Ketan Joshi: Are companies actually changing their emissions to meet their targets or promises or aspirations that they set out? So, in around 21, there was this huge surge. If you look at a chart of net zero promises, it was, it’s like this huge peak that sort of occurred like just before COVID during it and a little bit after as well of companies basically saying, you We are promising to tackle our climate responsibilities. Often it came in the form of net zero targets, but not exclusively. And this paper actually says, Okay, let’s just do a check in and see what happened with a lot of the, biggest companies that, set these targets and made these promises. And so, what they found is that a decent percentage of them, I don’t actually remember the exact number off the top of my head, I think it was 8% simply did not meet their targets

Mike DiGirolamo (narration): Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. I’m your cohost, Mike DiGirolamo., bring you weekly conversations with experts, authors, scientists, and activists working on the front lines of conservation, shining a light on some of the most pressing issues facing our planet and holding people in power to account. This podcast is edited on Gadigal land. Today on the Newscast, I speak with Ketan Joshi, a researcher and communications consultant working with organizations, activists, and academics in the climate focused, not for profit sector. His work largely centers on corporate accountability. carbon markets, and greenwashing. In our conversation, Joshi discusses a recent paper in the journal Nature Climate Change that examines the corporate climate commitments hundreds of large corporations make and whether they meet them. The results, perhaps unsurprisingly, show there is limited accountability. But Joshi expands further on the unexamined aspect of corporations that actually do meet their targets. And he explains why their actions may not be leading decarbonization of their business practices. And, how there is little way to actually measure how the money corporations use to purchase carbon offsets is being used in things like reforestation projects versus ending up in the pockets of intermediaries taking a piece of the pie.

Mike: Ketan, welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. It’s a pleasure to have you with us.

Ketan: Hi, very nice to be here.

Mike: The first thing that I want to breach with you is that, generally speaking, we’re starting to see corporations start to abandon their climate targets. And there was a paper that just got released, , but what can we glean from this? What are you seeing happening and why are they doing this?

Ketan: Yeah, so this paper that was released in Nature examines something which I have been yearning to see examined for many years. This is something that hasn’t really been properly investigated, and the exact question that it looks at is Are companies actually changing their emissions to meet their targets or promises or aspirations that they set out? So in the, in around 21, there was this huge surge. If you look at a chart of net zero promises, it was, it’s like this huge peak that sort of occurred like just before COVID during it and a little bit after as well of companies basically saying, you We are promising to tackle our climate responsibilities. Often it came in the form of net zero targets, but not exclusively. And this paper actually says, ‘Okay, let’s just do a check in and see what happened with a lot of the, biggest companies that set these targets and made these promises.’ And so, what they found is that a decent percentage of them, I don’t actually remember the exact number off the top of my head, I think it was 8% simply did not meet their targets.

Mike (narration): 8. 5 percent or 88 companies, if we’re being exact.

Ketan: So, they kept them they kept their climate promises, they didn’t delete their aspirations or ambitions, but they didn’t meet the targets. I think if I remember correctly, an even larger percentage actually deleted or very quietly erased their climate commitments.

Mike (narration): That number is much larger. 30.7%, or 320 companies targets, completely disappeared.

Ketan: And so recent bit of news from a few days ago, just to provide an example of this is a company called Equinor. Equinor is the state-owned, or mostly state-owned oil and gas company based here in Norway. And they have been one of the leaders, I’m doing air quotes for those listening in the oil and gas industry in terms of promising to deal with their climate responsibilities. And Equinor specifically promised to deal with their own emissions during the process of extracting oil and gas, but they also promised to deal with their, what’s called scope three or the emissions from when the fossil fuel products they sell are burned. And they did a big announcement last Thursday, which was essentially, they’re deleting. Their ambition to invest a certain percentage of their total capital expenditure in renewables. They also said we’re going to reduce the. installed capacity, the target for the installed capacity of renewables. And this really struck me as interesting. And I haven’t actually published this yet, but I’ve done a little bit of analysis on what they’ve promised. And what I found is that Equinor have never met any target that they’ve set. What they essentially do is they create a target for renewables, for CCS. And they just ignore it. So, it just sits there. Every quarter, every annual report you open up their PDFs, and it always has the same target, or it has like even an improved target sometimes. And the percentage of renewables that they sell just remains like this sort of measly about 0. 5 percent of total energy that they sell. The amount of CCS that they actually use to, to sequester, capture and sequester carbon. That remains at a very low level. I think it was, it’s 1 percent if I remember correctly, compared to their total emissions. And so, this isn’t, this is a nice example of what it really means for a company to set or to delete a target. And so, this nature paper basically says, this is a bit of a problem that companies like set a target and they ignore it or that they set a target and then it disappears. But what I find particularly interesting is that when companies do have targets. They actually tend to ignore them, and they just very brazenly miss their emissions targets, or they’re completely off track. And there isn’t a lot of scrutiny or attention paid to that and so there aren’t really many of us, like people who do corporate accountability analysis or work on trying to pick these apart. Kind of calling them out on setting and forgetting their target and then just brazenly breaking the promise And so the other thing that’s worth noting about this nature paper that came out that I found really interesting about it is A lot of us who do this kind of work analyzing corporate climate targets we have a good idea of what it means for a company to claim that they actually are on track. And so, the first question that I had, and the first question that many others had when we saw this major paper, was like, okay, this ad, this paper is actually saying a decent percentage of companies Set the target, and it was more than the majority of the companies in the paper examined. Set a target, and then just met it.

