Episode 50: Kelly Wanser, SilverLining
Today’s guest is Kelly Wanser, Executive Director of SilverLining, a mission organization driving research to ensure safe pathways for climate within a decade.
Previously, Kelly was the director of the Marine Cloud Brightening Project, a program focused on research in reflecting sunlight to reduce heat in climate. Kelly is member of the National Academy of Sciences President’s Circle. She also served as Senior Advisor to Ocean Conservancy on climate-ocean risk and to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on industry strategy for fusion energy. A technologist, executive and entrepreneur, she previously founded companies in IT infrastructure, analytics and security, and is the author of over 20 patents. She resides in San Francisco.
If you want to learn more about geoengineering, solar geoengineering, marine cloud brightening, etc, this one is for you! Whether you believe we should be doing research in this area or not, you will come away a lot more informed after this great discussion.
Enjoy the show!
You can find me on Twitter @jjacobs22 (me), @mcjpod (podcast) or @mcjcollective (company). You can reach us via email at info@mcjcollective.com, where we encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.
In today's episode, we cover:
Overview of geoengineering
Challenge of predicting earth system’s response to heat stress and risk of hitting catastrophic tipping points
'The case for geoengineering
SilverLining’s work, and how it came to be
What the critics say about geoengineering, and Kelly’s responses
'Some example projects they have taken on at SilverLining'
How the org is funded, and future goals in this regard
What fossil fuel companies think of geoengineering
Potential risks, side effects, and unintended consequences
Research vs widescale deployment, the best ways to stage exploration in this area
What else can be impactful in the climate fight
Kelly’s advice to others trying to find their lane to help
Links discussed in this episode:
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Jason Jacobs: Hello, everyone. This is Jason Jacobs and welcome to My Climate Journey. This show follows my journey to interview a wide range of guests to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change, and try to figure out how people like you and I can help. Today's guest is Kelly Wanser, founder and executive director of SilverLining, a nonprofit organization driving policy and innovation to ensure a safe climate within a decade. SilverLining focuses on near term climate risk and advancing our understanding of fast acting climate interventions, sometimes called geoengineering that might alleviate the most severe impacts. This is a thorny and controversial topic.
Jason Jacobs: Solar geoengineering is an area that is often misunderstood and even once it is understood, it is hard to navigate because there are some bad implications if it's deployed in the wrong way and some unknowns in terms of some unintended consequences that might come about. At the same time, there's risk of not doing this research, both in terms of any catastrophic tipping points that we might be coming upon in a way to mask the symptoms to buy time. But also, if we don't understand it, we won't know how to regulate it. And if we don't regulate it, then we might not be able to control what happens when some rogue nation or group decides to deploy it at any rate. I hope everyone comes away from this episode with at least a better understanding of what this topic is, and how to think about it. Because I think regardless of how you feel about it, it's an important one to understand. So Kelly Wanser welcome to the show.
Kelly Wanser: Thank you very much, Jason. It's really great to be here.
Jason Jacobs: Kind of weird because we're camping out here and First Round Capital's office in San Francisco and we're literally the only ones in the entire office.
Kelly Wanser: It's pretty nice. We got all the snacks to ourselves.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah, that's one thing I'll say without, without digressing too much, they have some incredible snacks. I need to get out of here so I don't eat them out of house and home because it's late in the day, which is when my snack eating is the worst.
Kelly Wanser: Right, that is a danger. So I'll try to keep you entertained.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah, but I'm excited to do this episode. It's interesting, solar geoengineering for whatever reason, when I started the climate journey back in November, December, one of the first topics I look into. I don't even know how I ended up doing that. Maybe because Bill from First Round pointed me this way.
Kelly Wanser: Might be.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah, it's a topic I didn't know anything about. And as I've looked into it more I think that it is thorny and nuanced, but important. It's an important subject to consider. And you are right on the front lines of that world and therefore I thought would be a great person to come on and explain to listeners what it is and talk to me about this important subject that I think not many people know about, but more will over time.
Kelly Wanser: Well, thanks. Yeah. So it's an interesting topic because it tends to spark curiosity and reactions. And it sounds sometimes sort of science fiction like. The language that people use, geoengineering usually spark some curiosity and concern. The way that I came to the topic was looking at, how close were we to severe and serious climate risk? And if we were close, did we have enough measures? Do we have enough tools in the toolkit to react. And so look at it that way, rather than looking at the engineering side of it, but looking at the use case side of it, if you like, it starts to come into a frame where it says, well, do we have any fast acting responses to climate warming if we need them? And if we didn't need them, what do they look like? Then it starts to bring you into this arena of, yeah, these are engineered solutions, but they're looking at tweaks on the way that your system works. That might help stabilize things for a while.
Kelly Wanser: It's an interesting space to be in now, because the climate risk profiles seems to be worsening. And people are getting more concerned that we may not have enough ways to address it. And so these sorts of ideas are becoming... they've gone from the tin foil hat to out of the box to, oh, well, maybe these are things we need to have in the toolkit.
Jason Jacobs: Well, it's interesting, because I think that there's no question that there's significant scientific consensus that the planet is warming and that it's at least some major portion of it is caused by human activity. That's basically not... I would say, not even basically, that is not controversial at this point. There's a handful of wild mouse on the door from entrenched interests, but the consensus is so much that I don't think that's controversial at all. What I do find though, is within the people that believe that there are wildly different views on how much this will impact us, how fast it will impact us, in what ways it will impact us, who will impact, when it will impact them, et cetera. So, like these catastrophic tipping points, for example that you're alluding to, it doesn't seem to be something that at least from what I've seen the majority of people that are in the climate fight, insiders are that concerned about at least if you look over the next say, decades. But let me stop there and please react to what I just said.
Kelly Wanser: So I think it depends on who you talk to and where they come from in the climate community. I work a lot with climate scientists and government agencies and people, climate modelers, and people very close to the science. The challenge of climate is that the earth system is a complex system, and forecasting what the earth system is doing is the biggest complex systems problem on planet Earth. The only bigger problem is predicting the universe.
Jason Jacobs: I thought you're going to say it's predicting Trump's next Tweet.
