frustrating exchange, and probably had both walked away writing each other off, when a random Twitter user, Misha Steiner, chimed in and suggested that we might want to talk live. I thought about it and I invited Ketan on the show. We did no prep calls, so the first time we ever met was when we hit the record button. And I really enjoyed the discussion. He's a thoughtful guy. And while we don't agree on everything, we actually agree a lot more than I would've thought, which is a good lesson here in that sometimes the polarized atmosphere on social media, if we actually take the time to meet people in person and discuss live, we might find that we're in agreement more than we think. Without further ado, Ketan, welcome to the show.
Ketan Joshi (00:03:24):
Hi. It's good to be here.
Jason Jacobs (00:03:26):
Good to have you. And this is an interesting one, because you and I have not met before. We've not spoken live before. I followed you on Twitter for a while. You followed me on Twitter for a while. I've done a little digging into your background and stuff, but that was after the invite to the show went out. And the way this came about, just for context for the audience, is that I tweeted something and then we got into a little back and forth. And I think we both left frustrated with each other.
Ketan Joshi (00:04:01):
It was somewhat testy.
Jason Jacobs (00:04:04):
Yeah. And then a Twitter user said, "Well, why don't you guys just hash it out live? You both are mission aligned. And I'm sure you'd really benefit from it. And I thought about it and said, "All right." So, really excited for this opportunity. My impression, and again, we've never spoken, is that you're thoughtful and mission aligned, and that some combination of maybe disagreeing on tactics and/or just like two ships passing in the night from a communication style standpoint. But excited to dig in and hash it out.
Ketan Joshi (00:04:34):
Yeah. Sounds great. Yeah. It was a good chat, I mean that Twitter discussion. Maybe our exchange was a little testy, but the responses, the multiple responses that you had to that, I thought were pretty interesting. And there's a few climate issues, on Twitter in particular, that don't go well. Whenever they come up, you can just feel in your gut this is not going to be good, the responses are going to be exhausting to this. Nuclear power is one, probably, that you are familiar with, that you would've seen particularly over the past few days where you don't look at a tweet or a news story and go, gee, I'm looking forward to reading their responses to this story. And this whole issue of personal and systemic stuff is one of those things where sometimes you feel a little nugget of dread, like, oh no, this is happening again. So I'm quite happy that you invited me on the show, and I'm really honored. And I'd love to chat about it. Because you get so much more from thinking about these things, talking about them, than you do composing 280 character jives on a website.
Jason Jacobs (00:05:40):
I think so too. Yeah. And I think if you're not regularly engaging with people that have different viewpoints to yourself, then you're not going out of your comfort zone and you're probably not maximizing your learning either or pressure testing your own worldview. But before we get too far down the micro path of a tweet and their responses and things like that, it'd be great just to get an overview in your words. And again, I've done some prep. But for listeners' benefit, just who are you, and what's the nature of the work that you do in climate?
Ketan Joshi (00:06:12):
My background's sort of somewhat unique in the climate space because I, like you, I didn't actually come into it from a pure climate runway, if that makes sense. So I wasn't sitting in a high school in my teen years thinking, oh, I'm going to work on climate. I'm going to do climate stuff. I was actually a real science and technology geek. And so, all my subjects in high school were science subjects, biology, chemistry, physics, that sort of thing. And then when I went to university, I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do with myself. I was interested in psychology and neuroscience, so I studied those topics at university. And I finished my university degree, and I just had absolutely no idea what to do with myself. I had this ball of guilt in my chest that everything was just too vague, and that all I liked was science and technology and nothing too specific. So I just started applying for a bunch of jobs that looked I could maybe do them. And one of them was a data science job at an energy company. And I remember the job interview was really embarrassing and ridiculous because it was one of those interviews where they don't tell you the name of the company. And the interviewer asked me to guess which company it was. And I was like, "Oh, well, I guess it's an energy company." And all he had told me is that this is a company, it's Australia's largest renewable energy company. And I was like, "Ah, is it BP?" And the only reason I said BP is because that was the only energy company whose name I could recall off the top of my head during the interview. Of course, it wasn't BP. BP is not a renewable energy company. It is the company that sells oil and gas.
Ketan Joshi (00:07:50):
So, I tell that story just to give you an idea of how deeply ignorant I was of not just energy, but climate, when I started out. This was in 2010. And I said, in a job interview, "Look, I've got some data science skills. I've got some analytical skills. I'm pretty interested in this topic, and I'm a passionate. I'm a good writer and I'm a good understander and communicator. And they were like, "Yeah, sure. You've got the job." They hired a whole bunch of people. So they weren't too fussed about my pretty alarming credentials. Most other job interviewers should have been like, "This guy kind of sucks. Why are we hiring this dude?" And so, I started the job. And I actually immediately loved it because what we were doing, we had this fleet of wind farms that were being set up in the national electricity market in Australia for the first time. So this was an entirely new technology. The grid operator was like, what are these things? They were so confused about the generation patterns of fleet of wind farms. They had all their control systems set up for coal, gas and some other, diesel, et cetera, et cetera, hydro plants, where they could issue instructions to those plants and say generate more, generate less. And then all these wind farms and solar farms come along, and they're like, okay, we don't really know how to deal with this or what to do.
