The Energy Transition with Emily Grubert, Associate Professor @ University of Notre Dame

Oh, today on the show we have Dr. Emily Grubert. Emily is an associate professor at Notre Dame doing research on a number of things, but most importantly for this episode, the energy transition. Something very interesting that I've already mentioned a number of times in my personal life uh since this episode's recorded.

Uh something interesting that she does research on is if there's truly a transition happening into cleaner technology, into renewables, into these things that there's a lot of conversation and press about, then there needs to be a transition away from the fossil fuel the existing fossil fuel infrastructure.

Is it fair to say that there's uh a transition if that transition away is not happening? A question that we discuss. And then also uh she spent time uh under the Biden administration uh in their office of of carbon capture. Uh and that is a topic that I'm very interested in because of my

fleeting beliefs that I think it is a sustainable and long-term solution to addressing climate change. So, a wonderful conversation we got into uh extremely high-level that complements the very specific conversations we have with a lot of uh CEOs and founders in this space. Thank you as always to our sponsors, CleanTech Growth Lab. If

you're growing in CleanTech, you want to do it with them. And the producers of this podcast, Craz In Friends. And with that, I give you Emily. Oh, welcome to another episode of The Grove. Shout out to our sponsors mentioned just before we pressed play.

Without them, it would not be possible to interview awesome people doing awesome things like Emily. Welcome. Thank you so much for having me. What is going on? I can't wait to talk about uh everything. A lot of times I'm speaking to people building, a lot of times I'm speaking to people investing in the

infrastructure and the energy transition as a whole. And uh increasingly it's exciting to me to look at it from uh an academic perspective, high-level perspective. It gives insights that you typically don't see when you're in the middle of it. So, um Well, we like it when people think our stuff's interesting, so it works out well. Good.

Well, then this is a good place. So, uh before we get started, if you could give a brief introduction of yourself and uh uh what you're building. Yeah, absolutely. I'm Emily Grubert. I'm an associate professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, and I work mostly on fossil phaseout and how you do that

in a way that really promotes a an actual just future. That's right. And that is exactly what caught my attention was that phrase right there. So, um a little bit of how did you Did you know you wanted to be a professor, an academic researcher? Uh did you even know you wanted to be in the energy

space, or did something happen at some point? Yeah, so my dad is a petroleum engineer and my mom's a water resources engineer. Um so, the fact that I ended up as a water and energy person is maybe not super surprising. Not to be too deterministic, but I did grow up around it quite a bit. I didn't think that I

wanted to be a professor until I started TA-ing as an undergrad, and then it was like, you know what? I actually kind of think this job would be pretty cool. So, it was a something that I was hoping would work out, and it fortunately did, but uh it was a it was a one of a few things that I

think could have been pretty cool to do. Nice. Do you Do you see um you know, pulling from your perspective just in the wild, but also in the classroom, are there typical misconceptions that people have about the energy space, about fossil fuels, water, petroleum, you know, any of these things?

That's an interesting question. I think like to answer a slightly different question, actually, I think one of the things that I do see a lot is people assuming that the only thing that environmental engineers work on is climate, when that's not really the case. We do a lot of stuff that focuses on water and air

pollution and things like that. Probably need to beef up our our moves on climate as a profession to be honest. In terms of misconceptions about the actual energy sector, I actually because people are constantly telling me that it's sort of an unrealistic thing to be aiming for, I'm sort of pleasantly surprised how many

people think that a lot of our energy system is publicly owned um and is government managed and things like that. It is not for the most part, but the the perception is out there I think that it is more so than it is.

Some parts of it are um a lot of it's not, but that one does surprise me how many people think that it is sort of a a government service. So then so then with that like what what types of dynamics does that introduce I guess when so for from the perspective of someone

where that would be surprising, you know, where you're just telling them for the first time, how does how do things actually work if it's not you know, government funded, government operated uh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How is there an actual market for these things?

Yeah, so for the most part the United States is actually really unusual this way. In a lot of most other countries that actually is government managed, so the misperception makes some sense that way, but I think one of the things that my group works quite a bit on actually is given the emphasis on trying to have

fossil fuel systems decline and be replaced by something cleaner and hopefully structurally better for people. Um it's really really hard to get private businesses to make decisions that are going to make them go out of business. And so the kinds of inertias that we see in a lot of the fossil phase out conversation is I think somewhat

related to the fact that a lot of these are private businesses. Um so oil extraction, oil refining, gas stations, all those kinds of things are privately owned, which means that there's even if there's competition within that sector, there's a really strong um desire to not have that go away.

