Tackling Super Pollutants - Ep146: Jason Anderson

Bryony Worthington  
Hello, I'm Bryony Worthington, and this is Cleaning Up. My guest this week is Jason Anderson, a program director at the ClimateWorks Foundation. Jason is an expert in the greenhouse gases that are not carbon dioxide, which includes methane, nitrous oxide, and less well known gases such as SF6. As the world's climate negotiators gather this week in Dubai, I wanted to ask Jason about international efforts that have successfully reduced greenhouse gases, which includes the Montreal Protocol - the global response to the ozone hole crisis. And as calls for international regulations to be applied to methane are growing, and Europe and the US have already moved in this direction for fossil sources, I wanted to ask Jason what he felt it would take to win this. Please join me in welcoming Jason Anderson to Cleaning Up. 

Michael Liebreich  
Before we start, if you're enjoying Cleaning Up, please make sure that you like, subscribe and leave a review. That really helps other people to find us. To make sure you never miss an episode, subscribe to us on YouTube or your favourite podcast platform. And follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram to participate in the discussion. Also, you can visit cleaningup.live to access over 160 hours of conversations with extraordinary climate leaders. And you can subscribe there to our free newsletter: that's cleaningup.live, cleaningup.live. And if you particularly enjoy an episode, please spread the word: tell your friends and colleagues about it. Cleaning Up is brought to you by our lead supporter, Capricorn Investment Group, the Liebreich Foundation and the Gilardini Doundation.

Bryony Worthington  
So Jason, welcome to Cleaning Up. I'm really delighted to be here with you in San Francisco. And I wanted to just start off by asking you: could you just tell the audience who you are, what you do and why.

Jason Anderson  
I'm Jason Anderson, I'm a senior Program Director here at ClimateWorks Foundation in San Francisco, and I run Programs, which is one of the functions that we have here as a climate philanthropy. And why I do it: on the one side, it's a really urgent issue, so it's nice to be involved in something that you feel like you're making a difference, and on the other side, it's just an absolutely fascinating area with so many different aspects to it. And in every way that you could think of, with a lot of great people to work with, you know, committed, smart. So it's been very interesting as a career.

Bryony Worthington  
And you- but you didn't start out in philanthropy, right? You started out in the field and working for a campaign. Do you want to tell us a bit about where you came from?

Jason Anderson  
Yeah, sure. I had started my career after college in the US Department of Energy. And oddly, I studied anthropology, but was really attracted to this idea of working on solar energy. And by some quirk of luck or whatever, I managed to work in the Solar Energy Office at USDoE. And they were sponsoring some projects in Central America around rural solar electrification. And I realised very quickly, that was far more interesting than working in a giant government office, so I just scarpered off to Central America and started working there. So I got this interest very early on in both solar and climate change. But the link between those two things was really fascinating at the time; we really wanted to get people electricity, but one of the ways of funding that, we thought, would be through things like offset projects. But it turns out, people don't use a lot of energy in the middle of nowhere in Central America, and so you couldn't aggregate any demand, as it were, from the climate rationale. So I think, from a very early time, I saw that there was a distinction between, you know, just saying how many tonnes can we offset or how many tonnes can we eliminate, and what do we actually need for human development and people's needs, and particularly in rural areas? I went on to study nearby here at UC Berkeley and did work on climate and energy, and as I was getting out, I just happened to write a report on something that was going on at one of the UN climate conferences, and somebody Climate Action Network read that and said, "Oh, this is a great report. Can I take it to the COP?" And at that point, I didn't even know what a COP was.

Bryony Worthington  
And what was the  paper on?

Jason Anderson  
Oh, gosh, I- oh, it was it was my thesis actually, I should remember that. It was- it was basically a climate economy model of the US proposal for the Kyoto Protocol, and how that, you know, the different pathways that would emerge from what they had proposed, and how that different from what we needed, that sort of thing. The baseline - what was going to happen anyway - and the US proposal were so close to each other that the lines were almost overlapping. That was kind of why the NGOs saw that and said, "that's a very interesting conclusion." 

Bryony Worthington  
Yeah. And this was- basically they came in and said, "Oh, you know, fixed regulations aren't great, we should have a traded mechanism." That was the US contribution at the time, right?

Jason Anderson  
Yeah, among other things, I mean, just in terms of the numbers of what we were aiming for, didn't really amount to very much. You know, you think back to the time and we had an- Article Two of the Framework Convention saying we're going to avoid dangerous anthropogenic warming, and then people come with these targets that are just completely lost in the noise of the growth of emissions over time. And of course, that's exactly what's happened. We've struggled over the last 30 years, from 1992 to 2023, to figure out how we're going to actually turn that around. But you know, for the NGOs, that kind of work was interesting to be able to have some analytically-backed advocacy positions. So I went to Brussels on a Fulbright Scholar scholarship, and right at the end of that somebody said, "we just got-" this is that Climate Action Network, they said, "we've just got money in from the Dutch government to do an analysis of hydrofluorocarbons. Are you an expert in that issue?" And I had just come out of policy school and the answer to that is always yes, right, because if you're not an expert, now, you will be tomorrow, after you've done as much reading as you possibly can. So I was like, "yes," and for the next, I don't know, several years, I was basically the NGO expert on HFCs, working in Brussels, and then stayed on through there and other positions in Brussels.

Bryony Worthington  
And that's really what we're going to focus our conversation on today, is the the non-CO2 gases that are greenhouse gases. But can you talk us- walk us into this through the lens of the HFC question, because obviously we had CFCs which were killing the ozone hole- creating the ozone hole, and they were replaced by HFCs, which turned out to be a greenhouse gas. So can you just walk us through the interactions between those two classes of gases? 