Mike (narration): Yep, most companies in the study met their target. 60. 8 percent of them, or 633 companies.

Ketan: They kept the target, and then they achieved their goals. And you could look at that as a positive story when you look at the paper. But then, of course, I opened the methodology, and what they do is they use this database called the Carbon Disclosure Project database, or CDP. And CDP is, really one of the primary sources for target setting data for actually homogenized or accessible version of corporate emissions data. So, what they claim that they emitted. And then, this is the important part, you also have a line in there for what companies claim to have bought as renewable energy certificates, which are a special type of certificate that you claim, that you purchase and then claim that you’re power electricity purchases off a grid are zero emissions. And then you also have data on the amount of carbon offsets that a company has bought which are a type of certificate that you buy, but you can use it for anything to claim that your emissions have gone from whatever you emitted actually down to zero because you’re undoing it by having purchased this carbon offset. And so of course, my question was like for the companies that actually say that they’ve met their targets in this paper, how many of them shut down the coal plant, the steel mill, and how many of them kept that coal plant going but actually bought carbon offsets or bought renewable energy credits. And that is something that the paper does not go into. And this is an interesting little nuance, right? Because we’ve seen this in, different contexts. So, what we saw last year, and I think the year before a little bit as well, is that some pro carbon offsetting lobby groups released a set of analyses that claimed companies that tend to buy carbon offsets are actually seeing a lot of success in directly reducing their emissions, which sounds like a good story. You think, ‘Oh, cool. So, actually carbon offsets aren’t really that much of a greenwashing tool,’ but actually those analyses don’t exclude renewable energy credits from counting as real climate action. So, what, the real trend is that companies that tend to buy carbon offsets also buy certificates for their electricity generation. And neither is really making a systemic or deep adjustment to a company’s way of doing business. they’re not changing the machinery or they’re not changing their suppliers or making any deep change to how they’re doing business to decarbonize or remove high emissions activities from what they’re doing.

Mike (narration): It should be noted here that a study published the journal PLOS Climate found that companies often will not report what’s referred to as scope three emissions or rather emissions that are attached to their businesses through their supply chain and thus not accounting for the full breadth of their carbon emissions. Even if they are otherwise taking action on decarbonization elsewhere. For a deeper look into this, I recommend reading Manga Bay staffer John Cannon’s five-part series on forest carbon credits, which I’m linking in the show notes.

Ketan: And yeah, this paper came out and I was like, Oh, that’s pretty interesting. it shows that the most interesting part of it to me was the way companies. have talked about their climate commitments, right? So, it’s certainly true that there’s been a noticeable trend of companies just deleting their commitment or even making a bit of a big deal about it because they want to show that, like Equinor we’re doing last week, they want to show to investors, no, we’re getting serious now. We’re back to, we’re back to being adults. we’re going back to our core business. Shell did that, late last year and BP did it a little bit earlier than that. last year as well. However, all these ongoing problems around like greenwashing and the way emissions are reported, that stuff is ongoing, right? And the sort of exodus from, net zero claims is not that massive. And I think part of it is because companies have such consistent access to ways to fake action on climate change, that they don’t really feel the need to quit. they get more benefit from, keeping their net zero target on their website but actually claiming that they’re taking action in some other way when they’re not really.

Mike (narration): Hey listeners, thank you for tuning in as always. I want to take a moment to remind you that we are a nonprofit. The work we do is made possible by our readers and our listeners. We believe independent media is critical to societal well-being and the health of our planet. It’s one of the reasons we are able to bring you all of our content completely free. Help keep it that way, head to Mongabay.com and click on the donate button in the upper right corner of the screen. If you want to support us, thank you very much. And back to our conversation with Ketan Joshi.