Kelly Wanser: Well, I remember that's a complex systems problem, I don't know what that is. So yeah, if you factor in that to the equation. The challenge of any response to what's happening with climate is, it's really hard to predict how the system is reacting to the heat stress that we're putting on it. And so I liken it to the human body having a fever. And a fever rises, and for while you're asymptomatic, and you're fine, as a fever increases, then you get these nonlinear impacts on the body until things start to shut down. And so the earth system has forms of that. And we don't know exactly where those nonlinear responses are, where things start to dramatically change. We know that they will, but we don't know exactly how and when. And the risks associated with that are massive. One of the things that some people are very concerned about in the inner circle of science and climate is these disruptive risks to the polar regions. The Arctic and Antarctic.
Kelly Wanser: And so if you take two big possible risks, one is the collapse of these big ice sheets, which would change sea levels, it would change the circulation of the ocean and the atmosphere, and it would be irreversible. And it would be disastrous for a lot of people and a lot of cities. Or these big stores of methane that are in the land and the sub ocean surface in the polar regions, where there's some tipping point where we get these massive releases of gas from the Arctic permafrost into the atmosphere, beyond our ability to counter the kind of warming they will produce. So if you think of those two things now, we don't know where those tipping points are. But the outcome of those tipping points are pretty sure are pretty devastating.
Kelly Wanser: The question is how do we deal with that kind of risk? And what all do we have in the toolkit for that? It doesn't mean that we don't want to pursue all of the things that we're pursuing at the macro level to bring down greenhouse gases as fast as we can. But if that risk is within a decade or two, do we have enough things in place to address it if we need to? If that makes sense.
Jason Jacobs: If we have no prior experience with these, with catastrophic tipping points, even being a thing, then what makes the scientists convinced that, that's something that we need to worry about as a potential outcome?
Kelly Wanser: Well, so they're starting to... Their observations of some of the precursor activity that you might expect, what's alarming them. So they're seeing melting rates. They're starting to see releases of gas from the surface and below the surface, those kinds of things that they're observing that their models told them might be the worst case scenario or beyond the worst case scenario. Their observations are mapping to bad scenarios from their prior predictions.
Kelly Wanser: So that concerns them. And they're also starting to identify more ways, more of the dynamics that underlie why climate models might have underestimated the risk. And there are a bunch of reasons why and there have been some recent publications about that. It's a combination of everybody's learning and we're learning about this vastly complex system. Before this, I was working on network analytics, and data center networks are highly complex systems too and what you're trying to do is forecast what will happen if you introduce a bunch of new traffic or you change security protocols or what have you, and predict whether the network will crash.
Kelly Wanser: Traditionally, it's been pretty hard to predict what will happen to networks. This is a similar problem only bigger. But what you do is try to look at the system from different angles and learn more and more about what it's doing, and try to hone in on what it's likely to do next. In this case, we're learning the question is, can we learn fast enough what's happening? One of the things that we're learning is things look like they're moving in a direction that's worse than our average predictions were. Our risks of some of these things that we thought might happen look like they're higher than we even thought they were.
Kelly Wanser: My point of view on it is, well, if the risk of methane release from the Arctic is 10% or 80%. Anything above a trivial percent, is high enough that we probably need countermeasures to deal with it, because of the risks that it poses to almost everyone on the planet. I'm a little bit less sensitive to how exact is our prediction, if we're in the arena of something material?
Jason Jacobs: And are we in the arena of something material and how would you define?
Kelly Wanser: I mean to me, and I think this is a great question for you to ask guests that come on your show, particularly ones that are close to climate problem, how they think about it. But when I first got into this space, over a decade ago, I was talking to a scientist at Stanford named Steve Schneider. And I asked him, he's quite a well known climate scientist, "How would you characterize the probability of runaway climate change in our lifetime?" And this was about 12 or 13 years ago, and he said, "I will put it in the single digit percentages, but not the low single digits." And if you had high single digit percentage of winning the lottery, you'd be out buying tickets. Where if we had a high single digit percentage risk of an asteroid hitting the planet, we'd be building the big laser. That's too high.
Kelly Wanser: It's extremely material risk against the outcome that we're talking about. And that was before, that was 12 or 13 years ago. And now what's happened is our experience of the symptoms is worse than was forecast. And that probability is more than that somewhere. But it's very hard to talk to scientists about it because they do have a hard time characterizing what that actually is. The question is, how do we deal with a risk like that where it's hard for us to quantify but the black swan nature of it, and the devastating outcome of it is something we would want to work pretty hard to prevent, if that makes sense.
Jason Jacobs: Well, given that we have no experience with it, what kind of devastating outcome is possible and what draws you to that conclusion?
Kelly Wanser: I guess there are different ways to talk about it in terms of looking at Earth's history, like very large volcanoes going off that we might not have had experience of in our lifetime, or asteroids hitting the planet that we might have had experience of. We have to try to forecast the things that would happen in the context of, let's say, a massive methane release into the atmosphere, for example, that would increase dramatically the amount of stored energy in the atmosphere for a decade or something. I'm from this kind of school of thought that says that we don't necessarily have to have direct experience of things even in the observed history, to be able to try to estimate the things that would happen if they occur. If the Earth system does certain things, other things follow.
Kelly Wanser: The ice sheet example might be a little bit easier to think about, because if these big ice sheets collapse, then you have this dramatic reaction to sea levels and the way the ocean behaves, and that affects the way the atmosphere behaves. You're going to have lots of changes in a relatively short period of time. And the biggest one being will affect people in coastal areas quite dramatically. I guess my short answer to that would be I don't think we need to have experienced these things to be able to forecast somewhat the risks associated with them, at least enough to think preventatively. We're doing this already in the sense of what conservatives talk about, "Hey, we want to move trillions of dollars in investment to try to quickly reduce greenhouse gases."
Kelly Wanser: The question is just by the same rationale that at some point, there's some abrupt changes we're trying to avoid. The question is, are there other techniques that we haven't looked at enough that might be faster acting if these risks are moving faster than we think or than we traditionally thought?
Jason Jacobs: Okay, we've talked about the fact that you uncovered that there was this non trivial risk of catastrophic tipping points, and that we don't know exactly what would happen, but we know it would be bad. So then how did you get from there to thinking about what we might do about it and the work that you're doing today?
Kelly Wanser: Awesome question. I'll tie in something related to prior piece of conversation to the answer to that. There's a report that will be released on September 25th by the IPCC on the ocean and cryosphere. Some of the things that I was talking about in terms of these polar tipping points, these Arctic tipping points, they're likely to be trying to characterize. And my understanding is that report is actually likely to be pretty dire. And we'll see more of an attempt to say, "Look, these are some of the approaching tipping points in these areas." The reason that's related to the answer to your question is that, I in the work that I do now and then in very science based, I look to well, what are the scientific authorities and assessment body is saying, are the most promising approaches to intervening in climate if we need to.
