Sasha Stashwick on Biden and climate change

Edward and Alasdair speak to Sasha Stashwick, climate expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), on how the Biden Administration is  gearing up to tackle climate change and  issues with the use of biomass for tackling climate goals.

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Ed: 0:06

Hello and welcome to the Economy, Land and Climate podcast.

Alasdair: 0:10

In this episode Ed and I spoke to Sasha Stashwick, a senior Energy and Climate expert from the US NGO, the Natural Resources Defense Council, NRDC,

Sasha: 0:20

NRDC and other organizations took the Trump administration to court. I think our record was something like suing bringing a lawsuit on average once every 10 days.

Alasdair: 0:32

We began by asking Sasha about her role NRDC, and how she thought the arrival of the US Biden administration would affect global climate policy.

Sasha: 0:42

Right now, I lead a lot of our work on bioenergy in the power sector. And I'm also the project lead for our pretty new work around industrial sector decarbonisation, the first thing to say is that Joe Biden ran on climate change, and he was elected on climate change. And the climate plan that he is putting forward is by a longshot, the strongest that we've ever seen from any president in American history, really, he's also filled his administration with absolutely the a team. So his administration, first of all, represents America. And it's been just really inspiring personally, for me, to see the individuals that he's chosen to place in key leadership positions. I think these are people that go to work every day, thinking about climate change, and how to make progress. And instead of thinking every day, how to dismantle protections, they're thinking every day, how to, to meet these challenges. And climate is really infused across the Biden administration's agenda. It's not a siloed issue. But as you say, you know, they are connecting the dots between climate change and the economy, jobs. So I mean, I just want to kind of share, like, I think some of the highlights of the Biden climate plan. So you know, it's a major investment in building a cleaner and more sustainable future while rebuilding the middle class that's kind of connecting the dots between, you know, climate and good quality jobs, you know, rebuilding the infrastructure of the country, for example, there's a big push, it's called the American Jobs Plan. It's a big push around infrastructure, but really centering, environmental justice, economic recovery, and climate change, no new drilling on public lands and waters, including permanent protection for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a climate test for federal infrastructure projects, requiring them to reduce climate pollution. Again, if we're making these major investments in infrastructure, we should be climate proofing our infrastructure, because we, you know, we're already experiencing a lot of the impacts of climate change. But also, you know, we should be using that investment to jumpstart the, the new, greener, cleaner industries of the future. And, you know, most recently I think, was at the heart of the the new commitments, new 2030 climate target commitments, the new American NDC to cut emissions, at least 50% by 2030. Pew Research in 2020. Did pretty detailed polling on this, and the majority of Americans support climate action. And this includes majorities of Republican voters. Two thirds of Americans across the board think that the government should do more on climate. So there actually is, um, I think, a broad base of support for, for climate action and climate policies. And of course, that support is very deep amongst the people that voted for Joe Biden, I think it's upwards of 95%. So the mandate is really there.

Ed: 4:48

And and you, you you guys are NRDC and you specifically have been writing on industrial decarbonisation and how to sort of, you know, how do you really emissions and those really tough to reach sectors but in a way, in a way that sort of means that you can still keep people on side who either work in those sectors or feel like they're, they're very connected to those sectors. I mean, I think everyone agrees that the industrial side of things is going to be pretty tough. So I mean, you know, steel, cement, you know, etc. What what, what is the way forward there? And you say, is it possible in this in the timeframe we've got?