Jason Anderson  
Yeah, I mean, as you say, CFCs, which were famously negotiated away through the Montreal Protocol, and that's considered a huge win in environmental diplomacy, and people often look at the protocol as an example of what we'd like to be able to achieve and other things. And it was also focused on HCFCs. But what happened is that you had this phase-out schedule where a lot of countries like in the United States, you would go from CFCs to HCFCs, and then they say, "well, eventually, we're going to go to this other solution HFCs." They're all terrible climate gases, in fact, CFCs are very bad. So actually getting rid of them for ozone reasons was a tremendous benefit to the climate. But HFCs are still very significant. So like, the main one that you find in refrigerators is around 1300 times more potent than CO2 on a mass-basis. So it was - as Greenpeace said at the time - "out of the frying pan and into the fire." And because of the success of the protocol, people weren't really focusing on it so much, and HFCs were actually better than - even on climate grounds - than what they replaced. But we knew that eventually, we'd have to get rid of them as well. So we had these problems of a double- - or even triple - switch: HFC, CFCs, you know, HCFCs, and then this alphabet soup, where you wanted to end up with something like natural gases, non-synthetic gases, but years ago, that was still too early to worry about it. And one of the reasons why we were able to get the protocol was that the chemicals companies went along with it, knowing that they had a market for another substance. 

Bryony Worthington  
Yeah. 

Jason Anderson  
And so that's been the tricky part is, if you're going to get away from HFCs, the solutions you can use - and they're readily available - don't make those guys as much money. And so it's been a real kind of rearguard action from the chemicals industry. 

Bryony Worthington  
And so that is a really clear line of difference, right, between the ozone crisis and climate change, is that you had a much more concentrated industry, and you had big players like Dow who kind of went from perhaps first of all doubting the science and denying it to then fully buying into it, and then also then getting involved in the writing of the regulations, so that as a front-mover, they wrote the rulebook for everyone else. So it was a kind of everyone moves forward together and we can move into a solution. And it was relatively easy to get that across the line in international diplomacy terms, because of that industry shift. But we haven't seen anything like that in climate so far. 

Jason Anderson  
Not really, I mean, we're in a much more diverse space. There's just too many sectors, too many gases, all of that kind of thing. And if you had another patented synthetic drop-in replacements, you know, it was a fairly easy job for them to support the one. I mean, half of the CFCs went away because we no longer, for example, have any fluorocarbon in hairspray or other kinds of emissive sources, and that's actually where you were just wasting, I mean, it was it was amazing what was going on. So their market did decline, but in the grand scheme of things, it worked out for them.

Bryony Worthington  
And bring us up to date then with the HFC question, because the Montreal Protocol was recently updated, right to include HFCs.

Jason Anderson  
Right, so obviously advocates were concerned about the existence of HFCs being climate gases. And in the background with the UNFCCC you had all of those negotiations going on. So there's this question, where do we best address this issue? Because the whole fluorocarbons question had been negotiated under Montreal, it made the most sense to continue in that direction, still a bit of a change of mandate for them to be able to address HFCs on their climate grounds, as opposed to ozone. But in 2017, the Kigali amendment was added and that did a similar thing with a phase-out schedule, or a phase-down schedule for HFCs, and differentiated between developed and developing countries and a complicated outcome, but still one that was much appreciated, and a lot of effort went into getting it. And I think it's also considered another win, especially because it was a shift to something where the outcomes were a little bit less certain. There certainly are blends and new gases that can get you under the limits, which are still synthetic. But in the background, these natural gases have been rising to the point where there's real competition in the market.

Bryony Worthington  
So tell us what a natural gas is. This is not the same as methane that we burn, this is a gas which is not persistent in the environment. Is that how you define it? Could you- 

Jason Anderson  
Well, I mean, in the in the case of refrigerants, for example, one thing that happened with domestic refrigeration in Europe very early on is that we went from fluorocarbons to isobutane. And yes, that is a greenhouse gas which has a very low level of global warming- it's a tiny quantity, and it's relatively leak-proof. And so that meant that you were cutting from, let's say, 1360 GWP down to like, 15 or 12-

Bryony Worthington
Just pause there; 1360 equals- so one tonne of CO2 equals 1,300 tonnes of- the other way around

Jason Anderson
Of well, yeah, one tonne or gramme or whatever unit of HFC 134A, the main refrigerant gas, is equivalent to 1,300 something of CO2. Now, of course, you're not using tonnes of it, you're not- it's not like just coming out of the tailpipe like this. But it adds up. Everybody has a refrigerator, there's lots of air conditioners, all kinds of cooling equipment.

Bryony Worthington  
 The natural gas alternatives, these are just non- they're not synthetic? So where do they come from? 

Jason Anderson  
Yeah, I mean, there you have for some things, they're actually hydrocarbons, you know, like isobutane and pentane. Other things could be nitrogen or CO2 itself, depending on what the application is. 

Bryony Worthington  
Okay, right. So, thanks for that, because you've touched on another topic, which is- we first connected on over, which is the use of synthetic gases in transmission network, right, which is SF6. So firstly, what is SF6 and how is it used currently?

Jason Anderson  
So sulphur hexafluoride - SF6 - is a substance that has had various uses. For a while they were put in the soles of Nike trainers - the air cushion-

Jason Anderson  
I had no idea - that's what gives you the bounce.

Bryony Worthington  
Yeah. And, well, it- the advantage is that SF6 is a big molecule, and so it wouldn't leak out of your trainers as you were jumping up and down on them over time. And so the Nike Corporation were very interested in protecting their brand, and they shifted to another substance once it was pointed out to them that that wasn't so great.

Bryony Worthington  
Because it's a greenhouse gas, right?

