I did something I have not done before: I rereleased an old episode of Reversing Climate Change. You can listen to this rerelease on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you get your podcasts, or the entire episode in full right below this paragraph.

Lately, it seems it’s been all about Charles C. Mann. Wizards and prophets as a conceptual schema keeps coming up. Over and over. His split between the wizards, who think that progress and technology will continue to solve more problems than they create, and prophets, those who think we’re beyond limits and need to find balance, order, and simplicity, is applicable to so much in climate and environmentalism. In fact, I did a whole monologue show about how his framework helps us make sense of splits over things like Ezra Klein’s Abundance and Paul Kingsnorth’s entire corpus.

And it also recently came up in the episode I did on science fiction and literary theory…

I am going to continue experiment with rereleasing some of the excellent old content buried in this catalogue. The ones that might still be relevant and add some modest value to your life.

I hope you enjoy the quaint strut down memory lane, with the old Nori branding no less!

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Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Hello, this is Ross Kenyon, host of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m not sure I’ve ever done this before: I’m re-releasing an old episode. There are so many great episodes buried in the catalog — including bonus episodes, there are probably the better part of 500 of them on Reversing Climate Change — including some of the ones that have influenced the show the most.

Recently, Charles C. Mann’s taxonomy of wizard and prophet has come up on several shows. It’s such a great shorthand for understanding some of the big disagreements in climate politics and environmentalism. I recently did a monologue episode where I contrasted Ezra Klein with Paul Kingsnorth and discussed the abundance paradigm as paradigmatic of being a wizard, and I contrasted it with Paul Kingsnorth’s prophet status.

Sometimes I’ll be catching up with someone and they’ll ask me, “Hey, did you ever read 1491?” And I try not to pat myself on the back too much, but I’ll say, “Well, since you mention it, Charles was on the show once upon a time, and I was so happy to get him, because he’s a wonderful writer and has taught me a lot.” This happened with a friend recently, and if she didn’t know this episode existed, I suspect there are probably a lot of great episodes that should be resurfaced in this way.

In any case, enjoy this time capsule. You’ll hear all of the old Nori branding for the podcast — this used to be a project of a company I co-founded called Nori. Don’t let that distract you; it’s the same show. There have been a lot of new listeners since. But whatever — enjoy the show. Take this walk down memory lane with me, and enjoy this episode with Charles C. Mann.

Ross Kenyon: Hello, and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. Today I have with me Charles C. Mann, journalist and author of 1491, 1493, and The Wizard and the Prophet. He’s also a correspondent for The Atlantic, Wired, and Science. Thanks for being here, Charles.

Charles C. Mann: It’s my pleasure.

Ross Kenyon: Your work comes up all the time, and we recently did a Nori Patreon book club for The Wizard and the Prophet for the month of April. It generated a lot of discussion and debate. I think this is a great book, and a great way to frame various schools of thought within the environmental movement. Why don’t you give us a nice baseline here: what exactly are these camps? Who are the avatars of each that you feature in the book, and how are you conceptualizing the split?

Charles C. Mann: Basically, I’m a journalist, as you said, and I’ve been reporting on environmental issues since the late 1980s — talking to activists, politicians, and above all, researchers. Over time, I came to realize that the answers I was getting to my questions fell into two broad camps. Not always, but generally, and I thought of them as wizards and prophets. Wizards essentially are the people who want what’s disparagingly called the techno-fix. Their argument is, “Look, we have these technical challenges from the things we want to do and the growth of our economies, and so what we need to do is switch on the science-and-technology machine and essentially produce our way out of our dilemmas.” The prophets, on the other hand, say, “That’s completely wrong. That’s exactly the wrong direction. It’s doing more of what’s gotten us into trouble in the past, and what we need to do is conserve and radically cut back and reduce the human footprint.”

And a while ago, it suddenly dawned on me that these two approaches were kind of the opposite of each other, and that many of the conflicts I saw — both within the environmental movement and between the environmental movement and society — were expressions of the conflict between wizards and prophets. And I thought, “Geez, I’d really like to read something about that.” And then I didn’t find it, so I decided, well, okay, I’ll try to do it, since nobody else is.

Ross Kenyon: And I think you do a very good job of being fair to both of these camps, because they each have a part of the puzzle. Depending on the issue or the application within environmental concerns, you might find yourself leaning one way or the other. I think you do a very good job of steelmanning for the listener — the opposite of strawmanning. You treat both of these schools of thought maybe even more fairly than you had to in order to write this book.

Charles C. Mann: Well, thank you very much. I think it’s important, and the reason is that relatively soon in my research, it dawned on me that these differences were not just pragmatic differences about how you do this or that — they expressed values. And they’re values that everybody shares, in one proportion or another; we just give different weights to them. So typically, prophets value community and the idea that we’re all part of nature, that we’re embedded in this much, much larger system in which we should play our assigned role. And the wizards, on the contrary, are much more about individual liberty and freedom — the idea of maximizing human potential and people living in the best possible way they can. And we all like both of these things in different amounts. It’s just that they come into conflict, and where you end up on which side of that conflict determines a lot about whether you’re appealed to by the wizards or the prophets.

Ross Kenyon: And in the book you use a very interesting framing device. I saw your book described as a joint biography, or some such. So you have these two avatars of these two ways of being and thinking. Who are they, and what, broadly, are their life arcs?