So then when we're talking about the space, it's not just about these the producers, the major uh the major gas suppliers and things like this. We're talking about all of the the trickle down infrastructure like the you know, the the gas station that's owned by family, you know, some entrepreneur that you know, and I did that. So

just to continue laying out a foundation, what else how else can we make sense of what we're talking about when we when we say that the infrastructure, you know, you mentioned water, you mentioned gas, you mentioned these gas stations. What what else is important to you?

Yeah, so from the energy perspective, I think generally it's some of the big central big plants like people might look at them and think they're factories, but petroleum refineries taking crude oil that comes out of the ground and turning that into something you can put in your car and an airplane or something along those lines. All the

pipelines that move both the oil to the refinery and then the products from the refinery to places, tanker trucks, all those kinds of things. A lot of ships in the oil sector. On the electricity side, it's a lot of power plants. So that might be wind farm or it might be a coal-fired power plant, nuclear power

plant, things like that, transmission lines, all of those types of things. And then for heating a lot of the time people are using usually something like natural gas or propane or wood in some cases. And that all has its own infrastructure associated with it too. But we kind of talk about like the big central

infrastructure, the poles and wires and pipes and then some of the the downstream stuff kind of gets all into the whole point of your appliances too. So what you're actually able to use to heat your house is going to depend on the fuel you're using and stuff like that. So it's it's a lot. It's a lot of

infrastructure and I think this is part of the reason why when we talk about transition, that feels so daunting so quickly cuz it's just it's a lot of individual things owned by a lot of different actors. So along the theme again of of this conversation being able to look down and consider all these things and then draw

insight. Uh w it it you can easily find yourself just you know, within the any type of news that you uh uh that you take in in these kind of segments of reality. And so if you're someone that follows the the transitioner clean energy or things like this, you can be like, "Oh, well this is happening." or

"Oh, maybe this isn't happening." So, when we say fossil fuel phase out or the energy transition, is it actually happening? And if that's not a realistic question that to answer, you know, like what is happening, you know? Yeah. That's a great question.

It's not happening. And I think this is something also that I and a lot of other academics talk about quite a bit is we actually have to do this fairly intentionally because it's not going to happen on its own. What we do see, and again, super US perspective, um this the general trends are similar around the

world in the sense that there's not really a structured phase out happening, but the specifics are different. In the US, what we basically see is what from an industry perspective amounts to essentially a collapse of the coal industry over the last 15 years. But from a actual transition perspective, there's let's just put it this way. It's we've

seen about a 50% decline in coal production and use in the US in the last 15 or 20 years. Mhm. Okay. Yeah, we make almost all of our own coal. Actually, this is another interesting thing that a lot of people don't realize. The US is basically energy self-sufficient. We're a net exporter of oil. We're a net exporter of

gas. We make our own coal. Um renewables are obviously local. Yeah, so then quick like quick question about that. There's a there's this whole narrative and this is a massive narrative especially with the war and things happening about energy independence. And I know that uh with this administration specifically, there's a huge narrative like the whole

uh at least from perspectives I've read is that like the the whole Venezuela move is is along the lines of energy independence. And then obviously like rolling back environmental regulation and being able to to to um you know, drill in different places. This is all around. So, what what just based on that

comment, what is the actual state of energy independence? Like, are we pretty solid without the additional drilling and mining and things, or are those types of actions still still relevant and needed? So, probably the thing about oil and gas is that a lot of the time new wells drop off pretty quickly. So, you make a new

well, it produces a bunch for a couple of months, and then it doesn't produce as much anymore. So, you do actually need to keep drilling if you're going to keep using those resources, but from an energy independence perspective, yeah, the US essentially produces everything it needs domestically, and that hasn't always been true. I think this is a

really interesting thing about watching American energy politics, actually, specifically and like to say this is neutrally as I can, when you have a lot of older people I know exactly. When you have a lot of people that actually still remember the oil crisis from the early '80s and really feel that, it's a little hard to

recognize that we actually have had a massive massive shift in the US's ability to provide its own energy even on the fossil fuel side. Renewables, people have been arguing for a long time, like this is a really useful energy security thing because renewables are inherently local. And obviously, there's some other stuff about the production capacity to make

the machines that use those renewables. Like, you have to make a solar panel to use the sun, but the sun is going to be not something that you need to import and export. That said, like since 2022, the US has been oil independent, I think a little longer than that for gas. Um

