This is a summary of episode 394 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast, in which Ross Kenyon brings back returning guest Sarah Godek—his self-described “sinologist on call”—to address the biggest country he left out of his recent monologue on the political risks to carbon removal: China. You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, whichever other app you use, or the full episode right below this paragraph.

Quick Takeaways

• This episode is a direct response to Ross’s earlier monologue How Carbon Removal Loses. That show walked through Canada, the EU, and Japan as possible carbon removal safe havens in a world where the US pulls back. It deliberately left China for a specialist. This is that conversation.

• Sarah frames world leadership as three things: power, reliability, and capability. The intangible “third thing” is capability—the ability to make another actor stop. No one else currently has that over the US.

• The war in Iran is a different kind of status hit than the war in Iraq. Iraq began with near-unanimous congressional support after a real attack on US soil. Iran does not. Allies are pushing back differently, and the Trump administration appears to have miscalculated the response.

• China’s preferred Taiwan scenario is still peaceful reunification. The value isn’t just territorial—it’s the legitimacy boost of people choosing the Chinese system over the Western liberal democratic one. That status prize is hard to quantify but is doing real work in Chinese strategy.

• China’s clean energy push is driven primarily by energy security. Coal is still over half of Chinese energy consumption, and Sarah describes the untapped coal reserves as “the thorn in the side” of China’s clean energy strategy; a mirror of how the US thinks about its oil and gas.

• “Green mountains are gold mountains” is the guiding principle. Chinese carbon removal policy today is heavily tilted toward natural sinks and reforestation, not engineered CDR.

• There is no clean institutional home for carbon removal inside the Chinese government. Relevant authority is split across the Ministry of Natural Resources, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, the National Development and Reform Commission, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. That fragmentation makes centralized CDR policy hard.

• Tencent’s CarbonX Prize 2.0 is one of the few genuinely interesting carbon removal demand signals in China right now. Round 1 was Chinese-only. Round 2 opened up internationally—partly ambition, partly an acknowledgment that Chinese entities alone can’t meet Tencent’s demand.

• On historical responsibility: China frames carbon removal as cleanup for historical emitters. Their posture is closer to “if we didn’t break it, why must we buy it?” than to “we’ll take the mantle.”

• Sarah’s closing frame is the line to remember: it isn’t that the US leaves a gaping hole and the world flounders. The world continues on without the US. The risk isn’t punishment. It’s being left out of leadership.

The Question Ross Left Out

How Carbon Removal Loses made a deliberately grim argument: the countries that carbon removal folks like to point to as safe havens—Canada, the EU and its member states, Japan—are less durable as climate anchors than they look, especially if the US pulls away from climate politics for a sustained period. The one country Ross didn’t feel qualified to treat with care was China. So he invited Sarah back.

This is their second conversation on the show. The first was about liberalism and realism in geopolitics: the underlying schools of thought that shape how states decide what’s worth doing. That episode is the right prereq if you want to understand the framing Ross and Sarah keep reaching for here. But the short version: liberal geopolitics says states pursue values and rules-based order; realism says states pursue power and security. The rest of the conversation sits on top of that distinction.

What “World Leadership” Actually Is

Ross presses Sarah early on the word “leadership.” It’s the kind of term that smuggles in a lot of BS. Why do countries care about prestige? Isn’t it just wealth and power?

Sarah’s answer is useful. World leadership, she says, is made of three things: power, reliability, and capability. The first two are familiar. The third is the interesting one. Capability here means the ability to make another actor stop doing what it’s doing. The example she reaches for is the current war in Iran: there is pushback, there is international condemnation, there are arguments that what is happening may be illegal under the laws of war—and yet no actor exists that can make the United States stop. That’s the thing other countries cannot replicate in aggregate, and she argues it’s also the thing that most of them don’t particularly want to acquire.

Ross pushes on the comparison to the war in Iraq, which also hurt US standing but didn’t permanently dislodge the country from its role as the ostensible world leader. Sarah’s response is that the two situations started from very different places: Iraq and Afghanistan opened with a 99-1 Senate vote after a real attack on American soil, giving the US a legitimate launching pad that made allied support much more available. Iran has neither of those things. The pushback looks different because the starting conditions are different. And, she adds, there seems to have been a real miscalculation inside the Trump administration: a classic dictator problem where the people around the decision-maker increasingly tell him what he wants to hear, and the actual ground truth diverges from the briefings.

Taiwan and the Value of Legitimacy

Ross asks what a war in Iran means for how Chinese military strategists think about a Taiwan scenario. Sarah’s answer is more interesting than the question.

Yes, she says, these events are invaluable for Chinese military planners. Watching how the US actually fights in 2025—which weapons, which tactics, which restraints—is exactly the kind of data you feed into your own war-gaming. But none of that, she argues, meaningfully changes China’s Taiwan calculus. Because the preferred Chinese outcome on Taiwan is still peaceful reunification. And the reason it’s preferred isn’t sentimental. It’s that a scenario in which the people of Taiwan wake up and choose to rejoin the People’s Republic of China would be an enormous legitimacy boost for the Chinese system—the strongest possible evidence that socialism with Chinese characteristics is desirable on its own merits, not just by force. Taking the island militarily gets you the territory but saddles you with a pariah tinge and an occupied province. The status prize is different, and the status prize is what the Chinese leadership values.

This is the “intangible third thing” showing up in a different guise. It isn’t about weapons. It’s about being chosen.

Realism, Coal, and “Green Mountains Are Gold Mountains”

On energy, Sarah’s framing is a mirror to how Ross talks about the US in How Carbon Removal Loses. The US is an oil and gas superpower, and its realist interests arguably pull it away from aggressive clean energy policy. China is the inverse: light on oil and gas, heavy on coal, and increasingly dominant in the “three new things”—solar panels, new energy vehicles, and batteries (including the long-duration storage research happening at Chinese universities). Clean energy is, from a purely realist standpoint, their energy security strategy. They pursue it because the alternative is importing vulnerability.

But coal is still just over half of Chinese energy consumption, and the country is, as Sarah puts it, “sitting on so much coal” that it’s very hard for a state that prizes social stability—and by extension energy stability—to simply leave it in the ground. There’s been real investment in clean coal as a result, and some academic arguments in China have gone so far as to lump coal in with clean energy sources in contrast to oil, which she reads as part of the broader project of splitting off a China-led order from a US-dominated one. Blackouts are still a concern. When local officials try to hit emissions targets by shutting factories off, Chinese leadership has pushed back hard: that’s not what we meant.

On the environmental side, Sarah notes that Chinese environmentalism today looks more like US environmentalism in the 1960s than in the 2020s. The movement is closer in time to a period of genuinely dirty air and dirty water, and that history shapes policy. “Green mountains are gold mountains” is the slogan. The concrete result, for carbon removal, is that Chinese CDR policy tilts heavily toward natural sinks—reforestation, ecosystem-based carbon uptake—rather than engineered removal. The China Green Carbon Sink Foundation is unusually active for a Chinese NGO, which Sarah reads as a signal of government attention on exactly that framing.

No Institutional Home for CDR

One of the most concretely useful parts of the episode is Sarah’s walk-through of the institutional landscape for carbon removal inside the Chinese government. And the answer is: there isn’t one.

Relevant authority is split across the Ministry of Natural Resources (which handles forestry and some geological/sequestration work), the Ministry of Ecology and Environment (air, pollution), the National Development and Reform Commission (five-year plans and action plans for peaking and emissions), and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (international engagement on climate). Each has different stakeholders and different goals. There is no centralized place to lobby. Ministry of Natural Resources is maybe emerging as the most likely center of gravity, but it’s still influenced by the others.

That fragmentation matters because of how Chinese policy actually gets made. The 15th Five-Year Plan is built through consultation— provincial governments, local governments, companies, academics, the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Once the plan is established, ministries and provinces issue their own sub-plans that have to fit inside the superstructure. Right now, the full plan isn’t out yet. What’s in the outline so far mentions green hydrogen and carbon sinks heavily, and does not put much weight on carbon removal as a distinct category.

Tencent, Carbon X, and a Real Demand Signal

The bright spot on the domestic CDR side is Tencent—WeChat’s parent, an enormous and famously wealthy Chinese company that has committed to carbon neutrality by 2030. That’s an aggressive timeline, which helps explain the CarbonX Prize. Round 1 was Chinese-only. The recently-announced CarbonX 2.0 opened it up internationally, and the top 30 list includes US companies like Heirloom and Octavia. Sarah reads the shift two ways: Tencent’s ambition has expanded, and Chinese entities alone are insufficient to meet Tencent’s demand.

Tencent is also accepting applications for carbon-neutral or carbon-negative building materials for their campus (the campus is, per one statistic Sarah saw, about 30% complete). There’s a 1,000-ton demonstration from China University of Petroleum in Beijing in the applicant pool. And—something that caught Ross’s attention a metallurgical biochar project (”bio-coke,” in the Chinese framing) from Beijing Forestry University.

The pattern across these projects is a lot of science, a lot of university involvement, probably some level of government backing via demonstration projects—but not a coherent national CDR policy. Sarah’s read is that we shouldn’t expect big Chinese CDR policy. It will operate in the background.

“If We Didn’t Break It, Why Must We Buy It?”

The hardest question is the one Ross came for: can China replace the US as the world leader on climate policy, and specifically on carbon removal?

Sarah’s answer is the most uncomfortable part of the episode, and it’s worth sitting with. China’s official climate framing—the framing that shows up in their policy documents and their talking points—puts historical responsibility for the climate problem squarely on traditional Western emitters. From that framing, carbon removal is not obviously China’s job. It’s cleanup for the people who made the mess. China sees itself as responsible for reducing its own emissions and, maybe, for compensating for its own historical emissions. But the broader cleanup of the atmosphere is framed as a Western debt.

When the US withdrew from the Paris Accords, China said it regretted the decision and that its own goals remained unchanged. What it did not say was “we’ll do more to fill the gap.” Sarah puts the quiet part out loud: “If we did not break it, why must we buy it?”

Ross pushes back gently. China could make a different play—the play where it says, look, responsibility doesn’t matter, we’re the world leader now, the problem needs solving, we’ll develop the technology and pay for it. That would be a huge status move. Is it likely? Sarah says it’s not consistent with the posture China has shown to date.

The World Continues Without Us

Ross’s framing of the episode’s motivating hope is that climate multilateralism can exist without US involvement. He’s come looking for reassurance. Sarah doesn’t quite give it.

But she also refuses the maximally dark version. She reframes it: it’s not that the US leaves a huge gaping hole and everyone else flounders and suffers and dies. It’s that other countries will ask what is possible without the United States and start building in that direction. Europe is already doing some of this. China will be opportunistic in making sure that international standards align with Chinese goals—as every country does with its own. The consequence for the US isn’t strict compliance punishment. It’s being left out. It’s watching standards get written without us, and realizing that the classic adage applies: if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.

That’s the grim news and the honest news in the same sentence. Carbon removal in a post-American-leadership world isn’t impossible. It’s just going to be shaped by people who aren’t us, with priorities that aren’t ours, and the window for being in the room is closing rather than already closed.

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Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Hey, thank you so much for listening to Reversing Climate Change. This is Ross Kenyon. I’m the host of Reversing Climate Change. An alumna of the show is returning today. Sarah Godek is back. She did a really great show with me last year. She and Grant Faber wrote a piece about carbon security and geopolitics that was really great, and that made me want to do a show with her. And then the show ballooned into just, how do we think about schools of thought with regard to global affairs, foreign relations, geopolitics? And then we ended up doing a really cool show about realism and liberalism within geopolitics. So if you haven’t heard that, that would probably be a good first step. And the link is in the show notes.

This episode is at least partially a response to the monologue episode I put out recently called How Carbon Removal Loses. It was about some of the trends around right-wing populism and domestic politics and how that influences climate policy overall. And if having the US as world leader pull out of climate politics means that other countries become a safe haven for climate companies and climate policy, or is that actually maybe not as durable as it seems. I analyzed several countries that carbon removal folks like to point to, such as Canada, the EU, and various member states, and Japan. But I had left out China. And China is one of those places that people still put a lot of hope in as an enormous economy, as a leader in its own right, that also has some really powerful realist motivations for pursuing a cleaner energy system.

But I didn’t have all of the detail here that I really would’ve liked in order to treat it with sufficient care. So I invited Sarah on to help me set the record straight and to give me a good answer of whether or not China can be a bastion of climate leadership and carbon removal leadership in a world without American climate and carbon removal leadership to the same extent that we once had.

Before I launch the show, if you wouldn’t mind opening up your podcast app and giving this show a full rating and writing a review if you’re on Apple Podcasts or any app that allows you to write a review, that’s massively appreciated. But in any case, here is my show with Sarah Godek.

Ross Kenyon: Sarah, welcome back to the show.

Sarah Godek: Thanks for having me back on, Ross. Good to be back.

Ross Kenyon: Yes. I think back on our podcast that we recorded often. I think it was such a fun show. I want to do more shows like this. And I recently did this monologue show where I expressed some of my concern about Japan, Canada, the EU, various member states within the EU for carbon removal policy as the world may be changing its focus or looking in different directions right now. And a careful and astute listener might have listened to that show and said, well, what about China? You mentioned it once, but are they not going to take the mantle and be the clean energy transition leader for this new era of human development? And I frankly do not know enough about what is happening in clean energy politics and just energy politics broadly within China. So I invited you back on as my on-call China-ologist. Basically, please tell me what I need to know. Was my diagnosis too grim? What are the green shoots in China that we can look forward to? Help me get a better sense of what I’m missing.

Sarah Godek: Sure. And always love the opportunity to talk about China, so feel really grateful that you left the entire country and its policy to me. That’s a lot of responsibility.

Ross Kenyon: For you, yeah.

Sarah Godek: Yeah, it’s a lot of responsibility. But I’m happy to offer some reflections. I definitely think it’s a challenging moment for the clean energy transition. There’s no doubt about it. What we’re seeing unfold across the world — you alluded to it in your podcast, sharing that there’s obviously some kind of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs here where there’s just a giant focus right now on energy security. But clean energy can be a piece of that, and that’s obviously been a huge part of China’s strategy as they’ve considered going from a world that relies on fossil fuels to what the future looks like. And you’ve seen them become a huge leader in what they call the three new things or the new trio — solar panels, new energy vehicles, and batteries. And especially looking into long-term storage batteries is a huge new area of focus and research as well at universities.

So I think that obviously there’s challenges, but China at least is eager to show that it can meet its own carbon goals. And I think that other countries are too. I think that there will be some loss of ambition and there will be some countries that try to — I don’t want to say weasel out of their goals, but will use this as an opportunity to say, well, maybe we can take a step back. But I think that there’s other countries like Canada, for example, that will be even more energized to move forward as the US sometimes takes a step back from the world. While that creates a bit of uncertainty — and in the current era that we’re in, a lot of uncertainty — it also creates a sense of, I think, it energizes states that want to prove that they themselves can take up the mantle and demonstrate their own global leadership capabilities in this space.

So I think Canada’s a great example. I don’t know if you saw, but Mark Carney had given a really strong speech earlier this year that many people are calling a sort of watershed moment for middle powers and their own ability to set their own path. So I think those are some things that we can look at — both China’s dedication in the space, but also other countries’ dedication to their own goals and even desire to move beyond what they set to try to fill in gaps that maybe the US has left.

Ross Kenyon: With regard to these gaps that the US has maybe left, how important is world leadership? It’s sort of an amorphous term. It sounds like a lot of BS can be smuggled in underneath a term like that. Why do countries care about prestige or status or how they’re perceived in this way? Is it not just about wealth and power? What is this secret third thing that is important, and how does it actually operate?

Sarah Godek: I think there’s a few things. One of them is just sheer power. Obviously that still plays some role. I think the other is reliability. And then the third is capability. I think this last piece is really important because we haven’t really seen many actors that have been able to, in aggregate, replicate the role of the United States. I think the war in Iran is a perfect example right now where we’re seeing a complete lack of leadership, and the United States in many ways is still calling the shots. And there’s pushback and there’s world leaders that are obviously — and rightfully — pushing back against some of the actions that are being taken, some of which I believe personally are likely illegal under the laws of war. But I think at the same time there’s still a reliance on the US to do something. Who is going to make the United States stop? And I think that that’s the sort of intangible third quality — this sort of capability where there’s not really a credible actor in this scenario that can make the United States stop what it’s doing. There are many actors that can maybe come together and try to pressure the United States into behaving differently, but we’re obviously seeing a pretty emboldened United States under Trump’s second administration that seems to feel — and seems to be the case — that they can just do what they want.

So I think that’s the intangible third quality that is very difficult for other countries to replicate, and that most of them may not want to. They might not necessarily want to say, hey, do something different.

Ross Kenyon: I’m trying to compare this moment to the war in Iraq. Granted, it was slower. There was more trying to coordinate among allies, trying to have this be like a multilateral military action. It wasn’t a sort of surprise for everyone. And so there was more time to build and work the diplomatic alliance network and try to make things kind of all come together. It didn’t work. I remember — I don’t know if I’ll keep this in the show — but I remember my dad pouring the French wine down the drain in 2003 and being like, well, France is not supporting the US in Iraq, so we are not buying French stuff.

Sarah Godek: Do you remember Freedom Fries?

Ross Kenyon: Freedom Fries. Yeah, for sure. And so the US did have some amount of — its status was challenged, but it doesn’t seem to have permanently negatively affected its standing in the world in a way that I can discern. The US is still broadly seen as the world leader for technology and innovation, and ultimately what the US says broadly goes internationally. And my interpretation of this is that it felt invincible. And we’re seeing now actually that the US can really harm it by playing too rough, by being less reliable, by being unpredictable. Some of these things mean that your allies balk at you. They question whether or not the alliance is stable enough. The middle power stuff starts happening where it’s like, oh, the US is not going to be the stable anchor for trade agreements that we once had planned on. And I think Trump is operating under a framework where he thinks: we’re the US, we’re the most powerful, we’re the biggest, baddest people, and everyone’s just going to fall in line because we’re the US. And people are not behaving in the way that maybe he predicted they would just go along with it. And now you’re seeing it change. I’m just trying to figure out what is different between how harmful the war in Iraq was to the US’s status, relative to what’s been happening in Trump 2, where it does feel like the status is actually eroding in a really big way — even though the war in Iraq also posed really big challenges for what the world thought the US maybe was.

Sarah Godek: Well, I think what’s important to remember about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was the place from which they started, which was widespread approval. I mean, 99 to 1 in the Senate to make a declaration of war. There was a declaration of war to begin with. It was something that had gone through a process, had pretty widespread public support because we had been attacked. That was the sense in 2001 after 9/11 — that we are under attack. And I think that’s why you saw broader support, not perfect, but broader support from our allies, specifically NATO allies, because there actually was an attack. We were attacked, and there was a sense that global terrorism was a serious problem that had the potential to seriously disrupt not just our country but other countries.

So I think that fundamental state of affairs in 2001, in the years that followed, made it a very different landscape from what we’re now seeing with Iran, in which we were not attacked on American soil. And we have launched a campaign that does not have congressional approval and does not have public approval. So I think that’s why the conditions, especially the pushback we’re seeing from our allies, is so fundamentally different.

And I think with respect to Trump, there was a sense, I believe, in the Trump administration, that they thought this would be fast. They thought this would be like Venezuela. And there are decades of war games that US generals, US military infrastructure gamed out through tabletops and saw that many of the things that we see happening are exactly the things that they expected to happen, that Iran had said they would do. A lot of this is not necessarily a surprise. But I think you start to get into a situation where the most accurate information is not necessarily making its way to Trump. There are many people who are surrounding him that may increasingly be telling him what he wants to hear because that’s who he chooses to surround himself with. And that just creates a classic dictator problem in which the information you’re receiving is very different from the actual reality. And so that makes your ability to make good and accurate decisions that accomplish the goals that you’re trying to achieve much more difficult.

Ross Kenyon: The generous interpretation of these events too is that it’s confusing because it’s meant to be confusing. Contradicting means you can — I’ve called it like a southpaw quality. Like you don’t exactly know where the next blow is going to come from because it’s very unpredictable. But it’s also possible that there’s just not a really well thought through plan either.

Sarah Godek: Oh, I was just going to say that. I mean, it’s a classic case of, oh no, my war plans didn’t go how I wanted them to. Set everybody ever. And once war starts — and it’s challenging because they’re not even calling this a war, even though it basically is one — it’s really challenging because once it starts, things start to spiral in all of these completely unpredictable ways, insofar as it’s really challenging to know how one effect will trigger next-order knock-on effects. And so that’s, I think, what makes war so challenging and why the fog of war arises — because you can predict human behavior to a certain point. But you start to get into really crazy complexities. These are some of the things that AI in a military context is being used for — to try to better model some of those second, third, fourth, fifth order effects. But it really does get into a situation where you have to make decisions based on all of the available information in the moment going forward. But that’s going to look very different from how you imagined it when you first set off on this adventure, so to speak.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. All of the second, third, fourth order effects that we’re seeing — and we certainly haven’t seen the end of it — but rising energy prices create problems for incumbent governments and leaders everywhere. That becomes a kitchen table issue. That’s really impactful and bad. Also changing how the war in Ukraine is being conducted and how sanctioned Russian energy assets are. And that changes the calculus for various things too. And then you have unpredictable things like Zelensky being involved with Gulf states, bringing drone warfare expertise over there. And how does that change? And then you have Marine Expeditionary Forces from East Asia going into the Middle East and leaving Taiwan less covered than it would otherwise be. And how does that change Taiwan, and what does it tell China about how the US will behave in a potential reunification event with Taiwan? How exactly would that play out? I cannot string all these things together because they’re so ongoing and so really complex. But I imagine this probably is changing the tabletop war gaming dynamics of how Taiwan would play out for China and how they’re thinking about that. Or maybe not. How is it impacting Chinese leadership? Have you seen anything that you’re able to share?

Sarah Godek: I mean, these kinds of events are great for Chinese military strategists because it gives them a really great window into US military behavior. That being said, I do think that US military behavior probably looks somewhat different these days under Trump 2.0 than it might in a traditional scenario. So I think that there is a little bit of variation there. But at the same time, it provides invaluable insight into the kinds of weapons we have, the ways in which we’re willing to use them, what kinds of tactics we use to affect certain military goals. And all of that data can be taken up through intelligence, through satellites, and put into a broader database of thoughts on how the US behaves in wartime scenarios.

So obviously any kind of opportunity to see how we engage in warfare is a bonus to China’s military strategists when they consider a Taiwan scenario. But that doesn’t necessarily change their calculus on a Taiwan scenario. And I think the reason for that is more ideological. Because I think when we think about what Taiwan is to China, the stronger ideological goal for China and Chinese leadership is to reunify in a peaceful way. And I say that with the thinking that what they imagine in that scenario is that people on the island of Taiwan all wake up and say, you know what, we want to be part of the People’s Republic of China and we would like to reunify with the motherland. And the reason that that’s such a desired scenario is because it would provide a really strong point of judgment for the Chinese system and its desirability. And that’s, I think, why that outcome is still the preferred outcome. Because taking it by force is something that I believe that China’s leadership thinks that they can and will do if they feel a need to do so, but I still don’t think it’s the preferred option. So obviously how we behave in warfare influences how they consider what a potential contingency could look like, should it come to that. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that their calculus on whether they want a contingency at all has changed.

Ross Kenyon: Wow, that’s a really fascinating answer. Obviously it’s better not to have a war in these cases. They’re expensive, they’re disruptive, and people typically don’t want them unless they have to, or they look like they’re quick and easy, and maybe it’s faster than some peaceful unification process here. But your answer here goes back to this initial secret third thing, status leadership question — where maybe there’s a theoretical reunification scenario where Taiwan would be okay with it, and that thumbs up to the Chinese Communist Party, I’m sure, would feel really good in a way that if they conquered it, they would have a little bit of that pariah tinge over, there’d be like an occupied province of theirs. And that doesn’t feel as good as “China is so good that we’d rather rejoin than remain independent and part of the broader North American, European worldview liberal democratic order. We’d rather join the motherland.” It is really hard to quantify how valuable that type of leadership and that status boost is, and what does it enable China to do with that? It gives them more credibility. Reinforces that their model of political economy and politics is more justified, that the system that they support and endorse continuing on with is a legitimate form of government, which is sometimes under question. Is it all of those things? What exactly is the value of that status?

Sarah Godek: Well, I mean, this goes back to the broader history of the People’s Republic of China, which was formed under really adverse conditions, when there was quite a lot of US opposition to communism. And under those conditions there was a really strong emphasis on trying to prove that China’s communist system was something different from the capitalist system. And so it was very oppositional — that’s a good word. It was very confrontational and there was a very strong desire to show that this was separate and new and different and better. Now obviously China has sort of dropped the illusion of communism in all but name, which the party retains but did consider dropping at one point.

Ross Kenyon: Really? Wow.

Sarah Godek: Yeah. Very, very interesting tidbit. But you know, now it’s socialism with Chinese characteristics is the system. But it’s still — there’s still this sense of an adversarial nature of the US, of the US trying to contain China, which from China’s perspective is not a new thread but rather a persistent thread that lasts across history. Which I think maybe feels a little bit weird to us because in the US we see our leaders change. We see great changes over the years, and we don’t necessarily always do the best at reflecting on the continuity in our strategy or posture because we feel like things are so different, especially under different eras of presidents. Whereas in China, they spend a lot more time — because their system has perhaps much stronger through-lines in terms of ideology, in terms of policy and the slow ways in which things have shaped over time, but also some rapid periods like the reforms of the eighties and nineties. And so I think sometimes they look at our system and they see maybe more continuity than we actually have.

So I think going back to what this means for the Chinese system is, I think they want to show that they have something that is unique, that is distinct from the Western model of capitalism. And I believe that they think that showing this model and its benefits and having others adopt it are pieces that contribute to something like global leadership. And so I think that there’s been a really strong desire to inject Chinese solutions to global problems. That’s been a really constant theme. And I think there’s a lot of lessons there for China’s energy transition and carbon removal as well, that we can get into. But I think that that focus on injecting Chinese solutions to global problems demonstrates that they’re interested in showing the benefits of their system and that they can contribute new and unique ideas based on that system, in a way that shows why China should be considered not just a responsible major power — which is the current framing — but sort of lurking in the background, not necessarily stated, perhaps one day a world leader.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, the understudy just waiting for their shot for the main stage. Such a good way to set this up. And I wanted to bring this back to when we first spoke, we were talking about liberalism and realism within foreign affairs and geopolitics and those broad schools of thought. And the way that I understand how the US is positioned here, and from Trump’s perspective, the Biden administration and Democratic presidencies tend to have a liberal geopolitics that does not suit the US. In fact, we are an oil and gas superpower, and we are throwing ourselves under the bus by clean energy politics that — we don’t have aluminum and rare earths to the same extent that our rivals do, or China does. And we are basically riding the bike and sticking the stick inside of the bike wheel and crashing ourselves to essentially no benefit, for some like muddle-headed liberal status victory that is disconnected from realist geopolitics.

In the same way towards China: okay, China has these clean energy materials, huge amounts of aluminum and much of the refining capacity of so many minerals and many of the rare earths that are needed for various types of clean energy. And there’s a question here of how much of China’s support for the clean energy transition is a liberal orientation of, oh, look, we are doing this because it’s the right thing to do, and how much of this is just realist, because they have coal, as you’ve noted, but not a lot of oil and gas, and clean energy is a way for them to have exports and to secure their own energy needs. Even from a purely realist geopolitics that doesn’t care about any sort of abstract values, they’re just needing to do this because it’s the energy that they have available to them. So how are we meant to understand what is driving Chinese energy politics?

Sarah Godek: That’s such a good question, and there’s so much that goes into it. Because there is the energy security element, which I think personally is the most important. But then there is also the desire to be a global leader. But I think there’s also really interesting lessons from Chinese environmentalist movements here too, because I think that a lot of the ways in which China frames the clean energy transition, and how they even treat carbon removal specifically, has to do with Chinese conceptions of nature and what it means to restore nature.

So, just to talk a little bit about the energy security piece: right now coal makes up about just a little over half of China’s energy consumption, with non-fossil energy making up somewhere around 21.7%.

Ross Kenyon: Oh wait, is it beautiful clean coal, or is it something else?

Sarah Godek: So sometimes, yes. There actually has been a focus on clean coal in China. In fact, I would say that’s actually quite a strong focus — cleaning up coal, because China has so much of it. And I think that this is really the thorn in the side of China’s clean energy strategy, because they are just sitting on so much coal, so many untapped coal reserves, and that is just really challenging from a country that prizes social stability, which relies to a pretty strong degree on energy stability. It’s really hard for them to look at those untapped coal resources and say, you know what, we’ll just leave them in the ground. That’s hard.

Ross Kenyon: We have the same thing here too.

Sarah Godek: Exactly. Yeah. It gets to — it’s a sort of mirror framing in terms of how the US thinks about oil and natural gas. So I think that coal is a really big challenge, and I think you see those interests reflected in China’s both new 15th Five-Year Plan as well as their broader carbon peaking goals. So you see a lot of reference to like the orderly transition from non-fossil to clean energy. And there was also, I think, some academic debate over what counts as clean energy. So I remember seeing sometimes coal being lumped in with clean energy sources, like only oil was the dirty one — which again, resonates with the idea of trying to split off a US-dominated world order from a Chinese conception of how the world could look.

So I think with respect to the energy transition, they’re really under a lot of pressure to make sure that their energy first is secure. Blackouts are still sometimes a challenge. And it’s hard because there are these dual goals that they have of growing but also growing their clean energy capacity at the same time. But sometimes the clean energy capacity might not be able to meet that demand. And so coal or other fossil energy sources could sort of fill in that gap. So their number one priority is to make sure that the lights stay on in many parts of China, some of which are recently developed. There’s been quite a lot of change in China over the last even decade. And they want to make sure that the standard of living they’re starting to provide in more rural or isolated areas is able to be the same level that has been promised. They don’t want blackouts.

So sometimes they’ve seen local-level officials, in an attempt to meet carbon peaking or clean energy targets, sometimes they’ve just simply shut the factories down or turn the lights off to show that they’ve met their emissions goals. And Chinese leadership very quickly made it clear that this is not what we intended at all.

So I still think that energy security is still number one for them, much like most countries on earth. So that’s obviously going to be a big part of their strategy. But there is also a desire to see that not destroy the environment. And that is both from a local and macro perspective. I think that China is much more close to some of the major environmental movements that we saw in the US in the sixties, for example. They’re sort of closer to that time period where there was a lot of activism surrounding dirty air and dirty water. And so I feel that there is some of that that influences their energy policy today.

So there’s a lot of focus on reforestation. That’s actually a huge component, and that influences their carbon removal policy too. There’s a lot of focus on carbon sinks — that is, I think, the biggest focus in China’s overall policy right now. And so I think it’s because they’re closer to that era in which there was really dirty air in China, there was really dirty water in China. And there’ve been tons of efforts to clean that up. And now the sort of guiding principle is that green mountains are gold mountains.

Ross Kenyon: Is that just like a very literal translation kind of thing that sounds kind of goofy in English but is more beautiful in Chinese?

Sarah Godek: Yes.

Ross Kenyon: Okay. That’s not unique to them. That’s literally every language if you translate literally. But okay. Interesting.

Okay, two big nested questions for you. One: are we going to see more carbon removal specific policy and events and competitions like the Tencent deal that is recurring in China right now? That is maybe a nice opportunity for carbon removal companies that are seeing opportunities around the rest of the world vanish or be pushed out further in time or shrinking. And then secondarily — gosh, this could take us all the way through to the end of the show pretty much — with the US pulling out of the UNFCCC and Paris and things like that, is there a chance for China to replace the US in terms of being a world leader, if not generally, at least with regard to climate policy? Is that a powerful enough status that they hold onto right now that they could generate enough commitment to these goals that it could replace what the US once provided for world order? Is it possible for them to do that? Sorry, those are two enormous questions. Good luck.

Sarah Godek: No, they’re both good questions. Those I think are kind of the two key questions that I was excited to address today. Because one of them was about prizes and like ops for domestic policy, and then the other was, will China replace the US role on climate policy? And I think those are both really great questions.

To talk about the prizes and the landscape in China’s domestic carbon removal policy: I definitely don’t think that the world will likely be able to count on China in this regard. So I think what is really unique about the Tencent policy is that Tencent as a company — for those who are not familiar with Tencent, it’s a massive Chinese company that runs WeChat, which is the proverbial Swiss Army knife app of China, in which people make reservations, talk to their friends, post videos, post articles, post academic articles, watch videos, book movie tickets, do banking, pay their friends. It’s like imagine if you had Facebook and academic journals and YouTube and Venmo and Eventbrite and movie ticket apps — like imagine you just have all of these apps and services all rolled into one giant app that everyone uses for most, or at least many, activities.

So it’s quite a famously wealthy company. They have made a commitment to reach carbon neutrality by 2030. That’s a pretty aggressive timeline, and so I think that’s partially why you see such a focus for Tencent on their Carbon X Prizes. So they have finished the first round. Those winners were announced a couple years back. They just announced the top 30 for Carbon X 2.0 in, I think, October of last year. And they’re now going to be moving forward soon with the deadline for applications for infrastructure for Tencent — I think it’s called Binhai campus. So they are accepting applications for either carbon neutral or carbon negative building materials for that campus. So I think the campus is maybe about 30% complete — I saw one statistic — but they still have quite a long way to go, and they’re obviously interested in incorporating more players.

I think what’s interesting between the first prize and the second prize is that the first prize was only Chinese companies and entities. And in the second round they expanded that to have a more international scope. So you see a ton of US companies on there. Some names like Octavia, Heirloom, very familiar names. And so I think that that’s a really interesting shift, because I think it highlights two things. I think it highlights Tencent’s expanded ambition, but I think it also highlights the fact that Chinese companies and entities alone are insufficient to meet that demand. So I think that piece is key. Because there are some Chinese companies that are doing really great work. I was looking at some of the projects and feeling pretty excited about some of them. There’s some unique processes there. There’s a 1,000-ton-level demonstration that China University of Petroleum in Beijing has applied for under this prize.

Ross Kenyon: Expand on them. Go Moonrise, go Moonlight, go diligence all of these Chinese companies. Come figure it out.

Sarah Godek: Due diligence in China is a whole other animal. But I mean, there’s capture materials, there’s mineralization, biomass, solid liquid air capture — all kinds of projects from Chinese entities, a lot of universities, which I find to be encouraging because that means there is likely some level of government support in the form of projects or demonstration projects.

But what’s interesting, as I was going through this and looking at some of these entities and looking through China’s energy policy, clean energy policy, and carbon removal policy, is that there’s not really a great home institutionally for carbon removal. There are companies that have committed to net zero policies. Another is Sinopec set a goal for carbon neutrality by 2050. China itself has a carbon neutrality goal for 2060. But policy doesn’t really put carbon removal as a really big piece of that. And I think there’s a couple reasons for that. The first is that there’s not a great home for carbon removal in the ministries of China’s government.

So I was looking, and there’s a few different places that it could live. I think probably the most likely would be the Ministry of Natural Resources, which handles forestry but also has a couple other geological bureaus or centers that I think will be likely involved with sequestration efforts and permanent storage. But there’s also some of it that falls under the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, which handles the air side of things, because they handle air pollution, for example. But there’s also the National Development and Reform Commission, which manages China’s development plans and action plans for peaking and emissions. But then there’s also the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which handles the international engagement side of things, which I think is a challenge for carbon removal because that means that some of the policies that are going to govern this technology ultimately will be split across multiple agencies with disparate stakeholders who have different goals at each of them.

So I think that’s one challenge for carbon removal policy in China — that it doesn’t necessarily seem to have a great centralized home. Maybe Ministry of Natural Resources is maybe emerging as one that would be a little bit more centralized, but still influenced by those other ministries, which makes it a bit of a challenge in terms of just lobbying for your own desires and goals.

But there are a lot of universities widely spread across China, also in Hong Kong, that have great projects that they’re clearly pursuing. And that probably indicates some level of government support through the demonstration efforts. So I think it’ll be really important to see what comes out of the 15th Five-Year Plan. Right now, all we have is an outline. And once the full plan is issued, then there will be sub-plans. And I think that matters because the way that policy making in China goes in terms of these plans is that once the major plan is established — well, let me back up a little bit.

So first, what happens is, in the formation of the five-year plan, there is a lot of consultation with governments around China, local governments, provincial governments, and companies, and they all give inputs into this plan and what they think they can do. Companies, individuals from companies, all may weigh in. Academics, scientists, especially at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which is China’s sort of premier science research organization. And then once the major plan is built and established, that allows agencies to issue their own sub-plans. So provincial governments, for example, will issue sub-plans. Ministries will issue their own sub-plans. And other plans must fit into the sort of superstructure of the goals of the 15th Five-Year Plan, and show how it is in accordance with them at minimum.

So right now, we haven’t really seen that much reference to carbon removal. There’s been much more reference to things like green hydrogen. Carbon sinks came up a lot. I had found — let me see what the specific name is — there’s a foundation, it is the China Green Carbon Sink Foundation, and they seem to be very active. It’s pretty rare for an NGO organization like that to be super active in this space as a sort of leading entity. But that seems to be where there’s been a lot of government attention — on the idea of looking at natural ecosystem carbon sinks and how to improve their uptake of carbon.

So I think that kind of gets back to what I was talking about earlier with respect to China’s environmentalist movements and push for a cleaner environment. Because there’s a sort of strong focus there on the natural elements of things, of like, how can we take this beautiful resource that we already have and make it better? And so I think that’s more of China’s focus.

But starting to see some projects from companies. There was one really unique project that was something to do with like bio-coke and capture in the process of that. So that’s pretty interesting. So you’re starting to see a little bit of that industrial tie-in.

Ross Kenyon: Is that the metallurgical biochar? Is that what that is? Bio-coke. I imagine that’s just a new term for it. They keep coming out with new terms for it. I can’t keep up.

Sarah Godek: Yeah, it’s something to do with the steel making process.

Ross Kenyon: I imagine it’s the same.

Sarah Godek: Yeah. That’s cool.

Ross Kenyon: They’re making biochar then, but it’s metallurgical coal.

Sarah Godek: Yeah, so it was a project from Beijing Forestry University that is in the new round of Carbon X 2.0. So yeah, seeing a lot of science. But I think that we won’t necessarily expect really big policy from China on carbon removal. And I think it’s one of those things that’ll be sort of operating in the background.

And that kind of gets me to the second question that you posed, which is: will China replace the US role in climate policy? And focusing on the carbon removal piece of it specifically. I think what’s challenging here is you’re starting to get to the question of whose responsibility is carbon removal. And China sees itself as responsible for reducing emissions, certainly, and for making sure that it compensates for its historical emissions, maybe. But when you talk about climate change, I think that China will focus more on the role that traditional emitters have played and that it will focus more on the historical emissions. That’s been a really big focus in China’s policy and talking points on the clean energy transition — who is responsible for the past harms. And they will place the blame squarely on specifically the US, but also other Western emitters that already have pumped tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, and will see them as more responsible for cleaning up after it.

So I think that there is an opportunity for China to do carbon removal in the future, especially as this ecosystem starts to build out. But I think you’re more seeing supporting technologies in their efforts, where it might not necessarily be the actual technology itself, but it might be ways to support it. And so I think that there’s maybe a role there for them to play a supporting role for efforts elsewhere. But I don’t necessarily think that China will take a leading role, and that’s partially because from China’s government’s perspective, it’s not necessarily China’s responsibility.

But I think the silver lining there is that companies are invested in ensuring that they themselves meet carbon neutral goals, and there may be more impetus to do so in the future. And that’s where you could maybe see a bit of a shift in that calculus, where: okay, if we can reduce our emissions, but we still have these leftover emissions from construction and infrastructure building, then we’re going to need something to make that up too. But I think there’s been more of a focus on low-carbon materials.

Ross Kenyon: That’s so fascinating. I would not have anticipated that historical responsibility angle for carbon removal — for residual emissions is not our responsibility, that’s for, you know, when we had the unequal treaty system and that was going on, you guys were industrializing, and this is basically your fault. Like, why should we be developing the technology and paying for the stuff that you basically created this issue? I haven’t heard that said out loud. But that is one potential framing for this too. They could also say in the future, it doesn’t matter whose fault it is. We are the world leader and we aspire to be this, and the problem needs to be solved independent of culpability here, and we are going to stick our necks out. We need to develop carbon removal and climate policy in the absence of the US or everyone will suffer. They could make that play. Is it likely? What do you think?

