 I'd like to welcome these four speakers to our panel and also introduce two more panel members. Gabrielle Wong Parody is an assistant professor in the Department of Earth Systems Science and a Centra Fellow at the Woods Institute for Environment at Stanford University. Shafiq Jaffer is the vice president of Corporate Science and Technology projects in North America for Total. This morning's panel will be moderated by Arun Majumdar, a faculty member in the departments of both mechanical engineering and material science and engineering and the co-director of the Precourt Institute for Energy. So the plan is for Arun to start with a few questions for the panel and then we'll take some questions for the audience. So over to you Arun. First of all, it's been a fascinating three days of discussions and I missed the first part of the first day because of another event but I listened to the rest and just putting today's in the context of the previous two days and we heard in day one sort of the the scale of the problem and I'm going to summarize it very very briefly the scale of the problem and the opportunity that is there to make a difference or sometimes the lack of it and so Sally talked about the magnitude of the energy and the emissions related to that and we heard on land-based as well as on sea ocean-based what the capacity is and what the opportunities are. On day two we talked about and we listened to some of the how complex the system is on a macro view and you know there are lots of opportunities in using soil as a sink for carbon but there are lots of complexities in understanding and extrapolating things and over predicting and over promising and today and the previous two days were sort of macro views and today we heard sort of the bottom-up technological revolution that is happening in biotechnology with from Don and Joe and the opportunities that may be there and we like to see the connections between the two but we also heard from Larry sort of the what are the economic tools we have to to really accelerate that on carbon tax and the impact and the various implications of that and from Gretchen we heard sort of a new paradigm of valuing things that we normally don't do and it has been adopted by Costa Rica but you know could it could be used elsewhere in China and many other places of the world so that is sort of where we are today and we heard elements of the human interaction the social interaction and Gabriel this is your field of research on behavioral science and decision making so what do you make of all of this and how would you look at this bring that perspective into this very significant challenge thank you for the question I think that when we're thinking about any of these options or any of these types of projects it's really important and what the evidence has suggested that communities and various stakeholders are brought into the conversation early and often so that they feel like full participants it's not only good because of this kind of notion of democratizing science but it's also good because those projects tend to go better and when there are events where sometimes things go wrong there's already the kind of that mesh that kind of social infrastructure that's there that could be built upon so that these different options or these different types of projects can go forward and be more successful perfect so let me move on to Shafiq and in a Shafiq you have been listening to all of this discussion and you've been asking questions and we want to at some point in a coalesce all of this information into and extract out the research problems that we need to be addressing so your viewpoint on listening to the three days and how to extract and what do you take away from this well I think the key challenge that I see coming out of this is that the systems level view is critical I mean it's a very complex set of interactions we heard about a lot of the unintended a lot of the extra benefits and how do we start quantifying that I think is a big part of what is needed I think the points raised by Gretchen today I think really show kind of the complexity in trying to bring a value to something that doesn't have a dollars and cents to it how do you put that in light in front of policy makers in terms of industry leaders that here's the value perhaps that is not a direct economic number so I think this kind of systems level kind of interactions has to be much better understood where those interfaces are where the complexity lies where the uncertainties lies and I think we got a little bit of that through the day two discussions quite well on the soils and things like that where the soil water plant water interfaces coastal ecosystems things like how do you start valuing kind of the efficiencies gained in terms of the yield in crops and that that really changed the perception of how land use has to change right can you minimize land disturbances and land changes in terms of reuse and that so I think this kind of systems level is what I took away today as kind of the primary number one thing we got to really kind of put a framework around and I think we're getting close from what I see of Gretchen and some of the other discussions we've seen but I think there's a little bit more nuance that has to be brought into this so let me then flip back to Gabriel then now just looking at this the the land use issue and clearly there are social cultural aspects of decision making in terms of land use but how land is used in for example India is very different from land use could be in China so how do you bring that aspect to of land use and and social cultural aspects of behavior and and introduce that in the carbon management carbon removal problem yeah I think that's a huge challenge and so just thinking about some of the work that I've done on the Navajo Nation and this critique that's been kind of been levied in terms of the development on the nation where