Kelly Wanser: In 2012, an organization called the Royal Society in the UK, which is their version of our National Academy of Sciences. They published a study that reviewed potential approaches to geoengineering or what in the US they're calling climate intervention capabilities and help sort through them to say what's material, what's meaningful in terms of scale, in terms of risk, in terms of engineering feasibility. In 2012, the Royal Society did a study like that. And in 2015, the National Academy of Sciences did something similar. And they did two studies, one looking at approaches to removing carbon from the atmosphere, and one looking at approaches to reducing warming by reflecting sunlight away from the planet.
Kelly Wanser: Those studies help to sift through the wheat in the chaff and say, "What are the priorities for research and what are the most viable ways to reduce warming quickly if you needed to?" And in the case of reducing warming meaningfully and less than a decade or two, what the scientific assessment said was that, the most promising way to do that is to try to reflect sunlight directly away from the planet. You're pushing heat out of the system. The most promising way to do that is a variant on the way that our system keeps itself cool, which is the reflection of sunlight from the particles and clouds in the atmosphere.
Kelly Wanser: By slightly increasing that reflection, you can push away huge amount of heat energy. For example, by increasing the reflectivity of the atmosphere by one or 2%, you might be able to offset two degrees of warming. If you needed something fast acting like within a few years or within a decade, then based on what they knew at the time, that was the most promising place to start to look. For me, in terms of coming at the problem, from the point of view of saying, we have some non zero risk of runaway climate change in our lifetime, and the part of the portfolio where you could meaningfully reduce warming within a decade or two is almost empty.
Kelly Wanser: The global level of investment and options that could reduce heat quickly is effectively zero. That didn't seem rational to me. And I thought to myself, well, I'm from tech, I've had successes and failures. I'm used to looking for high leverage angles on a problem, things that are technically complex, things that might not work. There's an opportunity for someone like me to help because we're starting from a base of zero, which is, if we can catalyze any kind of investment and research in these areas, even to rule them out, that we have a part of the portfolio that is vacant, and has a civilization. And as a community where there's something that we could do here to potentially improve our risk position if that makes sense.
Jason Jacobs: What you just described that's called marine cloud brightening, is that right?
Kelly Wanser: The general category in the USA we call atmospheric climate intervention, or solar geoengineering, marine cloud brightening is one variant of that. Another variants of that is Stratospheric Aerosol Injection or Stratosphere Climate Intervention. Any technique where you're dispersing particles in a layer of the atmosphere to try to increase its reflectivity. In the stratosphere, for example, the proposal is a variation on what very large volcanoes do when they go off. When Mount Pinatubo went off in 1992, it released material all the way into the stratosphere, push material all the way into the stratosphere. That material circulated and it slightly increased how much sunlight got reflected out of the stratosphere and it cooled the planet for over a half a degree Celsius for almost two years. And there was a big recovery of Arctic ice and a noteworthy difference in the climate during that time.
Kelly Wanser: Based on that scientists propose, "Okay, you might be able to do that in a continuous way, maybe even a more optimized way, and continuously cool the planet by releasing particles in the stratosphere." Another variants of that is similar to what happens when pollution emissions go into clouds, and other things go into clouds. But if you look at clouds from over the ocean from space, you'll see a streaks in them that are created by the emissions from ships. The particulates and emissions today are actually thought to be cooling the planet because they mix with clouds and they make them a little bit brighter, kind of a way umbrella effect. The idea there is to take a sea saltiness from ocean water and disperse it into clouds over the ocean. And that by dispersing mist into somewhere between 15 and 25% of ocean clouds, you might be able to offset two degrees of warming.
Kelly Wanser: These are right now more theoretical than something people would make strong claims about. But the idea being that it may be possible in a controlled way, slightly changed the way the atmosphere reflects sunlight as an immediate counter to warming doesn't counter the other effects of CO2. And at best, it would be a very limited solution. The more of it you do, the more risky it is like medicine. Most of the scientists who've looked at it, think of it as something that could buy time and it would buy time by reducing heat stress on the system if heat stress was pushing the system into these dangerous places.
Kelly Wanser: That's the way that I think about it in my work and my organization SilverLining, which is, how do we think about making sure that we're all safe? If we're approaching these unstable points and these unsafe points in where the climate system is. And while we're working on everything we need to do to make the natural system healthy, do we have the things that we need to make sure we don't lose the patient? So to speak, if that makes sense.
Jason Jacobs: I'd love to go back. You first uncovered that we were trending worse than the models and then you uncovered that if we needed to do something quickly that we weren't equipped and then you uncovered that potentially this solar geoengineering was an area that could be something that we could do quick, then what?
Kelly Wanser: Then I uncovered some of the... and again I really appreciate what I learned coming from the tech industry in early stage technology about how you think about innovation and scale. One of the things that I'm sure in your experience is true as well, is who the team is really matters, who the people are at the early part of something matters. For me, part of it was identifying, who are the teams and the talented people around the subject matter? And how do we get them the resources to work or continue working? And part of it was looking at some of the emerging efforts and saying how do we help catalyze resources for those efforts? And how do we identify those people in academia and government and things where early innovation and early work could make a huge difference to the trajectory of the space.
Jason Jacobs: When was all this taking place that you've been walking us through just in terms of timeline?
Kelly Wanser: I started this as a passion effort, not dissimilar to you. Looking into climate and exploring where it made sense to me to try to engage and help in these high leverage near term risk areas. And that was about a decade ago. I met quite early on some of the father figures of this area of solar geoengineering, Ken Caldeira at Stanford and David Keith, who's now at Harvard, Steve Scheinder he's no longer here, and then various people at the University of Washington who are working on marine cloud brightening early on and John Latham, who is the original father of that idea. I was fortunate in that I got to know over a decade ago, some of those people who are around the subject matter and then got a bit entrained in learning what all this entailed and trying to figure out how this might work, what technologies are involved.
Kelly Wanser: It's quite a complicated space in that it doesn't have a clear commercial market. It doesn't have a clear constituency, except everyone. It was very controversial, and a very difficult place until relatively recently for anyone to work. Because the opposition to work in this area, even research mostly came from within the climate community and the climate research community.
Jason Jacobs: Where was that opposition coming from the fiercest?
