A lot of people predicted that this would happen, but they did it in sort of a technology way. Solar kind of just uses energy from the sun. That’s the primary input of energy to the earth. So solar should win. What’s actually happened is it just got cheap. You don’t have to care about climate at all, or even clean energy at all to install solar. It’s just in many jurisdictions, the cheapest fastest thing to do. So if you only care about the price, which, let’s face it, that’s what most people care about. When we talk about energy, it’s just the cheapest, or sometimes second cheapest.
You’re listening to A Climate Change, this is Matt Matern, your host. I’ve got a great guest on the program, Marcius Extavour. Dr. Marcius is a senior partner at ODE, former executive VP at the X Prize, has PhD in quantum optics and atomic physics. Sounds pretty impressive to me. I was never any good at physics, so you know, maybe we can talk about quantum optics for a second today too, in addition to other things, yeah, let’s do it. So welcome to the show, Marcius.
Thank you. Good to be here, and thanks for the warm welcome.
Tell us a little bit…I always like to get the backstory of how people came to the climate movement and what got you on that path.
Sure thing, yeah, great question, and happy to talk about that. It’s funny sometimes I’m a little sheepish talking about my story here, because I feel like when you’re a climate person, or someone that cares about climate or working in climate, we’re sort of expected to have a story of a passionate environmentalist who was moved by maybe a personal experience or maybe in a spiritual experience. And that’s just not really me. I was an engineering kind of person, physical scientist. I was spending my days working in a physics lab at the time, I became interested in climate, and it for me, it was just, huh, this seems like a really big, important issue.
It’ll have huge social ramifications. It’s mostly a science topic, and the scientists seem to be debating this extremely hard. Why is the debate so hot? And a lot of physicists that I knew at the time were among the most skeptical of, sort of the professional scientists, professional modelers and things saying, I don’t know. We need more data. We’re not sure about these client models. I mean, this was a long time ago now, but so really I was interested. And I just thought, huh, hard problem. I bet my innovation bent can help. If we can make any progress, it’ll be extremely socially valuable. And that’s, like, really motivating for me. And so I just sort of started wandering in the general direction of climate and and now something I spent a lot of time, a lot of my time doing.
So what was your first kind of work in the area. What? Yeah, you start
You know, I didn’t even think about it as climate work at the time, but looking back, it was working on solar energy. So I always was interested in energy and energy systems as an idea, like when I was a child and a teenager reading books, novels, I was a huge novel head as a teenager, including a lot of science fiction, but also just a lot of more traditional fiction. But energy always seemed interesting to me, like it’s a big system. It’s entirely created by human beings, but it’s technical as well, but it’s kind of a machine, but it’s a social thing. But when I was an undergraduate, like at college, studying engineering, I had a chance to work on semiconductors, which I just fell in love with. I thought they were cool crystals.
And once I learned how a solar panel works, which is like a crystal that you shine light on and it squirts out electricity, which still fascinates me. I got a chance to work in the area, and I was really, really hooked then on energy technologies, and was sort of headed in a more semiconductor, chips, electronics, type of route. That was my looking back as I said, it didn’t think of it as a climate thing at the time, but I see climate in many ways, through the lens of energy, and that was definitely my first sort of engaging experience.
That’s cool to know it from the basics, from the ground up, is really important. And yeah, I assume you’ve seen incredible growth in the technology related to solar and its efficiency. Do you see it continuing to to get more and more efficient as we go out?
I definitely think we’re going to see more efficiency gains. And I’ll say why briefly, but I think the most important thing is that we’re just going to see more of what we already have. Sometimes, when you think about technologies, we especially the way digital technology has talked about it like, I don’t know, AI, for instance, it’s always about a better thing is just around the corner. Oh, this new thing is the best, this next model is the best. So we’re sort of conditioned to expect technology to always be getting better and better, which to be clear, I think solar will.
But I think the main story in solar for the next, let’s say, 510, years, is just going to be more installing. People have figured out that it’s really cheap now and you can install solar really fast, whether it’s in a rich, developed country or a very impoverished region where there’s not a lot of money for people or for governments, solar is really fast and cheap, and that just wasn’t true before. So I think we’ll see more rollout of solar. Or I can talk about why I think it’ll get a bit more efficient, but I think we’re just gonna see more of what we already have, which is, I think a good thing.
Yeah, it’s great that we’ve developed a maturity in the technology that it’s really is ready for prime time. It’s the cost of of a watt is less than any other source, from my understanding. So that’s as good as it gets. I guess you won solar warn. I think the specific threshold was that. And, you know, a lot of people predicted that this would happen, but they did it in sort of a technology way, again, like sort of sci fi type of, well, energy comes from the sun. Solar kind of just uses energy from the sun. That’s the primary input of energy to the earth. So solar should win.
I think the thing that that didn’t quite predict what’s actually happened is it just got cheap. In other words, you don’t have to care about climate at all, or even clean energy at all to install solar. It’s just in many jurisdictions, the cheapest, fastest thing to do. So if you only care about the price, which, let’s face it, that’s what most people care about. When we talk about energy, it’s just the cheapest, or sometimes second cheapest, and that just wasn’t true before. I think in terms of technology, most solar cells are made of silicon, as we know, or maybe folks don’t know, but that’s sort of the main crystal that goes into most solar panels. When I was working on it, as from an R and D perspective, it was about everything but silicon. Because we were we were in the game of what’s the next best technology that thing I was talking about earlier.
