17 January 2020, Charlottesville: Climate Restoration Workshop

[Daniel-Mietchen]

as per https://eri.virginia.edu/event/restore-workshop/

[Daniel-Mietchen]

The program is up.

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Nice introductory slides by Andres Clarens. Seem not to be public though.

[Daniel-Mietchen]

First keynote: Kate Lajtha, https://agsci.oregonstate.edu/users/kate-lajtha

• Looks at the global and US potential of green solutions to address carbon capture (both terrestrial and marine)
• There is more carbon in soil than in air and vegetation combined (not sure whether that includes marine carbon)

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Talks seem to be being recorded.

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Next: Daniel Sanchez, https://ourenvironment.berkeley.edu/people/daniel-sanchez (UC Berkeley Carbon Removal Laboratory), on Engineered CO2 removal from the atmosphere (apparently not oceans)

• mentions that direct air capture is expected to cost about 200-300 USD per ton of CO2, whereas California carbon taxing levels are around 15 USD, and EU ones at about half of that
• like Andres before, he mentions Microsoft pledging to remove more carbon than it produces by 2030 — see here for a thread basically busting that claim by taking into account the carbon budgets due to fossil fuel companies that Microsoft collaborates with
• frames things like plastics (specifically bioplastics) and using wood in buildings as mechanisms to pull carbon out of the cycle
• his research is focused on BECCS, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio-energy_with_carbon_capture_and_storage
• asks what UVA could be doing in this space
  • I would like to see the UVA power plant being put to use in this space

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Next: David John Hayes, https://its.law.nyu.edu/facultyprofiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=profile.overview&personid=47622 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._Hayes

• "I'm a lawyer, apologies"
• "Denial is out, worry is in"
• quotes long list of programs directed at farmers in order to protect environments around agricultural lands
  • let's use some agricultural subsidies to help deal with climate change
  • these efforts so far have not yielded useful metrics
• some politician said resources should be directed at measuring soil health
• public lands (about one third of US lands) should go first at becoming net greenhouse gas neutrality
• USGS is running a LandCarbon website
• interesting list of policy opportunities, including
  • infrastructure
  • post-disaster recovery
  • e.g.
    • 9 billion USD remaining to be spent on resilience efforts following the BP oil spill
    • hundreds of millions after some severe hurricanes
• landscape architecture

My thoughts: I would like to see the School of Data Science building and landscape architecture around the Emmet/ Ivy site to serve as pilots, e.g. around using cross-laminated timber instead of steel.

UVA manages lots of land, where some of the approaches discussed today could perhaps be piloted.

What about hydroponics?

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Panel with Lajtha, Sanchez and Hayes

Q from Arthur Small: what will be useful metrics to move carbon capture technologies/ policies forward or at least prepare the ground?

A (Hayes): permanently measure the effects of carbon capture locally and transparently

Q : UVA is currently converting a forest into a solar field - does that make sense from a carbon perspective?

A (Lajtha): no direct answer, but some examples from Wyoming and Oregon

[Daniel-Mietchen]

I was just told that slides will be shared eventually.

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Flash talk session starts (I have emails of all presenters)

Name	Notes
Erika Herz	Darden Business Initiative & Climate change
Arthur Small	transaction costs of negative emission credits; using historic approaches to grain storage as a model
Deborah Lawrence	climate restoration starts with mitigation - "Reduce first"; BECCS is heading to be piloted in the tropics, thereby potentially contributing to further deforestation there
Karen Mcglathery	Blue Carbon sequestration - not a climate mitigation strategy, but assistive / co-benefits ; marine soils have more carbon than terrestrials; "no fires under water"; relatively low-cost; We need resilience valuation
Bill Shobe	"I'm an economist, so I'm gonna talk about assets, in particular stranded fossil assets" - they all have to go to zero value eventually, and having carbon taxes would keep the value of some of those assets
Jay Shimshack, Batten	resource economist; choices with consequences for the environment; looks at policies that achieve environmental effects in the real world; PM2.5 particulate matters ; analyzed 36 years of PM2.5 across the 65,000 US census tracks - the most/ least polluted census tracks in 2016 are essentially the same as in 1981
Andres Clarens	food, energy and water implications of negative emissions, both with respect to green and grey carbon capture; direct air capture reduces food price hikes compared to a scenario where only biological capture techniques are available; he specifically said "Daniel, please don't tweet this"
Jonathan Cannon, also lawyer, UVA Law School	Hidden landscapes; e.g. Fremont Peak, Wind River Wilderness, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fremont_Peak_%28Wyoming%29 - and how our relationship with places (both near and far) shapes attitudes towards environmental issues
Larry Band	land use tradeoffs in terms of carbon, water, nutrients and energy; "which plots of land do we choose to convert from current use to which future use?"; also says that while 30% of the country is public in general, this is particularly in the West, while in the East and South, there are lots of owners of small lands
Andrew Mondschein	Decarbonizing cities - transportation and urban planning ; "Transit-oriented development"; much is already known, but hard to change policies and even if these change, to reap their beneits in useful time frames ; co-maps affordable housing, vehicle ownerships, transportation pricing and a few other things; lots of disparities
Scott Doney	contributes to the Global Carbon Project; taking carbon out of the air might reduce carbon uptake by the oceans
Tho Nguyen	works in the Mekong region and uses games for that; mentions the world's trash problem; Mekong basin debris tracker game - based on a similar one from Georgia, which is at http://marinedebris.engr.uga.edu/
Daniel Mietchen	Climate restoration needs open sharing; I referred to Andres' quick about me tweeting his slides, but I forgot the part about copyright being longer than the current IPCC projections
Lisa Colosi-Peterson	BECCS - where and why or why not, and thermochemical alternatives
Ben Converse, social psychologist, Social climate and decision lab	Critical behavioral questions - I am happy to see this perspective represented; referring the "past denial"/ "climate malaise" and the "lost assets" and wondering how social perception of the effects of carbon capture techniques will affect behavior

[Daniel-Mietchen]

We then had a group work session in 1-2-4-all mode, i.e. everyone wrote down 1 idea/ thought to be discussed with the group, then this was discussed subsequently in groups of 2, then 4, then all.

My input was

UVA manages a lot of land and facilities on it (including solar and coal power plants, parks and forests), so how can this be used to prototype carbon management approaches?

In the 4-mode, this got rephrased as "UVA as a carbon management laboratory" that would include things like UVA's investments/ endowments and their ties to fossil fuel. Such a lab would help link research and policy at UVA and beyond to Virginia/ Federal/ global scales.

[Daniel-Mietchen]

The rest of the day was further hands-on groupwork, so I did not take notes.

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Had a follow-up discussion with Tho Nguyen on the ethics of data science and AI.