Kelly Wanser: I would say the fiercest opposition... There are two kinds of opposition. There's the tinfoil hat contrail.
Jason Jacobs: That's within the science community or that's supposed to be different?
Kelly Wanser: No, that's different. I'm just setting it on my side.
Jason Jacobs: And I'm playing dumb little bit because I've Googled some of that.
Kelly Wanser: Yeah, you Google some them. I did a talk and I had a guy set up a tripod to record the talk and he was giving out buttons that had a little red slash mark through a little airplane with contrails coming out of it. I'm setting aside that contrail or chemtrail folks and focus on the more material opposition to this. For example, Al Gore has been very publicly opposed to any research in this area.
Jason Jacobs: Why?
Kelly Wanser: Greenpeace, I was just at a meeting where they were-
Jason Jacobs: Why is Al Gore opposed?
Kelly Wanser: They're two flavors of opposition, but I would say the primary one that has sustained throughout and is the most prominent now is what sometimes called moral hazard, or the way that working on these technology solutions might impair work in other areas on the core problem. The idea that we have a silver bullet, we have a panacea. We don't have to do these other things to clean up the natural system is probably the most profound of the opposition. And it's been a pretty strongly held view. I would say more recently, there's been some more conversation around the fact that the introduction of these ideas may be a wake up call. They may not necessarily be as... They may be equally as likely to propel action as to relax people because they are pretty severe in nature themselves.
Jason Jacobs: It's like when I want to get my kid moving, I can either say, "Hey, if you go and do what I want you to do, you'll get a lollipop." or I can say, "If you don't do what I want you to do, then you're not going to baseball practice today."
Kelly Wanser: Right. "You can quit smoking or I have this experimental drug for you." But the second form of opposition, which came it really strongly from the climate science community, up until I would say maybe five or seven years ago, was that it would be so hard for us to predict what would happen when we did these things. And there are so many macro level risks and unknown unknowns that you wouldn't do this. And when the climate problem was less severe, let's say in the 80s, or 90s, when scientists were looking at that, they were looking at it, I think, relatively rationally and saying we'd be crazy to do that versus stopping emissions, because we really have no clue what will happen if we do this. And stopping emissions would be a far more rational thing to do. And I think they had... And I've known some of the senior scientists who've evolved, basically, they're looking what are the risks of the warming that we're introducing now versus these kinds of things.
Kelly Wanser: At some point in that curve, the risks of these unknown unknowns are still lower than what we know about what happens at two and a half or three degrees. So that's where I think there's been a shift and people who are looking closely at climate system, who are saying, "Well, the risks of what we're walking into now are unbearably high."
Jason Jacobs: I want to go back. You started a decade ago, you met Ken Caldeira and David Keith and some of these other people that you mentioned, and you talked about where things were at the time, how it was almost impossible to work in this area. But then that was 10 years ago. What's happened in the last decade and when did SilverLining come about officially, how did it come about? Why did it come about versus when did it switch from a passion project to something more formalized?
Kelly Wanser: Great questions. Yeah, I carried on. I was working in startups for myself in early stage technology. And I did a couple of side projects to just try to help the University of Washington and program development. I did a project with the National Ignition Facility where they're working on nuclear fusion. Then about three years ago, maybe a little more than that I went... After my last startup, I decided this not... Just similar to you to go full time on climate change. And with a primary focus on these near term intervention solar geoengineering area, I was working a lot with the team at the University of Washington who works on Marine cloud brightening.
Jason Jacobs: Is that three years ago?
Kelly Wanser: Three years ago. But I also was doing a project for Ocean Conservancy on ocean climate risk. For me, part of the whole strategy I guess, is the intersection of technology and climate. Part of that is the technologies associated with intervention, but part of it is how do we understand the system? And how can we use what... The tech industry knows how to do to accelerate our ability to predict what's going on. One of the things I observed was, right now we have far greater investment in what shoes you want to buy, what ads to serve you than we do in forecasting the climate system. And some of the techniques that the tech industry knows how to use to predict things to manage complex systems, they've not been fully applied to this problem.
Kelly Wanser: I was very interested in also how do we improve the intersection of tech and climate and accelerate work on computing, complex systems analysis and the things that might help move things faster? Part of what I did was engage people like AWS and see can we accelerate the adoption of cloud computing, you have the biggest computing problem on planet Earth. Climate modeling takes more computing than any other problem on planet Earth.
Jason Jacobs: AWS has already booked helping the fossil fuel companies do more exploration.
Kelly Wanser: Well, they're an arms merchant, right? They can work all sides of the problem. But anyway, circling back, I was doing a few different projects but in my work with University of Washington and Pacific Northwest National Labs, their partner, I got increasingly engaged on in DC on The Hill and with government agencies, trying to move things forward in the US federal system. Nearly all climate research in the United States is funded through the US government system. And that became a big part of the orientation also. About a year ago, little over a year ago, I spun that off into a nonprofit SilverLining, so that I could work on policy and advocacy for the entire space with the idea of having a clear mission that we want to help ensure that we have a path to safety within a decade.
Kelly Wanser: Meaning that we have enough tools in our toolbox to ensure people that we and our natural systems will be safe and stable, which we don't believe that we have now. We're pretty directed in what we do in terms of making sure that we move things forward now and continuously. We've been working. We started socializing this with members of Congress, I've met with over 100 congressional officers, started last fall. And we got our first appropriations in the 2020 budget. We'll have some funding in [inaudible 00:35:44] and then the Department of Energy to start looking at some of the key science questions around these kinds of interventions.
Kelly Wanser: For example, when you poke into this you realize that the most prominent proposal for rapidly countering warming is to put material in the stratosphere. We do not currently have a baseline of the chemistry of the stratosphere. We need observations of the chemistry of the stratosphere if we or anybody else were to go thinking about putting material in it to try to cool the planet or we even wanted to be able to detect someone trying to do that. There are some foundational things that we can do pretty much right away, some foundational science questions like how do particles brighten clouds that we can invest in, that will help propel us forward. So that's what SilverLining is focused on a very directed mission strategy to make sure that we have what we need and we keep things moving.
Jason Jacobs: And what is phase one of that look like? What is the first piece of substantive progress that SilverLining is vying to bring about?