Ketan Joshi (00:09:08):
So for basically the first three years in that job, what we did was we set up all of these integration techniques. Solar and wind forecasting, we helped implement those systems. Dispatch and control systems that are automated for wind and solar, we helped set up some of those because they just hadn't implemented them. It went wrong many, many times, sometimes in very embarrassing and silly ways. But we figured it out. And I really liked it, but I couldn't help but notice how intensely politicized renewable energy, in particular, but climate in general, was in Australian politics and media. So just in case that wasn't clear, I grew up in Australia and I started my career in Australia. And people generally liked renewables. They liked wind and solar, but they didn't like climate like change and climate policy and carbon taxes, and all that top down policy kind of stuff. It was really, really different. So that triggered my interest in public engagement, so I started blogging. I got a Twitter account in 2013. I started tweeting like mad. I was doing shift work, so I was doing overnight shifts and there was a lot of downtime. So I was like, hell yeah, I'm going to start writing blogs about energy generation, and debunking myths, and talking. Basically became an advocate of renewable energy technology.
Ketan Joshi (00:10:24):
So my whole obsession, my whole thing was, I want to be a public advocate for wind farms in particular. So I found that very, very few other people were doing that. My company was a bit weird about it. They were like, "We didn't really hire you for this, but you seem to be doing a good job. So just keep going, I guess." And that became my job after a while. So I just became a public communicator advocating for the technologies. And then I sort of left in 2016. I worked for a government renewable energy agency doing more of a sort of vanilla communications role as opposed to being a public advocate. And then I worked for the Australian Science Agency, not just on renewables, but we started doing a whole bunch of data science stuff as well. And then after that we left Australia, my partner got a job here in Norway. And pretty much at the same time that we started planning that, I got an offer to write a book about the past decade in Australia, about the politics, about the community engagement issues. So I was really interested in community engagement issues around wind and solar development. And I participated myself in some community engagement and developer liaison projects back then. And then they also wanted something on politics, basically how politics mixed with the policies and energy politics and things like that. So I wrote that book at the junction of leaving Australia. And then it actually got released in the first year of the pandemic in 2020. That book is called Windfall, Unlocking a Fossil Free Future. It's very Australia specific, but it touches on a lot of energy justice issues and a lot of energy politics issues that I think many people around the world would recognize.
Ketan Joshi (00:12:07):
And then since then, I basically was a freelance writer and quasi journalist for a bunch of outlets, some Australian ones, some advocacy groups, like shareholder activism and NGOs and climate focus groups like ClientEarth. I wrote blogs and analysis for those groups. And most recently, I have been working as an analyst at the European climate foundation, working on corporate net zero targets, which have fascinated me for two years because I'm really, really interested in climate policy within corporations, and specifically how that interacts with public engagement, marketing, and also where the differences lie between what corporations are doing, the kind of decisions they're making, and what the science says is required in terms of emissions reductions, the most recent round of IPCC reports, that sort of thing. So yeah, that's sort of an almost quick summary of where I started, to where I am now. And I'm on parental leave until the end of August, and have been since the middle of May. So apologies in advance. My brain is tofu. I am not sleeping a huge amount, but I have been somewhat engaged on these topics still, through Twitter and short form quick stuff that I can do in between naps and things like that.
Jason Jacobs (00:13:31):
And maybe talk a little bit about how did you feel about the problem of climate change when you first started working on the issue many years ago, both in terms of, how did you feel? Did it cause anxiety? Or what were the feelings that it caused? But also theory of change at that time, and maybe how both of those have evolved, if at all, as we sit today.
Ketan Joshi (00:13:55):
The very important caveat here is that when I started, I came from a position of real ignorance. My entry into this was very, very technological and very hyper focused on energy technology specifically. And maybe it's through virtue of that fact. But I honestly felt, when I started, like we had a lot of time and a lot of space to deal with this problem. It felt very distant and it felt like one of those things where you hear warnings and you file it off into part of your mind that you're like, I'll think about that when I feel like it's a real and present danger. But at the moment, I'm just going to shove it in there into the don't panic corner of my mind. I don't know. I'm trying to think of a good analogy. Maybe when you get onto a plane and they'd give you the safety briefing and you're like, I'll worry about that when the plane is diving directly downwards through the air, I'll think about that safety briefing. But for now, I'm just going to put it off. Because [inaudible 00:14:54] seem like a major warning to me.
Ketan Joshi (00:14:57):
That's how I felt when I started. I felt very complacent. I don't think that's a good thing at all, but that's just how I processed it and how I felt when I started. And particularly in terms of theory of change, I guess I probably haven't changed particularly much in terms of my worldview on this, but I had a very government intervention focused way of thinking about this, in that, of course, when I started my job, my job existed because of a government intervention, because of a government policy, which was a policy called a Renewable Energy Target that was expanded to a very large proportion of Australian electricity. That target was set in 2009. And I got my job in 2010. All these kind of jobs just sprang into existence. I mentioned that when I got hired, I was hired among a whole bunch of people. And so, of course, my worldview was like government policies to tackle climate change are fantastic. I wouldn't have that job, and I probably may not even have this career had it not been for that policy, which just sucked me up out of my aimless, wandering post degree. So I think where I am now is similar kind of philosophy, but hopefully, my mind is a little better tuned to better policies and spotting bad policies. Because of course, we're now in a phase where it's actually worth thinking about the strength of policies, and how fair they are, and how fast they are, and that sort of thing. It's a really tricky thing to think about.
Jason Jacobs (00:16:27):
And do you still feel like we have a lot of time like you did when you first started working on this issue?