So there are other crystals or materials that you could make solar panels out of the current extreme cheapness has been driven by just more installation but also better manufacturing techniques, but there could be better baseline materials that replace some of the silicon solar panel. So that gets a bit technical, but that’s where I think efficiency gains might come. If they do, it’ll be newer and more potentially efficient materials that were really just starting to scratch the surface on from a installation or a commercial perspective.
So tell us a little bit about the XPrize work that you’ve done, and what was your involvement with it, and how do you think that it helped move the needle for energy?
Well, the really cool thing about working at XPrize was I had the opportunity to as somebody who was interested in innovation and figuring out how technology could be helpful. The whole game at XPrize was to create sort of a sandbox that would be attractive to other innovators, that they could come and play in and hopefully do really interesting stuff, not just because nerds think it’s cool, but specifically to do interesting stuff that could benefit humanity. So it was a non profit foundation, which still is alive and thriving, and it is run and organized by people who do have an affinity for technology, but they also truly believe that innovation, social or technology, innovation, can make the world a better place.
So stepping back from that super lofty goal in practice, that means challenging creative people to go further than maybe they think they can, or that the world thinks they can, by creating what XPrize likes to do, which are prizes. So hey, if you could do this, if you could solve this puzzle, create this device, make this treatment, make that medical intervention, help this family in a really structured way, that would be great. And we will reward you with a huge prize, and make a big deal out of it, and use that whole exercise to try to push the field forward. So that’s sort of what the basic approach of XPrize was, and I got to use that approach, use that tool for clean electricity, for off grid remote communities, for weird things like space based solar power, but also for carbon removal and carbon utilization, which are ways to directly attack This carbon dioxide problem.
So do you think carbon removal is is going to be the wave of the future, or an important tool? Or I’ve certainly heard a number of commentators, Al Gore, among them, who kind of poo pooed carbon removal strategies, saying, hey, they’re just too expensive. And you know, the oil companies are trying to use it as a tool to excuse further drilling.
Great question. I’m glad you brought that up. I definitely think carbon removal is an important tool for now and for the future. In technical terms, it is going to save us from the really, really devastating long term huge risks of climate change, like the really apocalyptic stuff. That’s the stuff we can avoid by directly eating down the C02 in the atmosphere, and that’s exactly what carbon removal is for. It’s not going to help us prevent a flood next year or prevent. Next forest fire.
You know, I just moved out of LA it’s not going to help us prevent an LA wildfire next year, but it takes the edge off of the long term huge climate risk. I have a ton of respect for Al Gore and everything that he’s done. I think he’s totally wrong about this. Actually, I think he raises some really great points that are risks, like, could it the whole thing be taken over by the oil and gas industry. There is a risk of that, but that hasn’t happened, and that’s not a foregone conclusion. Is it expensive? Yeah, some of the approaches are very expensive and they’re not ready for prime time, but that’s not all, but many of them are, many of them are incredibly cheap and are being deployed and developed now. So it’s an early type of idea. 25 years ago, people thought this.
The whole idea was nuts. 20 years later, frankly, 20 years of not cutting our emissions, 30 years, 40 years. However, when we count it, we’re in a deeper hole than we were. And ideas that once seemed crazy maybe two generations ago are no not only don’t seem crazy anymore, people are actively working on them. So I think there are a lot of risks to take, to think about, but I certainly think carbon removal is one of the only tools we can use, in addition to deep emissions cuts and a lot of other types of solutions to rebalance the carbon cycle, which is the thing that is driving dangerous climate change?
Well, talk to us about some of the the cheaper versions of carbon removal that you think hold the most promise at this time.
Sure, the ones. Well, I’ll give you an example from the project I’m maybe most proud of to get to work on, an XPRIZE. Was a prize for carbon removal, and I had a chance to attend the award ceremony this past spring. It was in New York, and it was really cool experience to sort of cheer on my friends and colleagues who took the project all the way and finished it off and really brought it to the world. The winning solution is a team that works with small holder rice farmers in India. These are people that don’t have a lot by our standards, even by Indian standards, they’re farmers. They know the land. They’re rice farmers specifically.
And what the team does is something that is the furthest thing, maybe from people’s minds when they think of carbon removal, if you think of it at all, and it’s soil additive, it’s basically a rock powder, like a dust that comes in a bag and you sprinkle it on farm fields. Okay, I’m oversimplifying it a bit, but that’s kind of what it is. And it turns out that this rock powder, which is made of a crushed mineral that’s naturally abundant on Earth, increases crop yields because it helps the soil retain moisture better and increase its vitality. As an aside, the degradation of topsoils and farmland is another consequence of changing climate.