decisions were made from a techno economic perspective and not really taking culture into account so how do you identify what the cultural impacts or the land use impacts are going to be and and so in that particular case we ended up developing a decision support tool for the Navajo Nation that elicited those those things that that citizens cared about and integrated it in a more formal fashion a more formal matter into the modeling that's done that helps to inform where projects are cited how they're cited what the process is like and so I think kind of elevating that and and thinking through how to make some of those intangibles more tangible is really critical in terms of research that needs to be done so there is there is hope there is yes it can be done I think it can be done it just takes time and it takes an acknowledgement that it's necessary in order to have these projects move forward in an ethical way in a way that's that's more successful great let me now flip back to and bring the other panelists who've already spoken and I want to put the first two talks of Don and Joe in the context of what was presented early in the last two days I think we have seen the the Griscombe paper chart many times in terms of natural climate mitigation potential and so that of course takes a macro view of things and clearly one of the the cheapest and the in terms of scale the avoided forest conversion is a big deal and I think we we kind of realize that there are lots of co-benefits of that as as Gretchen pointed out in the bars that that are there in the left hand side of the picture so when I look at the macro picture of that and clearly when Joe and Don when you talked about the tools that we have the scientific understanding of affecting photosynthesis and using biotechnology and if you can use increase the food productivity then we can make a dent in the avoided forest conversion so that I can see one connection potential connection up there help us understand from the bottom up view of things of using the scientific understanding and the technological tools how that could be integrated into this macro picture of climate mitigation potential what are the other levers that are there from the bottom up tool based things of understanding to affect the other mac massive climate potential and mitigation potential what are you what are your thoughts on that well I guess I could I could go first I mean certainly there are people thinking about can we direct more of the biomass that we enjoy for more protective productive crops um in a way that is more stable and so um there is work going on in terms of generating deeper root rooted plants generating plants that have a large amount of of super in which is stable in the soil underground um and you know and so then there are estimates you know tied to that and um as you know I think as David LaBelle was saying they tend to be optimistic and so the less you know the more optimistic you're allowed to be and so I think the proof of concept of how important that potential technological solution of putting more of the extra biomass below ground um you know really isn't known at this point I think the other truism as well is that um if we are to believe that we do need 70 to 100 increase in overall food production over the next three or four decades then any biomass that we put below ground um is going to represent a yield drag and you know be difficult in the context of fulfilling this other goal Joe you started you created the roots program at RPE and you ran it you had a vision for this you have any thoughts on that so building on what Don was saying I think one of the challenges we have is and actually when we had workshops talking about carbon sequestration using crops um it was to say it was a heated conversation would be an understatement um you had one camp said that basically we couldn't do this that basically you would reduce productivity and you had another camp that said we've never had the appropriate genetics to actually even even test the hypothesis so there is a lot of historical thinking that actually is not necessarily tied to empirical results going forward and a big part of that is not having the tools to actually allow us to actually be able to measure some of those end points so what we've actually seen in the last several years through programs like Roots and others is we're now actually creating the tools that actually now allow the biologists to actually test those hypotheses um there's a robust field of opportunity for us to be able to discover and and breed traits that exist in natural populations the challenge that we've had in many respects is our ability to actually measure the genetic impact real time and both within the plant as well as from a carbon perspective with within the soil so I'm fairly optimistic that those tools now are starting to um evolve to the point where they can actually help us settle some of those debates on can we or can't we partition carbon effectively and at the same time not jeopardize yield Joe let me follow up with you and I'm hoping that there will be some questions and if someone could help me with that from the audience we can queue them up you know we heard also yesterday a reference to the idea that you know using technologies like impossible food or beyond meat there's a lot more going on and you're part of the Gates Foundation and you know what's going on in that that realm you know breakthrough energy is is investing in that can you talk about a that whole change that is happening and what the potential impact on carbon could be and what are the unintended consequences potentially of that when we talk about food net I mean today we've spent most of our time on the production side from an agricultural perspective but the food value chain as everyone know everyone knows is a very complex ecosystem that goes from seeds and traits all the way up through to consumer behavior and