Mike: We’re going to put a pin in that and come back to it. But I want to talk about another thread to pull on here, which is that corporations seem to be taking up more litigation against activists and, even environmental defense offices like happened here in Australia, the EDO. for those folks that don’t know.

Mike (narration): The Environmental Defender’s Office was ordered to pay court fees for oil and gas company Santos after a federal judge rejected the EDO’s application to halt the Barossa Gas Project on behalf of the Tiwi Islands. However, Santos requested a subpoena of four different organizations, some of them activist organizations, which were not a party to the case in order to inform their application. This request was granted.

Mike: So, all of this happened last year, I believe. What’s your take on this, Catan? What do you think of this happening in this moment?

Ketan: Yeah, something I’ve worked on a bit and pay close attention to is the inverse. So, basically fossil fuel companies. On the grounds of their climate claims or environmental claims, right? So, a lot of companies are being taken to court or being fined by regulators for making claims about what they’re doing on, climate or environment. And I feel like. Obviously, fossil fuel companies have used these really aggressive legal tactics, particularly against activists for quite some time. Exxon in the US, of course, have been doing this for a while, and Chevron have too. there are people who’ve been to jail, activists who’ve been to jail in the US. However, I think that in Australia, this is quite a new thing being legally aggressive directly, like the company, towards activists or environmental groups, I haven’t seen too much of it and I think part of it is because Companies like Woodside, for instance, have always relied on the actions of the police forces to come down on activists, right? There have been some actions against Woodside, against their headquarters in Western Australia and some activists went to the They went to spray paint the exterior wall of the CEO of Woodside, and the police were there before they even began they basically, that type of activism, they rely on the actions, the excessive actions of the police force, and then governments also creating very punitive excessive regulations against protest however, the What we’re seeing now in recent years is environment groups actually leading a push to sue companies. And so, during the planning process, they sue companies they sue companies for making misleading environmental claims or climate claims. 2022, I think, had the highest number globally. of climate cases involving fossil fuel companies ever.

Mike (narration): It was 2023 if we’re going by the number of cases brought against fossil fuel companies. The second highest would be 2020, but both 2021 and 2022 also had a relatively high number of cases. Source, Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, Climate Change Litigation Database.

Ketan: So, this is really, this is a really, a thing that’s been happening in the past few years, and I think, if I remember correctly, it was either 2022’s report or 23’s report, Australia was number one.

Mike (narration): I couldn’t confirm this, but I found that as of 2023, the United States is the country in the world by far with the most climate change litigation cases. And the second is Australia. Source, Global Trends in Climate Change Litigation from the Grantham Research Institute.

Ketan: And so, this could be related. I think this could be like a sort of, like pushing back on environment groups, obviously fossil fuel companies have a lot of money. And they know that they need to. really just hammer down on these groups. And it’s really quite shocking to see some of those, like you mentioned, the Santos and the EDO. It’s really quite shocking to see how successful that has been. Obviously. That raises a lot of issues for a bunch of different environment groups. It’s very expensive, even if you win a case to get pulled through the courts and put through the ringer on this. And yeah, I find that really stunning. And just on a quick related notes just, sorry to bring up Ecuador all the time, but this is relevant. Greenpeace Greenpeace Norway did an action against Equinor’s CEO that really reminded me of the one against Woodside in Australia. And some Greenpeace activists actually went into the garden of the home of the CEO of Equinor to dump refuse, flood damaged refuse from the floods in Brazil. They put it in his backyard and they put up a sign, basically saying like this is, it’s coming home to you, this is the reality. It’s in our homes all the time, but now it’s in your home too and the state owned media outlet said to the police, like, why aren’t you arresting these people? What are you doing? They’re in the home. They’re like, in the backyard of the CEO’s home and the police were just like, ‘we’re not gonna arrest them. It’s freedom of expression. They’re allowed to do this.’ Which I found to be a remarkable contrast to the, not to be too glowing about like Norway’s You know, legal situation or whatever because activists do get in trouble here and it’s sometimes punitive, but comparing that to Australia I was, I found it really shocking because of course, actions that are taken against, in protest against fossil fuel companies in Australia are met with an absurd amount of force. There was another case where activists were riding in chalk outside of Washable chalk on the ground outside of Woodside’s headquarters on a bridge, I think not even really near their head office and the police and the police arrested them And I think I think one of them was in jail or I think they received, some very punitive fines.

Mike (narration): On August 20th, 2021, about six Extinction Rebellion activist group members in Western Australia were arrested and charged with property damage for their washable chalk protest. Their homes were also raided by the state counter terrorism police force. One of them received a 2, 000 fine. The maximum fine under the law for protesting by blocking or indirectly blocking a public space is $50,000 in South Australia and in New South Wales it’s $22,000 for blocking a road and up to two years in prison. These laws were created in 2022 and have been condemned by 230 civil society groups and human rights organizations. Meanwhile, the maximum cost for a corporate lobbyist to meet with a government minister. is up to 4,000, and if you’re a donor, you can even have dinner with the prime minister for up to 10,000.