It doesn’t get as much billing as the emissions in the air, but it’s kind of terrifying to think that the soil is getting slowly worse every year, and a lot of food growing regions, that’s not good. So this is a very simple solution. It doesn’t require extremely complicated technical things. You don’t need six PhDs and whatever to understand it. You’re just sprinkling rock dust on a farm field, and you can have a conversation with a farmer. From what I understand, the type of conversations they have are things like, not, hey, let’s have a long conversation about climate change. But hey, we think we might have a way to help you with your farming practice.
Are you interested to have that conversation? And the answer is like, yes, let’s talk about that. If you want to go down the climate change route with it, you can, but it works as a food and farming solution as well as a climate solution. So just to answer your question, that type of thing is happening all kinds of places in this continent, in Africa, in Asia, in Europe, it’s being demoed and tried in Australia. I know there’s some projects. It’s not at full scale yet. It’s still in early days, but it shows a lot of promise.
It’s cheap, it works. It works in a lot of contexts. You don’t need a lot of fancy equipment, and you don’t have to have a long, convoluted political or scientific conversation about climate. It’s called Enhanced rock weathering, if anybody wants to do research on the type of stuff that means. But the thing I remember in my mind is sprinkling rock dust on crops, on farmland, and it makes the soil retained water better. Oh, and by the way, it sucks down C02 out of the air and locks it in the soil as well. It’s pretty great.
Yeah, that’s pretty incredible. I like the elegance of the solution. It’s in the simplicity of it is, is incredible and and, of course, as you said it is terrifying losing our topsoil is, you know, you know could be apocalyptic. So it helps on so many fronts. That’s, that’s great stuff. So, yeah, I you know, it’s, it’s great to hear that there are some solutions out there that are working, any other particular carbon solutions that you think hold promise. I know that they’re talking about capturing stuff and putting it into the salt dome, say, in Louisiana and other places. I don’t know if those are technologically feasible or whether or not those are pipe drains.
Yeah, that’s these are great questions, too. Me go through a couple of the other approaches. Maybe I’ll just very briefly touch on some of the different buckets of approaches people work on in carbon removal and how they’re supposed to work. So we talked about the enhanced rock weathering. One, again, you take a specific type of mineral that is naturally occurring. It already reacts with C02 in the air and makes a more stable version of carbon, usually a carbonate, which is like a chalk or another type of mineral.
So it’s sort of turned into a rock, and the reason you crush it is because you want to increase the surface area of that rock. Instead of it just being a boulder, like sitting in a farm field, it’s now a bunch of grains of sand or powder, and that just helps this C02 sticky reaction from the air happen faster. So that’s enhanced rock weathering. Another technique people like to think about are land based solutions. What does that mean? Sometimes people call them nature based solutions. There are really things that happen on land, and they use plants. Plants naturally eat carbon dioxide. We know that human beings suck in oxygen, breathe out C02, and the plants suck in C02 and breathe out oxygen. That’s why we’re cousins. That’s why we sort of CO evolved on this planet together. So we know plants can naturally eat the thing that we is our waste product.
So that if you want to do one of those solutions, what you have to do is try to enhance a plant’s ability to do that, or maybe manage some kind of ecosystem. So is it managing a grassland. People are thinking about that. Is it tree planting? That’s a classic example. Is it maybe a genetic modification of a plant that makes it suck more C02 down into its roots? Some people are okay with GMO plants.
I am. Some people are not. I think there are risks, but I’m generally fine with that. So that’s a general those are a few approaches people are thinking about the key point there is the efficiency that plants or the rate at which plants can take C02 out of the air, probably is not enough on their own to deal with the C02 that we need. So we have to enhance it somehow, maybe just by managing a natural lens, or maybe getting out of the way or other techniques.
So there’s a whole group of researchers and entrepreneurs and people working on that really fascinating and fast moving area. A third area deals with the ocean. And there’s two basic approaches here. One is sort of sidebar, about a third of the carbon dioxide that we emit ends up in the ocean. So one thought is, okay, let’s just take it out. It’s just dissolved in seawater. Let’s take it out. So one approach is called direct ocean capture.
You want to filter it right out of the seawater. Those things will probably look like water treatment plants. Another approach is to try to grow something in the ocean, maybe algae, maybe plankton that will consume the C02 itself and then disappear it somehow. None of these are risk free, right? What if there’s too much algae and it goes out of control? What if the water filtration plant adds additional pollutants into the water?
Luckily, people are focused exactly on those questions. So you know, it’s great to raise questions of risk, but sometimes they do have answers, but that’s a general approach. And then the last one is the one you alluded to, which is trying to take C02 directly out of the ambient air. It seems like it wouldn’t work because point 4% of the air is C02, which is a small number, but it turns out, yeah, you can directly filter it out of the air. The mental rule I have in my mind is, imagine taking, like a HEPA filter or an indoor air filter and just putting it outside, just putting it outside of your place, outside of your apartment, inside your house.
It seems like it’s too small to matter, but if it was huge, or if there were a bunch of them, yeah, you could imagine it might slowly clean the air. So that’s called direct air capture. And then usually the suggestion is to take that CO2 and stuff it down under the earth into rocks where that carbon came from, and originally as fossil fuels that we burned, and it will turn into rock underground and then stay there forever.