Sarah Godek: They could. But it’s not necessarily consistent with the posture that they’ve shown up to now. I think that there’s been — so, for example, when the US withdrew from the Paris Accords, they said that they regretted the decision and that nothing about their goals had changed. Like, China remains committed to their own. So I think there is a moment where you could have seen them step in and say, oh, we can do more. But again, there’s really this piece of responsibility. If we did not break it, then why must we buy it?

Ross Kenyon: So it is just the US or nothing. Like, I guess the hope that frames this question is, can climate multilateralism exist without US involvement? I think everyone is hoping that the answer is yes. And my asking you to come on the show is at least partially to tell me, yes, it is maybe possible, and here’s how. And what you’re telling me is that maybe the US’s leadership is irreplaceable, at least for now, when it comes to climate policy.

Sarah Godek: I would say it’s more that the world will continue on without the US. I think that that’s more of the framing that I would use, is not that the US has left this big gaping hole and everyone will just flounder and suffer and die. I think it is more that countries will say, well, what can we do without them then? I think you’re seeing a lot of that in Europe of, you know, what is possible without the US, and starting to imagine what does a world that isn’t dominated by the US look like and how can we increase our own relative influence in that?

So obviously China will be opportunistic in ensuring that standards are in accordance with Chinese goals, as other countries will be ensuring that international standards align with their own goals. But I think that just means that we will have less of an opportunity in the United States to promote our own interests. It’s the classic adage of: if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu. And I think that we will be on the menu when we see that standards internationally that we are subject to, not necessarily because of some kind of compliance measures that are strict compliance measures that like, oh, we have to abide by them or something bad will happen to us, some kind of punishment or retribution. I think it’s just that we’ll be left out, and the world will move on without us, and we will become more isolated as a result, if we continue this current course.

Ross Kenyon: Sarah, thanks for coming back on. I realize I’m asking you some of the hardest questions to forecast probably in the entire world. So thank you for doing a sterling job. I feel like you did it. Thank you for doing it.

Sarah Godek: Absolutely. And thanks so much for having me back on again, Ross.

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This is a summary of a bonus episode of the Reversing Climate Change podcast, a solo episode in which Ross Kenyon reads and reflects on William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming.” You can listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you listen to your podcasts, and also the episode in its entirety right below this paragraph.

Quick Takeaways

• “The Second Coming” is best understood as horror, not lament. It’s a poem about something that is still arriving—present progressive, not past tense.

• The trigger for revisiting it wasn’t war or politics in any obvious sense. It was thinking about artificial general intelligence, and the image of a falcon that can no longer hear its falconer.

• The famous lines (”things fall apart,” “the center cannot hold,” “the worst are full of passionate intensity”) get all the attention. Some of the most interesting craft is in the quiet phrases: “troubles my sight,” “vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,” “slow thighs.”

• Yeats grants agency to humans. The worst are “full of” passionate intensity, not “filled with” it. Nobody poured this in. We did this to ourselves.

• Monsters, etymologically, are meant to show. Good horror—Hereditary, The Babadook, Jordan Peele’s films—uses the monster as a way to talk about grief, depression, race, or whatever else can’t be said directly. “The Second Coming” without a monster is fear of change and the worries that what is coming is not better than what preceded.

• Antonio Gramsci’s line pairs perfectly with Yeats: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” The unsettling part isn’t the new order. It’s the gap before it.

The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

A Defense of Useless Things

The case for spending half an hour reading a poem on a podcast about climate is, honestly, that you don’t need a case. Ross opens this episode with a defense of useless things, mistakenly citing Thomas Merton’s In Praise of the Useless Life (it was a different author but Merton penned a foreword!), and the observation that as life accelerates it gets harder and harder to justify anything that doesn’t immediately convert into productivity. Opportunity cost is always lurking. Today’s episode is going to be about poetry, about economy not of time but of words, and that’s enough.

It’s a small move, but it sets up everything that follows. The whole episode is an argument that close attention to a single poem—what its rhythms do, why a particular phrase lands, how it gets repurposed across a century—is itself a form of taking the world seriously.

Why This Poem, Why Now

“The Second Coming” gets quoted constantly in moments of uncertainty. Joan Didion built a book around it. Chinua Achebe took its most famous line for a title. The lines have become a kind of shared vocabulary for “things are bad and we don’t know what comes next.” Ross has had lines from it popping into his head for weeks, watching Paul Muldoon’s reading on a loop, and trying to figure out why.

It isn’t war, exactly; though there is war. The actual catalyst, he says, was thinking about artificial general intelligence. The image that grabbed him is the very first one: the falcon that cannot hear the falconer. The thing that was supposed to be subordinate has stopped listening. It’s using its own discretion, out of command of what should be commanding it. Whether or not you take AGI seriously as an existential risk, that image is doing real work.

Underneath that is the broader sense that what we built our expectations around is eroding. The United States and NATO and the post-war order have been changing in ways that may or may not return to equilibrium. Maybe this is a temporary detour from the long arc of history. Maybe it’s the birth of something new. The poem refuses to tell us which.

Horror, Not Lament

The most important reframing in this episode is that “The Second Coming” is a horror poem. Not a sad poem, not a war poem, not even an apocalyptic poem in the prophetic sense. A horror poem.

The first stanza is about what has happened: the gyre, the falcon, the loosed anarchy, the ceremony of innocence drowned. The second stanza is about something that is still on its way. The rough beast hasn’t been born. It is slouching toward Bethlehem. The verb tense matters. If this were a verb tense, Ross says, it would be present progressive. The horror is that the worst is still arriving.

Yeats also grants the humans in his poem real agency. The worst are “full of passionate intensity,” not “filled with” it. Ross gets into close-reading territory here, but the distinction is the whole game: “filled” implies an external pourer, some demonic force acting on people from outside. “Full of” locates the agency inside the actor. Nobody made these people the way they are. They made themselves. The supernatural elements that follow are responses to human choice, not substitutes for it.

That makes the poem scarier, not less scary. The first stanza is the part where humans do terrible things to each other without supernatural help. The second stanza opens with what reads almost like a plea—surely some revelation is at hand, surely the second coming is at hand—as if the speaker is begging for there to be something more than just us. Please let there be a reason. Please let it be supernatural. Because if this isn’t the second coming, whatever the actual second coming turns out to be must be much, much worse than what just happened.

Economy of Language

The lines that get quoted are not necessarily the lines Ross loves most. The famous ones: center cannot hold, mere anarchy, passionate intensity; do their work. But the craft he keeps coming back to is in the quiet phrases.

“Troubles my sight.” Three words. You could say “and what I see disturbs me” and it would mean the same thing at twice the length and a fraction of the power. The phrase isn’t showy. You don’t need a dictionary. It just trusts itself enough to stand alone.

This reminds Ross of seeing Tig Notaro do stand-up about a decade ago. The comic before her had been manic, neurotic, filling every half-second of silence because silence felt like failure. The audience was tense. Then Tig walked out, held the mic for thirty seconds without saying anything, delivered one simple sentence, and the room came apart laughing. She’d sit in another thirty seconds of silence, totally at ease, in complete control. We trusted her because she trusted herself.

That’s what “troubles my sight” does. It’s a phrase that doesn’t need to perform.

Then there’s the line Ross can recite without effort, the one that will not leave his head: “But now I know that twenty centuries of stony sleep / were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.” How do you vex a stony sleep? Let alone vex it to nightmare? The verb doesn’t go with the noun, and that mismatch is exactly the point. There’s a chugging, locomotive rhythm to it. It just moves.

And then “slow thighs.” Who, possibly, puts those words together. You immediately see the lumbering beast.

What Monsters Are For

The image of the rough beast—lion body, head of a man, gaze blank and pitiless—is what Ross calls a “therianthrope”: a hybrid creature, like the Egyptian gods, half human and half animal. It is a Lovecraftian image in the sense that what makes it terrifying is that it doesn’t make sense in the logic of our world. It intrudes from somewhere else.

This is where Ross makes the case for horror as a serious genre. Good horror isn’t really about the monster. The monster is a way of talking about something that can’t be said directly. There’s a Slavoj Žižek bit from The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema where he stands on Bodega Bay and argues that the birds in Hitchcock’s The Birds are the maternal super-ego—the overprotective mother who can’t let her child go and form a new family. That’s one reading. It might or might not be what Hitchcock was consciously doing. But the broader point holds across the genre: Hereditary is a beautiful film about grief that would still be a beautiful film if you took the horror out. The Babadook is about depression. Jordan Peele’s films are about race. The horror is the vehicle.

The etymology backs this up. “Monster” is related to the Spanish mostrar, to show. Monsters are didactic. They exist to communicate something. There’s a thread in folklore where the right response to a haunting isn’t to run but to stop, face the spirit, and ask what it’s trying to tell you. Sometimes the resolution is to learn something about yourself. Sometimes it’s to help the spirit pass on. Often both. You grow as a human, and in growing, you can help someone you couldn’t help before.

If that’s what monsters are for, then “The Second Coming” is asking us to look at the rough beast and figure out what it’s showing us about ourselves.

The Time of Monsters

The line that closes the episode comes from Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” It pairs almost too neatly with Yeats. The center couldn’t hold. Things fall apart. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. All of that has happened. The new order, represented in the poem by the rough beast still on its way to Bethlehem, has not yet arrived. We are in the gap.

That’s why the present feels monstrous. Not because the new world is here and is bad, but because it isn’t here yet, and we don’t know what shape it will take. How much of what is happening will roll back, and we’ll look back on this as a strange interlude? How much is the actual structure of the next order being laid down right now? The poem doesn’t answer. The honest answer is that nobody knows.

Which is why the rough beast slouches. It hasn’t arrived. It’s only on its way.

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Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Hello. Thank you for listening to Reversing Climate Change. I’m the host, Ross Kenyon. I’ve been a carbon removal entrepreneur for the better part of a decade, and I’m also someone who enjoys poetry. So thank you for tuning into this bonus episode. It’s nice to break things up a little bit with something important, something related, but also not something immediately useful, you might say. In fact, I like the defense of useless things.

Even saying that, I’m like, where does this phrase resonate in my brain? And it comes from the Thomas Merton book In Praise of the Useless Life: A Monk’s Memoir. It’s like, oh, that makes sense. I think there’s something that as life gets faster and faster, it’s harder to justify things that feel useless, wasted time, wasted productivity, could have been doing something else. Opportunity cost is something that we’re thinking about constantly. And you know what? Today we’re going to talk about some poetry. We’re going to talk about economy, not with time, but with words. So that’s what we’re doing today. Thanks so much. I’m going to get right into it.

If I could make a quick ask of you though, if you could please open up your podcast app right now and give this show five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And if you use Apple Podcasts, write a quick review about why you like this show, that would be much appreciated.

Okay, I’m going to read a poem that is one of the most famous poems in the English language. It was written by William Butler Yeats after World War I, at a time when art was tormented, classical forms, familiar forms no longer made sense in a world with poison gas and machine guns and trench warfare, and just the sheer scale of carnage that threw basically everything that was assumed to be stable into question.

And so this poem often gets trotted out in times of great uncertainty for various lines that resonate. For instance, Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a great book and references this line. “Things fall apart. The center cannot hold,” is referenced constantly, from the Chinua Achebe book, also a great novel.

A poem or a work of writing is powerful when you see lines from it show up all over the place. Think about how many movies take lines from something like the Lord’s Prayer or Hamlet’s soliloquy. It’s just being like, okay, these lines have a resonance. They are poetically powerful and they get referenced. And this is one of those poems. And one of the things I like about reading poems here is that I’m not trying to do super deep dives and find obscure things that maybe you wouldn’t have already come into contact with.

What I like about the classics is that when you can appreciate them, you are tuning into a civilizational or planetary conversation about art, about what it means to be human. And that goes beyond what is quickly published and forgotten about, or is so specific to a moment or an insular group that it doesn’t have that sort of resonance that can be echoed a hundred or a thousand years later, in ways that the truly classic works of literature do.

I’ve been thinking about this poem a lot lately. I’ve had lines just pop into my head. And while I can appreciate again how resonant these images are, it’s not for good reasons. This is an apocalyptic poem. It references Christian eschatology very strongly, and I think it makes the most sense to locate this poem within the genre of horror. I think it’s a truly scary poem.

And in fact, there’s a version of it that’s read by Paul Muldoon that I must have watched this thing like a hundred times in the past month or two. I think the reading is masterful and the music that it’s put to is so spooky. It’s a really affecting poem. And I keep coming back to it.

There’s something here and I can’t fully articulate all of the reasons why. But after I read the poem, I’ll come back to some more analysis here, and so I will begin reading William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming.”

Turning and turning in the widening gyre. The falcon cannot hear the falconer. Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand. Surely the second coming is at hand. The second coming. Hardly are those words out when a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi troubles my sight. Somewhere in sands of the desert, a shape with lion body and the head of a man, a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, is moving its slow thighs, while all about it reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again. But now I know that twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle. And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.

I can’t say I read that half as well as Paul Muldoon reads it. I recommend listening back to his reading.

There are so many things that I like about this poem. The images are powerful. It connects again to another work of classics, the Bible, and John of Patmos’s Revelation. It uses the imagery from the Christian Bible about how the Antichrist will be born.

And one of the great things about a poem like this is that it gets repurposed in times of great uncertainty. And so you might think that my reason for reading this is the war in Iran, but it’s actually not. I was actually thinking much more about the growth of artificial intelligence and artificial general intelligence and whether or not that will be a thing that is coming and how big of an existential risk that is or is not.

And I kept thinking about that because of this line about how the falcon cannot hear the falconer — what is ostensibly the inferior of the falconer has gone and is using its own discretion out of command of what should be commanding it. I’m pretty sure that’s what originally caught my attention. It wasn’t just that there’s war, but I also think there’s also a really strong sense here that what we have built, our expectations around, are eroding. And you can think about how the United States and NATO and its place in the world has been changing over the last year as really one of these moments when the center cannot hold.

Or maybe it feels like maybe the center will not hold, and there’s a question of, are we going to return to a new equilibrium that will be stable that we can count on? Is this just a temporary detour away from the long arc of history, or has this signaled some sort of new world order that is being born right now?

And even the way that this poem is composed — if this was a verb tense, this would be present progressive. The rough beast hasn’t already given birth to the Antichrist in Bethlehem, but actually it is heading to Bethlehem to give birth to the Antichrist.

What’s interesting to think about this is that Yeats is writing after World War I, and people often associate this poem with World War I and its carnage, but given that he’s writing several years after it, he’s not pointing to the war itself, but it’s the aftermath of, we actually don’t know who is going to lead the world and how the world’s order will be structured and what will come about. It actually took several years after World War I to even get to a point of what the peace looks like. The Treaty of Versailles doesn’t take place until mid-year 1919, and there’s a great book called Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World by Margaret MacMillan that I really liked. It also reminds me of that John Cale album, Paris 1919, as well, although I think maybe a little less relevant to this discussion.

That sense of progress, of the approach of the beast, is what makes this so frightening of a poem. It isn’t only that things have happened. The poem is split into two parts, and the first part, as far as I can tell, is about what has happened. There’s a sense of spinning, of losing orientation within this widening gyre, this sort of eddy of swirling forces. The falcon, which should be under the command of the falconer, is off, has left the falconer.

I was wondering how the world will change outside of one’s control. And that itself, you can think about so many types of plots that have this theme. Perhaps the most obvious will be Frankenstein, and how Frankenstein’s monster was created to serve Frankenstein, but actually has desires, hopes, dreams, philosophies of its own that it seeks to pursue. But you can also link it even further back to the exile from the garden of Eden. Humans were created by God to follow the rules of God, and they did not follow it, and thus they are exiled.

And then what follows is this period of bloodletting — how the blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned, presumably drowned in blood. What a shocking image this is.

And this line is also one that gets quoted so often and by seemingly everyone: “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” When I was trying to memorize this poem, I kept getting caught on this line in particular. Especially “are full of passionate intensity,” and I kept saying, “are filled with passionate intensity,” and “filled” is passive. Right? When you say something is filled, it asks the question of who made it full. Who poured the thing that made it full? And that makes it seem like there’s an external agent who has acted upon these people. And I think what’s interesting about this here — this is super close reading and always runs the risk of reading too much into things — but when you say it’s “they are full of passionate intensity,” it locates the agency within the actor itself. So these people are not being misled by some demonic force, nor are they being elevated by angels in a good force. They have done this to themselves and they have made themselves full of passionate intensity. And I think putting it at that level makes sure that the supernatural parts of this poem are a response to human choice and volition.

If humans were just being filled with passionate intensity that was helping prepare the way for this eschatology to arrive on earth, you would start having questions about determinism and whether or not it makes sense to blame these people for creating this new epoch that is arriving.

And I don’t think Yeats is trying to say that we are just passengers in our bodies in time and things happen to us. There is culpability here, and it’s at least partially the result of individual actions. Even though I think when he’s talking about these gyres — I did some amount of research on Yeats and he has some interesting thinking about the nature of time and eras and the zeitgeist and how there are these moments in time where people all seemingly lurch together in a very similar kind of way. And so it isn’t just about the individual person and their soul and how they’re making decisions. It’s almost about these collectivities, these polities, and how they are changing and reacting.

The second part of the poem has a much stronger theological Revelation feeling to it, and I think it ups the spookiness quite a lot, because the first stanza humans can do terrible things to each other without there being some supernatural overlay. The first two lines of the second stanza almost make me feel like he’s pleading for there to be some sort of supernatural answer. Please let there be something beyond just humans did this to ourselves because we are bad or foolish or both. Which is why I love this line: “Surely, surely some revelation is at hand. Surely the second coming is at hand.” That strikes me as extremely plaintive. Like, please let it be the second coming. Please let it be something else. If this isn’t the second coming, whatever is the second coming, presuming that exists, would surely be much worse than what has just occurred.

And the lines that I most like from this poem are not the “the center cannot hold,” “mere anarchy,” “passionate intensity” — those lines that people often seize upon in this poem. I actually really love several images and phrases and the rhythm of several parts of this. So this is more like textual analysis and how the poem actually operates rather than just the concepts of it.

So we also at this point of the poem switch to first person. So now the narrator is now speaking and observing and being a witness to what is happening here. So he says, “Hardly are those words out when a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi troubles my sight.” The phrase “troubles my sight,” I think is really powerful and has such economy to it because you could say something like, “and what I see disturbs me,” but it’s half the length and it’s much more powerful. It troubles my sight.

It is an unusual way to say something, but it’s also not done in a way that feels showy. There are ways of saying something like this that might be much more verbose and equally as unusual, but not as powerful. The confidence here of having such a simple phrase stand alone like this is something that I really respect.

And in fact, I wasn’t planning to tell this story, but it reminds me of this. I saw Tig Notaro do stand-up probably about a decade ago, very nearly a decade ago, if not. And right before she performed, the comic who preceded her had a set that was extremely manic. This person’s vibe was very much based upon neurosis and energy and a sort of mania as he was presenting his comedy, and it left the audience feeling very uncomfortable. You could just feel it in the room like we were not at ease with his performance. And every half second of silence felt like he was bombing, just felt like he was failing in his duties. Due to that lack of comfort, it was not easy to sit there with him and enjoy his performance.

But when Tig came out, she would hold the mic for thirty seconds or something, say one simple sentence, and have everyone rolling laughing, and then would sit for another thirty seconds or so with immense comfort in the silence, with enormous control. We all trusted her because she was so comfortable performing. Of any performance type, I think Tig Notaro might be the most skillful performer I’ve ever seen for that level of comfort and trust and control. It is amazing.

This is a phrase like that. “Troubles my sight.” It is so effective. It makes me think — it’s one of those things where I’m like, wow, how could I speak like that in a way that is creative and unusual without being showy? You know exactly what he means. It’s not like you need a dictionary to look this up. And I really respect that. And he has a number of sentences and phrases that feel this way to me too.

The object of the verb is not something that you would expect. Have you ever thought that twenty centuries of stony sleep could be vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle? I don’t think you’ve ever thought that sleep could be vexed to nightmare. This sort of juxtaposition with nouns and verbs that unexpectedly have agency back upon the noun is so creative, and it’s such a powerful sentence because this juxtaposition is unexpected.

This might be the silliest thing I’ll say about this poem. “Somewhere in sands of the desert, a shape with lion body and the head of a man, a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, is moving its slow thighs.” Okay, slow thighs. Also, who possibly could have put these words together? You just immediately think of this lumbering beast.

It just makes me think of the Michael Scott part from The Office, where he’s asking people about their personal religious beliefs, which, you know, not typically supposed to do, and thinking that if only they had prayed to the right entity, it could have prevented this disaster. I had to even look this up. It’s from the episode “Fun Run,” where Michael Scott says, “Maybe believing in God was a mistake. What did people believe in before the Sun? Maybe there’s some sort of animal that we could make a sacrifice to, like a giant buffalo or some sort of monster — like something with the body of a walrus with the head of a sea lion. Always makes me laugh how similar they are. Or something with the body of an egret with the head of a meerkat, or just the head of a monkey with the antlers of a reindeer with the body of a porcupine.”

I was trying to think of what the actual term is for this kind of hybridity, and it’s called a therianthrope or therianthropic morph. You can think of it like certain Egyptian gods as combinations of animals, or of humans plus animals.

I think part of the reason why this imagery here is so successful is that it’s meant to be terrifying. When I think about horror, one person that I think of is HP Lovecraft, which, you know, not everything of his has aged especially well, and I’m aware of this. But what he is very famous for is that his monsters are often the kinds of creatures that are so terrifying because they don’t make sense in the logic of our world.

It will be things like colors that we don’t have names for and shapes that are non-Euclidean and just do not map to the spatial reasoning that we have evolved to recognize. And these are the things that are terrifying in the world of Lovecraft. They’re entities that almost are intruding upon our current reality from a separate reality. And what makes them scary is not their immediate sense of danger. It’s not someone in your house at night with a weapon. Shapes and movement and combinations of animals that don’t go together. This is sort of a way of saying that you are not in control. Something greater than humans is moving here.

I was quoting the end of the doggy door sketch from I Think You Should Leave recently, where Tim Robinson says there were monsters on the world, and how scary that is, that there are monsters on the world.

And I actually have a lot of affection for the horror genre. It’s come up in a couple different shows, but I might as well reintroduce it here. Horror has been an increasingly sophisticated genre to the point I even saw something making fun of the A24 horror films, which, you know, they’re like artsy horror. It’s like horror for people who like Jean-Luc Godard. It’s like a little bit snooty, a little bit intellectual. The kinds of films where you’re like, what is actually happening here?

And one of the rules — I think I got this from Slavoj Žižek, he had said something like, one way of cultural theory’s way of grappling with a horror story is taking the monster out of it. And what is it meant to signify? So in this case, he talks about — he’s on Bodega Bay. I think it’s from The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, I think is what this is originally from. But he is on Bodega Bay and he is talking about the film The Birds by Alfred Hitchcock and about how a classical psychoanalysis by way of Freud and talking about the ego, super-ego, and id, and how the birds are so strongly associated with the maternal super-ego of this overprotective mother figure that would come in and try to prevent the couple from coming together and being intimate and forming a new family. And this is what the symbolism of the birds is meant to convey: this sort of overprotective mother who’s not ready to let their child go.

And that’s one way of reading it. And this is true for plenty of films, especially the more sophisticated horror films. You can see this everywhere. Like for instance, if you watch Hereditary, which is, you know, top of class — it’s about grief. That film is a beautiful film. Even if you took everything out of it and it was just a family struggling with loss, it would still be a beautiful film about grief. The Babadook is a good example here where it’s about depression and mental illness. The horror films of Jordan Peele are often about race and how that is experienced and processed. So there are people who are using the motifs and the language of horror to make a sort of social point, whether that’s an internal or external force or the combination thereof.

What’s interesting about the Hitchcock example from Žižek is it’s not exactly clear to me. I should probably read up on this and see how much Hitchcock was purposefully trying to tell a story about classical psychoanalysis, their model of the mind — ego, super-ego, id — and how important that actually is to Hitchcock. Or was he tapping into some collective unconsciousness, archetypes? This sort of like a Jungian way of explaining that there’s really not that many stories and that these are patterns that repeat, and he just intuitively knew like, this is what is happening. This feels right to me at this moment when I’m writing it or directing this film, to create it in this kind of way.

Hitchcock was very famously controlling. He said something like, “The actors are cattle. They do what I tell them,” or something like that. So it wouldn’t surprise me if he actually was making a very deliberate choice here with reference to something intellectual. But I think probably what is happening is something much more intuitively driven.

And horror, when it is good, is meant to show — like one of the things that people often say about horror is that “monster’s” etymology is related to mostrar, which is the Spanish infinitive for “to show.” So monsters are often meant to show something about yourself, to communicate something. They aren’t just entities that are inherently malevolent. There’s almost a didactic purpose built into what they are trying to communicate.

Sometimes stories in folklore with regards to hauntings or ghosts — sometimes this is a spirit that needs to be exorcised and banished by some sort of spiritual professional, like a priest if you’re working within the Catholic tradition, or maybe a shaman. But in some of the stories that you will hear, people will have some sort of paranormal or supernatural experience, or this will be part of the folklore, and they will not understand why this thing is coming back to them and scaring them and visiting them. And the solution to some of these problems is, well, have you listened to what they’re trying to communicate? And like, are they looking for something? Do they need something? And then in folklore, sometimes this will be solved by, instead of running, you stand and face it and then understand what is being communicated to you. And you either learn something about yourself, and/or help them pass on to the next plane of existence. Or maybe both.

And that absolutely fits within the mostrar way of understanding what a monster is, that it’s there to show you something about yourself, but you’re also able to help them pass on. You grew as a human, and in growing as a human, you were able to help someone that you were previously unable to help.

Now we’re working our way to the conclusion of the poem. And this section here, I’m pretty sure, is my favorite part. As you might have heard from the Whitman, I think it’s really important to not just have to love the entirety of a poem or work of art. I think it’s totally okay to love certain sentences and maybe not like the whole thing. I think it’s okay to like the plot or the overall themes of a book without liking exactly how it’s written.

And this is a case where I think the sentence has such a beautiful rhythm to it. I find it really fun to say. There’s something about it that makes it really easy for me to remember. Like, some parts of this poem I find are really easy to memorize and some parts of them I will get it wrong every time that I try to recite it.

The part of this that I find so easy to repeat and to have in my brain is this line: “But now I know that twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.”

I had mentioned this earlier — like, yeah, how do you vex a stony sleep, let alone vex it to nightmare? There’s still that incongruity, that mismatch of verbs that don’t typically go with those nouns. That’s really just powerful. But I also just like the rhythm of that. It has a sort of chugging through it. It almost feels locomotive to me.

And I’m already here. I might as well just read the end of it here too. “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.” Rough beast is another one of these unusual combinations that is unexpected, and one of those ones I come back to quite often. And if you ever hear “a rough beast,” you’ll now know where it comes from.

One final thought that I’ll leave everyone with here. This gets quoted also quite a bit. It’s from Antonio Gramsci. He said, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” And this fits so nicely within Yeats’s “The Second Coming.” And this poem feels this way too. The center couldn’t hold. Things fall apart. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. Yeah, that has happened. The new order represented by the Antichrist has not yet been born. In fact, the rough beast is only just now slouching towards Bethlehem. Should really hurry up. Because the new world is not quite born and there’s this liminal space here of between orders that’s really unsettling. And I think that’s a good part of why the world does feel so monstrous right now — because it isn’t clear what the order is that we are slouching towards right now.

How much of what is happening will roll back and we will look back on this time and say, wow, that was really weird that the world did that for a while and the US did that for a while? Or is there a new order to be born that we will have to adapt to?

This poem is too good to only read once, so I’m going to read it and then I’m going to send you on your way. So here it is one more time. “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer. Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand. Surely the second coming is at hand. The second coming. Hardly are those words out when a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi troubles my sight. Somewhere in sands of the desert, a shape with lion body and the head of a man, a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, is moving its slow thighs, while all about it reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again. But now I know that twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle. And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.

Gives me chills. What a poem.

Spiritus Mundi is the spirit of the world. I suspect it’s another way of saying zeitgeist. I should have said that earlier, but I’ll leave you with that. Thanks for listening. This is much more than I anticipated doing, but I’m glad we got to talk about this poem. I’m glad we got to locate it within the horror genre, and I hope it gave you something to think about.

Thanks for listening.

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This is a summary of an older episode of the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Sarah Tuneberg. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to the full thing right below this paragraph.

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Quick Takeaways

• At the time of recording, Sarah Tuneberg was the CEO and co-founder of Geospiza, a climate risk assessment firm. She also served as Colorado’s COVID testing czar during the pandemic, scaling the state’s testing from 50 samples per day to over 50,000. The experience reinforced what she already knew from climate work: we almost always know catastrophe is coming, and we’re almost always surprised when it arrives.

• The episode walks through a Passover Seder—the ritual Jewish meal celebrating the Exodus from slavery in Egypt—and draws out climate parallels at each step. The Haggadah (the text that guides the Seder) is deeply customizable, and Sarah’s family keeps theirs in a manila folder that gets rearranged every year.

• The Seder tradition of reclining—getting comfortable with pillows and stretchy pants before doing hard intellectual and spiritual work—maps to a key insight about climate engagement: people may do harder things when their basic needs are met. The all-or-nothing framing of climate action (no meat, no flights, no plastic ever) may be counterproductive.

• The Four Questions, traditionally asked by the youngest child at the table, connect to Greta Thunberg’s rhetorical power: taking an incredibly complex story and distilling it to its simplest, most transmittable terms. If even the youngest can tell the story, it cannot be forgotten.

• Tikkun Olam: the Jewish concept of “repairing the world,” isn’t just charity. It’s an active obligation to dismantle broken systems. In climate terms: it’s not enough to reduce your own footprint. You have to be engaged in the structural work.

• The plagues of Exodus—hail, pestilence, drought, darkness—are functionally the same natural disasters that climate change is intensifying today. As Sarah put it: “They’re not making new natural disasters for us. They’re the same. We just made them worse.”

• “Next year in Jerusalem”—the traditional closing toast of the Seder—becomes a climate intention-setting exercise. What does your “next year in Jerusalem” look like for the climate?

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Ancient Plagues, Modern Catastrophe

This episode was recorded and released during Passover 2021—a year into the pandemic, with Sarah Tuneberg freshly off a nine-month stint as Colorado’s COVID testing czar. The original recording had been planned for the previous year’s Passover, but the pandemic intervened, which turned out to be fitting: the story of Exodus is, at its core, a story about catastrophe that people should have seen coming.

Sarah’s professional life sits at the intersection of risk and preparedness. As CEO of Geospiza, she worked on climate risk assessment; helping organizations visualize, understand, and act on the risks that are already baked into our changing climate. Her pandemic work reinforced the same lesson: we model these disasters, we run exercises to practice for them, and then when they arrive, we act shocked. The plagues of Exodus, she argued, are the same disasters we’re dealing with today—hail, drought, pestilence, darkness. We haven’t invented our way out of any of them. We’ve made them worse.

Comfort and Capacity

One of the more surprising climate insights came from an unlikely place: the Seder tradition of reclining. At a Passover meal, you’re supposed to get comfortable—extra pillows, a good chair, wine at prescribed intervals. The idea is that you can do very hard intellectual and spiritual work while also being at ease. Sarah drew a direct line to climate engagement: the prevailing narrative that caring about climate means deprivation (no meat, no flights, no plastic) may actually reduce people’s capacity to engage. If we accommodate people’s basic needs and comforts, maybe they’ll have more bandwidth for the harder work. You can have anything, she suggested, but you can’t have everything.

Ross extended this to a broader framing about basic needs: if you’re struggling to eat, you’re not going to be thinking about abstract problems that might affect your grandchildren. Climate change is still, for some listeners, elective to think about. Meeting people where they are—comfortable, fed, not in crisis—might be the precondition for meaningful climate action, not an obstacle to it.

The Power of Simple Language

The Four Questions are a centerpiece of the Seder. They’re asked by the youngest child at the table; a ritual that ensures the story of Exodus is transmittable across generations, stripped down to its most essential terms. Sarah connected this directly to Greta Thunberg: after decades of Al Gore and climate policy wonks, it took a teenager speaking in the simplest possible language to make the message stick. The power wasn’t in complexity. It was in clarity.

There’s also a startup analogy in there: if you can pitch your idea to a third grader and they can retell it, you might actually understand what you’re doing. Sarah suggested this says more about venture capitalists than third graders.

Nobody’s Coming to Save Us

The conversation took a theological turn when Sarah described a strain of post-Holocaust Jewish theology: rather than waiting for a single messianic figure to arrive and fix everything, the obligation falls on all of us to create the messianic time ourselves—to end poverty, inequity, violence, and war through our own collective work. The parallel to climate is obvious and uncomfortable: nobody’s coming to save us from ourselves.

This connects to Tikkun Olam, often translated as “repairing the world.” Sarah was careful to distinguish it from ordinary charity. Tikkun Olam isn’t just giving money or reducing your carbon footprint. It’s an active obligation to dismantle the systems that cause harm. In Holocaust terms, the distinction is between people who simply didn’t participate in atrocities and the “righteous Gentiles” who actively hid people, smuggled, and subverted. Not participating isn’t enough. You have to do the work.

The Same Plagues

The most direct connection between Exodus and climate is the plagues themselves. Hail that devastated crops in ancient Egypt is the same hail that devastates crops today. Drought, pestilence, wildfire, darkness—these aren’t new categories of disaster. They’re the same ones, amplified by greenhouse gas emissions. Sarah found it fascinating that thousands of years of human civilization haven’t produced new natural disasters. We’ve just made the old ones worse.

The Haggadah also prompted an interesting discussion about the “hardening of Pharaoh’s heart”—a passage where God seems to prevent Pharaoh from letting the Jews leave, ensuring more plagues must be visited on ordinary Egyptians who had no say in their government’s decisions. The revisionist reading asks: how do we include mercy for the everyday people who suffer from decisions made by those in power? In a climate context, this maps onto the tension between developed nations (who benefited from fossil-fueled industrialization) and developing nations (who are told to bear the costs of decarbonization without having enjoyed the benefits).

Next Year in Jerusalem

The Seder closes with a toast: “Next year in Jerusalem.” For a historically diasporic people, it’s a phrase layered with melancholy and hope; an acknowledgment that you’re not where you want to be, combined with the belief that you might get there. Sarah suggested this as a climate intention-setting exercise: what does your “next year in Jerusalem” look like? Less plastic? Solar panels? Something structural? The point isn’t perfection — the whole arc of Hebrew scripture is a story of people falling short and trying again — but intention, renewed annually, in comfort, with wine.

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Full Transcript

Alexsandra Guerra: You are listening to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast by the team at Nori, the Carbon Removal Marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.

Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m the creative editor at Nori, the Carbon Removal Marketplace. Today I have with me an alumna, Sarah Tuneberg, CEO and co-founder of Geospiza, and more recently, Colorado’s COVID czar. What a sentence. I’m so privileged to get to say such a thing. Welcome, Sarah.

Sarah Tuneberg: Thanks for having me.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. This show has been so long in the making. We tried to last year and we were gearing up for it. In fact, this outline that we’re working off of was built a year ago, but the pandemic happened and it prevented us from doing this Passover episode.

Sarah Tuneberg: A long-gestated podcast is a good thing. I’ve reflected deeply on it in moments across the last year, and I think we’re better for it now.

Ross Kenyon: You really had time to think about this over the last year.

Sarah Tuneberg: Occasionally when you were like, hey, are we gonna do it? And I was like, yes. And then I’d be like, ooh. Such good things to think about. And then it was all COVID all the time.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I can imagine. If you go back and listen to Sarah’s original episode, we were talking about climate risk and how various organizations are working to visualize that, understand that risk, and act on it in cases where they can. Is that an okay summary of your work?

Sarah Tuneberg: Very, very good. It’s the understanding that you need to take the changes to reduce the risk, and as we’ve seen over the last year, we live in a world of risk. A world where we do very poorly at preparing for that risk.

Ross Kenyon: I feel like you’re getting at something specific. Is this potentially related to your pandemic work? Does this all flow together for you?

Sarah Tuneberg: It does actually, because I think that one of the deep learnings of my career and my work is that all of the things we think of as surprises or natural disasters or anything like this — we know that they’re likely to come. We do the modeling about them. We even do exercises to practice for them, and yet when they happen, we’re like, oh my gosh, what are you talking about? We had no idea. How could we ever have known this was gonna happen? We pretty much always know. And so it’s a human problem, and I think we’ll talk in our episode about catastrophe in the form of the plagues. And so even back in biblical times, we had natural catastrophe and they are, turns out, not that different than what we’re dealing with now. So that we’re surprised is surprising to me.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I was thinking — if a Geospiza in biblical times would be a Caesar, right?

Sarah Tuneberg: I think so. Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: That’s the joke I’m trying to make. I don’t know the exact way to package it. We’ll just leave it at that.

Sarah Tuneberg: I like it. It’s funny.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Okay. Before we get into the Passover story and how climate relates — what happened in this last year for you? What was it like working with Colorado state government and the pandemic response?

Sarah Tuneberg: I’ll say that I’m not sure yet. I feel like it has been a year of incredible intensity and loss and the hardest work I’ve ever done in my life, and that the work was so intense and driven that I feel like I lived in a state of adrenaline or fight or flight for nine months and I’m not yet sure exactly — I’m not sure if I even laid down the memories in my brain yet. It’s still just sort of stewing around up there. But what I will say is it was a year of people coming together and doing their absolute best and just trying with everything. A lot of the work was very intellectual, very academic, very brain — and yet you would see people’s bodies on video calls just sort of tense up and move forward. And you could see that my colleagues and the people who were all across the world working to solve this had every cell in their body in it. And it was an incredible thing to witness.

Ross Kenyon: I’m not sure. We should have another episode next year, maybe at this time, and we can reflect on all of this.

Sarah Tuneberg: I’m not quite there yet. Still just trying to take a breath.

Ross Kenyon: Wow. It sounds pretty raw still then. Well, I’m sure we’ll try another podcast in a year and then three years later when we actually do it, then we can talk about it. Maybe that’s enough time to reflect.

Sarah Tuneberg: Yeah, I think that sounds like plenty.

Ross Kenyon: I’m trying to remember how exactly this came up the first time you were on the show. I think we were just talking about the plagues of Exodus. You had recommended this book that I have here, which is Jonathan Safran Foer’s — another podcast alum — his New American Haggadah. I worked through it. It was the first one I’ve ever read and experienced, except for I went to a friend’s Seder once. I guess that was the only other time I’ve referenced one of these. But I got a lot out of it. And apparently these are quite customizable. A lot of people customize their Passover Seder to feature different elements of the story and different themes. But I suppose before we get to the customizability, maybe we should just start with the bare bones. What is the story of Passover? What is the Seder? Let’s set a nice foundation for everyone.

Sarah Tuneberg: Sure. Absolutely. So Passover is one of the oldest Jewish holidays and it celebrates the Jews’ exodus from slavery in Egypt. It’s a big momentous event in Jewish history — that the Jews were able to leave slavery and bondage in Egypt and go into the desert where they began to wander, which then led them to entry into Israel. And enshrined in all of this legend and myth are lots of details — the giving of the Ten Commandments comes in this place. This is the early, early days. Not Genesis, not the beginning, but the story of Exodus. One of the things that’s very wonderful and beautiful about the Passover story is that it is a holiday oriented around lots of traditions in the home and lots of storytelling. It’s not a single night — it is a many-night event. There’s a first night Seder, a second night Seder. You can do it for up to eight nights, differing in traditions. And so in Judaism, there is a lot of — as with any faith tradition — there’s a lot of food, a lot of ritual, but Passover to me is the one where it’s just magnified. And the Haggadah, the book you reference, is the story guide. It’s the text that guides us through the meal. We have a meal, and Passover is where the prayers happen. So you sit at the table with your family and friends and you process through the story, and there’s wine and specific foods. It’s a real feast of the senses, of intellectualism, and of questioning. It’s a pretty wonderful holiday.

Ross Kenyon: I think that’s a great place to start. And if you’re listening and you’re not familiar — a Seder is, as I understand it, just the name of the actual celebration or the event itself of Passover? Is that the correct way to understand it?