Kelly Wanser: Well, I would say that one big plank of it is the federal research funding. Having money in appropriations this year and next year and subsequent years and helping to initiate programs in federal agencies in the US and make sure that we have the models and observations that we need to work on these kinds of questions. That's like a first big plank of what we're doing. And we've been more successful than average in that, because normally it takes longer and harder to do these kinds of things. But at least that's what I was told. I think we're pretty... I don't want to say that we're happy, but we're gratified that we've got some money going already in the federal system.
Kelly Wanser: Part of another plank of what we're doing is to try to catalyze philanthropy, some people are under the impression that maybe there are deep pockets somewhere that are funding work in this area and that's not the case. Relatively modest amounts of funding in research that in the areas that I'm talking about are pre commercial. These are not venture investments. This is research. But in key research can also be extremely helpful. And then the third plank that we work on is how we communicate about these things and get different constituencies into dialogue about them, and help position this in a way that's constructive and not too esoteric if that makes sense.
Jason Jacobs: Do you have a big team that's doing this is just you?
Kelly Wanser: No, I have a small team, not a big team and I've got some professional partners in DC who helped with the mechanics of how you work the political grounds. I've got a pretty sophisticated advisory board and some very dedicated funders who've been also very supportive.
Jason Jacobs: And are those individuals, family offices?
Kelly Wanser: Individuals and family offices primarily. This hasn't been a category of foundation funding or traditional grant funding, at least not yet. We're hoping that it might move in that direction.
Jason Jacobs: What are the fossil fuel companies think about this?
Kelly Wanser: So that's super interesting question, because I think the answer to it's a little bit counterintuitive. Because some people who have been worried that this would be something that they would embrace. It turns out, because I've spoken to a couple of the large ones about it, and I was told that they would never fund something like this, that it would be tying them too closely to the outcomes of what's happening in the climate system. It's not something that they would engage on, which I found not what I expected.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah, I just watched Merchants of Doubt yesterday on the plane.
Kelly Wanser: All right. Okay.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah. So now I'm like playing detective all the time because it's like, "Oh, I get it." It's like say that it's to keep the planet stable and that's for the good of all humankind. And really the friends of humankind is made up of this fossil fuel CEO and... yeah.
Kelly Wanser: Yeah, well, and some of them, at least are making meaningful investments in carbon removal. And I personally think if it's meaningful and serious that, that's not a bad thing. But in this category, I don't think some people would be worried about them as sinister force and some people would be worried about or thinking that they're in the back pocket as a savior. But I don't see any indication that they will get involved in this particular area.
Jason Jacobs: What are the biggest thing? And I know we talked about the different buckets, right? There was like the contrail people and the tinfoil hat, right? And then there was the insider in the scientific community that say, there's so much that we don't know, we don't know what we don't know, right? And I've done some reading, you're a zillion times more deep in it than I am. But, for example, what impact be on weather patterns? Or will it be increasing drought or causing famine? Or how do we regulate because if we do it in one place, then it's not... Like if you pollute in a river, it affects that river, right? It affects that local community. But with this, if one rogue nation or rogue group does it in one place, it could affect the whole planet, right?
Jason Jacobs: Or it could affect something on the other side of the planet that had nothing to do with the place that did it, right? I'm just spitting out some of the concerns that I've heard in the wild. And maybe just react to those and if I missed any big ones, then it'd be great to hear what those are as well.
Kelly Wanser: Yeah, well, I think you hit a lot of the big ones, which is, what if somebody else goes to do this, and we don't know what will happen? What if people try to do it directed in one part of the world and it affects other places? And what about variable outcomes or bad outcomes for people, from what happens? I think those are all in the big top tier of concerns. And first answer to this is, we have such a low base of information that we really can't answer questions even to know whether currently, whether we should support the idea of these countermeasures, or we should plan defenses to shoot them out of the sky. When I talked to policymakers about this, our level of information is too low for a policy response. If another country went and launched a serious program in this right now, because those questions are serious, open questions. We've got some basic work to do, just to get ourselves to the level of saying, "Is this a plus or minus? Or where do we sit?"
Kelly Wanser: The thing that scientists that I know in the field are saying about it currently, although with some variations is that it's likely, especially with the stratospheric form, that you would have a relatively widespread positive effect versus what happens if the earth continues to warm. Because if the earth continues to warm, most places around the world they get less and less livable. And by constraining that warming, by limiting it, most places around the world are better off with just a small fraction, less than 5% that are worse off in most of the modeling up till now. However, the things that we have trouble predicting about climate, are the same things that we have trouble predicting about what happens with these interventions. So there are lots of things in the earth system that we can't forecast very well and there are some big risks that we don't understand.
Kelly Wanser: One of the things that I learned about relatively recently is when you put material in the stratosphere it changes the distribution of cooling and heating in the horizontal layers of the atmosphere. So the outer atmosphere actually warms up, and the cooling is unevenly distributed. It can change the way the whole atmosphere circulates. And that's something we don't understand. That's a good reason to say, "Hey, there are some very serious macro level risks associated with this, that we would want to understand before we said this was a something we want to do." However, it also looks like it's incredibly promising versus letting the world go to two and a half or three degrees. Like that, comparatively speaking, it's a much better world.
Kelly Wanser: Those are the things to me that compel urgency in terms of studying this stuff, because the risks are, they're real, and some of them may be showstoppers. But at the same time, two and a half, three degrees is a showstopper. So that's where I think those questions are, they're absolutely legitimate questions. But until we have more information they're not showstoppers and they're not green lights.
Jason Jacobs: Isn't there just as much unknown about the two and a half or three degrees than there is about solar geoengineering? We can't say more confidently, that things will get dire with two and a half or three degree. My point is that things could be worse at two degrees than we think or things could be better at two degrees than we think. And actually, I've heard contradictory perspectives from within the scientific community about what it will take for things to get bad or things will definitely get worse as it gets warmer, right? But for example, how much... Like the same way that this is like reducing a fever to use your analogy. In a way adaptation is as well, it's like better flood planning, for example, not forced migration in a panic but planned migration in advance. Or I don't know, I'm just spit-balling.
Jason Jacobs: But my point is that this is only one potential lever that we have. And there are other ones that may be less effective, but also have less unknown unknowns.
Kelly Wanser: I think those questions definitely come up. And I'm certainly not a person who's going to claim to be able to say exactly what the projected state of Earth system is. In the future, however, I think there's a fair amount of consensus, is sort of gradations of severity. And the problem with this heat stress on the system, and the idea of adaptation, and the idea of slower moving solutions, is whether that's a linear thing that gets gradually worse and we can adjust, and there's not a massive amount of suffering for people, or whether we have more abrupt and severe level of changes.