That’s the idea, and that we know works really well. The unfortunate problem is it costs a fortune today, and so the real effort is, how can you bring that cost down to a level that seems socially cheap enough that, yeah, we decide collectively this is a good idea to spend our money on. Those are four big buckets of carbon removal, and my rough understanding about how they work in a general way.
Let’s you know, pivot to your work as a senior partner at ODE, and you know what? What are you doing there? What is the organization about? I looked at your website, and the client list is quite impressive. You guys are doing work with some amazing organizations. So what?
What gives the really fun part about ODE and what they’re doing is really trying to blend these two cool capabilities. The first capability is hardcore data engineering, sometimes that’s known as machine learning, sometimes that’s even known as artificial intelligence these days, but the other half of the group are artists, designers and digital product people, one of the and so what ODE tries to do is build useful digital stuff for a range of clients.
And you can see some of the clients on the website that all have some combination of that data, technical element, using data, using analysis, maybe visualizations, maybe writing an AI Model to collect data, but also design, not just so that things look good, but that they feel great to use, one of the great questions that one of the founders of ODE told me once was he put it like this, if you think about the apps you have on your phone, you know, they’re all great and easy to use. You could operate them with one button and like one thumb while you’re holding your phone, and they’re always really nicely designed. Product designers love them if they’re well made.
But then if you look at the world of, let’s say sustainability, climate, even climate tech, which is a little bit more technology forward. You know, the way I put to me is like, Why do all the products kind of suck? Why do they not look and feel as snappy and easy to use and technical people like me are sort of trained to think like, these are just like the details. They don’t matter. It’s just fluff. But it turns out they really matter if you want somebody to actually use your thing, if you want to share it with somebody, if you want that person to share it and say, Hey, this thing was easy to use.
It just worked. It didn’t give me a headache trying to navigate a zillion different buttons or menus or what have you. So I’m not doing justice to the design work, but what ODE is about is trying to combine those two things in service of climate related topics, whether it’s agriculture, finance, energy, even entertainment. Are things that ODE gets involved in. That’s what I think is really cool about what ODE is doing working at the intersection of those two ideas to make sort of one plus one equals three.
Well, clearly, I feel like at this moment in time with this current administration, the US, we’ve got to get more individuals involved in in this movement or this, you know, conversation, and certainly making it easier and making it more engaging, is going to forward that process. So tell us maybe some examples of things that you’ve worked on that have moved the needle a bit.
I think, yeah, just to riff on the point that you made, like, sometimes we make climate action or even the topic, feel like something that you should do. Maybe do you want to do it? It’s like we sort of side sidestep that, and we said, but, but you should do it because it’s important. Or I said so, or somebody said so, or it feels like kind of eat your vegetables, right? Okay, I like vegetables, but you get the idea something that you’re supposed to do, and you kind of eat a couple bites, but your heart isn’t really in it. I think excellent product design. People that are really great at this, they speak in terms of creating like a desire to actually use the product.
And I know that can sound corny for a scientific audience, but I think for a lot, if you just think about the apps you use on your phone, the things you use in your tech or your computer you don’t use, the ones that are just a little bit annoying, even a little bit or that just make you not want to look at them, whether because they’re too bright, which is seems trivial, or because it’s hard to navigate. So just bringing a little bit of the kind of customer centric ethos into development of climate oriented technologies, I really like that part, because it connects to the thing you’ve just mentioned, which is, how do you invite more people in?
I don’t think you do it by waving your finger at them or showing more data or speaking more loudly. I think you do it by kind of opening your palm and inviting people in and just, you know, it’s a really sharply designed tool that’s built with the audience in mind, or with the user in mind. I think can do that a little bit better than, let’s say, here’s a database of just, you know, a bunch of numbers you figured out yourself. It’s all there, but you know, you can use it, which is sometimes what our digital stuff feels like in the climate world, right?
Yeah, I just had a guest on the program, Nick Wise, who was founder, or is founder and CEO of ocean mind and co founder of climate trace. And I know climate trace is, I believe, a customer of or collaborator with ODE. Tell us a little bit about maybe if you know what work has been done on that climate trace.
I had a pleasure of working really closely with that group and on that project for a while this past year and some of last year too. Climate trace is a really cool international effort. I think of it as a bottom up counting, an inventory, so to speak, of all the large point sources of greenhouse gasses, so carbon dioxide and they might add methane in the future. So not sort of a top down, like, hey, Canada emits this much. Or the aviation industry emits 3% it’s more like this specific airport, this is what its emissions are. This specific aluminum smelter in Uttar Pradesh is pumping out this much C02. This specific coal mine in Wyoming is emitting this much C02, and that data is gathered by a team of scientists working together around the world. They each focus on different sectors, you know, oil and gas sector, forestry sector, et cetera. And they’re doing a combination of sometimes measurements, but usually it’s analysis. And estimates by triangulating other data. So you’re digging in reports.
