Could Climate Engineering Do More Bad Than Good for the Environment? (Your Radical Questions with Professor David Keith)

**Gabriel Gatehouse** (0:08)
Hello, I'm Gabriel Gatehouse, and welcome to Your Radical Questions, where we put your questions to one of our guests. It's your chance to engage directly with the radical people that we have on this podcast and to ask them about their ideas for the future. Professor David Keith from the University of Chicago joins me again. He's one of the world's leading researchers on geoengineering, the deliberate large scale manipulation of the Earth's climate systems to counteract human-made climate change.
If you haven't heard our conversation from Thursday, do go back and have a listen. It's a pretty radical, pretty controversial, deep dive into the issues. We focused a lot on the idea of dimming the sun, how you might do it, what the consequences might be, whether we should do it at all, and if we do, who gets to decide when and how.
But we touched on other possible tech solutions to climate change as well, such as carbon capture. And Professor David Keith is here now to answer your radical questions. Professor Keith, hello.

**David Keith** (1:12)
Hello there, happy to be here.

**Gabriel Gatehouse** (1:13)
It's very good to have you here again. And I think we've got a lot of engagement from our audience. Our first question comes from a former guest on this podcast, Gaia Vince, who's written about the approach that we'll need to take to migration as climate change displaces populations.
And she sent us this voice note.

**Gaia Vince** (1:31)
Hello, David. My question to you. Well, I'm broadly in favour of research into geoengineering and potentially its deployment, which may well become inevitable.
I ask you, what are you doing to protect this environmental technology from being co-opted by the dangerous political and corporate entities who are also pushing for more fossil fuel use and therefore furthering climate breakdown?

**Gabriel Gatehouse** (2:00)
I think this is the moral hazard question, David.

**David Keith** (2:04)
Yeah. So I'm doing the best I can, which is not that much is the answer. So maybe I'm doing less than I used to in the sense that when I was at Calgary earlier in my career, I was more kind of directly fighting against the fossil fuel powers.
I mean, broadly, I've tried to speak to political elites and environmental elites about climate dangers forever, and I've tried to point directly to the political power of the fossil fuel world.
Maybe it's helpful to say on a personal note that I've actually really had this up close and personal while I was a professor at Calgary. One time I had a full page ad taken out against me by the so-called Friends of Science, and I've been part of a confrontation about the oil patch at University of Calgary that actually is part of what led to me going and confronting the president on the national CBC broadcaster. So I've seen the fossil fuel companies do their thing up close and personal, and there's no question that they are fighting hard to try and block action on climate.
But I actually don't think they're succeeding. I'm very optimistic about emissions cuts these days. The world is spending almost two trillion a year on clean energy now, and I think the politics of climate have changed. Although it's not as visible as it was a year or two ago, I think that there's much broader agreement that climate action is needed than there was.
I'm pretty confident we will gradually cut emissions down. I think that's what we should focus on doing and then talk about supplementally doing these other things like something like refactoring.

**Gabriel Gatehouse** (3:42)
David, you mentioned your earlier brushes with the fossil fuel industry, and we talked on the main podcast about the company that you founded and that was then sold to Occidental Petroleum.
Did you feel uncomfortable about doing that? Was that a difficult decision?

**David Keith** (4:01)
Yeah, I certainly felt uncomfortable. I mean, as a decision, actually, as a board member at Carbonized Sharing, but a small shareholder at that point, I was more, it was more a Canadian nationalist concern. So us, me and some other early board members were really sad that it was sold to an American company. So just primarily, that was actually our principle.

**Gabriel Gatehouse** (4:17)
You were more worried that it was sold to an American company than a fossil fuel company.

**David Keith** (4:20)
Yeah, I mean, yeah, Canada is a small country. We want to keep clean tech and stuff in Canada. So if we'd had a Canadian buyer that was reasonable, we would have done that. That's separate, but as in practice, what, you know, given my duties to, as I saw them, to employees in Canada, that was how I thought about it. But yes, I of course had concerns about the oil company sale, but I also ultimately think it's reasonable in the sense that there is an element of green wash, but fundamentally the reason they're spending the money is because they believe there's a market for carbon removal. And the reason there's a market for carbon removal is because of environmental pressure forcing that market.