Before I get yelled at, it is true that it oil in particular, you do need certain kinds of oil to make certain kinds of refineries run appropriately, and so there is a little bit of swapping on the edges where what we produce in the US isn't a full overlap for what some of the refineries need. So, we sell

some and then we buy some. On net, we're selling more than we're buying, and we could theoretically change the refineries to be um to be more aligned with American production qualities. That all said though, yeah, it's it's not the case that we had in the '70s or even sort of the early '00s. We're solidly in

a place where the US produces more energy than we use. Okay, awesome. So so then so then back to that uh that that bigger question because uh I mean the whole ethos of, you know, like this podcast, all the other work that I do, like this whole clean tech climate tech space, whatever,

um is a lot about the inherent understanding that there are better ways or there I guess there there are ways to operate human life that agree more naturally with how the planet operates and that oil and gas fossil fuels, things like that, are not as uh agreeable in in in the long term. So

that is like a underlying assumption in this space and that's um you know, something I believe, but there's a lot of complications when we talk about actually doing it, you know, which is a lot that that you speak on.

So if we're saying that it's the phase out is not happening, can can you say that a transition is still happening even though the phase out is not happening? Right, it's an interesting question and I think one of my main points is that a transition actually does need to be normative. You need to decide you're going to do it and

you need to decide to commit to it rather than just being like, oh, let's see where the market takes us. If you actually think that what's on the other side of an energy transition that moves away from fossil fuels is better for people and better for the planet, then you just need to decide to do that.

We have not done so. Um another actually misconception in the climate space I think that probably a lot of your listeners are aware of, but many people aren't is that emissions globally are still going up. Um US emissions have dropped somewhat, but global emissions are still going up. And so this notion that you actually do need

to decide to transition, I think is not something that we see very often. So I would argue we're in a space where we're seeing a lot of movement around the edges in really important ways. I think like even since I started working in this space, I feel much much safer and more confident saying that we have the

technologies that we need. There are a few things around the edges that yeah, are going to present a bit of an engineering challenge, but I don't think it's the situation that we were in even 15 years ago. It was like unclear whether solar could deliver on what we were hoping that it would. Like those

kinds of things. So, I would say we we've done a lot of the groundwork. We know what we need to do and we know how to do it basically, but we haven't actually committed to doing it. And that's why we do see as with coal like from an industry perspective falling in half is

dramatic. From a transition perspective, it's shocking that we've only had coal fall off by half and we haven't really seen very much movement in oil and gas at all. Um the transition that we have seen in coal to the extent that that's a thing has largely been from coal-fired electricity to natural gas-fired

electricity with some renewables mixed in, but it's been an incredibly chaotic and incredibly damaging process. In part, I would argue because it wasn't planned and it wasn't intentional. So, when we see those and I get this question a lot like well, you know, looking at what we've seen so far, this seems terrible. Like why would we do

that on purpose? If we do it on purpose, we can do it a lot better. Okay. All right. So, then So, then some questions based on that. So, um I think it's easy. So, it it's it's easy if you want to prescribe to um uh political agendas to say that this uh this administration is

very anti, you know, clean climate energy, whatever. And the previous and the previous um administration was, you know, how much of that is branding and how much of that uh is is is real because like you're speaking to, and this is a cool thing that I've seen is that even though this administration has

gone in and said like all these regulations and all this compliance and all this momentum and tax incentives and just ripped it out, it has it it has done some positive for um for the space as far as um really strengthening business models like allowing people to you know gain gain more momentum as far

as like building a company that's based on strong economics and also better for the planet. So is it is it fair to say that the last administration was I don't know like better for the the clean energy transition than this one or are we actually just still headed in that direction?

