Episode 180: Ross Koningstein, Google
Today's guest is Ross Koningstein, Director Emeritus at Google.
Ross is currently Director Emeritus at Google and works in the tech giant's Climate and Energy R&D group. He has led a number of efforts during his time at Google. Before joining Google in 2001 as its first Director of Engineering, he was a founder at Costa del Sol Systems and CriSys Ltd. He is co-author of the IEEE article "What would it really take to reverse climate change" and presented the talk "Why Incremental Advances are Inadequate to Solving Climate Change" at the 2015 MIT Low-Carbon Energy Workshop. Ross has contributed to Google's RE<C effort (Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal) and Google's breakthrough high-efficiency data center in The Dalles, Oregon. Ross holds a B.Eng. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Carleton in 1984 and a Ph.D. in Aerospace Robotics at Stanford University.
I was looking forward to sitting down with Ross because of his perch at Google and the climate sector. We cover so much in this episode, from nuclear energy as a climate solution to carbon offsets and the role of the oil & gas industry in the clean energy future to mobilizing folks to care about climate. We also explore Ross's role at Google and why he is a techno-optimist. Ross is a great guest, and this is a must-listen episode.
Enjoy the show!
You can find me on twitter @jjacobs22 or @mcjpod and email at info@myclimatejourney.co, where I encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.
Episode recorded September 28th, 2021
In Today's episode we cover:
The work Ross does at Google, how it has evolved, and his climate journey
Why people are allergic to nuclear and how fear plays into their reaction
Ross's climate awakening and what motivated him to focus on this sector
The chicken & the egg problem of climate change
How to determine which resources are needed and where to allocate time and money in the climate crisis to make change effectively
Climate problems Ross would like the solve, personally
A discussion about technology versus policy and innovative technology versus deployment of existing solutions as it relates to tackling climate change
The most significant barriers that are holding back to clean energy transition
The role sacrifice should play in the clean energy transition and the role Ross thinks it will play, realistically
The "Mr. Burn test" and what role it plays in the clean energy transition
How to mobilize people outside of the climate sector to become climate-motivated consumers, philanthropists, investors, etc
Who should pay for the climate transition and address climate change
Why Ross is a techno-optimist
Whether it's a contradiction for financial investors to back innovation that requires future policy or not
The biggest market-based solution levers that would most accelerate climate action
The role oil & gas companies and carbon offsets will play in the energy transition
If Ross thinks there should be a price on carbon
A discussion about how cost-competitive nuclear can be
Links to topics discussed in this episode:
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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 Ross Koningstein. Ross is currently Director Emeritus at Google and works in the tech giant's Climate and Energy R&D group. He has led a number of efforts during his time at Google. Before joining Google in 2001 as its first Director of Engineering, he was a founder at Costa del Sol Systems and CriSys Ltd. He is co-author of the IEEE article "What would it really take to reverse climate change" and presented the talk "Why Incremental Advances are Inadequate to Solving Climate Change" at the 2015 MIT Low-Carbon Energy Workshop. Ross has contributed to Google's RE
I was excited for this one because Ross is a technology industry vet and a climate vet at this point. And it was really interesting to talk about Ross's roots in each of those things and how they ultimately intersected and why they ultimately intersected.
We also talk about the clean energy transition in general, the different levers at our disposal, some of the trade offs as we think about that portfolio of potential solutions. We talk about risk. We talk about capital sources.
We talk about how to take more technology out of a lab and get it to wide scale commercial deployment. We also talk about the role of policy, the role of academia, the role of industry and the role of capitalism in general. At any rate, really interesting discussion and I'm excited for you to hear it. Ross, welcome to the show.
Ross Koningstein: Thanks a lot. Really glad to be here.
Jason Jacobs: Thanks for coming. You might not know this and I didn't mention it in the prep, but when, when I was just heading down this path of focusing on climate change a few years ago, we were at the same conference together. I think I even said hello. I don't think we talked much, but I said hello and you were kind of on my radar at that time and I've been following you since so I'm so psyched that you made the time to come on this little show.
Ross Koningstein: Oh, well, thank you. All right. Well, let's talk about some interesting stuff in climate.
Jason Jacobs: I'm looking Forward to it. So for starters, maybe just talk a bit about where you're at today and the work that you're doing at Google. Sure.
Ross Koningstein: So it's been a, a bit of a convoluted path from how I started at Google to where I've ended up these days in the research group working on climate and energy. But the types of things that I've been involved with lately... I guess at Google you tend to have often several projects at the same time.
So one of my big ones is our carbon aware computing, where we shift our load around to try to align better with carbon-free energy and this, you know, helps reduce emissions and gets also supportive of, of Google's 24/7 initiative. I have other efforts that are more research-oriented, in other words, they don't couple into products directly.
I help through our group sponsor research, for example, at a couple of universities in Nuclear Excitation via Electron Capture, which is a recently observed form of nuclear transition that might have an energy option. So that could be really cool for, let's call it, designer nuclear power for portable applications.
Jason Jacobs: I mean, I'd love to talk about your progression within Google, but before we even go down, 'cause I know you've been there a long time, but before we even go down that path, how did you come to care about climate and energy? When did that start? Where did that come from? How did that manifest?
Ross Koningstein: Sure. I mean, I guess like, unlike some folks, I grew up about two hours down river of a nuclear power and research installation. So as a kid in grade school and intermediate high, we had field trips and I got to hold fuel rods in my hand and stand next to a reactor and see the glow of product in the water tanks.