Sarah Tuneberg: So a Seder is a meal. And it is a special meal in that there are prayers and storytelling and foods and wine. So it’s the event. You build them together to make Passover.

Ross Kenyon: Okay, understood. I was familiar more with the pretty basic story of Exodus and how Passover is celebrated, but my understanding is that you can customize this a great deal and people will write Haggadot that feature different themes. And so we seized upon an idea of a climate Haggadah or a climate Seder. Have you been to many Seders, and how much customizability do you feature in your celebration of Passover?

Sarah Tuneberg: Let me preface this by saying this is Judaism and Passover from my perspective. And with all things Judaism, as many people or Jews as there are, there are perspectives. And Judaism is a tradition of questioning and study — that is the best, that is the highest art, the holiest activity. Study all of the Torah and the books and the teachings. So this is my perspective. You have a different classic Jewish text. It is not static. It’s malleable. It’s adjustable. My personal family Haggadah is like a mess. It’s a manila folder that is a mess of stories. And every year we sort of discuss which ones we want to highlight. Are we going short? Are we going long? Are we doing lots of singing? Are we talking? What’s the point? And then we’ll sort of adjust and then make copies and pass them out. Others — my grandparents used the modern Jewish Reform Judaism Haggadah. It was a book. We did the whole thing. There was no messing around. You just did the one. And then there’s other things — I’ve been to a feminist Seder where it was all about the women of the Torah, and it was all about adjusting to the lens of feminism, and it was very cool. So it’s this idea: reflect on what you need to in the moment. And I think one of the other things that’s fascinating and unique is that you do it in a meal. So you’re also sharing food and you’re drinking wine if that’s your jam. The Haggadah calls for wine in particular places, so you can get a little tipsy and then the discussion — it’s exciting. It’s lovely.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. The story of Exodus is a story of slavery and then the Jews escaping and as a nation leaving Egypt and going their own way, and they sort of get lost on the way, right? They’re out in the desert for a while. So it’s sort of somber, but it seems celebratory too at the same time. Is that correct?

Sarah Tuneberg: Yes, absolutely. And there is redemption. It’s a story of redemption and freedom, and that is something that is incredibly celebratory. I am blessed to have never been enslaved, but I don’t imagine — I don’t know what that experience would’ve been like for them. And it’s also a story of incredible loss and trauma. The killing of the firstborn of each of the Egyptians. It’s horror, right? That’s trauma like we couldn’t even contemplate. And the plagues are terrible. As with life, I think, there’s levity, there’s celebration, there’s grief and loss, punctuated by redemption.

Ross Kenyon: Passover itself — the name is about the firstborn Egyptians being killed, right?

Sarah Tuneberg: Correct. And then the passing over — the Jews would put lamb’s blood over their doorway.

Ross Kenyon: So the message was for the Jewish houses to mark their doorsteps and their gates with lamb’s blood, and the Angel of Death would know to pass over those homes.

Sarah Tuneberg: And that tradition has been pulled forward. Now the holiest prayers are tucked in a scroll and put in the mezuzah on the door. So it’s a linkage — now Jewish homes are always marked.

Ross Kenyon: Oh, that’s interesting. I’ve seen mezuzahs on people’s doors before, but I learned about that from Curb Your Enthusiasm. I think much of my knowledge of Judaism is Larry David related.

Sarah Tuneberg: As it should be.

Ross Kenyon: A fair amount. But I didn’t know there’s a connection between the mezuzah and Passover.

Sarah Tuneberg: They’re linked in a prayer. But I think this is to me always the interlinkages. In Jewish tradition, we study and we reference and we note. So it’s very common in a book of Torah to have one passage and then a whole three quarters of a page of — Maimonides said this, Hillel said that, this person said the other thing. So they get muddied. Some prayers reference back.

Ross Kenyon: I saw the scholar Jonathan Haidt say that argument and debate is a fundamentally Jewish cultural characteristic. It sounds like you might agree with that.

Sarah Tuneberg: Indeed, and I think it comes back to some degree to the story of Passover, which is in Passover — the first diaspora of many. For the Jews, they had to leave everything. You couldn’t take anything with you. There’s the unleavened bread — the matzo doesn’t have to rise, so they just take what they can. But the most portable, highest-value thing in Jewish tradition is education. Nobody can take it away from you. In your diaspora you get to keep everything that’s in your head. And so I think that’s always been the root of the Jewish debate culture, the Jewish intellectualism — you can take all of our things, you can put us in a ghetto, you can enslave us, but you can’t take what’s in our heads.

Ross Kenyon: What even is the correct way to understand that? Somber, sad — but it’s been turned to a strong positive at the same time.

Sarah Tuneberg: Totally. It’s powerful. It’s a nice subversion of what one might expect.

Ross Kenyon: That’s great. I think this is a really good baseline to move from. How exactly does one celebrate a Seder when you host it? In the Haggadah that I have, there’s a whole bunch of things you say together, exercises, thought experiments that you debate through. How do you do it?

Sarah Tuneberg: In my tradition, we have a usually big family Seder. It’s family of choice and family of birth. Invite lots of people, extend out the table. And it begins with the washing of the hands in our tradition. And that is a marking of specialness and ensuring that you are prepared — that’s how I experience it. You wash your hands. And I think in some traditions — sometimes at our house — you wash another’s hands. So you pass a bowl, a ritual washing — not a real one, there’s no soap. You hold your hands over the bowl and the person pours it over and then you pass it along. So it begins that way, which to me is an interesting reflection in the context of climate change — a cleansing, a beginning, fresh.

Ross Kenyon: A nice clean start. You have to get your house in order, get yourself taken care of, and then you’re prepared to proceed. Okay, so then there’s this ritual hand washing. Where do you go from there?

Sarah Tuneberg: So one of the key traditions is that you recline in Passover. You have an extra pillow, you get your comfy chair, your stretchy pants — my family, because you eat a ton — but you recline. And we’ll come to the Four Questions. But one of the questions is: why on this night do we recline? There are lots of reasons why, but the one I think about is that we can do this very hard work, this big reflection and event, and also be comfortable in doing it. And perhaps in being comfortable, we have more capacity to think and more capacity to be reflective. In the climate lens, I think a lot about the idea of comfort and being able to be okay as a barrier to the changes we need to make. There is this idea that you have to be a vegetarian and walk everywhere and never take an airplane again. And it’s this very restrictive life if we’re gonna have a carbon-neutral or carbon-negative life. But I think the Jewish teaching of this reclining idea is that we can do very hard things and still have comfort. Maybe we can do harder things when we’re comfortable. If we accommodate ourselves and our base needs, maybe that gives us greater capacity. And maybe if it wasn’t this all-or-nothing, you gotta do everything, no plastic ever forever — we’d get more people on the side of minor changes. To me it comes back to this idea: you can have anything but you can’t have everything. And maybe we need to let people have a little bit and they’ll do better work on the climate.

Ross Kenyon: That’s an interesting idea. I imagine it’s easier to care about something abstract that may affect your children or grandchildren to a far greater degree — something farther away — if you’re not struggling to get your basic needs met. You’re able to zoom out a little bit. It’s easier to think about things that are farther away. Of course, climate change isn’t farther away for everyone, but at least for some people listening, it is sort of still elective to think about.

Sarah Tuneberg: Oh, I think that’s a really good framing — this idea of basic needs being met allows you to have space to worry about other things. If you’re struggling to eat and all you can do is eat the meat or whatever — yeah, I agree that resonates with me deeply.

Ross Kenyon: If all you get is free manna from heaven and you really want quail — I love that part of Exodus. If you’re listening, after Egypt, the Jews are in the desert and they get free bread that tastes like it’s been flavored with honey and they’re like, hmm, we don’t really like it that much. We’d like — can you get any quail up there, God, that you can send down? Does that crack you up? Is this intentionally funny?

Sarah Tuneberg: It does crack me up. And I think there’s so many things like that, which leads to the really good questions of why, what on earth — and the multi-authorship of Hebrew texts. There isn’t a single author, there’s so many. I have never actually read any of the reflection, but I would love to see — why quail and not honey? Are there quail in the desert? Is it a remnant? Is there a memory there? I have no idea, but I agree it’s hilarious. It also speaks to this — it’s never good enough. Wandering the desert, you get free food and you’re like, but really what I want is the quail. Come on, dude.

Ross Kenyon: I grew up in Arizona and there’s tons of quail there. So — quail in the desert.

Sarah Tuneberg: There you go.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I think I got this from Amy-Jill Levine — her work’s come up on other podcasts. She’s a Jewish scholar of the New Testament. So her perspectives are always really interesting. She had something about trying to understand the humor and how much of the scripture is actually intended to be funny, in her opinion. And reading Exodus like that — I reread it for this podcast — one thing that always gets me is Moses on Mount Sinai. He’s up there for 40 days getting the tablets, getting the Ten Commandments. And he comes back and the Jews are already building a golden calf. They’re already building an idol. And he’s like, that’s the one rule, guys. You know this doesn’t work, right? This is how God gets really mad at you over and over again. 40 days, not even that long.

Sarah Tuneberg: It’s nothing! 40 days. And this idea too — I’m a planner, right? I’m an emergency manager. How much planning did they have to do to already have constructed it at 40 days? They’ve been working on that since he went up there.

Ross Kenyon: You had to gather all the jewelry from the people. You had to melt it down. You had to make the cast. There’s a whole series of operations.

Sarah Tuneberg: Yeah, I agree that this was what they were gonna spend their time on instead of whatever else.

Ross Kenyon: I don’t know. It is possible this is not intended to be funny, but the whole shape of Hebrew scripture, as I understand it — if there is an agreement with God, the Jews break it in some way. And then some prophet will scold them and they’ll sort of come back into God’s good graces, and they break it. It’s this cycle of coming back to God and then losing the way and coming back. Is that how you see it, or am I imposing that?

Sarah Tuneberg: No, I think that’s true. That’s accurate — it’s one of the many, but yes. And isn’t that like human? Isn’t that the way of humans? Oh, it’s all great. Thank you, thank you. Oh, we’ve done a little sideways. Please forgive me. I need a guru. You are gonna help me get back. Oh, I’m back. Okay. I think it’s really common. It’s like exercise and meditation. It’s universal. It just can’t stay good forever.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I think the overall shape of Hebrew scripture, if we accept that interpretation, is a sticky story because it rings true to us. Resolutions is a funny lens — you make these resolutions and then you don’t really keep them. You keep trying and trying, but you fail.

Sarah Tuneberg: I appreciate that even the prophets fail. That’s one of the things I love — even the ones who do the best work aren’t perfect. So there is no perfection. Just continuing self-improvement. You can always be better at Judaism.

Ross Kenyon: You can always be better at Judaism. It’s a great line. Okay. Sorry, I let us down into tangents — hopefully related enough — but let’s get back into celebrating Seder. What comes next after the reclining?

Sarah Tuneberg: So I will admit it has been two years, though I’ve had many every year of my life. My Seder last year was a little sketchy — I had COVID and it was my birthday. My birthday falls in Passover, which as a small child was a huge bummer because I didn’t get a real cake. I got some sort of flourless nonsense. But in real life it’s nice now. Good big party. And there’s matzo brei, which is sort of like French toast made with matzo. And this isn’t a subject of huge division — some people love it and think it’s the greatest thing in the world. And I’m pretty sure it’s like eating paper with maple syrup on it. I’ve got no love for the matzo brei. But anyway — essential and quintessential of the Seder are the Four Questions. The Four Questions are part of the Haggadah. They are asked by the youngest child, and it is long-held tradition to learn the Four Questions as a small child. It’s a big thing when you can do it. If you can do it in Hebrew, even better. There’s a song. The questions are: Why is this night different than all others? Why do we recline? Why do we eat bitter herbs? Why do we eat only flatbread? And there’s another one. Maybe we’ll look it up. I’m not the youngest — so I never had to learn them anyway. The service is inclusive. It isn’t just the adults speaking. It is about all people, including the youngest child, who has a very important role. And I think about this in the context of climate — it’s really important. Because we talk in Passover about very difficult subjects: slavery, redemption, sadness — sadness is an understatement — unbelievable loss. And we give that storytelling responsibility to children as well as adults. And I think in doing that, we are ensuring that the story is transmittable between generations, that it isn’t too lofty or intellectual, and that we get it to its simplest terms so that we cannot ever forget it. And that even the youngest knows it. And this comes up for me with Greta Thunberg a lot. We had Al Gore and all sorts of other prophets of climate change. And it wasn’t until Greta came along and was able to give us this incredibly simple message that a lot of people heard and that a lot of people were able to internalize and also transmit — the story of climate change. And so I really think deeply about this idea of ensuring our storytelling is appropriate for everybody and that everybody can then tell the story.

Ross Kenyon: That’s a really clever connection with Greta’s rhetorical approach and maybe her personality generally — speaking forcefully in very clear language. She also has a bit of that Hebrew scriptural prophetic thing going for her too, as social critic. Those prophets are railing against the civilization and society as they see it. That seems very Greta-esque.

Sarah Tuneberg: I think the thing I find especially Greta-esque, and in the tie to the Four Questions, is taking this incredibly complex, multifaceted story and being like, here’s the four key things, and I’m just gonna talk about them incredibly simply. Not as a criticism, but simply and elegantly. We don’t need all the big words, all the big government talk. Here’s what’s happening, here’s what the consequences are, here’s how we can stop it, and we need to do something about it now. And I just think it’s really beautiful — the idea of being able to have power with simple language, the most power. And also not negating the idea that even the smallest person, the youngest, can make magnificent change.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s a really beautiful sentiment. And it’s nice that it’s included ritualistically — it’s always the youngest child.

Sarah Tuneberg: Always the youngest child. And when you go to adult Seders, it’s very funny. When I went to Seders in college, it would be like, when’s your birthday? Because we were all really young, but there was always the youngest.

Ross Kenyon: That’s good to know. Well, yeah — these questions. Why is tonight different? Why recline? Why the bitter herb? And why do we eat flatbread and matzo? The bitter herb stands out to me. Do you recall what that one might be about?

Sarah Tuneberg: So the bitter herb is to remind us of the time of slavery. And we dip our bitter herb — in the United States, in most traditions, the bitter herb we eat is parsley — and we dip it in salt water and eat it to remind us of the tears of the enslaved. And the bitterness of the work and being enslaved people.

Ross Kenyon: So this is the somber part. Some of these thematically — it feels like you’re telling kids a sad story. You’re explaining why the bitter herb, why you’re eating flatbread — you’re eating matzo because there wasn’t time before fleeing Egypt. You had to make the bread. You didn’t have time to let it leaven. Is that right?

Sarah Tuneberg: Yeah. Didn’t have time, had to go. So you baked it really fast so that you had something, and that something was a cracker.

Ross Kenyon: Right. Okay. So then after this, the kids get their answers. They’re able to learn. And by the way, if you’re not able to explain your ideas in terms that a low level of understanding can access, there’s always an open question of how well you actually understand those ideas. I think it’s an important exercise in general.

Sarah Tuneberg: Yeah. In the startup world, there’s always this idea of pitching to a third grader. If you can, and a third grader can understand and then retell you what your business is — I think that might say something about venture capitalists more than third graders, but.

Ross Kenyon: Okay. Throwing some Passover shade, I see. Yeah. Where do you go from the Four Questions? What happens next?

Sarah Tuneberg: So again, this is sort of a meandering story and it’s different in different families. There’s wine, there’s all sorts of parts. But one of the things — and this might be a little out of order — but thinking about Greta as a messenger leads me to the idea of Elijah. Elijah the prophet — the idea of a ghost. We don’t really have ghosts in Judaism, but kind of like a ghost. At Passover we have a glass of wine for Elijah, and we also at a point in the service towards the end open the door for Elijah. Elijah is the one, I believe, who will arrive prior to the Messiah. So there is an idea in Judaism that a human form will come first to a particular coastal village in Israel, and Elijah will appear first and sort of guide through. And we make room for Elijah, who’s considered a stranger, because we don’t know when Elijah’s gonna come. So we make space for a stranger. And I think about this in lots of different ways. It’s this weaving of a thread of connection and humans over time. And the Passover message that one, we make space for people we don’t know. Traditionally in Passover, you are supposed to invite anybody who needs a home for Passover. Nobody should go without a meal. So we make space for the stranger. We also, in our tradition, think about Elijah as this ancestral arc — this connection where my grandparents, my great-grandparents, the people all the way back to Europe and before that, wherever they came from — making space for Elijah, this force that was gonna welcome the Messiah. And we still do it every year. And I think it’s a really beautiful thing that you pour a glass of wine — gonna make it comfortable. Not only is there a seat, but there’s also wine for Elijah.

Ross Kenyon: I don’t know how many times this happens in Hebrew scripture, but I feel it’s gotta be dozens — the admonition that you were once slaves in Egypt and so the expectation is that you need to extend a helping hand, to be charitable, to be kind. Is this related?

Sarah Tuneberg: I don’t actually know if it is directly, but there’s a good connection there. This idea of making space for the stranger — you were once slaves in Egypt, so you need to be more thoughtful and more caring. And tzedakah, the giving of charity, is really important.

Ross Kenyon: You were also telling me about an interesting idea — an idea of the Messiah within Jewish theology as maybe the people overall or the time overall, rather than a single person. Can you explain how that works?

Sarah Tuneberg: Yes, absolutely. The experience of being a Jew in history has been one often of incredible trauma. You have slavery in Egypt, subsequent wars, the Inquisition, and then obviously the Holocaust. And I learned it as post-Holocaust theology, which is: rather than expecting a single human-formed savior, a messiah, to come and save us all and usher us into the messianic period of peace — instead it’s incumbent on all of us to create the messianic time. That we together can create the peace, create the kindness. It’s funny, all of the things that are coming up for me, I’m thinking of the opposite — ending poverty, ending inequity, ending violence, ending war. If we do that, that will make the time of the Messiah, rather than us waiting for it or waiting for somebody to save us. We need to do the hard work to make it be. And I think about that in the context of climate: nobody’s gonna save us from ourselves. We have to do the work. And perhaps the time of the Messiah — the first thing we need to do is to not have climate change, to stop the greenhouse gas emissions.

Ross Kenyon: Oh no, just put it out there. Just a thought, huh? That surely will be part of it. Is this — one term I’ve seen used frequently in these circles is Tikkun Olam. Is this all related in your mind?

Sarah Tuneberg: Yes, it is. The idea of doing good — and not just doing good, but there’s an idea of righteous good in Judaism. It’s not just doing good because you’re supposed to, but actually doing the work of change, the work of charity, the work of help, the work of dismantling broken systems that harm others. It’s righteous work. It’s the work that we all should be doing. The shorthand, probably unfairly truncated version of it, is Jewish social justice. It’s not just about charity. There’s this idea of charity — you give, you donate money, you donate food. That’s not enough. In Judaism, you have to be socially just. You have to do more. You’re not allowed to stand by and let the bad thing happen. You actually have to be an active participant in dismantling. I think about this a lot in the terms of the Holocaust — there’s this idea of righteous Gentiles, those non-Jews who hid people, who undermined the Nazis, who smuggled, who did other subversive activities — because it’s not good enough to just not have participated. You have to actively do the right thing.

Ross Kenyon: Do we even have a word in English that expresses that? I feel like you have to explain that idea.

Sarah Tuneberg: No, I don’t think we do. Which is why we talk about Tikkun Olam. Jews don’t have shorthand — we’re like, we’re doing Tikkun Olam. And you’re like, what is Tikkun Olam? And you’re like, it’s justice, but it’s righteous and it’s powerful and you don’t have a choice. You just have to do it. There’s a lot.

Ross Kenyon: So circling back to a couple of things we’ve already talked about — we also in Judaism make space for righteousness and comfort at Passover. We’re talking about incredible loss and an incredible story of redemption, and we do it reclining. And when we think about climate change, it’s not enough to just be — you have to be actively engaged in the justice component.

Sarah Tuneberg: And for me, I think a lot about my role in the world in climate. It looks like helping people who don’t have the space or the capacity to make those changes. To what you said about if your basic needs can’t be met, how can we expect you to make space for this very hard work? On the global scale, we talk a lot about developing nations and what work they need to do. And I think there’s this idea of, well, screw you, Western countries — you got to have all the benefits of coal-fueled development. Why can’t we have that? But this idea that we all have to do the hard work, and maybe some of us have to work harder to compensate for those who can’t. I don’t know — that’s a little half-baked.

Ross Kenyon: That’s okay. I think there’s something there. We should talk about the plagues, right? I think this is what everyone thinks about when they say, oh, they’re doing a climate Passover episode — the plagues. Rivers of blood, frogs, hail, climate change, natural disasters.

Sarah Tuneberg: Yes. And to the point I said earlier — one of the things I find absolutely fascinating is that the plagues of slavery in Egypt and Exodus remain the plagues that devastate huge swaths of our human population in this current year. They’re not making new natural disasters for us. They’re just kind of the same.

Ross Kenyon: No, they are the same.

Sarah Tuneberg: So I think of hail especially — hail, wildfire. Hail devastated crops in the time of slavery in Egypt for Jews in the same way it does right now. And the catastrophic effects of climate change are the same as the catastrophic effects that God rained down on the Egyptians to free the Jewish slaves. It’s absolutely fascinating to me. And we have not innovated our way out of it. We’ve made it worse.

Ross Kenyon: In fact, we’ve made it worse. Yeah. So you think — I mean, that’s the most obvious link. There are many ways to spin the story of Exodus to be about freedom and relate to the climate, but focusing on the plagues — that strikes me as the most one-to-one comparison. Is that how you see it too?

Sarah Tuneberg: Yeah, absolutely. I think this is how we got here in the beginning — natural hazards have been the same since the time of, they’re still the same, and climate change is just — to me, sometimes I think about it: are the plagues coming full circle? Are they so bad that we are in a time of global human catastrophe that we’ve magnified with our greenhouse gas emissions? Or is it just a continuation?

Ross Kenyon: I think a lot about what is the lesson of the plagues in climate. I’m very interested in this too, and I don’t think I have a great interpretation of it. It’s a genuine puzzle. And I’m sure a lot of ink has been spilled on this. But okay — if you haven’t cracked open Exodus alongside us — Moses will go to Pharaoh, say “let my people go.” And Pharaoh seems to be okay with it. But then there’ll be a sentence that says God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Why? It seems like Pharaoh would have let the Jews leave Egypt, but the hardening of the heart — why? I don’t get it.

Sarah Tuneberg: I don’t know. And I think this is one of the heavily debated passages. It would be interesting to hear in comments what people’s theories are. But is one of the ideas that the Jews didn’t deserve it enough yet, that they hadn’t done enough? Or was it an idea that in order to not go after them and chase them down — which they do, the Egyptians do, leading to the parting of the Red Sea — that without the trauma of the plagues, would the Jews be able to make a break? I also think the Old Testament Hebrew Bible God is a mean one. There might be funniness, but it is a vengeful God. A God that is punishing and harsh. And the last thing I’ll say is that there’s an idea that religion and the Torah and the Bible and all of these texts are written to explain very difficult things. You don’t have an answer, so religion is a function of trying to answer all of these things. And in a time when it was probably very terrible — there was boils and pestilence and drought and darkness — there couldn’t have been another explanation than that God had to harden Pharaoh’s heart to do it again. I don’t know. What about you?

Ross Kenyon: I don’t know. It’s a hard one. It’s related to what’s typically called theodicy — the problem of evil. Why does evil exist? Why does God harden hearts? To a modern reader, Abraham going up Mount Moriah with Isaac to sacrifice him, and then at the last second being saved — that doesn’t seem like such a great test of faith. The things done to the various peoples — that really seems like conquest and maybe genocide. It doesn’t strike the modern reader as unobjectionable good. But one thing I liked about reading this Haggadah especially is the revisionist take on some of these stories. God is hardening Pharaoh’s heart multiple times over. And the people who are suffering are regular Egyptians who are having their crops ruined or their firstborn killed by the Angel of Death. They’re living in a dictatorship, right? Pharaoh is in charge. These people are not in a democracy. They have no control over their government, and yet they’re the ones who are suffering. So the revisionist take here is: how do you include mercy for Egyptians inside of the Passover story for Jews celebrating Passover? Is that part of your tradition too?

Sarah Tuneberg: No, it is not a part of my tradition, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a worthy addition.

Ross Kenyon: Not just a dictatorship, but a monarchy. He was born into it.

Sarah Tuneberg: Yeah. A monarchical dictator — worse. You get to be born the dictator. Like North Korea.

Ross Kenyon: I think it’s a really wonderful and sad idea — that we had to include that so that we could have a little empathy for the other people.

Sarah Tuneberg: I think there is an idea that, oh, there were slaves of the Egyptians. But it’s not like those everyday Egyptians had the power to make a difference. Though in a Tikkun Olam reflection, it would be incumbent upon those everyday Egyptians to be fighting the power and saving the Jews. So I don’t know.

Ross Kenyon: Okay. So what we just did — that’s a part of Passover, right?

Sarah Tuneberg: Yes. You’re reinterpreting the story and asking these questions. That’s the tradition. And I think the reason we eat and drink and are in comfort is because we want to ask these questions. Because the text isn’t static. It’s about questioning and making space.

Ross Kenyon: And another seminal, most important part of the Seder —

Sarah Tuneberg: Is that you say “Next year in Jerusalem.” May we be together for Seder next year, but in Jerusalem. So this idea — the story of Exodus: they wandered and then they made it to Israel, though 40 years later. Interestingly, in that lifespan, the people who were enslaved never actually made it to Jerusalem. The idea of the wandering was that you truncate the memory and you have a new generation who starts fresh. That’s why it took so long. Because I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the Sinai Peninsula — it’s actually very small. And the idea of wandering there for 40 years — bad directions. But God wouldn’t let them. And God didn’t let Moses enter, because there is this need of fresh starts.

Ross Kenyon: So to me, in this time of coronavirus and global pandemic, “next year in Jerusalem” — I think last year especially it resonated with a lot of people, and I think it will this year too, because we’re nowhere near the end, unfortunately.

Sarah Tuneberg: Which is: what is next year? What do we want for next year? “Next year in Jerusalem” can mean so many things. It’s being brought out of slavery. I imagine in the Holocaust, people thinking about next year not in the camps, being free. For hidden Jews in Spain post-Inquisition, the idea of “next year in Jerusalem” was about being able to be public in their celebration of Passover. And so I think that is one of the most — to me, it resonates the deepest. What is our vision for next year? Passover will happen every year, and what do we want? What do we mean by “next year in Jerusalem”?

Ross Kenyon: I like that. There’s something really poetic about that sentence. It sounds almost like a toast, right? “Next year in Jerusalem.”

Sarah Tuneberg: Exactly.

Ross Kenyon: Given that Jews are throughout their history so often a diasporic people not in their traditional homeland, there’s a hint of irony or melancholy I’m picking up on. Is that in there?

Sarah Tuneberg: I think it is absolutely there. For a people who are historically pushed around geospatially, hidden, and spread thin — the idea of having a place where we will all be next year. It’s melancholy and also so much hope. One day we’ll get there. Next year in Jerusalem. We’re not there now, but we’ll get there eventually. And maybe it’ll be next year.

Ross Kenyon: That’s a beautiful sentiment. If someone is listening and they celebrate Passover and they want to incorporate some climate elements into their Seder this year — we’re gonna release this the week of Passover, so they’ll have time to prep — where might you steer them? What might you tell them?

Sarah Tuneberg: I think talking about what “next year in Jerusalem” means in a climate context — and also the pandemic context. What does it mean for next year? And in this idea of setting intentions and recognizing our humanness of falling down on them — what is your intention for where we’ll be next year? Is that family? Less plastic? Solar? I don’t know what it is, but what is your climate intention? What does your “next year in Jerusalem” look like? I think also, because it’s so wonderfully illustrative, talking about the climate plagues and coming up with them for your family and having that discussion. Even in the Seder, you could do planning — or you could just in the moment say, what are the plagues of climate? I also think that having more empathy is a key feature of the Passover story as well as what we need in climate change. So maybe finding the empathetic component. What about you?

Ross Kenyon: I think those are all good points. I don’t know, given that my experience is so limited, but I do like the malleability of the story. What does it look like if we map this — freedom from slavery in Egypt into freedom in the Sinai and Canaan beyond — what does that look like in a climate context? Is it appropriate to say we’re in a suboptimal position now with regard to how we treat each other and the climate, and what does it mean to move to a just, Tikkun Olam kind of world in the making that is waiting to be born?

Sarah Tuneberg: Yeah. I like this idea of kindness with righteousness — what do we have to do to be freed from the bondage of this? What is this that we’re in right now? And do we not like it enough that we’re gonna go asking to be freed? Do we have to ask, or do you just sort of make it be?

Ross Kenyon: Who’s our Pharaoh?

Sarah Tuneberg: Yeah, I don’t know that I want to name a specific person. I don’t want to lay that on anyone necessarily. My recommendation for your climate-centric Seder: have a discussion about who’s the Pharaoh these days. It’s probably not an individual. Maybe there will be some, but also — what entities and what structures, what systems? And how do you be righteous in your seeking of undoing and dismantling?

Ross Kenyon: Well, maybe that’s a good place to leave it. It certainly is time to do the work. If you listen to the show, you’re already one step on it.

Sarah Tuneberg: Yeah. I’m excited to hear about people’s climate Seders.

Ross Kenyon: Do you even get to talk about a Seder plate? What is it?

Sarah Tuneberg: A Seder plate is the ritual crockery or dish on which we place particular symbols that we reference through the meal. There is a lamb shank in the center representing the marking of the door. There is an egg that represents rebirth. There is the bitter herb, the salty water for the tears, charoset — which is a paste that represents the mortar of the bricks that the Jews laid while they were in slavery. It’s made out of apples, and depending on where your family’s from — where my family’s from, we make it with a paste that’s apples and walnuts and cinnamon, and it’s boring and dry. Or Sephardic Jews, who add a ton of dried fruit and lemon and wine — the good stuff. In Judaism you have lots of different traditions to pull from. Anyway, the Seder plate is the center visual of Passover, and you place the foods around it and work your way through as part of the Haggadah, the service. And there are new Jewish traditions about adding items to the Seder plate to reflect particular themes. And so if you were to make an item on your Seder plate connected to climate change, what would it be? If you were to make space for a new item on your Seder plate about climate — what would it be?

Ross Kenyon: Interesting. Do you have any ideas for what you might do?

Sarah Tuneberg: No, not yet. I imagine there are vegan Seder plates. Surely people have done work around this.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I’m sure if you looked up “climate Seder” or “climate Haggadah,” surely some resources must exist at this point. You sort of independently came to this — it was like, oh, we should do this. But we’re probably not the only ones.

Sarah Tuneberg: I can’t imagine we’re the only ones.

Ross Kenyon: So I’m excited to hear about it. Feel free to write in. Well, thanks for being here, Sarah.

Sarah Tuneberg: Thanks for having me. And whatever it means to you — next year in Jerusalem.

Ross Kenyon: Next year in Jerusalem. Indeed. Well, thanks so much for listening. I hope you had a great time hanging out with Sarah and me talking about Passover. We’ll catch you next time.

Alexsandra Guerra: Well, thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts and/or Stitcher. It really helps us get this content to a wider audience. You can keep up with Nori at nori.com, where there is a newsletter — that’s nori.com/subscribe. There’s a podcast, there’s a whole bunch else, or you can send us an email at podcast@nori.com. We are also now on Patreon at patreon.com/noripodcast. If you’d like more content, engagement, and community — thank you so much for your support.

This is a summary of episode 393 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to the full episode right below this paragraph.

As I said in the intro to this episode: this isn’t the show where you’re going to get super quick tech takeaways within 30 minutes that you can drop at your next meeting. It’s something else. You’ll spend this time with us laughing about the absurdity of having a career in climate communications, about life and how we live it, why we make art, and why we even bother doing this climate work when it isn’t always the glamorous, high-paying kind. A good chunk of the reason The Carbon Removal Show is so fun is because Emily is so fun—she cracks me up constantly—and this episode is basically an extended version of Emily’s Language Chat. My sincere thanks to the team at The Carbon Removal Show for loaning me the jingle.

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Quick Takeaways

• Emily Swaddle has been co-hosting The Carbon Removal Show since 2020, producing deeply researched, highly produced seasons that have become a cornerstone educational resource in the CDR community.

• She sees her role not as a technical expert but as a storyteller; someone who can translate complex science into accessible, engaging narratives. Her advice to scientists: “Don’t worry about telling everyone. I’ll do it. Because, no offense, I think I’m a bit better at that.” 😅

• The Carbon Removal Show Coalition is a community-funded model that lets multiple organizations support the show rather than relying on a single headline sponsor. Emily sees it as more aligned with the kind of systemic change CDR itself needs.

• Emily and Ross explore why silliness and vulnerability are underrated in climate communications. The imposter syndrome that comes with not being a “real” expert can actually be a strength—it keeps you honest, keeps the questions accessible, and keeps the audience connected to a real person.

• Language is both a connector and an excluder. Emily’s obsession with how words work—from regional British accents to academic jargon to the phrase “more than human world”—reveals how much power sits in the words we choose and who they’re designed to reach.

• Both hosts grapple with the tension of being generalists in a world that rewards specialists. The career confusion that comes with “fingers in all the pies” is real, but so is the ability to see connections and ask questions that specialists might miss.

• The conversation takes a philosophical turn into whether technocratic solutions are enough to address climate change, or whether something more like a “spiritual revolution”—reconnecting with the natural world, sitting in a field, listening to birds—is what’s actually needed alongside the policy and technology.

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The Storyteller’s Defense

There’s a version of the carbon removal community where everyone speaks in megatons and marginal abatement cost curves. Where every podcast sounds like a conference panel. Where credentials are checked at the door and the price of admission is a PhD or at least a convincing approximation of one.

Emily Swaddle does not live in that version. She lives in the one where you lose it laughing on mic during a cold open about marine CDR, where you commission a birthday reggae jingle called “Emily’s Language Chat,” and where you openly admit that you don’t really know what rest is—and then try to make a podcast about it anyway.

This episode was different from most on Reversing Climate Change. No policy deep dives, no technology breakdowns, no market analysis. Instead, it was a conversation about what kind of person you need to be to do this work over the long haul, and what kind of space the industry needs to create for people who don’t fit the expected mold.

The Value of Not Knowing

Emily came to The Carbon Removal Show without a science background. She didn’t know much about CDR when she started, and by her own admission, she still doesn’t always feel like she knows enough. That’s the imposter syndrome talking, and she’s aware of it. But she’s also turned it into something useful.

Her pitch, essentially, is this: the scientists should keep doing the science, and she’ll tell people about it. Not because the science isn’t important, but because communicating it well is a different skill entirely. The serious stuff, on its own, is never enough to engage people. It never is.

This is an argument that the climate space badly needs to hear. There’s an assumption baked into a lot of CDR discourse that if you just get the facts right—the tonnage, the cost curves, the lifecycle assessments—people will understand. Emily’s experience suggests the opposite. What actually lands is the storytelling: reading the room, knowing when to push and when to pull back, and being willing to ask the question everyone else is too embarrassed to ask.

Ross made the observation that when he listens to Emily on the show, he feels like he’s accessing who she actually is as a person. That’s not true of most people in professional podcasting. There’s usually a layer of performance, a guardedness. Emily doesn’t seem to have that layer; or if she does, the silliness burns through it.

Language as Identity

If you spend any time with Emily, you learn quickly that she’s obsessed with language. Not in a pedantic, grammar-police way (though Ross admits to some of that himself), but in the way a curious person pulls at threads. Why do we say “bury the lede” and spell it L-E-D-E? Why does the phrase “more than human world” carry within it an entire worldview about indigenous knowledge and ecological respect? Why did saying “mebbes/maybes” in a job interview—a very Northern English word—end up being the thing that got her hired?

The conversation kept circling back to a central tension: language is designed to connect people, but it’s just as often used to exclude them. Academic jargon signals membership in a club. Accents communicate class. The words you choose in a job application can either make you legible to the system or mark you as an outsider.

Emily’s siblings are both dyslexic, and watching them struggle with a system that equated intelligence with reading ability shaped her understanding of this deeply. Language is a tool, she said, sometimes used beautifully, sometimes used powerfully, and sometimes just rubbishly.

For carbon removal, this matters more than most people in the industry want to admit. The space is full of its own jargon, its own gatekeeping vocabulary. If the goal is to reach people beyond the existing community, someone has to be willing to speak plainly. Emily’s instinct to do that—combined with her refusal to pretend she knows more than she does—is what makes The Carbon Removal Show work.

The Generalist’s Dilemma

Both Ross and Emily occupy a strange position in the professional world: they’re generalists operating in a space that rewards specialists. Ross described his career as a constellation of activities that has very strong continuity to him but is confusing to basically everyone else. Emily said she strongly relates to not being able to describe to people what she does.

The conversation landed on a comparison to role-playing games: life is like an RPG where you don’t realize which skill categories were important until it’s too late. By your mid-thirties, you’ve invested so many points in swinging a two-handed battle axe that you might as well keep going as a naked barbarian.

It’s a funny metaphor, but it touched on something real. Generalists can see connections that specialists miss. They can zoom out and ask the big questions about whether the system itself makes sense. But they also struggle with purpose in a way that specialists don’t. When your thing is everything, it’s hard to hold onto a one-sentence explanation of what you do… and harder still to make a conventional business case for why someone should hire you.

Emily’s answer to this was characteristically direct: she just pivots without the formality. No going back to school, no credential-gathering. If you write, you’re a writer. If you act, you’re an actor. If you do science, you’re a scientist. The doing is the thing.

The Icky Feeling

The episode’s most striking moment came when the conversation turned to money. Emily harbors, by her own description, some deeply anti-capitalist sentiments and is uncomfortable with the way everything has to come down to a bottom line. She described a recurring cycle: needing money, getting a job, realizing the job is killing her soul, quitting, feeling free, running out of money, and starting again.

This isn’t just a personal quirk. It connects directly to how she thinks about carbon removal. When the industry talks about co-benefits and monetization and putting a dollar value on ecosystem services, Emily’s gut reaction is that something essential is being lost. She gets why it’s necessary in the current system. She just hates that it’s necessary.

Ross pushed back gently, noting that if you don’t put a price on it, the question becomes whether the needed changes will actually happen. The game theory is real: no one wants to be the country that slows down while rivals keep going. But he also agreed that a purely technocratic approach—just get the right technology and policy and we can do this—probably isn’t enough.

What followed was a surprisingly earnest exchange about the need for something like a spiritual revolution. Not the woo-woo kind, Emily clarified, but the true woo—the recognition that we grew out of a rock flying through space over billions of years and maybe that should make us reconsider how much conflict we maintain with each other and the natural world.

It’s the kind of thing that sounds like a freshman dorm room conversation, and both of them acknowledged that. But Ross made the point that he doesn’t know how to fix climate change without it. The polycrisis isn’t going to be solved by spreadsheets alone.

More Than Human

Near the end, the conversation settled on the phrase “more than human world” — a term Emily picked up from ecofeminist theory, possibly Vandana Shiva. Ross riffed on it without much preparation and pulled out a surprising amount: it signals membership in an ecologically progressive community, connotes respect for non-human sentience, avoids the nature-versus-humanity dichotomy, and likely carries an indigenous worldview. All embedded in four words.

For Emily, the phrase is personal. It’s what she reaches for when the human stuff gets to be too much… when she needs to go sit in a field and listen to birds and remember that the system she’s caught up in isn’t actually all there is.

The episode ended where it maybe should have started: with Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese,” a poem Emily loves and that Ross had been planning to read on the show. Instead, he asked Emily to read it and give her own commentary on it. A storyteller doing what storytellers do: taking something beautiful and making sure other people can feel it too.

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Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Hey, thank you so much for listening to Reversing Climate Change. This is Ross Kenyon and I’m the host of this show. I’m just a long-time climate tech and carbon removal guy, I guess you could say.

Before I tell you about today’s guest, if I could please ask you to open up your podcast app and give this show a full rating. Five stars on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify. If you do use Apple Podcasts, a review that you could write is super impactful. If you love this show, it’s one of the most important things you could do, and if you’d be willing to do it, I would be very grateful to you. There’s also an option to become a paid subscriber on Spotify. $5 a month gets rid of all the ads I don’t read myself, and there’s bonus content.

One cool new thing I’ve been doing too is that there are Substack articles that have full transcripts of all the shows that have been published recently, which sum up the episode, have some clear takeaways, the podcast thumbnails, all those things. If you want to see those, you can subscribe to me and/or the show on Substack, the link to which is in the show notes.