Ketan: The different types of activism that are used against fossil fuel companies in Australia They’re starting to see real pushback from a bunch of different areas and it’s quite scary

Mike: Yeah. I just felt like it could have a chilling effect that sort of surge that you’re talking about of over 2022 and 2023 of people taking up litigation against fossil fuel companies that this potentially could have a chilling effect. on anyone, anywhere wanting to do it again. And particularly the people who don’t have a ton of resources to do this that, rely on, pro bono efforts from offices like the EDO. It seems like it would really have a huge chilling effect.

Ketan: Yeah, I was also quite interested to see the political response to this, right? Because this involves, I think what the fossil fuel industry sees as quite a victory against the Environment Defender’s Office, involving a case where a judge found if I remember correctly, the judge implied that the EDO had been incorrect during a case where they were coaching a witness, maybe, or something like that.

Mike (narration): Yes, in January 2024, a federal judge ruled that the EDO and a consultant had engaged in a form of subtle coaching to the three Tiwi Islander traditional owners in the case against the 3. 6 billion Barossa Gas Project owned by Santos. The EDO was ordered to pay Santos 9 million in costs.

Ketan: And this was days and days of media coverage, right? it was seen as a big a big loss for an environment group. of course, a bunch of media outlets, the fossil fuel industry, were very happy to see that outcome. And so that was a, bad outcome for the EDO. And then of course it, because they’ve got so much wind under their sails now, they really just keep going after them. And it really, sucks because the environmental defender’s office have been doing, has been doing a lot of really good work in Australia.

Mike (narration): This includes my previous Newscast guest and client of the EDO, Murrawah Johnson, whose group Youth Verdict won a court case over the Galilee Coal Project in Queensland, Australia, which is owned by billionaire Palmer. You can find that interview on the Mongabay Newscast from last year.

Ketan: And it’s, there’s obviously a chilling effect in terms of the ability to. Like free communication and to speak freely and to communicate with these groups and for people to exchange ideas For me, I’m always more interested in how it affects money. I was actually sued for defamation myself back in 2015 by an anti-wind group who basically just did this spamming, they just basically sent out these defamation letters to, I think, five or six different people on the flimsiest of grounds, right? It was just, it, the whole, the point was not to actually go to court, right? The point was actually to tie up critics of anti-wind groups in legal nonsense, around like defamation law, and Australia is actually, such a horrible place for defamation law itself, you can do this and so yeah, I the money, the emotional impact of that was really serious for me, of course, since that happened, I always ridiculously careful with the way that I say things because it’s always in the back of my mind. Even though I don’t live in Australia anymore, I can’t untrain myself from constantly changing the way I speak based on the experience.

Mike: Yeah, one must be careful in phrasing things for sure. with that said, there’s some critiques here in the ways that companies are using carbon offsets and just carbon offsets in general are a topic that our audience are going to be really familiar with…we did an entire investigation on the carbon offsets used by the United Nations. So, what other things about these carbon offsets from corporations did you want to highlight or critique for us?

Ketan: Yeah, there’s two things that I think are quite important that I’ve been Very curious about and following closely over the past year or so. The first thing is money again. I’m always interested in the argument that Carbon offsetting is a source of private money flowing from companies into climate action. This is very consistently the core line of argument that gets used to defend carbon markets the action of carbon offsetting. It’s always that this is the best way, in lieu of governments actually providing the money to different types of climate action and to communities. This is the best way that money goes from rich companies into places where people are doing climate action. And primarily this argument gets used for protecting nature for reforestation and for protecting existing forests and natural areas. And so, something that I have been trying to do over the past few years is compile the evidence together on where the money actually goes. And of course, what happens is a company or even an individual or a landholder will generate a carbon offset by taking some sort of action on their, property. Let’s just say they plant a tree. Then that, of course, that gets sold. That carbon offset doesn’t get sold directly to Microsoft or whoever. It actually gets sold to a middleman or a broker. And that can happen many, times. almost an unfathomable number of times. this unit of carbon avoided or removed gets traded before it actually ends up being it’s called retired, but a simpler way to say it is just used by a company. For instance, Microsoft claiming that its data center is one unit less of emissions because it bought a carbon offset. And because there are so many steps in between there are, there’s a lot of people taking a cut, taking their slice of the pie. And there have been really a shocking amount of Sorry, I should say a shocking absence of evidence on how much money is being nabbed in between the people doing the climate action and the people who buy the carbon offset. It’s just a, it’s just a remarkable void in between because this is the core argument that gets used in defense of carbon markets. And , strongly believe that we need to be asking more and more. Show the evidence, like you’re saying that this is like a really massive way of funding climate action. And what I strongly urge you to do, if, next time you read like a press release or a statement or something from advocates of carbon markets, look, pay attention to the language they use they’ll say something like, the carbon market could bring 5 billion dollars of investment by 2030, or something like that, right? Now, they don’t mean, they don’t say it’ll be, bring 5 billion, 5 billion dollars to the communities that are out in the forest protecting land, or sequestering carbon into mangroves. they, they mean, Investment as in money that goes to the companies that trade carbon offsets or sell them finally to the people who demand them at the end use. And this is really shocking to me because, this, it feels like the primary question. And there’s just, there’s just total lack of information. There are some, there are a few companies that disclose what cut they take. But if you think about just the number of intermediaries between the supply and the demand point there’s just no information about that out there. And I think basically. If you were to have, it would never happen, but if you had some sort of magic wand and you could finally get all the information about this, you would probably find that much, much more money goes into the pockets of intermediaries than ever ends up in the hands of the communities actually doing the climate action.