Jason Anderson  
Because it's a massive- it's 25,000 times more damaging than carbon dioxide. So it's not used in huge quantities, but even a small amount is incredibly damaging. And one of the main ways that it's used is as a kind of insulating gas inside high-tension switchgear. So in high-voltage applications, in substations and transmission lines and that kind of thing, you'll have these switches that you don't want to have an arc across them because you've got huge amounts of electricity. And so it insulates that. But there's a lot of this stuff all over the place. And so even leaking a little bit, it adds up over time.

Bryony Worthington  
So, this is a fundamental part of how we keep the grid operating. So it helps with the transition from high voltage to low voltage. And these boxes - I assume they're box-shaped bits of equipment - are filled with this gas to create an inert environment so that you don't get the arcing, and is there a substitute- I mean it does leak from these boxes, right, because they do have to keep going and topping them up. Is there a substitute for that in these switching?

Jason Anderson  
There are substitutes. Some of them are not fully commercialised, especially towards the higher-voltage end, but you can essentially- you can use natural-origin gases, something like CO2 or nitrogen. Also a little bit more space, so some of them have a larger space requirement. And those are already commercialised, especially at the farther, at the lower size. But what's happening is that the European Union has developed, over time, increasingly stringent regulations on fluorocarbons. In fact, when I first got that contract through the Dutch government to work on this in 1999, this was to prepare for regulations that ultimately came out in 2006. They've just been revised. And part of that revision is just phasing out things that have alternatives, that's been the European approach. If you don't really need it, then let's just phase it out. Because we can't necessarily rely on that happening otherwise in the market. And so with SF6, they've set now under the - it's not quite fully passed to the council, but you know, it's basically negotiated - they have a phase out schedule, which in typical fashion for them, it's now for everything that's already commercialised, a little bit later, and then a little bit later, 2032, basically for everything. And that will certainly impact the way the grid and transmission evolves in Europe, but it could have influences on neighbours as well.

Bryony Worthington  
So, and this is really important, because as we're all now aware, I hope, the IEA just put out a recent report on this, it's very, very hard to see how you make a transition from a fossil fuel-based economy to a renewable economy without huge investment into transmission, meaning you're gonna have to put wires in to move the solar and the wind, or the hydro where it occurs to centres of demand, and we're gonna have to integrate our grids so that we can cope with the variable nature of some of these renewables, right? So almost all scenarios show hugely more grid infrastructure. And that means more transmission and more SF6, right, unless there's something- unless something intervenes.

Jason Anderson  
Yeah. This does seem like a dilemma. On the one hand, you don't want to slow that progression down, you want to be able to make those connections. And of course, it has its own difficulties. There's always competition for land and whatnot. On the other hand, you don't want to be introducing a lot more SF6, it woud be a bit ironic for a climate measure. And there are alternatives, but the most- some of the most popular alternatives right now introduce another synthetic chemical.

Bryony Worthington  
Oh, here we go again. So we're going from one thing to another, like Green Peace said, "out of the fire..." and yeah-

Jason Anderson  
So there's perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances - PFAs. And that's the way they're universally known PFAs. And these are what also called "forever chemicals". They have-

Bryony Worthington  
And they're synthetic, and they're forever.

Jason Anderson  
They're synthetic chemicals. They have some negative effects in the environment and on on the body. They're not hugely well studied at this point, but there's enough concern that if you apply the precautionary principle, again, as Europe is planning on doing, you might end up with some restrictions on PFAs. And because, again, some of the alternatives that are being considered include those right now, grid operators are in this position of saying, "do I invest in that with the prospect of them being hit by another regulation later? Or, you know, do I look for an alternative?" And advocates certainly say, "well look for the alternative and where you don't necessarily have one at commercial level, you should be working actively toward getting those commercialised rather than just being passive recipients and waiting for that to happen."

Bryony Worthington  
And because the two that you mentioned which you would class as maybe natural rather than synthetic - nitrogen and CO2 - I mean, these are really abundant chemicals. Why would you not go to those first? Is it about the margin, is about or are there technical reasons why we would go through this intermediary, not-quite-a-solution solution?

Jason Anderson  
The synthetic chemicals are effectively a drop-in. So you've got a very similar kind of configuration. The equipment doesn't have to be changed very much. You have alternative manufacturers for these alternative pieces of equipment where the gases are not so much the point, it's how the configuration of the equipment is, some of that gas is in there. A lot of the time what happens with the equipment is that the gas manufacturer and the equipment manufacturer have been working so closely for so many years, decades, that they are kind of reinforcing the messaging of each other about the necessity for those synthetic chemicals.

Bryony Worthington  
They're not vertically integrated though, they're two separate kind of coexisting ecosystems that benefit from each other. 

Jason Anderson  
I believe some are vertically integrated, but some of them are next to each other. And so that kind of-

Bryony Worthington  
A bit like the oil industry and the car industry,  in lockstep? Sort of helping each other? 

Jason Anderson  
Largely, although if I'm not mistaken, there are some that are integrated and so that makes it even tougher. You know, it's quite obvious that if there are- there are some companies that make compressed natural gases, of course, you know, somebody has to get that nitrogen or that oxygen or CO2, whatever. But it's- they're not making the same kind of money as a synthetic chemical company would. But again, in the grand scheme of things, that's not a huge economic driver, even for those companies. So I don't think that's really- the concern so much is just like all industry, they want to be able to see a tried-and-true product that they can get it off the shelf right now. It's always difficult to keep an eye in the pace of regulatory change that's trying to drive something like a big shift in the name of climate.

Bryony Worthington  
Yeah, there's a kind of path dependency, right, you've got this already in-place, everyone understands it, it kind of creates a natural conservatism about moving away from it. Okay. And are there any safety concerns? Because, well, the electricity industry is famous for, you know, safety is their number one priority at the local level, but presumably they provide equivalent services?