And I never really had a fear of nuclear energy and it kind of seemed obvious to me as a kid that this was deploying in Ontario, where I lived. The price of electricity was cheap. It just seemed like a very logical way to go. And then when I went through university, I took engineering and did some basic power courses. And again, I never worried about energy and climate. It just seemed to me that this would just happen.
Jason Jacobs: Why is it that people that grow up in close proximity to nuclear, why does some of them go to the direction of being acclimated and being comfortable and being used to it and being excited by it and then others of them grow up so allergic to it when the proximity is the same?
Ross Koningstein: Well, I don't know. I mean, fear works in interesting ways, but I'm speaking with some of my colleagues here in the US who have never been to a, a nuclear power plant. You can only imagine what goes on in there. And the media keeps repeating that it's scary and that it's terrible. And you just don't have any positive evidence really that you could say, "Oh, well, I've spoken with the people who operate these plants or these plants are the cleanest power plants I've ever seen."
And you know, it's like, okay, waste is bad, but you know, if we put our effort into it, we can detoxify it or get rid of it or whatever. It's just that if you think it's all bad, then you wanna just stay away from it and have less of it, you know. It's tough. The movie Pandora's Promise, that I worked on years ago, one of the reasons that we wanted to put that movie together was to start these conversations between people.
People who were, let's call it, not rabid pro-nuclear people, but people who were like, "Hey, why don't we consider nuclear," and people who were against it, but they didn't really have enough information, knowledge, or even wisdom to have a basis for that fear. And if you can have a conversation about that, then you can explore a space where there actually is a future for advanced nuclear energy, as opposed to saying, "Now we should shut this down forever."
Jason Jacobs: Okay. Now let's come back around so that you don't lose your train of thought. So you grew up getting tours and it was kind of a part of your youth growing up and then take it from there.
Ross Koningstein: Sure. Like I said, it was something I didn't really think about that much because I didn't worry about it. I thought, "Oh, you know, technology will progress and stuff will just happen." Then I, you know, went to university, came out here to California for grad school, did a bunch of high tech startups and ended up at Google.
So over the period of 10 years or, or more, I never really thought much about energy. And then after starting at Google, I was a bit of an odd bird there because by then I was later on in my career, my days of writing software every day were kind of behind me so I went into management. But I had this background in mechanical and electrical and whatever other engineering.
So when Google started doing things in our Custom Data Centers, our energy efficiency, our renewable energy, I actually had a background to contribute to that. And that's when I realized that, unlike where I had last left the topic in my head of not worrying about it so much, it's like, oh my goodness. The state of the grid, for example, is basically worse than it was in the late '70s when a whole bunch of nuclear build out was going on.
And it looked like California was heading into becoming basically a natural gas consumer, because what else is keeping our grid going? So I worked on Renewable Energy than Coal effort, you know, concentrating solar thermal plants. I wrote the paper on what it would really take to reverse climate change.
And that for me was, I guess, the two or three year period where I, all of us sudden, shifted from, I don't really worry about this or think about it too much, to realizing that way too few people were thinking or worrying about this and the ones who were worrying about it, like the environmental groups, were very action-oriented.
Most of them were saying, "No, don't do that." Which a very few were saying, "Yes, do this." And even to the things they were saying yes to, like a lot of renewable energy at Sierra Club, for example, you'd have one side of the hallway saying, "We need to build these projects."
And then every time a project came up, the other side of the hallway would say, "Oh, we can't, you know, build something huge in the desert or we can't do something offshore or whatever." And so there's this tension of how do we actually get to a carbon-free future and I think that tension still resides here. And so I think there's a lot of room for planning out, what do we want our future to look like, given that people will use energy.
Jason Jacobs: And so just from a time scale standpoint, what year did you have that, what sounds like an awakening?
Ross Koningstein: I think that sort of started around 2011 and then probably I locked it into a change of what I wanted to do at Google by about 2014.
Jason Jacobs: And so many of our listeners are people who have had similar awakening, some of them decades ago and others of them last week. So I'm sure they'll wanna know when you first had this awakening, where did you start? What did you do? How did you think about that?
Ross Koningstein: So for me, that article, What it Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change, was kind of a profound challenge from our VP. He said, "Aside from publishing technical materials, tell me, what did we really learn from Google's renewable energy efforts that spanned about five years or so?" And that's like a deeply philosophical kind of wisdom type of question.
That article was basically the response to that question. And it was partly soul searching, it was partly looking at, what is it that is important to solving climate change? Why are so few people looking at it and why are we not actually planning for success?
Like for example, everybody understands a portfolio approach to accomplishing any kind of goal, whether it's in business or politics or, you know, whatever, and yet we are really not playing that game particularly effectively in climate. We're heavily loaded on activities we can accomplish now. And humanity tends to overestimate what it can do in the short term, and it really underestimates what it can do in the long run.
And so, while I'm not trying to say we shouldn't be doing the short term efforts, I think we need to add a bunch of efforts that are geared towards creating more options for us in the future to really address major challenges in solving climate change, like, you know, how do we pull 1,000 gigatons of CO2 out of the atmosphere and oceans?
How do we keep the climate reasonably habitable for populations that are gonna experience extreme stress in the coming decades? Right? These are things we can't just wish that we're on a path where everything is great because it's not. So let's, let's take into account those things that we can do now. And those things that, where we need to invent technologies to address them later.
Jason Jacobs: While you had a job at Google that was not climate and energy-focused, yet you were hungry to start gathering this information, was this nights and weekends? Was it books? Was it the internet? I mean, how did you get yourself up the learning curve?
