327: Carbon Removal & the Philosophy of Science: Kuhn's Paradigms & Feyerabend's Anarchism—w/ Anu Khan & Dr. Holly Jean Buck

How do we conduct science when there isn't a single isolated variable? What does that mean for carbon removal not taking place in a controlled environment? How does science even work?!

Today's show originated from a question of how open-system carbon removal research can be conducted given that in a less-controlled environment, isolating for a single variable with replicability is less obviously possible. Does the scientific method really demand that, or is that some sort of pop culture understanding of science that needs to be challegned?

To answer that question, host and co-founder of the Nori carbon removal marketplace, Ross Kenyon, asked Dr. Holly Jean Buck of the University at Buffalo and Anu Khan of Carbon180, to read two books and come on Reversing Climate Change to discuss them.

The two texts are some of the foundational works of modern philosophy of science: Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and Paul Feyerabend's Against Method.

Kuhn argued that paradigms are the collection of foundational beliefs we have about how science and knowledge production is conducted, and that they are quite hard to see outside of since most people work so deeply within them. It can often be a generational effort, as older scientists die and new ones take their places.

Feyerabend goes further, arguing that we shouldn't just look for where one paradigm supersedes another, but be protective of competing systems of knowledge and the valuable ways of seeing that they unlock.

The show applies their learnings to the state of the CDR industry, and attempts to ferret out carbon removal's existing paradigm, whether the world is ready for credits that are not tonne-denominated, and how much time we can afford in retooling and letting "normal science" work within an imperfect paradigm vs. trying to create an entirely new paradigm ex nihilo.

N.B. At the 8:55 mark, I contrast Ptolemaic with geocentric and I meant to say heliocentric. Feyerabend said that the quality of predictions between Ptolemaic/geocentric and heliocentric models was similar.

Resources

Anu Khan

Holly Jean Buck

Carbon180

Against Method on Wikipedia

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions on Wikipedia

The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman

Historiography