Ketan Joshi (00:16:34):
No. No, certainly not. So the entire formulation of how much time do we have is a bit of a strange one for a problem that accumulates in constant quantities. It's not like an on and off switch. It's not like, oh, okay. You've heard that thing before about, we've got 12 years to go before out of control. You can't really do much with the problem anymore. There's a long and funny history behind that phrase itself. But of course, it's the wrong way of thinking about it. We have some time to save whatever's left. And that is constantly changing every single day. Every single day, the amount that we have left to save decreases simply because yesterday we continued to emit X number of mega tons of greenhouse gases. That's simultaneously nerve wrecking, but also liberating because if you feel like you've lost the previous day, you get up in the next day and you go, well, I've still got another day to save. I can create change on this day as well. And so, the whole concept of having time or time limits. Certainly, the rising drumbeat of physical consequences of climate change, really focusing attention on the first half of the equation, which is what have we failed to do? What have we failed to prevent from happening? Back home, my parents live in New South Wales in Australia, and the flooding there has been astonishingly severe. Just record breaking in every single way that you could possibly formulate a record for the amount of rainfall. But of course, a couple of years ago, there were the bush fires as well, which I'm sure you would've heard about, the Black Summer of Bush Fires, they're called. And so, all those sort of things, they add up more and more. But then of course, I constantly retune myself to thinking about, okay, that's not great. But of course, there's a lot of emissions lined up in the future that can be prevented through the decisions that we make and the efforts that we apply. So basically, I've stopped thinking about whether or not we have or do not have time. I've started thinking about it in a slightly, hopefully, a bit more representative way, that better sort of represents the problem and perhaps makes us a little less, I hate the feeling of a looming deadline. This is why I wasn't a particularly good writer. The stuff I wrote wasn't bad. But ask my editors, the feeling of a deadline seizes me up. It doesn't make me better. It doesn't make me better at what I do. So I've changed the way I think about that. Hopefully, it's a better way of thinking about it.
Jason Jacobs (00:19:13):
So how do you think about it now?
Ketan Joshi (00:19:15):
What I just described, which is basically formulating the fact that, yes, the past has happened. There are emissions that have been released. There are a lot of mistakes that could have been prevented that weren't. But, of course, today and tomorrow and the next week and the next month, and next decade, there is a lined up list of decisions that should be prevented. There are things that we can do, there are actions that we can take. The most recent IPCC report that came out, it was kind of buried in there, but I found it to be really, really interesting. They were trying to formulate how bad things would be right now if all of the effort from the past 5 to 10 years hadn't happened. It imagined basically that just nobody had decided to do anything on climate ever, and that we had just let things go unbridled. And of course, things would be worse. It's not like we avoided 50% of potential emissions. It was sort of around maybe 10% to 15%. The line would be 10% to 15% higher had we done nothing. But that's something, right? That just shows that actual prevention of climate damage is possible, and that the actions that we take, sacrifices we make, the risks that we take, they all have a meaningful impact on the state of the planet that we live on, and the habitat that we rely on for everything in our lives that we love. So, yeah, that's how I think about it now.
Jason Jacobs (00:20:37):
And so, I mean, there are different ways that I've heard people categorize it. I mean, some might call it a climate emergency. Some might say that we need a World War II style mobilization. I know you said you don't think about it from timing or deadlines. So I guess, how do you frame it in your head? You talked about how you frame it in your head in terms of the way to address it. But what about the level of urgency or the level of panic or the level of disruption that we should be injecting as a society in order to address it adequately, if there is such a thing?
Ketan Joshi (00:21:13):
Yeah, that last one's pretty sticky. But in terms of the level of urgency, of course, it's very urgent. It's an emergency, it's a crisis. It's all those things in the same way that many other cumulative problems are. So there's no good metaphor for climate change. It's a completely new thing. You can't really relate your mind to anything like it. But of course, it's urgent because it's so difficult to undo what we've done. It's possible, of course, to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, but they've been up there for X amount of time, and they've caused some amount of heat trapping climate impacts, but also takes a lot of energy to take it out of the air. And of course, the more urgent thing that we need to do now is prevent its release. And the thing also with fossil fuel usage in society is that incumbency is very powerful. If we started acting on this problem in the '90s, early '90s sort of thing, then we would have had, first of all, a much shallower runway. So the annual reduction in emissions would've been much less. But also, we would've been fighting against weaker incumbency. Every day of time that it's left in place makes it doubly hard to undo, to remove. And it's not just because I live in Norway. Norway is a rich country with a lot of cash lying around that it gets from selling fossil fuels to other countries, but there are other countries that are at different stages of societal and industrial development. And they are making decisions that are in their own interests, as they have the right to do.
Ketan Joshi (00:22:59):
And there are countries that operate with agency, and there are people that have the same wants and desires as many other people in the world, they want to live good lives and rich lives and healthy lives. And it's something that is really urgent is to give them options to do all of those things that don't result in the lock in of more fossil fuels. So the urgency isn't just, oh, okay, we need to prevent climate impacts because the atmosphere is something that we all rely on. The urgency is also societal and technological, because once things are in place, they are very hard to get rid of. So, yeah, it's certainly urgent. As to your second question about disruption, the level of disruption. This is really hard to think about, particularly now, as we are sort of in this strange, not post pandemic, but almost in this, I don't even really know how to describe it. It's not post pandemic because people still acquire the disease and they still suffer horrible impacts, and many, many people are dying every day. But the level of restrictions, the level of societal disruption from COVID controls in society has significantly reduced, certainly has here in Norway. And I think this is a common thing across the world. Governments are very hesitant to introduce the same disruptions that we saw this time two years ago. And so two decisions are being made here. At the very start of the disease, it was like, oh my gosh, this is a new disease. It's really scary. We have to introduce very, very severe disruptions into society, fundamentally change human society for about half a year to one year, just to get a grip on this, to get a control on it. And then two years later, it's now, okay, we've got some technologies, we've got some policy options for controlling this. Some people are still having impacts, but we're going to tweak the settings and have less disruption.