Jason Anderson  
Yeah, no, that's- I mean, and that's part of the whole idea about  in the European regulation - about having this time is to make sure that there's the time for the testing, for the rollout, even the commercialization so that you actually have an option when you're going on the market to buy things and it'll be equally functional. 

Bryony Worthington  
So Europe, old grid, invested in over decades, can see how there might be some problems, especially if the gear actually has to change shape and size. But in countries where there isn't a grid, or where we're planning to build a grid, is there a way in which we can start off with the right solution from the outset? Are we going to- can we leapfrog I suppose, is the question?

Jason Anderson  
Well you certainly can if you don't have the same kinds of space limitations, perhaps right now, if you've got a substation, and it might be, you know, X-percent more space, that's potentially a problem where you have to reconfigure it. A lot of places won't have that problem. But like any new technology, if there is a price increment, then you have to make sure that there's attention to the way that they're going to need support for that. And this is true also with renewables and other kinds of advanced technologies. We can't expect countries in the Global South, broadly-speaking, to just leapfrog without any kind of financial assistance, technical assistance, etc.

Bryony Worthington  
Okay. Yeah. If it costs more initially, right, how do we get over that? Because the cost curve, presumably would come down with deployment, but someone's got to pick that up. And it's usually Europe that does that, or the US in the past?

Jason Anderson  
Well, I mean, this is where lots of things got deployed was you had a domestic market. I mean, why is tiny Denmark a leader in offshore wind? You know, it's not evident that that would be the case, but they created well, but you know, they created a home market, and then they were able to export. The same is true, ncidentally, for- because they more-or-less, accidentally banned F-gases before everybody else because they, yeah, so as they were getting rid of CFCs and HCFCs, they kind of addressed all fluorocarbons. And so they invented some solutions for all kinds of random things like fire suppression equipment and whatnot that were ahead of the game. And what do you know, they they created a market.

Bryony Worthington  
So if we want a level playing field, and we also want to enable a leapfrog, because it'd be crazy to start off with an SF6- based system and then have to swap out later, doesn't that speak in favour of some sort of global governance, like the Montreal Protocol almost gives us an example here where we do it once and we do it for everyone. I mean, there were differentiated scalings, weren't there, for less developed economies. But a global regulator could crack this presumably?

Jason Anderson  
Not many sectors have a global regulator. If you think about shipping and aviation, you know-

Bryony Worthington  
And the Montreal Protocol.

Jason Anderson  
-and the Montreal Protocol. Well, yeah, that's not a regulator of a sector but of substances. And so if you want to talk about the electricity sector, it's a little bit harder to have a protocol on a thing that hasn't yet been done. You could do it for SF6 on the basis of what's already there and the concerns about it.

Bryony Worthington  
See, if I was Antonio Guterres, head of the UN, you know, he's famously getting more and more agitated about climate and the lack of action, but he's got within his control the levers of international regulation, right. So he could set up a global, initial, you know, think tank or commission on SF6 and set in place a kind of technical working group that leads to regulations. That would solve the SF6 problem, presumably.

Jason Anderson  
I like where you're heading with this, this is - that he would spend that much time thinking about SF- well, you know, there have been some approaches to other gases. So, for example, methane: methane is a far bigger problem. 

Bryony Worthington  
Yeah, let's get on to methane, that's another topic you cover.

Jason Anderson  
Yeah. So, you know, one of the one of the big initiatives on this was the Global Methane Pledge, which came out at the the COP in Scotland a few years ago. And that's essentially a voluntary pledge by a bunch of governments that got together and said, "we've got to do something about that, we don't have a global regulatory approach, but at least we can cooperate on this." And there are various trends in diplomacy and regulations, some of which are this kind of club, some of which are through protocols. And it's just- diplomacy is incredibly time consuming, and they they pick their targetd. So it took a long time to get the Kigali Amendment on HFCs, which was a direct result of something that Montreal Protocol had done decades earlier, kind of forced HFCs into the market. So it made sense. But to come up with something on a new gas or in a variety of sectors is pretty challenging. 

Bryony Worthington  
But, so I feel like we've lost our way slightly with our our view of multilateral agreements, because there used to be a period when that's what the UN did, and it did it well, right. Going all the way back to the 1950s when they created sectoral regulators to enable global trade to flourish, which created a level playing field, and yes, there were differentiations between blocks of countries, but by-and-large, there was a recognition that regulations are good for commerce, for innovation and for trade. So level playing fields on technical rulebooks were in fashion. And then I think, I don't know where we lost our way, but the UN seems to have morphed into a much more voluntary, kind of like focus less on practicalities and more on principles, maybe. But couldn't we get back to that focus on the practicalities? Like, let's take methane, right, what would it take for a UN-negotiated agreement on oil and gas methane or fossil methane? It's conceivable, right?

Jason Anderson  
I mean, there are intergovernmental discussions on this. So the nature of those is, again, it's voluntary participation. They don't put a lot of money on the table. I think, you know, they're kind of testing whether or not this is actually able to deliver anything and I think the answer is, maybe it's kind of it's kind of slow. And the idea of being able to achieve what you're talking about seems like it's coming out of a larger set of considerations about the direction of multilateral governance. And if we, on the basis of climate and equity and a number of other things, can arrive at a point where we have that kind of agreement, I think, you know, obviously, that would be wonderful. But I think we're not in that space.

Bryony Worthington  
Well, it seems to me, the difference is whether the US wants to engage or not, right? Because for the longest time, there will be these initiatives, and then the US would famously not sign or pull out or do something. But then maybe, maybe we're getting to a period where the US is interested, perhaps, in a kind of reimagining of what level playing fields might look like. I know this is counter to the recent retrenchment into, you know, domestic support for manufacturing, but if you do do things on climate, right, let's imagine the US starts to really lean in on climate, they're gonna want to then level the playing field out there with others? Like if we-

Jason Anderson  
Well, I mean, this is, you know, the European approach to carbon border adjustment, that kind of thing. And of course, in the US, when the prospect for climate legislation was actually here, that was a super current discussion. 