as we look across that entire food value chain there are multiple opportunities for us to actually affect change one of the comments I think it was I'm not sure whether it was Monday or Tuesday where we talked about just the amount of food actually gets diverted into protein production that's actually a social opportunity but it's also a production opportunity in the context of how can we actually lower that particular impact the sheer magnitude of the fact that 30 percent of our food is actually waste how do we actually harness that particular component when you look at the entire food supply chain the total greenhouse gas impact is between 20 and 30 percent now we actually have those are those are large enough targets for us to actually think about what innovations we could be occurring not just on the farm but also as we think about transportation refrigeration and ultimately food waste let me take that and go over to Gretchen Gretchen you're on my left of my screen out here and both you and Larry on the left of the screen so if I take that line of you know we talked about food and agriculture other biotech tools increasing photosynthetic efficiency using biotechnology and you know if you're seeing a paradigm shift in terms of impossible foods and others have have have you looked at that in your your global ecosystem of productivity or in other framework to evaluating the impacts of agriculture or changes in food habits into the ecosystem understanding this is a great conversation and yeah you're teeing up a frontier basically we've certainly looked at it in China there's been a lot of concern over an ability to maintain domestic food production especially with questions about international trade and concern over zoning a lot of the rural parts of the country the so-called western China for provision of this much broader array of benefits inclusive of food but often in place of food in place of growing say dryland rice or corn on a very steep slope that for societal purposes in a collectivistic framework would be better purpose towards flood control you know there is a pretty dramatic shift underway and China has the highest absolute reforestation rate in the world and that forest and some natural grassland is coming in in ag lands so it's a a key place where this kind of analysis comes to the fore and they are you know it the trade-off has made sense at different levels and it's been a very very high priority of the government I think there are probably thousands of papers there are hundreds in English written just about that trade-off there so it's it's crucial and I want to drive home a point that Gabrielle is making in this interplay that talking with people and developing a participatory approach as opposed to what's also obviously useful as a sort of macro approach just sort of tallying up in a spreadsheet type way with interactions in many you know what the possibilities are but coming at it from a participatory way is absolutely crucial Gabrielle's very eloquently emphasizing both the ethical and the success rate dimensions thereof and I'd say there's also relatedly to unpack success a bit there's a lot of innovation involved in in the participatory process so I would say that most of the demonstrations I've seen including in China where we tend to think of the government as very top down and all that you get nothing done if you didn't do it in a participatory way and there's a heavy emphasis on that there and then certainly in all these other parts of the world we were rapidly referencing and I think we need to go a lot further in the realm you're opening up around now and that the conversation this morning and the past couple days keeps touching on namely like what where might there be a real shift with some innovations coming along like in Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat but also in private sector engagement and financing of which there's a great need for much more so anyhow I don't have a direct answer just to say that that is a key frontier and the different approaches that we're talking about are all really essential to making the most of it. Gabrielle do you have a quick follow-up on that? Oh it's just what Gresham was saying was making me think of some of the work that we've done around shale gas siting in China and yeah completely I think if the communities that felt like they had some sort of engagement were much more supportive of the projects and also I think the projects benefited from the local knowledges and which I think Gresham was alluding to a little bit sometimes the projects are better designed because local communities know their area better and have suggestions for how to improve things. Let's go on to an audience question I think the first question is from Kedar. Hey it was a very interesting presentation and carbon pricing is I think a very interesting topic and a very controversial one as well if you if you will so I believe some of these some of the existing instruments were touched upon as well voluntary offsets, cap and trade, carbon tax however I believe that there are quite a few regions in the world where you know no notion or no form of carbon tax exists till date and I mean the the problem of carbon leakage is pretty well known right I mean companies move their carbon intensive operations to other regions where the carbon tax doesn't exist or is very low. I was I mean I think this problem possibly has very strong social socio-political implications and whatnot but I was just wondering just curious if this problem can be addressed if this problem can be addressed scientifically and how. A great question important problem it is absolutely it is true that there are many parts of the world where the effective carbon price is zero and as a result when countries that do have carbon prices have those prices or even increase them there is the phenomenon of leakage that you refer to where industries can move