Ketan Joshi (00:24:54):
So in terms of climate change, I have a very different formulation compared to COVID. I think that calling for disruptive policies on greenhouse gas emissions is fundamentally very, very different to calling for disruptive policies on COVID controls. People were comparing them, these two things together very closely at the start of the pandemic. And it bothered me a little bit because fossil fuels are ingrained in society in a way that something like going to a sports match or going to sing in a choir indoors is not. Basically, people rely on fossil fuels, not just to drive a nice car or go on a flight on a holiday, but to get stuff like computers. And within a two meter radius of me is a bunch of technologies and furniture and physical structure like the insulation in my walls and everything, all fully dependent on fossil fuels. And without access to those fuel types, would be a disruption that is fundamentally, almost unimaginable, like if you were to basically block access to those fuels, those energy types. So basically, there are some levels of change that you can implement that are relatively aggressive with emissions reductions. But on the general sort of side of things, you can't really do it because, as I mentioned, time results in greater incumbency, and there has been a lot of time, four or five decades now, that we've sort of grown fully dependent on these fuel types.
Jason Jacobs (00:26:36):
One clarifying question there, if I may. So there's a whole subset of the climate community that seems to just grab a megaphone and talk all day long about how we need to cease all fossil fuel usage immediately, and every day we wait is a crime against humanity. So it sounds like you aren't aligned with that perspective.
Ketan Joshi (00:26:56):
I mean, we need to cease as quickly as we possibly can. And so, of course, ideally, we would stop immediately if we could. We can't, for those reasons that I mentioned. I certainly haven't heard anyone saying what you said there. I think most people recognize that there is some non-zero quantity of time that it takes to protect human life, protect justice, protect fairness, protect human comfort and food and water and safety and housing. All of those things need to be protected, at the same time as removing the threat of what happens when you burn fossil fuels and when you release methane into the atmosphere. So it's extremely urgent. But when COVID first happened, you didn't sort of see anyone calling for permanent reductions in social content. I guess maybe some people did. But there was a level of awareness of the sort of steps, the changes that would be required. So yeah, when it comes to disruption, you have to be really clear about what it is that you're referring to, right? So an example would be in the power sector, there's a really constant debate, and it happens in every single country, about the rate of change of swapping out one technology for the other technology. And it's this dance between getting rid of the old stuff and putting in the new stuff. If you get rid of the old stuff too quickly, you don't have enough supplies of electricity to call upon. And then people turn the light switch on, and then there's no power. And so, if you don't build the new stuff quick enough, then emissions don't fall fast enough. And people suffer the impacts of what happens when you burn fossil fuels, climate impacts.
Ketan Joshi (00:28:41):
And so, people frame disruption from their own personal perspective. So when I mentioned I started that job, and the policy that helped me have that job was a policy that resulted in a surcharge on people's electricity bill. So it was like, out of a $2,000, Australian dollar, charge on your electricity bill, that you would have it throughout a full year. This was maybe sort of 2% to 3% of it. It wasn't a very big charge at all. And that was given as a subsidy to the people who construct renewable energy because wind turbines and solar panels were more expensive back then, and we were also up against the incumbents. But there were a lot of people who looked at that and said, that is too much disruption. That is a change that we cannot tolerate and that we cannot accept, and we are going to fight against it because we think that the rate of change is too fast. We think that what you should actually do is wait for the cost of wind and solar to fall naturally, and then you can start building them and implementing them into the grid. But don't subsidize them, because that causes that charge on people's bills, and people have to pay extra on their bills. And I'm sure you've heard all of this type of talking before. It's people trying to formulate and describe how they feel about disruption and the different depths of change that people worry about and that they object to.
Ketan Joshi (00:30:08):
So yeah, people come at it from very different ways. I think it's always important to just prod people a little bit and just be like, you're talking about a change here, but I think you need to be explicit about what you mean. Like when the UK introduced its policy to effectively ban combustion engine car sales by 2030, people objected to it. I think they asked some pretty reasonable questions, which is like, what if you still live in an area that doesn't have street charges? Or, what if you just desperately need to purchase a combustion engine for some reason? Is there going to be an exception, some way, to help people deal with that disruption? Because that's a pretty significant societal change to implement in the space of eight years. Who knows where that's going to go with the UK's current shenanigans? But that's a completely separate story. It's a really good question. But people formulate it in very, very different ways. And I think maybe that's why people talk across each other sometimes, particularly on Twitter, about this, because they're formulating that word, disruption, in a very different way. And two people have two different ideas of what they mean by it.
Jason Jacobs (00:31:20):
But I think what I've heard from you so far is that too much disruption, too fast, is not the best path due to the dependence as a society that we've developed on fossil fuels and how entrenched they are. So what is the best path? And also, what needs to happen for that best path to come about?
Ketan Joshi (00:31:47):
So, I think the rate of change for emissions reductions can potentially be much, much higher. I think it's sort of commonly understood, without resulting in unfair impacts on people. Often, the way people talk about it, they're actually generally referring to unfairness, right? So a change that results in, say, gas becoming significantly more expensive as a result of the climate policy is not necessarily a good thing. It may lead to a very small reduction in emissions, but it could also lead to a really severe burden on families trying to pay heating bills in winter. And I don't mean that as a tactical comment. I don't mean that like, oh, that's bad climate tactics. I mean it's just immoral. It's cruel. And we don't want to be cruel people. We want to be good people.