Bryony Worthington  
So carbon border tax adjustments, meaning you put in place some kind of pricing mechanism on carbon, but rather than that mean all your industry fleeing to non-priced or non-taxed, jurisdictions, you apply the same tax at the border, right?

Jason Anderson  
So even if something comes from a higher-polluting country, they pay for that through the mechanism and that should equilibrate. And I think actually, the intention of that isn't so much to earn money, it's to have influence on those other places and say, "hey, why don't you set up an equivalent system, and then you can collect your own revenue, and you could do what you want with that." And that's the idea. And certainly, if the United States were ever to be in the position of having actual climate legislation, that kind of thing is, you know, super interesting to the US. But it hasn't been able to do that and I don't think anybody really sees the prospect for that kind of overarching legislation. It has managed to get a lot of money on the table, and what have they done? They've had a lot of buy-local provisions. So that means that you know, the US is actually- a lot of companies are having trouble accessing this money because they don't have the supply chains within the US to produce the equipment. Over time that maybe will work its way out. So actually, in some ways, we see that the other direction, where we're spending a lot of US money to create US manufacturing, whatever is happening everywhere else, we're not creating kind of global systems that speak to each other.

Bryony Worthington  
You're absolutely right. But could we -well, so, I mean, we've both worked together on shipping, and we just did an episode on shipping. So we're not going to talk about too much. But there where you've got a pre-existing international arena, how is the US engaging there, because presumably, it is behind this move to higher targets, and perhaps there's a realisation that throwing out multilateral rule books is going to slow progress?

Jason Anderson  
It does help that it already exists. So the International Maritime Organisation is the UN regulator of shipping and it is a regulator. It's not just a talk shop, they have influence directly on what happens in the industry. And because of that, there's a lot of very detailed technical conversations, which, as a result of that, have a lot of industry engagement. The United States is not a big flag carrier or relatively speaking, not a big owner. It doesn't have quite the skin in the game that your Panamas and Marshall Islands have at one end, or your Chinas even Europe where all most of the port calls are actually in Europe and Asia. So there's- it's a weird dynamic in terms of global geopolitics, the US isn't quite as big a player, but it has under the current administration been far more positive, and can be encouraging of the kinds of things that we're seeing in the next couple of years. But would they create that from scratch now? I just don't know that they would have the wherewithal to be able to do that. They are, however, a very positive player in the Climate and Clean Air Coalition, which is that inter-governmental entity discussing non-CO2 gases, and they're pushing quite positively looking for what they can achieve there. And in fact, under the current administration, and also under the Obama administration, they were a big driver of what came out in Kigali. They've really looked at every sub-sector that they can find some emissions reductions from and tried to do rulemaking in the US and also encourage that internationally.

Bryony Worthington  
So if anyone from the US State Department is listening, should they choose to do SF6, it's conceivable that you could see an international regulation. It's not on the agenda right now, but that would probably be the most efficient way of solving it with Montreal, you know, a Montreal-style "let's all move together on this."

Jason Anderson  
Yeah, and it does help that because- and this is the way things have happened in a lot of these international agreements, you have one region of the world pushing forward, usually Europe, and they're starting to regulate and that drives the market. So you've got the technical alternatives, makes it much easier than internationally to say, "we're going to be able to make some rules that everybody has to adhere to."

Bryony Worthington  
Yeah, yeah. And that's true now also of methane, right, where Europe's saying it's going to move forward on a regulation on fossil-based methane, and that will presumably, then, both transform the way the industry behaves within Europe, but then- can you then put pressure on imports and, you know, gas arriving into Europe? Is that possible?

Jason Anderson  
Well, depending on how they design it, if they're able to have a kind of emission factor associated with the upstream emissions before import and kind of the equivalent of that border tax adjustment, then you could potentially drive change. We see a lot of places, including in the United States, that are paying a lot of attention. Now, with methane satellites and infrared cameras on the ground, we can spot these emissions much more easily. But you have to want to do something about it and you have to have a regulation. And in highly regulated environments like North America, or Europe, you can see direct regulation working in places, let's say around the Caspian Sea, you know, in Russia and so forth, where they're not as enthusiastic, or these countries that are really heavily dependent with the national oil and gas company, they might not do direct regulation themselves. That's why I'm doing it indirectly, via European- something like that might help you.

Bryony Worthington  
Okay. Okay. So you can see a sort of patchwork emerging where one or two regions move forward, puts pressure on the industry, and maybe it becomes standardised or the costs come down sufficiently where- but the governance is still going to be a question. But you've touched on something there, which is, we now have these satellites. And the methane SAT that in fact, an NGO, Environmental Defence Fund, is planning to launch, which will give us a kind of civil society eye in the sky. And will that change the methane conversation or- we already have satellites that can help us spot some methane emissions, right?

Jason Anderson  
Yeah, we're already seeing news coming out about what's being detected. The thing about where  some of the biggest sources are, kind of the rogues or it's- there's a certain amount of leakage throughout the system. But if you are able to spot through satellites that that one defective well or tank or whatever piece of equipment, then that allows a company to go in and fix it. It also allows us to question the kind of calculations that a lot of countries make about how, you know, our inventory for greenhouse gases says we have a methane leakage rate of 1%. We know it's not true, but we can't prove it's not true. But with the satellites, maybe we can get- and that can have some pretty significant policy shifts. Now, I'm not going to name any names, but China, its non-CO2 emissions are getting equivalent to like US overall carbon emissions, you know, so it's a huge area that they are doing some things to address. But with a little bit more of a push in that direction, I think we might be getting closer to them taking on some commitments in their next- 

Bryony Worthington  
And what's the biggest source there for China? It's not oil and gas- they don't have oil and gas. So where are their non-CO2 emissions coming?