And now I’ll tell you about the guest who you probably know if you’ve listened to The Carbon Removal Show — Emily Swaddle, who’s one of the co-hosts there. It’s a great show. Ben Weaver-Hinks and Tom Previte and Emily put that show together and it’s wonderful. I think it’s one of the best pieces of content within climate media. I think it’s really fun and approachable.

And I love all of them, but I’m gonna celebrate Emily here for a second. I think a good chunk of the reason why that show is so fun is because Emily is so fun. She cracks me up. This is the kind of show where it’s about kind of everything. It’s about life and how we live it, and why we make art. Why we even bother doing this climate work, and why do we do it even when it isn’t the glamorous, high-paying energy executive type work, but even when it’s something else — why persist in this thing that we do?

This is the kind of show I think you can put on and laugh along with us, and this maybe isn’t the show that you’re gonna listen to and hope for super quick tech takeaways within 30 minutes that you can go and say at your next meeting and have that latest little nugget of intel. It’s something else. You basically will have spent this time with us laughing about the absurdity of all things — about having a career in climate communications, media, humor. And what exactly that’s like, and what kinds of questions does having that approach allow one to ask?

I’m really grateful Emily and I got a chance to chat. She cracks me up constantly. And thank you so much to the team at The Carbon Removal Show for letting me borrow Emily’s Language Chat, which is — every time this song is played, whenever Emily wants to talk about language — which this show is just basically an extended version of Emily’s Language Chat. It cracks me up. And then learning the origin story of this song is also just so beautiful. So thank you to the team for loaning that to me. My sincere thanks. And here is the show with Emily.

….

Ross Kenyon: Well, it’s unlikely that you’ll be any less prepared though.

Emily Swaddle: That’s true. Actually, I do have a question. I think we’ve already started, but I do have a question.

Ross Kenyon: Okay. What is it?

Emily Swaddle: I don’t know what your editing process is. Not that you have to tell me the ins and outs of it, but do you want me to be slick?

Ross Kenyon: Do I want you to be slick? Like sound wise and knowledgeable and clever.

Emily Swaddle: Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: Or —

Emily Swaddle: Eloquent and coherent and all those things.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I mean, some of those things I can fix in post and some things I cannot. Can’t make you like a sage if you are a dullard. And one cannot transform character.

Emily Swaddle: I’ve been asking Ben to do that for years and he’s just like, you’ve gotta give me something to work with, Emily.

Ross Kenyon: I know. Yeah. There’s a limitation here to what you can do. I imagine you could probably just chop up someone’s words to make them say very intelligent things if you have enough of their dialogue recorded. But no, I’m not gonna be doing that. The show tends to be pretty naturalistic and say what you said. So we’re in. So now the pressure’s really on. Can’t save you from yourself, Emily. No one can. Can you save yourself from yourself? Are you able to do that?

Emily Swaddle: It’s not a skill I have yet mastered.

Ross Kenyon: What’s going on with you? I think people are very familiar with your voice. You are such a funny, cool climate communicator, carbon removal basically legend at this point. You’ve been doing it for — how long has The Carbon Removal Show been going? It’s five years, four years.

Emily Swaddle: Yeah, so we actually started the beginnings of it all at the end of 2020. So that was like five and a bit years ago. And then we didn’t release our first season until 2021. We did quite a lot of prep and research and stuff because we didn’t know anything at the beginning. We had to do a lot of prep and research. We still don’t know all that much, so we continue to do a lot of prep and research. But yeah, 2020 was when we first kind of came together as a team.

Ross Kenyon: Wow.

Emily Swaddle: Big year.

Ross Kenyon: Big year. You guys didn’t know that I was already podcasting. You didn’t actually need to do it.

Emily Swaddle: That was literally the first question that came up. It was like, why are we doing this if there’s already this guy doing it? Maybe we should just tag out.

Ross Kenyon: People have asked me that before too, and I’m always just like, there’s a million different takes and stories and I never get to the bottom of any of them and you’re gonna do something different and we need as much of this good stuff as we can possibly get. So yes, let your Emily freak flag fly. And I’m not doing that. I’m not doing the Emily thing. I don’t have Emily’s language chats, basically, is what it really comes down to. All right. We had a detour into that because it came up already, mostly because I was desperately trying to shoehorn that in wherever it would fit. That’s one of my favorite gags of the entire podcast. How did that come about and how did you commission this song?

Emily Swaddle: So the song was a birthday present from Ben to me because our first episode of this current season came out on my birthday and Ben was like editing it and he was just like, you have to listen for your birthday present — it’s in the episode. And at first I was like listening to it, thinking every single little edit was a birthday present. I was like, oh my gosh, is that — no, that’s not it. Wait, is it? No, that’s not it. And then it got to “It’s Emily’s Language Chat.” I was just like, yes, I have a jingle.

So that was really nice. I think it just came about because I am obsessed with language. I can’t really have an in-depth conversation about anything without being like, isn’t it weird that we say that? Why do we use that term? Where does it even come from? And I was just doing that anyway in our conversation, so I was like, we should just include this. And it’s always been that. I think it probably was in the first episode, I don’t really remember, but probably was.

Ross Kenyon: Wow. That’s a fun story. I really like that. And obviously I like language quite a bit. I’m a wordplay enthusiast. I make annoying pedantic observations about how language is used on a regular basis. I like studying language. It’s a thing that I do. I had a philosophy of language professor once, though, who took it to the next level where you could not use an idiom around that guy or he would take it at face value. He’d be like, really? Why would you want to kill two birds with one stone? He would just do it perfectly deadpan for everything. I need to just speak in plain language. We’re going to go Wittgenstein here. Okay, fine. We’ll do that. I’m just not gonna use any idioms around you. Fine. It can be pedantic, but it’s also fun. I like your little language chat.

Emily Swaddle: Thank you. I wonder what it would be like to play with the other end of that spectrum where you just spent a whole day only speaking in idioms and metaphors. That was the kind of thing that I would do and everyone around me would be like, she’s not gonna keep this up all day. And then I actually would and they would want to kill me.

Ross Kenyon: Oh no. They’d want to shuffle you off the mortal coil.

Emily Swaddle: Yeah, exactly. They’d want to come in with one of the stones that they were using to kill the birds.

Ross Kenyon: That’s right. Yeah. I love idioms. And I especially like the King James Bible and Shakespeare. It’s funny if you just read Hamlet and the King James Gospels, you’re like, oh, this is basically every idiom that exists and is still in common use. How many of them just come from the “to be or not to be” soliloquy?

Emily Swaddle: Yeah, it’s mad. I did quite a lot of Macbeth a few years ago — I was in two productions of Macbeth back to back and it was way too much Macbeth. Nobody needs that much Macbeth in their life. And at first I went into it just being like, I’m kind of here for the theater, I don’t know if I’m that into Shakespeare or whatever. And it didn’t take very long before I was like, you know, he’s pretty good at this. This writing’s pretty good. I appreciate this.

Ross Kenyon: Hot take. Shakespeare is good. Did you read David Mitchell’s book on royalty? What is it called — Unruly? You didn’t read that?

Emily Swaddle: No, I didn’t.

Ross Kenyon: Okay. So he covers the origins of British monarchy — I think it starts with Celtic mythology, Romano-British, King Arthur and Anglo-Saxon stuff later with Beowulf. And then all the way up to basically Shakespeare and he ends it by just having a chapter about how someone had to be the best in human history at art. And it just so happens he was born in Stratford-upon-Avon. And it’s Shakespeare. We have him. That’s where the story is going to end for royalty. I do like that bold claim. But sure. Shakespeare is good. Thanks for the hot take, Emily. So controversial.

Emily Swaddle: You’re welcome. So controversial and yet so brave. Because what I’m really bringing to the podcast world is my bravery, my courage.

Ross Kenyon: I think that’s actually — we’re saying it in a joking way, but I think you are bringing something very unique and specific to climate communications work and carbon removal. I don’t think there’s anyone else like you. And people can say that in a backhanded or a four-handed kind of way. It gets to me sometimes too, and I’m just like, I’ll take it. Thank you. Is this praise? It’s not kind of clear. But in this case it’s praise from me to you. I like the way you show up in this space.

Emily Swaddle: Thank you. How do you think I show up? Like I sometimes think I barely show up. I’m not fishing for compliments, but it would be interesting to know how you think I show up.

Ross Kenyon: So, we’ve talked about this some previously, and we don’t have to go there if you don’t want to, but there is a sense of imposter syndrome or “what is one doing” or “by what right do I have to be speaking in public about carbon removal.” And even I have some of those feelings sometimes, where I’m like, does the world really need this much of me running my mouth out there in it? And I think if you don’t have a little bit of that, the people who think the world desperately needs their commentary — I think those are the most dangerous kinds of all. So if you’re gonna lean one way or the other, I like the direction you’re going with it. But you are funny. I can tell when I’m listening to you that I’m actually accessing who you are as a person, where I think for many people there’s a little bit more of a performative nature to this work. Or it feels a little bit more guarded. I feel like I, before we became friends, I knew you just from listening to you, and that’s not true of a lot of people. Sometimes you listen to a podcast and you’re like, no idea what this person’s actually like. Are they kind to animals? I don’t know. I listen to you though. I’m like, Emily’s probably kind to animals.

Emily Swaddle: I love animals, to be fair. Yeah, I could just be a really good performer. And you’ve been drawn into my masquerade.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Are you like this secret evil villain? You’re horribly manipulative?

Emily Swaddle: Imagine if I was, but I was using my power for carbon removal. That’s such a specific niche for an evil villain to go down that road. Feels unlikely.

Ross Kenyon: That’s true. I mean, there are people that I meet in professional spaces that scare me, and that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re bad people, but they are people that I know are — what’s the way to put it? Being a wise and compassionate person is different from the kinds of skills that might make you successful in business. And sometimes they overlap and there are people who are very compassionate people who ended up very wealthy and successful. But the skills are not one-to-one. You do not have to be wise to be successful at business. And in fact, many of the people who are, I’m like, how did you get here? You are like a functioning 14-year-old. But sometimes just that level of maturity or behavior can make you ruthless and very successful in that kind of way. But you don’t have that. And I feel like I’m a fairly decent read of character. Your stuff on The Carbon Removal Show — it’s silly as hell. You’re a joker, that’s obvious. You like to be silly.

Emily Swaddle: It’s good fun.

Ross Kenyon: You’re very, very silly. Without a doubt. It feels very warm to me. There’s also the word that I used for you — I think I’ve told you this before — it’s bawdy. There’s a lot of double entendres and innuendo in the show. And I think it’s driven by you. I’ll hear one that you did and then there was a beat in the podcast and then everyone started laughing and you guys kept it in the editing process.

Emily Swaddle: There’s so much that we do when we’re recording that I kind of look at Ben and I’m like, he’s not gonna keep this in. This is too much. And then it’s such a treat to listen to the final edit and be like, what did he keep in? There’s probably so much that Ben has on his computer of me and Tom just being absolute mess-arounds and not making much sense a lot of the time, but definitely lots of giggling. There’s actually one cold open that we did, and I can’t remember what season it was — I want to say maybe season two — because it was one of the ocean episodes, we were doing marine CDR. And I listened to that cold open and I can hear myself completely losing it. I’m selling some stupid joke. And the funniest thing is that Tom does not understand that the joke is not even funny — it’s ridiculous and supposed to be nonsensical. And he’s kind of like, “No, but Emily, what? I don’t — can you just explain?” And I just lose it. I can’t breathe because I’m laughing so much. And it is quite therapeutic to listen to, to hear yourself completely go out of it with laughter. Kind of takes you there again every time you listen to it.

Ross Kenyon: That’s so nice. And I wish it was a little bit more common. I don’t feel like everyone in this space likes to bring that to the shows, which I get it — you’re doing serious science on a serious world-impacting topic.

Emily Swaddle: And also it’s a vulnerable place to go, right? Because I’m lucky that with Tom and Ben, who I make the show with, we are friends and also coworkers, which sometimes is difficult but most of the time is wonderful. And it means that we have these moments and I can just completely lose it and then be like, hold on guys, I need to pull myself together, because that was proper crying with laughter. And that’s okay. I don’t feel like that’s too vulnerable or fragile in that moment. And I have definitely been in professional circumstances before where I would not have felt comfortable going there, just because there’s a level of keeping it all together that you feel like you’ve got to do so much of the time. So yeah, I think I’m lucky to have a space in which I can just let go and allow the giggles to flow.

Ross Kenyon: Well, don’t giggles help more in career matters? I feel like we all want it. We want it in our life. We like working in workplaces where you obviously get stuff done and you ship, which you guys do. You keep shipping seasons of podcasts that are very high quality and good. Why don’t we prioritize more of the things that actually feel good? I feel like in some cases it can be a liability, even to the extent that I look at my LinkedIn sometimes and it features humor. Like one of the carbon removal memes is plastered all over my profile. And I’m like, to certain types of potential employers, I’m sure they’re like, this guy’s maybe too into memes. Does he do other stuff? But I also don’t know if I’d want to work someplace where it didn’t have a sense of humor. I think that makes the work better.

Emily Swaddle: Yeah. And I think what we were saying earlier about the masquerade stuff and the imposter syndrome — it’s harder to keep up that masquerade if you’re doing the silliness thing, in my opinion. I don’t think I can be silly and then also pretend to know a lot of stuff. I just don’t think it works. And the silliness in a way makes me feel like it’s okay that I don’t know a lot of this stuff. And what I tell myself — because this is what I would tell somebody else who told me about the imposter syndrome — is that I might not be bringing expertise in a specific area of CDR or in-depth understanding of some scientific concept. That’s not what I offer. What I offer is storytelling, essentially, and everything that comes along with that. The reading the room and understanding the flow and maybe pulling back when it’s a bit too much or going for it when there’s space for it. And that is kind of a skill that, although we definitely value it in certain parts of our culture — actors are ridiculously highly paid and famous because they’re essentially good storytellers — but when it comes to serious things, we don’t value the storytelling side. We just assume that the serious stuff is enough to engage people. And it never, ever is. It never is. And from many years ago, I realized the science that needs to be out in the world is so important. And I just wanted to go and be like, it’s okay. Don’t worry about telling everyone, babe. I’ll do it. Because I know you are busy doing the science stuff and that’s fantastic. Do the science stuff. I’ll just tell everyone about it because, no offense, I think I’m a bit better at that. And that feels important. We need all the different skills. So that helps me feel a bit better about not knowing things and asking the dumb questions and having the imposter syndrome, I guess.

Ross Kenyon: Man, there’s so many good things in what you just said. I can also imagine you saying this in a job interview. You’re like, look, hon, you don’t need to — you do the science. Don’t tell anyone about it. Leave that to me. You’re not good at it. I can help you.

Emily Swaddle: It’s not where you shine. You shine in the lab.

Ross Kenyon: Thank you very much for your time. We will let you know if there is a fit. Goodbye for now.

Emily Swaddle: But you know, you’ve gotta bring yourself to job interviews. One time I got a job, I was told after the fact that I kind of got the job because I said “maybes,” which is a very Northern English saying — maybe. Maybes.

Ross Kenyon: Okay. Yeah.

Emily Swaddle: Maybes. And the person who was interviewing me was a Scottish woman who had previously — she said a lot of the people who’d come in for the interview were quite composed and posh, for lack of a better word. And then I came in and I was like, “Oh, I dunno. Maybes.” And sort of letting my slight regional twang come out. And she appreciated that and was like, yeah, you can have the job. So you kind of let the uniqueness flow, you know.

Ross Kenyon: I think so. I think if you obscure those things about yourself, you might end up in an environment where you’re like, oh, actually they hired a version of myself that doesn’t even really want to be here. That was on its best behavior. And it’s only saying the smartest, most serious things.

Emily Swaddle: I’ve been in that situation before where I’ve got the job and then I’ve been doing the job and being like, oh my gosh, I don’t really want this job. But I said I wanted it and I pretended I wanted it so they would give it to me and now I’m here and I don’t really want it.

Ross Kenyon: But you need money to exchange for goods and services — to quote Homer Simpson. And now you’re in it. Now what?

Emily Swaddle: Now I’m in it. That’s the thing. I keep going through that cycle of: oh my gosh, I need money to exchange for goods and services, so I’m gonna apply for all these jobs and projects and things. Just give me something to do and then you can give me the money. And then I get into the thing and I’m like, I really hate this. I feel like this isn’t what life is about. I feel like I can’t keep doing this. I feel like this is killing my soul. And then I get out of it and I’m like, yes, freedom. Oh my gosh. I need to focus my energies on things that are much more valuable to me. And then I don’t have any money. And I go, oh my gosh, I really need money to exchange for goods and services.

Ross Kenyon: Are you trying to do more in science communication? Because I feel like your portfolio is already stacked. It’s really good. Why is it a little bit tricky, or what do you think it is about the job market or what’s going on?

Emily Swaddle: That’s a very interesting question. I do think it’s a really tough job market out there right now for everyone. It’s like nobody knows really how much money they have or who they want to hire or what they want them to do. It just feels like there’s a lot of uncertainty and a lot of desperation, really. And that sucks, but it’s true. And also the other side of this equation is me and my life and really having gone through a process over the past few years of trying to fill my life with the kinds of things that feed me and finding that balance of I do actually need to pay the bills, but I’m not willing to sacrifice — I think there’s more things that I’m not willing to sacrifice than quite a lot of people I know. And that can be confusing for talking to friends about. I don’t have any money and I don’t just kind of want this kind of job. I want something really special. And they’re like, just get a job. What are you doing? So anyway, it’s a mix of those two things, I’d say.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Such a funny — okay, I’ll take it to David Mitchell one more time. He has that line about how Americans expect service workers to be happy, and we’re always sort of disappointed when they’re like, oh, you don’t like your job and you’re making me very aware of that fact. This seems highly inappropriate. British people just sort of expect like, yeah, they’re maybe not having the best day and maybe that’s not what they wanted to be doing right now. And so of course they have a little bit of a bad attitude. That’s fine. But it seems like you have kind of a whimsical approach that strikes me as very un-British, at least in that stereotypical way.

Emily Swaddle: Yeah. Lots of people have told me I don’t come across as very British. Also, I like to nap in the middle of the day, which makes me feel very Spanish.

Ross Kenyon: Oh, okay. All right. We’re on something now.

Emily Swaddle: Probably also doesn’t help the job hunt situation if I’m napping most afternoons. Kind of like a toddler in that sense.

Ross Kenyon: Maybe we just need to take you down to a place that has siesta. Maybe you’ve just been born in the wrong place, the wrong time.

Emily Swaddle: I think so.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Okay, well, we’ll keep working on that.

Emily Swaddle: I also would really like to be one of those people — you know how there was a certain time in history where if you were an affluent artist, you just existed and your art just kind of came when it came and you could just — that’s probably still the case for a lot of people, actually. But that’s the dream.

Ross Kenyon: You would like a patron. You want like a crown royal or something? You’d like a royal pension, or you want the Medicis to find you or something like that.

Emily Swaddle: Yeah. That’s what I’d like.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah.

Emily Swaddle: Anyone? Can we put a call out on the podcast?

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Is there someone out here who wants to be The Carbon Removal Show and Emily’s personal patron? I feel like that work should exist. Because what you’re doing is one of those things that’s a very valuable service to everyone, but it makes it hard to get paid because everyone chips in a little bit of money and it’s almost certainly not commensurate with the amount of value that is being created by podcasts that are reaching pretty widely. I imagine a lot of people find out about carbon removal and then they search it and your show is probably very high up on the list, if not the first thing that shows up. And this is a very good educational resource that’s highly produced, and yet it doesn’t strike me as the most lucrative thing. And I know that because I’ve also been podcasting for a long time. It’s hard to make it your primary thing.

Emily Swaddle: It is. Yeah. And also we’re kind of quite an expensive podcast to make in this spectrum because we do a lot of research. We highly produce it. And so it might take us a couple of months to make three really good episodes. And without fully understanding the value of that, you can understand why people are like, well, just interview some people and put it online. Just make them quick and easy for yourself.

Ross Kenyon: Be very careful about what you say next.

Emily Swaddle: Just, you know, hang out with people and post it online. Pretend it’s quick. Which is a very valuable form of podcasting, but just not what we do. We do a completely different way of telling the story, and yeah, it happens to be more expensive. So it is a kind of — and we had for a long time a kind of, every season was like, okay, how are we gonna get money now? How are we gonna fund the next one? Where are we going with this? And we’re still kind of in that space, but we started the Carbon Removal Show Coalition in 2024, which came out of this idea that we want to be a resource for the community of carbon removal. And we didn’t necessarily want to be a resource for one company who wanted to headline sponsor it. We’d had some really good experiences of that, but we just felt that we were moving in a direction that we wanted to feel more connected to the community. And so then it became kind of obvious to say, okay, well maybe the community would like to chip in. And more than just putting that on individuals within the CDR space — so many of our connections were with organizations and the companies in CDR that it made sense to go there and say, would you like to support us, because we are trying to support this industry.

And you know, I am at my core so anti-capitalist and I hate having to think about money, as is demonstrated by the fact that I just want to do my art. I just don’t like the idea that everything has to come down to money. It really doesn’t sit well with me. And this idea of the Coalition felt so much better because it wasn’t like we were selling the show. It felt like a different kind of paradigm. And that is exactly what we sometimes talk about with CDR as well — that it needs, in order to survive and thrive and create a new kind of world, it needs to have a new kind of system. And I was like, okay, well then we need a new kind of system too, because I don’t like the way money is the bottom line. I just don’t like it.

Ross Kenyon: Interesting. Well, I think one of the ways we framed The Carbon Removal Show is as a public good, and therefore you should receive public subsidy. It does seem like the benefits accrue to everyone for shows like yours existing. But it’s hard for companies to internalize the benefits specifically to them and therefore to make a business case for it. Especially as the price creeps up over time and you reach more people and it becomes more valuable real estate. It’s a tough problem to solve, especially because there’s a lot of people probably just free riding on it. They’re like, glad this resource exists. Not gonna chip in anything, but glad that it’s there. Which is fine, by the way, if you’re listening.

Emily Swaddle: It’s okay, you can keep listening.

Ross Kenyon: People have been getting value out of this for six years. I know you’re out there, Brian. Cough up the money, Brian. It’s $5 a month. That’s okay. Even just by listening to the show, it helps get it to more listeners. You’re consuming ads and that is also funding the show and that’s okay. But yours is a little bit trickier though because you guys aren’t running ads in that same kind of way.

Emily Swaddle: Yeah, that’s the thing. You’ve gotta find that balance. And actually, Ben and I — I don’t know if he wants me to tell all his stories — a few years ago we sat down to brainstorm the creation of a very different podcast about rest. Because rest has become this huge important thing in my life, or trying to understand rest and what that means to me. My relationship with rest has become this huge part of my life with various health things and mental health stuff and just all kinds of ways in which it has integrated into my thinking. And I don’t really know what rest is. And that was kind of confirmed by the fact that Ben and I did a few interviews with people and everyone was either straight out like, nobody knows what rest is, or they were like, oh, well it’s not really about rest actually.

Ross Kenyon: It’s about this other thing that isn’t that.

Emily Swaddle: So we decided we really were keen to make this podcast about rest and we started trying to do the sales pitch thing to get funding for it and reached out to all kinds of different organizations that might want to fund a podcast about rest. And we had a lot of difficult conversations between the two of us about where do we draw the line. We want to make this podcast in a way that aligns with our values. So do we really want to collaborate with a company that feels like it’s not aligned with those values, but they could give us a lot of money. Such hard conversations to have.

Ross Kenyon: Yes. I was trying to think through who might be receptive to a pitch about a podcast about rest who might also be an evil company. Like, who overlaps there?

Emily Swaddle: I’ll send you the Venn diagram after.

Ross Kenyon: Thank you. I really appreciate that. For my own education. I’m surprised you couldn’t just fund this off of — whenever I see a double-barreled British person, I’m just like, Ben Weaver-Hinks. Where’s your family estate? When do you join the House of Lords? When your father dies?

Emily Swaddle: I love that.

Ross Kenyon: There’s something about those names. Sorry, Ted Christie-Miller, if you’re listening.

Emily Swaddle: Is that a true fact?

Ross Kenyon: It’s not true?

Emily Swaddle: It’s so not true. Actually, in England, often double-barrel surnames come from — the people I knew who had double-barrel surnames growing up were often like, they had really progressive parents and they just didn’t get married. And so they had two surnames. Really progressive. That was the bar in the north of England in the nineties — children out of wedlock, progressive. Or blended families — step people and blended families. You get double-barrel surnames.

Ross Kenyon: Definitely not half people, but okay. Continue.

Emily Swaddle: You know what I mean? So that’s funny that you associate the double-barrel with the posh thing. I tell you what — Tom Previte has two middle names.

Ross Kenyon: Oh my. Is that a very tweedy kind of thing?

Emily Swaddle: I don’t know. I just think it’s indulgent to have two middle names. His parents had so much time on their hands. They gave him two middle names.

Ross Kenyon: That’s pretty funny. I don’t know where this association comes from in my head though. Maybe it’s the Parker Bowles kind of thing. It’s in my head. So I just imagine that Ben is slumming it as a podcast producer until he inherits.

Emily Swaddle: He’s probably listening — if this is in the actual thing and he listens to this, he’s gonna be like, my God, I wish.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Ben, when do you inherit your barony? Maybe you can come on and talk about it sometime.

Emily Swaddle: It’s funny though, because when I first met both Tom and Ben — maybe this is quite a British thing — but I’m from the north of England and they’re from the south and so to me they both sound very posh. And I was kind of like, oh gosh, all these posh people in this podcast. I’ve gotta hold my own, because I’m northern and also the only woman working on the podcast. Before, it was just me and Tom and Ben. We also had a bigger team in previous seasons sometimes. It kind of fluxed a bit. But we did at one point have another woman who was helping us with some of the guest bookings and stuff. But I think she was only working with us for about three months. So most of the time it’s been me with a whole team of men with very British names — Ben and Tom and Sam and Henry. It’s very “Five Go on Holiday” kind of thing. Very cute. But I think it works. So I’m not complaining.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it definitely is working. The sort of class system in the UK has always been very interesting to me. And I imagine to an American listening to British accents, you get a free pass. It always sounds smarter. Americans are like, wow, that’s so smart. I’m sure if you’re actually British and listening, it’d be like, that guy’s an idiot. He has no idea what he’s talking about. But I’m glad he has the right kind of accent. It’s like a little bit of a premium. Even like, you’re from the north of England, and we can’t really distinguish that. We’re not able to hear, oh, that’s a lower class, provincial place to be from.

Emily Swaddle: Yeah. It’s funny on a lot of levels. I spent quite a lot of time in America when I was growing up and we definitely got that impression — we’d say anything and they’d be like, oh, so cute, so posh.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Extra charisma points for free.

Emily Swaddle: But also this idea of “the British accent” — because there are literally hundreds of accents across the UK even though we’re relatively small geographically. And from my experience — this is something I maybe hold onto a bit too much — I am from the northeast of England, which has a very strong accent, and I don’t really have that accent.

Ross Kenyon: Can you show us though?

Emily Swaddle: Yeah. It’s a Geordie accent. So when I was saying before, the “maybes” — we’d be a bit sort of, “ee mind, hun, I didn’t even know.” This is just Geordie. Very lush. And actually when I’m a bit drunk or chatting to my most Geordie friends, I will become a bit more Geordie. But I don’t really have a strong Geordie accent at all. Although I have heard from Ben that he has kept certain things in the show because he thinks my accent has come out in a word or a phrase or something. He’s like, I just like the way you say that, so I’ll keep it in. But in Newcastle, where I’m from, I can come across as quite posh because I don’t have a stronger accent.

Ross Kenyon: Oh, interesting.

Emily Swaddle: But kind of anywhere else in England, because I don’t have a southern posh accent, I do not come across as posh.

Ross Kenyon: Fascinating. I grew up watching — my grandma loved Keeping Up Appearances and had them on VHS. I watched a ton of Keeping Up Appearances as a kid. As an adult, thinking back on it — oh, this is all class anxiety. The Bucket family, which is sort of a working class English family. And then Hyacinth calls it the Bouquet family. She mispronounces the name intentionally to make it more posh, and her family is always undermining her class aspirations of being a high society lady with gloves on.

Emily Swaddle: I really relate.

Ross Kenyon: That’s not the same thing in America. We have sort of a — we all imagine we’re all equally successful or on the road there, and it’s not determined by our families in the same kind of way that it is in the UK. Granted, it’s probably more mythology than anything.

Emily Swaddle: Yeah, it’s an interesting thing. Growing up, my dad used to live in California, so I had a bit of American culture and quite a lot of British culture. And I was like, oh, there is a problem with race in America. We don’t have that in the UK. We have a problem with class. And then I realized — kind of very similar. It’s not that they don’t exist in one or the other. The framing and the way people talk about it was so different. Here we are back at language.

Ross Kenyon: Back at language. And it’s like what your language communicates about you. Accent, dialect, word choice. There are definitely ways of speaking that are especially tweedy where you’re just like, yeah, this is not the language of the common person. This is guaranteed to alienate many of the people that we might like to reach. I mean, this is where the show started too. I think you’re very successful at making this highly accessible because you don’t take yourself so seriously. It’s funny. And you are not scared of asking a dumb question. And I think that’s maybe the most courageous thing that can be done in many of these cases.

Emily Swaddle: Thank you. Yeah, it’s funny, I think I naturally do that. I was just thinking when you were saying that about the way you speak and word choices — I moved to the Netherlands for my master’s degree and I found myself actively choosing not to say certain words because I knew they were Northern or Geordie and that I would have to explain myself more. And so it just became easier to say the thing that people get. And now having moved back to the Northeast, I’m like, oh, it’s actually really nice to just be able to say the word that I turned off for a little while because now everyone’s just using it.

Ross Kenyon: That is nice. I especially like it when it’s a regional thing. I like language in somewhat of an annoying way where sometimes I will say things like — why use a common word when you can use a $10 word? Why say sad when you can say lugubrious? It’s very annoying. It feels good in your mouth. But it doesn’t always feel good to other people. I was playing disc golf with some friends back in Arizona a couple of years ago, and a friend brought a geologist friend along who I hadn’t met, and I said something really annoying. It was something like, “And what has you sequestered over there?” And he was like, “What? What is that?” It was just way too try-hard. It put distance between us rather than connecting us, which is what language is ostensibly there for — to make it easier for us to meld minds.

Emily Swaddle: Yeah. Well, that’s interesting because originally that is exactly what language is used for, to connect with people and hopefully to connect with many. And yet it is so often used as an identifier of which group we’re in, and particularly which group we’re not in, or that you are not in my group. And I think this is one of the reasons I find it so fascinating — you can’t underestimate how much there is to learn about the words we use and how we use them. It’s an ongoing, lifelong learning process that I love. And I think that’s one of the things I love about it. I learned a new thing the other day. Do you know this, Ross? You know when you say “bury the lead”? It’s not spelled L-E-A-D. It’s spelled L-E-D-E.

Ross Kenyon: I did know that one. I think it’s just because I worked for my school newspaper or something.

Emily Swaddle: Of course. I’m so sorry to underestimate you.

Ross Kenyon: I had one where — yeah. That one’s especially confusing because it’s meant to say put the most important thing up front and that should lead. And that makes it seem like it’s gonna be L-E-A-D, but it’s not. It’s some sort of — I imagine this is like some physical device that people would use for some purpose or something that’s been —

Emily Swaddle: I kind of need to know now. I’m gonna have to look that up. Because you’re right — it should be “lead” as in the leading note of this tale. But it is not. I kind of love it. It annoys me a lot and I kind of love it.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Actually, for your thoughts on language as exclusion rather than connection — I’ve also heard that for academic communities. There is some technical benefit to using their precise language of art that they need to communicate about their highly specific ideas, but it’s also used in a way that signals membership and also makes sure they’re not getting the riffraff into their academic conferences. It’s supposed to bind and exclude in the way that certain communities work religiously or in political communities. So it’s probably not correct to think of language as inherently connecting. It’s that, but it’s also excluding. I don’t know which of those comes first or if they’re simultaneous.

Emily Swaddle: I have two siblings who are both dyslexic, and growing up I think I’ve always loved language and words and reading and stuff, and they really struggled with those things. And I just saw how that affected their access to so much, whether it was explicit or not. There was an assumption that if you were struggling with reading and writing, then you wouldn’t be able to go on and do other things because the baseline was you have to be able to do this well. And it just infuriated me because I knew these people and I knew that was not the case. There is so much more to their intelligence than the fact that they struggle with reading and writing. And having said how much I love language, this is me now acknowledging that there’s so much more beyond it. And in those moments where it’s used to exclude, it’s important to keep in mind that it’s just a tool that we use — sometimes very beautifully and sometimes incredibly powerfully. And sometimes just rubbishly. That’s not even a word.

Ross Kenyon: It should be.

Emily Swaddle: And recognizing when it’s one or the other is so important. Assuming everything is wonderful and amazing just because it’s been said in a way that’s wonderful and amazing — that’s kind of the root of a lot of evil.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I think that’s very well said and a nice moment that shows you are a humane person in the right kinds of ways. It’s good to have those experiences with disability or being like, the main way of showing that you’re smart in our civilization is punishing to these people. And in a different era that was primarily oral, they would’ve been totally fine. I feel a little bit of this towards myself too, where I am not as numerate as I would like to be. I like working conceptually and come from the humanities and I think a lot of powerful work can be done without bringing unnecessary numbers into it. And it’s one of those things where I have to relearn what a megaton is. Every time someone says it, I’m like, what is the proper thing I should have inside my head for this? Because I don’t think it’s that important of a thing to know and it doesn’t really impact the work that much. And yet people will talk like that. And I don’t really like it, but I do feel held back by it. If I could just hang on this level with the scientists and engineers — but then it’s accepting that I should know this and I am committed to always strengthening these skills, but it’s not my primary way of interacting with reality. My mind does not go there as a first recourse. In some situations that can be embarrassing or career limiting, but it also unlocks abilities in the more intuitive, linguistic, conceptual space that I think is sometimes cut off from people who are engaged purely in spreadsheets and numbers and megaton talk. But sometimes when you’re on the business end of it and things are not going well because you’re not able to signal your membership in this specific technical community, it hurts. And then you retreat back to being like, I’m actually really good at this other stuff. And maybe I’m just gonna turn my microphone on and say some nice words.

Emily Swaddle: And it’s gonna make you feel better.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. One of the things I love — I think you’ll love this too, I’ll try and find the meme so I can post it with this episode. Did you ever play any RPGs or video games?

Emily Swaddle: Not really.

Ross Kenyon: All right. So the way this works — and it’s a terrible name, by the way, every game is a role-playing game — I’ve never really understood how it could possibly be otherwise.

Emily Swaddle: I did play Dungeons and Dragons like three times.

Ross Kenyon: Oh, okay. This is great. You’ll get it then. The way it works with basically every RPG is that when you start the game, you don’t actually know how you’re going to play your character. And by the time you make all the investments into which categories of skills you want to develop, you’re like, oh, I became something that doesn’t actually fit with my playing style. The meme I saw was something like, life is like an RPG and you didn’t realize which categories were important until it was too late. But then you get to your mid-thirties and you realize that if swinging a two-handed battle axe has gotten you this far, you might as well just keep being a naked barbarian swinging that battle axe. It’s too late to change now. You can’t just start over as a paladin. You’re the naked barbarian now. It’s not great in many ways, but you max it out. And that’s kind of how I feel in my career too. Should I go back and get an MBA? Should I go back and get a hard science degree? How could I do this in a more serious way? I’m like, I can still learn a lot of this stuff without having to go back and re-enroll in this expensive way. But I get tempted.

Emily Swaddle: Yeah, I get tempted too. And I think the thing is I’ve got into this habit of just pivoting without the formality of it all.

Ross Kenyon: Without the full what?

Emily Swaddle: Without the formality of it all. I don’t feel like I have to — well, I do feel like I need the training, but I don’t bother, I guess.

Ross Kenyon: Are you too busy resting, taking a siesta?

Emily Swaddle: So for instance, there was a time last year or the year before where I was like, I’m just gonna give everything up and become an actress. That was my plan. I was just gonna pivot hard into theater because I really wanted to. And I was like, oh my gosh, maybe I have to go to drama school or learn how to do this. And I was like, I could just do some acting. And the thing of — if you write, you are a writer. If you act, you are an actor. If you do science, you are a scientist.

Ross Kenyon: Very true. I agree with that.

Emily Swaddle: That thing feels so important to me. And the thing about the role-playing game — I totally agree. And also I completely disagree with it. Because I don’t think anything is set in stone and we can always shift and pivot. And if tomorrow you’re like, I just really want to change my career and go this way, I truly believe you could do it. It would not be easy. And depending on your levels of resources and capacity, there’s probably a lot of sacrifices you have to make. But also it’s possible. I think I have to believe that because there’s so much that I constantly feel like I want to try or that I want to change, that I need that reassurance that it could happen. I could do it.

Ross Kenyon: I like that and I think you should pursue that. It’s a good thing to believe and a good thing to do. I’m trying to figure out the exact right way to react to this. I think you’ll connect with what I’m about to say. My career is very confusing to everyone — both people I know primarily from online life and even to my family. They’re like, what are you doing? And what is this constellation of activities?

Emily Swaddle: Relatable. It’s very relatable.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. And to me it all has very strong continuity. I can see every step and I’m always looking for things that are challenging and things that have me learn stuff every day. And I also like working with people and doing things that have me relating to lots of people. Every bit of what I do is hitting on that same thing. I know that it’s going somewhere. I don’t really know where it’s going, but I’m also pretty opportunistic about it. I don’t feel like I have some grand plan and I’m also okay with it, as long as I’m able to survive. It’s very much my own unique thing and that’s okay. I am not someone who can easily be put into a box, and that’s both good and bad. Because I will get into interviews sometimes where they’ll be like, you’ve done a lot of marketing. You’re not like a marketer, though. And I’m like, no. But I will hire around the stuff that I don’t have and I bring a bunch of extra cool stuff that you wouldn’t otherwise get from the right-over-the-plate marketer. And they’re like, yeah, we’re gonna go for the more conventional marketer. Okay, fine. Oh, you do strategy? Cool. We’re gonna hire an MBA for that. But you’re gonna get the same MBA answers as probably everyone else. Consider the weirder option. “Consider the weirder option” is a terrible pitch, by the way. Have you considered the more confusing, less scriptable option?

Emily Swaddle: Yes. You could go for this — ask my qualifications. But I am weird, so consider it.

Ross Kenyon: I like that it appeals to the gambling instinct. You’re bringing a wild card on. There’s a chance that undiscovered value erupts in a way that is really cool. Which is true. I’m often able to find stuff that other people have overlooked because of the weird constellation of skills and experiences. That is something I feel pretty confident in saying — this is a service that I offer. But it’s confusing as hell. Do you have some of that in you too?

Emily Swaddle: Definitely. I strongly relate to not being able to describe to people what I do. And also that it depends who I’m talking to as to how I describe it. I don’t say the same thing to everyone.

Ross Kenyon: I feel like imagining some of these scenarios and there’s also lots of “maybes” in there too.

Emily Swaddle: Yeah. And maybes I do this and maybes I don’t.

Ross Kenyon: That sounds like a threat.

Emily Swaddle: Anyways. Yeah. And there’s a recognition in me, even if I can’t necessarily articulate it all the time, that I understand the thread. I think it’s kind of obvious. We’ve talked about the storytelling stuff and that to me is just a word I use very liberally — storytelling. It can be podcasting, it can be writing, it can be acting. I work sometimes at the National Centre for Children’s Books in Newcastle and literally tell stories to children.

Ross Kenyon: Great. Love it.

Emily Swaddle: And I also love to design and put on events, and that to me feels like storytelling because an event is an experience and you’re guiding people through that experience in the same way that you guide people through a story. That feels so — it just makes so much sense to me. And if you’re writing a job application, this can be tricky. Because you have to be like, I know it looks like I’ve done all sorts of things, and I have, and that’s great — trust me, it’s great for you. Let me try and tie them all together in a nice bow in the limited space on this application form.

But yeah, there’s this book that I wish I could remember the name of.

Ross Kenyon: There are a couple of books, maybe we can narrow it down.

Emily Swaddle: It’s about the power of being a generalist.

Ross Kenyon: Oh yeah, I think I’ve read that one.

