Carbon offsets are often touted as a solution to humanity’s bad habit of emitting an awful lot of CO2. But how many of us actually know what things like carbon offsets and carbon dioxide removal are all about? This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with David Ho, a professor in the oceanography department at the University of Hawaii at Manōa and a co-founder of the nonprofit, [C]Worthy. We discuss his recent piece in Nature journal explaining the shortcomings of carbon offsets, learn more about the mission of [C]Worthy, and take a look at how some corporations greenwash the admirable goal of producing net zero goods.

Narrator | 00:02 - This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.

David Ho (DH) | 00:21 - Everybody wants things to be simple. And you know, we, we want to change nothing about our lifestyles. You know, just replace one thing with another plug in an electric vehicle for an internal combustion engine and change nothing about our lifestyles. You know, nothing about driving less. You know nothing about consuming less and for everything to be okay. And I think that's just not the case.

Narrator | 00:50 - Carbon offsets are often touted as a solution to humanity’s bad habit of emitting an awful lot of CO2. But how many of us actually know what things like carbon offsets and carbon dioxide removal are all about? This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with David Ho, a professor in the oceanography department at the University of Hawaii at Manōa and a co-founder of the nonprofit, [C]Worthy. We discuss his recent piece in Nature magazine explaining the shortcomings of carbon offsets, learn more about the mission of [C]Worthy, and take a look at how some corporations greenwash the admirable goal of producing net zero goods.

Alex Wise (AW) | 01:46 - I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by David Ho. David is a professor at the University of Hawaii and its oceanography department, and he's also a co-founder and the director of science at the nonprofit [C]Worthy. David, welcome to Sea Change Radio.

David Ho (DH) | 02:01 - Thanks for having me.

Alex Wise (AW) | 02:03 - So first, why don't you tell us briefly what [C]Worthy's mission is all about?

David Ho (DH) | 02:08 - Yeah, so we're a nonprofit research organization that's focused on building free open source tools for verifying ocean-based carbon dioxide removal.

AW | 02:22 - And give us an example of some of these tools in action.

DH | 02:26 - Well, so there're mostly going to be modeling tools because it's, it's a hard problem to observe in the ocean, and we need observations to calibrate and evaluate and validate the models. But, eventually they will be numerical models. So we're just building fit for purpose models that will allow people to make sure that they are taking up atmospheric CO2 in the amount that they claim they are, and to make sure that there aren't adverse side effects.

AW | 03:04 - Yeah, I was trying to verify the effects that some of these carbon dioxide removal tools or programs have seems to be a challenge. Why don't we create a little glossary for listeners before we dive into some of the, the details of what carbon dioxide removal is all about. Why don't you first kind of define CDR and then maybe also explain net zero and direct air captured.

 DH | 03:31 - OK, so carbon dioxide removal just means that we use some sort of method to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it permanently, or at least for, for a long term in, in some reservoir, either geologically or in the ocean or in products and direct air capture, DAC is one method that people have proposed and, and it's sort of a straightforward sounding thing. You have a machine that sucks the CO2 out of the atmosphere, and then you, you have all this CO2 that you have to do something with and, and one of the most obvious things to do is to sequester it in a geologic reservoir somewhere or make it into rocks.