Jason Anderson  
Well, the study that we did, which is now a couple of years old, so it may not be the most accurate now, but they have a lot of coal bed methane, so tonnes of coal mining. There's a lot of methane associated with that. And that comes out.

Bryony Worthington  
Yeah, that's so always struck me as odd that when we do gas calculations, and oil calculations, you can sometimes get the methane added in right as a kind of greenhouse gas associated emission from that. But coal always seem to be, well, coal was already so bad, that there was no real effort to then put on the- add on the methane. So you were looking at coal without methane and comparing it to gas with methane, which is not really comparing, like-for-like, and now we're discovering that coal has got not only a crazy CO2 problem, but also a really bad methane problem.

Jason Anderson  
Absolutely. And it's incredibly dangerous as well for mining. And so the most logical way to proceed with China is not to put pressure on them for climate reasons, but to say, "we don't need buildup of explosive gases in your mines, rather than venting it, let's capture it, because then we get a double benefit for climate as well." 

Bryony Worthington  
Yeah. Yes. And going back to methane from oil and gas, the detection of it. I mean, that is- it's an invisible thing. It's probably leaking everywhere. But we are getting better, not just the satellites. But I think there's also now much more effort going into ground-based detection. It used to be the case that the industry was only really interested if it risked health and safety accidents, right. But now they know that small leaks, persistent over time are also a problem. And we have got technologies right FLIR cameras and handheld devices and static towers that can help detect it, right.

Jason Anderson  
Yeah, and one of the great things that's happening now is that you're able to get a handheld infrared camera to people, they're still very expensive, they require some training to use properly, but you get them to people who are able to go up to all of these facilities in their community. And we're talking about, I mean, think about the infrastructure for fracking and the all of the pipes that connect them. And you look at the west of the United States, and it's like spaghetti on the land. And this is true in a lot of different places. So you get these cameras in the hands of local activists, or just local people who aren't yet activist and the moment they see what's leaking in their backyard, they become active.

Bryony Worthington  
Yeah, so I have, I've got a great story about this. So I've been working on climate for over two decades. But I think the most impactful thing I ever did was I was walking, I used to regularly walk through a park in my- where I lived in Kent. And I very occasionally smell natural gas because there was a storage tank under this park land. And there was a period when it was just persistent and you could smell it everyday. And on the gate was just a sticker saying if you smell gas phone this number, so I did, and the very next day I walked past and the whole thing's being dug up and fixed because it was it was leaking from this- 

Jason Anderson  
I thought you meant the sign was being fixed. 

Bryony Worthington  
No, they were taking- no my phone call, which went through just the switchboard. And you know, it resulted in action the next day, because it was in a populated area. They can't risk any kind of accidents. And so I think that's probably the most impactful thing I've ever done. Truly,

Jason Anderson  
Very satisfying for smebody who works in climate change to see something actually happen the next day.

Bryony Worthington  
But I guess the message is there that, you know, citizens, it is possible to detect these things. You can either smell it or you can even take photographs of it. 

Bryony Worthington  
I mean, well, you know, distributed gas has an odorant added so you can smell it. But if you've got a colourless, odourless gas coming out and in its basic form, then when you- when it can't be seen, the industry can say there's nothing you know, and for decades, that's what they've done. It's not a problem and people didn't realise that this was going on and now use see these images and you've got workers just kind of walking through plumes of gas without any idea that that's happening. And you know, the kinds of environmental and health impacts that accrue over time. And people are wondering why this makes it a lot more obvious.

Bryony Worthington  
Yeah. You know, I think there's a new awareness of the risks of associated with so called natural gas as in methane. Certainly in the home. I mean, I've- once you start looking for these things, you find more and more evidence, but I've spoken to lots of people who said that their children had really bad allergies and asthma is and then they found out that it was, it was something in the natural gas that they were burning on their stoves that was basically filling the house and it like- we are essentially, currently in a system where we're exposing ourselves not just to climate risks, but also real health risks in the home, right from our use of these.

Jason Anderson  
Yeah, and that's something that's been coming up in the last few years is just making people recognise that they've got this stuff in their houses, you know, and, I mean, we've always said that if natural gas wasn't an existing system, nobody would ever allow it to now be built, the idea that they've got this massively explosive, dangerous substance, I mean- 

Bryony Worthington  
Yeah, I know. And it's often- it's curious, isn't it that occasionally- well actually fall to you regularly, there's a gas explosion, right. And often, there are deaths associated with it. And it's- but it's kind of like oh, you know, sort of brushed over or it doesn't hit the headlines. But these are real life tragedies are borne out of the current system we're in. And yet there are some novel things that we try and introduce where everyone's so risk-averse and you can't do that. Because we've somehow normalised this currently dangerous system. Dangerous on two levels. But we're very aware of future risks of things changing.

Jason Anderson  
Well, if we're able to look over the edge here, down onto the streets of San Francisco, we might see an autonomous vehicle. Yes, people drive like crazy. Autonomous vehicles cannot come soon enough for me. 

Bryony Worthington  
Well, my favourite is, you know, "oh, EVs are heavier, therefore, all the multi-storey car parks are going to collapse", the sort of ability to attach risk- be overly cautious about the new whilst tolerating something really risky, and then in the now is-

Jason Anderson  
Yeah, and not being able to conceive of the system design that is allowed by a new technology. So in the case of autonomous vehicles, why would they go into that large carpark? They could be, you know, kept in pockets of space that aren't needed, because they can be summoned when they are and you would have fewer overall- how much of our cities are given over two streets that really are only there so that people can have enough room to manoeuvre which a vehicle doesn't really need? So, yeah.