Ross Koningstein: Well, my years on the Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal effort had already taught me a lot of things about the structure and the way energy and policy works. And the project I was working on at the time when I was going through this change was actually still an energy project, but it was looking at a very specific problem, a useful one, but it wasn't tackling what I then believed to be the bigger problems like how do we pull CO2 back to 350 PPM? Or how do we avoid some of the worst aspects of climate change.
Instead of looking at energy as a, this is what we want people to adopt or force people to adopt, what are people likely to adopt and how do we create more of that? And that was really where my mind went. And it's when I started spending more time actually looking at scientific publications, looking at what is at the edge of research that might actually become useful and thinking about, for example, the nuclear fusion, right?
People make annoying jokes about it always being on the horizon, but the reality is that it's an engineering problem. It's a difficult one, but there are people that are working on it really hard. And if I could crisp it down to this one kind of notion, it's like we have these people that are really trying to make something work.
How could Google accelerate their progress in order to create a better future? And that's really how my mind was framing it. And then it was like... The problem became two separate problems. One was, how could I get resources within Google to make that happen? And other is what could those efforts look like?
Jason Jacobs: So what was the initial theory of change? And then how did you solve that chicken and egg of needing to show evidence of, of it working to get the resources, but needing to have resources to show evidence of it working?
Ross Koningstein: Oh, that's a great question. I think that that kind of chicken and egg problem is, you don't have it when there is an alignment of vision between some key decision makers. So if you've got a couple of people, let's say, if there's a mandate in a part of the org to make a difference in energy for the future, then you've already got a hook, right? And then it's the case of every company has something like this.
It's like, if we're gonna spend time and money on this, then why should we do it? Why should it be done at all? And why should we do it now? You know, 'cause it sort of figures out this fit. If it needs to be done, but there's no way for a company to do it well at all, then it, it really doesn't make any sense. So it's this little Venn Diagram intersection of things.
And I think that's part of what makes the whole climate thing interesting is that what Google could do, for example, to partner with this fusion company to help them is what was in Google's wheelhouse, but there's other companies working on other neat things that have problems that might actually fit into other tech companies' wheelhouse.
So it would be fun for people in general to say, "Oh, you know, if there's a company doing some form of fusion that they like, are they experiencing a type of problem because of the way that they are approaching it, that maybe somebody who's doing large scale CFD, Computational Fluid Dynamics, or somebody who's doing really sophisticated high speed control systems, maybe that is their avenue to accelerating that type of energy."
Jason Jacobs: And as you thought about the initial resourcing required and the initial entry point of things that you would try, what did you come up with as a starting point and maybe take us through that entry point and key learnings and then maybe some of the highlights over the last few years of how your thinking and resourcing and problem solving has evolved.
Ross Koningstein: Sure. I guess the initial concept behind starting a nuclear energy R&D group at Google is that Google itself is not gonna build a nuclear lab. It's, you know, like [laughs] specialized groups of people, specialized facilities, all that have to go into it. And furthermore nuclear actually has a lot more dimensions to it, I think than most people think.
Like people hear the word nuclear and they think the Simpsons or they, they think Chernobyl or whatever, and it's all bad. But Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imagery, NMRI, the name got shortened to MRI because people didn't like putting nuclear in there, there are many nuclear technologies that might offer a path. And so the concept was pitched as, "We've already done a bunch of things in renewable energy and we're starting to understand what the limitations are of that."
If we want to really have carbon-free energy that scales in a number of different situations like in the north, for example, where it's dark and maybe not windy all that often, or in really humid areas in Asia, for example, where you don't have enough land area to do a lot of renewables, then we need other forms of energy. And if people don't like the pressurized water technology from the 1960s, okay, I, I can kind of get that for a number of reasons, but technology doesn't stand still.
If you make it move forward then these are the things that could happen. And so we identified a couple of different areas where we saw that Google could help move the needle. One of them was in a fusion collaboration which was based on a project pitch that one of our engineers had, and it was a beautiful pitch, but we had to have a group it with resources in order to host that project. So starting the nuclear energy R&D group actually made that possible.
Then we wanted to allow for Federal Government policy to enable a lot more innovative R&D 'cause that part of the budget was very small. So we worked with some groups in Washington DC, NGOs who were putting together a campaign to increase the ability of federal policy to support innovation in various types of nuclear technologies. And you know, those folks have been quite successful.
And lastly, at the time there was an interest in things going on in cold fusion. Now, I'm not like a cold fusion believer, but I do know in the scientific area, if you completely shut off an area of science to any investigation, then that withers and it, you know, you can destroy people's careers.
So the stuff that we saw in cold fusion was really bad science as opposed to bad topic area. And so we wanted to see if you had a bunch of really smart scientists say, what would they look for in that area in which cold fusion was reputed to be? And we funded them for a couple of years to actually examine those set of conditions, which turned out to be really, really difficult to create and sometimes observe.
Jason Jacobs: And what was the motivation from Google at the time of supporting these efforts? Was it purely for the collective good or was there any self interest involved and if so, what did that look like?
Ross Koningstein: I think in any situation where you have people making decisions, they're gonna be doing it both because they have a long term view that there might be something good that comes out of it for society, and often it's because there is a personal interest component.
And like I was saying at the intersection of why different companies do what, in our case, the plasma fusion partnership was a very clear fit for why Google could move that needle forward. And so once we had landed in that topic area, that one seemed like a really positive way to move forward. So I think, to answer your question, it's a bit of both and I'm sure it varies all over the place.
