Sustainable California

Sustainable California is a podcast from University of California Television, and its recent episodes draw on several kinds of recording: symposium presentations, a moderated panel, a one-on-one interview, narrated explainers and a piece recorded on location in Yosemite Valley. Carbon removal is the subject it keeps coming back to, and the talk stays on cost, scale and place. Roger Ains and Kim Mayfield, both scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, explain the appeal of direct air capture in terms almost any legislator can follow: there is too much CO2 in the air, so take it out. Then comes the bill. Credits from Climeworks, the Swiss company doing this work, cost about $1,000 a ton and have still sold out. The Livermore team's best engineering judgment is that prices could fall to around $200 a ton once at least 30 million tons a year of capacity exists. Kern County comes up as the place others are watching. James Lawler, founder of the educational content group Climate Now, moderates a panel on carbon capture and storage and, in another episode, interviews Ains about California's path to carbon neutrality. The panel has the sharpest edges. One panelist recalls local wind and solar growing to 150,000 acres, floats ripping out the trees along Santa Monica Boulevard to argue that everything has to be on the table, and asks for 'all the bad questions' about carbon capture. In the interview, Ains sets out three pillars for capturing and storing carbon, beginning with natural solutions in trees and soil. He explains why California, having never deforested, has limited room to regrow forests. He closes with a plain request: when buying an electric car becomes possible, consider it, because that shift will be the state's biggest and hardest. A narrated overview, which ends by pointing to Climate Now, surveys several carbon dioxide removal methods, their costs and the difficulty of deploying them at the scale net zero by 2050 requires. It notes that Chevron, Shell and Total have been willing to invest in one of these approaches, and it brings in Dr. Matthew Langholz, a natural resource economist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, on how much carbon bioenergy with carbon capture could store in the United States. The show's range goes beyond carbon. Speaking from Yosemite Valley beneath the Lost Arrow rock formation, an archaeologist treats native California as a long tradition of sustainability whose challenges included fatal epidemics that arrived with European colonization. Acorns carry the argument: slow to process, added to the diet as populations grew, and worked in bedrock mortars, which in the narrator's account helped communities avoid the catastrophes Malthus discussed. The fisheries episode moves to the coast, naming the collapse of the Northern California salmon industry, the Central California sardine fishery and the old Cannery Row fisheries. A fisherman describes the Dungeness crab season as a derby, with every boat racing the one next to it, and reckons groundfish are in fine health because so few people now catch them. The narration then weighs efficiency gains against their effect on access and on fishing communities. For a first listen, Carbon Dioxide at Scale: Working Fast for an Equitable Future lays out the cost case for direct air capture in plain figures, and Adaptable Societies shows how far the show's idea of sustainability reaches.