Emily Swaddle: I read it and it just made me feel really good about myself. Because I am definitely a generalist. And actually, I was listening to — do you know my favorite episodes of your show are what I like to call “Ross Rants”? When you don’t have a guest on and you just kind of stream of consciousness.

Ross Kenyon: They’re pretty improv-based, but yeah.

Emily Swaddle: They’re my favorites. I sort of think along with you as you go down your rabbit hole of wherever you’re going. And it’s very — it always gets me in a good mood as well as making me think about these important questions that you always bring up. And I was listening to the recent one you did about the polycrisis versus carbon efficiency and it just — I find it really hard to work in a way where I’m not thinking about bigger picture stuff, connecting things and thinking about systemic things. And in the world in which we live, it’s really depressing to have a brain that works like that because a lot of the systems are absolutely fucking shit.

Ross Kenyon: I’ll bleep those out. Yeah.

Emily Swaddle: And I also deeply see the importance of the people who are like, this is my thing and I’m gonna do this thing to the absolute best that I can for the rest of my life. That’s not me at all, but I really appreciate those people, because if we don’t have them, then the people who are looking at everything and flittering around don’t have anything to anchor to in the systemic change thing that needs to happen.

Ross Kenyon: No, I think we definitely need people who are able to zoom out and ask some of those big questions. I worry a lot about scientism or technocracy or just this drive where technicians will determine everything without thinking about the more humane parts of what we’re doing here. And it’s hard to put a quantitative measure on humanity. It’s hard to put a monetary value on it. It almost feels wrong. Those are the wrong ways to understand those behaviors. So it probably doesn’t help you or I in emphasizing those things and saying, here’s why you should bring me onto your company for a fixed expense, for an indeterminate amount of value that will be delivered. Let’s do it together. But I think that work is really valuable. And I would do my little Ross rants even if no one was listening.

Emily Swaddle: I would listen. I would listen to a Ross rant any day.

Ross Kenyon: I call them my monologues, but Ross Rant is probably what I should — Ross Rant, trademark.

Emily Swaddle: Rant makes it sound like you’re angry. It’s not got a ranting energy. I’m such a sucker for alliteration. That’s why the rant came out. So you said about putting that monetary value on humanity, and it’s also — this is something I come up against with carbon removal quite a lot — putting that monetary value on the more than human world.

Ross Kenyon: I was gonna say it if you didn’t. That’s a great example.

Emily Swaddle: Don’t say the n-word.

Ross Kenyon: “More than human” is a very specific kind of phrase. But please continue.

Emily Swaddle: Okay. We need to come to this. Yeah, it just makes me feel icky. When we’re thinking about CDR, we talk about co-benefits and we’ve gotta make sure they can monetize this. I’m like, I get it in the system we currently live in, yes. And also I hate the fact that we have to look at this amazing planet that is self-sustaining and can feed us and go, yeah, but how much is it worth? In USD?

Ross Kenyon: It does feel pretty icky. It’s like a category error in some way too. But if you don’t do it, then the question is — is this gonna happen? Because then I worry we need to have some sort of spiritual transformation happen. But that’s hard. I think people are pretty scared of it too. The game theory of it is the part I always come back to for why this doesn’t occur more spontaneously or naturally. If the US just said, okay, we’re actually gonna take a pause on AI stuff because we don’t know how dangerous AGI is or how far off artificial general intelligence is going to be and the ramifications of that. So we’re just gonna try and do some more research and make sure we don’t rush into this. But if we didn’t do it, then China’s probably not gonna slow down and every other agency working on this — they’re not gonna slow down because they know if they don’t, their rival agency in a different country is gonna do it. So we kind of can’t. And once you’re on the cycle, you’re like, where does this end? Does it end in a good place or a bad place? Because it could end in mutually assured destruction and we’re all going to check ourselves because the balance of power ensures that bad actors don’t just wipe everything out. Or it all just falls apart at some point in the near future. That’s a fairly real risk. And the solution to this is probably all the woo-woo stuff that we’ve all been told is not serious business. How we spiritually relate to the rock that we grew out of and how magical that is and how that might actually chill us out a little bit. To recognize some of the pure mysticism of that. There’s a rock flying through space that we grew out of over the course of billions of years. It was pretty unlikely that we would take this shape and we’re able to observe this thing that we spontaneously grew out of. And having a recognition of that should make you be like, yeah, maybe we shouldn’t have as much conflict with the Russians or Chinese and we should probably just figure out how to live here with dignity. And it sounds so woo. But come on. You’re there with me, right?

Emily Swaddle: Ben and I came up with this phrase — there’s “woo-woo,” which we are like, ah, but then there’s “true woo,” which is the woo we can get on board with. Because we recognize it’s woo, but we love it and it’s true. So this is the true woo.

Ross Kenyon: I didn’t cross over, did I, into proper woo-woo?

Emily Swaddle: No, you weren’t even close.

Ross Kenyon: I feel like it’s a little bit cheesy to say out loud where it sounds a little bit like freshman dorm room. There might be certain kinds of smoke floating around in the room. There’s a Bob Marley poster on the wall. But also, couldn’t we get along on this planet? It’s bountiful enough for all of us and we could also have a really good time if we just treated each other more decently.

Emily Swaddle: Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: But it doesn’t seem like we’re doing that. I don’t know how to fix climate change if we don’t do that either. The pure technocratic — we just need the right technology and policy and we can do this — like maybe. But the polycrisis thing probably said it as well as anything else.

Emily Swaddle: Yeah. The tech stuff and the policy stuff will change something for sure. It’s not gonna have zero effect. But is it just gonna get us to the point where it’s survivable and then at that point it’s like, do I want to be in this world? If it’s where I worry it could get to. But then also thinking about that level of stuff is very depressing because I totally agree with what you say. If we don’t have a full — you used the word spiritual revolution and some people would consider that to be the woo-est of woo. But I actually think it’s so true. We are so disconnected from the idea of spirituality that the idea of a spiritual revolution is laughable. And that’s the problem in so many ways. Okay. I’m going back, but tell me your thoughts and feelings about the “more than human world.”

Ross Kenyon: Oh yes. Thanks for bringing it back. I think that phrase signals your membership in a certain kind of ecologically progressive community. It signals respect for animals and sentience of different types. You could say “nature,” but that introduces this dichotomy thing that you probably don’t want to do. I like that it still has hierarchy involved. It’s more than human. It’s not different from human, it’s more than human, which I think connotes a lot of respect for it and likely an indigenous worldview. It’s funny — a small phrase like that. This is just me riffing on it, not even thinking that hard about it, but all of those things are embedded in there. And that’s how powerful that phrase is for me.

Emily Swaddle: Yeah. I don’t remember where I originally got that phrase from, but I’m pretty sure it was some ecofeminist theorist. Maybe Vandana Shiva or somebody like that, could have been. But I really struggle — and I think we’ve spoken about this before — that barrier between like, nature is them and humanity is us. I hate that. And I also hate the idea that there is a hierarchy in that, that humanity somehow sits above the natural world. So I kind of like the phrase “more than human world” because it also reminds me that there’s more than the stuff that I get caught up on so often. All the human stuff.

Ross Kenyon: Which parts of the human experience have got you down?

Emily Swaddle: Oh, there’s everything.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, totally. I got you.

Emily Swaddle: And then I go to a field and I sit and just try and do nothing for a little bit and listen to the birds or look at the grass. And I just take a deep breath and realize that it’s not actually all this. We make it all this because that’s the system in which we have to exist. But really it’s not.

Ross Kenyon: You’re listening and not watching. Hopefully you can tell the directionality of her gestures.

Emily Swaddle: Yeah. Sorry. That’s not very good for an audio-based medium. But yeah, that’s the thing that really — personally I know I need, in order to survive in any kind of position of working to change things, I have to connect with something greater than myself. And that’s the definition of spirituality. And for me, that means the more than human world, this natural connection that I need to have.

Ross Kenyon: Yes. I think pretty much anything in that position is good. There’s a bumper sticker that I pass — I’ve told this story on the podcast before, but it’s been a while. I suspect it’s someone who came from a 12-step program, because I’m pretty sure this is where the phrase comes from. But his bumper sticker says, “Relax, God’s in charge.” And you don’t have to be a specific type of monotheist to appreciate it. I think humans need to be in their place a little bit. It’s actually not our responsibility to do everything. And the risks of us trying to fulfill that God-shaped hole are maybe more than we can do at our current level of civilizational maturity. And it’s nice to just be like, you know what? This isn’t my responsibility. And I can relax a little bit. The universe is beneficent and I trust that things are broadly trending towards goodness. And I can work on my small little corner of the world. I know that’s kind of a canned phrase that is common. And even still, every time I see it, it makes me happy and calms me down. That’s true. Why am I taking so much responsibility for literally everything? I can’t control all these things. Why am I carrying this with me? I’m actually not in charge.

Emily Swaddle: Here’s my question though. Do you think that’s because you’re a generalist? Do you think those people who work on their niches — that tiny little thing that they obsess over and get better and better at throughout their lives — do you think they have the same worries?

Ross Kenyon: Wow. I’ve never — this is the kind of question a journalist would ask, and this is why you should scoop Emily up while she’s on the market, even though she’s not big on capitalism or money. But that is a great question. I think probably so. I think the kinds of shows that I produce run all over the place, and so seeing connections — I’m pretty freaked out watching the direction of the world and have been for a while. I’m not feeling as optimistic as I typically do. I don’t like being a Cassandra-esque person. I don’t think it’s a fun role to be in. Part of it is because I’m trying to look a couple years in the future, follow the trends and see broadly where they’re pointing and how that affects my personal life, my business life. And that has me freaked out. And I think people who are just trying to be like, well, how do I get the unit cost economics down here, and are just focused on that — I think that is probably more focusing. I do feel better when I am focused on specific discrete problems that have solutions. And I try to keep some problems in my portfolio that are the big “what if” spots on the map. And then I also work with people on basic stuff — how do you explain your weird technology to a generalist VC such that they might take a second meeting with you? Because what you’re doing right now is confusing as hell and it’s not gonna get the second date at all. So I like to have both involved. But yes, I think being a generalist opens you up to blue-sky thinking that can also lead to, “Oh God, what is all of this? What are we doing here?”

Emily Swaddle: And I think one of the tricky things of being a generalist is — I’m speaking for generalists — humans need purpose. We need a sense of purpose. And the people who find the niche thing that they want to do and are of the personality type that fitting into a niche really works for them — purpose, I can imagine, comes much more easily than to a person who’s kind of like, I’ve got my fingers in all the pies and I’m trying to tie all these things together and also make sure everyone’s okay. There is a purpose there, but it’s so vague. It’s not a thing that you can hold onto and be like, look, here’s my purpose.

Ross Kenyon: You know? One sentence to explain it. Okay. Sorry, this is sort of a stupid thing to say, but the fingers in multiple pies thing — who’s out there sticking their hands in pies? Get out of my pie, man. That’s gross. I don’t want that in there.

Emily Swaddle: I kind of love it as an image. I could just imagine going into a place and being like, mmm, yummy.

Ross Kenyon: You like yummy. You like thinking about criminal actions basically, at a pie store.

Emily Swaddle: Yes. A crime that didn’t involve pie.

Ross Kenyon: It doesn’t involve pie. Dumb expression. I really hate the “I wear many hats” expression. I find that one in like three meetings involves someone introducing themselves saying that.

Emily Swaddle: But back in the day, that was the case. If you were a police officer, you had a very specific hat. I mean they still do in the UK. If you were a banker, you probably had a very specific — a different kind of hat than if you were a chimney sweeper. I’m going very Mary Poppins now, I’ve just realized.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, there’s a banker and a chimney sweeper in there. What kind of hats do nannies wear? That’s the next one.

Emily Swaddle: Yeah. You are wearing a bonnet then.

Ross Kenyon: What about admirals?

Emily Swaddle: Admirals do have hats. The three-pointed hat.

Ross Kenyon: Why is he allowed to have cannons on his roof? Why does that exist?

Emily Swaddle: That is hilarious. Just the fact that this person at some point got so high up in the military that he now is allowed to have a cannon not only just sitting on his roof that he fires on the hour.

Ross Kenyon: I feel like that would not fly at all. Bizarre. Should not have happened.

Emily Swaddle: Great movie though. One of my favorites.

Ross Kenyon: Oh yeah.

Emily Swaddle: I’m such a Julie Andrews fan.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I had a little bit of a crush on her when I was growing up.

Emily Swaddle: As Mary Poppins?

Ross Kenyon: No, I’m more of a Sound of Music kind of man. Actually, one of our family jokes — do you need to take that or is it okay?

Emily Swaddle: Nope, this isn’t my house. Somebody else’s problem.

Ross Kenyon: Cool. Do you know the trend to do revisionist novelizations where you take a classic story and rewrite it from a different perspective? Like, Jim from Huck Finn is now James and we’re gonna rewrite it from Jim’s perspective. Or we’re gonna do Wicked from the witch’s perspective. I want to do one for Sound of Music for Rolf, who’s like — he has low self-esteem and he becomes a Nazi. But I would make Rolf an understandable, relatable —

Emily Swaddle: I love that. The villain origin story of Rolf.

Ross Kenyon: But Rolf just kind of sucks. He became a Nazi and then he turned the Von Trapps in at the end. Come on. And then I want to do one for Scar. Our son really likes The Lion King. I’m like, Scar is just a —

Emily Swaddle: Oh yeah. He deserves one.

Ross Kenyon: Misunderstood.

Emily Swaddle: I think he deserves one more than Rolf, to be fair. Because from the beginning, Rolf is like, “I am 17, going on 18. You don’t know anything and I’ll tell you everything.” He’s up himself from the beginning. There is a musical — don’t tell me, it’s coming — called Unfortunate. And it is the origin story of Ursula the Sea Witch from Little Mermaid. And it is camp as hell. It’s jazzy, it’s colorful. It’s an amazing musical. Check it out.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I love stuff like that. And Ursula — I’m not surprised it’s camp. Ursula seems like a drag queen. You’d get someone from RuPaul’s Drag Race to come on.

Emily Swaddle: Well, not to get too deep on you, Ross, but there’s so much about early Disney movies where the villain is queer-coded and we all just accept that these people who are the evil ones are probably gay or trans or whatever. That was really ingrained in stories and a lot of the Disney movies that we had growing up.

Ross Kenyon: Interesting. I’m trying to think — all I can think of is Jafar.

Emily Swaddle: Jafar is a really obvious one. He’s the poster boy for queer-coded villains. Then there’s also Scar — I know he’s British and there’s a potential that he could just be kind of posh, but I think he’s also a bit queer-coded in that movie.

Ross Kenyon: He does want to marry —

Emily Swaddle: Maybe Nala is his beard. It’s just for appearances.

Ross Kenyon: Helps them build the pride. There’s a lot of YouTube videos. You can go down a whole rabbit hole about this.

Emily Swaddle: I actually said “rabbit tube” — I wanted to say rabbit hole on YouTube and now I can’t stop thinking about how “rabbit tube” should be the phrase.

Ross Kenyon: Go down a rabbit tube. Yeah. Rabbit hole is also a kind of tube. This is where the show has — you know, it’s time to start wrapping up when this is the caliber.

Emily Swaddle: Yeah, but what about a rabbit tube? This is literally when Ben unmutes himself and goes, okay guys. That’s it. You can just stop now. Thank you. I think we’ve got enough. He tends to do, “I’m sure I’ll get something out of that.”

Ross Kenyon: I’m sure I’ll get something out of that. Okay. Are you able to say anything else about what the next season of The Carbon Removal Show is gonna be about?

Emily Swaddle: I can tell you what the next few episodes are gonna be about. We’ve been doing these kind of mini-series little chunks recently. The next trio of episodes is about the buyer’s experience — the whys, the hows, the whats, and the “how do we make it better” of buying CDR.

Ross Kenyon: Whoa. Those will be studied by suppliers in great detail. Great intel. You should paywall it — it’s a thousand dollars if you want to be a supplier listening to this episode.

Emily Swaddle: No. I’m not about this money stuff.

Ross Kenyon: Oh.

Emily Swaddle: That’s not my vibe.

Ross Kenyon: Not your vibe. Capitalism. Okay, got it.

Emily Swaddle: I’m also gonna send you a poem because I listened to your Walt Whitman. I just love when we can bring in punctuation marks of art into any kind of conversation. It’s my favorite thing. And while we were talking about the nature stuff, a poem came into my head.

Ross Kenyon: What is it?

Emily Swaddle: It’s “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver.

Ross Kenyon: Actually, I was gonna read this one soon because I had — I was gonna do this one and Yeats’s “The Second Coming.” I know these are kind of greatest hits and they’re well-known poems, but they’re good.

Emily Swaddle: They’re classics for a reason.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. “Wild Geese” is among the best. There’s a reason why it’s so beloved. There are bumper stickers too — you’ll see around Seattle sometimes — that will be like, “Honk if you want to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

Emily Swaddle: It’s literally the perfect poem. Beginning to end — “You do not have to be good.” She could have stopped there and I would’ve been crying. And then the last line is, “calling to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting, over and over announcing your place in the family of things.”

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. What an amazing sentence. What if you read it for me and then I published it on the show? Because I was gonna read it myself, but I’d rather you do it.

Emily Swaddle: That would be nice.

Ross Kenyon: Can you give a little Emily exposition on it and talk about what you like about it and why? You saw how I did the Whitman one.

Emily Swaddle: Sure. Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: Send it to me now. Yeah.

Emily Swaddle: That’s one of my absolute faves.

Ross Kenyon: Oh yeah. I kind of had an intuition that you were going to say that. And I am not surprised at all. And it is wonderful. Yeah, I like doing that too. And thanks for saying that. I’m glad you’re out there listening and appreciating it. I know if someone like you likes it, because I want to pull the STEM people towards you some, as part of my intention, but I know if the end result is someone like you appreciating it, I’m like, I think I’m where my people are. I think I’m in the right zone. If Emily’s like, yes, this is feeding me in the right kind of way.

Emily Swaddle: Thank you.

Ross Kenyon: So thanks for sharing that. I really respect what you do and who you are and I think it is very important. I am sorry it isn’t maybe as remunerative as we might all hope, as you’ve alluded to, but I think it’s really valuable work that can be done even in the absence of that. And I’m just really grateful that you are exactly who you are, Emily.

Emily Swaddle: Thank you, Ross. We were talking about how I’m not very British, but I am British in the way that I don’t really like compliments coming straight at me.

Ross Kenyon: Sorry, you had a bunch of them this episode.

Emily Swaddle: I’m just kind of like, mmhmm. Thank you.

Ross Kenyon: Sorry. Do I need to obscure it in some way or negate it immediately after?

Emily Swaddle: I don’t know. Maybe. Yeah. You show it in this way. Thank you. It’s a great thing to model for our emotionally repressed little industry.

Emily Swaddle: Yeah, yeah. Well, I love listening to your show, so let’s just keep making cool content.

Ross Kenyon: Let’s keep making cool content. Thanks so much for coming on, Emily. I know it was a little bit of a who-knows-what-is-going-to-happen today.

Emily Swaddle: I think to sum up this episode, it’s like: Emily talks about how she’s silly, how she’s broke, and how the world is broke. There you go. That’s the tagline.

Ross Kenyon: That’s pretty close, I think. Yeah. Queer-coding Disney villains. There’s a lot of stuff we covered today.

Emily Swaddle: Thank you, Ross. Thank you for having me.

This is a summary of episode #392 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you enjoy your shows. You can also listen to the full episode right below this paragraph.

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Quick Takeaways

• Europe’s flagship climate policies—the ETS, CBAM, and its carbon removal frameworks—are facing unprecedented political pressure from right-wing populism, US withdrawal from climate commitments, and basic guns and butter opportunity cost dynamics.

• CORSIA, the international aviation offset scheme from ICAO, faces a critical decision point in June 2026, when the EU must decide whether to maintain the scheme or revert to imposing its own emissions trading system on international flights.

• Carbon dioxide removal sits outside NDC (Nationally Determined Contribution) targets globally, which is actually a strategic advantage for CORSIA if the right regulatory carve-out is created.

• The durability of any climate policy ultimately depends on creating sticky demand: either mandatory compliance-based purchasing or government procurement, not just subsidies and tax credits.

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European Climate Policy Under Siege

When Lev Gantly and I began our conversation, I wanted to understand how much of my own worry about geopolitics eroding climate action was grounded in reality or paranoia. The answer turned out to be more sobering than reassuring.

Lev’s assessment is clear: the political environment has shifted radically in just the last two months. The US withdrawal from climate commitments hasn’t just weakened American climate action—it’s emboldened political figures across Europe to openly challenge the EU’s “flagship pillars” of climate policy. Friedrich Merz in Germany recently suggested the emissions trading system might no longer be “fit for purpose” given the competitiveness pressures Europe now faces. Giorgia Meloni’s government in Italy is moving to circumvent aviation allowances. Hungary has been vocal. The messaging is consistent: climate spending is a luxury Europe can no longer afford.

This isn’t the bluster of marginal figures. These are serious politicians in major economies, and they’re operating from a coherent political logic. Europe is facing low growth projections, must dramatically increase military spending to defend against Russia and shore up NATO without trusting the US, and is watching right-wing populist parties surge in election after election. In this context, asking voters to accept higher energy costs or restrictions in service of a global climate goal starts to look electorally suicidal—especially when the world’s largest emitter just withdrew and is calling the whole thing a scam.

The EU’s response so far has been to propose modest flexibilities: reducing the linear reduction factor from 4.3% to 3.4% (pushing the complete phase-out of free allowances from 2039 to the early 2040s), and extending out the dates when airlines must purchase allowances at full cost. These aren’t dramatic changes, but they signal that the Commission is paying attention to the pressure and beginning to accommodate it.

What makes this moment particularly precarious is timing. Two critical public consultations on climate policy were released in early 2026 and run through May. One concerns integrating carbon removal projects under the EU Carbon Removal Certification Framework into the broader climate architecture. The second addresses how Europe will integrate up to 5% of its 2040 climate target through international credits under the Paris Agreement. And right now, Ireland—Lev’s home and where his firm is headquartered—holds the rotating presidency of the EU Council for the second half of 2026, which is precisely when the most consequential revisions to the ETS will be on the table. This is the hinge moment for European climate policy.

CORSIA: A Scheme in the Eye of a Geopolitical Storm

To understand what’s at stake, you need to understand CORSIA—the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation. It’s a UN-backed program that most people outside climate policy have never heard of, which makes it simultaneously less politically salient and less protected than the ETS itself.

CORSIA’s history is a lesson in how geopolitical power works. In 2005, the EU created the emissions trading system. In 2008, it expanded the ETS to include aviation—first for flights within the European Economic Area, then immediately expanded to all international aviation touching EU airspace. This meant airlines flying to and from Europe would have to purchase and retire EU emissions allowances, potentially expensive if they operated nowhere else in the system.

The US fought this tooth and nail. The UK (then still in the EU) was taken to court; airlines sued; the European Court of Justice backed the EU, but the backlash was severe. China canceled billions in Airbus orders. The Obama administration passed the ETS Prohibition Act, forbidding US carriers from complying. Rather than escalate further, the EU agreed to step back and let the UN’s International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) design a multilateral scheme instead. In 2016, ICAO’s General Assembly adopted CORSIA.

Here’s how CORSIA works: it entered a pilot phase from 2019 to 2022. We’re currently in CP1 (Phase 1), which covers 2023-2026 emissions. CP2 (Phase 2) begins in 2027 and is mandatory for all ICAO contracting states. About 120 countries have voluntarily opted into CP1. Eligible emissions units are due to be retired by January 2028—about eighteen months away.

But here’s the critical decision point: the EU has a rule called “stop the clock” that suspends application of its own ETS to international aviation as long as CORSIA is working. The EU is required by its own 2023 regulations to assess CORSIA’s effectiveness this June—2026—and decide whether to lift “stop the clock” and apply the ETS to international aviation, maintain CORSIA, or pursue a hybrid approach.

The June assessment hinges on two questions: Has participation reached at least 70% of ICAO contracting states? Does CORSIA align with Paris Agreement climate goals?

This timing is toxic. The assessment comes less than twelve months after the US withdrew from climate commitments and abandoned the International Maritime Organization’s deal to regulate emissions from international shipping. It comes when right-wing parties are surging. It comes when European governments are already under pressure to water down climate policy. Meanwhile, NGOs and aviation groups are lobbying hard against CORSIA, citing low credit quality, insufficient participation, uncertain penalties, and slowness in implementation.

Lev’s view is that this is an arbitrary moment to judge a scheme still in its voluntary phase. CORSIA depends heavily on Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, which was only finalized eighteen months ago. Host countries are just now developing the frameworks to implement Article 6. Supply is only now coming online. It would be madness, in his view, to kill CORSIA based on a snapshot of a system barely given a chance to mature. He also notes an equity dimension: asking airlines serving all of humanity to pay European carbon prices to serve a few wealthy travelers seems contrary to the principle of “common but differentiated responsibility” enshrined in the UNFCCC.

But CORSIA has another problem: if the EU kills it and reverts to the ETS, that’s a geopolitical grenade. It would unilaterally apply EU law to international airspace, exactly what triggered the backlash fifteen years ago. The world has changed, but the politics haven’t become simpler.

Why Carbon Removal Needs CORSIA—And Why It Doesn’t Get It Today

Carbon removal has an unusual position in the international climate architecture: it sits almost entirely outside NDC targets.

This is worth understanding deeply. Under the Paris Agreement, countries submit NDCs—Nationally Determined Contributions—that outline how they’ll meet their climate targets. These targets typically include emissions reductions in specific sectors: energy, transport, waste, agriculture, industrial processes. But carbon removal activities like biochar, enhanced weathering, and direct air capture aren’t in most countries’ NDC targets. Why? Because they’re expensive, countries haven’t planned to do them at scale, and they’re not like standard sectoral emissions reductions that governments can require industry to achieve.

This quirk is actually strategically powerful for carbon removal under Article 6 and CORSIA. Here’s why: Article 6 requires host countries to make “corresponding adjustments”—basically, when a country exports carbon credits from a project, it has to add the tons back into its national inventory so nobody double-counts between two countries’ accounting ledgers. The rule exists to prevent a country from exporting millions of tons from a coal plant closure and then also counting those same tons toward its own NDC target.

But carbon removal doesn’t fit this logic. If a country exports biochar credits from Kenya and those activities don’t appear in Kenya’s NDC, why should Kenya have to apply corresponding adjustments? There’s no double-counting risk because Kenya isn’t counting those tons in its own climate target. And an airline buying those credits is making a claim to offset its emissions, not creating an overlap with two national inventories.

Yet CORSIA and Article 6 as currently written don’t make this distinction. They require corresponding adjustments even for carbon removal activities that sit outside NDC targets. This creates an unnecessary friction: host countries worry that any export of carbon removal credits—even from outside their NDC—could somehow jeopardize their ability to meet their targets. So they’re reluctant to authorize exports.

The solution, which Lev and others have been pushing, is to create a regulatory carve-out for “novel CDR” activities that sit provably outside NDC targets. Under this rule, if biochar or enhanced weathering is confirmed to be outside a country’s NDC, it wouldn’t require authorization. Supply would unlock. Countries could issue credits freely because they’d face zero risk of double-claiming.

Think about the demand numbers: CP1 (2023-2026) requires somewhere between 120 and 220 million tons of offsets. CP2 (2027-2035) could require hundreds of millions of tons. If you could unlock carbon removal supply at $100-150 per ton via biochar and other CDR pathways in the Global South, you’d have a massive incentive to scale these activities over the next decade. And because CDR is expensive and permanent, it’s actually a good tool for CORSIA’s integrity.

The problem is that ICAO’s technical advisory board—the folks who set the rules for what counts as an eligible credit—takes direction from ICAO’s contracting states. And the folks who show up at ICAO’s General Assembly are aviation ministers and transport ministers, not climate ministers. So the people who understand Article 6’s architecture and CDR’s potential don’t get a seat at the table. The rule change hasn’t happened.

Lev notes that several CDR-focused standards have recently been approved for CORSIA or are in the window to apply for CP2 approval. But unlocking the supply problem requires political direction from ICAO member states, and that direction needs to come from climate ministers talking to their transport and aviation counterparts. It’s a coordination failure in plain sight.

Where Durable Carbon Removal Policy Actually Exists

The conversation then shifted to a harder question: forget the policy architecture. Where is carbon removal actually getting meaningful, durable policy support today?

Not in the Global South, Lev says bluntly. This is the discouraging part. Host countries are more ready than ever—they’ve just finalized Article 6 implementation frameworks, written sophisticated carbon market laws, and are actively seeking carbon finance. But demand-side commitment from the Global North just isn’t materializing at scale.

In North America, the approach has been carrots: tax credits and grants. These enable innovation and small pilots, which is valuable. But they’re not sticky. A tax credit that depends on Congress or the IRA can be reversed with a political shift. They don’t create mandatory demand.

Europe is where you see something more durable emerging.

Spain and Germany have both announced budget commitments to carbon removal. Ireland has been in active conversation with government departments about creating a regulatory framework for carbon farming, with a focus on biochar. There’s genuine interest in how biochar could help Ireland meet its effort-sharing regulation targets (the portions of the EU climate goal that don’t fall under the ETS).

And then there’s the EU CDR Buyers Club, a nascent initiative that remains somewhat opaque about who the members are and what it will look like, but represents an attempt to aggregate buyer demand.

The most interesting opportunity Lev describes is Ireland’s situation. Ireland is behind on its effort-sharing targets and could face fines between 4 and 20 billion euros if it doesn’t hit its goals. The effort-sharing regulation covers waste, agriculture, transport, and land-use changes—sectors where biochar deployment could help. If Ireland legislates that biochar counts toward meeting those targets, the government could procure biochar and spread it on farmland, and it would reduce Ireland’s compliance costs. That’s a genuine, durable incentive: if you have to choose between paying a billion-euro fine and paying for carbon removal, you pay for carbon removal.

The catch is political palatability. Farmers are under margin pressure. You can’t mandate carbon removal on farms without making it affordable or profitable for farmers. So the policy has to look like a subsidy or benefit to farming, not a climate mandate. That requires careful design. But it’s the kind of policy that could survive a change in government because it’s solving a real problem (meeting climate targets and avoiding fines), not just a symbolic one.

The Durability Test: Who Actually Buys This?

This brought us to the question that Lev says defines his approach to every new client conversation: Who’s going to buy this?

Not eventually. Not theoretically. Not if the subsidies last forever. But actually buy, sustainably, over twenty or thirty years?

The venture capital and startup world around carbon removal often sketches an answer that looks like: tech gets cheaper, voluntary corporate demand grows, governments eventually require it. But that’s a story that works if policy doesn’t shift and if corporate commitments don’t evaporate during a recession. Lev’s experience suggests those are big ifs.

Sticky demand comes from one of two sources: either mandatory compliance-based demand (you have to buy to meet a regulatory target, or you face fines) or government procurement (the government has to buy to meet a target, and it’s cheaper than alternatives).

The tax-credit approach is useful for building supply and testing technologies. But it’s the opposite of sticky. Every change in administration is a threat. Every budget cycle is a battle.

The Ireland effort-sharing approach, if executed, would be sticky. Fines are real. Meeting them with biochar is cheaper than paying them. A government department that deploys biochar has a budget line to defend, not a discretionary program. A politician explaining why they cut biochar spending can be asked: “So you want to pay a billion-euro fine instead?”

This is also why integrating carbon removal into the ETS would be powerful. If engineered CDR like direct air capture could retire ETS allowances, then demand for those removals becomes a function of the ETS carbon price. As the ETS price rises (which is the whole point of the system), demand for CDR rises too. You’ve created a durable, price-responsive demand curve.

The challenge is political: introducing CDR into the ETS requires acknowledging that the ETS alone won’t get Europe to its 2040 target, and that’s politically awkward when right-wing parties are already claiming the ETS is too much. But it might be the path to the most durable demand.

The Parallel Universe Problem

Toward the end of our conversation, Lev raised a question that haunted the entire exchange: Are we living in a parallel universe?

Scientists say we need removals at the scale of the fossil fuel industry’s emissions. We need massive deployments of carbon removal to deal with overshoot. The data is clear. But voters are worried about grocery bills and heating costs. Governments are cutting military slack and scrambling to defend themselves. Right-wing parties are surging. And the world leader is withdrawing from climate commitment entirely.

How do you bridge that gap?

Lev didn’t have an easy answer, and neither did I. But the conversation suggested something: maybe the answer isn’t to convince voters that climate is more important than the kitchen table. Maybe it’s to show that climate solutions—biochar for soil health, carbon removal for meeting compliance costs—can solve kitchen-table problems first, and climate second. Policies that make farming more profitable (biochar), reduce the risk of billion-euro fines (carbon removal), or lower energy costs (renewable energy procurement) survive political shifts because they have local constituencies that benefit.

The policies that survive are the ones people want because they solve real, local problems. The policies that evaporate are the ones that ask people to sacrifice for a distant future they’re skeptical about, especially when the world leader says the whole thing is a scam.

The narrow window for creating those policy foundations is closing. Lev thinks Europe will probably maintain some version of CORSIA in June. He hopes he’s right. But the margin is narrower than it was a year ago, and narrowing still.

Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Lev, since we started talking, the world has changed quite a bit. So where should we even start with climate policy? What should we even talk about today?

Lev Gantly: Yeah, I mean, a lot has changed. We obviously have quite a number of conflicts, and I think one of the things that I’m most disappointed by, although perhaps not surprised, is how quickly the various tensions—not least in part imposed by the current US administration—have spilled over into Europe. And how all of a sudden we have “brave” politicians in certain member states taking what I would consider, and I think others would consider, fairly aggressive measures in the name of competitiveness and geopolitical climate to take “almighty cracks at” the flagship pillars of EU climate policy. That’s one of the knock-on consequences I’m sensing in my bones in the climate world over the past couple of months.

But it does feel limiting to talk about climate generally in light of what’s going on. I’m not an alarmist, but I do feel a civic duty to keep up with what’s going on. It is obviously concerning.

How do you feel, Ross? What should we talk about? I mean, there’s some good news we can get into.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think we should try to take an accurate pulse on world climate politics. I think the canonical view right now is that even though the US has pulled out of Paris and the UNFCCC, and the IMO deal didn’t happen because of the US, various things we were all hoping for are being carried on in places like Japan, Germany, the EU broadly, and the UK.

While I think that’s true, I also think the world is distracted by geopolitics and war. And there’s right-wing populism that’s electorally ascendant. The Japanese parliament has shifted far to the right. I’m watching Germany with the AfD gaining ground. And when Europe is projecting low growth rates and spending a lot on climate or things that feel altruistically like supporting Ukraine, that’s a recipe for right-wing populism.

I would not bet on CBAM remaining strong in Europe. I’m not holding my breath on the ETS. And I hate that I’m saying this because it’s all terrible news for us. But I also think we have to understand the probabilities we’re facing. How much of this is me being paranoid? And how much of this are you very concerned with?

Lev Gantly: I think you’re right to be worried. Some nights I go to bed worried about those things. Other nights I think about the other side, and I think there’s some sense left in the universe. I try to keep myself on that side of the equilibrium as much as I can.

But let me zoom in on some of the things you mentioned. Friedrich Mertz, just a few weeks ago at a green industry conference in Europe, was one of the big voices taking a go at the emissions trading system. He was effectively saying something like: if this is no longer fit for purpose within the current competitiveness landscape we’re in, we might need to re-engineer this policy or look at something else completely.

He paired back on that a couple of days later when challenged. But there have been other moves. Georgia Meloni has a new energy policy coming out in Italy, effectively trying to circumvent emissions allowances that power producers would have to buy and retire. There’s a question about whether that unilateral move would be challengable under EU law.

There’s been noise about how to appease these utterances against the ETS. The obvious candidates are lowering the linear reduction factor and extending the dates for the phase-out of free allowances. The linear reduction factor is currently 4.3% and goes up to 4.4% in 2028, which leads to zero allowances in 2039. The suggestion from people like Peter Lisa is to reduce it from 4.3% to 3.4%, which would mean zero allowances in the early 2040s instead of 2039.

There are two big public consultations out right now that run through May. One is about integrating carbon removal certification framework projects with the climate architecture. The second is about how to integrate up to 5% of the 2040 target through international credits under the Paris Agreement. These consultations are really important for anyone who cares about keeping Europe’s climate goals on track.

Interestingly, little old Ireland holds the presidency of the European Council in the second half of this year—exactly when the greatest revisions to the ETS will be on the table. We may end up submitting documents to ministers laying out the landscape of different directions things might go around the ETS and carbon removal integration, not just in Ireland but across Europe.

Ross Kenyon: Did you put in a letter on behalf of Philip Lee or yourself?

Lev Gantly: We have to be careful from a lobbying perspective because we’re a regulated law firm registered with EU authorities as an entity that could engage in lobbying activities. We have to make disclosures. We haven’t planned on submitting directly. But the International Admissions Trading Association, of which we’re a member, is submitting responses, and we’re feeding into what they’re saying.

Ross Kenyon: Tell me about CORSIA. Is it something that’s good for carbon removal if it survives intact? And is it likely to survive intact?

Lev Gantly: I’m happy to explain CORSIA. Let me answer the question of CORSIA and what’s happening first, then we can get into its relevance for carbon removal.

Why do we have this scheme for emissions in international aviation? Back when the EU was bold, in that galaxy far, far away, the EU set up the ETS in 2005. In 2008, it updated it to include a requirement on airlines to retire emissions allowances for intra-EEA flights. They then announced they were immediately extending it to international aviation—flights coming in and out of the European Union.

The UK government was brought to court, basically for implementing the CORSIA regulation into UK law. There was a court case taken by airlines and related groups suing the UK government for applying EU law extraterritorially. The European Court of Justice ruled the EU was right, but there was a pretty negative reaction. Chinese carriers canceled over $10 billion in Airbus orders in retaliation. The Obama administration passed the ETS Prohibition Act, forbidding US carriers from complying.

At that point, the Europeans said, “Okay, we’ve won the case, but we’ll play good global citizens and let ICAO come up with a multilateral scheme that creates a level playing field for airlines operating in international airspace.”

In 2016, ICAO’s General Assembly introduced CORSIA. We had a lame-duck pilot phase from 2019 to 2022. We’re currently in CP1 (CORSIA Phase 1), which covers 2023, 2024, 2025, and 2026 emissions. We’re still in CP1, which is voluntary. But about 120 contracting states of the Chicago Convention have opted in to voluntary participation.

This year, 2026, is the last year that needs to be monitored for CP1. The retirement of eligible emissions units is January 2028—about eighteen months away. Next year, 2027, is the start of CP2, which is mandatory. All contracting states have to comply.

What’s really interesting mechanically is that you have this UN scheme called CORSIA running in the background, and the EU has a rule that stops the clock—the application of the ETS to international aviation stops while CORSIA is operating. But the EU already pushed back the assessment of CORSIA’s effectiveness twice. The point in time at which the EU must definitively and conclusively review CORSIA’s effectiveness is this June.

The Commission has to produce a report explaining how effective it thinks CORSIA is by looking at two particular points: whether participation is at least 70% of contracting states or covers at least 70% of overall volume of international flights, and whether CORSIA has been strengthened to be in line with Paris Agreement goals.

Depending on how this report turns out, the Commission’s proposal will be accompanied by an amending regulation that will do one of two things: it’ll either stop the clock and apply the ETS to international aviation, or it’ll say CORSIA is working quite well and we need to give it time to breathe, or adopt some hybrid approach.

All of this is coming this June, after we’ve had US withdrawal from climate commitments and the IMO deal. We’re seeing the spillover effects we talked about in relation to the overall sentiment on the ETS in Europe. But CORSIA is something that US airlines pushed for. It really happened because of US airlines. So it would be really interesting to see what Europe does now, because historically they didn’t want it.

There are certainly plenty of lobby groups, NGOs saying CORSIA doesn’t work: credits are low quality, not enough of them, low integrity, not enough states participating, not enough states have transposed CORSIA into domestic laws, penalties are uncertain.

My own view is that it would be crazy at this point for the EU to abandon CORSIA because it’s still effectively in the middle of a voluntary phase. It relies on Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, which was only concluded a year and a half ago in Baku. It’s just now, in the last twelve months, that host countries are getting to grips with how Article 6 is supposed to work. Supply of credits is only now coming online. It’s just a terrible time for the EU to make a decision around this.