Bryony Worthington  
Right. So getting back then to your day job, which is in philanthropy. What- just describe to us what, you know, what do you do on a day-to-day basis? So you know, you've got this deep knowledge of this topic of non-CO2 gases. How do you go about making an influence through the use of philanthropy?

Jason Anderson  
At ClimateWorks Foundation, we're in a somewhat unique position in that we work with philanthropy. So big endowed foundations, we inform them through our global intelligence services, we also convene and try to align- it's not exactly like divvying up grant making, but we have these conversations that help people understand what's on the horizon and what the emerging issues are. And then we gather support from those foundations and create campaigns and strategies and support the field. So I sit in that programmatic space where we are making grants and devising strategies. And a lot of what we do is really listening to the field because we want to be of service to them. And then also-

Bryony Worthington  
And the field here is the campaign groups, the NGOs, the advocacy groups, think tanks- 

Jason Anderson  
Nonprofits, they're- analysis and advocacy is generally the way I think of it. And they're all doing great work. But the privilege that we have here is a couple of things. First of all, we have a global perspective, so we really work on these global campaigns and think about every place, whereas a single organisation might be housed in one country or a few countries. The other thing is that while NGOs are wonderful and are doing fantastic work, they often have a kind of brand, or a way of doing things to defend or are in competition for funding or whatever it might be. So there's kind of a way of doing things, and in philanthropy, we're able to have a bit of an overview and try to get people together through coalitions, try to create a good information flow between them and then between the field and philanthropy. And that's to make it more efficient to make sure that there's the right kind of cooperation, and that we're also then funnelling that philanthropic funding to the most effective places.

Bryony Worthington  
And one of the things- I mean, I've just spent some time in philanthropy and it was fascinating. It did strike me that there's not enough joined-up thinking between the investment community, like here we are in the heart of Silicon Valley where huge excitement about profit- for-profit investments to save the climate. But often those solutions, they require a kind of benign or a supportive regulatory environment, they need strong narratives and politicians that understand the solutions that they're providing, and the NGOs are doing all of that, you know, there's this kind of- but the two worlds don't always coincide, right, there's the VC world over here, funding clever startups, and then there's philanthropy-funding campaign groups. But actually, when you coordinate the two, you actually could get to a tipping point more effectively. Are there people who specialise in that kind of joining the dots between the for-profit space and the not-for-profit space?

Jason Anderson  
I'd say not enough. There's definitely a lot of campaign groups who don't understand investing. And I think on the investment side, they have trouble discerning between the levels of risk of what's going to emerge from let's say, a regulatory process that might drive a new market, how long will that take, which technology should we choose, and there's a kind of sweet-spot that you have to be super well informed from both sides to be able to say, "now's the moment to jump in", where philanthropic capital will actually drive something forward, that will, that will persist. And so it requires a lot of good dialogue to be able to spot those opportunities.

Bryony Worthington  
And actually, more often than not, I've heard from the investment side, they see any form of regulatory interference as a risk, even if it's to their benefit, because they perceive it as being like temporary, or perhaps this is a US thing where you don't really trust the politics is going to last, so you try to get through the valley of death without government intervention. But everybody on the, you know, on the incumbent side, all the big industries who are currently providing everything, they know that politics and regulation and policy is a way of keeping the show on the road, right, they invest a lot into that. And I had an experience with a heat pump manufacturer in Europe, you know, they provide an amazing service, which is not just individual ground source, heat pumps, but kind of networked, community scale, the ground source heat pumps, which is a really clever solution. But they were insistent they didn't want any government support or any government interference, because they just had to make it on their own. And then you compare that to the hydrogen and gas lobby, who are in and out of government offices all the time, making sure the regulations and the policies and the subsidies are in place. And it just feels like there's a disconnect.

Jason Anderson  
Yeah, there have been some disappointments when regulation doesn't work out, especially if you're trying to break into a market where there are a lot of incumbents, I mean, getting back to the non-CO2 space, the alternative to vehicle air conditioning that relies on fluorocarbon: at one time, the idea was we'd have these compressed CO2 systems. And there were these manufacturers in Europe that were entirely dependent on a regulation to drive that into the market, because it's such a unified system with very few equipment manufacturers, the whole thing was going to tip over more or less, or a few big companies. And there were even commitments kind of on the table from big car companies that they just never pulled the trigger. And those companies spent a lot of time waiting for the regulation to come in. So you can see why there is a certain amount of concern from these small companies. But from the other end of the equation, you get the oil and gas lobby, who let's say are moving into the hydrogen space, trying to say that grey hydrogen using fossil fuels is okay, or blue hydrogen, where we at least sequester the carbon coming out of the natural gas, that that's okay. It's, you know, like psychologists said, "loss aversion is much more motivating than an opportunity that you're not quite sure where it's gonna lead." And so they're gonna always spend a lot more money on that kind of lobbying.

Bryony Worthington  
And yeah, not just loss-aversion, but having 100 years of built up accrued capital, both political and actual capital helps, right, if-

Jason Anderson  
Well, yeah, if you've got the money, it definitely helps. 

Bryony Worthington  
Yeah, exactly. So obviously, philanthropy can help to make new markets introduce change. But how has philanthropy been engaging with the non-CO2 gas question up until now?