Jason Jacobs: Are there particular problems that the department is focused on now? And if you can't say, then maybe talk about particular problems that you're personally quite interested in, in thinking through solutions for.
Ross Koningstein: If I speak to my own interests, I think that what I've been trying to identify in the last couple of years is a way to communicate that there are several different ways our future could play out. And if you think about achieving, what is a goal? A goal is, for example, solving climate change, or even halting the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere like Project Drawdown wants to do. Then there are many different plans or approaches one could take to achieving that. And you can't really say, "We're gonna put all our money on one plan and force it to work." That's not a great strategy to achieving a goal.
And I would liken people saying, "Oh, you know, we have to, for example, cover California's deserts with solar panels and put wind on all the shores and, and then hope somehow we can still make our airplanes fly and, and grid work." So that's a plan, but it's best if you have other plans that can fill in the gaps or take cover in case things don't work out.
And so I like to think of what are the probabilities of different scenarios happening and then maximizing the probability that we achieve our goals. And so I've used that kind of framework and talking with people to uncover, I guess, what you would call the obvious, which is, we need to have a, a large scale energy transition, but what might seem less obvious to people is, we can't just will that to happen in 20 years, you know.
Energy is, is a system that takes decades for industrial scale changes to happen. And I think expecting it to change, you know, including electricity as well as fuels and stuff, expecting that to change in 20 years, I think is being way too optimistic. If you give it a probability scale, then you'd say, "Oh, maybe there's a 5% chance it could happen in 20 years," but you know, the 50% chance is really more like decades.
So then you say, "Well, given that what other things are true? And then, well, we're gonna have higher CO2 levels. So we're gonna need to pull more CO2 down. We're gonna see, you know, the types of temperatures and weathers that we don't wanna see. That means we're gonna have to have things to mitigate those." Are we putting development in R&D dollars into the areas that are solving the problems that we're likely to see in the next 30 to 50 years? That's kind of where my head has been at.
Jason Jacobs: And if, if you think about breakthrough new technologies versus better deploying what we've got, or if you think about this technology versus that technology, or if you think about technology in general versus policy, are you more focused on finding singular solutions that can have outsized impacts? Or is it more looking at the system overall and figuring out how to get the system to transition faster? Or both?
Ross Koningstein: It's kind of at the intersection of those two, you know. Like if you look at Drawdown, for example, there are literally hundreds of things that one could do. But categorically, if you look at what it takes to really move the needle on the climate change experience for people in the next, let's call it, century, energy transition requires real solutions for the grid and real solutions for fuel.
Options like for fuel to make fertilizer or stationary applications, and then a solution for portable power applications. So each of those problems are hard and they're kind of different economically and technically. And then carbon sequestration to remove over a 1,000 gigatons, we need to do that in a way that costs almost no money and has almost no environmental detriment to the planet.
That's an interesting set of challenges right there. And there, there aren't too many paths that you can go down that would get there. And there's so little money that's going into that, that, that is an area of concern that I have that I would, I would love to remedy. And so, yeah, it's the scale, like I would say in carbon sequestration, there's things that operate at the gigaton level, that might be useful for making synthetic fuels and, you know, creating a, sort of a, a circular economy in the fuel system.
But at the 1,000 gigaton level, it's not a collection of one gigaton solutions that solves that problem. It's actually... You need something that it's baseline of operation needs to be in the multiple gigatons. And biology is really the only one that we know of that can do that.
Jason Jacobs: So how would that manifest from a solution standpoint? So therefore I think X should exist or we should be deploying Y more actively.
Ross Koningstein: Right. Well, I would hate to say we need to do X, Y, and Z exactly, because I think that's still a, a research and development problem. But if you look at nature, what is it in nature that made it possible for nature to sequester more carbon in the distance past than the problem we face today. There was a temporary imbalance in nature. And by temporary, in this case, it's like a million or more years [laughs].
But it happened when lignin gave plants an evolutionary advantage of they out-competed each other and they were successful, but there really wasn't, let's say the large scale ability to digest lignin. And so a lot of these plants turned into coal seams and we sequestered a lot of carbon that way. I think that could be used as a model for how do we think about solving this problem today?
Well, our tools in bioengineering and biotechnology are getting better and better. Our understanding of ocean ecological behavior and what is good and what is bad and water columns are getting better and better. So essentially we are getting better and better at solving a problem that exactly needs the tools that we have and are developing.
So I see a convergence there where we would be able to, for example, if we put our mind to it, create a deliberate imbalance in nature that we control, that causes more biomaterial, for example, to sink to the bottom of the oceans. It's biomaterial so it's, you know, basically not bad for the environment and it's carbon containing, so it helps create an atmosphere that we prefer.
Jason Jacobs: And for people that are interested in learning more about this concept, are there organizations that have expertise in this area or companies that are working on this problem that you're excited about? Are there... Is there an anything going on or, or anyone thinking, writing, or acting in this area that we should know about?
Ross Koningstein: Yeah. So for example, I think maybe the easiest thing to search on is looking for algae beds that are being cultivated out in the ocean for carbon sequestration and like Brian Von Herzen's work, for example, in this space is really quite interesting. He, in turn, is supported financially by philanthropic dollars and works in a community of people who are ocean ecology-oriented.
So it tells a very interesting story that some people might consider this work. I don't know, scary [laughs] in some way, and yet it's actually occurring in the open, it's being done scientifically and it, it is collaborating with people who are very ecologically-minded, as well as people who are philanthropically-minded.