Sometimes you’re calling the facility manager, you’re piecing that data together. I think you’re probably familiar with generally speaking, if you call up a company and ask them for this kind of information, sometimes, I might tell you, usually you’ll get a dial tone, or they’ll just say, go to our website. It’s not something that people normally just share. So a credible, scientifically rigorous, bottom up estimate of all the major point sources on earth turns out to be really useful, and now climate change is figuring out how to take that forward and put that data into the hands of decision makers, policy makers, communities that can actually act on it. That’s where Al Gore Al Gore’s leadership, if it’s so great, to really bring the project forward and bring it into a higher level of conversation internationally, because of his credibility and the passions he can speak to these issues.
What was cool for me to participate in the project with ODE was what we brought was the possibility of doing that a lot more quickly and cheaply, so that some of the data scientists on our team came up with a few ways to use these large language models in the way that I would never have guessed, as somebody who started out not as an expert in these things. You we usually think about text and and is it going to take away a coder’s job? Is it going to write code? It turns out, these things are also really great for gathering and packaging bits of information that normally might take you weeks or months to put together, like an investigative reporter.
So we built a few prototypes for climate trace more recently that say, Hey, look, we think we can source some of this data in a credible way for kind of almost no money, and do it very quickly, like maybe in a matter of days or weeks instead of months and and so the project was to trial some of these things out, and to see if it would be something that climate trace could actually rely on, because there can be reliability questions with these large language models like we don’t you want to make sure the data is actually reliable. It’s the whole point and could be checked, and that the sources can be checked.
But we’ve made it pretty far, and I’m very encouraged that you know, what’s the point of this? If that inventory could be done with less money. That just means the team can go faster further. It could be more accessible to more people. So it was sort of like a big efficiency exercise that I never would have guessed. But the whole thing was in part, driven by some of these new AI tools that are being developed. It seems like every month,
well, I’d see the you know, as you’re just talking, I’m thinking just neighborhood groups that are very interested in what’s happening in their neighborhood, if they have access to this super powerful data base to say, hey, what’s polluting in my neighborhood, in my area, in my city? Totally. You know, people, people then get energized. I get pissed absolutely being that you’re, you know, sending these toxins into my air. Like, that’s a problem.
And, no, I love that you brought that up. Like, sort of the community angle, right? Like, at first, when I first heard the concept a few years ago, when they were, you know, when they were a little younger, before I had a chance to get involved, I used to think, like, that’s cool, but like, a little bit. So what like? What do I do with the information?
But now that I’ve had a chance to really hang around the people that have been making it happen and participate? Yes, that community angle, like, for instance. So one of the things ODE brought before my time was sort of the initial design and layout. You call it the GUI or the UI UX, like the user interface, the part you actually touch and see. So if you go to climate trace.org It’s the data’s all there free, and it’s kind of a map tool like Google Maps.
So you can spin the globe. You can, you know, if you’re like me on Google, you like, immediately search your name. And if you’re on maps, you immediately search your address. So you search for your address, like, where am I? What’s near me? And you can find things like, I didn’t even know there was an aluminum smelter in the neighborhood, or, I didn’t know there was a so and so recycling, but you can click on it and a little box pops up and it tells you something about that facility. So the idea that this data can be put into the hands of, yeah, a community group, maybe it’s like, I don’t know.
Maybe I could start like dads of Sonoma County that care about CO2 emissions or something. Okay, I haven’t done that. I’m making this up, but we could use this website to do whatever we want to do. Maybe we’re spreading the word, maybe we’re organizing around it, but at the same time, some ministers of some of the smaller countries in the world that don’t have the internal resources to actually build their own systems or do their own counting, they’re looking at this data as, at minimum, a reference to help them figure out or check against what’s in their own jurisdiction.
So I really love this sort of spirit of making the data accessible to people and then standing back and seeing what they can do with it. And because I think that is not just cool and fun, it sort of builds agency among more people that it’s not, you know, Dr X Devor is saying do X, Y, Z or so, and so is saying do this. It’s more like, here’s something we’ve made. We have ideas how it could be used, but we probably think the world has other ideas that are probably better. Let’s just share it, you know, a little bit like that, open source sort of mindset, and see what good things will happen. I really believe in that kind of thing.
Yeah, it’s exciting. I really like, you’re putting a superpower tool into people’s hands. And as you said, if you can have the user experience just that much easier, a little bit fun connection. Oh, who my neighbors? I mean, it could actually kind of be a community tool like so and so is looking at this. Oh, yeah, this, there’s so there’s hundreds of organizations I know, just around Los Angeles and 1000s and 10s of 1000s around the world that are dedicated to these issues. And, you know, up to this point in time, they just didn’t have the kind of data tools that this allows for, which is really earth shaking, hopefully.
Totally, I mean, just, you know, check out when you have some time, go there and check out, you know, the fort of La San Pedro la port. Like you can there’s a lot of actually interesting stuff happening in the ports that you probably know about. But like, for a lot of the listeners, that may not be as up on it as you like, you can just see what’s happening, not the new initiatives. We can see where the emission sources are. You can check out relative to other ports. Anyone that’s a nerd for maps, I really recommend it. I think there are a lot more map enthusiasts in the world than I would have realized.