Sasha: 5:27

in sectors like the cement industry, for example, I don't know how much you know about the process of making cement, but most of the emissions actually occur because of a chemical reaction, you know, you're heating limestone to really high temperatures. And as it breaks apart, it releases a tremendous amount of co2 into the atmosphere, that's an unavoidable chemical reaction, you can abate some share of emissions from cement manufacturing by doing energy efficiency, fuel switching electrifying some portions of the process, but the majority of the emissions are unavoidable, they come from this chemical reaction. And the other thing to say about products like cement and steel is that they are foundational to modern civilization, right. So unlike fossil fuels, where I think our goal is to ultimately be phasing them out, we are going to be, you know, using cement and steel to create our built environment. And so we really need to find solutions for these emissions in the context of the cement industry, there are a lot of really innovative carbon capture utilization and storage options for cement and other industrial sectors. I know that carbon capture and, and storage can be a tricky topic, in the context of, you know, the power sector, I think a lot of advocates point to the availability of other solutions, right, you know, renewables batteries, in the context of many of these industrial sectors, you actually cannot get to zero, you cannot abate the emissions without, without, you know, capturing them and, and, and, and either storing them, or there are some really cool and innovative technologies where you can actually use utilize the the co2 sort of reinjected into materials like like concrete, the other piece of the package of policies, I think, is government procurement is that is a huge lever, where if the government is going to be, you know, spending, you know, large amounts of money to rebuild roads, bridges, tunnels, our infrastructure, the materials used in that ought to be lower carbon materials, and, you know, the government can can use its massive purchasing power to create early markets for those those cleaner, cleaner products. And I think that's another place that that the Biden administration is doing a lot of thinking, which I see as as, as enormously positive. And then finally, I think, you know, part of the package of policies is standards, you know, ultimately, we want to be moving towards cleaner products standards that apply, not just to what the government procures, but apply to the market, overall, broadly, and I think the important thing to note is that making these investments today, putting these policies in place today, I'm sorry, is critical to getting these investments made today. So that these advanced technologies and these, you know, these sort of innovative solutions are available, you know, a decade, two decades from now, we have to get that machine started today. And it's an investment in American competitiveness. I mean, I think this, you know, from the perspective of the Biden administration, you know, they know that, you know, a carbon constrained economy, you know, is coming and and you know, jumpstarting those industries in the United States, I think is a is a priority of them.

Alasdair: 9:09

Yeah. So So, I mean, I'd like to move on to climate targets, the much publicized concept of net zero. So, do you think the recent discussions on net zero and the kind of the talk about the validity of the concept has been useful? I mean, is it useful at the moment to talk about net zero and to talk about the benefits of focusing on that policy?

Sasha: 9:38

Okay, so the first thing that I think is really important to say, in any conversation about climate change policy, but especially in conversations about netzero, is that what we know loud and clear from the IPCC and elsewhere is that what we do over the next next decade is paramount it is the most important thing is what gets done. Over the next decade and the IPCC and other scientists around the world have told us that three things need to be the pillars of that action. The first is that we need to end our reliance on dirty energy, full stop. The second is that we need an immediate transition to clean energy sources, renewables batteries, energy efficiency. The third is that we need to protect natural carbon sinks, forests, first and foremost, but also other intact ecosystems, which serve an enormously important role. So whatever governments are doing, the test of their seriousness in addressing climate change, I think has to be what they are doing on on those three fronts, and no discussion around net zero targets in the mid century timeframe, I think should happen absent a bright spotlight on immediate action over the really near term.

Alasdair: 11:31

That's really interesting. I mean, how do you think BECCS or sorry, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage is going to develop in the in the next few years? I mean, I'm asking that because I'm aware that in the UK, the UK is is seems to be in its in its climate models. And the committee on climate change seems to be looking at the quite the use of, of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage at quite a large scale. And it's in its modeling.

