Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Jamey Mulligan ’07

BLUEPRINTS FOR A GREEN FUTURE

A senior scientist at Amazon and a judge for the XPRIZE for carbon removal, Mulligan takes the long view on climate change, technology and Earth’s future.

As a senior scientist at Amazon, Jamey Mulligan ’07 serves as the technical and strategy lead on the company’s carbon neutralization team. His work focuses on assessing a range of natural and technological measures for carbon removal and abatement, accounting for feasibility, lifecycle performance, cost, social impact and scalability, as well as implementing strategies to scale those measures. He was recently selected as one of 12 expert judges for the $100 million XPRIZE for carbon removal. Funded by Elon Musk and the Musk Foundation, the carbon removal iteration of the global science and technology competition is designed to fight climate change by rebalancing the Earth’s carbon cycle.

Broadly speaking, what’s the state of climate change policy and technology, and where is it headed?

We’re seeing an acceleration of progress across a much broader scope of the economy. Not long ago, the central focus was retiring coal plants and incremental gains in fuel economy, and even that could feel hopeless. We’re also seeing — and this is the key to the whole enterprise — a shift in the political economy around the climate agenda. Wind and solar now have political traction and have come massively down the cost curve. You’re starting to see that same shift with electric vehicles; it’s a race now, with the major automakers trying to catch Tesla. This is the playbook we need to apply to other sectors as well, because even if we’re completely successful in the power and transportation sectors, we still have all kinds of other emissions to deal with — from agriculture to cement production — that for the most part have nothing to do with fossil fuels. We’re starting seeing an increased pace of technological innovation and investment across a much broader set of emissions and opportunities for carbon removal, which is really exciting. As these technologies begin to commercialize, we’ll see the same political economy dynamics start to take hold.

The Paris Climate Accord projects that we need to cut global emissions by roughly 50 percent by 2030 to limit temperatures to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels (and stave off the worst effects of climate change). Is that doable? Are we on track?

We’re not on track by any measure. Atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases are already at dangerous levels, and we’re seeing the effects, so we need to get to net-zero emissions fast. And once we get there, the only way to return atmospheric concentrations to safe levels is through carbon removal, so we have to learn how to do that at scale. It is doable, technically and economically. The politics are the challenge — politics and the institutional challenges of turning big ships around quickly.

What will it take to get beyond those political and institutional hurdles?

Ultimately, people need to see economic opportunity. You get the big, entrenched industrial players to realize that if they’re not leading the pack, they’re at the end of the line; once they do, and there’s investment, then you start to have political interests and there’s a feedback loop through the policy arena. Just in the last few years, we’ve started to see real traction, at least in the U.S. government. Soon the feedback loops will kick in, with more companies investing and more policymakers supporting them, because these solutions are going to be built and employ people in their congressional districts. We’re on the path, just very early on.

You’re a judge for the XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition, sponsored by Elon Musk, that launched last year. The unprecedented $100 million prize is earmarked for the best solution to pull CO2 “directly from the atmosphere or oceans, and sequester it durably and sustainably.” What is the role of carbon removal in addressing climate change?

Carbon removal is a backstop: if you have too much water in the bathtub, the first thing you do is turn the water off, but you’re still going to have too much water in the bathtub, so you have to take some out. We have so many different options that will increase the removal of CO2 from the air and store it—some natural, some technological, some quasi-naturally engineered—but none of them are operating at scale. Global emissions are at 40 billion tons annually, so we have to build capacity for these technologies to be deployed at the gigaton scale. This is a new grand challenge within the grand challenge of stabilizing the climate, and it will increasingly get more attention and finance because it’s necessary.

What might these solutions look like, and what are the challenges in implementing them?

Imagine transformation of the world’s pasture from open field to integrated agroforestry systems that support livestock, crops and carbon-sequestering trees. Or large industrial facilities designed to chemically bind CO2 directly from the air. Or mining operations that move alkaline minerals to the ocean to bind CO2 and combat ocean acidification. Or offshore cultivation of kelp on massive floating platforms. There are literally hundreds of concepts for carbon removal, each with its own promise, challenges and constraints to scale. But if we’re going to mount a massive effort — and we have to mount many to stabilize the climate — let’s find opportunities for win-win-win solutions.

Agroforestry, for instance, has been around for many decades. Shade-loving crops like coffee and cocoa can be planted underneath larger shade trees and sequester quite a bit of carbon. In pastures, you can plant leguminous trees that will fix nitrogen into the soil and make the land more productive; at the same time, the trees’ leaves provide fodder and shade for grazing cows, improving meat production.

Time after time, you see that these systems are beneficial from a financial standpoint, from total yield standpoint, from a resiliency standpoint and from a carbon standpoint. That’s why Amazon is investing in these kinds of projects; we can help small farmers in places like the tropics implement these systems in a way that enables them to produce more food and sequester carbon at the same time, all while restoring land, enhancing biodiversity, feeding people and lifting them out of poverty. I wouldn’t say that every technology that we’ll need has been developed, or fully commercialized, but solutions are there — it’s not crazy to think about putting them all into place.

Considering current reduction, mitigation and adaptation efforts, what does “the future” look like? What’s your sense of Earth’s habitability in, say, 50, 100 or 200 years?

We’ve already come a long way, and there’s clarity around what needs to be done and the urgency with which it needs to happen. Energy systems will evolve. We’ll see transformations in industry and in technology. From that standpoint, the future is going to be fascinating.

Even if we avert the worst effects though, we’re still locked in for a material set of impacts from climate change. No matter what we do, we’re going to continue to see natural disasters that upend people’s lives. We’re going to see slower burning issues that exacerbate food and water insecurity, issues that lead to migration of people across the world, that lead to conflict. And it will hit the most vulnerable the hardest, so hopefully we’ll see a strengthening of social safety nets and sustainable development investments to help manage that — both from an equity standpoint and from a stability and global security standpoint.

We have the blueprint, not only the technological and economic elements, but the political elements as well. We put that blueprint together for renewable energy and we can do the same for other technologies. It’s a massive challenge, but you have to be an optimist to work on these issues.