Jason Jacobs: So I wanna ask, come back to something we were talking about before about you can't just will the transition to happen in 20 or, or 30 years and how it, it takes time to play out on the fuel side and on the electrification side. What are the biggest barriers or gaps or knots or things that are holding back that transition from occurring practically?
Ross Koningstein: I think the answer to that is different for almost every little slice of the pie you look at, for example, phasing out liquid fuels for automobiles faces a whole hurdle of challenges many of which are... Like, for example, let's look at fire trucks and ambulances. Let's say we wanted to make them carbon-free and electrify them.
Well, that actually conflicts with a need in those services to be available to send those trucks anywhere, anytime and if they need to be refueled in order to get somewhere further, that needs to happen without delaying their arrival time. That sector would be almost folly to decarbonize anytime soon, anyway, because the risk to life and limb is much worse than the gain you would get by the small CO2 savings you would see.
On the electric grid, for example, if we mandated going over to, you know, renewable storage, I think we would see pretty rapidly that the cost of incorporating the storage would be really a problem, especially when you, you wanna figure out how do I, you know, keep the grid working in the middle of the winter when solar isn't so high here in California.
And each one of these situations is very interesting because if you want to conclusively prove that something can be done, you don't wanna take something to the quarter way point and then make an argument that that could take it to the 100% point. What you wanna do is you wanna take a sizable representative set, like let's say a medium-size city in Arizona or one in North Dakota and disconnect it from the grid and put in an alternate solution that you think would work and then see, what does it practically take to make that happen?
And once you've done that and you've worked through the kinks, then you can say, "Here is what 100% solution looks like." And I think this is something that is missing from the planning process. And it's why I say you can't just force something to 100%. You need to show people that it can be done and that it can be done economically, because if you don't, you're gonna be fighting people who are gonna doubt that every step of the way.
Jason Jacobs: So have you given any thought to structurally what we might do to try to foster environments for that type of proof point to happen more frequently across more areas in a more timely way?
Ross Koningstein: Oh, that's a great question. The role of policy, and I guess the willingness to experiment together, are really important components to making that work. You can't conduct an experiment like this in an area that doesn't want to incur some of the downsides on the path to getting maybe where you're happy in a medium.
And on the policy side, whenever you make a transition, that means investing in, in new types of infrastructure investing in change and that costs money. If you're asking for people to go through the problem and cough up all the money personally within their little area, that's probably not a great thing either. So the role for federal or state dollars there I think is also pretty important.
Jason Jacobs: And before we started recording, we talked about how there are certain words that are kind of these generalized hot button words that are polarizing just to say them. And one of those words, which we didn't talk about, is sacrifice. So one question I have for you is, or two questions, what role should sacrifice play in the energy transition? And then a follow up is what role do you think realistically that it will play? And those might be the same answer. I don't know.
Ross Koningstein: Okay. That is a, a really tasty question. If you don't mind, I'd like to frame it using a slightly different, but parallel word, which is care. So I'll use the example of airline travel. So in order to reduce my carbon footprint, you know, I don't travel all that much, but realistically I wouldn't probably travel super a lot anyway. But let's say you were to say, "How much would I sacrifice in my travel?"
And when I was younger, I might answer, "Oh, you know, I'd be willing to sacrifice a fair amount and, and not travel much at all." But now that I'm, you know, a little older, my daughter has moved to the East Coast and my wife and I are certainly going to visit her, and our parents are getting old in Canada and we're certainly going to visit them.
And so it's not like we don't care about the environment, but the things that we care about in terms of our family and connections, rank higher. And so we are not willing to make that sacrifice of cutting down on our aviation in order not to see our daughter or not to see our parents, and I think this is like a very personal story.
I'm sure people can come up with very rational or perhaps rationalized stories for themselves, but it explains some of the reasons why it's hard to get to 100% reduction, for example, in aviation or 100% reduction of gasoline automobiles, or name these other things that people can care about something to an extreme amount, for a limited potion of their lives, I believe.
And so a durable solution is one that allows us to have a behavior that ultimately we value at the goal level, like being carbon-free, but that we don't really need to think about it so much. It doesn't constrain our behavior that much. I think that's what a successful solution really looks like.
Jason Jacobs: A related question to that is, I've heard this term thrown around, the Mr. Burns test, how products should be better on their own two feet and climate should just be an aside and you shouldn't have to live with climate because it should be a better product.
And clearly Tesla's an example of that, where, you know, it's an EV, better for the planet, but most people that buy a Tesla, that's a nice bonus. That's better for the planet, but mostly it's just a better car, it's smoother, it's got the big screen, it's got better GPS. It's got, it's got a lot of cool... I, I actually got one for the first time in the, the last few months.
I'm, I'm loving it, but my question is, realistically, does everything need to pass that Mr. Burns test in order to, to transition expediently? Or should we expect that we should be putting up with lesser products? And it, it's similar to that sacrifice or care question. Should we be putting up with lesser products because they're better for the planet?
Ross Koningstein: That's a tough one. The closest example I can come to, something that is indicative of that, is what the US went through with the Clean Air Act and how emissions controls started coming into cars. I'd say that the first decade of impact of that on the US automotive industry was pretty devastating.
And until people really perfected the fuel injection in the automobiles, computerized fuel injection, it was a pretty ugly situation. So there was a 10 year period of hurt that was experienced after which the American automotive makers not only absorbed the fuel emission technology, but also some of the quality engineering technology. And now things are actually looking really good.