Ketan Joshi (00:32:35):
And so, I think that you need to basically formulate these policies in a way that prioritizes justice and fairness, but also a maximum rate of change. And so, just to go back to the grid. Sorry, I always go back to the grid because that's my home, that's where I started. But the rate of change that you can potentially implement in power grids is turning out to be much, much faster than people realized. So basically, the function currently served by power grids, which is the dispatch of electrical power by a bunch of generators in response to demand sources, can be replicated by clean sources. And solar, wind, hydro and nuclear geothermal, a bunch of other enabling technologies like transmission demand response batteries, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you would've heard it all before. All of that stuff is actually turning out to be significantly more feasible than we realized.
Ketan Joshi (00:33:26):
But to get that speed, you then come up against a choice. You can either get that speed in a way that comes with a little bit of a side sacrifice, or you can get that speed with a bit of extra effort, ensuring that it remains fair and accessible and it doesn't leave anyone behind. And so, I'll give you an example. The way renewable energy is developed requires sometimes the construction of new transmission lines. And so, those transmission lines have to be built, generally, in most cases, not too close to people. But in some cases, it goes over people's land, goes through their communities, it goes past their homes. And I think that it's really, really important to basically, all those people who are experiencing that, they're taking part in climate action. They're actually becoming involved in it in a way that you and I became involved in it through our career pathways. There's suddenly becoming this prospect, this technology is just appearing in front of them, and they're suddenly a part of the movement. But they're often not treated like it. They're often treated as obstacles or NIMBYs or objectors. When really, with a bit of effort, they could actually be brought on board, and the companies that build the transmission lines might do better at engaging with them or sharing the benefits of developing those transmission lines with the people who live near them.
Ketan Joshi (00:34:54):
So this is what I mean when I talk about speed and fairness. Obviously, you need the speed to align with climate goals. But in terms of the fairness, disruption can manifest in a bunch of really strange and scary and surprising ways. And I think you actually want to avoid that. You don't want to develop something that ends up unfair or cruel. There's been a lot of research and writing on this about stuff like carbon prices and who pays basically? Who puts the money into climate action? But I think it's actually really interesting in the context of technologies, and particularly grid technologies, because it's the part that we're experiencing right now.
Jason Jacobs (00:35:37):
So I'm hearing about the way policies should be formulated in an ideal world. I mean, does that mean that policies will carry the day? Is this hypothetical? Are these policies actually viable in getting put in place? Are there other gaps that we have? I mean, is policy the full picture of what we need for climate solutions?
Ketan Joshi (00:36:00):
No, definitely not. It's because I'm a wonk, which is why I'm a bit interested in it. But definitely not. No, there's a huge array of other areas that are really important. One is corporate decision making. Of course, it's something I've been doing a lot of work on and reading a lot about over the past couple of years. But it's really tricky and, in some ways, a bit alien to me. I mentioned my background is science and technology. And the inner workings of corporations, particularly at high levels, is a bit new to me. So I'm learning a lot. But I'm particularly interested in decision making in extractive companies and high emitting companies, or sort of heavily fossil reliant companies because they're faced with really, really significant choices over the next few years, particularly in the context of pressures like the pandemic and the war, the Russia, Ukraine war. There's a lot of scrutiny and a lot of pressure on them. But I think there probably needs to be a bit more pressure. But there also probably needs to be a bit more of a collaborative effort. There's a lot of people operating in good faith who want to do the right thing, who get sucked into doing not necessarily enough just because, through no fault of their own, they're just trying to do the right thing. And they just don't really know what to do, they're faced with a very complex and really tricky set of decisions to make.
Ketan Joshi (00:37:21):
The other interesting part is society, basically decisions that we make as individuals or that we formulate as communities. There's a lot of changes that need to happen in that context, and there's sort of like a mix of culture and individual. There's a really good report from the International Energy Agency that came out in May '21 called their net zero report. And what they do is they kind of split, they have this big chunk on policy. They have this big chunk on corporations. But they also have a really interesting chunk on individuals. And it's not the right word to describe it, individuals, because it's not really about individuals. It's about sort of the blob, everybody as a sort of whole. And, of course, that's the right way to view it because no one really is an individual. You make decisions based on what you chat about with your friends, and what you see on TV and social media, and what you feel from your own life's experiences from hundreds of thousands of people that you've had some type of interaction with through your life. So it's not really just you as a single unit.
Ketan Joshi (00:38:24):
And they present it in that way. They talk about enabling people, giving people the opportunity to make decisions based on what they feel. So a lot of people feel really strongly about climate action, but they don't necessarily have access to a bike lane on their street that they can use. They may not have that near them. They may have to rely on a car because they've got no other option. Or they may not be able to afford a cool thermostat that lets them save 20% on their heating bills, because it uses an AI thing to reduce energy consumption. So it outlines how decision making and culture and policy all tie in together to result in people becoming leaders in climate action, basically doing things, making decisions.
Ketan Joshi (00:39:12):
And it's not just about changes like switching from driving to cycling or having more energy efficiency. It's also about giving some things up, but doing that in a way that people are empowered to make those decisions by themselves, and to do so in ways that they can ensure that their lives are just as enriched as they were before, and that they're giving things up that they decide that they don't need. So I'm sure you would've seen people talking about meat consumption, which is really so far away from my background and knowledge and experience that I don't want to talk too much about it because it's certainly not my area of expertise. But it has been really interesting to see people talk about their own emotions, experiences with it. They talk about how they felt somewhat liberated or they felt like they were taking control of this sort of pathway or vision of the supply chain of impacts from their food. They felt like it enriched their life. They felt like it made their life better to switch to lower emissions foods.