But yeah, people that like that, I think will, will will get a kick out of it. And I’ll just say too, it’s, it is a scientific global collaboration. So the whole thing itself is a collaborative exercise, with people pitching in and working together, virtually, in person, from many places, and that not only helps the connection spread, but it sort of brings a an energy and spirit to the work which is, which is sort of fun. That’s what makes it interesting. I think that’s why people continue to spend their time making it better.
Yeah, great stuff. So what else are you working on over at ODE?
Well, the main thing is really try to figure out. The way I think about it is, like, what is AI good for? Oat isn’t an AI company, per se, but it’s a company that’s trying to use AI tools and put them to practice. Some of the things I’m most excited about are things like, I think of it as, like, Dude, where should I put my ex? Like, where should I cite my project of interest, whether it’s a water treatment facility or where to put a carbon removal facility like we were speaking about before? Okay, you’ve got this farm technique that I described generally, but where specifically is the best place to put it?
ODE has built some models. They’re called foundation geospatial models. The translation of that is these models are trained, not on text. They’re trained of images and data about Earth taken by satellite. So imagine all the NASA satellite data, European Space Agency data, that type of stuff. We’re embedding that into traditional maps, and you can use that to figure out where the best place to put your thing is. But here’s another application that I haven’t able to work on yet, but I’m going to speak but I’m going to speak about it because I’d like to. I just spent a couple of weeks visiting my hometown, Toronto, Canada, and I grew up in sort of the downtown part. And one of the cool things about the downtown part is the city is very vigilant about the tree cover. You can’t just cut down trees or plant new trees, like my mother had an old tree. She wanted to get removed.
She had to call the city. City comes and cuts it down. And then they tell her, you can pick from a list of these trees that we’ve decided are appropriate for the area, because we have tree people on staff. And so she picked one and she got a new tree. It’s great, but the point is, as the world warms, for me, this is the most terrifying climate risk is heat and heat stress, and worse heat death. We wouldn’t want to cool the cities.
We know the cities get hot because they’re full of concrete and stone, and so it’s hard to cool down at night. If you know Toronto, or the Great Lakes area, or the east coast of USA, it’s sticky. Toronto has great tree cover. So I’m walking around thinking, wow, in the middle of this huge city with terrible grinding traffic, but I can hear the cicadas buzzing you know, kind of incessantly, if you’re if you’re familiar with that sound in the trees in Chicago. So I know about humidity.
Chicago and Toronto are like, exact same weather, right? Beautiful, hot summers, cold winters that you’d wish ended a little sooner. It’s by the lake anyway. So you know about that. So I’m thinking, wow, I’m kind of still in a forest, even though I’m in the middle of this city and I’m so glad there’s shade. You just like day to day things. Even if I were a climate nerd, I would think that. But back to ODE, using aerial views and data that’s trained on that kind of aerial vision to do things like planning urban tree cover and shade. This isn’t just a cosmetic thing.
When I was at time a couple years ago, I got a little bit more familiar and fluent in sort of, some of the interventions happening in cities around the world on the adaptation side, and it’s getting hotter, what do you do when it gets hot? You go in the shade. So cities around the world are thinking about, how can we bring more shade to our communities? And to get technical about it, sometimes there’s a fight about, should you put up an awning? Does that block the business if it’s on a busy street? But also, if you’re going to plant trees, it sounds good, but where should you put them? They have to integrate within the rest of the community.
You know, it has to be socially simpatico. And so I think using some of these tools to combine some of that area. Real data, combined with intelligence that we get from these machines, plus humans in the loop to make sure the final decisions about where and how to manage this kind of thing for the lowest public cost. I think that’s really exciting, so maybe I’ll try to speak it into existence. I think there’s a tool out there that could bring these things together. I don’t have all the answers, but I’d love to figure that out.
Yeah, that sounds exciting. I mean, certainly out here in the West, we know about Phoenix just being sweltering hot. And Phoenix isn’t the only city. It’s just kind of the prime example, because it’s probably the largest super hot city, but Vegas and and Tucson and just tons of other cities and some in California are almost unlivable and getting worse. So this is, this is an extraordinarily important problem that we got to get on right now.
I my wife was traveling through Phoenix just last week, and she texted me, she’s like, it’s 45 degrees in Phoenix, so in Fahrenheit, I don’t know that is 110 or under 20. Like, it’s nuts. Like, a nut, that’s a nutty number. I remember thinking, like, there aren’t many places on Earth right now that are this hot, and Phoenix is one of them, right here in USA. And, yeah, like, one of my first visions of LA. Like, this is a little off topic, but maybe it’s the same. You know how LA is famous for those very tall, picturesque palm trees? Yeah, right. And some of the neighborhoods have beautiful rows of them, and you see them from afar, and you’re like, wow, that looks so cool.
And then, like, the first 100 degree day happens, and you realize these things do nothing for shade. I’m almost like, I don’t I’m not saying get rid of them, but can we get some shade? Like, can we get some ficus tree, or whatever the right kind of tree is? So like, you know, maybe things like that are relevant. But yes, everybody, not everybody, but like, this is something literally people are going to chat about more and more over time. Unfortunately, many people in the hot cities are already talking about it. So I’m hoping this kind of thing can have universal appeal. And if some of the hot cities can get, you know, get innovative stuff going quickly. Maybe the rest of us can learn from them.