Kelly Wanser: That mean a lot of suffering and a lot of things you can't adapt to. And that unknown right there, I'm a person who will say, look, going back to the conversation from the beginning, there's some material possibility that we have abrupt and severe, unadoptable risks that put hundreds of millions or billions of people in play, a lot of infrastructure, a lot of global security, a lot of our food supply, a lot of things that we need to live. These measures, it comes to like, well, what's the portfolio best that we're making. And I'm for having a portfolio that's got a good mix against where the level of risk might be. Because there are some indications that we've got a fast moving, high severity situation in which adaptation and slower moving measures might not protect enough.
Kelly Wanser: You could argue differently and I personally, I would love to be wrong. But if you go to Pascal's Wager or something, like if you make a bet, and you put some modest level of investment into these fast acting countermeasures, and you turn out to be wrong, it's like nuclear deterrence or something. If you don't have them and you need them, then that's not a bet you can recover from later.
Jason Jacobs: I'm worried about the unknown unknowns of the [inaudible 00:49:58] here, obviously, right? But I get your point that without doing research, we don't even know how to think about it. And we don't know what we don't know. But some of the things we don't know, we still don't know, but some of the things we don't know, we actually can know, right? And we can know, at a very small scale with safeguards, right. And again, I might be speaking over my head but that's what I can gather, right?
Kelly Wanser: No, you doing well, you doing well.
Jason Jacobs: In that regard, my inclination will be, well, let's do some basic research. But here's one concern that I have, right? Is that, I don't know if this is the right term, but the term that I'm going to use even though I don't think it's the term I'm really going for, but it's late and my words aren't that crisp, but it's sunk cost, right. And, and the reason I bring that up is that it's, "Hey, I'm not, I have no intention of..." Cigarettes is a good example. "I am not a smoker." "No, no, it's like just fine drink like, I might have one. I'm not a smoker only when I drink." Every smoker will tell you the story that that's how they started, right? The reason I bring up that analogy, right? Is that it is a bit of fear as it relates to solar geoengineering research, where it's, "Oh, no, no, no. We're not doing it. We're not doing it. This is just research, just so that we understand it.
Jason Jacobs: It's just so that we know how to regulate it in case other people try to do it." I think I've even caught people, when I've watch interviews or things like that kind of slip a little bit where they say, "Well..." They don't maybe say it as explicitly, but it's, "Well, we'll researching for now until, but I mean, yeah. If you're asking me, it seems like it should, it could, it would, it will." There's almost, I can see that it's what starts with..." Research is a gateway drug, right. It's like, one you're doing some of it, it's like the seal's broken. Now if the seal is broken a little more, a little more, a little more, next you know you're a smoker, right? So anyways.
Kelly Wanser: Yeah, I think there's a big line of objection to this for on the argument is sometimes called the slippery slope or the inbuilt momentum. You start research, you get an embedded community, you get... You have this inevitable progression towards this outcome.
Jason Jacobs: I'm not a podcaster I'm just going to do one episode just, for fun. [crosstalk 00:52:38], 70 episodes. It's like, "Oh, man, I'm going to [inaudible 00:52:43] podcaster." "No, I just want to do this thing on the side and-
Kelly Wanser: I know. I was just going to go on a couple of meetings on geoengineering, I know. The flip side of the coin, and you get into one of the interesting things about this category is it raises these larger societal questions and people are even more concerned about the slippery slope of technology because of what's happened with the rapid development and unanticipated consequences of faster moving technologies like social media or Nano tech or what have you. There's a meta discussion going on about the whole slippery slope concept and are we stopping ourselves to ask questions before we just plough into these kind of technologies. The irony of this particular case, is that geoengineering research actually is very slow and very linear and very expensive. It's not a runaway technology in the way some people are concerned about, it doesn't have a commercial and it's all base. But it does to this point of, does it create its own momentum and its own inevitability? I think that's a potential question.
Kelly Wanser: At the same time, one of the things that you have to do when you research intervention in the climate system is you have to look very closely at what the climate system is doing, and the things that are causing it to change. And so you're up close and personal to the system in a more applied way, like an engineer is. Climate research has been pretty academic. So now you're up close to the system is like, one of the things that was highlighted for me maybe five or seven years ago was how much it highlights how you need to get greenhouse gases out of the system. In that way, it's a bit more like chemotherapy. It's like the closer you get to looking at... Trying to counter this cancer, the more quitting smoking seems like a good thing to do. People don't like that analogy, it's not the most appealing, right? There's the possibility also, that the research could actually cast light on or even propel action than these other areas to say, "Oh, we'd much rather the system was here and here and that we didn't have to try to do it this way.
Jason Jacobs: If that's the case, could we make progress faster if we stopped talking about solar geoengineering and started talking about better modeling and prediction? Because that's the layer one that you would need to look at the solar geoengineering anyways, right? And that's a thing that's lacking to help us all get a better understanding, but by mentioning solar geoengineering scares people into preventing us from actually doing that level one, that would be much less controversial.
Kelly Wanser: Well, maybe, but I appreciate the question because one of the first things we did at SilverLining was with other experts in the fields, we developed a report and the report is called National Imperative for Research in Climate Intervention in our System Prediction. We look at the problem the way you're describing, which is you can't separate studying research and solar geoengineering from being able to predict what the Earth's system is doing. But one way to look at it is that you're scaring people by talking about these interventions. The other way is by looking at the system in an applied way, as a system you're trying to manage. You're actually more focused on having the right tools.
Kelly Wanser: And so do these climate models really reflect a real system? And do we have the statistical probabilistic and other modeling methods to try to actually really forecast what's happening? So it could be, and it's actually proven to be the case in our conversations in Congress, that it's actually a different way of driving investment in the models and predictions and research that we need to understand what the system is doing, because it's moving it out of an academic category into applied category, a system that we're trying to manage.
Jason Jacobs: So if we want the US to get the analytics, we need some rogue nation to threaten to hit the button and launch all this stuff into the stratosphere, and then the US will race to catch up to understand. I'm just joking.