I also think telling airlines that they have to pay European carbon prices is not particularly equitable. It ignores the principle of common differentiated responsibility enshrined in the UNFCCC.

Ross Kenyon: I hope so. Although I am spooked by seeing things like the National Rally predicted to maybe win a major French election. I’m concerned because I don’t want to avoid standing up for climate, but there are ways of doing it that antagonize a stressed Europe that has to commit much more GDP to defending itself and no longer trusts the US with NATO. They also have to spend on climate, and growth rates are pretty small.

Climate politics are a bit of a loser electorally unless they’re framed in the right ways. CORSIA might catch the national pension as something to rail against, rather than the ETS, which is more well-known.

Lev Gantly: One quick point on competency: European airlines like Air Lingus, Air France, KLM will react. This year, 2026, is the first year there are no free allowances for the aviation sector. Previously, there was free allocation until last year, when they phased out 50%. So there’s auctioning for 50% for airlines. By April 2027, European airlines will have to have purchased and retired emissions allowances for their full exposure for the first time. That’s going to be expensive and weigh heavily on their balance sheet.

If you then turn around and say they have to pay the same price for international emissions, the reaction will be predictable from CEOs and CFOs.

Ross Kenyon: I’m not worried about them. I’m worried about consumers.

Lev Gantly: But that’s it—it’s a pass-through. All of a sudden, you’re not going to be able to visit cousins in Austria if you’re living in France. It’s going to be a lot more expensive over the next five or six years.

Ross Kenyon: Let me ask about CDR’s potential to interact with CORSIA.

Lev Gantly: The challenge with unlocking supply of credits into CORSIA is linked with challenges in implementing Article 6 at the host country level. In order to determine if you as a country can authorize the export of carbon for use under CORSIA, you have to determine that your NDC—your Nationally Determined Contribution submitted to the UN—is sufficiently ambitious. You have to have headroom to export tons from a mitigation activity and a project class for which you’ve made expressly clear you’re seeking external finance.

What’s interesting about CDR is that CDR sits outside NDC targets. As far as I’m aware, I haven’t seen any NDC with references to CDR within the NDC targets. There are long-term goals under the Paris Agreement that stretch 10, 15, 20 years, and there are some references to carbon capture and sequestration, but those aren’t the same as NDC targets.

For all intents and purposes, biochar and enhanced weathering, direct air capture—they are not currently within Global South country targets. Because they’re outside those targets, it should be a no-brainer that countries could authorize and export those tons freely because they don’t jeopardize the achievement of an NDC target.

The problem with CORSIA at the moment is that it married Article 6 too much—maybe 70 or 80%, not 100%. The Article 6 rules basically say you as the host country, once you’ve authorized the mitigation activity, have to correspondingly adjust your emissions balance or your national inventory accounting. You arithmetically add the tons to your emissions balance, irrespective of whether the authorized activities are inside or outside your NDC.

The reason that rule exists is to prevent double counting between two national greenhouse gas inventories. But CORSIA—which operates over international airspace—is not a national greenhouse gas inventory. CORSIA is solving for a different problem: preventing double claiming between an airline and a country, which is not the same as counting between two national inventories.

If an airline is buying biochar credits from Kenya, and biochar sits outside Kenya’s NDC, why should Kenya have to authorize this and apply corresponding adjustments? It’s not in the NDC target, so there’s no double-counting risk between two greenhouse gas inventories. There’s just a claim by an airline for emissions in international airspace.

This has come up increasingly in conversations because there’s fear that pressure at host country level around jeopardizing NDCs through over-export could constrain supply going into CORSIA. Think about the demand numbers: for CP1, overall demand is somewhere between 120 and 220 million tons. CP2 runs from 2027 through 2035 and could demand hundreds of millions of tons.

Could we scale carbon removal in the Global South if we created a demand pool through CORSIA? If there was a rule change from ICAO saying that for a narrow category of activity types that sit outside NDC targets—what we call “novel CDR”—we don’t need authorizations because there’s no fear of double claiming?

You could unlock significant demand and help these activities scale over the next decade. We’ve been trying to push that narrative with relevant people in the right rooms, and what we’ve been told is that it’s a great point that needs to be pushed at ICAO’s General Assembly by member states.

The problem is that you have aviation ministers and transport ministers showing up to ICAO, not climate ministers. So these ministries need to start talking to each other if we want to unlock the supply.

Even if we cut the cord and say, “Don’t need authorizations for novel CDR pathways,” you’re still going to get into a pricing debate. Right now, we’re talking maybe $100 to $150 for biochar in Kenya versus $200-300 for a clean cooking ton. But think about it this way: if Article 6 works, the availability of low-hanging fruit mitigation should disappear because NDCs are supposed to ratchet up in ambition. You keep all the low-hanging fruit for yourself and export higher-hanging, more ambitious fruit that you can’t afford to pay for yourself.

If the whole thing starts to work as intended, we could create quite a lot of interesting demand. Isometric was recently approved for CORSIA, and I think some of the other CDR-focused standards have just recently or are about to submit applications for approval. I know there’s a window for application for some CDR standards right now that might be closing this week.

Ross Kenyon: It’s very useful to understand how all these terms interact and the potential overlaps and gaps. Thanks for clarifying that. Are there places where you are seeing good, durable policy support for carbon removal right now?

Lev Gantly: Not in the Global South, I would say. I’m just not seeing it. It doesn’t mean it’s not happening. One interesting thing happening is that we’re starting to see interesting things even in places like Ireland.

But one positive thing—and it’s unfortunate because Article 6 negotiations concluded eighteen months ago—is that a lot of host countries are really ramping up their readiness for policy support, not just for CDR but for other types of mitigation activities and renewable energy and clean cooking. They’re putting in place pretty sophisticated climate laws and carbon market frameworks across Sub-Saharan Africa and central Asia. We work with local lawyers to understand these laws as we advise our clients. We’re pleasantly surprised by the detail and work that goes into creating those frameworks. It’s unfortunate we don’t see specific references to CDR activities yet, but I suspect it’s a matter of time.

In terms of the CDR landscape in Europe, things seem to be happening. Reports are coming out of Spain. Germany has announced a budget to commit to CDR activities. In Ireland, we’ve had good conversations with several government departments around potentially creating a framework here for carbon farming, with a real focus on biochar. There’s the EU CDR Buyers Club that’s in formation.

Ross Kenyon: What’s your take on what makes a good CDR policy right now?

Lev Gantly: I’m looking for policies that are likely to survive changes in polity, depending on which political party is in office. Different countries that previously supported carbon removal—I’m wondering if that’s changing. Canada has historically been supportive, and Mark Carney seems personally supportive. But Canada is facing very high cost of living, spending much more on military, and trying to cut trade deals. Their economy is going through structural changes. To what degree will climate policy remain a priority in Canadian politics?

Ross Kenyon: My high-level take on carbon removal policy in places like Canada and the US over the last couple of years is that there have been quite a few carrots in terms of tax incentives and grants. That’s all great because it allows people to innovate and test small-scale pilot projects. But in terms of durability and stickiness, that requires people to buy.

My question is always when I get new clients doing interesting things: this is brilliant, you’re great, I love it, but who’s going to buy this? Who’s going to buy the tons? This is really expensive. I want you to succeed, but who’s buying this year? Who’s buying in five years? Who’s buying twenty years from now?

This is about creating mandatory compliance-based demand on either polluters or government departments. One of the things we’re thinking about for Ireland, for example, is the effort sharing regulation and the new LULUCF regulation. Ireland’s not the only member state; Spain, France, Germany and many others are behind. They’ll have to pay billions in fines if they don’t hit their targets—in Ireland, the range is four to twenty billion euros.

There are questions about whether those fines just move from one pocket to another. But how do we actually help Ireland meet its climate targets? The effort sharing regulation covers waste, agriculture, transport—things not in the ETS. There are a lot of farms in Ireland with grazing, dairy, beef production.

If we wrote a policy that required farmers to buy biochar and spread it across their land, that enhances soil fertility and sequestration, the government could pay for that. That would act as a subsidy to farmers. It needs to be thought through more carefully in government, and we might end up supporting government in mapping this out.

But we have to use levers that don’t agitate folks that are already struggling. Farmer margins are tight. We’re asking people to decarbonize, but people are just trying to make ends meet. It has to be palatable. Who’s going to buy? Is Ireland going to legislate for corporates that are polluting to buy these tons? Or will the Irish department of agriculture or climate change buy these tons and count them in Ireland’s national ledger, which sits within the EU target? Otherwise, we’re going to have to pay fines. Either do good stuff and help farmers decarbonize, or pay fines.

The integration into the ETS is the other piece. We talked earlier about reducing the linear reduction factor and pushing out the date for availability of free allocation. There’s obviously talk of introducing DACs and BECs into the ETS because there’s obsession with permanence. How about buying biochar?

Ross Kenyon: ETS delay might be a really smart example of surviving the political moment. It’s no longer an urgent political issue because the biting point is farther away. The next election cycle deals with it. That might give breathing room, even though it’s painful, like losing years and the curve gets steeper. I like the suggestion for farm inputs.

I was also trying to think: did you follow the attempts to limit liability for glyphosate with regard to Bayer and Trump? Are you too busy being a lawyer?

Lev Gantly: I do know a lot of my nighttime is consumed by following what’s happening in the US, but there’s a cap on that, Ross.

Ross Kenyon: Well, there’s a lot of tension between MAGA and MAHA parts of the Republican party right now—”Make America Healthy Again,” the Robert F. Kennedy crew. They’re obviously no great fan of pesticides and would like things to be more regenerative and less toxic. There’s room for biochar in there for sure. That’s a really cool crossover point that could be bipartisan.

Bayer’s trying to limit their liability for the never-ending glyphosate lawsuits. The glyphosate side is winning, and the MAHA side feels betrayed. It was a smart pick to make Kennedy health secretary for the election, but as it goes on, you realize that commitment wasn’t equally shared.

I’m wondering if the politics are different in Ireland such that a more regenerative farming model might not face the same uphill battle. Everyone in America likes Kerrygold butter. I’d love to see Kerrygold that said “made with biochar” on the box.

But agribusiness is very powerful. Synthetic fertilizers have diminishing returns and can’t be applied forever without soil harm. Consumers want to switch. But this all cuts against cost of living too. People care less about a little biochar logo when feeding your family is hard and a hundred dollars of groceries used to be four bags several years ago.

Maybe none of this matters as long as bread and butter issues at the kitchen table are top of mind.

Lev Gantly: They are. Thanks for that, Ross. When you say bread and butter issues being top of mind, are we living in a parallel universe?

You and I—I know you do, I know I do—spend most of our time thinking about what scientists say. Scientists say we need removals, we need a lot of removals, removals at the scale of the fossil fuel industry’s emissions. That’s the scale we need to get to.

How do we bridge the gap between where most folks feel what’s important and what stresses us out in the climate and CDR community? It’s a pretty colossal gap.

I’m an optimist, though. I believe that we need enough like-minded, right-minded politicians. If you had your pick, and I don’t know what you think of Governor Newsom in terms of 2028, but let’s say he did come in—he’s responsible for some fairly interesting policies in California, a backer of cap-and-trade there. What would you like to see on a global stage, domestically, and at the federal level? The US is such a big tone-setter for what happens to the rest of the world.

Ross Kenyon: I think the format of this question is fascinating because I haven’t even thought that far ahead. The news cycle has been so much quicker. People are thinking toward the midterms later this year.

I keep seeing people talking about a Newsom candidacy, but he’s also highly polarizing. Much of the country hates his guts. People blame him for San Francisco. He said supportive things about trans athletes that a lot of the country finds important, and he’s taken courageous stands.

We’ve seen people do well, like the Hochul win in New York. Democrats talk left in primaries but govern from the center and run from the center in generals because most of the country doesn’t like socialism rhetoric.

Even if Newsom made it, I’m curious how much he could do. Political capital brought into the White House—are you able to quickly rejoin Paris and the UNFCCC and restart these things? Or are there legal or Supreme Court decisions that make it really hard to dive back in?

It’s also possible this causes a backlash in the opposite direction. Even if Democrats took the presidency and had a good midterm showing, they might control the house and maybe the Senate, but it’s probably even. And Presidents with a house majority usually get hit pretty hard in midterms.

I don’t think far ahead. Even if you had a committed president, can they easily rejoin climate multilateralism?

Lev Gantly: I’ll caveat this by saying I’m not a US lawyer or constitutional lawyer, so these are technical points. I think there are qualified professors from Stanford and other places that have written about this. There’s some suggestion that because he executive ordered his way out of the UNFCCC, it doesn’t need congressional approval to come back in. The next president can just executive order back in. Apparently the same applies with Paris.

But what does it mean to be party to the Paris Agreement? Why does it matter if the US is party to the UNFCCC or Paris Agreement? I think the most important thing is that the US is the first or second largest polluter globally in terms of emissions. The Paris Agreement brings together over 190 countries and all their ledgers. Everybody starts bean-counting to figure out global emissions and global targets and how much we need to enhance targets every five years to hit the Paris temperature goals.

But right now there’s a big gaping goal in the Paris Agreement target of 1.5 degrees. How could you try to meet that target when the biggest emitter is no longer counting the beans?

Knowing the US plan from a carbon markets and CDR perspective would be slightly more granular, but just on a macro level, it’s really important to have everyone’s counts. We can’t work out where we are without the counts.

Ross Kenyon: Can I jump in on this one point specifically? This spooks me very badly. The US not being part of the game theory: we’re probably not going to achieve climate targets without US participation. Voters are going to be smart enough to be like, if the US isn’t doing this and they’re the world leader and biggest polluter, we’re probably not going to hit our targets. Why are we spending tax dollars on something that won’t ultimately stop this?

When the world was broadly committed, holdout countries could be wagged at. But momentum switches without the US. The politics become: why are we still doing this if the US isn’t? That part really scares me. And I feel like people don’t talk about how much US leadership matters because it’s easy to hate on the US for being a world leader. But having the world leader say this is not a thing, it’s a scam, and we’re not doing it anymore—that’s extremely disruptive everywhere.

Lev Gantly: Yeah, Ross. What breaks my heart is all the work we’re doing in Global South jurisdictions on all manner of projects—the purpose of which is to serve basic human needs: clean cooking, access to clean water.

A lot of these countries are just getting to grips with the Paris rule book for carbon markets, which closed eighteen months ago. It’s really only in the last eighteen months that countries have started writing elegant regulation frameworks saying, “We’re here, we’re ready for carbon finance, we’re ready for UNFCCC. Come sort out our clean cooking problem because 1.2 billion people still cook on open fires.”

These activities are expensive to implement at scale. Finance is needed. A lot form conditional parts of NDCs. So they’re exportable from a carbon finance perspective.

What I find quite upsetting is that we’re at a point where host countries are ready to engage with global carbon markets through Article 6 or through CBAM. But where’s the buying power? Where’s the buying?

Likewise with CORSIA, you’ve got China, Japan oddly building up ends through Joint Implementation mechanisms, bilateral deals. We were hoping for big buying countries to come in and buy these tons and have them transfer, helping buying countries meet their targets.

With the US dropping, not participating in Article 6, not being in Paris, it sends the message you talked about, and the influence of that on other Global North players. Maybe they don’t bother helping Global South folks. Maybe they can’t be bothered doing their own thing.

Or maybe it’ll have the counter effect. Maybe they’ll say, the US is out, maybe we won’t spend $100, $200, $300 per ton on marginal cost of abatement in a particular sector. Maybe it’s actually better for us to buy from the Global South at 5%.

But 5% in Europe isn’t a lot. Right? Maybe they’ll change it again. I don’t know. But the US tends to set the tone for overall sentiment on climate. And I do dream about 2028, Ross. I’m not in the US, but I’m keeping an eye on sentiment around the midterms. I do try and look forward to figure out what happens after he’s gone—assuming he’s gone.

Ross Kenyon: Lev, thank you for joining me for the impossible task of one, explaining CORSIA and its history. Super hard. Speculating on possible roads for carbon removal to enter CORSIA. And then also just grimly looking into the state of world politics as pertains to climate and so much else. Thank you for going on this wild, multifaceted ride with me.

Lev Gantly: It’s been fun. Thanks for having me.

This is a summary of a solo episode of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you enjoy your shows. You can also listen to the full episode right below this paragraph.

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Quick Takeaways

• The foundational assumption of carbon removal has been the “pre-compliance story”: the voluntary market is a bridge to compliance-driven demand that will arrive soon.

• That story depends on Japan, Canada, the EU, and the UK advancing climate policy while the US steps back.

• Every one of those countries is now facing significant political headwinds against climate action.

• Right-wing populism is surging globally, and it competes directly with climate policy in every case.

• Japan’s new leadership is focused on energy security and defense, both of which crowd out decarbonization.

• Canada’s Mark Carney has a carbon markets background, but faces cost-of-living crises, Arctic and conventional security threats, and Albertan secessionism.

• The EU is projecting low growth, facing rising energy prices, and watching right-wing parties gain ground across the continent.

• The UK’s Reform party is growing rapidly at the expense of the Tories, mirroring patterns seen everywhere.

• Climate action requires collective sacrifice, and that story becomes nearly impossible to sell if major economies opt out.

• If the US doesn’t participate, European leaders face an impossible pitch: raise taxes and energy prices for a goal that can’t be met without global coordination.

• Carbon removal companies should plan for both continuity (regression to the mean) and discontinuity (a fundamentally reshuffled world order).

• This isn’t doom—it’s a call to build strategies that survive either future.

The Pre-Compliance Story

There is a story that carbon removal has been telling itself for years. You’ve heard it. You may have said it. You may believe it.

It goes like this: the voluntary carbon market and the big corporate offtake agreements we’re seeing are necessary but not sufficient. They’re buying time. What we’re really waiting for is compliance — regulation that automates demand, that obligates it, that makes carbon removal not a nice-to-have but a legal requirement. We’re in a pre-compliance moment, and the biting point is coming.

This story has been enormously useful. It gives startups a reason to keep building despite thin order books. It gives investors a thesis for patient capital. It gives employees in the space a reason to stay through the lean years.

But it depends on a specific geopolitical configuration that may no longer exist.

The Countries We’re Counting On

After the US pulled out of the Paris Agreement, the UNFCCC, and torpedoed the IMO shipping deal, the pre-compliance story didn’t die. It just moved. The new version says: fine, the US is out, but China is leading the clean energy revolution, and Japan, Canada, and the EU will carry climate policy forward. No need to panic.

Each of those pillars is wobbling.

Japan elected Sanae Takaichi of the Liberal Democratic Party, who is focused on energy security and defense — priorities that compete with decarbonization. They don’t have to, but from the right, they are rarely framed as complementary.

Canada nearly elected Pierre Poilievre by double digits before Trump’s “51st state” rhetoric shifted the race. Mark Carney won, and he has deep carbon market credentials. But he’s now navigating cost-of-living crises, a need to rapidly militarize, Albertan separatism, and Arctic security questions that will define Canadian politics for decades. Climate policy will survive in Canada, but it faces pressures that make it far less reliable as a global anchor than we’d hoped.

The EU is projected at around 1% growth, energy prices are surging, and right-wing populism is advancing in nearly every member state. The National Rally is projected to do well in France. The AfD is growing in Germany. Reform is surging in the UK. Even center-right leaders like Friedrich Merz face pressure from their right flanks that makes ambitious climate policy harder to advance.

The Collective Action Problem

Climate action has always been a collective action problem, but the current moment makes the logic especially brutal.

Meaningful climate policy requires sacrifice—higher taxes, higher energy prices, or at minimum the opportunity cost of investing in decarbonization rather than more immediate concerns. Voters will accept that sacrifice under specific conditions: when they feel safe, when their cost of living is manageable, and when they believe that other major economies are making the same sacrifice.

Remove any of those conditions and the politics collapse.

Right now, all three are under strain simultaneously. Voters across the developed world feel less safe (security competition, Arctic tensions, the Iran conflict). Cost of living is rising (energy prices, inflation, low growth). And the world’s largest economy has conspicuously opted out of the collective sacrifice.

That leaves European and Canadian leaders in an impossible position. Telling your population that their net worth went down, inflation went up, and energy prices are higher—but they need to keep sacrificing for climate goals that can’t be met without global coordination—is not a winning electoral strategy. It requires a kind of patient, selfless political maturity that no electorate has demonstrated at scale.

The Maslow Problem

There’s a Maslow’s hierarchy at work here that’s hard to argue with. If you’re struggling to buy groceries, or worried about whether your country is safe from its neighbors, or watching your purchasing power erode—you are not going to prioritize threats that are abstract, probabilistic, and decades away.

Climate change is the most important long-term threat facing humanity. But it is precisely the kind of threat that recedes when more immediate ones advance. And right now, immediate threats are advancing everywhere.

The smart play is to frame climate policy in ways that address those immediate concerns simultaneously—energy independence, job creation, cost savings. And in fact, much of the clean energy transition does exactly that. But there is always going to be some residual cost, some amount of sacrifice and disruption that can’t be reframed away. And it’s that margin where the politics are being lost.

Continuity or Discontinuity

When advising companies, there’s a question that increasingly needs to be asked up front: do you want advice based on continuity or discontinuity?

The continuity scenario says this is a temporary disruption. The US will eventually return to something like the liberal democratic order. The populist wave will crest and recede. Climate multilateralism will resume. The pre-compliance story will arrive, just delayed.

The discontinuity scenario says the world order is being fundamentally reshuffled. The rules that governed international cooperation for the past 80 years are changing. Climate compliance may not arrive in any recognizable form for a very long time.

If you’re building a carbon removal company, you can probably design a good strategy for either scenario in isolation. The challenge is that you need a strategy that works across both—or at least one that doesn’t leave you bankrupt if the world you planned for doesn’t materialize.

That’s the real takeaway here. Not doom. Not despair. But clarity. Know what the world is doing. Have a plan for the world you want and a plan for the one you might get. And don’t mistake optimism for strategy.

Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Hey, out there. Thank you so much for listening. This is Ross Kenyon. I’m the host of the Reversing Climate Change podcast, which is the show you’re listening to right at this very moment. Before the show starts, if I could ask you please for a very small favor, what I hope is a very small favor, if you could please open up your podcast app, whether it’s Apple Podcast or Spotify, or whatever you use, give the show a full rating on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

That’s five stars. If your podcast app has reviews, if you could leave a quick review on Apple Podcasts, whatever else you use that does reviews. It’s really helpful. It helps more people find the show. And if you like this show, presumably you’d like it if more people listen to it. If I could ask you to please do that, it would be so appreciated. You can also become a paid subscriber on Substack or on Spotify for $5 a month. You can get ad free listening except for the ads that are you, myself, and bonus content for subscribers only. I haven’t fully set it up on Substack or on the other platforms, but I really should stay tuned on that.

I’m gonna try and get that set up. I already recorded a version of this show and I try to listen to my gut actually as much as I can, and that day I just felt like I wasn’t quite getting it and I wanted to make sure that I could give you the show that I think this topic deserves.

And I think it’s a hard topic to do well because there’s a tendency to overdo it and include way too much information. And I also don’t wanna include too little information in seeming cavalier. Today I’m gonna be making a bearish case for carbon removal. What might lead to carbon removal coming apart at the seams in the world to come? And just so I can say it as clearly as possible, I do not like playing this role. If you know me, I love to help people. I love relating to people. I love trying to make sure that everything gets to where it needs to be.

I’m not trying to steal all the glory for myself. If I were to spend a lot of time gatekeeping, I’m really trying to move this forward because I think climate change is a team sport as the cliche goes. And one thing about not being tied to a specific company in a full-time capacity is I’m able to really focus on an ecosystem building kind of capacity.

If you’re at a company and you know that there’s a party line that you must tow, because there often is, maybe I can give voice to some of those feelings and intuitions and intellectual observances that maybe you’ve had but haven’t felt super safe voicing whether to others or even to yourself, because many of the things that I’m going to talk about today are threatening to the self and your life plans and your ability to pay your mortgage and to have a career that is not as turbulent as maybe your spouse might like it to be.

One of the foundational assumptions of carbon removal to the point that it’s become a bit of a cliche is what I call the pre-compliance story. Whether you call it this or you call it something else, or maybe you haven’t even named it, you’ve certainly heard it, which is that the voluntary carbon market purchases and the big corporate offtake you see are necessary but not sufficient, that we are basically waiting for compliance to automate demand, to obligate demand, and we’re all waiting for the biting point to arrive.

We are waiting for compliance to make sure that climate policy is taken seriously enough that we are able to hit the climate targets we need to not send the world into a desperate overshoot scenario.

And the most recent version of this that you may have heard, maybe you’ve said it yourself and maybe you believe it, and I really do hope that you are correct and that we are still on the trajectory to be in a pre-compliance moment.

Okay. The United States has pulled out of the UNFCCC, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, has torpedoed, for lack of a better word, the International Maritime Organization’s deal to regulate international shipping. It’s pulled out of the Paris Agreement.

But that’s not as big of a deal as it maybe looks because China is still leading the clean energy revolution and moreover, the policy environment in Japan, Canada, the EU, specific member states within European Union are going to carry the day with climate policy.

And so, no need to panic. There’s still going to be enough support here to make sure that carbon removal can scale in the years ahead. I do not think this story is true. I want it to be desperately, I do not like playing this role, but I’ve been studying this, watching the politics and the geopolitics and the international relations and the trends in various electorates, especially since the start of 2025.

And I keep waiting for the high watermark to be visible to me, and I can’t say that I’ve seen it yet. And that was even before the conflict with Iran. And I had recorded essentially an entire podcast on this topic that I decided to scrap. And then this had come along. But I actually think Iran doesn’t pose that big of a challenge to the core ideas I’m going to discuss.

What concerns me about the pre-compliance story is that I think in a post-Trump two world, the three countries or network of countries that I mentioned earlier, all have had substantial electoral changes since that pre-compliance story was written.

Japan elected Sanae Takaichi of the Liberal Democratic Party. Her party picked up a whole bunch of seats in the National Diet of Japan, their legislative body. Admittedly, I know the least about her politics and how Japan operates, but she seems to be quite focused on energy security for Japan. And is focused on defense — those things compete with decarbonization. They don’t have to, but they often do. And coming from the right, they are likely not seen as complementary. I think, or maybe not as much as we might like.

Canada is a place where Poilievre of the Conservative Party was projected to win over Carney by double digit figures and only began to lose because of Trump’s 51st State talk. The 51st State talk really caused problems for Maple MAGA. This 51st State talk really makes me think because it’s one of those things where it’s an own goal. In one sense, it probably would’ve been much better for Trump to have a MAGA or MAGA-esque candidate as the Prime Minister.

And surely he had advisors saying, knock off all the 51st state talk and all this Greenland stuff because it’s freaking out the Canadian electorate. You’re gonna put someone in power in Canada that you really don’t want.

If that advice was given, it doesn’t seem to have been heeded. Which actually concerns me because it makes it seem like that 51st state talk was genuine. There wasn’t some blustery near-term political advantage to it. In fact, it seemed to have caused political problems more than political solutions.

It is not like Canada as the 51st State was a core issue for MAGA that Trump hitting on was rallying the base in some way. It just felt like, where is this coming from? Which struck me as more than likely to be a sincere desire, which is scary. Most of the Canadians I know, they took that 51st State talk very seriously.

It seems that Mark Carney has as well, even though Mark Carney famously has a long background in carbon markets, he’s also in a position now of trying to cut trade deals. Canada has very high cost of living and has to focus on militarizing in a way that is genuinely new for it. And all of those things compete with things like climate action.

He also has to contend with Albertan secessionists who potentially want to join the US or maybe want to just be independent of Canada and the US, but certainly will have more affinity with Trump than with the Trudeau-Carney sort of orbit.

I think Canada will continue to be a climate leader, but I’m also very aware of the fact that Canada is going to face many more challenges in the future. One of the big geopolitical questions I have for the future is, does it help a country to be in the Arctic? Or does it make it more vulnerable? One of the stories around why climate change may not be so bad in the future deals with the Arctic and says that this will make shipping routes much faster around the world. It will open up access to many more types of natural resources, and this will be a really good thing.

Yeah, but I think it’s very likely that we will see intense security competition and potentially even war in the Arctic during our lifetimes. I guess it depends on how old you are right now at the time of listening for your lifetime, but I think that’s a very real possibility.

And while Canada will certainly benefit in many ways, it also exposes it to a great deal of risk. Its internal politics also are not uniform and are not uniformly oriented towards climate policy as we saw from how the last election went. And I do not feel confident that Canada has a permanently durable climate politics in it. The electoral competition may show that Canada has more pressing and urgent problems than climate.

They need to make sure that they have security. They need to make sure that the Arctic is protected. There are things that they need to be looking out for, and obviously many of those things do overlap with climate. But people are not choosing climate policy in a vacuum. Politicians whose jobs are always up for being called back and replaced are trying to figure out how to balance climate politics versus more kitchen table issues like cost of living and “are we safe from our neighbors” kinds of questions.

And those other questions in a sort of basic Maslow’s hierarchy of needs way are going to ring much more powerfully. If you’re having a hard time buying enough groceries for your family or feeling like you can’t get ahead in this economy, it’s really hard to think about how bad the world is going to be in several decades if we can’t make sure we’re hitting our climate targets and sacrificing right now. There are ways of making that pain less — ways of doing more with less that actually make our lives better.

But in many cases, addressing climate change will require higher taxes or just the opportunity cost of investing in climate technology rather than more quotidian issues that voters care about. I don’t feel like we can look to Canada as always going to be a place of climate policy refuge that we had maybe hoped it would be. And I hope that is the case for the future. I think Canada has durable institutions, but it also faces political pressures that essentially the entire world is experiencing right now.

And that brings me to Europe and the European Union in particular. I think it’s safe to say that within carbon removal, the EU has the most hope placed upon it. Everyone is looking towards Europe with the hope that various things like the carbon border adjustment mechanism, CBAM, or the EU ETS, the emissions trading system, or direct procurement by various states like Germany are going to have for carbon removal. There’s talk of the buyer’s club and there’s various other acronyms of European policy that depending upon your preferred type of carbon removal offer various types of supports.

I have a hard time imagining a near future where Europe will be able to advance significant climate policy. Even in the last couple weeks we’ve seen the EU ETS be criticized by mayors in Germany and others. But one thing I’m looking towards closely, and granted I’m an American and I’m not living in these places and swimming in the same political culture as Europeans are. But I still try to track pretty closely what’s happening in Europe for various reasons.

And quite a lot of what I am seeing is the growth of right-wing populism in the same way that we’re seeing essentially everywhere. The National Rally in France is projected to have a very good year. Friedrich Merz in Germany — he’s a Christian Democrat and right of center.

But I think a lot of older school center-right politicians face some pretty significant electoral challenges, especially with the growth of AfD, the Alternative for Germany. Right-wing populists just have a more aggressive story that — if you’re an American, think about how different MAGA feels from Ronald Reagan, or even Bush Senior and Bush Junior, or even some of how Bill Clinton spoke because Bill Clinton, of course, as a quote unquote “new Democrat,” the idea was very much that we’re gonna balance the budget and we’re not going to spend and focus on giving welfare, but we actually need to be fiscally conservative in a way that you wouldn’t associate with someone like LBJ or FDR.

It has a stately, tweedy, older school vibe to it. I think that’s even more pronounced if you look to the UK and you think about how the Tories are doing relative to Reform. I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, that when I was a kid, United Kingdom Independence Party, UKIP, when I was younger I remember hearing about Nigel Farage. And then now to see 20 years later, you’re seeing how Reform, the party that Nigel Farage is a part of now, the growth of them has been absolutely staggering.

And I think the Tories are really struggling to figure out what their story is. Because there’s always a funny kind of strange bedfellows vibe with right-wing politics where there often are working class traditional values kinds of voters and people, but then certain types of conservative thought is extremely intellectual. Think of someone like William F. Buckley as sort of an archetypal tweedy conservative type. The average working class person, I don’t think they’re looking to William F. Buckley and thinking like, this is the guy I wanna listen to. But they do wanna listen to someone like Trump who sort of has this populistic, non-philosophical, not talking about Aristotle or looking back in time to English institutions and how important Magna Carta is. It’s more about kitchen table issues and the culture war and things like that, that I think the more stately types of conservatives are very poorly suited to win in a debate with. And you’re seeing this happen where statelier, older school conservatives don’t have as good of a story to compete with more radical right-wing candidates. So you are seeing around the world right now, much more radical right-wing governments ascend.

It would divert from the show to go into why this is happening and why now, and there are still a number of theories for how this is working. A fair amount of the causality belongs to how the internet operates and is monetized in the political economy of the internet. I’ll leave that to someone else who has studied this more closely. All we need to know, though, is that right-wing populism is a very, very dangerous trend for climate action.

And when people point to places like the EU as a bastion of climate policy that will survive even though the US has pulled out of essentially all of the major climate policy frameworks internationally, even if there are still some very good things happening inside of the US that have lingered on even within Trump two.

I think the thing to watch out for here is that Europe is projecting low growth rates. In the show that I recorded previously, I had heard that Europe was poised for an average of 1% growth rates over 2026, which is pretty low, and that was before Iran and the cost of oil shot above a hundred dollars a barrel.

That can only put more pressure on the European system. It changes the relationship of various European states to Russia and those that are friendlier with Russia want to maintain their access to Russian gas. And even the US has relaxed restrictions on Russian energy. To make sure that the war remains less controversial, because obviously one of the main moves that Iran is doing and will continue to do is trying to make this experience as embarrassing for the US and as costly as possible by raising energy prices worldwide.

It’s one of those kitchen table issues that really focuses the mind of politicians where they know that their voters are going to care a lot about their energy prices and whether they have a job and whether they get a raise, because whatever money that they were gonna get has now gone into paying higher energy prices, which are already very high in Europe. It’s gone.

Those kinds of issues can be very challenging for governments. And if you want an example, you don’t even have to look that far. And you can think about the Gilets Jaunes of France who were protesting over a tax on gasoline. And you don’t really want to encourage politics like that if you are aiming for stability and for climate action. And when there is just less breathing room with low economic growth, with higher energy prices and with right-wing populists gaining in so many countries, I don’t think there’s going to be as much room for radical climate politics.

Germany has carbon removal procurement in its sights — do you think that’s likely to survive if the AfD continues to grow in electoral support? My guess is probably not.

People are looking towards the UK ETS — is that likely to survive the growing ascendancy of Reform? My guess is probably not.

And one additional reason why this concerns me so much is that climate action basically only works if we all or most of us band together and say, we’re all going to restrict ourselves in the same kind of capacity. We are going to invest the money in decarbonization, invest in carbon removal, because that is how the world order is structured. And if we don’t do this, we will be an outsider to what are seen as the most legitimate countries on earth, the most powerful, the most trustworthy, who are all making those sacrifices and looking askance at us when we fail to meet our obligations and are trying to do the thing that is for our collective wellbeing.

But the US is world leader and it’s an open question to what degree the US wants to remain the world leader that has been since the end of World War II versus change its status to something more like a regional hemispheric hegemon. Open question.

But if that were to play out, it’s difficult for me to imagine European leaders arguing to their populations that even though the US is not pursuing climate action, the EU should still raise their own taxes, raise their own energy prices to enact meaningful climate action, because climate action essentially only works if all or most of these economies are engaged in the transition.

If major powers just sit it out, those other countries are making sacrifices that actually don’t get us to the goal. Maybe it buys us a little time, but I think that’s a really hard story to sell to voters. Going to your population and saying, your net worth went down this year. Inflation went up, your earnings went down. Energy prices are up, but we need to sacrifice, even though it’s not going to stop climate change, we need to do it because it’s just the right thing to do. I think that is an electorally losing strategy. I’m really sorry to say. I wish we were able to have a sort of symbolic, beautiful, sacrificing kind of moment where that could be successful.

I would think it would take a lot of patience and maturity and character to do that, but I don’t think that can happen. Especially not at the scale necessary to do that in the hopes that maybe the US gets it together and either at midterms or at the next administration.

I’m really concerned that that’s probably the way that it’s going to go. None of those dynamics feel conducive to climate multilateralism, climate action for the world. It seems like those are really powerful headwinds — the zeitgeist is blowing into our face, and it’s hard to imagine how we’re going to come back out of that.

Those are the biggest reasons why I’m personally bearish right now on the future of carbon removal. I don’t think the pre-compliance story is going to hold unless the zeitgeist switches again, and it’s possible that it does. But these trends are so global and it doesn’t seem like the momentum has petered out quite yet.

And this doesn’t even get into all of the stuff about Greenland and playing so aggressively with one’s allies in NATO. And how dramatically that can reshape the world order. The behavior of the US around Greenland — it reminds me of someone who maybe wants their significant other to break up with them, but isn’t willing to break up with them themselves. And so behaves badly in the hope that their significant other will dump them. That’s kind of how that whole thing felt to me. I’m like, oh, wow, you just really don’t care about doing this to NATO, huh? I feel like that’s a really surprising thing to do, and I feel like something like NATO no longer existing in a trans-Atlantic capacity, at least for the US, I think would be a major, major change to the world system. NATO’s durability and even the European Union’s durability is something that I think is a big open question and none of it bodes well for climate policy. I think anything that’s disruptive, anything that raises prices in this way is likely to make climate action more difficult.

Because when people are concerned about security or the cost of living, more abstract, probabilistic, future-oriented threats recede. How could they not?

You can try to make your climate policy focus on ways of addressing all of those things at the same time. And in fact, it’s probably the smart thing to do. But there’s just probably always going to be some amount of sacrifice and cost necessary that we will have to shoulder to deal with the world that we have created and are passing on to our children.

Given the way electoral politics is changing around the world and the rise of right-wing populism, I don’t think that we can depend upon Japan, Canada, and the European Union, and to a lesser extent the United Kingdom, to carry us through climate policy.

I hope that I’m wrong. I’m actually really sick of thinking these thoughts and saying them. I keep saying them in meetings. People ask me, what do I think about this? I’m like, this is where I am at and maybe I’m just gonna send them this episode from now on because I’ve been staring into this for a long time.

And it’s just not looking good from basically any angle. In fact, one of the famous lines that I think this is one of the best jokes of all time — I don’t even actually know if it’s true or not, it might just be apocryphal — but it’s George Orwell’s famous response to Joseph Stalin.

Stalin is alleged to have said, “If you wanna make an omelet, you’ve gotta break a few eggs.” And George Orwell retorted, “Where’s the omelet?” And that’s essentially how it feels to me right now. The world has been changing massively in the last year plus, and I’m looking for the omelet, and I cannot seem to find one for climate, let alone on any other front really.

When I’m advising companies in carbon removal and climate tech broadly, I’m often put in a position to ask them if they would like advice based around continuity or discontinuity. Do we regress to the mean? Is this a temporary phase that we all pull back from and say, oh, that was a thing that we did for a while, but the US is still broadly on the track that it was previous and that we just made a small detour and then we all came back to the liberal democratic order, and that’s what we’re gonna commit to for the foreseeable future. Or are we entering a period of reshuffling when the world order is being reconfigured?

And if you want the answer based around continuity, I can give you a pretty good sense of how to build a successful carbon removal company, but you need to keep inside of your probability distribution what you do when the world is fundamentally changed and does not regress to the mean.

Whatever you’re doing in climate, make sure you have some plans for how your company can be successful if the world does not go back to the way that we thought it was. Because it may not.

Hopefully that isn’t too dour a message. Again for the third or fourth time, I don’t like being in this position. I like being helpful and optimistic, but I think it’s really important, especially if you work on anything strategic, that you have a clear vision of what the world is doing and what the various inputs are.

In hindsight, some of them will matter less than one thought they would, and I hope that this is the case for this podcast. But I think we all need to prepare for a future in which the pre-compliance story does not arrive on time — or maybe does not arrive at all.

Thanks for listening.

This is a summary of episode 390 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you enjoy your shows. You can also listen to the full episode in its entirety right below this paragraph.

And a hearty thanks to this episode’s sponsors, Philip Lee LLP and Rainbow.

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Quick Takeaways

• Climate change can be framed as a pH problem: too much acid in the atmosphere and ocean, not enough base to cancel it out.

• Alkalinity is abundantly available around the planet, but finding sources that don’t break the LCA (life cycle assessment) or the economics is where the real challenge lies.

• Before investing in expensive testing, the first question is whether the volume of available material justifies the effort.

• Heavy metals, transport distance, ocean efficiency, and permitting all factor into whether a source is viable—and any one of them can kill a prospect that looks perfect on paper.