Ketan Joshi (00:40:14):
So I find that really interesting. Some people might say, oh, those people had to sacrifice or give up eating meat. But they themselves would probably say, "No, no. It wasn't a sacrifice. I felt like I upgraded my life. I felt like I did something better." And so, if you can basically help people reach a point where you're giving them more control, you're giving them more knowledge, more information, you're empowering them, you're certainly avoiding anything cruel or any imposition or anything drastically mean spirited, I think that's really, really important. Because as soon as you get into those bad areas, everything starts going wrong. People stop listening to you. You don't get any results. You don't end up with actual changes.
Jason Jacobs (00:40:59):
So are we on the path that we need to be on?
Ketan Joshi (00:41:04):
Certainly not. No. In terms of global emissions, the general sort of way it was formulated a couple of years ago to help people understand it was that to align with limiting warming to 1.5 degrees relative to pre-industrial temperatures, you'd have to reduce emissions by a pandemic's worth every year. Obviously the physical impacts we all experienced from those emissions reductions were not good. People, families were separated. And people couldn't go to the funerals of their loved ones, and it was all bad. No one liked or enjoyed the restrictions of the first few years of the COVID pandemic. Obviously, most people accepted them because they were there to protect human life and to protect human safety. But you have to formulate that as a volume, a quantity of emissions reductions. You have to do that, but do it in a completely fair and humanistic and in a way that basically doesn't cause suffering to people or cause unfairness or cause psychic pain in people. You don't want your climate policies to hurt people. If they do, then why are you even trying to prevent climate change in the first place if you're not concerned about hurting people through the creation of policies? So that has to happen every year, basically, in terms of the magnitude of emissions reductions. And it's not happening.
Ketan Joshi (00:42:31):
The most recent IPCC report that came out talked about, basically what it says is that the next year needs to see lower emissions than this year from here on out. There can't be a year where emissions are higher than the previous year ever, if we want to align with those climate goals. And it's looking harder and harder to align with that 1.5 degrees every single year, which is a shame, which is really, really sad. But there's still glimmers of possibility here and there. But it's just looking very, very hard. 1.5 degrees is not any sort of magic number. It was chosen as a sort of mix of feasibility and ambition at Paris in 2015. So the next goal is 1.500001 degrees, right? That's our next step, is that we want to prevent the next release of greenhouse gas emissions. So we're not on the right track, but there are a bunch of changes happening that are going in the right direction. They're buried because they, some of them are technological changes. And so technological changes don't manifest as emissions reductions immediately. Some of them are cultural changes. So we've seen climate protest movements, and we've seen the creations of policies in countries that you may not expect strong climate policies from. So yeah, there's a lot of concern, justified concern, about the trajectory of emissions, particularly post pandemic. But I have to say, I really don't think that... Emissions are not rising relative to what they were sort of 2018, 2019. It's not the sort of linear, upwards, terrifying straight line that we envisaged in 2010. It's kind of flatlined. Flat line is still bad because emissions add up in the atmosphere, and we really want to be reducing them as quickly as possible. But flat line is something. That's really not what people expected 10 years ago. So we've done something, we just got to keep going.
Jason Jacobs (00:44:37):
Yeah. I mean the tension that I'm picking up as I'm listening to you here is that, on the one hand, we need to move faster and bolder and accelerate the transition. And then on the other, we need to be careful not to overstep in terms of the social injustice side, whether it's energy poverty, or supply chains or visiting your loved ones, or things like that. And what I'm wondering just listening to you talk here is, can they coexist? Can we possibly move fast enough and not upset the apple cart, if you will?
Ketan Joshi (00:45:08):
Yeah, definitely. Definitely. I think so. So we've seen it happen a few times. An instance would be, sorry, renewable energy, keep coming back to it. It's my thing. The way it works when you add it into a grid is that it's being dispatched into a system, but it's not paying for fuel. It's not available all the time. Solar is not available all the time, nor is wind. But when it is, it bids in at a lower price. And that pushes wholesale price down in power markets. So you end up with an effect where the greater the emissions reductions, the cheaper electricity is for power. That's an effect that happens up to a point. That's obviously not going to happen forever, in terms of the percentage of renewables that you have in a grid. But I think it's quite a nice example of what I referred to as co-benefits, which is basically where the more you reduce emissions, the better experiences people have. Another example is when you basically get rid of combustion engine cars on roads, people get years added to their lives from an immediate reduction in air pollution. It's actually quite shocking how much we suffer just to have combustion engines on our roads and how much shorter our lives are because of that. Maybe not so much here in Oslo, but in other parts of the world. So people live better lives when they're not breathing in these particulates, they obviously have fewer health problems throughout their life, and they live longer lives.
Ketan Joshi (00:46:39):
And so the real challenge is, first of all, maximizing those co-benefits as much as possible. In particular, making sure that those benefits flow to people who have been historically denied them, like marginalized communities who really should be the first ones to get this stuff because they've borne the burden of the worst of fossil fuels for a long time. And so, they should get the cleaner air and the cheaper power and things like that first, I think, because they're also good people to have on board on the climate action bus. All of these things are possible. There are, of course, many, many instances where what I'm describing as an ideal scenario is really, really hard to get, or potentially even impossible to get. And I know this is going back to our Twitter thread, to some degree, but like aviation is perhaps a clear example of where de-carbonization, reducing emissions gets a lot more complicated, because there's no immediate technological alternative to international or even sort of national travel through the air. There's ground transport, pretty good. Some places have good trains, some places don't. Some places have good buses, some places don't. Really, when it comes down to it, it's going to be a demand reduction problem for the next decade, potentially. Potentially shorter, maybe hydrogen planes or electric planes will become a thing. But if you want to reduce emissions, you really have to do it using those techniques.