You know I I think like unequivocally I think the last administration was much better for the climate than this one. That's and I I'm not sure that I would give this administration as much credit on benefits in some ways. Like I get your point about forcing companies to actually really think about what they're

doing but I think some of the damage that's been done on public engagement and public consultation and those kinds of things has been really really severe and a lot of the sort of bureaucratic shift in the sense that there's like no one works at these agencies anymore has been really really damaging. I think that

said I think one of the things that is pretty clear when you look at American regimes more generally is that this has been a really pro natural gas country for many many administrations. That was true for Biden, it was true for Obama. It's been true for quite a while and so from a

like are you actually committing to a full transition perspective? I'm not sure we've seen an administration that really is yet. I think the last administration did do some things that were putting um better models of community engagement in place, were making some efforts toward policy certainty but still was a pretty big proponent of natural gas development

and so those kinds of things it's an interesting question. Like I don't think we've seen a good climate administration. I think this one is unusually bad but I'm not sure that we've seen a good one really. Okay, cool. So then So then with you mentioned it a couple minutes ago about solar you

know becoming definitely viable. Battery storage like the capacity, like just just general advances in technology making electrification and these um alternative sources of energy just much more uh realistic. But at the same time that's happening and and and price-wise too, things becoming a lot cheaper and economically viable.

At the same time that's happening, there's still no transition happening. So, is it just that we're just adding capacity and not nothing else or you know, how how do these things exist simultaneously? Yeah, it's a really good question. I think some of it is just that there's um there's so much to move off that even

moving from, you know, 1 to 5% solar is still a pretty small number actually. Like those kinds of things I think are sometimes a little hard to see and there is actually some displacement happening, I think, within the electricity sector, but it's small enough that it's a little tough to see.

Um, all of that said too, though, I think that one of the real reasons why we're not really actively seeing transition is because this isn't a free market and there are really good reasons that the energy system is not a free market, but the I think the argument that I sometimes hear is like, well, if wind

and solar are actually so cheap and if you can build all of this stuff quickly and with batteries and it's fine, like what's the issue? And a lot of it really is like our regulatory apparatus, for better or for worse, has really made some choices about who gets to do what in the electricity sector that mean that

cost is relevant, but it's really not the end-all be-all. Like I'm in Indiana and good number of our counties have effectively banned wind and solar installations. Like that's not a cost issue and that's not unique to Indiana. Like I don't even think we're the ones that have the um the most aerially extensive bans, to be honest, but stuff

like that I think really matters. Um, stuff like who actually gets to connect or stay online. Like those kinds of questions come up a lot too. And again, like there's a good reason that these aren't free markets. We need actual safety standards both for uh you know, direct hazards like an explosion or something, but also for

just making sure the power stays on. And I think it's also the case that a lot of the way that the electricity system in particular is not a free market has made it much harder to transition when that's not a specific objective.

Mhm, seems very entering a little bit of a wheelhouse. So, I So, I I think something to to get it clear cuz it's really it's really interesting how you frame that is So, from the perspective, if we've established the transition is not happening, but there is advancement happening as far as cleaner energy, more

sustainable energy. What are the actual incentives that are in place? You just mentioned a couple, regulation. Because they're not 100% free markets, it's not 100% economic the incentives to engage with new technologies or alternate sources of energy. And so, to what to what extent, I guess outside of what you've already mentioned, does

regulation play a role in incentivizing decisions? And then also, what level of regulation, like you just mentioned, I believe it's county or local, you know, then there's state and there's federal regulations to consider. Um and then anything outside of regulation that also if there is that that that drives decision-making in the energy, electricity, water sector.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's interesting cuz I think there's a lot actually in statute that hasn't made it down to the level of actual infrastructure or rule makings, especially at the state level. So, there are a good number of states around the US that actually do have zero carbon targets.

And how that gets enforced and the sort of interim checkpoints are fairly weak to the point where I've heard people just be like, "Oh, yeah, that's the law, but there's no way we're ever going to hit it, so we're not really going to bother with that. We're just going to assume that it's going to get

overturned. And it's like, really? Cuz that's not how you behave with other laws. Whatever, but like that kind of thing I think is is an interesting thing to track. Like just my own personal soapbox on this one, I always find it really interesting when energy systems modelers state essentially that they're modeling the system as it is with

existing law and existing restrictions on things. And then they completely exclude state legal targets for zero carbon contexts. I get that there's a distinction between federal and state here, but nonetheless like during the Biden administration there was an executive order which as long as those are enforced, they do have the force of

law that said not just net zero, but that the electricity sector was going to be zero carbon pollution by 2035. And yet nobody behaved that way. Like there was a massive amount of federal support for carbon capture. Full disclosure, I worked for the Biden administration in the carbon capture office. Um partially as a a bit of a critic.