Absolutely, I know I’m looking for shade as I walk down the street, like which side of the street is shady or, you know, and it’s also like a health perspective. I mean, getting blasted by the sun is dangerous for your skin, so totally, it’s like a win win scenario for everybody is totally have more shade.
So and like, yeah, crucially, you don’t have to go down a deep rabbit hole about the science of climate change, or C02 emissions, or 1.5 degrees, or that more technical jargon, to just have a conversation about like shade. And everybody gets that. Y’all, everybody has common ground. Now we can have a conversation. I like that about it.
So with so much attention on tech solutions like carbon removal, AI renewable energy, do you believe that we’re neglecting nature based solutions? And how can we better integrate, you know, tech and nature into the climate mix?
Yes, I don’t think that we’re neglecting nature based solutions, but what I would say is that there is a tension. And I think the tension is because these two sort of sides of the coin, which itself is a weird false dichotomy, like are have been pitted against each other. So I’ll tell you why I think it’s a false dichotomy, and then I’ll tell you what I think maybe an answer is. Think it’s a weird way to describe things, because, like, for instance, the rock crushing and grinding thing I spoke about before enhanced rock weathering for carbon removal.
Is that nature based? Well, kind of because it’s about farming, but it’s also crushing up a rock and spreading a powder in the field, which is going to be some rock crushing machine. Is that technology based? Well, so does a little bit of both. Where I think we go wrong is nature based solutions like reforestation, rewilding, protecting marine species, protecting biodiversity, restoring Coast lands, those solve different problems than things like a direct air capture machine or a solar panel or an electric vehicle. A solar panel is not going to do anything to prevent your beachfront from flooding, but a mangrove restoration will, or, you know, the mouth of the Dawn River, my hometown, Toronto, which is just redone, they just reopened a huge new park.
It’s called greening the dawn or something. Imagine like if the LA River had been restored, or is were restored. I know there were flooding issues, but the idea is a nature based solution might help with things like flood control, shade, different adaptation, mixed forms of agriculture, water retention, clean water, all kinds of stuff, but it’s not going to generate electricity necessarily. It’s not going to suck carbon out of the air as efficiently as something else will. So I think it’s more about not pitting these things against each other as if they’re enemies, but recognizing that they sometimes address different problems.
And it’s about figuring out where their niches are and not over claiming the benefits. Solar panels are great at generating electricity period. Is it going to increase crop health like maybe plus shade? But like to. My knowledge, that’s not really what it’s about. Not saying. People are out there claiming it, but sometimes we like to root for our favorite solution or the thing we work on. And I came into this more neutral, even though now I do have my favorites, and I definitely am more of a technology person, I can admit that I see these things as just addressing sometimes fundamentally different challenges, and so that, to me, is a way to use them all in the appropriate mix, in the appropriate way, rather than say it’s got to be this one or that one.
I’ve got to ask you about AI, and certainly we’ve heard a lot of hype about it. And you know, some people are concerned that it’s using up so much energy that could be a problem down the road, or because they’re having to build these gargantuan data centers and use more and more power, and so that’s harder to meet our clean energy goals when all this new power is required. Kind of what’s your take on it? And what are your predictions, if you have any, for Where is AI and net positive for all of us, is AI and net positive?
Let’s see. Let’s take it, maybe in chunks. So I overall, I definitely think AI is extremely powerful, and I think it’s a mistake for climate and sustainability people to ignore it. I really do. It’s something I use every day, even because I’m playing with it, or I’m also just trying to figure out what it is, and when I say it okay, I’m talking about things like Claude, which is made by anthropic or chat GPT, these large language models that you interact with as chat. I’m experimenting with coding or writing or searching the web, probably like a lot of people are, if they’re messing with it.
For me, the most exciting things have to do with enhancing our capabilities. I’ll get to what I think the downsides are, but things like, if we can design things more cheaply, if we can put design capability in the hands of people that don’t have access to a lot of data or labs. I grew up in Canada in a working class household. There are plenty of people that grew up with way less than me that have no access to a lot of technologies. Ai, in some forms, might be helpful with that. Specifically, it just get nerdy decreasing the cycle time when you’re designing a thing that needs to be manufactured, I think AI can do that for us, whether it’s a tractor or a solar panel, and decreasing that time it means you can test more quickly and cheaply. One of carbon rubles, biggest problems is it’s really expensive to test and it’s young, so there’s not a lot of money for just testing stuff.
If you can reduce the cycle time or on any other intervention, wind wind turbines, it’s geothermal power, tidal power, coastal restoration. I think there’s power on the other side. Though, a crazy thing is happening right now in the rich world, electricity demand is going up for the first time in generations. I worked at a power utility 15 years ago, nobody would have predicted that the demand for electricity would go up. We thought it was kind of peaked and slowly, slowly coming down as we gotten more efficient over time. But the fact that ai demand, AI data centers specifically, are creating this huge sucking sound for requests for new electricity, and now the electricity system people are responding by making plans to build. That’s a big change. And of course, it depends where the electricity comes from.
