Tom chi: Optimising Life to heal the climate

Nate Hagans continues to publish brilliant videos and blogs based on interviews with impressive thinkers and practitioners. A recent episode with Tom Chi of At One Ventures. Tom has a background in tech innovation and could now be described as a venture capitalist with a mission.

We are investing towards a world where humanity is a net positive to nature. (Tom Chi)

Here is a video of Nate’s interview.

This is a 2.19 hour episode full of great ideas, but here are some themes that popped out for me.

Theme one: Abundance and diversity of life

Tom talks about creating an economy that maximises advantage for as many species as possible. This section starts at about one hour.

… life on earth, if you follow the algorithm of life on earth you don’t need less of it you need more of it right? What earth has been doing over these billions of years is actually making more life and way more diversity of life you know, touching more and more niches – that is the algorithm of life on planet earth… We actually have the most diversity of anything in Earth’s history now even after those mass extinctions we get set back pretty hard… We had the great dying. We lost  95% of biodiversity at that point but sprung back pretty strongly. …The whole point is that is what life is trying to do on planet earth and one could design an economy that can go on forever if you focus on the maximisation of organisms benefited in the middle because you can keep on getting more and more economic benefit. (Tom Chi)

Tom echoes indigenous knowledge when tallking about keystone species. Here in Aotearoa, iwi (tribes) around the country have an affinity with keystone species, such as the tuna (eel), wheki (octopus) or kumara (sweet potato). Indigenous peoples have close relationships with keystone species and build up knowledge over time about them. He states that we are the keystone species that need to nurture other keystone species. His attitude to other organisims is reminiscent of Jeremy Rifkin’s notion of extending empathy to the other creatures we occupy the plaent with, and the planet itself.

We need to be listening to more organisms than we are today. We mostly look at organisms as resources, or food, or materials for ourselves… We don’t like to think about like “oh what is this organism trying to be? What is a great life for this organism? What would be a maximisation of its life experience?

…imagine it was just part of the larger vocabulary that people are thinking about organisms not just as resources, but organisms as other types of sentience that we are effectively wanting to listen to you as a process of maximising how many organisms are benefited in the middle? (Tom Chi 1.06 hours)

Theme two: Beavers vs. carbon sucking machines

I think we’ve over-rotated around just that CO₂ number and for good reason, the CO₂ number is important… so I’m not saying it’s an unimportant number to track but we made everything just about this one number. If your focus is just on that one number, then you’ll start to see things like huge direct air capture plants as a possible solution. But I did a calculation that the biggest direct air capture plant ever built is actually going to have less impact than 200 beavers. … the 200 beavers were way cheaper than the billion dollars that went into making the (carbon capture) plants… That’s us missing the point because we got so focused on this one number and we got so focused on how capital can go play with how you move this one number, but beavers do a fantastic job sequestering carbon because they build dams and then the river system feeds all this organic material which then goes into the sediment that gets trapped there. (Tom Chi 1.20)

Beavers generate lots of other benefits too. By slowing down water they hydrate the land, create wetlands and recharge aquifers. Landscapes are more drought and fire resistent.

Theme three: Ditch emissions trading schemes

Tom Chi doesn’t rate emissions trading schemes.

I don’t think that we should have a carbon trading scheme. I think we should ramp it down the way that we ramped down CFCs, the way that we ramped down DDT, or the way that we ramped down lead in gasoline. All things that happened in the modern era. These were…1980s 1990s type interventions. And what that basically looked like is you didn’t put everybody out of business on day one but you made it more expensive to use those substances, and then after a couple years you turned the dial up even further, and a couple more years you turned the dial up even further and by year 10 it was basically impractical to go use that stuff now.

.. So instead of a kind of trading scheme where you need to go populate the stuff with credits and then people can kind of dissemble all sorts of things and play all kinds of games on how credits are counted. No it’s just polluter pays on a graduated scale that kind of kicks up. You can’t do this in 10 years… it will take a little bit longer but you might be able to do this on a 25 year scale (Tom Chi 1.22 hours)

In Aotearoa, in addition to a carbon tax on fossil fuels, phasing out synthetic fertilisers will reduce nitrous oxide emissions and improve water quality.

Theme four: Hope

Tom prefers an aspiration goal to a “thou shalt not goal”. The mindset that stresses “we gotta get it done by 2030 otherwise we’re all dead” isn’t helpful.

… no no that is a setup for despair because it will not be done by 2030. There’s no physics way for it to happen by 2030. … you could you elect better people by 2030… You could you pass better policies by 2030. I hope we could we have started to make some moves relative to how we do agriculture and industry. Yes I hope so. I’m not saying we should sit on our hands but I think like when you set up the psychological frame like that you’re setting up for a lot of very passionate people to fall into despair and I think that is also a waste of the cognitive resources of the planet…

The reason that the tagline for our firm is to help humanity become net positive to nature is that’s a type of goal construction which is the world that you want, as opposed to our goal construction so far has been thou shaltl not exceed 1.5°C. (Tom Chi 2.05 hours)

A podcast / book club?

There is alot of material in this podcast and some of it was new to me. If we are to have any chance of navigating through the meta-crisis we have to learning a lot faster than we are, and we have to learn collectively.

Listening to this podcast reinforces how incredibly deficient our collective response is. Tom refers to “over-rotating” around CO₂“. It reminds me of how blood-letting was the go-to medical procedure for European doctors for centuries. We need a stronger collective response to the meta-crisis and refining our collective thinking is a vital foundation.

Following our 2023 conference Climate Action Tai Tokerau wanted to foster the growth of the climate action community. One ideas is to have a podcast / book club – getting together to discuss a book or podcast after listening or reading and ruminating on it. I nominate this podcast as the first.

Leave a comment or contact us if you would like to participate. We could do video call and in-person sessions.