But that's not zero carbon pollution. And so supporting that with tax credits, other sorts of things was like in violation of that executive order, but that wasn't really how the conversation was going. All of this is to say like I think that there is a regulatory base and a statutory base that does need to

get created. I would like to see us have probably at a federal level some sort of actual legal commitment to reaching some sort of restriction on carbon pollution. Hopefully one that is consistent with getting to net zero at some point.

But even when those kinds of regulatory contexts exist, they're not necessarily enforced because people aren't super sure what the obligation is. And I think this comes up a lot actually in oil, which is a bit different from the electricity sector. But you'll see companies basically saying like, yeah, we're totally on board with this climate

thing. Like we're totally on board with the idea that we need to transition, but there will be some oil being used and we think it should be ours. And I think you see that a bit in electricity too, where it's like, oh, yeah, certainly, like we need to transition, but you'll need a little bit

of fossil, and so I'm not going to turn mine off because I assume I'm going to be the last guy to close. And like, not everyone gets to be the last guy to close, but I think that's a lot of the way that people are behaving, and because there's not the regulations are vague enough, or the

the laws are vague enough that there's not really a direct imposition on specific assets in most places with a few exceptions. So, like, just I'll stop talking in a second, but one of the things that I have been really kind of watching, and I know that it's under threat, um but Illinois basically put into their

climate law that their coal plants, with a couple of exceptions, need to close by 2035. That's an explicit, like, this asset needs to close at this point thing that we don't see in most laws, and I think makes it much, much clearer who has an obligation to do something when you do it that way.

So, is it I mean, as far as execution of those obligations, is it really like, does it just come down to if uh those those legal actors decide, or is there something else? It's an interesting question. We're actually in the middle of putting a paper together on this, but the um there's an element of

with critical infrastructure like this, what are you really going to do if they don't comply? And I think that a lot of asset owners know that. And like, whether this is malicious or not, I think does very based on the context, but if you're in a situation where there is a law that

says, "We're not going to use fossil fuels anymore after 2045," which is not that long from now, but is long enough to be kind of out of the wheelhouse of people that are making decisions right now, at least in terms of who's going to get called up to testify about it or whatever.

Like, if you just don't, what happens? Like, are we going to let the power go out? Probably not. Like, historically, that has not been how this works. We see this in all the time, too. Like, you can have the legal right to water as a farmer, but if a city is about to run out of

water, like in practice, they're going to get it, even if you're the one that has the legal right to it. And I think that we see with these critical infrastructures a lot of awareness that you know, if you just don't transition, the options that anybody who's trying to enforce might have are either to let the

service fail to be available anymore or to let you keep operating. And this is like the long and short of it is this is how we get to the notion that to actually transition, you do need some sort of public management function here that coordinates these things because if you don't have the ability to compel

things to open and close, you're sort of at the mercy of people playing chicken with this a bit. Um and yeah, I I think that's a real problem, actually. Yeah, beautiful uh beautiful lead-in to the next question, which I was going to say, uh with all this considered, because in alternate universe, you go down a path of like,

you know, philosophy, what is moral obligation, like these types of things. Um but I'm cu- I you know, I'm curious in in in your view, you know, university's view, whatever you want to say, what does a good transition look like? Yeah, very basically. And are there places on the planet that are doing it? Yeah, that's a great question.

I think what a good transition looks like to me is one that really takes people's dignity seriously as its sort of first obligation. So, at every point along the transition path, and then also at the end of the transition, do people have what they need to survive? Like, are people warm enough? Are people cool

enough? Are people able to get to where they're going? Like, are you actually ensuring that the system is providing the services that people need in a way that is not actually harming us? And I think that those kinds of things and that sort of human centrism as we think about design really does lead you to

some pretty different conclusions about where policy might go. So, rather than saying like, I primarily care about swapping natural gas in the electricity sector out for something cleaner. I'm more interested in saying like what would it actually take to make sure that nobody freezes to death or nobody overheats in a heatwave or something

like that. And then all of a sudden like you have the fuel transition, but you also open up the notion that some of these policies might be like residential building efficiency, which we actually in my group argue pretty strongly would be a really really important policy lever given what we see about heating

electrification and just the strain that that puts on grids to have these simultaneous loads around the times when you have the least solar availability cuz winter. Um but stuff like this actually does emerge I think as part of the energy system in a way that it is a little harder to see when you're very