So if we go hard at this AI thing and throw a bunch of fossil fuel energy at it, it’s going to be a climate disaster period. On the other hand, if we throw a bunch of green energy at it, which we started out the conversation saying by is now becoming the cheapest or second cheapest option in almost every region, I’m a little bit less worried about the energy impact. But the last thing I’d say, and here’s maybe my hot take, if I could, if I could say one, I’m not an AI researcher, but this is my, this is my, think, after, after really engaging with this heavily for a little bit, I think the argument about the AI energy use is real. I think that, like, sorry, Gemini, I don’t need your summary of searching the web at the top of my Google bar when I type something in Google.
I just don’t think I need generative AI to search the web for, like a restaurant or what the best type of headphones to buy is. So I don’t need that energy use. Save it for something useful, and it’s being pushed on us, sorry, Gemini, but they’re all pushing it on us because it’s a hot new money thing. But I really think the way it’s being done now, with a huge arms race to get the big models and hoard all the chips and pay people a billion dollars to join your company, that is not sustainable. And I really want to see if it’s going to transition into, not the large language model era, but just sticking with that for a second, the small language model era models that run on your phone, or whatever comes after phones, if it’s a wearable thing, or whatever, your personal computer that didn’t need to be trained with zillions of chips and a huge amount of energy and a huge data center.
That’s how we’re doing it now. So I know this is getting technical, but I think there’s I would hope for a future in which there are many small little bits of AI. Money that were useful as sort of small buddies for us in different places of life. And each of those models doesn’t take a lot of energy to run, and it didn’t take a lot of energy to train and make so therefore the whole energy use would come down. This is not an idea unique to me. A lot of people that I follow in the field have put this idea forward, but it seems plausible to me based on at least a plausible path that I’ve seen other technologies take. Ultimately, it’s going to be up to us to choose which path we want to take, like we are in control this thing, so we can choose where it goes.
Yeah, well, that makes a lot of sense, and it also let’s use the really strong technology and powerful resources of a data center to do to answer the tough questions that are really important, and maybe price it that way, so that there’s a pricing model that encourages people looking for the best cheeseburger to not spend as much money doing it, because that’s seemingly wasteful.
There is just one more thing on this point. So there’s another there. There’s an idea out there that perhaps back to this idea of electricity demand going up in countries that have working electricity grids already. By the way, electricity demand is going up everywhere. In places that have terrible electricity infrastructure, like, I don’t know, Botswana, electricity demand is going up because people want basics. They want air conditioning, they want heat. They want refrigeration. They want power. They want internet at home and lighting. So that’s generally driving electricity demand in the rich countries, electricity demand is now being driven by the prospect of AI.
But one of the big ideas in climate to how to sort of solve this big mess, at least from the greenhouse gas perspective, is, as you know, electrify as much stuff as possible, move as much of our energy system away from the thermal, fossil heat based side of things like gasoline and fossil fuels and oil, into the electricity side of things. And the reason is, we know how to make clean electricity. It’s called solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, hydro, whatever, batteries. So we know how to do the clean thing that way. So that’s why we should think about electrifying trains and tractors and vehicles and ships and stuff like that.
Stoves. People have been saying electrify everything for a long time, and if you believe in that, you also say we should build up a ton of clean electricity. So that was people were saying in the climate world for like, the last 15 years, and I noticed that that did not make electricity, man, go up. People like me were saying it, but it wasn’t happening. But the AI people have cracked that. They’ve come along and they’ve said AI, AGI, whatever they say, right? And now people are like, we need that. We need power for that.
So there is a belief among some people that, I know in the climate world, they’re like, maybe the AI has broken the door open on the need to build up a bunch of new energy electricity, specifically, if we can now push for that to be clean, because the cat’s out of the bag on the idea that if we use fossil energy to power all this AI stuff, it’s going to be a disaster. Maybe this is a way to drag the clean energy agenda along with it. Again, this is a hope, but this is an idea that I find very interesting, and it’s something I’m gonna keep an eye on to see if it seems like it could possibly be true, right?
And I guess hopefully AI will become more energy efficient in the way that it runs searches and stuff like that. So if there is this potentially excess capacity, then that could be used to power cars and clean, you know, clean energy using devices throughout the economy. So Well, it’s been a pleasure having you on the program. Dr Marcius Extavour, amazing work that you’re doing out there, and I encourage everybody to follow you and ODE and everything else that you’re working on. Please let everybody know how they could do that and support you as well as I hear you’re an aspiring podcaster, so when you do launch, let us know, and we’ll, you know, love to support what the work that you’re doing there.
Thank you so much. This was a fun conversation. Real thrilled to be here. I applaud you on passing the 200 episode threshold, which is a pretty exciting thing. And yes, I’m hoping to follow in your footsteps trying to develop a podcast now to talk about issues a little bit the way we did today. You know, there’s a lot of technical depth in there, but we don’t have to go all the way down the rabbit hole. We can talk about it in a way that hopefully is just more relatable to people and brings a little bit more curiosity and optimism into the conversation. So let’s see. Stay tuned.