So in the long run, it worked out fine, but there was a short run period where the US automobile makers, I would say, made a sacrifice, not willingly. I think on the climate side, does every product have to lead with climate? I think, no. I think people buy most products based on other criteria and would only not buy them if their effect on the climate were truly egregious.
And also, I think the idea of messaging everything around climate can create this climate fatigue that doesn't help either. If you wanna focus people's decisions that influence like really moves the needle or, or cause a transition to happen, focus it there. Don't make it the need to infiltrate every single decision in your life.
Jason Jacobs: How important is it to convince, or... I mean, I guess convince is a loaded word. How important is it that more and more regular people who don't work in this industry for a living care about climate? Like, should they just be focused on other things and the changes that are happening under the hood at the systems level invisible to them? Or do we need them to get mobilized and active and care and support and time and philanthropy and anything else?
Ross Koningstein: So I don't think changes that happen in the system will be invisible to people. I think they will be visible. You'll see changes in job profiles, or example, as infrastructure changes from one set to another. Let's say, hypothetically, that ocean carbon sequestration at scale becomes possible and its side effect is better ecology for fish, then what you'll see is a bunch of fishermen will fish further away from the coastlines, but they'll have better catches. So things will change.
I think with energy, it's the same deal. You know, imagine if your Tesla, instead of coming with a really heavy battery, came with a small [Mist-fusion 00:40:01] kind of power plant, right? It would change the very nature of how the car is manufactured and sold, but it would be a good thing. So I don't think you'll never see the changes as they happen, but I think people will adopt them because A, there are a lot of smart engineers and scientists who are pushing on making these changes and there's more of them today than there ever were.
So I think the rate of change we're gonna see is gonna pick up. And the other is that I think there's enough savvy consumers, that, that will help pull things in a direction, that will cause things to improve. Not everybody has to be the informed, super motivated consumer. There to needs to be enough of them.
Jason Jacobs: Are you an optimist, Ross?
Ross Koningstein: Yes, I am a techno-optimist, which means that I believe that humanity has made a number of substantial improvements to its living situation over the ages and it has been because of things that we have invented and perfected.
Jason Jacobs: So I'll ask three questions that are all around the same topic. Overall in 100 years, will our quality of life be higher or lower. And then I'll ask the same question for wealthy Western countries and for developing countries and the billion plus people without basic electricity today.
Ross Koningstein: Okay. So will things be better in 100 years. Yes. We just see that, the hallmarks of that, whether you're looking at medicine or energy or transportation or computing or whatever. I think if you divide society into the developed economies and the ones that want to develop, the story there becomes more nuanced and it depends on what agreements, concessions or forcing functions are there.
I'll cite an example. So parts of Africa really want more electrical energy so that they can develop, so they can have industry air conditioning, you know, all sorts of the affordances of modern life and yet the World Bank and a lot of the investment underwriters, are basically saying they have to go with renewable energy.
Now, in some cases, maybe that's a very practical thing, but, you know, Ghana, their hydro dams, for example, are aging out and they wanna replace 'em with energy that has the same capability and it's either gonna be hydro or nuclear, but they can't really get that funded through the conventional World Bank today. So it's like... Play this out over 100 years.
So do our policies for lending money and backing investments preclude them from doing that and ending up with a grid that's unreliable and expensive? Or do we change our policy and say, "We actually are pro-development for these countries. And we want to help them adopt more modern advanced nuclear energy or whatever." And I think that's a decision that really hasn't been made. I don't think it's one that can be made right now, but it is one that the outcome of which determines the effect on powering of Africa.
Jason Jacobs: So when you hear people say that you can't untangle climate justice from climate solutions and that the people that have done the least historically to cause the problem will bear the brunt and that the wealthiest did the most to address it and they're the ones that will bear it, the least, uh, does that weigh on you or how do you think about that? And as a society, what should we be doing directionally to make sure that we not only transition but do so in a way that is as just as it can be?
Ross Koningstein: Oh boy, there are a lot of moving parts in that, that inquiry [laughs]. So is it right for a developed world to tell the developing world what energy choices they should have?
Jason Jacobs: Yeah. I didn't ask that, but that's a good question. That gets at some of the stuff I was asking. You just worded it a little better than me.
Ross Koningstein: And I think the answer to that should be no. A lot of societies in developing countries, they are very aware of what their local situation is. They have a lot of really smart people. They know what would work best there. Why don't we rely more on their feedback and help fund that? And let's pose another question along that line is, if we have a lot of carbon in the atmosphere, how do we apportion the cost for pulling it out?
Jason Jacobs: And who pays? Yeah. Who pays for it? Right?
Ross Koningstein: Who pays for that? Right.
Jason Jacobs: Because it certainly doesn't pass the Mr. Burns Test [laughs].
Ross Koningstein: [laughs] So that's a fun one. At least when you look at what's there today, you could say, "Oh, well, we, we can actually do a pretty good job of estimating who put how much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere." So at least you know what the apportioning of the bill might look like, and then there's gonna be all the political fights about how it happens.
And there's kind of the more complicated case, which is that we don't have like all the technologies, for example, to have carbon-free aviation or carbon-free grid 100% right out of the box that you could buy today or that people would want to sell today. And so, because of that, you can't just say to anybody, "Hey, you need to be like A plus on all these checklists starting right now."
We can only do things that are better than where we were in the past and hopefully keep us flexible to become even better in the future, because we don't have all the things that we need today to satisfy all the check boxes that we'd like to have is who pays for the R&D and development to create those options for the future?
Jason Jacobs: Who do you think should pay?