Jason Anderson  
The philanthropic support has been up and down. At the time of the Kigali amendment to the Montreal Protocol, there was a lot of support that had a successful campaign and then it kind of waned. So we as ClimateWorks have worked since the beginning of our organisation about 15 years ago on non-CO2 gases and have been trying to create sustained attention and interest within philanthropy. And a couple of years ago, we partnered with Pisces Foundation basically around the corner here to create the FAST Initiative: Fast Action on Super-pollutants Today, which is essentially a way of informing the field of policymakers and philanthropy about what the opportunities are here. So for example, because these are short-lived climate forces, the impact that they have on the atmosphere, but also the reaction you get from preventing their emissions into the atmosphere, has a long short term effect. So for example, the 20 year global warming effect is much stronger proportionally to the 100 year effect compared to CO2. And what that means is that over the next couple of decades, there's seven times more climate benefit from reducing non-CO2 gases than CO2 gases. So if you think about that, if you were to reduce CO and non-CO2 on a 1.5 degree trajectory, kind of Paris Agreement-aligned trajectory, most of that impact, seven times more benefit comes from non-CO2 gases in the next 20 years. And I don't think many people realise how much outsized importance they have. And this includes gases that have huge impacts on human health, agricultural productivity, so we have a wide range of benefits from addressing them now, as opposed to saying, this is old thinking, "well, because they're short-lived, we'll just wait until the end, take them out." Well, in the meanwhile, you've created this huge bump of emissions, that is going to make it impossible for us to reach our 1.5 degree goal.

Bryony Worthington  
Because basically, what you're saying is, though they may decay over a shorter time period, while they're up there, if you compare their impact over a 20-year, it's much greater than if you spread it out over the 100 years, which is what the convention is to compare, it's like everything's compared over a 100-year time scale, but actually, it's having an impact over a 20-year period, which is much higher.

Jason Anderson  
Yeah. And we're already seeing, just looking at the weather, that in the climatic conditions that we've had this year, we've already seen that the signal of climate change is coming through, I think, much stronger than a lot of people expected to see so soon. That means we have to deal with it now before we hit tipping points in the near term within the next 10, 20 years. And really the only way to do that is through non-CO2 gases.

Bryony Worthington  
I think that'd be fair number of people who would say, "that's true, but we might expend an awful lot of effort fixing methane leaks, and, you know, trying to clamp down on an existing system, where what we need is a paradigm shift to a totally new system not based on fossil fuels, and therefore speeding up electrification, which gets you out of this whole dilemma, you know, gets rid of the fossil-based emissions, at least in theory. Is that- is there a tension there? 

Jason Anderson  
People sometimes say that, but I don't see why that's not- we have a left hand and right hand where you can walk and chew gum, I mean, you have to do both of these at the same time. And I think one part of the equation that people forget is that, okay, while you're building and ramping up this alternative economy, you have massive impacts from what's already there. So fixing those leaks isn't like, "well, we're gonna get rid of it eventually anyway." Those lakes have an impact now. And that includes killing people. So for a long time, the climate community has only talked about tonnes and looked at their curves and everything like that, and ignored the human impacts. And those are very real. And in fact, those are the people who become the most motivated campaigners for climate change overall. So it's really- it has a couple of benefits. It pulls people in, specially in the Global South, where they're most concerned about air pollution and human health impacts. And so we really can't ignore that. And we have perfectly the capability to do both at the same time. 

Bryony Worthington  
Yeah, I think you're right. I think you're absolutely right. I think, actually, for me, if I had to lay them all out and think, I'd be trying to find the ones where there's the double benefit from the action. So if we can talk to people about the danger of natural gas in the home, and that triggers a greater clarity that the answer is electrification of heat and the electrification of cooking, then you get the double benefit, right, you're removing the pollutants, and you're introducing the clean at the same time, at the downstream consumer level, like I think we could spend 20 to 30 years trying to fix the upstream oil and gas problem, or the coal bed methane problem and find that, really, the fastest answer was to just killed demand for all of that.

Jason Anderson  
Well, the supply and demand, I think they do have to work together. But one of the biggest things we have to do is not create new sources of demand. So right now, for example, in shipping, which you've talked about recently, they're largely moving to liquefied natural gas as a propulsion system, which means that you've got a new demand centre when you should be phasing out heavy fuel oil, marine diesel, and not going to liquefied natural gas, but going to alternatives. 

Bryony Worthington  
Yeah no, there is always the fuel-switch potential, especially when you have an abundance of natural gas as we do in the US. Well, it's a fascinating challenge. And it really actually reassures me that, Jason, people like you are committed to this question and spending your days thinking about how do we solve it, investing through philanthropic funds and encouraging more philanthropy into the sector. So thank you for walking us through this fascinating topic of non-CO2 gases. I look forward to continuing the conversation.

Jason Anderson  
My pleasure. Thank you.

Bryony Worthington  
So that was Jason Anderson at the ClimateWorks Foundation. As the world meets for the 38th time to debate and negotiate international climate responses, it's important to remind ourselves what has has been achieved in the past when it comes to global threats. And it was great to hear Jason's expert views and perspectives. For me, it seems highly likely that as climate impacts increase, and our ability to detect and track greenhouse gases increases, so too will the calls to regulate them out of existence, especially those having such a big impact in the short term. The Paris Agreement is a framework deal, and more targeted international regulations surely must be on the table to deliver deep cuts in emissions. As Jason points out, it won't necessarily be easy. But getting going with specific negotiations now seems like a worthy use of our diplomats time. Let's see if advocates can successfully get COP 28 to take concrete steps in that direction. 

Michael Liebreich  
If you've enjoyed today's conversation, please remember to like, share, and subscribe to Cleaning Up, or leave us a review on your chosen podcast platform. And do please please spread the word on social media or by telling your friends and colleagues. And if you want more from cleaning up, sign up for our free newsletter at cleaningup.live, where you'll find our archive of ver 160 hours of conversations with extraordinary climate leaders. Cleaning Up is brought to you by our lead supporter, Capricorn Investment Group, the Liebreich Foundation and the Gilardini Foundation.