Sasha: 12:03

One area maybe we can talk about it is this discussion around bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, which often too often comes up in these conversations around zero. And I know it's a big part of the conversation in places like the UK. And so maybe I can just quickly say what it is first. So bioenergy with carbon capture and storage is the idea that you're going to take biomass, which is basically plants. It can be a sort of fast growing energy crops. Basically, what you would imagine growing on a farm where something is harvested, you know, every year every few years, to you know, cutting down mature trees actually taking biomass from forests, and then that is taken as fuel. It's burned in a power station. The carbon is captured at the smokestack at the power station. And then the idea is that that carbon is then injected underground. And so proponents of this technology, say that biomass, the the the idea of not using a fossil fuel, but using a fuel that can be regrown on the landscape, that that is a carbon neutral fuel, because it can be regrown. So they basically assume that that that is a zero emitting fuel to begin with. And so then when you burn it in a power station, you capture the emissions and you bury them, presumably, safely and permanently underground, the theory is that you are then actually removing emissions from the atmosphere, you're actually creating a carbon negative technology, a carbon negative power station. So I spoke earlier about the fact that, you know, we know we need to do three key things, which is get off of dirty energy, get onto clean energy, and protect the carbon in our forests and other intact ecosystems. bioenergy, it must be said, threatens all three of those goals. So at the moment, we have decades of experience with different types of bioenergy, we have over a decade of experience of burning biomass, for electricity in power stations. And everything we know about the technology, as it exists today tells us that it is exacerbating climate change. It's putting more carbon into the atmosphere. It is siphoning scarce public resources, from investments in real clean energy, like solar and wind, which actually guarantee real emissions reductions at a fraction of the cost. Yet, you know, the bio energy industry continues to really dominate in terms of just the subsidies that it's that it's receiving. And third, the industry is harming forests, either directly, or because the demand for biomass fuel is so massive, that it's driving, you know, indirectly I use change, it's skewing land use choices. So that's today. Um, I know that there's a big discussion underway, around continuing to rely on biomass burning with CCS as a form of negative emissions, a form of carbon dioxide removal. And here is where I think that the conversation around net zero becomes really counterproductive, dangerous. But I don't think that that's because it's inherently so. I think it's because you have policymakers that are willfully choosing to ignore, like I said, you know, over a decade of experience and evidence with the bio energy, industry and markets and what it means, what it means for these sort of three tests that I laid out, which is ending reliance on dirty energy moving to clean energy and protecting forest and other carbon sinks. So bio energy fails those three tests, and I think because policymakers some policymakers, I should say, are either unaware, in which case they should make themselves aware or are aware and are willfully I think, ignoring the evidence, which I think is more likely the case. There there is entirely too much reliance on bioenergy with CCS, Beck's as a form of carbon dioxide removal, that is almost being treated as a silver bullet where I think the the real danger is that policymakers feel they have permission to continue with business as usual today, because they believe that they're going to have this technology available to them at a large scale a couple of decades from now. And on paper, it shows them that it's going to deliver, you know, a lot of carbon dioxide removal, a lot of negative emissions. But in reality, I think we know, it's very likely to exacerbate climate change, erode carbon sinks, actually, again, you know, divert attention from real climate solutions. So this is an example I think of, of where, you know, the net zero debate has has really gone awry that

Ed: 18:17

should we spoke to Professor Michael Norton a couple of weeks ago, and he's he's had an environment at ESAC, European science academies. And previous price of that we spoke to the Chief Scientist at Greenpeace, UK, DPA. And both of them brought up bioenergy with CCS as a major problem with net zero, but they didn't challenge the concept net zero. But they brought that up as one of the major areas where and essentially the you've done say, so clearly, this is this is a real concern. I guess one of the questions I have, and given that you work in clean energy, but you know, a lot about land use as well is, I mean, one of the things this is this, is this, speaking specifically about that it's very subsidy driven. So the argument goes, Well, if you got rid of the subsidy, then you wouldn't have the demand for for chopping down trees. And then I guess that my other question is, well, sorry, my only question but relates to that, is, how do you get to a situation where you're actually valuing nature, as it were alive, rather than dead? More than dead in the sense of if we if, if if we do have to preserve carbon sinks and and extend them quite radically? Where does the money come from? For that, because it seems to be quite easy to find money to chop things down. It's ever more difficult to find the money for preserving them or extending them and do you think, you know, a market is required for that kind of thing for the so called negative emissions, or should we do it some other way? things being discussed in the US along those lines,

Sasha: 19:54

I am not ideologically opposed to subsidies I think when large amounts of public resources are being spent on a public good, they should deliver the public good. And in this instance, there's billions of pounds euros what however you want to speak about it, being spent to subsidize the bioenergy industry as a form of clean, renewable energy, effectively on par with solar and wind, and billions of pounds, euros, dollars, yen, whatever you want to say, should buy a lot of climate benefit. And instead, what we see is that the subsidies are I don't know how to put it, they're, they're, they're buying a lot of harm, they're causing a lot of harm there, they're really counterproductive to the goal of reducing pollution. Today, it's really important, I think, for your listeners to understand that this industry would not exist, if it were not for the subsidies, it is wholly uneconomic. If you look at a side by side of the development of the industry in the United States, compared with a place like the UK, and some other countries in Europe that have invested heavily in this, the thing that you'll see is that where there have been massive subsidies put in place, this industry has absolutely exploded. So the United States is the world's largest supplier of biomass fuel, the largest exporter of wood pellets. Those pellets are being manufactured mostly in the south east, in the south eastern part of the United States along the southern Atlantic coast and down through the Gulf south. That's where the pellet manufacturing industry is, that's where the biomass is coming from, that's where the forests are from those pellet Mills would love to find a domestic market for their product. Right. And they're certainly, you know, a lot of old coal plants in the United States that, you know, ostensibly, you know, could have been converted to burning biomass. But instead, upwards of 90% of these utility grade pellets are exported from the southern United States. And overwhelmingly they go to a single market, which is the UK, but they also go to some other countries in Europe, like the Netherlands and Denmark. And the reason for that is the subsidies. Right?