to where the regulations are softer where the prices are zero or moreover they can also consumers can shift production away from domestic use or it imports coming from countries without with with low or zero carbon prices and that would contravene the purpose of the regulations in the countries that have the carbon prices because what happens as a result of those demand side shifts is that emissions increase outside of the more regulated areas to those areas that are less regulated and globally you don't get much or any reduction so you've articulated an important problem the ultimate solution of course would be to have a global carbon price with the kinds of compensation schemes that I referred to earlier where you take the revenue to offset unevenness in the in the burdens especially for low-income countries however we're not there yet what do you do in the meantime and that gets to your question is there a scientific is there an option there is and that is the countries that are concerned about leakage can introduce border adjustments so as to prevent shifts toward imports from countries that otherwise would have a have an advantage on international markets by virtue of the fact that they have lower prices and lower regulation there's also something which is called output based regulation output based allocation under cap and trade and without going into the details it basically helps energy intensive trade exposed sectors and helps avoid leakage by keeping despite the higher regulation in the countries with the higher carbon prices by keeping things more unequitable or even basis internationally that is a second best solution it is less efficient globally and more costly than would be the case if you could have broad coverage but it's the kind of thing that maybe it is being used and is a kind of stopgap I would hope that ultimately we can move toward a much more broader based internationally carbon price which would take which would to a large extent deal with the leakage problem and I think that can still be done in a way that's equitable provided you make sagacious use of the revenues right thank you so much Shafiq do you want to take a shot I mean you have global operations uh a total and how do you view this uh you know it's it's not a flat word as far as social cultural issues a concern so how would you look at your global carbon management scheme uh given the heterogeneity I think you're seeing that amongst all the major companies where they're trying to address it from a global standpoint things like net zero and trying to say we are focused on scope one two and then ultimately three emissions by a given time frame and when you start putting that into your corporate social responsibility or into your annual reporting you know that makes you accountable and I think this is being done by individual companies because they see the the need to be acceptable in 20 30 40 years right and I think this is going to be what drives it amongst the private industry even though a lot of the political side is an action there isn't this action at the global level so I think the major multinationals you know for the most part are moving this way and I think they they see that kind of moving operations like this carbon leakage is just not going to be acceptable there's just too much visibility globally on this right and you can hide it you can say oh I'm going to go put it somewhere nobody sees it so so I think this pressure on the big companies for acceptability in the future especially shareholders let's say activity shareholder pressure is driving a lot of this today so I see there's a lot of self-correction for the big companies the issue is for more the mid-sized small companies and kind of how they behave right so I know Jenny has a question herself Jenny you want to ask yeah thank you and we did have one come in from the audience but I've been sitting on a couple all day so this is kind of complex it covers a lot of things but I'm particularly interested in the agricultural sector and this is probably directed to Joe and Dawn to some degree so you know I was interested in trying to figure out what the incentives would be for farmers to employ sensor techniques and other things to to manage or increase carbon sequestration I'm trying to get a handle on that whole that whole sector and who has the main impacts is it the government is it farmers decide themselves to do something to you know employ new technologies and the other thing is thinking about the future and the technologies that Don talked about and biochemical modification of plants to increase photosynthesis now obviously that's some years off let's suppose that it gets into a crop that's useful whether that's a food crop or a crop that's good for carbon sequestration just in itself how do we manage to do it in a way that doesn't end in some of the the things we've seen already with companies deploying modified crops so you know what's what's the way to do that that involves many players in a way that has the carbon sequestration the incentives in a way that's not harmful either to farmers or to the environment Don started last time so I'll take this I'll go first as well from an agricultural standpoint that there's it's really interesting when you watch farmers actually commingle from around the world you can take a you can take a farmer from from country a and put them in a room with a farmer from country b and they're immediately they're like siblings because they're they're actually facing the same challenges and those challenges are around the vulnerability that they have being exposed to the environment matter of fact a very common saying among farmers is that it's the only business where they actually buy retail and sell wholesale and at the end of the day what every farmer is trying to do is optimize their productivity because ultimately that's what their family and everything else actually ultimately