Mike (narration): There’s a colloquial name for these intermediaries, carbon cowboys, often described as those who do much like Catan says here. They take a cut of the money while giving what is often described as an insufficient amount of money back to the communities keeping forests standing. There are a lot of documented cases of a lack of consultation and human rights considerations that have occurred with these deals. But just from a purely financial perspective, it isn’t easy to figure out how much money is going into that restorative work because the amount of money these intermediaries are siphoning isn’t known 90 percent of don’t share what they are charging for a credit. Gilles Dufresne, policy lead at Carbon Watch told Mongabay, it’s a bit crazy that nobody is measuring this. There is no number, no data at all on how much finance is flowing to climate action. Again, this is all reporting from Mongabay staffer John Cannon, who writes about this extensively in part three of his series. Another thing you might want to check out is the second episode in the Mongabay Explorer season on New Guinea, where I spoke with Governor Gary Juffa of the Oro province in Papua New Guinea, describing this problem firsthand.

Mike: So, you say you’ve been compiling the data over, over, recently. Has there anything that you’ve published that you would want to direct listeners to go and read more about it?

Ketan: Nothing that I’ve published but a bit that a few other organizations have so there’s a there’s an organization called the Center for Tracking multinationals. I think it has the abbreviation SOMO, S O M O And they recently published a really good piece that was about This exact question, trying to gather up information about who is taking the money in between and who’s actually profiting or benefiting from carbon offsetting projects.

Mike (narration): I’ve linked this publication in the episode summary.

Ketan: And then the second thing that I wanted to mention on offsets is A really interesting trend that I haven’t actually seen looked at very much and I think would be worth digging into if anyone wants to do this which is basically. How carbon removal, specifically, is being presented as an improved version of a carbon offset. And so just to explain the context here a little bit, most carbon offsets that have been traded and created to date, I think 90 95 percent of them off the top of my head, have been carbon offsets that involve someone claiming that they avoided the release of emissions that they were originally going to do. So, for instance a farmer says I originally planned to chop down all these trees, but I’m not going to. And you, and the farmer gets paid the equivalent amount of carbon in those trees and in a carbon offset. Carbon removal. Carbon removal is interventionist. Carbon removal is taking your hand into the atmosphere and taking a ton of carbon out of the atmosphere and sequestering it somewhere, whether it’s in trees, vegetation, or deep underground. And so, it’s presented as, first of all, more verifiable or trackable. Because you can measure the amount of carbon. It’s very difficult, of course, in like trees and grasses. But with, a technology if you have a fan sucking carbon and then through some sort of substrate that actually removes the carbon, you can weigh it. You have a truck with full of carbon, right? You can weigh the carbon dioxide. And so, it’s meant to be a lot more verifiable. there’s a techno solutionist tinge to it. And of course, this relates to a lot of the different technological carbon removal offerings that are out there. So direct air capture is one example. There’s a lot of techno natural like combo solutions. I just made that word up, but I’m sure there’s a better word for it. But it’s, basically when it’s basically just when you have a mix, right? So, biochar, for instance, is when, you, end up with this sort of like black charred, I don’t know if you’ve ever done overcooked a pizza in the oven and then you get this Solid black char. It’s not it’s like more than burnt. It’s like a silvery Black char they do that with Like waste from farming operations. They char it and then it’s just this inert stored carbon, and that is by, far the most highly used form of carbon removal to date. Everyone imagines, fans sucking air but, biochar is mostly what gets used. And there’s this organization called the Science Based Targets Initiative, and it has been the primary ratings method for companies claiming to have net zero targets for many years now, right? Like since sort of the late 2010s and they still remain the most trusted and most widely used ratings method of tick, you did a, good net zero target. You’ve got all the right criteria. It’s like high quality, et cetera. They got a lot of criticism in the past for having too weak criteria. And to their credit, they actually adjusted it. they made it stronger. They’re releasing a draft version of their new criteria in a couple of month’s time. And so, I was checking out some of the documentation from last year and they they really come down hard on offsets. And of course, there’s a little bit of controversy about this last year. But That’s that related to the older type of offsets. What they actually carve out some space for is carbon removal. And they basically say, look, carbon removal is different. Carbon removal, you can use it for the final 10 percent of your emissions. And it’s okay because carbon removal is interventionist, it reaches into the atmosphere, it pulls it out, it’s a bit more verifiable, it has higher integrity, hypothetically. And we’re already seeing companies really leaning into this. So Microsoft is a really good example. Microsoft wants to remove all of its historical emissions from 1970 onwards and all of its future emissions. So from today up to 2050.