Alasdair: 22:51

I just wondered, does the US government have its have its own plans on on BECCS, because, you know, ever every government seems to be looking for negative emissions,

Sasha: 23:02

obviously, there's a lot of work happening around integrating nature based solutions, natural climate solutions into the conversation around climate action. And then, you know, we have actually done some, I think, a really interesting and useful analysis around this question of BECCS, and direct air capture, which is another technology that is often part of the conversation around net zero, and then technological solutions to actually remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. So the one thing that I think is really relevant to our conversation to say is that we kind of we kind of got into this detailed conversation around models and policymakers relying on models that that show that they need a lot of BECCS a lot of bioenergy to meet their targets. So and I described how many of those models put very put no restrictions or very few restrictions on the kind of biomass that they assumed to be carbon neutral. So when NRDC when we do our own analysis, looking at achieving a net zero emissions by the mid century timeframe by 2050, and this analysis is for the United States, but I think it's applicable beyond the United States. So we actually restrict we actually restrict the biomass that we make available to the model that we use. And we do that based on the science. We do that because the science, peer reviewed, established science has been telling us for many years that in most instances with with few exceptions, when you're taking biomass out of forests, you are harming the climate because you are putting more carbon in the atmosphere that otherwise would have been there. And oftentimes, you're doing that by eroding the forest carbon sink, so we actually restrict the availability of forest biomass to the model. So we don't we don't eliminate bioenergy. But we we put safeguards on the supply of biomass that we believe is actually low carbon and broadly sustainable, which is a much more constrained supply of fuel. And when we do that, what we find is that not surprisingly, the model builds a lot less BECCS. There's still some BECCS much less reliance on BECCS and in the sort of head to head between direct air capture and backs, you know, the model actually chooses to build more direct air capture, which, you know, I am not a policy expert on and I know that there is some debate around that. But the thing that I'll say, since we're talking about natural sort of protecting lands, is that one of the key insights from this analysis, is that what, what the what the investment in direct air capture actually does, is it just takes pressure off of the lands

Ed: 26:09

doing very much as a problem now, or do you think it's just one of the you know, we'll get through and we should worry too much about court? I've talked about company level, sort of ESG agenda, sort of greenwash? Is that is that a big problem now do you reckon or?

Sasha: 26:25

Well? Yeah, I mean, it's a problem on two fronts. So I think bioenergy is a great example of greenwashing. But there's greenwashing that happens, like more, you know, in terms of consumer products and stuff, and I am generally of the view that we can not lay the full responsibility at the feet of, you know, individual consumers. I think that has been a message that I think has been counterproductive in many instances, because a lot of these issues are systemic issues, and they require systemic solutions. And really, you know, we need governments to be held accountable and to establish rules and protections that prevent false information from reaching the consumer, for example. So it's not to say that people shouldn't be informed. And I do believe that individual actions matter, I believe all actions matter. But I think, in particular, you know, in the work on bioenergy, I think is a great example. I don't even place the ultimate responsibility at the feet of the companies themselves, right, they are taking public policy signals, and, you know, they are responding to those signals, I think I point to their bad practices. To highlight the damaging impact of the industry, we often point to, you know, drags the supply chains, for example, to show people, how bad what they're doing is for forest for communities, for the climate, for the environment. But ultimately, the responsibility is at the feet of the government, which is, you know, making these policies and and, you know, bioenergy is one of those issues where, like you as a consumer, you, you you, you can't, you don't really have a lot of choice there, right. You just want to turn your lights on and you want to heat your home and you want to live your life. My what I just urge everyone to do is not to say, you know, some people don't have any responsibility. I think everyone has a responsibility and everyone's actions matter, but to ultimately lay the responsibility, I think at the feet of of policymakers.

Alasdair: 28:39

Thanks to Sasha Stanwick for her time, and thanks for listening to the LC podcast. Please do subscribe to us if you enjoyed it. And we'll have new interviews and topics to come very soon. Bye from us for now.