survive on so as we think about these incentives carbon is particularly interesting because for farmers the single most important phenotype is yield because that's the way that we reward them and in the absence of having other other policies to reward them for other behaviors their their natural inclination is to do whatever it takes to actually drive that even if it means a pine three x the amount of fertilizer you need at the end of the day that's cheap insurance relative to being able to maximize yield so one of the things that we need to look at is how we actually help them supplement the decisions that they're making in order to optimize that return the other is and that's really addressing short-term return long-term return actually is in the land and land prices are directly correlated to yield and yield is directly correlated to soil organic matter so when we start thinking about soil carbon in the soil it has so many benefits to the farmer whether it's nutrient cycling, water holding capacity, friability of the soil there's a reason why soils in in Don's neck of the woods of Illinois are so much more valuable than they are in other parts of the country so there actually is a number of different ways that we can think about incentivizing farmers in addition to what their natural inclination is yeah I mean I would just amplify on that a little bit and this is this is somewhat anecdotal but you know in lots of years even some of the big family farms and industrial farms they're so close to the margin that the only thing that they can do is try to get through to the next year get enough capital to put seed in the ground and fertilizer and this is the anecdotal part however and that was you know some years ago you know shortly after they started corn ethanol and you know in maize went to six dollars a bushel and when that happened you know particularly the people that own these big family farms you know then they started doing things that were for the long term as you know as Joe said they know it's all about the soil and they want the family farm to stand the farm and so they spent big money putting in you know new drainage you know to prevent erosion and you know a lot of them went to more you know were able to buy new equipment that that was had a lower footprint from the standpoint of soil compaction and and you know were more efficient to operate and so I do believe that particularly the family farms really want to be stewards of the land and when they have the economic opportunity to do it they will do it and so one of the ways I think to incentivize farmers to do that is to get them more years away from the margin so they can do these things and I suppose that brings us back you know to this notion of you know can we put a price on carbon and you know can we prevent carbon leakage and things like that that you know that make that difficult. So the next question I think this will probably be the last question from the audience from Jagavondu Hazra you want to unmute yourself and ask the question and I think this is for Larry. Hi so I have a follow-up question Kedar's part. Emissions could be direct and indirect right so for example we talked about leakage where you are doing indirect emissions even that is part of your supply chain you are doing some emissions indirectly as per the GHG protocol there are scope one scope two and scope three emissions right so in carbon tax system do you only consider direct emissions or it also consider indirect emissions? Let me make sure I understand your question by indirect emissions do you mean process emissions or do you mean something else? When I say indirect emission this is beyond my organizational boundary for example let's say I'm running a company so what is the emission happening within my organization that is direct and anything beyond my organizational boundary is indirect? Well let me say this the fundamental problem here is that there is an externality there's a cost to society associated with any company's emissions it is not usually born at least in the absence of some pricing or direct regulation by the decision makers and as was stated by Don earlier and also by Joe the old the bottom line for farmers is profitability and pricing is one way of making the pursuit of profit consistent with the production of the environment in a more industrial context the facility is going to be in the absence of pricing only thinking about the direct cost to it of changing its production process and emissions those damages won't be taken into account at all in the presence of carbon pricing and this might get to your question do they then consider emissions beyond themselves? I would say generally not although there are PR issues that I think Joe referred to by the way where they may be issues of bad behavior that go beyond but otherwise you just think you know okay here's the carbon price changing my benefits and costs from different production options let me maximize my profit subject to that so let me say that in general I think if to extent that the firm is really trying to maximize value and satisfy its own stockholders the effects outside of the boundary are not being taken into account the good news though is I can't resist another plug for carbon pricing is that a carbon price will affect costs or prices all the way down the supply chain not only where it's implemented but also downstream like if it's on oil it'll affect gasoline prices and that'll affect consumer behavior that'll affect prices uh elsewhere all the way to the end use but it means that it's going to give incentives beyond the particular firm that's being targeted target is a bad word but it's also going to affect things all the way through the economy so you get good incentives in principle of broadly speaking and so I think that in a way it makes the concern that firms are mainly concerned with their own outputs and their own emissions less uh on us