• Ocean efficiency varies by site: good mixing zones and water circulation matter enormously for how much carbon a given addition actually removes.

• There are levers to pull—leeching technology, particle size adjustments—but ocean site selection is mostly a fixed variable.

• As projects scale, capital expenditure decisions like building rail spurs start to make economic sense for moving bulk alkalinity more efficiently.

• The Cornwall/St. Ives project demonstrated that OAE could be measured and that a real signal was detectable, but alkalinity sources were ultimately too far away and too expensive.

• Community engagement needs to start early and begin with listening—local knowledge about ocean areas is invaluable before you start changing chemistry.

• In carbon removal sales, the buyers who matter most want to know you as a person, not just hear your elevator pitch.

• Trust-building with buyers like Frontier requires transparency about challenges and collaborative problem-solving, not last-minute surprises.

• Omar’s background as a mental health nurse carries directly into his carbon removal work—relationship-building, listening, and repeating back what you’re hearing.

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  The pH Framing

There’s a way of looking at climate change that strips away a lot of complexity and gets at something almost elemental. We have too much acid in the wrong places, and we need base to cancel it out. That’s it.

It’s a reductive framing—Omar Sadoon, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Planetary Technologies, would be the first to say so. But it’s not wrong. Weathering pathways are about alkalinity. Ocean alkalinity enhancement is about alkalinity. Even parts of direct air capture involve pH swings. A surprising amount of the carbon removal industry consists of people running around the planet trying to find, move, and deploy alkaline materials.

And this is how the earth would handle the problem on its own, given enough time. Rocks would weather. Alkalinity would react with atmospheric carbon. The pH would eventually rebalance. We’re just trying to speed that process up by a few hundred thousand years.

The Sourcing Puzzle

Alkalinity is everywhere. Calcium and magnesium compounds exist in abundant forms all over the planet. The problem is not finding alkaline material—it’s finding material that works.

“Works” means several things simultaneously. The source has to be clean enough that it won’t introduce heavy metals or contaminants into the ocean. It has to be close enough to a deployment site that the emissions from transporting it don’t eat into the carbon removal you’re trying to achieve. It has to exist in sufficient volume to justify the investment in testing and qualifying it. And the testing process itself is expensive and slow.

Omar’s approach is to start with the money. Before spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on lab work and qualification, you want to know the economics could work—that there’s enough material at a reasonable enough cost to justify the investigation. Then comes the chemistry—screening for anything that would rule it out on safety grounds. Then the logistics: how far is it from the ocean, what transport infrastructure exists, and what would need to be built?

Each of these variables can independently kill a source that looks promising on every other dimension. You might find a massive, perfectly clean deposit of alkaline material that happens to be hundreds of kilometers from the coast with no rail access. Or a conveniently located industrial byproduct that turns out to contain trace metals above safe thresholds. The search for what Omar calls the “Goldilocks setup”—a giant pile of clean alkalinity sitting right next to the ocean, pre-permitted and ready to go—remains ongoing.

Nobody’s found it yet.

Ocean Efficiency and the Levers You Can Pull

Once you’ve identified a viable source, you still need to figure out where to put it. Not all ocean is created equal for alkalinity addition.

What Planetary’s ocean science team looks for are areas with strong mixing and water circulation—places where added alkalinity will disperse and react efficiently rather than sitting in a stagnant zone. Depth matters. The percentage of carbon actually removed per unit of alkalinity varies significantly by location.

This creates a tension at the heart of every project. You don’t want to ship material too far from its source, because transport costs and emissions add up. But you also don’t want to deploy it somewhere with poor ocean efficiency and lose removal potential on the backend. The project planning is a constant negotiation between these competing constraints.

There are some levers available. You can alter the material itself through leaching or particle size changes to improve its reactivity. You can gather measurements over time to reduce uncertainty in the ocean models. But you can’t move the ocean. Site selection is largely a fixed variable—you work with what the geography gives you.

As Planetary scales up, the capital expenditure decisions get more interesting. At what point does it make sense to build a rail spur to cut down on trucking? When do you invest in infrastructure that changes the fundamental economics of a project? These are the conversations happening now.

What Cornwall Taught Them

Planetary’s project in Cornwall—specifically in St. Ives—was an early and important proof point. Working with a wastewater treatment facility and funded by BEIS (the UK government’s business and industrial arm), the team demonstrated something that matters: OAE could be measured. You could detect a real signal from alkalinity addition.

The material they used was familiar to the wastewater industry, certified and safe. The science worked. The results were published through Plymouth Marine Labs.

But the project also surfaced the economic reality that haunts every alkalinity-based venture. The sources they needed were too far away and too expensive to make the project viable at that location long-term.

And then there was the community experience. Some locals were enthusiastic. Others were vocal in their opposition. Planetary took that feedback seriously and built out a dedicated community engagement function led by Diana Phillips, whose approach starts with listening. Before you talk about changing the chemistry of someone’s local ocean, you need to understand what they know about it and what they value about it.

That lesson has carried forward into every project since.

Relationships Over Transactions

The conversation took a turn that might surprise people who think of carbon removal as purely a technical and scientific endeavor.

Omar spent a significant portion of our discussion talking about relationships—with alkalinity suppliers, with buyers, with community members. The carbon removal market is small enough that reputation travels fast. And the deals that matter most, like Planetary’s work with Frontier, are built on trust developed over years of transparent communication.

Buyers know there’s uncertainty in scaling plans. They know the economics might shift. What they’re evaluating is whether you’ll bring them along honestly when things change, or whether you’ll show up at the last minute with bad news. The difference between those two approaches determines whether a contract leads to future contracts or becomes a cautionary tale.

Omar connects this directly to his seven+ years as a mental health nurse. Nurses are among the most trusted professions precisely because they invest in bedside manner—listening carefully, repeating back what they hear, making sure everyone is on the same page about what’s expected. Those skills, he says, transfer directly.

It’s a reminder that carbon removal, for all its scientific complexity, is ultimately a human enterprise. The relationships make it work. And occasionally, they make it fun—whether that means talking baseball, debating whether OAE companies can survive being turned into memes, or workshopping whether “I drop base” is an acceptable thing for an ocean alkalinity enhancement professional to say about themselves.

(It is.)

Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Thanks for being here, Omar.

Omar Sadoon: Thanks, Ross. Glad to be here.

Ross Kenyon: Omar, is all of carbon removal just about alkalinity. I’ve been saying this lately, it’s not always true, but it’s often true. How much of carbon removal is just the same people running around many of the same places on the planet trying to find alkalinity?

Omar Sadoon: I would say, I don’t know that carbon removal’s all about alkalinity, but I would frame it as, you know, there is a point where you can view climate change as an asset based problem. You’ve got too much acid in one location and you need to commit a lot of base to cancel it out or move it where it is. So it’s not a completely bad framing. I think some people will definitely view it that way, and I think I’m in that group.

Ross Kenyon: The pH framing. Anything that’s weathering related is alkalinity. There’s parts of direct air capture that are alkalinity swings, and also manipulate pH trying to get us to negativity. It seems like a lot of this is where’s the rock getting spread and why, and where’s it going? But it’s mostly about moving alkalinity around, at least for several of the major pathways in carbon removal.

Omar Sadoon: I think one good way to back up and think about it too is like this is the way the earth would naturally do it if we weren’t around. So that’s why I think it’s not a bad framing to use. Because absent human interventions, it would just take a long time. But yes, those rocks would weather, that alkalinity would react with what’s in the atmosphere. And eventually you cancel out a lot of that acid that we’ve put in the atmosphere. So yeah, there’s truth to that.

Ross Kenyon: You spent about five years in carbon removal. We’ve known each other for a fairly long time here. How much of your working life has been chasing down alkalinity and making sure it doesn’t break the LCA to get it to where it needs to be?

Omar Sadoon: It’s been at least the last four years of being really diligent about what are the sources of alkalinity we can use, where do they exist in an abundant enough form that it’s worthwhile to pursue them and to do all this contracting and supply chain and figuring out how to get it there efficiently. And then backtracking to make sure that we’re not having upstream effects or we’re changing the way that operations may act that could force us as a company to start having to take account for those emissions. So thinking about those upstream effects we have when we make a purchase and finding it and qualifying it, it’s been a long road. It’s been at least the last four years.

Ross Kenyon: I know people are sometimes reticent to share too much about where they source alkalinity from. I know there’s competitive and trade secret reasons for being close to the vest on that and would not wanna ask you to disclose any of that. But I am hoping we can talk about some general principles here about how to think about alkalinity, where people are looking for it. Why is this so hard to get right? I hear my friends who work in alkalinity based carbon removal gripe about it sometimes about how difficult it is to find it, move it, and make sure the chemistry is even the right fit for their application. And sometimes you’ll get one part of that that is totally perfect, and one part that will totally kill a source that you would otherwise be dreaming about as this thing that you are so looking forward to. And then it just broke everything. But please tell me, how accurate is that?

Omar Sadoon: What I’d say is that alkalinity broadly is abundantly available all around the planet. There’s all kinds of it in different forms. There’s calcium, magnesium are the two primaries that we look for and utilize in Planetary’s process. But finding sources that don’t break the LCA and the economics of the project is sort of the secret sauce. And also don’t do any damage or harm to the spaces where we utilize it. So in broad terms, the way to go about that is to determine what’s the relationship between your alkalinity source and your host site, where you plan to use it. How do you plan to move that stuff in a way? And what are the efficiencies of the different transport methods? You really gotta think about how was it produced in the first place? What was the intended use case? If you’re going after a primary source, and what kind of energy goes into producing that stuff? If similar to Planetary, you start to look at byproducts and other non-intended products, you really wanna test for anything else that could be in them. So there’s a lot of ways you need to ensure that what you’re doing is first and foremost, safe for the ocean to be utilized. And then you wanna think about the economics and scale—is this a one-time or one-stop shop where this is all that’s left? And this pile only exists for a limited time, or is this something that’s ongoing that supports the project for decades onwards?

Ross Kenyon: When you’re approaching this, sounds like an enormous calculation with so many different variables, where do you even start to make sense of does this source of alkalinity make sense for me or not?

Omar Sadoon: My approach is to look at the volume of material that we’re talking about. So before you start investing hundreds of thousands of dollars into testing these sources, you really want to ensure there’s enough there to make it worthwhile. Because that testing process is not just expensive, but it’s long. And so you probably wanna start there. Just, is this worthwhile to even start the investigation?

Ross Kenyon: Assuming that it is a sufficient quantity to make it worth your while, what’s the flow of how you invalidate a source and how do you do that as early as possible? It would be terrible to go through quite a lot of this and find out that there’s enough heavy metal in the rock that you’re just like, cool, this is actually a contaminant and is above safe or legal or ethical limits or something like that. You probably wanna know that pretty quickly, right?

Omar Sadoon: You wanna know quickly. And that’s where you need to have some sort of set of criteria for how the host site’s permitted. At the same time as you’re looking at things like what are the transport chains that exist and what’s gonna be new infrastructure that you need to build out? So if you start getting into sources that are really far away distance from the ocean, it’s not always gonna be worth it, even if you can build a relatively efficient supply chain. Just because if you can overcome the initial cost of the transport, you still have to overcome then the energy you’d spend doing it. So then you get into LCA and TEA calculations. So that’s probably the next step after you can ensure that there’s no heavy metals that would rule it out. In Planetary’s process, we’re also looking at things like ocean efficiency, so how much carbon does it actually uptake? And it is, you’re right, a really big calculation to make and it takes a lot of people on the team to ensure that we’re doing it in a way that we’re not over-investing. But at the same time, we’re not rolling things out too early that have potential. Because it’s probably one of the single biggest and most important decisions that we’ll make as a company—what’s the source? And then where do we want to go invest into putting it, and how do we ensure that that’s safe and economic.

Ross Kenyon: Tell me more about ocean efficiency. Are there certain sites where this is super powered in some places that render it impotent?

Omar Sadoon: Yeah, so there are definitely regions of the world, and this is more the expertise of the ocean science team. They basically try to determine where is it most efficient to add that alkalinity. The things you’re looking for typically are a really good mixing zone, where you’re getting a lot of circulation of water. So it’s not stagnant areas. You’re looking for a particular depth. And those areas will determine basically on a percentage basis where’s the most efficient to do that addition. So it’s this interplay between, okay, we don’t want to go too far away from our alkalinity source. Because then you’re racking up those costs of transport. But you don’t want to lose a lot of points on the backend of ocean efficiency. So it’s a conversation between the teams to make up where is the best place to do an addition. When you’re working through the LCA-TEA dynamics here and trying to figure out how do you maximize your net removals calculation to make sure that you’re not just losing removals you could otherwise sell due to emissions that are built into moving alkalinity around.

Ross Kenyon: Are there things you can do that change that equation besides selection of site and source? Are there improvements that you have to game out, like the capital expenditure of building a spur line on a railroad that brings it closer to the source? Are there things that you can do that change that, or do you kind of have to take the world as a given?

Omar Sadoon: No, there’s definitely levers you can pull on. In some cases, it’s changing aspects of the alkalinity, whether it’s through things like leaching technology or changes to particle size. You can change the material efficiency. With ocean efficiency, you’re probably more stuck with what you get. Like once you select a site, you can reduce the uncertainty over time by gathering samples and a lot of the work that the ocean sciences team does to go ensure that what we’re seeing in the model is confirmed by what we’re seeing on the ground or in the ocean. That changes the uncertainty bounds on any of our verification work. And then at the plant level, to a degree, you’re stuck with what you have. You’re not going to change the operations of a power generation plant or a wastewater treatment plant or any of the places where we look for alkalinity. To a degree we can take up some land, make changes to the site to some point. But yeah, those are probably the areas in which we try to pull levers.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. It seems like it’s mostly around, can you alter the material that’s going in the ocean more so than fixed geographical issues or high CapEx issues.

Omar Sadoon: Yeah, and those are the conversations we’re getting into now as we scale up, right? Like, where is the point to make those investments? When do we build a rail spur and when do we start to do more?

Ross Kenyon: Dang, that sounds fun. Are you working on that too?

Omar Sadoon: I’m part of a team that works on that. So there’s a lot of smart people on the team and then I add my little LCA piece in. But yeah, we definitely talk through it quite a bit.

Ross Kenyon: Are you able to speak generally about some of the projects that one might consider for doing this in alkalinity broadly?

Omar Sadoon: Yeah, so the probably the best example is just what we’re doing—the first rail spur, that’s part of what we’re evaluating for the next evolution of the Tufts Cove project. So for those folks that are interested, I think one of the best places to go to dig into some of these things is the Isometric website where all of our verified credits kind of live, or the verification steps we took and the specifics about how that project is performing. I encourage anyone to go look at those documents and get an idea of what goes into the credit generation for Tufts Cove and Planetary. When it comes to new projects or evolutions of the Tufts Cove project, it really is about scaling up our capacity to efficiently move that alkalinity and the sources we look for being more abundant and available. And so that’s where things like rail spurs come into play—how do we cut down on the number of trucks we’re moving? How do we cut down on these big ocean transport steps that we have to take today? Railways are really efficient relative to some other transport methods. And so if you can move a lot more bulk over larger distances without as many emissions or costs, it starts to make a lot of sense for the project to grow.

Ross Kenyon: Is there any place in the world that’s parallel to the Guano trade, that you could just like bring a tanker up, load some equivalent of bird shit? Is there like a cliff side you could just mine and throw a bunch of alkaline rocks into a barge and then stick it right off of Peru and then you have a nice upwelling zone and something like that could just take place? Does that exist anywhere?

Omar Sadoon: If somebody knows about it, where there’s basically a giant pile of alkalinity sitting beside the ocean and it is already pre-permitted and it’s super clean, you call me up. I’d love to know. I haven’t found that Goldilocks setup yet.

Ross Kenyon: They used to, and then they mined it all, and it was a pretty destructive process. Actually, that framing is probably not the best framing for OAE.

Omar Sadoon: The opposite direction of what we want to tell about OAE.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Pull up to either a remote island that has a bunch of beautiful pelagic species and like Galapagos or wherever, or on the coastal Peru, and you just carve up a cliff and dump it in the ocean. It also sounds politically unpopular. I said it in a very cavalier way, but yeah, that sounds rough. Your experience with community engagement leads you to believe this would be a tremendous failure and you don’t wanna work on that.

Omar Sadoon: Not just community engagement. My love for all things ocean and safety and my environmental streak in me just says, let’s not do that.

Ross Kenyon: Let’s not do that. Are you able to talk much about the Cornwall experience? The St. Ives experience?

Omar Sadoon: To the degree that I can, because I never actually spent any time personally in Cornwall. And there’s a lot of really hardworking team members that helped get that first dosing project off the ground. But broadly speaking, it demonstrated that OAE could be measured, that you could really see a signal. That project was funded by BEIS, the business industrial portion of the UK government. And we worked very closely with the wastewater treatment facility and with an alkalinity partner to ensure that what we were adding was something that’s traditionally been added to wastewater treatment. So it was nothing new. It was something very familiar and very safe and certified to be done that way. And there was some portion of the community that was very excited about that, that wanted to see that project exist. And then there was a portion as well that spoke out very loudly against what we were doing and felt it went against their values. Ultimately the reason that project didn’t go forward was because of everything we just talked about, that the alkalinity sources that we were looking for were just too far away and too expensive and didn’t make a lot of economic sense for us to move forward. So the results of that work we’re very proud of. It’s published work through Plymouth Marine Labs. But the community experience certainly was something that we took on board very seriously because at the time we needed to do a better job of community engagement and working with the community to make sure it’s something that they wanted to. That we’ve taken that forward in not just Tufts Cove, but any project we do in the future.

Ross Kenyon: Do you have any advice you could share with people for how to best manage the community experience, the engagement? Just making sure that there’s enough buy-in locally, that this is a project that they desire and maybe not merely tolerate, let alone oppose.

Omar Sadoon: My advice would be start early and do it often. We have a wonderful team now, led by Diana Phillips at Planetary who really has a structure and a framework for how you engage the community. And they’ve done a number of indigenous engagements. They’ve done a number of efforts in wherever we’ve deployed or tested, whether it’s in the US, in Canada, in Europe, that make an effort to listen. It really begins with listening because there’s so much local knowledge about that local ocean area that you wanna take on board before you start talking about how you’re going to play with the chemistry of that area. So I would really just kind of defer to Diana’s knowledge because we’ve had much better success with her on board and with her approach, which is collaborative first and foremost.

Ross Kenyon: Are you sick of people saying that OAE is antacid for the earth?

Omar Sadoon: I think it’s—I heard someone say, you guys should just name the company Hydroxydump.

Ross Kenyon: Hydroxydump. Is this like a Canadian medicine that I’m missing the connection to?

Omar Sadoon: No, it was just like a casual way of saying, oh, that’s what you’re doing. You’re adding hydroxides to the ocean. Similar to the bad guano thing. I was like, if that’s what makes sense for you.

Ross Kenyon: I thought this was maybe like a, oh yeah, everyone has milk in a bag. Everyone knows Hydroxydump. That’s what we—you know that, right?

Omar Sadoon: Fancy ketchup, chips, milk in a bag, Smarties, all those things.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Go out for a rip and all that. Cool.

Omar Sadoon: And I think—I’ve heard people tell me that all I do is drop base.

Ross Kenyon: Now see, that one I like. Yeah, I am very supportive of that. Do you think—a lot of the brands in carbon removal don’t have enough humor. Whenever we’re doing memes, sometimes we even think, I don’t think this company has a sense of humor. I think if we made a joke about it, they’re not gonna respond and play along with it. They might be like, what the hell do we do with this?

Omar Sadoon: I say go for it. If you wanna rip on Planetary once in a while, I’m sure we can take it. A good sense of humor in the company, whether it’s dropping the base or dropping the guano or dropping the Hydroxydump.

Ross Kenyon: Challenge accepted. What do you think is funny about your space? Is there anything that you think is a recurring issue or something that if was referenced, your peers and different OAE companies would recognize?

Omar Sadoon: I think the peers would probably say like the confusion between the biological and chemical pathways. There’s like, oh, we don’t know what’s gonna happen if you add stuff to the ocean. And a lot of things get mixed up in reports. It’s just a gripe that I hear pretty often. Confusing the biological pathways that you’re growing seaweed and the risks around that with the chemical pathways like Planetary where we’re changing the pH and canceling out carbonic acid in the ocean. Different set of risks than what you’d see in those seaweed growing pathways. So a lot of stuff tends to clump us together, and that’s where I hear our ocean sciences team start to get frustrated because they’re different approaches.

Ross Kenyon: The first meme I thought of for this would be the one of Pam from the office where corporate needs you to find the difference between these two pictures. And it’s the same picture. So I would just do like one that’s biology and the other one’s ocean chemistry and be like, how to drive an OAE professional insane.

Omar Sadoon: Yeah, I think they would get that. But what are other funny things about our space? I have to think about that one.

Ross Kenyon: What do you think is funny about your space?

Omar Sadoon: Tell you one that did make us laugh was this experience we had at a buyer event. Someone on our team basically was talking to one of these big buyers, and then as soon as the word “models” came up, it was the same effect of being friendzoned. Like, oh, you guys use models. Okay.

Ross Kenyon: I thought for ocean stuff, models are fairly supported. I followed the discussions around bicarb work and the desire for direct measurement rather than modeling in ocean spaces, and it ruffled a lot of feathers. And I saw people pushing back and saying that ocean models are basically the way to go. I come from soil. We’ve all been traumatized by models to some extent, and so everyone was pushing towards direct measurement, even though it’s expensive. But it was funny to see that kind of inverted for oceans. Where are the fault lines for that right now?

Omar Sadoon: What I can say is there’s multiple levels of this. The models really just contain to some degree of uncertainty. You’re essentially just correcting for that broadly understood uncertainty, whether it’s an IPCC model you’re borrowing from, or some publicly available, generally accepted ocean model for that region. What you’re doing is you’re saying we’re still gonna go take direct measurements. That’s very much part of our process. It’s part of our regulatory steps to ensure that we’re not breaking TSS or pH limits. We’re not doing anything that would harm the ocean in any other way. And part of taking those measurements means that you’re gathering data that can reduce the uncertainty in that publicly available model. And you’re saying, are these two things in agreement? And that’s where a lot of the work lies in getting people to trust that the models are always gonna be wrong. But it doesn’t mean that they’re not useful. There’s always gonna be some degree of uncertainty, but it doesn’t mean we can’t use them to make a strong determination with a tremendous amount of certainty that that is carbon that’s been removed.

Ross Kenyon: How important is relationship management in this process? I’ve been told diligence for those big deals takes between a year and two in many cases.

Omar Sadoon: What my take on it is—I wasn’t leading on the initial Frontier deal, I was part of the due diligence process. So I got to know Frontier and others on the team a little bit better as we were working through it. And what I recognize is it’s about trust. Any buyer’s gonna recognize that there’s only so much we can know in 2025 or 2026 when we were starting to write the deal about what the economics of these things was a hundred percent gonna look like. There’s a degree of certainty that you can have and then there’s the unknown of that scaling plan. How much is it gonna cost to upgrade the system? How much is it gonna cost to switch to a new material? What’s the efficiency of all these things gonna be? And so they know that there’s some risk involved. What you’re doing in those quarterly or regular conversations is taking them on the journey with you and ensuring that you are being as transparent as you can be. If you’re doing things that start to erode trust, and you’re coming to them in the last minute when things have changed, that’s not going to set you up for future years in that contract. It’s not going to set you up for maybe another contract that you wanna do. And it’s a small industry and people are gonna talk to each other. But if you approach it with, hey, this is a team effort to collaboratively problem solve, and we may need things from Frontier—advice, contacts—then I think we can get somewhere. There’s this old adage, I think it’s an African proverb: if you want to go fast, go alone. If you wanna go far, go together. And we really are trying to build this industry together, whether it’s what you do with Reversing Climate Change, or what we do as a supplier at Planetary, or what Frontier’s trying to do as a market maker. We have to work collaboratively and just say, put my hand up when I think something isn’t going right. And say, I don’t know exactly how to do this, but I would love your advice on it.

Ross Kenyon: How much continuity do you perceive between your current career and your former career as a nurse?

Omar Sadoon: I was a nurse for roughly seven or eight years. I technically still hold a license as a registered nurse, and the biggest thing that I take away from that that kind of spans both is that relationship building and humanity piece of it. I was a mental health nurse, and I worked in a few different hospitals in that capacity. And I was a unit manager for a while, so I managed a team as well where I had to learn how to work collaboratively across different disciplines. Nurses are one of the most trusted professions and that’s because they invest heavily in that bedside manner. And that aspect of it is something that carries over—how can I be a better listener and talk less in these situations? How can I repeat back what I’m hearing so that we’re both on the same page about what’s expected here? Those are just lessons that I find incredibly useful in my day-to-day work. And yeah, it’s led me this far and let’s see how much further I can go.

Ross Kenyon: Thanks for being on the show, Omar. I’m so happy we were able to help you cross over from being a listener to now a documented participant for your first podcast ever, actually.

Omar Sadoon: Yes. Thank you so much. I’ve been nervous about doing a podcast at all, but I’m glad I had a good friend to do it with.

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This is a summary of episode 389 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you enjoy your shows. You can also listen to/watch the full episode right below this paragraph.

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Quick Takeaways

• Many early soil carbon entrepreneurs faced a fork in the road: double down on agriculture or abandon it.

• Soil carbon markets have promise but depend on slow verification cycles and uncertain demand.

• Agricultural systems deliver many benefits beyond carbon sequestration.

• Programs that enroll farmers can take years before credits actually appear.

• Some recent success in soil carbon reflects projects started years ago.

• Policy uncertainty has shaped many soil carbon business models.

• Emma Fuller decided to step outside the carbon credit paradigm entirely.

• Her company, Fractal Agriculture, invests directly into farmland equity.

• The goal is to improve soil and ecological outcomes through ownership and incentives.

• Farmers avoid the complexity of MRV systems and carbon registries.

• Investors gain exposure to farmland rather than relying on credit markets.

• Sometimes the simplest solution is to intervene further upstream in the system.

The Fork in the Road After Soil Carbon

For people who worked in the early wave of soil carbon commercialization, the experience produced a kind of fork in the road.

Some people went deeper into agriculture. Others ran the opposite direction.

Emma Fuller chose the first path.

Part of that choice was practical. She had already spent years working in agriculture before soil carbon markets emerged, and she knew that the promise of carbon was only one piece of a much larger system.

Farms influence biodiversity, habitat, water quality, and soil health. Carbon sequestration is real, but it sits inside a broader ecological and economic landscape.

That perspective made it easier to keep working in agriculture even as the carbon market itself proved complicated.

The Slow Reality of Soil Carbon Markets

From the outside, the soil carbon industry can look volatile.

At times it seems to surge forward with new credits and projects. At other moments it appears stalled by policy uncertainty or limited demand from buyers.

But part of that volatility is simply a reflection of how agriculture works.

Programs that enroll farmers take years to unfold. Farmers adopt new practices. Soil carbon accumulates slowly. Verification frameworks take time to measure the results.

Many of the credits appearing on the market today were set in motion three to five years ago.

That lag makes it difficult to interpret what’s happening in real time. A burst of activity may simply reflect work that was done years earlier.

And it also means that building businesses around those markets requires patience—and often a degree of faith about where policy and demand might eventually land.

The Problem With Betting on Policy

For Emma, one of the hardest parts of the soil carbon business model was how much it relied on things outside a company’s control.

Many projects implicitly depended on policy shifts that would expand demand for carbon credits or make them easier to use. But policy can move slowly, and sometimes in the opposite direction.

That uncertainty made it difficult to build a business that could reliably support farmers over the long term.

So Emma asked a different question.

What if the goal wasn’t to make soil carbon markets work better?

What if the goal was simply to create agricultural systems that delivered the same environmental benefits without needing those markets at all?

Moving One Layer Upstream

That question led to a different design.

Instead of measuring soil carbon and selling credits, Emma and her cofounder built Fractal Agriculture, a platform that invests equity directly into farmland.

The idea is straightforward: align incentives between investors and farmers to improve land management over time.

When soil health improves, farms become more productive and resilient. Environmental benefits—including carbon sequestration—follow from those practices.

But the system no longer depends on carbon accounting to generate revenue.

Farmers don’t need to navigate registries or MRV frameworks. Investors aren’t betting on the future price of carbon credits.

The intervention happens one level higher in the system: ownership and incentives.

A Different Way to Think About Climate Solutions

The broader lesson from Emma’s work is not that carbon markets are useless.

For some sectors they may be essential.

But it’s easy for climate entrepreneurs to assume that every environmental benefit must be routed through the same market infrastructure: measurement, credits, buyers, and registries.

Sometimes the better move is to zoom out and ask a simpler question.

Where is the leverage point in the system?

In this case, the answer wasn’t another marketplace or verification method.

It was farmland itself.

By stepping further upstream, Emma’s approach aims to achieve many of the same environmental outcomes while removing several layers of complexity along the way.

And that kind of first-principles thinking may be exactly what the climate space needs more of.

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This is a summary of episode #388 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you enjoy your shows. You can also watch the full episode right below this text.

🔹 Quick Takeaways

• A technically sound CDR project is not automatically investable.

• Project development and financial structuring are different crafts from technology development.

• “Offtakeable” is a design constraint, not a marketing afterthought.

• Insurability shapes engineering choices.

• Bankability requires predictability, not brilliance.

• Carbon developers often optimize for removal, not risk allocation.

• Standardized contracts matter as much as standardized MRV.

• Investors fund structures, not aspirations.

• The first wave of CDR projects blurred roles.

• The next wave will separate them deliberately.

• Finance disciplines technology.

• Scale requires translation between engineers and capital.

📝 The Category Error Holding Carbon Removal Back

In early-stage carbon removal, everyone did everything.

Scientists built technology. The same teams tried to design credits. The same people pitched buyers. The same people structured contracts. It was scrappy, heroic, necessary.

But scrappy doesn’t scale.

The central insight of this conversation is simple but profound: developing a carbon removal technology is not the same thing as developing an investable asset.

Those are two different products.

One removes carbon.

The other allocates risk.

And capital often cares much more about the second.

🏗️ Offtakeable Is a Design Constraint

When developers ask, “How do we build this?” they are usually thinking technically.

But the better question might be:

“How do we build this so someone will sign a long-term offtake agreement against it?”

That changes everything.

Offtakeable means predictable delivery.

• Predictable MRV.

• Clear durability profile.

• Defined liability if something goes wrong.

• Insurance that actually pays out.

• Contracts that don’t collapse under scrutiny.

You can have beautiful engineering and still fail this test.

An investable project is engineered backwards from the requirements of buyers, insurers, and lenders.

💼 Insurability Is Engineering

One of the most overlooked forces in climate infrastructure is insurance.

If a project cannot be insured, lenders hesitate. If liability is unclear, offtakers hesitate. If permanence risk is undefined, everyone hesitates.

That means engineering decisions are no longer just about yield or efficiency. They are about risk transfer.

Can reversal risk be bounded?

Can monitoring be standardized?

Can delivery timelines be forecast with boring reliability?

Finance rewards boring.

This is hard for founders who are optimizing for elegance or maximum carbon efficiency. But markets scale through repeatability, not novelty.

🔄 Separating the Disciplines

The episode surfaces something maturing industries eventually learn:

Technology development and project development must separate.

In renewables, developers build pipelines and structure tax equity long before electrons flow. In infrastructure, SPVs exist precisely to isolate risk. In oil and gas, exploration and project finance are distinct crafts.

Carbon removal is just beginning that separation.

You need technologists.

You need developers who understand permitting and logistics.

You need finance professionals who understand waterfalls and risk allocation.

You need counterparties who can translate across all three.

Without that separation, every project remains bespoke.

And bespoke does not attract institutional capital.

🧭 Designing for Capital From Day One

This is not about surrendering to finance.

It is about acknowledging that if the goal is gigaton scale, projects must be:

• Offtakeable

• Investable

• Insurable

• Standardizable

Those qualities do not emerge accidentally. They must be designed into the project from the beginning.

The first generation of carbon removal proved that tonnes could be removed.

The next generation must prove that tons can be structured.

Because the difference between a promising project and a scalable industry is not just technology.

It is whether the deal closes.

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“What does the beautiful thing tell you? Well, it tells you the person who made it really cared.

— Patrick Collison, Stripe

Can a registry be a genuinely pleasant experience?

At Carbon Unbound in Vancouver a few weeks ago, I was catching up with Ludo Chatoux, Rainbow’s CEO, when Aidan Preston from Milkywire walked by. I asked him what he thought of Rainbow’s registry.

“It’s delightful,” he said. “Genuinely a pleasant experience.”

This struck me. We’re talking about a platform for entering technical data about carbon removal projects and then issuing carbon credits. Quantifications. Lifecycle assessments. Proof documents. It’s fundamentally a glorified spreadsheet, dressed up with some workflows and review processes.

Why should it be delightful? Why should anyone care if it’s beautiful?

The answer, I think, gets at something essential about how carbon markets should work.

Details show that you care

There’s a famous story about Van Halen’s concert contract rider from the 1980s. Buried in the technical specifications—the stage weight requirements, the electrical loads, the safety protocols—was a clause requiring a bowl of M&Ms backstage with all the brown ones removed.

It seemed like a rockstar throwing their weight around. MTV made fun of it. But David Lee Roth later explained in his autobiography:

“Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine 18-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors—whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through.

… So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say, “Article 148: There will be 15 amperage voltage sockets at 20-foot spaces, evenly, providing 19 amperes … ” This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was, “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.”

So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl … well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error. They didn’t read the contract. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.”

The brown M&Ms were a signal. A superficial detail that revealed deeper care, or lack of it.

Beautiful tools work the same way.

When Rainbow rebranded from Riverse and rolled out a new visual identity, they made choices that seemed small or superficial but actually reflected a commitment to craft. They picked a vibrant purple instead of grayscale. They shipped a website with full bleed background colors—blue, orange, purple— rather than the typical white or black.

These same decisions carried over to how they built Arc. They added color to forms and interfaces when many certification platforms look like tax software from 2003.

These choices signal something: the team cares enough to make this beautiful. And if they care about the interface, they probably care about the methodology rigor. The data validation. The audit process. The scientific integrity.

As Collison put it in the same podcast quoted above: “If you care about the infrastructure being holistically good, indexing on the superficial characteristics that you can actually observe is not an irrational thing to do.”

What beauty looks like in practice

Kimberly Joly leads Product at Rainbow. She joined in April 2025, coming from a SaaS background into carbon markets. One of the first things she noticed was how depressing most certification platforms were.

“The feedback we get from a lot of project developers is that other certification platforms are very black and white or grayscale,” she told me. “It’s a bit depressing. Even when platforms use color, it’s often so pale it barely registers.”

Rainbow went the opposite direction. Not just with their brand—the name itself, the logo, the website—but with Arc, the actual tool project developers use daily.

“We’re trying to incorporate color a lot more,” Kim said. “We have a bunch of secondary colors, though I don’t know if they can still be called secondary given how many we actually have. But we’re trying to integrate them so Arc isn’t just grayscale and purple.”

Arc looks alive.

One project developer told Rainbow’s team she’d worked with one of the larger, more established registries and would never do it again because “their interface was so bad.” She specifically called out how Arc balanced simplicity with the rigor required by certification standards. The interface was simple enough to not be overwhelming, but asked all the right questions and enabled her to gather all the information she needed.

This isn’t just aesthetic preference. It’s about making hard work less miserable. As anyone knows about working in carbon removal, this step of the process isn’t the glamorous part, e.g. hollering at Aidan Preston while wearing sports jackets.

Functionality is non-negotiable, but it’s not everything

Here’s something we forget: project developers are people. They have preferences. They notice when software is pleasant to use. They appreciate when someone thinks about their experience.

“I think everyone wants a beautiful experience as long as things still work in the background,” Kim said. “That is non-negotiable. We couldn’t even be having this conversation if Arc wasn’t delivering value to project developers. But it is, and we’re very rigorous in terms of how we build it. So we have the luxury of being able to add this additional aesthetic layer on top of it.”

She’s right that functionality is non-negotiable. But calling beauty a “luxury” undersells it. In a market where project developers have choices—where they can register with different standards, work with different registries, choose different partners—the experience matters.

If you had the choice between a very bland tool and a tool that worked the same but with a nicer visual layer on it, which would you pick?

“I would always pick the one with a nicer visual on it,” Kim said.

Of course you would. We all would.

And yet most certification platforms are built as if the users don’t have preferences. As if they’re just data entry machines who don’t care about their environment. As if making something beautiful would be a waste of time.

Beautiful tools are trust signals

Here’s the bottom line for project developers considering where to register their projects:

The tool you’ll spend hundreds of hours with matters. The interface where you’ll enter your quantifications, upload your documents, answer methodology questions, coordinate with auditors—that environment affects your work.

Beautiful tools aren’t just nice to have. They’re easier to use. They cause less friction. They make tedious work slightly less tedious. They signal that the organization building them cares about details and user experience.

And in carbon markets, where you’re choosing a partner for a long-term relationship, where trust and competence matter enormously, these signals are rational things to pay attention to.

Arc has document libraries with clear visibility indicators. Quantification tools that generate both technical spreadsheets for auditors and beautiful PDFs for investors. Color-coded interfaces that make navigation intuitive. Simplified forms that don’t require dozens of clicks to access.

But more than any specific feature, it has something else: it shows that Rainbow cares.

They cared enough to make it beautiful. They cared enough to think about your experience. They cared enough to build something delightful instead of just functional.

As Collison says: “What does the beautiful thing tell you? It tells you the person who made it really cared.”

In carbon markets, where so much depends on trust, that signal matters more than you might think.

The world is not meant to be only utilitarian

I’ll end with this: the world is ugly enough already. Climate change is depressing enough. The work of building carbon removal infrastructure is hard enough.

If we can make the tools we use every day beautiful—if we can inject some joy and whimsy into technical work—why wouldn’t we?

Beauty isn’t frivolous. It’s not a luxury add-on for companies that have extra resources to burn. It’s a fundamental way of showing respect for the humans using your tools. It’s a way of making hard work slightly more bearable. It’s a way of signaling care and competence.

Rainbow understood this. They built Arc to be not just functional but delightful. Not just rigorous but joyful.

And project developers notice.

If you’re choosing where to register your carbon removal project, pay attention to the tools you’ll be using. Ask to see them. Use them. Notice how they make you feel.

Because the beautiful thing isn’t just telling you that someone cared about the interface. It’s telling you they probably care about everything else too.

And in carbon markets, that might be the most important signal of all.

“The world will be saved by beauty.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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This is a summary of a bonus episode of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or right below this paragraph where the full episode is embedded as a video.

🔹 Quick Takeaways

• Whitman’s grass is not a symbol with one meaning. It is a cascade of meanings.

• The poem resists certainty and embraces interpretive plurality.

• Grass becomes a political statement: it grows among all races and classes alike.

• Grass becomes theological: perhaps a “handkerchief of the Lord.”

• Grass becomes mortal: the “beautiful uncut hair of graves.”

• Death is presented not as annihilation, but as transformation.

• Equality in death unsettles hierarchies of wealth and status.

• The poem moves from metaphor to metaphysics—from hint to declaration, and is this good for poetry or does it violate “show, don’t tell”?

• Whitman shows that we do not have to love every line equally to be moved.

• Circularity—decay into growth—undergirds both ecology and hope.

• The smallest sprout becomes an argument against despair.

• Beauty itself can interrupt the seriousness of modern life.

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Song of Myself, 6 (the poem itself)

by Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, soon out of their mothers’ laps,
And here you are the mothers’ laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

📝 The Grass That Undoes Us

In this episode, the work pauses. No markets, no carbon accounting, no civilizational diagnosis. Just a poem.

The sixth section of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself begins with a child asking a simple question: What is the grass? The brilliance of Whitman’s response is that he (mostly) refuses to answer it definitively. Instead, he offers a cascade of possibilities. Perhaps it is “the flag of my disposition.” Perhaps it is a divine handkerchief, deliberately dropped as a coy clue. Perhaps it is a political hieroglyph that needs deciphering, sprouting alike among every race and class. Perhaps it is merely a child of vegetation itself.

Whitman does not collapse these meanings into one. He lets them coexist.

That openness is part of the lesson. The grass does not demand a single interpretation any more than life does.

🌱 The Beautiful Uncut Hair of Graves

Then the metaphor deepens.