Ross Koningstein: So I think the two players that make the most sense actually are philanthropic capital because it's research and it's aligned with philanthropic goals. And then once you get some of the research and initial developments going, then you have technologies that require further research where government-funded science research plays a very active role on that. You just need to get it on their radar, and that requires a certain body of work.
You know, it could cost a couple of million dollars, but once it's good, the government can say, "Oh yeah, this is an area of science that is worth putting money into," like investigation into DNA, you know. Passed that test quite a while ago. Another example is technology that comes out of research that is so obviously useful right away that you just need engineering to turn it into something better.
And I think that like some of the stuff we did for solar panels, the silicon cells there fits into that kind of bucket. And so a little bit of work early on to show what capabilities there are can be followed by a bunch of value engineering to bring it to market.
Jason Jacobs: Now, if you look at the media headlines, surely there's not a lot of techno-optimism as it relates to climate change. And if you talk to the experts and granted, expert with an asterisk, since lots of experts disagree with each other and so who's the real expert, right? And that's a, that's a whole, whole other discussion, but they would say generally that there's a carbon budget and carbon's up in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.
And so a lot of what's gonna happen over the next several decades is already baked in no matter what we do, and so it's a pretty pessimistic lens. And so I guess what I'm coming back around to is make the techno-optimism case, what reasons do you have to be optimistic? And why should I and other people listening to this show share in your optimism? I hope you're right. I wanna be optimistic. And actually I am optimistic, but I really wanna know from you why you are, because so many people are not.
Ross Koningstein: Okay. So I guess my personal story is I'm an engineer. I have built a lot of things over the years, and I've worked at a number of teams and I have confidence in people's abilities to do things, you know, given a chance. And I've seen this in other groups of people too, that given the chance, finding the brightest people to work on some of the best problems and giving them resources just time and again is a way to make things happen.
And the other reason that I'm an optimist, I guess, is it depends on what stories you tell yourself. So in climate change, I think there's sort of three phases of storytelling. There's the mitigation storytelling. It's like, "Let's do things so we're not as bad." Then there's the adaptation story, which is, "Oh, dear. Things are getting worse.
You know, we need to build up the sea walls or we need to install powerful air conditioners and figure out how to power them," you know, that kind of stuff. And it's kind of gloomy too. And then there's the solution-oriented story, which is, and particularly since I'm a techno-optimist, "What can we develop that will then be adopted and takes us to the other side of this equation where we don't worry about this problem anymore 'cause it's in the rear view mirror?" Right?
And that story is a positive story. It's a story of taking on challenges, meeting them, facing adversity, finding ways around them and ultimately arriving at where you want. So that's the story I tell myself, and that's the story I like to communicate with.
Jason Jacobs: One debate I've heard about is whether it's okay, from a financial investor standpoint, to back innovation that requires future policy. How do you feel about that? Should everything that we invest in from a climate innovation standpoint be able to stand on its own two feet without future policy intervention? Or should we assume a future policy is gonna come given the inevitability and the magnitude of the problem?
Ross Koningstein: I think making any assumptions is, is generally a bad idea in that space. Like for example, if you wanted to have advanced fission reactors that are safe, like, you know, beyond their property line, there's no hazard to anybody living beyond them. You could not make that possible unless you changed policy and some of the guidelines of the NRC to support different technologies in nuclear power plants. So it's non-optional in a case like that.
There are other examples where, you know, batteries, for example. I think there's a lot of room for improvement in batteries and you don't really need that much policy, I think, to make it work because it will find a niche where it makes sense. I think you could use policy to try to force it in places where it might not fit well, but, you know, at some point like storing energy in a battery in the summer in order to pull it out in the winter is not typically a great use of a battery, for example.
Policy probably won't change that much. So I, I think batteries could do with some lightweight policy maybe to help push them down the cost curve for example. There are many things that don't necessarily need policy like hard coded in legislation, but where you need to create safe spaces for discussion. And I think this is true in, for example, the carbon dioxide removal space where people can get very upset about doing things with nature, for example.
And there already is a policy, you know, like the London Protocol. It doesn't prohibit certain types of experimentation and learning, but it does draw the line at actually doing things at scale, like in a production sense. And so even there, yes, you need long term the policy, but the short term is you need the research and the development of things that become the reason why the policy needs to change.
I think making an argument to change policy without having a, a factual thing [laughs] to base that example on is a tough sell. And back to your question about, should things be funded that require policy changes. I think sometimes that's a fine bet, but you have to know that somehow that policy that somebody's got that, you know. If you just rely on somehow policy happens without actually being specific about it or intentional about it then, yeah, I think that's not necessarily a great bet.
Jason Jacobs: So in your view, as you look at potential levers, are market-based solutions the biggest lever? Are they the only lever that matters? Are they just one of many levers? Where do they fit in the pecking order?
Ross Koningstein: Sure. So like for energy transitions, I think markets are the major driver of energy. I mean, it's 10% of the economy. It's a profit-driven enterprise, but it's also heavily subsidized. So there's, there's a lot of wiggle room to affect things for 1,000 gigaton level carbon sequestration, where each one of us personally might be on the hook for, you know, dumping 20 tons or, or more a year down there that I think is a difficult economic proposition.
But if the cost is low enough that it can be rolled into a recurring fee that we pay as part of our gas bill or whatever, then I think it's tractable and things like weather mitigation, like maybe California decides it needs to do something to create more rainfall for snow up in the Sierras, or maybe we need to keep temperatures lower by changing the way some streams work.