Ketan Joshi (00:48:05):
And so you have to face the challenge, how would you reduce demand for something like aviation in a way that maintains all of those things that I mentioned before? If somebody has a dying relative in another country and they need to go see them, what do you do? How do you do it in such a way that that person can still go log onto a website, buy a plane ticket and get to their relative that they need to see as soon as they possibly can. I don't actually have a good answer for that. There are just many different options that are available to ensuring that a climate policy reducing demand from aviation doesn't end up impacting people in a really negative way. So a company that is taking a thousand business trips every week when all of those trips could be Zoom calls with basically no impact to the company, maybe they're the ones who should be changing the way they operate so the person who really needs to go, who has an emergency and they need to take a flight, that carbon budget can be reserved for that person. I just wanted to bring that up as an example of where it's not so easy, there aren't necessarily co-benefits, and somebody has to give something up. Yeah, there are areas of climate action that are like that.
Jason Jacobs (00:49:16):
Are fossil fuel companies the enemy?
Ketan Joshi (00:49:21):
Yeah. Look, I think you can answer that question just based on taking a hard look at what they're doing and what they've done. Certainly, over the past few decades, a few of them have taken active efforts to try and instill doubt about climate science and to basically cause problems for climate policy. A few of them just changed. A few of them were like, nope, we don't want to be invested in fossil fuels. And they changed their entire business model and became something else. And so, there's a Danish company called Ørsted that used to be a dedicated oil and gas company. And they became a wind energy company because they just decided to change. So it's certainly possible. But a lot of the large oil and gas companies are deciding to invest very little in transforming the products they sell. It's kind of up to them. If they want to sell products that don't cause climate change, they're free to do so. No one's really stopping them, but they're not really making that change as fast as they need to be. They certainly are the enemy in the classic sense, in that they are the most concentrated and most invested in causing the problem that we're trying to stop. But I don't really like saying that too much because it implies that every single person working there is some sort of nemesis of mine, which is not the case.
Jason Jacobs (00:50:41):
What should the role of natural gas be in the clean energy transition?
Ketan Joshi (00:50:46):
So this is something that's come up a lot over the past 10 years. The way it has been formulated in the past is that gas should be a transition fuel, or a sort of bridge fuel to go from coal to renewables. What that phrasing does is it obscures the amount that you should have or that you would potentially need. And the more and more, like every single day, we learn something new about integrating wind and solar into power grids. There's some new technology or there's some new way of thinking about transmission lines or demand response or control systems for wind and solar, all the different time scales at which you need to integrate control of dispatch for wind and solar into power grids. And every single advancement results in basically just a little less need for traditional fuels like gas. And I'm talking about, when I say less, I mean the quantity of power generation that you have in a grid. So currently, if somebody pointed a gun to my head and said, "Decarbonize the entire grid right now." I would probably have to have some gas peak there to run for 10 hours a year or something. But do that again in five years and you probably won't need it at all. So yeah, that's power grid specifically. But heating homes and industry and agriculture are sort of different questions as well.
Jason Jacobs (00:52:09):
What about carbon removal? What should its role be, if any?
Ketan Joshi (00:52:13):
Carbon removal is a super interesting one because it comes up a lot in my day job, which is basically talking about researching and thinking about net zero targets. And it comes up in the context of natural carbon removal, so tree planting fundamentally to suck carbon from the air that has been released through the burning of fossil that was dug up. The more carbon you remove from the air, the less the impacts of climate change. This is the exact goal that we are working on. This is the actual specific problem that we all desperately want to reduce. So it is actually a wonderful thing when carbon dioxide is removed from the air. The physical realities are pretty straightforward on this. It takes a lot of energy to do it. It takes a lot of time and effort to figure out how to suck it down, how to store it and how to guard that storage for a very, very long time so that you're basically replicating the way fossil fuels are when you found them, which is buried deep underground, under a lot of rock. But the thing that's most interesting to me is actually the sort of cultural and rhetorical use of carbon removal, which is, is anyone basically saying, "Look, we can continue emitting. We've got all this carbon removal coming up, and that means we can keep our coal plant going. We don't have to worry too much about it."
Ketan Joshi (00:53:30):
And you know what's really interesting? The answer is actually not that much. They do that with carbon capture and storage, which is capturing it the point at which the carbon is released. But actually not so much with technological carbon removal. So I'm sure you would've heard of the company Clean Works. They actually make a really specific point of saying that we are not really partnering with fossil fuel companies because they're worried about that exact problem, which is a fossil fuel company saying, "Don't worry too much about avoiding emissions. You can kind of suck it up in the future." And I actually found that to be a really responsible and wonderful thing. And it actually really turned around my view on carbon removal quite significantly. We're seeing a company being like, look, we actually want to be responsible about this. We do not want our technology to result in any delay to climate action. We do not want our technology to be used in bad faith or in the wrong way. All we want is to suck carbon from the air and make climate change less bad. And I thought that was really cool. I thought that was really important.
Ketan Joshi (00:54:28):
So when the question comes to the role of carbon removal, obviously you have to be very, very cautious about who's using it, what they're saying that it's for, what else is being justified off the back of it. But I think there's actually a lot of reason to be hopeful, because there are many instances of companies doing this responsibly, I think. And of course, just physically, it's not going to play a massive role in the future, but it's going to play some role. I'm pretty sure of it. And hopefully, that role is a healthy and constructive one.