Mike (narration): Ketan is mostly correct here. Microsoft says it wants to be carbon negative by 2030 and by 2050, remove an equivalent amount of carbon from the atmosphere that it has emitted ever since its founding in 1975, not 1970.

Ketan: Which is a lot of emissions I don’t actually have the numbers in front of me, but it’s, massive and so what I’m already seeing is an excessive reliance on carbon removal. This is not Microsoft saying, ‘Oh, look, this is just the final 10 percent of hard to abate. We can’t deal with this. It’s too complicated.’ This is Microsoft saying everything, every single time that we emit from the past to the future will be dealt with using carbon removal. And just to go back to our earlier conversation about missing targets, Microsoft are missing their targets by an eye watering amount, and that, they’re building a lot of data centers, they have a high construction there’s a lot of embodied emissions in what they’re building, and so their emissions are going up quite significantly and so they’re basically saying, calm down, it doesn’t matter. We have a lot of carbon removal in the pipeline, and you will see a new article like every week, every few weeks with a new deal that Microsoft is doing with a carbon removal service provider. And so, what we are seeing is carbon removal, even though it’s meant to be. a better form or an improved form of offsetting exhibiting a lot of the same problems as traditional carbon offsetting and becoming the same thing, which of course you would expect if the system hasn’t really changed and you just plug a new thing into it, then you will get the same phenomena occurring.

Mike: And I guess the obvious question here, which I think has already been answered by a few scientists. Is the technology there? And from what I understand it’s an instant emphatic. “No, and also it probably won’t be for a very long time.” Do I have that right?

Ketan: The interesting thing about that question is and this is something that I’ve only really learnt quite recently, last year, are the sort of physical constraints of carbon removal. And so, there was a really good paper last year that raised the question of following the logic of, say, Microsoft. Through to its conclusion, right? Let’s just say that you took the philosophy of Microsoft, and you applied it to the world. Or even just a few of the largest companies in the US. The amount of electrical energy you need to run the fans and to suck the air is phenomenal, right? Like it’s, like country level country sized amount of electrical power. And so, using say wind and solar or clean sources to run those direct air capture technologies like you could throw that out as a solution, but it would make way more sense to use those wind turbines and solar panels. to just not emit in the first place and to displace existing fossil fuels from the power grid. So, this is an example. So, the technology will improve, of course, it’ll get cheaper. but there are these sorts of physical limitations and somebody, I really wish I could find who first made this analogy, but it’s such a good analogy, but it’s basically, it is almost literally like trying to unmix a milkshake, right? Like it’s you’re separating something blended. Something that’s been blended out into its components and in the atmosphere, the proportion of carbon in the atmosphere is very small. And so, you just simply have to move a very, large amount of air through a thing to get even a small amount of carbon out of it. And funnily enough, this is why point source carbon capture, the old stuff, like the decades old, carbon capture in power stations, that should have actually worked way better because the concentration of carbon in the air Coming directly out of a coal power station, for instance, is way higher. So, you would think that would have actually worked better, but that too, of course, had its own problems, which we won’t go into. So, there will be technological improvements for sure and they’ll get more efficient, they’ll get cheaper but one other thing I want to quickly raise on that is the narrative. And again, not something I’ve seen discussed too widely, but I’ve been tracking it pretty closely, is the narratives used by Carbon removal companies themselves, so like tech startups, and there’s, there’s a few universities involved, like my alma mater, Sydney University, has been doing a whole bunch of carbon removal stuff and often academics working on carbon removal at universities then have their own spinoff or startup or whatever what they say is that, this is very expensive, and it’s early days, it’s early stages. We need cash, we need money to get our carbon removal thing off the ground. And we will get that cash by selling carbon offsets to companies. That’s where the money comes from. We’re not going to get enough money otherwise, no one’s going to fund us, no government’s going to support us to the amount that we need. Therefore, we need to sell we need to sell carbon offsets to Microsoft and Google and Spotify and like the companies who have a specific love for carbon removal. And so, my counter argument to that is that it is a toxic form of cash, right? this is money that you get. That is being created because a company wants to greenwash its rising emissions. And yeah, maybe, carbon removal startups should actually be getting money. But should they be getting it from a company whose emissions are rising five times, ten times faster than the amount of carbon removal that they’re purchasing? Probably not, because the net effect on climate then is that there are more emissions being added, plus A company will be able to fend off regulation by saying, no, you don’t need to regulate us. We’re dealing with our emissions. Look at all of the carbon removal we’ve got. Look at our, emissions going down. When actually they’re going up. yeah, there probably will be some technological development in the future, but the side question of who funds it and how, and where that money comes from, should it come from, basically paid greenwashing services? I think not, right? I think it’s I think it’s not a healthy I think it’s a healthy, long term, more sustainable pathway for the, for carbon removal technologies. And I think I could be totally wrong about this, but I think that we’ll be having a similar debate about where the cash comes from for different types of more interventionist geoengineering activities like solar radiation modification or aerosol spraying, probably in the coming years.