Grass becomes “the beautiful uncut hair of graves.”

It is hard to overstate the force of that image. The dead are not erased; they are transformed. The white hair of old mothers, the colorless beards of old men, the faint red roofs of mouths—all become dark green vitality pushing upward. Death feeds life. The grave grows hair. How can it be both grass and hair?!

Whitman lingers here not in morbidity but in wonder. He wishes he could “translate the hints” about the dead young men and women. The grass seems to whisper that they are not gone in the way we fear. The smallest sprout becomes evidence that nothing truly is obliterated. All goes onward and outward.

Whether or not one shares Whitman’s metaphysical confidence, the emotional gesture is powerful: death is not a wall but a passage.

⚖️ Equality, Mortality, and Perspective

There is also something radically egalitarian in this vision.

The grass grows alike among Black and white, rich and poor. It sprouts over children taken too soon and elders who lived long lives. It covers the graves of congressmen and laborers without distinction.

Death is the great equalizer.

And that realization has consequences. If mortality is universal, then what do we do with our time? Do we cling more tightly to status and accumulation? Or does the knowledge of finitude soften us toward ourselves and toward others?

Whitman does not preach this conclusion, but he gestures toward it. The poem oscillates between playful metaphor and profound metaphysics, but beneath it lies a quiet invitation: remember that you will die, and let that remembrance humanize you.

🌿 Why Poetry Belongs Here

In a world saturated with crisis and optimization, there is something quietly radical about stopping to read a poem aloud.

Whitman reminds us that meaning does not always arrive in arguments. Sometimes it arrives in a phrase—six words that rearrange your interior world. “The beautiful uncut hair of graves” can do work that policy cannot.

“The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,” he writes.

Whether we take that as literal truth or luminous metaphor, the effect is the same: the world is more continuous, more interconnected, and more alive than our fear allows.

Sometimes, amid all the seriousness, we need to look at the grass.

And wonder.

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This is a summary of episode #387 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. It can be heard on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, wherever else you listen to podcasts, and also right below this text is the full episode.

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🔹 Quick Takeaways

• Carbon efficiency measures how much feedstock carbon becomes durable removal.

• Some approaches (like biomass burial/BiCRS) optimize heavily for efficiency.

• Others (like biochar) sacrifice efficiency but generate broad cobenefits.

• This debate isn’t merely technical—it’s philosophical.

• The carbon efficiency camp is focused on lowering atmospheric greenhouse gas parts per million (PPM) as fast as possible.

• The polycrisis folks sees climate as one expression of a broader civilizational crisis.

• Commodification could scale removal dramatically.

• Commodification could also flatten complexity into a single tradeable metric.

• A “ton is a ton” might work financially—but not ecologically.

• Productive tension between these views may be necessary.

• Trying to solve everything at once risks solving nothing.

• Trying to solve only one thing risks missing the deeper problem.

📝 The Fight Beneath the Fight

On the surface, the carbon efficiency debate looks technical.

How much of the carbon in biomass actually ends up durably stored? How much is lost in conversion? Is 90% better than 50%? Should buyers prioritize maximum atmospheric impact per dollar?

But beneath those questions lies something deeper.

What are we actually trying to solve?

If climate change is primarily a parts per million (PPM) of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere problem—if the overriding moral imperative is to reduce PPM as quickly and cheaply as possible—then carbon efficiency is an obvious north star. Durability and volume become the defining metrics. Simplify, standardize, commodify. Make a ton fungible. Let markets do what markets do.

In that frame, anything less efficient looks like a distraction.

🌱 Biochar, BiCRS, and the Shape of the Problem

Contrast that with biochar.

It emits some carbon during pyrolysis. It is less carbon efficient. On a spreadsheet, it will lose this fight.

But biochar also plugs into agriculture, soil health, water retention, fertilizer reduction, wastewater treatment, toxicity mitigation, even construction materials. It interacts with the living system rather than bypassing it.

This is where the polycrisis lens enters.

If climate is not merely a carbon accounting issue but part of a nested civilizational stress test—biodiversity collapse, soil degradation, chemical toxicity, geopolitical fragmentation, fragile food systems—then perhaps carbon removal should not be judged solely by atmospheric efficiency.

Perhaps the point is not just to bury carbon, but to repair systems.

And now we are no longer arguing about efficiency.

We are arguing about worldview.

📈 The Seduction of the Single Number

Markets like simplicity.

A ton is a ton.

Durability can be denominated in years.

Financial instruments can be built.

Liquidity can grow.

Conservative capital can enter.

This path could scale carbon removal dramatically.

But it requires abstraction. It requires compressing a complex ecological and social reality into a small set of tradeable characteristics. It assumes that lowering PPM is sufficient, or at least primary.

For some, that feels clean and powerful.

For others, it feels reductive and spiritually hollow.

If we commodify carbon removal, do we accelerate salvation… or reify the logic that created the crisis?

🔥 Productive Friction

The temptation is to pick a side.

But the episode resists that.

PPM-focused thinkers bring discipline, focus, and scale logic. Without them, carbon removal risks dissolving into holistic aspirations that never materialize into measurable impact.

Polycrisis thinkers bring humility and systems awareness. Without them, carbon removal risks becoming a sterile financial instrument detached from biospheric reality.

The friction between them is uncomfortable, but maybe necessary.

Each side prevents the other from going too far.

🧠 Listening to Your Reaction

One of the most important moments in this show is not about biochar or BiCRS at all. It’s the invitation to notice your gut reaction.

Does commodification feel exciting? Or does it feel “yucky”?

Does holistic integration feel inspiring? Or does it feel naive and impractical?

Those reactions matter.

Because this debate is not ultimately about feedstocks or pyrolysis temperatures. It’s about what kind of civilization we are trying to build on the other side of climate disruption.

Lowering PPM is enormous work.

Redesigning civilization is even bigger.

The real question may not be which is correct, but whether we are wise enough to let both approaches sharpen each other without collapsing into dogma.

Carbon efficiency is a metric. The polycrisis is a diagnosis.

The future likely requires grappling with both.

This is a summary of episode #386 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, wherever else you listen to podcasts, or right below this paragraph is the full show.

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🔹 Quick Takeaways

• Vocation is a calling, not a job—it answers who is calling as much as what you are called to do.

• Niggle’s art is not self-generated; it reflects a transcendent reality that exists beyond him.

• Most lives are divided between Parrish-work and Niggle-work—practical service and contemplative creation.

• Justice alone would condemn Niggle; mercy understands him.

• Intent matters more than outcome—especially when outcomes dissolve over time.

• Interruption is not the enemy of vocation; it is part of its test.

• Legacy is fragile—even the museum burns—but that does not invalidate the work.

• True creativity is participatory, not proprietary.

• Redemption involves role reversal—we become what we lacked in life.

• Spiritual maturity is a prerequisite for civilizational maturity.

• Art, policy, and climate work all fail without mercy at their core.

• Even if nothing remains, the work is still worth doing.

📝 Why the Tree Was Never His

Leaf by Niggle is often misread as a simple Christian morality tale: selfish artist learns to care about others. But Tolkien is doing something subtler… and much more demanding.

Niggle’s failure is real. He resents interruption. He prioritizes beauty over service. He is small, fussy, and incomplete. Justice sees all of this clearly. But mercy sees something else: that Niggle’s attention, however flawed, was oriented toward something true. His tree was not a fantasy or an indulgence. It was a partial glimpse of a reality that existed before him and would exist after him.

That distinction matters. Niggle is not creating beauty and vocation; he is responding to it.

The tragedy of his life is not that he failed to finish the painting, but that he believed it was something which could be finished.

🌿 Mercy as a Condition of Meaningful Work

Tolkien stages the moral trial not as a courtroom drama but as a metaphysical diagnosis. Justice catalogs Niggle’s selfishness accurately. Mercy does not deny it, but insists that intention, sacrifice, and responsiveness matter more than efficiency or outcome.

Niggle goes on the bike ride to fetch a doctor for Parrish’s wife knowing it may cost him his life’s work. He helps even when he suspects the help will prove unnecessary. He loses time for nothing. This is not strategic altruism. It is obedience to a call that interrupts his desires.

And that is precisely why mercy prevails.

🛠️ After Death, the Work Continues — Differently

In the afterlife, Niggle does not paint. He builds. Parish, the practical man, wanders and contemplates. Each grows into what they lacked. The tree, finally whole, reveals that Niggle’s work was never about possession or completion—only participation.

Even the single saved leaf, briefly admired by worldly men and then lost to fire, matters. Not because it endured, but because it testified.

This is the quiet radicalism of Tolkien’s vision: meaning does not require permanence.

The museum burns. Civilizations fall. Policies fail. What matters is whether the work aligned with something real—something larger than the worker.

🌌 Why This Still Matters Now

This episode lands as vocational because it refuses the modern lie that value is measured by scale, efficiency, or durability. Climate policy, carbon removal, art, and care all suffer when stripped of their spiritual dimension; when they become merely instrumental.

Niggle’s tree will outlast him whether he paints it or not. His calling was simply to notice it, to serve it imperfectly, and to offer what he could.

That is not escapism.

It is realism about finitude.

The episode closes where it began: with gratitude, humility, and the invitation to listen for what is calling you—even if the leaf is small, the interruption costly, and the museum destined to burn.

That, Tolkien suggests, is still enough.

This is a summary of episode #385 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, all of the other apps, and right below this paragraph.

🔹 Quick Takeaways

• The climate crisis may not be a singular crisis but a polycrisis of climate, biodiversity, inequality, geopolitics, AI, and governance failures.

• Most global problems share the same structure: multipolar traps, prisoner’s dilemmas, and tragedies of the commons.

• Meditation didn’t make Eugene more optimistic—it made him more honest.

• Systemic change is about changing dynamics, not accelerating with the same tools.

• Helping people “get climate jobs” is insufficient at civilizational scale.

• Leadership beats placement—change comes from coordinated actors, not isolated hires.

• Regenerative economics isn’t ideology—it’s a property a system must have to grow and be stable.

• Natural systems model successful economies better than modern markets do.

• Technology innovation alone is like building “bigger bacteria” rather than an elephant.

• What actually needs innovation is economic architecture: ownership, governance, finance, coordination.

• Collapse is likely—the question is how many times it happens.

• Hope doesn’t require believing collapse won’t happen.

• The work is about making what comes after healthier—and sooner.

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📝 Working After Certainty Is Gone

This episode begins where many climate conversations quietly end: after the optimism breaks.

Kirpichov doesn’t arrive at regenerative economics through hope, but through acceptance. Meditation didn’t soothe the reality of the polycrisis—it gave him the capacity to sit with it long enough to see it clearly. The way he sees it, climate change alone is not the threat; it’s the convergence of failures across every system modern civilization depends on, all locked into arms-race dynamics where prisoner’s dilemma defections are rewarded and cooperation is punished.

The result is grim but clarifying: no single technological acceleration can solve this, because every domain is constrained by the same underlying structure. We aren’t failing because we’re too slow. We’re failing because the system is wired to fail.

That realization forces a reframe. Work on Climate, originally designed to help people transition into climate jobs, confronts the uncomfortable truth that job placement does not change system behavior. You can’t throw the rabbit harder and expect it to fly. What’s required instead is leadership—people who can act within institutions, reshape incentives, coordinate across sectors, and push on leverage points simultaneously.

🌱 Regenerative Economics as a Survival Property

Kirpichov is careful to demystify regenerative economics. It isn’t a utopian blueprint or a return-to-the-land fantasy. It’s a necessary property: any economy that degrades the systems it depends on will eventually collapse. There is no alternative equilibrium.

The insight that grounds this vision comes from biology, not ideology. Cells, bodies, forests: these are all economies. They exchange resources and signals in ways that strengthen the whole over time. The striking contrast isn’t that nature is gentle, but that it is durable. Fifty-million-year-old rainforests outperform modern markets on the only metric that ultimately matters: persistence.

From this perspective, most climate-tech innovation looks misdirected. It’s optimization within a failing topology. Bigger batteries, faster models, smarter markets—all useful, but insufficient. True phase changes happen when the level of organization increases: single cells become multicellular organisms; organisms form ecosystems.

The economic analogue isn’t better firms—it’s better forms: ownership structures, governance models, financing stacks, coordination mechanisms. That’s where regenerative economics actually lives.

🔧 Why Collapse Doesn’t End the Story

One of the episode’s most bracing moments is Kirpichov’s calm acceptance that collapse is likely. Not as nihilism, but as historical realism. Civilizations fall. Complexity contracts. What matters is whether something healthier grows afterward and whether we can shorten the cycle.

This is where his hope resides. Unlike natural evolution, human systems can be redesigned intentionally. Even if the first collapse is unavoidable, the work now can reduce how many times we repeat it. Regenerative structures that survive stress, resist capture, and outcompete extractive systems don’t need moral purity—they need to win without becoming what they replace.

That tension between realism and aspiration, between woo and suits, between structure and spirit, runs through the entire conversation. Spiritual change matters, but it cannot survive hostile systems alone. Structure shapes behavior more reliably than virtue.

The task, then, isn’t to save the world in its current form.

It’s to build the scaffolding for what comes next… and to do it before the ashes cool.

This is a recap of episode #384 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you enjoy your shows. You can also listen to it in full below.

🔹 Quick Takeaways

• Graphyte treats carbon removal as infrastructure, not innovation theater.

• Carbon casting prioritizes carbon efficiency over co-benefits.

• Low CapEx and modularity enable real project finance, not just venture funding.

• A 50,000-ton module costing ~$10–15M is financeable today—that’s the point.

• Carbon efficiency beats ecosystem co-benefits in a net-removals framework with major storytelling ramifications.

• Delivery now matters more than theoretical scale later, at least to some.

• Simplicity de-risks both technology and capital.

• Graphyte’s projects are already near project-level profitability.

• Project SPVs, not TopCo bundling, are key to lowering cost of capital.

• Community acceptance comes from familiarity: “this is just reverse mining.”

• Biomass scarcity is a future problem—today it’s literally going up in smoke.

• One of the biggest risks to CDR isn’t tech—it’s mismatched capital structures.

📝 Carbon Removal Without the Footnotes

This episode is unusual because it strips carbon removal of its usual mystique. There’s no grand new chemistry, no speculative future breakthrough. Instead, Graphyte presents carbon removal as a logistics and finance problem; one that can be solved now by being relentlessly pragmatic.

Carbon casting takes waste biomass, dries it, compresses it into bricks, encapsulates it in a durable polymer, and stores it underground or above ground. That’s it. No regeneration cycles. No delicate catalysts. No dependency on cheap clean power. Photosynthesis does the capture; engineering does the storage.

What makes this approach controversial is not its feasibility, but its values. Graphyte explicitly optimizes for carbon efficiency—how much of the carbon in biomass ends up permanently removed—even when that means forgoing agricultural co-benefits or ecosystem services that other biomass pathways like biochar emphasize. In their framing, climate change is the problem to solve. Everything else is secondary.

🧱 Why Capital Structure Is the Real Technology

Much of the conversation revolves around a quiet but decisive insight: carbon removal will not scale on venture capital logic. You cannot finance manufacturing facilities with exponential-growth expectations. Atoms don’t scale like software.

Graphyte’s response is to design for project finance from the start. Small, repeatable modules. Conservative assumptions. Early third-party engineering validation. Separate project SPVs beneath a TopCo. The result is something rare in the sector: facilities that can plausibly raise debt.

This is why simplicity matters. A financier doesn’t want to underwrite unproven chemistry, complex LCAs, or heroic operational assumptions. They want something that looks like infrastructure—because it is. Graphyte’s low energy demand, modest CapEx, and modularity make it legible to capital that actually builds things.

The comparison Ross draws to Nintendo is revealing. Graphyte isn’t trying to win on technological flash. It’s using well-understood components, deploying them efficiently, and delivering tons today—not promising millions tomorrow.

🌍 Delivery Beats Elegance

A recurring theme is time. A ton removed in 2025 may matter more than one removed in 2035. Many CDR pathways may eventually outperform carbon casting on cost or scale—but they don’t exist at that scale yet. Graphyte does. And its scale doesn’t come from building facilities at greater and greater sizes, but upon simple modular tech that can be easily distributed.

This immediacy also reframes concerns about biomass scarcity. In theory, biomass could become a contested resource. In practice, vast quantities are currently burned or left to decompose, emitting CO₂ and methane anyway. Until that changes, the constraint is not availability but willingness to act.

Community acceptance reinforces this point. Rather than resistance, Graphyte often encounters recognition: mining regions understand excavation. Filling holes instead of digging them makes intuitive sense. “Reverse mining” resonates in a way abstract climate narratives often don’t.

⚖️ The Tradeoff the Industry Avoids Naming

The episode doesn’t pretend carbon casting is perfect. It acknowledges tradeoffs openly: fewer co-benefits, dependence on voluntary markets, sensitivity to policy shifts. But the core argument is that clarity beats optionality.

Graphyte chooses a narrow objective—net carbon removal—and designs everything around it: technology, finance, siting, storytelling. In a sector crowded with complexity, that linearity becomes an advantage.

The implicit challenge to the industry is uncomfortable but necessary:

If the goal is to lower atmospheric CO₂ quickly, are we optimizing for the right things?

This is a summary of episode #383 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast, “The Biochar Company Owned by a Data Center Company Owned by Private Equity—w/ Alastair Collier, A Healthier Earth”. You can listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you enjoy your shows. You can also listen to the full episode right below this text.

🔹 Quick Takeaways

• Carbon removal is infrastructure, not software—atoms don’t scale like bits, and venture logic can break quickly.

• Private equity cares about unlevered yield, not vision decks—slide two should explain how the project makes money.

• Biochar may work for PE because it fits capital deployment constraints—DAC is too uncertain, BECCS too large, weathering too diffuse.

• Demand quality matters more than policy ambition: long-term commercial offtakes beat politically contingent revenue.

• Insetting is not a silver bullet—accounting boundaries make it far harder than founders assume.

• Repeatability beats creativity. PE wants cookie-cutter projects, not bespoke climate art.

• $5M is a ticket size dead zone—too big for angels, too small for institutions.

• Most founders are optimizing for the wrong capital—VC return profiles don’t match project economics.

• Infrastructure investors fund discipline, not optimism—being early, late, under- or over-budget are all failures.

• You don’t “sell your company”; you enable infrastructure to exist. Ownership follows capital reality, not founder mythology.

📝 Carbon Removal After the Startup Illusion

The central claim of the episode is simple and unsettling: most carbon removal founders are telling a story that no serious capital provider believes. Venture capital logic—fast scaling, exponential upside, deferred profitability—works when you’re moving information. It often collapses when you’re moving biomass, concrete, steel, and heat.

Collier’s experience inside private equity exposes the mismatch. Infrastructure investors don’t ask how big the market could be; they ask whether a specific project generates predictable cash flows over 15 years. They want contracted revenues, conservative assumptions, and unit economics that survive stress; not narratives about saving the world.

That difference explains why biochar emerged as viable for PE. Not because it’s morally superior, but because it fits capital deployment realities: project sizes in the tens of millions, multiple revenue streams, and timelines that match infrastructure horizons. Other carbon removal pathways may be technically promising, but they miss the financial window these investors operate within.

🧱 Why Venture Capital Keeps Failing This Sector

Collier is blunt about VC mismatch. A 30% IRR return hurdle makes sense for software; it might be fatal for biochar plants. Worse, early VC-backed pilots often introduce risks—unproven feedstocks, weak contracts, bespoke designs—that later scare away institutional capital entirely.

The result is a graveyard of “successful” demos that can’t scale. Not because they failed, but because they succeeded the wrong way.

Private equity works differently. It demands boring competence: repeatable designs, standardized contracts, credible counterparties, and management teams that hit timelines precisely. Creativity lives in the appendix. The front of the deck is cash flow.

This is why Collier insists founders stop calling themselves startups. You’re building infrastructure, and infrastructure belongs to those who finance it. The tradeoff isn’t purity versus corruption; it’s existence versus irrelevance.

🏗️ The Real Bottleneck Isn’t Money

One of the episode’s most counterintuitive points is that capital is not scarce. Collier describes multiple institutions willing to deploy $50–150M into biochar today—if only they could find projects that meet their criteria. The gap isn’t interest; it’s translation.

Founders pitch biochar’s benefits. Investors want to know who buys the output, under what contract, at what price, with what downside protection. The mismatch is cultural as much as financial. Climate founders optimize for inspiration; infrastructure investors optimize for survival.

The lesson is uncomfortable but clear: carbon removal will scale only when its builders stop trying to sound visionary — and start sounding boring.

That may be tragic for the startup mythology that grew out of software eating the world.

But it might be excellent news for actually pulling carbon out of the atmosphere.

This is a summary of episode #382 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast, hosted by me, Ross Kenyon. It is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your shows. The video version of the show is also uploaded right below this if you prefer to listen in here.

There’s also bonus content from this episode on Spotify for paid subscribers.

🔹 Quick Takeaways

• Enhanced rock weathering is already path-dependent—early assumptions are shaping investment, research, and markets.

• Silicates dominate the field for narrative reasons as much as scientific ones.

• Carbonates can remove CO₂ under some circumstances, but have been sidelined without enough scientific justification.

• A single conservative IPCC assumption from the 1990s mattered enormously—even if it was reasonable at the time and a good faith conservative placeholder.

• System boundaries drive conclusions—what “counts” depends on what you choose to measure.

• Silicates offer a cleaner story—no carbon in the rock, no risk of emitting fossil carbon.

• Carbonates weather much faster, but their embedded carbon complicates accounting.

• Additionality is harder to sell when a practice already exists as agliming—even if it’s accidentally removing CO₂.

• Good projects can be excluded by design choices made long ago even when new science and approaches emerge

• Policy may be necessary, but not neutral—subsidies and rules and what counts as settled science can create new path dependencies of their own.

📝 How a Field Chooses Its Story

The episode is less about rocks than about how scientific fields quietly converge around narratives. Kukla frames enhanced rock weathering through path dependence: once a field commits to a story that is simple, defensible, and legible to outsiders, alternatives face an uphill battle—even when evidence suggests they’re worth exploring.

Silicates won early not because carbonates don’t work, but because silicates fit a compelling frame. They align cleanly with the “natural thermostat” story: over geologic time, silicate weathering has regulated Earth’s climate. Speed it up, and you get carbon removal. Carbonates complicate that picture. Not because they’re ineffective, but because on long timescales their net effect cancels out.

That distinction matters scientifically. But it matters even more narratively. “We’re accelerating Earth’s thermostat” is an elegant sentence. Carbonates require footnotes.

🧱 When Conservatism Becomes Destiny

One of the most striking moments in the conversation is how much weight Kukla places on an IPCC methodological decision from 1996. Faced with uncertainty, the IPCC assumed—conservatively and for responsible reasons—that all carbon in applied carbonate rock would be emitted. That assumption made sense for emissions accounting. It was careful. Restrained.

But it echoed. It shaped how enhanced weathering was first explained, funded, and legitimized decades later.

Silicate proponents could say: we avoid those emissions entirely. And even after the science became more nuanced, the story had already stuck. Early choices didn’t just guide the field—they narrowed it.

This isn’t a tale of incompetence or malice. It’s a reminder that reasonable decisions under uncertainty can harden into structural constraints long after their context has changed.

🧪 Measurement, Markets, and Missed Possibilities

Kukla repeatedly returns to a subtle but crucial point: carbon removal markets reward what can be cleanly measured, not necessarily what works best. Carbonates struggle here. Their signal can be noisy. Their additionality can be contested. Their effects depend heavily on soil chemistry, rainfall, and system boundaries.

As a result, potentially valuable projects may never be built, not because they fail scientifically, but because they don’t fit the accounting scaffolding we’ve erected. That scaffolding is now intertwined with venture capital, registries, and political economy. Changing it later will be hard.

Policy mechanisms could help—subsidies, pay-for-practice models, public procurement—but Kukla is careful not to treat them as a panacea. Policy expands what’s possible, but it also creates new defaults, new incentives, and new lock-ins.

🧭 Why This Conversation Matters

What makes the episode compelling is its refusal to declare winners. Kukla doesn’t argue for carbonates over silicates. He argues against premature closure. Against mistaking a good story for a complete one.

Enhanced rock weathering is still young enough that its future isn’t fixed, but only if the field is willing to question its own narratives. That requires humility, flexibility, and a tolerance for complexity that markets don’t naturally reward.

The risk isn’t choosing the wrong rock.

It’s choosing the right one too early and never looking back.

Beyond the binary

“Scientists document problems,” he said, dismissive. “We need solutions. Scientists just keep documenting how the world is getting more polluted. That’s not useful. I’m putting you on policy work instead.”

She was disappointed. She’d wanted to do scientific work. But his limiting cynicism stuck with her, even as she disagreed with it. Of course documenting climate change is essential. Proving CO2 concentrations are rising, modeling impacts, measuring decline; that’s all necessary work. It’s just not what she wanted to do.

She wanted to be closer to solutions.

After I published my piece about field engineering at Rainbow, Ludo suggested I speak with Erica, who leads Rainbow’s science team. She had mixed feelings about the article. The overall thesis resonated: carbon markets do need practical, operational thinking alongside scientific rigor. Rainbow does take an engineering-first approach in many ways. But something about how I’d characterized scientists and her work as Science lead at Rainbow made her uncomfortable.

“It made me worry readers might think nobody at Rainbow understands what researchers really do,” she said with concern.

Fair point. I’d leaned into a binary that felt clarifying but maybe wasn’t quite right. So I asked Erica to help me understand what I’d missed. What do scientists actually do in carbon removal, and how is it different from the academic stereotype I’d invoked?

What she told me complicated the story in useful ways.

Scientists aren’t just academics

Being a scientist is more of a skillset than a job category.

Yes, “scientist” often conjures images of academic researchers—people in labs, publishing papers, working on narrow thesis topics for years. That is a huge category where many scientists reside. But even within academia, there’s enormous variation. Some scientists are highly theoretical. Others are intensely applied.

“One of my good friends during his PhD spent three quarters of his work creating a piece of measurement equipment,” Erica said. “To be able to measure what he wanted to measure. So yes, it was a PhD, but it was very applied.”

Her own PhD was in environmental science, doing life cycle assessments of urban farms. “On the one hand it looked like the work of a consultant: going to different farms, setting up their data collection procedures, analyzing their LCAs. That didn’t really look like the work of a scientist. But then I analyzed the data, interpreted it, and published it in the same way that a scientist would.”

This reminded me of something I’d seen recently. I’d been on a sailing research trip from Seattle to San Francisco with a bunch of University of Washington oceanographers. They were running experiments and deploying equipment in the open ocean. And I watched several of these university scientists with wrenches in their hands, trying to make sure the gear actually worked when we put it in the water.

Where does the line between engineering and science go when a scientist has a wrench in their hand?

“You start glitching,” Erica joked. “The categories break down.”

Skills vs. topics: What makes someone a scientist

The more important distinction, Erica argued, isn’t between scientists and engineers as personality types or career paths. It’s between research skills and technical topics.

“People naturally expect that when you do a PhD, your thesis topic is your value,” she said. “Like, I’m an urban agriculture expert because that’s what my PhD was on. But that’s not really it. The topic versus the skills… the skills part is so much more transferable.”

This matters enormously for scientists considering moves into carbon removal or other commercial roles.

She gave an example: an oceanographer who wants to work on ocean alkalinity enhancement instead of paleoceanography. “Those are just different topics. You don’t have to be a scientist to learn about how enhanced rock weathering works. But you do have to be a scientist and apply scientific skills to do research on those topics. Once you develop those skills, you can do research on all different kinds of topics.”

At Rainbow, Erica is the science lead. People assume her expertise is in the technical details of various carbon removal pathways. And that is absolutely true. But that’s not really what makes her well-equipped for the role.

“Our engineers have plenty of technical training,” she said. “They took the same introductory science courses I did. They have just as much capacity to understand the underlying principles from chemistry and physics as I do. It’s not being a scientist that makes me particularly equipped to understand enhanced rock weathering or pyrolysis chemistry. Being a scientist is more about the research skills than the topic. We are trained to learn deeply and fast. But both engineers and scientists have the same potential to understand these topics.”

This is the distinction I’d partially missed in my first piece. I’d presented scientific thinking as inherently slower, more theoretical, more removed from implementation. But what Erica was describing was something different: scientists who’d developed research skills in academic settings and then chosen to apply those skills closer to real-world deployment.

Not because they stopped being scientists. Because they wanted to and deeply understand things and change things, not just document them.

How science and engineering work at Rainbow

So what does Erica actually do as Rainbow’s Science lead? And how does that relate to the field engineering work I’d written about?

“At Rainbow, the science side sets the requirements,” she explained. “The operations and certification team bridges those requirements with what project developers can actually provide as proof or data. They help project developers prove that they meet the requirements we set.”

In other words: science sets the floor. The minimum standards. Then the certification team (where our beloved engineers work) supports projects that meet that floor, working within a pretty wide range of approaches as long as they clear the threshold.

This is where I’d maybe gotten something important right, even if I’d framed it too starkly. The engineering mindset does focus on making things work within constraints. The scientific mindset does focus on setting rigorous standards. Both are essential. The question is where the productive tension lives. Erica here is helping me move the acceptable lines by coaching me through this tension

And here’s where Erica complicated my thesis further: “There’s not so much friction or tension between the engineering and science teams at Rainbow. We’re rather aligned on quality being most important. The engineering operations team defers to us if we say this is our requirement. They’re happy to make that happen.”

So where does the tension actually occur?

“Between the project developers and the operations team,” she said. “In the chain of science to operations to project developers, the tension occurs between the last two rather than between us internally.”

This makes sense. Rainbow’s internal teams—both science and engineering—are aligned around maintaining high standards. They’re not at odds with each other. The friction happens when project developers struggle with requirements, or when they can’t meet standards, or when they compare Rainbow’s requirements to other registries that might allow more flexibility.

“Sometimes project developers tell us, ‘But at the other registry they allowed me to do this,’” Erica said. “And we say, ‘We’re not going to lower our standards. We’re not starting a race to the bottom.’”

The scientists aren’t the slow ones here. The engineers aren’t the fast-and-loose ones. They’re aligned. The tension is structural—between what rigorous certification requires and what project developers can easily provide.

Avoiding the race to the bottom dynamic

But what struck me about Erica’s description was how Rainbow handles it when this friction arises. Not through science vs. engineering conflict, but through what she called a “customer oriented mindset.”

“When project developers and our operations team have this tension, it’s not like, ‘Well, you just have to meet it,’” she said. “It’s like, ‘Okay, I know it’s scary. Hold my hand and we’ll figure it out.’ Sometimes that even goes all the way up to the science team, where I go dig something up if I don’t have the answer right away.”

She gave an example: Rainbow’s biochar methodology requires tracking where every unit of biochar ends up to prove it actually gets put into soil or concrete. It’s a strict requirement they knew would be harder for projects to comply with. But they also knew they couldn’t compromise on traceability.

“We wrote the requirement without knowing exactly how project developers would comply with it or what kind of proof they could give,” Erica said. When the certification team went to use it, there was tension. Project developers, who were already operating, didn’t know how to prove they met it.

“The certification team came back to us and asked, ‘How are we supposed to do this?’ We said, ‘Figure out what the project developer already tracks and records, where the gaps are, and how hard it would be to add data collection to close them.’”

That approach played out with one biochar project in Kenya delivering to 300 farmers per year. The project was using informal record-keeping that Rainbow didn’t consider sufficient, given the risk of biochar being used for energy rather than soil application. They worked together to land on a photo documentation system that satisfied everyone, and the traceability standards on which Rainbow holds firm.

This is the messy reality of building rigorous carbon markets—requirements that are scientifically necessary but operationally challenging. Science that has to work in the real world. Engineering that has to maintain integrity while helping projects move forward.

Not as a binary. As a collaboration. And sometimes the race to the bottom can be solved by a serious investment in obsessive customer success.

What I got right and what I missed

Looking back at my original piece, I think I got something important right: carbon markets do need operational, practical thinking. They need people who understand how facilities actually run, who can translate methodology requirements into implementable processes, who can help project developers navigate complexity.

Rainbow does embody an engineering-first culture in many ways. That’s real and valuable.

But I framed it as more of a binary than it actually is. Scientists vs. engineers. Slow vs. fast. Theoretical vs. practical.

The reality is messier and more interesting. Many scientists in carbon removal—including ones working at registries—aren’t the stereotypical academic researchers I invoked. They’ve made deliberate choices to work closer to implementation. They’ve developed research skills that transfer across topics. They care deeply about moving quickly and maintaining quality.

And the real tensions in carbon markets often aren’t between science and engineering teams internally. Those teams tend to be aligned around quality. The tensions are structural: between rigorous requirements and what’s operationally feasible for project developers. Between methodology boundaries and market demand. Between moving fast and not getting Guardianed.

Erica helped me see that the work of building carbon markets isn’t about choosing between scientific rigor and engineering practicality. It’s about holding both. Setting high floors and then helping people reach them. Maintaining standards while providing support. Being aligned internally so you can handle external pressures together.

Scientists in carbon removal get that. They’re not just documenting the decline. They’re building the systems that might reverse it.

Even if they have to figure out biochar tracking requirements along the way.

This is a summary of episode #381 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast, hosted by Ross Kenyon. You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you enjoy your podcasts.

🔹 Quick Takeaways

• Carbon removal is past its “false peak”—early momentum made the climb look easier than it is. The real mountain is only now visible. Or is it? Are there just sequential stacks of false peaks?!

• Policy progress is real but mistimed. Governments are moving, but not fast enough to meet startups’ near-term survival needs.

• The central bottleneck is demand, not supply— plenty of capital, talent, and technology exists if someone credible will buy the output.

• Voluntary markets were a miracle, not a solution— they proved concept, but will never scale the industry alone.

• Carbon removal is a public good: without government signaling or obligation, the market won’t clear.

• Advance market commitments (AMCs) are the missing bridge, not necessarily one big pool, but clear, bankable signals that demand will exist.

• “Staying alive” is the wrong goal. Building a real commercial-scale project is what separates survivors from hope-casters.

• AI demand is coincidence, not destiny. Tech companies buying removal isn’t structural, just fortunate alignment.

• Protectionism is real and unavoidable—countries want projects, jobs, and ownership at home, even if it’s more expensive.

• Carbon removal won’t scale on climate math alone — it must align with jobs, affordability, energy, and economic development.

📝 After the False Peak

Early carbon removal optimism assumed a familiar arc: innovation → voluntary demand → scale → policy reinforcement. What Deich describes instead is something messier. The field didn’t stall because the tech failed or the science was wrong. It stalled because there is no natural customer for negative emissions.

Carbon removal works precisely because its benefits are diffuse, global, and long-term. Which also means no individual actor has a strong incentive to pay for it at scale. The voluntary market was never a solution—it was a proof-of-life. A strange, improbable one. The fact that companies paid hundreds of dollars per ton at all still borders on the miraculous.

But miracles don’t build industries.

Deich is clear: if carbon removal is going to exist at industrial scale, governments must signal demand before it exists, not after. That signal doesn’t have to be a single global fund. It can take many forms: tax credits, ETS integration, contracts for difference, guarantees, etc. What matters is credibility. Builders need to know that if they construct something expensive, slow, and politically exposed, someone will be there to buy it.

🏗️ Projects, Not Hope

A recurring theme in the conversation is impatience with what Deich sees as the wrong survival instinct. The frame of “just stay alive until policy shows up” is comforting… and dangerous. It produces slide decks instead of steel; pilots instead of plants.

The companies that matter, he argues, will be the ones that build first: commercial-scale projects that generate data, reveal costs, and establish learning curves. Those projects don’t just remove carbon. They make the future legible. They allow investors, policymakers, and buyers to point to something concrete and say: this works.

Without that, everything else is narrative.

This is where protectionism enters the picture. Countries want carbon removal to do multiple jobs at once: climate mitigation, economic development, industrial strategy, political optics. That means free trade purity is unlikely. Carbon removal may specialize geographically—innovation in one place, deployment in another—but national interests will shape where money flows and who benefits.

🕯️ Why This Is Still Worth Doing

Deich doesn’t pretend this is easy, fast, or elegant. He treats carbon removal as what it is: a hard public-goods problem unfolding in a fragmented, protectionist, impatient world.

And yet, he remains cautiously optimistic. Not because the market is working, but because people keep showing up anyway. Builders keep building. Policymakers keep experimenting. The field keeps inching forward, one project at a time.

Carbon removal may never be glamorous. It may never have a clean product-market fit. But if society decides it wants to reverse climate change then this is the work.

This is a summary of episode #380 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen to the episode in its entirety on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you enjoy your shows.

Also, here’s the full show in video format above.

If you want to hear the episode with Charles C. Mann, it is below.

If you’d like to hear the episode with Paul Kingsnorth, it is right below this text.

🔹 Quick Takeaways

• Environmentalism is split by a deep philosophical divide between faith in technological progress (the Wizard) and skepticism rooted in limits, meaning, and restraint (the Prophet).

• Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance represents the Wizard case: build faster, innovate more, remove bottlenecks, and trust progress.

• Paul Kingsnorth embodies the Prophet stance, warning that endless growth corrodes meaning, culture, spirituality, and human belonging.

• Technology is not neutral: it carries values, shapes behavior, and quietly defines what kinds of lives feel possible.

• Creative destruction cuts both ways, generating material abundance and new polities while also eroding social bonds, traditions, and shared narratives. This can be good if you enjoy how industrialization led to the emancipation of the serfs, or bad if you look to what globalization did to Rust Belt America.

• Climate work forces a wager: accept emissions now for theoretical reductions later, or insist on limits today at the risk of stagnation and a dangerous status quo.

• AI intensifies the Wizard–Prophet conflict, raising existential questions about control, mortality, and what it means to be human.

• Modern culture defaults to Wizard logic: optimism, scale, speed, and engineering are treated as moral goods.

• Prophetic critiques feel alien because they question progress itself not just its distribution or governance.

• The tension is irresolvable—and may need to remain so.

📝 Two Ways of Being Human

At the heart of this episode is a deceptively simple question: What kind of beings are we meant to be? The climate debate, Ross argues, is downstream of a much older philosophical and theological struggle, one that Charles C. Mann memorably framed as the Wizard and the Prophet.

The Wizard looks at history’s upward curve—life expectancy, wealth, knowledge, power—and projects it forward. Yes, problems exist, but technology created prosperity and can correct its own excesses. Abundance is not naïve optimism; it’s a moral obligation to build a world where suffering is optional.

The Prophet looks at the same curve and recoils. Growth looks less like liberation and more like alienation. More power, fewer limits, and deeper abstraction pull us away from place, community, mortality, and meaning. For the Prophet, the problem isn’t distribution or governance so much as its overall direction.

Neither position is easily dismissed. And neither has ever permanently won.

⚙️ Abundance vs. Limits

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance channels the Wizard impulse with clarity and urgency. America once built boldly; now it litigates, delays, and vetoes itself into scarcity. Housing, energy, transit, healthcare all suffer from a culture that confuses procedural caution with moral seriousness. If climate change is real, then slowing innovation is not neutral. It is harmful.

Paul Kingsnorth’s response is deeper and darker. He doesn’t deny that abundance can ever solve problems. He questions whether the kind of world abundance produces is one humans are meant to inhabit. Technology’s great promise—mastery over nature, death, distance, and scarcity—begins to resemble hubris. Not just ecological hubris, but spiritual overreach.

Kingsnorth’s critique widens beyond climate into AI, capitalism, and transhumanism. What happens when tools no longer serve human ends, but quietly redefine them? When optimization replaces wisdom? When immortality becomes a product, not a mystery?

🕯️ Why the Argument Won’t End

Ross doesn’t pretend to resolve the conflict. In fact, the episode’s thrust comes from its refusal to do so. The Wizard is right: it’s too late to walk away from modernity. Climate stabilization requires massive technological deployment. Returning to Hobbiton now means facing a climate Scouring of the Shire.

But the Prophet is right too: some technologies don’t just solve problems—they change who we are. AI, in particular, raises stakes that abundance frameworks struggle to contain. If progress threatens to outrun human judgment, then speed itself becomes dangerous.

The episode closes not with synthesis, but with recognition. This argument isn’t a policy dispute. It’s a civilizational one. Wizards and Prophets will keep talking past each other because they are answering different questions.

One asks, What can we build?

The other asks, Who should we be?

And climate change ensures we can no longer avoid either.