Kelly Wanser: Well, it's a variation of the argument, that says, "Hey, we need to understand this in case we owe somebody else, actually. And that argument is actually really compelling one to policymakers, which is everyone is reading the same reports you are and seeing that we're in this highly risky situation. And in some parts of the world, these severe impacts are occurring now. By 2025, it's predicted that in the city of Calcutta, there will be zero days where it's safe to work outside. You have places in the world where direct heat stress, drought and other things are creating severe conditions. And so people are realizing, "Hey, this is starting to come on the radar in other parts of the world as a top." And in China, they have a small research program already. And they have a precedent for quite large weather modification programs. And so if you're the US, I grew up in the fine American tradition of leadership in these things, and saying, "Well, I would like to ensure that we know at least as much as anybody else about these things, if other people are starting to look into them."
Jason Jacobs: Well, just as an exercise, let's pretend there's zero constraints and that someone handed you the keys and said, "Okay, Kelly, you've convinced us and here's a skeleton key and you can make whatever changes you want. You can bring this about in whatever way you think it will be the right way to do it." Not the best we can do, given our current political climate or funding environment or things like that, but just the best way for us to most efficiently and effectively and safely get into the position we need to be to protect the planet. What would you do? And how would you stage it?
Kelly Wanser: From my perspective on Make It Simple, there are sort of two sides to the coin, what are the kinds of response measures we have to keep the system stable? And what do we need to do to restore it to health. I'm not an expert in all of the things we need to do to restore it to health, but to restore to health, I would characterize it as we have to bring greenhouse gases back to, close to pre-industrial levels. And we have to have pretty large need of natural systems that are supporting biodiversity.
Kelly Wanser: And we need to avoid letting the system move too far out of its current state. So that's what I'm saying about natural systems. Or that's what I'm saying about the restoring to health part. All of the portfolio that people are working on, starting with, what are the economic drivers like carbon fees or taxes or other things to move our social economic systems into supporting a healthy state of the earth system. All of those things if I could wave a magic fairly wand, I'm not an expert. I would say, how can we build in price of carbon, investments and research and innovation on things that remove carbon and green all of our different economic sectors, right. But that's not my personal area of focus, because lots of people are working on that. In my personal area of focus, if I could wave a magic fairly wand-
Jason Jacobs: And just to be clear, that's a helpful perspective to look at the big picture. And I'll let you go because I wanted to hear your perspective on that. But that wasn't actually the question I meant. The question I meant is within the context of your work, if someone gave you the skeleton key and said, "Okay, funding is not an issue political backlash is not an issue, we will clear the way for you to do whatever you need to do, because you know this better than anybody and so show us the way." What would you do in that scenario?
Kelly Wanser: I'll give you the small skeleton key and then the large fairy wands. We're starting from a situation where the global level of investment and research in this area is me being the neighborhood of seven or $8 million a year and 3 million of that is the Chinese program and another 2 or 3 million of that as the program at Harvard. So barely pocket change is going into research in this area, and that includes the US government. That includes everything. The small skeleton key would say, "I'd love to see a group of philanthropists get together even at a modest level like 10, $20 million." To catalyze the low hanging fruit stuff where there are researchers that can just start to drill down the feasibility of these things and modeling efforts and data efforts.
Kelly Wanser: The big fairy wand is to say, the United States is a really important player in this area. Because the assets that it takes to study the Earth system are big. You need the satellite observations, aerial observations, money, lots of researchers, giant supercomputers. And my magic fairy wand and ultimate goal would say, I'm with the Center for American progress that would say we need to double our investment in climate research in the United States, so that we can accelerate our ability to predict your system and we need to get the tech industry bringing some advanced techniques onto it faster. And in this particular category, we need to make investments across multiple science agencies to get each of them going on their different angles on the problem and have active technology, modeling data and experimental programs in the stratospheric approach and the marine cloud approach. And probably another approach called [inaudible 01:03:22].
Kelly Wanser: And that we need those things to be done in a concerted way over five to seven year period, so that we can then have enough information for policymakers to say whether any of these things are relevant to scale. And that type of research, we're talking about research that would have negligible environmental impact, no real risks to people or ecosystems, but lots of scientific work and lots of process level work and some technology innovation to get us where we need to be, to know whether any of these things are like an investable piece of the portfolio.
Jason Jacobs: I know these are not your areas of expertise. But I'd love to just do a rapid fire just on a few quick topics just to get a sense of where you stand, because I do think it's relevant to the discussion we've been just having. How do you think about nuclear technology?
Kelly Wanser: Again, not my area of expertise, but based on what I know from people who are more expert than me, I think it's probably quite important to achieving the scale of energy that we need to support the demands of the planet in a way that we don't rely on fossil fuels. And also that the new generation of nuclear technologies is far safer and more manageable than prior generations. And I don't think that that's well understood. I don't think that the new... what they call advanced nuclear, especially these small modular reactor technologies, I don't think that the awareness of the paradigm shift or generational shift in nuclear technology is as high as it could be.
Jason Jacobs: Do you have a point of view on the best path to net zero emissions?
Kelly Wanser: Again, not my area of expertise. But I think that nuclear energy is likely to be a pretty important part of it, and maybe a substantial piece of the portfolio. I also understand from the people that advised SilverLining who are leaders in the space that carbon capture and storage with fossil fuel technology, possibly natural gas could end up playing a pretty significant role in energy supply, and that technology is actually working today and almost economic today. I do think that it's likely that in order to meet all of the global energy needs, and what the climate system needs, that those two technologies are likely to play a big role. And they're both pretty controversial. And in parts of the environment climate community.
Jason Jacobs: How do you think about the issue of energy poverty?
Kelly Wanser: Again, not my area of expertise, but one of the people I really respect in this space, who also works with SilverLining as a funder is Rachel Pritzker, and the Pritzker Innovation Fund, and she would be somebody interesting to talk to on your podcast about these questions.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah, I don't know if she's a public spokesperson. I would love to have her on but I don't know if she's going to come on, but I talk to her fairly frequently about this stuff. Yeah.
Kelly Wanser: You talk to her quite a bit. Okay. Yeah, and various people in her circle about where these issues are. And there's also a really good TED talk on that topic from this last TED summit.
Jason Jacobs: The reason I asked is this, that if things are as dire and as close to catastrophic tipping points, like there's actually a lot we can do to get to net zero emissions faster but they have consequences. So for example, we could draw hard line and say like, no more fossil fuels, we could deploy the heck out of nuclear, right? Like there's stuff that we can do. But we don't do it because of consequences. But actually, I think if people had a choice of those consequences versus all the unknown unknowns that we're talking about here, right? They might be a lot more accepting of some of these other things, right? And if that's the case, then I feel like if we aren't blowing the doors off on these other things then we... It's like we better be before we evaluate seriously doing this. Yeah. I think that's the main point that I wanted to make.