Mike: I want to shift gears really quick because as we all know what is formerly known as Twitter used to be a really big space for scientists or people that work in the climate sphere or activists to coalesce and communicate. And there’s been a mass exodus from that platform onto one called Bluesky. For our listeners who aren’t aware it’s a new platform that runs things a little bit differently than the way that Twitter used to or that X currently does. And so Ketan you run a space on this platform called GreenSky, which has seen a lot of scientists, flood into it. Can you tell us about it?

Ketan: Yeah. I joined BlueSky in early 2023 not that long after Mask actually bought, Twitter. And I was very heartbroken. I really spent a lot of time on Twitter my entire career with a lot of people in my position have a similar story, right? My entire career really relied on Twitter. And every, almost every job I’ve ever gotten comes from my profile on, on social media or Twitter. and, Job, but also like freelance contracts and stuff like that, right? Like it all comes from, it all came from having a very large profile on Twitter and being an active member of the climate and energy space there. And I was really very sad and I knew very early on that what the fate for Twitter was. Like it was pretty clear that it was not, Musk was not going to sit back and just be like a very passive owner of Twitter. he wanted to shape it very distinctly into something very different. I think a lot of people didn’t quite recognize that. I think there were some hopeful folks who were just like, oh, maybe it’ll turn into It’ll be a little bit like Facebook or something like that where it just decays slowly over time But I rightly suspected that it would decline pretty quickly and so blue sky someone invited me to it and it was invite only and I was having a lot of trouble finding other climate and energy people, but I felt like the crowd was right behind me. I felt like people were going to join Blue Sky en masse pretty quickly once it opened up to the public, which it did in February. 2024. And it’s, they didn’t I think, so basically I had the spreadsheet and I was collecting up, people, climate and energy people. And the idea was I would share the spreadsheet and other people could use it to go to just open up all of the cells in one go. I go clear, follow, and did get used for that a little bit, but then I realized in February 20, like some of this time last year that. People were not actually going to be moving quickly to BlueSky, that it would take a long time. but then I realized, maybe that’s a bit of an opportunity. And so, I turned the list that I had of people on, GreenSky into an actual list on BlueSky. And then something that can drive what’s known as a feed. Which is basically, if you go onto a normal social media website. Facebook or LinkedIn, you get posts delivered to you and you don’t really know why. It’s a secret algorithm that’s being used, that’s being tailored to you specifically with the goal of maximizing you engaging with those posts. On BlueSky they do have that as an option if you want to get like a sort of tailored for you type feed of just stuff that’s tailored to your interests, but you don’t have to, you can subscribe to another feed, you can delete that one, you can make your own, and so I thought, okay, I wonder if I can make this into an algorithm of posts from people on the list, and so I did, and people really found it useful in November last year, Trump won the election in the U.S. And that specifically triggered, there was a few things before that, that had a few, there was a few periods of like smaller influx, like X being brand in Brazil, Musk saying he’s gonna get rid of blocking from Twitter but Trump winning? Was massive right like the servers blew up there was smoke pouring out of the data center like it was just it was really wild like it’s like millions and millions of people joined blue sky almost overnight And so Greensky really took off as well right a lot of people joined green sky A lot of people use this feature called starter packs Which is basically just a list of people that you can follow in one go Which is what GreenSky originally was. And you can actually find a lot of starter packs if you’re interested in joining BlueSky. Created by scientists like Katherine Hayhoe there’s a few others. I’ve created some, I’ve created a little document I can send that has a list of starter packs.

