Are Net Zero Goals Enough? A discussion on climate narratives with Herman Gyr, Ph.D.

Trailblazer Interview with Herman Gyr Ph.d., Principal at Enterprise Development Group, Silicon Valley, California, September 2022.

Herman works with businesses and leaders to transform potential crises into opportunities for reinvention. Herman has a Ph.D. in Psychology and has worked with numerous Fortune 500 companies. Now he and his team primarily focus on motivating enterprises and organizations to develop solutions for the climate crisis. 

Hi Herman, great to meet you. Thank you for the opportunity to talk. What are you currently working on?

Our work is multi-dimensional – as it has always been. Our work is predominantly in organizational transformation. We are usually involved in situations where companies face moments of significant disruption, be it from new technologies or from new competitors. Traditionally our work has been to help our clients turn disruptions into a competitive advantage for their companies. Now of course the most critical disruption we face is the climate. Climate and sustainability have always been an aspect of our work. We collaborated closely with Bill McDonough and Cradle to Cradle and with several sustainability-oriented NGOs, foundations, and organizations. While sustainability has always been something we did in parallel to our primary corporate work, today nearly all our efforts are in support of climate-related interests of our clients.

What is your professional background and story?

My educational background is a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology. In graduate school, I focused on the psychology of groups and wrote my dissertation on collaborative practices in hierarchical systems. Following my studies, I worked as an organization development specialist at Kaiser Permanente, a large hospital chain, and after that began building our consulting firm that focused on the transformation efforts of large companies. Companies like BP, J&J, the BBC, Swisscom, and many others. It’s been a remarkable ride!

What experiences have most impacted your approach to sustainability?

My experience with forecasts and the use of data in times of technological and market transformation and the impacts such developments have on organizations have heavily influenced my thinking. Regarding the climate crisis, we now see a fundamental conflict between the available data and our broadly accepted approaches. The data shows that there are 1000 gigatons – one trillion tons – of CO2  in the atmosphere that are persistent for hundreds to thousands of years. Our atmosphere has reached a concentration of 420 parts per million of CO2. This represents a 50% increase over anything the planet has seen in over a million years. And on top of this, we are now adding massive amounts of methane, which has a significant and immediate impact on our current climate. Methane represents about 50% of the heating we are currently experiencing.

Humanity’s near-exclusive focus on reducing CO2 emissions does not address the fact that our weather, the current climate, and the current rate of climate change are primarily driven by what's already in the atmosphere, by those 1000 gigatons.

Plus, we increasingly understand that it’s not just about CO2, but that methane is now an equally significant risk. There is the possibility of a methane burp, meaning that at some point, a significant Arctic permafrost melt releases a burst of methane large enough to raise temperatures by two, three, or four degrees nearly instantaneously. This increasingly real possibility reinforces the need that we develop technical solutions to address this existential threat as soon as humanly possible.

The available climate data is troubling because it so clearly shows that our climate reality and the approaches we are currently taking are not aligned. What we are promoting in the Paris Accords and in most governmental and corporate commitments is not effectively aligned with the facts of what we are facing. I am interested in how we can bring that dissonance into focus and develop a more rational relationship between the reality of our situation and the actions we must take now.

How do we take action toward goals in line with our climate reality?

First, we need a fundamental reorientation of the narrative that nearly exclusively focuses on reducing CO2 emissions, e.g. Net Zero by some far away date. Net Zero goals don't promote a meaningful set of actions because as we can already see in the data, we are continuously off track. We say that we have to reduce emissions by 50% by 2030, but we are currently on track to increase emissions by 14% by that date. Yet there is no response that is commensurate to the discrepancy between what we know must be done and what we are actually doing. There are no emergency meetings, no calls to radical action. We must find more effective responses to the fact that our current approaches are not working. And then there is this: Net Zero is presumably about trying to keep temperatures below 1.5 degrees or certainly below 2.0 degrees, which we are increasingly learning would actually be catastrophic. Just look at what’s already happening at 1.2 degrees and the fact that this means a rise of three or more degrees Celsius in the polar regions - which is leading to catastrophic thawing of polar ice and permafrost right now.

And yet, we're holding on to these goals, despite not progressing toward them, despite discovering every day just how inadequate they are. These goals are of course particularly problematic because they are not dealing with the greenhouse gasses that are already in the atmosphere and with the realities we are learning about every day now. What the models predicted should occur in 50 or 60 years is here now. At 420ppm of CO2. At +1.2˚C. over pre-industrial global temperatures. 

From my perspective, a reorientation toward specific, measurable, and concrete goals related to actively drawing down CO2 and methane is now essential. Thankfully, there are some positive signals for such approaches from organizations like these:

• The Center for Climate Repair at Cambridge, founded by Sir David King supports climate repair projects that can be deployed at scale over the coming 5-10 years.

• The ideas promoted in the book Climate Restoration by Peter Fiekowsky and Carole Douglis and the work of the Foundation for Climate Restoration. Their aim is to return the planet to conditions that have allowed humans and other species to thrive. They are working on a limited number of high-impact solutions that are permanent, scalable, and financeable.

• Project Drawdown, which works on a wide range of practical solutions for drawing down significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. 

These three initiatives and others like them offer the essential reframes of where we should concentrate our efforts. Climate restoration, climate repair, and drawdown reorient our thinking towards goals we must achieve to return our planet to a livable atmosphere below 300 parts per million rather than doing what will inevitably worsen things. 