Kelly Wanser: I think you're right in the sense that we need to put the pedal all of the way to the floor on these things. And when it comes to the idea of energy poverty, I think of the problem growing energy demand in parts of the world that don't have the same standard of living that we do. And that climate change, we're not in a really great moral position to say like, "Well, you need to slow down, like improving your standard of living and your energy demands. Because we have this climate change problem that is been created by Western countries filling up the..."
Jason Jacobs: But think about the converse to that though, is that what you're basically saying is, we are not in the moral position to say you need to stop emitting, but we are in the moral position to say keep emitting and we're just going to go and spray a bunch of stuff and we don't know what's going to happen.
Kelly Wanser: No, that's not what I'm saying. Because remember I'm saying that I look at the aerosol atmospheric interventions as strictly like a stop gap to keep things stable, not a replacement. I'm not saying to anyone we should keep emitting I guess the point I was getting at, and it's a reinforcement of your questions about nuclear and maybe CCS is we have to include in our math approaches that get these other parts of the world the energy that they're looking for some of the basics that we've had for a while. I'm not saying that's a justification for fossil fuels or geoengineering. I'm just saying we've got to have realistic math.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah. I just think it's so ridiculous that out of... It's not ridiculous that we're talking about this research if we truly are potentially approach, if what you said is right about the science, right? I think it's ridiculous so that one part of the discussion is you time to get in the bunker because this is getting so bad that we need to explore things like this. And then the other side is, we don't need you to make any sacrifices. We're entering a world of abundance which will be like never before and energy for all and right in it's like the... It's crazy how... just the dichotomy.
Kelly Wanser: Well, on your magic fairy wand idea, and this is not going to make me popular in your podcast, but I think, at the 1% end of the societal spectrum, the things that we can do to pull back I think are worth doing just on principle, and also potentially material. It's not that I'm saying that we should have a free for all. I actually think in the developed countries, especially the US, everything we can do to bolt down and reduce our emissions and our footprint we should try to do. But in other parts of the world, we're dealing with people who they didn't cause this problem, and in some places they're still looking for toilets and continuous electricity and healthcare and things that are part of some of the basic life security.
Kelly Wanser: In that way I think... Yeah, I come from Silicon Valley. Or I'm a product of Silicon Valley where I think let's figure out what we need and then let's figure out how to get there. And failure is not an option. So let's do realistic math. What do people in the developing world need energy wise and otherwise? What is the technology options available to us? And what portfolio of investments do we need to make this happen along the right time horizon? And I think we're capable of that. I really do. There wasn't an internet 30 years ago. We here, we are the people that know how to do things that actually change the way the world works in this time horizon. But we've got a multi faceted problem that we'd have to do this on a few different dimensions for it to work.
Kelly Wanser: And so it's going to be a nail biter. But failure is not an option. The stuff that I work on is to make sure that we don't let the system get too far out of whack while we're solving the problems of energy and healthy natural systems and having intelligent ways of doing things.
Jason Jacobs: If someone had $100 billion, and they said, "Kelly, this is yours, but the only way you get it is if you allocate towards the things that will have the highest impact on [riding 01:12:41] the ship as it relates to this called a carbon pickle or, climate crisis." Use whatever word you want, but where do you put it and how you allocate that money?
Kelly Wanser: I don't know if I can give you the complete answer to it. But I can tell you what I would allocate to the solutions that I'm working on now, the near term climate intervention solutions will probably be just two or 3 billion of it. And the rest of it, I would invest in a mix of ways of drying carbon out of the atmosphere, and ways of greening different critical sectors of the economy. I think $100 billion applied in the right way could actually make... And some of it would have to be applied to policy, for sure. And how we get policies that map incentives and disincentives to how we treat the Earth system is pretty crucial. But I think that one could with $100 billion applied in the right way, you could probably do it.
Jason Jacobs: Our last question is just for anyone listening that is concerned about what they're hearing and wants to know how they can help in the most impactful way possible. What's your advice?
Kelly Wanser: I'm going to go two sides to the question. One is for people who are listening, who are concerned about climate change. I like your approach to it, which is similar to my approach which is, for people to think about, where their leverage is, personally where their interests are, where their network is, where their knowledge is, and where they might intersect most effectively from where they sit. But for people who are particularly interested in these safety response options, climate interventions options, I would love to have them contact me and SilverLining because it's such an under-serviced area that both in expertise and money, a little bit of help can actually be quite material.
Jason Jacobs: I thought this was great. There's a lot to think about here. It's not a fun thing to hear. I think it's important to hear it and I think every person needs to come to their own conclusions and get to their own worldview on this stuff. But I think that one thing I can say definitively is that, regardless of where people come out, listening to this episode, I think their worldview will be much further informed after listening to this episode than it was before we recorded it, and honestly, that's all you can ask. Right? And in that regard, I think the episode was a big success. I appreciate the time. And thank you for all the work you're doing. I wish you every success.
Kelly Wanser: Well. Thank you, Jason, and thank you for inviting me. I really appreciate the format and project you've got going on, I think it's very valuable. And these kinds of discussions, I think are irreplaceable in the process. I'm really glad to be here and happy to help.
Jason Jacobs: Awesome and regardless of whether... As you know, and as everybody that listens to this podcast knows, my worldview is a work in progress. But regardless of where I end up coming out on it, and whether we end up agreeing or disagreeing, I really appreciate your intent, which is to help. That's not to say, I'm not going to end up advocating for geoengineering research is just to say that, regardless of if I do, or if I don't, everything I sense from you is that you're in it for the right reasons. And that I'm very much appreciated about it.
Kelly Wanser: Well, thanks, Jason. I appreciate that. All right. Thanks.
Jason Jacobs: Thanks, Kelly.
Jason Jacobs: Hey everyone, Jason here. Thanks again for joining me on My Climate Journey. If you'd like to learn more about the journey, you can visit us at myclimatejourney.co note that is .co, not .com someday we'll get to .com but right now .co. You can also find me on Twitter @jjacobs22 where I would encourage you to share your feedback on the episode or suggestions for future guests you'd like to hear. And before I let you go if you enjoyed the show, please share an episode with a friend or consider leaving a review on iTunes. The lawyers made me say that. Thank you.