very focused on just the fuel mix stuff. And not to say that that's not important. Like absolutely that's important, but there are other things here too that I think do need to be pretty front and center. So like how do you make sure that the system we're building doesn't replicate a lot of the

major major injustices of the one that we're leaving while also moving towards something that is pretty evidently much much better from an environmental and public health perspective. Yeah, so as as you were answering um uh I guess I realized there's a there's also an inherent assumption in that question, which is um if if if you're if the focus that you're

uh that you're putting forward is human-centric and it's around do people uh have what they need to survive? Are they healthy? Um are they not threatened? I can see some people and I've read the these opinions that um introducing this type of transition at all is, you know, putting people at risk because it's uh it's threatening how

things are and things are good. We know that people have what they they need. So, um you know, how how would you address that type of question? That like the true like even just the transition period is isn't uh Oh, yeah, for sure. And like I think the first thing I would say probably is just

to contest the notion that we are in a situation where people have what we need. They're not going to get the number exactly right, but the the new residential energy consumption survey for the US just dropped its initial statistics a few days ago. And I think the it's I'm not going to get the exact

number, but about a third of Americans had trouble paying their power bills in the year that they did the survey, which I believe was 2024. Like that's not a system that is providing people with what they need. And I think that we see this really really repeatedly. Like in an incredibly wealthy country with a lot

of energy excess, the number of people that actually struggle to get the energy services that they need at the end of the day is sort of astoundingly high. Plus we have all of the pollution issues, all those kinds of things. I think to address the question really directly though, like yeah, transition is harmful.

A lot of the work that I do is on the concept of just transition, which is basically thinking about how you address workforces that are being displaced. And the argument sort of being that yeah, you know, people lose their jobs all the time in various industries, why is this different? When you have an intentional

shift out of a particular set of industries on behalf of a broader social goal, there is a bit of a higher obligation to the people that are being displaced. That said, like I I do think that you can't actually do transition without a lot of focus on universal programs. Like I think universal health

care is a prerequisite to transition and all those types of things about shelter and just the basic needs that you have. I think you really do need to address those, too. That said, like yeah, the transition will be pretty disruptive.

There are things that we know how to do to prevent that. So, one of the problems or questions that I have my undergrads do is just calculating how much it would cost to basically buy out the fossil fuel workforce for the next few years and then put that in terms of how much of that relative to the social

cost of carbon that would be produced by not winding these industries down would be. It's a tiny number. Like I get that when you go up to a government you're like, "Hey, I need like X billion dollars. That's not nothing, but we're talking about numbers that like individual humans have access to kinds

of a thing in a lot of these transition contexts. Like there's really it would be expensive to do this, but it would be very expensive not to as well. And so just thinking about what it actually looks like to do that transition in a way that really tries to focus on people's basic needs

before focusing on, you know, making sure that nobody ever has to do something different than we've done in the past. Like I think that that gets you a long way from a trust perspective. Uh fascinating. That's a That's a good exercise. Your under your undergrads are lucky. Uh you you mentioned you mentioned this

a little bit a while back and I wish we had like millions of years to discuss it cuz I think it's so interesting. Um mainly because and I I think you said it too as a critic, the whole idea of carbon credits and carbon markets and things. It's uh I don't know. I mean it's it's cool as

uh I'm glad that people came up with the idea that it's it's it's being developed that there's an active space with a lot of people working on it and a lot of work has been done, but it's just I don't know. I don't know what to think about or know its effectiveness. It

feels like at least from uh the information I've consumed so far like a good first try. You know, it's like uh at at trying to do something cleaner or address the whole uh you know, climate change issue, but you know, with your perspective working on it, you know, I'm in one of the you

know, best places to do it like you know, the government of the USA. Um what like what are your thoughts on carbon credits, voluntary carbon markets, their actual impacts, their longevity. Yeah, you can talk for like another 60 minutes if you want.