So the real question we should focus on is this: what do we need to do to restore our climate to below 300 parts per million? 

What solutions can we pursue? 

We must look at biomimicry and learn how to mimic nature's capacity to absorb and sequester carbon and methane too. Planting trees provides some level of sequestration. And importantly, trees not only sequester carbon but also are critical for the hydrological cycle, for rain, and of course for habitat and maintaining biodiversity. However, trees are too slow, at a scale that is too small, and thus insufficient for what is necessary now. 

We also need to look at more radical geoengineering or terraforming solutions that use chemistry and biology for radical interventions, like cloud brightening and other approaches for cooling the polar regions and slowing permafrost from melting. And restoring our oceans, probably the most important and under-appreciated organism of our living Earth. The focus must be on areas that are already heating up at rapid rates. We need to contemplate how we can intervene and stop catastrophic developments much more proactively and rapidly.

How do we approach the complexity of geoengineering and the associated risk? 

We must of course understand the risks associated with these technologies, but we also need to start developing solutions that will be ready within the next 5-10 years. Time is very short now.

We must experiment with ideas such as cloud brightening and find ways to improve the albedo effect in polar regions. We need experiments deployed now, experiments that allow for testing and verification of effects, both intended and unintended. We need to collaborate with agencies like the European Space Agency and access their space-based sensors that allow us to see what the effects of these experimental technologies and solutions are. We need to understand the impact of interfering with the natural trajectory of the current rapidly heating climate. There is urgency because if we wait, we will be working from a place of desperation with a much higher cost and negative impact than if we start now. 

How can we build alignment around solutions like geoengineering?

First, we need to be honest about the current narrative. Emissions reduction such as Net Zero and holding the temperatures to below two degrees Celsius while we know we're on a trajectory that will most likely get us to over three degrees is simply not acceptable. 

What is our goal? Our goal is to return this planet to a livable climate. Right now, that's not going to happen. The Paris Accord, if we actually achieved it, would deliver an atmosphere with 460+ parts per million CO2 by 2050. That would undoubtedly mean over four degrees Celsius of temperature change in the polar regions. Can you imagine the effects of that? 

As Peter Fiekowsky and the Foundation for Climate Restoration suggest, our narrative must focus on returning our atmosphere to a livable state. 

The idea that this planet is still one with familiar biological, geological, and meteorological dynamics is misguided. We are pretending that we're on a planet that is still in some kind of familiar balance, when in reality we are now a species that finds itself on a quite different and unfamiliar planet, one we have never experienced in our evolutionary history. Imagine that we just landed on a planet where much feels familiar, much potential exists to make it into something that can support human life and the life of the flora and fauna we know, but it will take work, it needs to be actively transformed to be a livable place for us and the diverse species we depend on.

How does the idea of landing on a new planet allow us to take action? 

If we landed on a planet and discovered that it was nearly perfect for terrestrial life, but just not quite, we’d inevitably apply terraforming and geoengineering technologies. We’d use our science and technologies to increase albedo and refreeze the glaciers and polar ice; neutralize methane; actively draw down massive amounts of CO2; return the pH of our oceans and their surface level to livable conditions, and ensure the restoration of habitat for the rapidly dwindling terrestrial species so they can thrive again. We’d immediately go to work. We’d invent an economic system that would not exacerbate the problem but would be designed to actively contribute to creating a livable atmosphere and biosphere. Our capacity to realize that we are finding ourselves on a planet that is not currently capable of sustaining life as we know it is fundamental to our ability to come up with the required solutions and to do so without fear.

Economic systems are refocused during crises. This reminds me of Milton Friedman, who claimed, “Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”

How do we turn fear into action? 

Conversations like ours right now are the starting point. We need to be honest about the present and what’s ahead. Then we can find ways to realize the change we want to see; the change we must see. Humans are an imaginative and courageous species: when we find ourselves in difficult situations, we naturally engage with them with all the intelligence and strength we can muster.

We can't tap into our ability to rise to the occasion by ignoring the dire reality of what we're facing. If you suddenly find yourself at an accident site, you may decide to drive by and pretend that it didn't happen. Or – and I think that’s much more likely for most of us – you’d choose to stop and step in to help. In times of crisis, there is a deeply ingrained capacity in humans to help and support those in need. Our ability to step into troubling situations and help is a noble and empowering aspect of our species. We need to stir that capacity to connect to that natural inner strength. That means creating a story that does not deny our current reality.

What advice do you have for anyone wanting to step into this space? 

Climate change is our life now. It is an unavoidable reality. We're all going to have to step into it. The climate crisis is the call to action of our time, to bring forth our best humanity because we are all taking action together for each other's future. It's a remarkable moment in human history where all skills are needed. My main advice is this: don't try to step away from this challenge. 

Do you want to be a journalist or a chemist? Go for it. Step in as someone who helps with the narrative. To show what we are facing and uplift people into action. And of course, a lot of solutions require a deep understanding of chemistry. Or biology. Do you want to be a business person? Great! Think about what are viable businesses on a heating planet and a planet that needs repair. Everything and everyone is required. This moment is incredibly dynamic. Young people want adventure, dynamism, meaningful work, and opportunities to prove themselves and their courage. Let's draw on those natural and heroic instincts. The greatest risk of this moment is for people to turn off and disappear into some kind of virtual oblivion. 

There are many great precedents in human history for facing and overcoming global crises. The current moment requires all of us to step in and step up to a challenge humanity has never faced before. 

We are after all the first generation to know all this and the last that can do something about it.