Jason Jacobs (00:54:56):
Well, I know we're coming up on time. I have a punch list of three or four other topics. We could probably spend a full episode on each. If it's okay, maybe just give one sentence on each one, just so we touch on them. And the first is offsets.
Ketan Joshi (00:55:12):
One year ago I would've said, minimize them. Today I say, reform the entire system aggressively and turn them into contributions instead so that you can't use them to justify or compare against existing emissions, and make them into something good that a company decides to do.
Jason Jacobs (00:55:29):
Geoengineering.
Ketan Joshi (00:55:31):
I have no idea. Oh man, I've actually avoided the topic because it's too much. I don't think my heart can handle it. No, I don't know what to say.
Jason Jacobs (00:55:42):
So, should we be doing research?
Ketan Joshi (00:55:45):
No, no, no, no.
Jason Jacobs (00:55:45):
In case rogue nations, or rogue people, go and try to implement it on their own?
Ketan Joshi (00:55:50):
No, no, no. I think research is really important. I'm okay with that. I just mean more, I stay away from it because the topic is just too daunting and the arguments about it are too confronting, and I just can't fit it inside. There's too much in there already. I have no room.
Jason Jacobs (00:56:05):
Two more. Nuclear.
Ketan Joshi (00:56:06):
Yeah. Oh man. Really important lessons for every other energy technology to learn, and a lot of kindhearted and good people advocating for it that are also worth talking to, no matter how you feel about the technology itself.
Jason Jacobs (00:56:20):
Should we be deploying nuclear at scale?
Ketan Joshi (00:56:24):
It already is being deployed at scale. Countries like China and India are building it at relatively substantial rates. Not quite as much as they're deploying wind and solar, but it's certainly helping to avoid the burning of fossil fuels. The question of whether it should be deployed at scale in other countries that are sort of unlike those ones I mentioned is really, really vexed because it's a lot of cash, it's a lot of cultural capital. But I hope people keep talking about it because it's a clean technology, and we've got to think about it.
Jason Jacobs (00:56:52):
And the last one is just capitalism generally. If we want to get to where we want to go, do we have to tear down the existing system, or are we wiser to try to work with what we've got and reform it?
Ketan Joshi (00:57:05):
You could tear down a fair few bits of it, for sure. No one can tear down everything of anything. That's just physically impossible. No change can really happen like that. But there are chunks that are just far too circular and self sustaining. And the only way to stop them is to jam a big spanner in the works. But what it gets replaced with, I tend not to get sucked down too much into those arguments. I tend to think a bit more about human wellbeing and societal wellbeing and justice and things like that. You can have fairness and you can have social justice coexisting alongside some types of capitalism. But it tends to go wrong in ugly ways pretty frequently. So there's a lot that we have to rethink. That's my quick answer.
Jason Jacobs (00:57:50):
If you had a magic wand and you could change one thing to most accelerate our progress, what would you change? And how would you change it?
Ketan Joshi (00:57:57):
I'm going to be really, really specific here. I'm going to use my magic wand on making the growth of transmission lines something that is really done with community and economics and social justice in mind so that it's not something that we have to worry about, because it's the thing that constantly freaks me out, and it's the thing that I think could derail everything. So yeah, I'm going to use my magic wand on that.
Jason Jacobs (00:58:21):
Two last questions. One, anything I didn't ask that I should have, or parting words? And the other is just, who do you want to hear from, if anybody? How can the audience be helpful to you?
Ketan Joshi (00:58:30):
Not really. No. Those questions are really, really wide ranging and I really enjoyed them. So thank you for asking them. My parting words would be, keep an eye on power grids and transport. I think this year, they're going to be really, really big questions because, of course, the energy crises could end up having a bunch of flow on effects that I'm somewhat worried about. So pay attention to those two issues. I think it's going to be really important. And also, I'd love to hear from people who are thinking about communities and conflict and construction of energy infrastructure to clean energy infrastructure. It's something that I've just been obsessed with my entire career. And I'd love to hear the way people are thinking about it, whether they disagree with me or agree with me. I just want to hear it all, because it's really interesting to me. And I really relish hearing from people who are engaging with it too.
Jason Jacobs (00:59:19):
Seems like a great topic for us to cover on the show too. So if there's anyone that you'd like to learn from that you haven't heard from, point them my way and I'll bring them on as a guest.
Ketan Joshi (00:59:27):
Yeah, for sure.
Jason Jacobs (00:59:28):
So thanks. I know we went over, so sorry about that. But really glad that you made the time. I feel like we could have kept talking, but cordial and I learned a lot. And I think we'd have to dig in to know exactly the nuance of it. But we agree on a lot. So I'm really glad that we made the time. And also, I think one lesson here is just to be wary about who you disagree with on Twitter, because you might not disagree as much as you think.
Ketan Joshi (00:59:52):
Yeah, definitely. Thank you for having me on. I really enjoyed it.
Jason Jacobs (00:59:56):
Hey everyone, Jason here. Thanks again for joining me on My Climate Journey. If you'd like to learn more about the journey, you can visit us at MyClimateJourney.co. Note, that is .co, not .com. Someday we'll get the .com, but right now .co. You can also find me on Twitter, @jjacobs22, where I would encourage you to share your feedback on the episode or suggestions for future guests you'd like to hear. And before I let you go, if you enjoyed the show, please share an episode with a friend or consider leaving a review on iTunes. The lawyers made me say that. Thank you.