And yeah, to be clear, when I was working with the feds, I was mostly working on carbon capture rather than carbon markets, but I've been doing a lot of carbon markets work for years. So happy to talk about both of them, honestly. Yeah, I I think the carbon offsets thing has been I agree it was well-intentioned. I think

maybe it's done more harm than good, frankly. A lot of the major issue, essentially, is just the fact that you're not actually exchanging anything. So, if I purchase you saying that you're not going to emit something, but you don't purchase the obligation to do something about my emission, then what have we really accomplished? And

that's sort of the core issue. I think one of the things that actually really has changed in the climate discourse over the last, I don't know, 10 years or so is we really have started to talk about net zero seriously. Like I get in the '90s when you were coming off of this big high of having had the um

the sulfur and NOx markets in the US having successfully reduced those emissions by some margin. I get where you come to the conclusion that that's a good idea for carbon, too. And also in the '90s, like the notion of actually just reducing emissions by 20 or 30% was still reasonable. Um at this

point, we're talking about eliminating emissions. And I think fundamentally what a carbon market does is sort which emissions get to stick around. And when the whole point is that no emissions get to stick around, that's not that helpful. So, I don't find them useful in that regard. And I think that because they have essentially

allowed people to make claims that they've done something really important for the environment in practice having not done so, that's been quite damaging in a lot of different ways. I will say like the the move toward removal-based credits as opposed to avoidance-based credits, and this is basically the difference between like am I actually

going and putting a machine in in place somewhere where I'm taking CO2 that's already in the atmosphere out and making sure it never gets back in, or am I promising I'm not going to emit an emission that I maybe would have emitted otherwise? Like two totally different things in a physical context. But the

removal-based credits, I'm still quite skeptical of how those are playing out in market contexts because carbon removal, yeah, hypothetically actually is doing something physically different. Like I'm emitting something and then I'm buying having taken some back out of the atmosphere. So, it's the 1 - 1 = 0 as opposed to the 1 + 0 = 1 issue is the

way that we usually talk about this. But, if that that minus one opportunity, the carbon dioxide removal is a limited resource, which I assert that it is because it's incredibly energy intensive, incredibly land intensive, depending on how you're doing it.

You if you only have so much of that, and that's also the only way that you can start to actually draw down atmospheric stocks. So, like if we're at 420 parts per million right now and we wanted to get back to 350, like you need to do some removal to do that that

doesn't actually get offset by somebody emitting something new. In a market context, you're basically selling that removal capacity to the highest bidder rather than thinking about what emissions do you actually structurally need for society to continue functioning. Like I One of the arguments that we make sometimes is that something like um N2O emissions from particular kinds of

agriculture are probably pretty high on the list of emissions that are worth keeping around. Like even if you're very, very good at fertilizer management, you're probably going to have some greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture into the future. That's a good place to use CDR potentially to get to something that looks like net zero.

Something where like I decided to go home for the weekend and so I got on a plane and so I get to use CDR to do that. I've just appropriated a resource that now is not available for all these other things. And so I think that that aspect of marketizing it is kind of

um troubling in a lot of ways. On the carbon capture side, that one too, like there's a lot of places where the kinds of carbon capture that we're looking into deploying are replaceable by something else. Like I don't really need to put carbon capture on a coal-fired power plant if I can build a wind farm

instead and have sufficient battery backup to manage what I needed out of that coal plant. I concede that there are some places where carbon capture on a big facility probably is useful because there's not a lot of other ways to to handle those industries. So, for example, when you make cement um and this I've been told

I'm too conservative about this. I'm a civil engineer. So, when people are like we're going to mess with cement compositions, I get a little nervous. But, aside from the idea that we might actually come up with new chemistries, which there is some promising activity there like silicate cements and things like this. For now, carbonate-based

cement production means that you are going to drive some CO2 just off of the rock regardless of the fuel you're using. That's a pretty good target for maybe to plan carbon capture because you can't just make cement out of not that yet. And so, when we think about where to deploy carbon capture, like I don't

see a real role for it in power. I do see a little bit of a role potentially for it in some industrial applications. So, you so so, then we're saying it's it's a it's a it's a decent concept that has application. It has application in the spaces where alternatives are not as feasible yet.

So, I think the coal plant is a good example. If you could just put a wind plant there in the first place, then the carbon market doesn't make any sense. But, agriculture or cement uh for example, from that perspective are useful places because the technology isn't there yet. Is that accurate?

Yeah. And might never be. Like, the the notion of growing enough food for the world's population without fertilizer is True. difficult to imagine. So, like those kinds of things, yeah. True. Um It It's really interesting uh how you were speaking about in in the prior conversation about um you know, there being regulation, but

the enforcement of that regulation. And so, in the same in exactly same way, we have these carbon markets and we are creating them. You know, there needs to be somebody or some population of people that are enforcing you know this market to exist and exchange and people actually engaging in it. Do you see that happening or is that

also a shortfall of of I mean there've been many attempts. I think like fundamentally a market that actually relies on truly good offsetting credits is just a really hard one to pitch. It's like good offsets the way that I would define them cost like a thousand dollars a ton.