Mike (narration): We here at Mongabay have a starter pack that includes all of our staffers on the platform and our own personal Mongabay account. I’m on there as well as Eric Hoffner, the producer of this podcast. Feel free to follow us and Ketan Joshi if you’re on there.

Ketan: But my contribution is more like the ongoing community of GreenSky. And GreenSky is just a list of people who are actively engaged in climate from a very wide variety of backgrounds. I let a lot of people on there. The whole idea behind it is I want it to be a really broad swathe of discourse across BlueSky. So there are some of my enemies that are on there, right? People I have beef with or whatever. But it’s it doesn’t matter, right? Like it’s, I want it to be I want it to be a real buzzing kind of representation of climate environment and activism on Bluesky. And I think it’s, I think it’s getting there. I think we need, it’s overrepresented. There are a lot of academics on there, a lot of like energy experts, professionals type folks like me, but I would love to see more activists. BlueSky hasn’t seen, as a whole, has not seen a lot of representation from Global South countries. It’s largely Anglophone, with the exception of Brazil, which I mentioned earlier, thanks to X being banned there and there’s also large representation from East Asia. So, there’s like a lot of Korea, there’s a lot of Japan, but besides those exceptions, it’s largely Anglophone. So maybe in the future, hopefully it starts to switch up and I can start creating. different language versions of GreenSky. I would love to be able to start doing that. But it’s also a good wayfinding tool, if you have just joined and you’re like, This is so confusing, I don’t know, where are all my friends at? They’re probably on GreenSky, they’re probably somewhere in that feed. And so, you can follow that feed and just go, oh, I remember that person, from, Twitter, from the old days. And then the other thing that’s quickly worth mentioning on BlueSky is, it’s owned by what’s known as a public benefit corporation in the U.S. It, one of its core investors is an awful company called Blockchain Capital. Bluesky was actually born, I won’t go into the full history of Bluesky, but it was born out of a, sort of Silicon Valley, crypto libertarian at least initially has a lot of those vibes, and it does have this investor. Which is like this awful blockchain, company that invests in a bunch of terrible things. If you know that big orb that scans your eye that Sam Altman was doing called WorldCoin, it’s just ridiculous stuff, right? But that’s a problem, it’s something to keep in mind, but the whole idea behind Bluesky is that it’s built on an open protocol. So hopefully sometime soon, somebody is just going to make Bluesky 2 and you can join Bluesky 2 and talk to everyone on Bluesky 1 and it’s owned by someone completely different. And if, like the company in charge of existing Bluesky does something terrible, you just move and it’s all interoperable and you can exchange, you can, it’s you can extract your posts and your name just like you can do with your emails. Yeah, that would be a significant improvement, I think. And I think that’s going to happen soon.

Mike: Ketan other than Bluesky, of course, where can people follow along to get your latest updates and what you’re working on?

Ketan: Yeah, so I I’m, pretty active on LinkedIn as well. If you just put my name in there, you’ll find me. And then my website is ketanjoshi.co. And I will be getting back into doing a fair amount of blogging and writing there pretty soon. Yeah, please check it out. Lots of nice long posts to read.

Mike: It’s been a pleasure speaking with you and cheers from the opposite end of the globe and the other hemisphere. It’s great to chat with you.

Ketan: Thank you.

Mike (narration): If you want to check out Mongabay’s reporting on forest carbon credits from John Cannon, you can find the series linked in the show notes. If you want to check out Ketan Joshi’s writing, you can also find his website in our episode summary. As always, if you’re enjoying the Mongabay Newscast or any of our podcast content and you want to help us out, we encourage you to spread the word about the work that we’re doing by telling a friend and leaving a review. Word of mouth is the best way to help expand our reach, but you can also support us by becoming a monthly sponsor of the podcast via our Patreon page at patreon.com/Mongabay. Mongabay is a non-profit news outlet. So when you pledge a dollar per month, it really does make a big difference and it does help us offset production costs. So, if you’re a fan of our audio reports from Nature’s Frontline, go to patreon.com/Mongabay to learn more and support the Mongabay Newscast. You can also read our news and inspiration from Nature’s Frontline at Mongabay.com or you can follow us on social media. Find Mongabay on LinkedIn at Mongabay News and on Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, and TikTok where our handle is at Mongabay or on YouTube @MongabayTV. Thank you as always for listening.