These things cost money, but they tend to be focused on populations. And so the idea of a government saying, "We wanna do this for X dollars that our country will pay for in order to provide this value," again, it's an economic argument, but there's a policy component to it.
Jason Jacobs: What role, if any, should the oil majors play in the energy transition?
Ross Koningstein: [laughs] Well, I know some groups would just love to shut down oil and gas and I think that's not necessarily a, a really realistic approach and would probably harm the developing world a lot and would be like shooting ourselves in the foot too. If we transition to a synthetic fuel economy where instead of pumping it up from the ground, we recycle CO2 and high hydrogen and so forth, the oil companies are actually the best suited to run that kind of infrastructure and fund it. They know how to do that.
So is there a tipping point, a logical reason why those companies would want to get into that business? 'Cause I think that would be the most effective way to reduce the output of fossil fuels and to increase synthetic fuels, is that the oil companies themselves see the reason to get into that business and make it succeed 'cause they'd make more money [laughs]. So yeah, I, I, I don't see the need to get really hostile against particular industries because they're behaving according to, to rules that, that aren't just their own. They're like a function of human behavior in economics.
Jason Jacobs: In same question, but for offsets.
Ross Koningstein: Well, offsets are pretty complicated beast. They are... You know, I think if you speak with many people, they'll say there are good and bad aspects of offsets and in the small scale, properly verified, I think offsets are probably a very tactical way to get CO2 reductions at the most efficient cost. So for example, you could argue that creating synthetic fuel for aircraft at $1,000 a ton, CO2 saving is, is not effective today as some really well verified offsets could be.
But if you're looking for an energy transition, then it's kind of like asking the offset to scale to 100% and offsets don't work that way. Offsets are useful to start a process and to help you figure out what's gonna take you to 100%, but offsets are not a way to get to 100%.
Jason Jacobs: Should there be a price on carbon and will there be a price on carbon?
Ross Koningstein: Oh, so should has a very moral connotation. Again, it gets to equity. So if you put a price on carbon, the people who can at least afford it end up having it impact their life the most. And so in that sense, I think, no. Should we have a price on carbon that somehow cause parts of the economy that can afford to pay for changes that need to occur to the system? That would be a very interesting and more progressive way to factor in a carbon price.
But ultimately, if you look at what makes carbon pricing or a tax like this effective, it's at the point where a transition is possible. So if you heavily tax carbon, for example now, without having a viable carbon-free alternative, you're just gonna make a bunch of people upset for decades.
But if you have a replacement carbon-free energy source that can take you all the way to 100% and it's just at the point where it's getting cheaper and you know you can drive it down the cost learning curve, then that is an excellent place to introduce a temporary carbon tax. Because by doing that and altering the market, you make it, the new carbon-free option cheaper and you make the carbon alternative less efficient and more expensive and you'll push that transition faster.
Jason Jacobs: Will nuclear ever be cost-competitive? And if so, what is the path to get there?
Ross Koningstein: Oh, well let me get out my crystal ball and answer that one. So first off, nuclear actually has many different flavors. So would nuclear fission of 1960s technology ever go there with reactors that we custom build on site? I don't think so. Will nuclear fission with advanced technologies that can recycle fuel and reduce waste and be safer to the property line and yada, yada.
There's a chance that could be effective in some countries. Would fusion, for example, be able to get there? Well, a lot more market possibilities across the world. So, you know, barring some demonstrations, I would sure hope so. And then there's other technologies that might come along, you know, that I won't really go into any depth here, but you never know what's around the corner, right? That might surprise you. And I think the term nuclear can encompass many different types of energy. And so I wouldn't rule it out.
Jason Jacobs: Well, last question is just, if you could wave your magic wand and change one thing outside of the scope of your control and Google's control that would most accelerate your efforts and the efforts overall in the clean energy transition, what would you change and how'd you change it?
Ross Koningstein: I guess my magic wand would be to create a climate solutions fund that was funded to the level of at least $100 million a year that was devoted to R and early development of new technologies. That would be the ones that could really solve the big problems for climate change down the road. Because, you know, you can see where climate change is going now.
I would like my wife and I and our daughter and our descendants and so on, I'd like to set up the world so that they have more options for better chances tomorrow because I know we're already working on a lot of the things that we can do today.
Jason Jacobs: And is there a specific wishlist you want to call out for areas of investment?
Ross Koningstein: I think I'll leave that one blank because I've found that in speaking with people, like for example, with ocean ecologists, right? If you ask them, "Gee, how do you think your field might actually apply really well to sequestering carbon at gigaton scale using nature's processes?" I've found that people say, "You know, nobody's ever asked me that before."
And I think if you speak to people in fundamental physics about things for various nuclear processes, you will get the same answer. And if you talk to people about applying new molecular designs to radiative forcing, for example, you'll start to see similar types of questions. So I think first we need to start asking a lot of really smart people a lot of pointed questions.
Jason Jacobs: Ross, this is has been such an awesome intellectually stimulating wide-ranging discussion. Is there anything I didn't ask that I should have or any parting words for listeners, including just who do you want to hear from if anybody and where do you need help?
Ross Koningstein: I would love to see the conversation about climate change encompass thinking 30 to 50 years down the road so that we have more people asking for our scientists and our engineers, our technicians and our, our long term philanthropic funders and our legacy donors to engage in that part of the space. That would be my ask.
Jason Jacobs: Well, thanks again for coming on the show. You've given me and listeners a lot to think about and wishing you and your team at Google every success.
Ross Koningstein: Okay. [laughs] Well, thank you so much. This has been fun.
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 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.