The offsets that people are trying to buy are like five. So it's it's just hard to set up a system where you actually do stick to your guns about like what is actually going to count here. Um but then I think like the broader problem from my perspective is again this allocation question. If you don't have the infinite

capacity to offset things especially via removal who gets it is not something that I think ability to pay should be deciding. Hm. Um with with all this and I'm just you know holding back further questions but I have I have two final ones for you which is I'll have about three. So in in the

with the with the work that you're doing, you know, how you see you know your role in all of this, what is the biggest hurdle that you face and how is it also an opportunity? Yeah, I mean I think the biggest hurdle is just the fact that we don't actually have a commitment to decarbonization. I don't

think it's going to happen without a commitment. So it's it's an opportunity I guess in the sense that it's a very clear thing. When people are like what needs to happen next it's like we should decide to do it. It's a really clear next step. So I think that's an easier problem to solve than like we're not

physically sure if we can. I think there's some element of that still too but the the whole like we haven't decided to do it and that's why it's not working very well I think is pretty clear. Is there is there opportunity to still make like significant progress without like a ubiquitous commitment like that or or you saying

that that needs to happen? I mean, it depends on how you define significant. I don't think that we are going to reach net zero emissions this century without an actual directive. Facts. All right, second question. Are you optimistic?

I think that we have a lot of what we need. And I think I spend a lot of my research time trying to differentiate between where there are actual physical limitations to something versus where there are institutional or political limitations to things. Not to say that they're not um that institutional limitations aren't

difficult. But knowing when somebody says, "Oh, I can't do that." Can you not do that for like thermodynamics reasons? Can you not do that cuz you don't have enough staff, right? Like one of these problems is solvable and the other one just fundamentally isn't. So, I think knowing which problems we actually can't solve

so that we can spend time on the ones that we can solve is really important. So, I wouldn't say that I'm an optimist necessarily. Like I think there's a shot here. Um and I think that if we decided to do it, we could make a huge amount of headway in making a lot of people's lives better

for a very long time. Um so, I I am committed, but I'm not necessarily optimistic. Very cool. I'm going to start using that that question when people tell me they can't do things. Right. Because of thermodynamics? Because you don't want to?

Yeah, exactly. Like so, you're not going to be on time to our thing. Exactly. It's like no, like fit like physically, thermodynamically, I can't make it on time. I'm sorry. Um so, my last question then uh related uh what inspires you to keep working on these things if you're not an optimist?

Yeah, I mean just knowing how important this is for so many people, I I makes me feel like doing even making the chances that we succeed a little bit better feels like enough. Like I'd rather succeed to be clear. I'm not really in this to be like oh effort points or whatever, but like I do think

trying is important. So we'll keep trying. Are there are there places doing it well? Or people? Um yeah, I I mean I think that there are a lot of people that have good ideas. I think that nobody's really gotten the critical mass to really say like look a whole country did this well.

Um in a way that's super replicable. I'm not saying that there's no lessons to be learned. I think there are actually a lot of really interesting ones that we can look to and I I think the fact that we don't have a good example is not evidence that we can't do it. It's more

evidence that we haven't tried. Um but yeah, I mean there's there's not really a country that you can point to and be like hey look this was a major fossil producer that like isn't uh isn't emitting anything anymore. So maybe we'll get there. I hope before I die. Cool. Well, this is uh

I mean so much fun. I mean I you know, you let me take my three questions make them five and uh at the end there and I have so many more, but thank you for um entertaining just these two pockets of conversation, you know, about what uh the fossil the phase out of fossil fuels

even mean, uh you know, the the carbon capture and things like this and uh really appreciate the work you do and so if there's anyone else that was inspired to follow along or you know, read the wonderful things that you've produced to what's the best way to do that? Um pretty easy to find on the internet. Uh

my kind of Notre Dame page has my email and uh most of my papers on it. So emilygrubert.org if anyone is looking for it. Cool. Definitely doing. Go read that stuff. Emily, thank you so much. Uh I'm excited for another one. Definitely have to. Uh but yeah, thank you for your time and uh yeah

Yeah, thanks so much for having me.