Charles C. Mann: Well, as I said, I’ve been a journalist for a long time, and over the years I realized I’d often heard this name, Norman Borlaug. People who I later came to think of as wizards would say, “I want to do for X what Borlaug did for wheat.” Norman Borlaug is the main figure in what’s called the Green Revolution, which is the mix of high-yielding hybrid seeds, high-intensity fertilizer, and high-volume irrigation that doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled global grain yields in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. It had a huge impact on our lives. One way of putting it is that as far back as historians can go, the majority of humankind has faced hunger at some point in the year. When I graduated from high school, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that between 40 and 60 percent of the world’s population was malnourished. Now those same people estimate it’s on the order of 8 to 10 percent. So you see this enormous, dramatic decline that the Green Revolution had a lot to do with. People saw that, and took a very powerful lesson from it: you switch on the science machine, and you can have this dramatic impact on life — and they hope they can do the same in whatever field they’re in. So that’s the reason for looking at Borlaug as this sort of prototypical wizard.

At about the same time, I realized that when I talked to especially older environmentalists, I’d hear this name occasionally that I’d certainly never heard in public discourse: a guy named William Vogt. Essentially, he put together the ideas behind the modern environmental movement. He wrote the first modern “we’re all going to hell” book, if you know what I mean — and that was back in 1948. It was called Road to Survival. If you read people like Jared Diamond, or Paul Ehrlich, or Bill McKibben to some extent, or Naomi Klein — all these kinds of people — their ideas directly trace back to William Vogt. And then I was fascinated to realize that they both got their ideas, which are diametrically opposed to each other, at the same time and in the same place: rural central Mexico, in the mid-1940s.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I bet the journalist in you loved that you found that nice little connection.

Charles C. Mann: Oh, absolutely. I was like, “Wait a minute. There’s a way you could actually tell this story — the two people got their ideas at the same place and time, met, had this immediate collision, and never spoke to each other again.”

Ross Kenyon: Wow. Yeah, I like that. Nice intersection. I’m trying to think — you just gave a great list of other people who may qualify as prophets that are currently operating. Who might be some of the great wizards? The first person who comes to mind is also an alumnus of this podcast: Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute. Do you think that’s fair? And who else might be in his company?

Charles C. Mann: Sure. There are lots of those kinds of people. Hans Rosling, the guy who wrote Factfulness, would probably be another. Jesse Ausubel; lots of people with Resources for the Future. And one of your guests, Ramez Naam — a good friend of mine — would certainly count as one; he’s told me so himself. You can find them all over. They’re the people boosting the idea of huge solar installations, huge wind installations; the people who want to do next-generation nukes; the people who argue — I think Emma Marris recently argued in Wired that GMOs are necessary to save nature. So that kind of approach is a wizard’s approach. And by the way, just by naming them, I’m not trying to single them out or criticize them. I’m just saying they’re exemplars of a kind of tendency that’s been around in the environmental movement since the very beginning. Norman Borlaug, the guy described as an agricultural scientist, also saw himself as an environmentalist, because he believed that intensifying production and having this much more, quote-unquote, “scientific method of agriculture” would lead to increased yields and fewer demands on nature — so you wouldn’t have hungry people going out into the forests and meadows and stripping them bare.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s my intention not to name and shame these people either, because I think it’s very useful in learning to split ideas into their various camps. I like that there’s a wizard and a prophet group, and that helps me really wrap my head around this in a clear way. If one of them clearly was right about 100 percent of everything, there would no longer be a dichotomy and this partition between them — one of them would’ve just concretely won, once and for all. So I think that means each of them has something to say here. That being said, when you create a nice partition and there are two broad schools of thought within an issue group, that’s just begging to be disrupted and complicated. So what are some of the complexities that might face such a divide?

Charles C. Mann: Well, first I should say that what I’m talking about is a kind of mental model, for how to sort things. There’s a famous expression that all models are wrong, but some are useful. So the first thing to stipulate is that there are tons of exceptions and caveats in this model. The question is: is it a useful way to break things down? I think it is. And one of the complexities is that, say, take Ted Nordhaus at the Breakthrough Institute. I think Ted would be appalled if any of this were taken as somehow meaning that his belief in technological solutions equals a lack of love of nature and a lack of respect for the natural world. And similarly, I think prophets who are, say, in favor of organic farming, embedding themselves in the community, are very upset at being taken for anti-science. There’s a guy just down the road — I live in a small town in Massachusetts, and just down the road from me is a small organic farm, and they regard themselves as highly scientific, because they see themselves as embedded in the ecosystems around them, and they’ve gone to considerable trouble to understand how these work. So one way to put it is that they both express different parts of a love of nature and different parts of a love of science.

Ross Kenyon: Okay, that’s useful. One of the other axes that seems like it might map onto wizards and prophets is: to what degree do you believe in economies of scale versus decentralization?

Charles C. Mann: Yes, that’s exactly it. The wizards typically — not always — look to centralized solutions and economies of scale. The prophets regard those as brittle, and tend to look for decentralized networks. And there’s a whole division about whether they are democratic or not.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, because I could definitely think of counterexamples too, especially with something like the potential of blockchain to be radically decentralizing in an important way. A lot of the people who are extremely wizardly about blockchains are also some of the strongest advocates I know against centralized institutions. That isn’t to say it breaks the model, just maybe—

Charles C. Mann: Well, take solar power, for example. There are sort of two models of solar power. One is gigantic installations. You hear this calculation: you cover X amount of the Arizona desert in solar panels, and that would be enough to power the entire country. And the idea is that on some level you should actually do that — we should have these huge places in the desert, pipe it around the country, and leave the rest for nature. And the prophets tend to viscerally react against that, because they see it as creating a kind of sacrifice zone. What they like is the idea of these immense networks of neighborhood solar — lots and lots of rooftop and small-scale installations, all networked together, passing power back and forth. They see that as under much more local control, much more decentralized, much more resilient in case of disaster. So you get an identical technology, the PV panel, thought of in two remarkably different ways.

Ross Kenyon: Another axis I’d like to plop on top of this and see if it maps at all: do you see it fitting along partisan lines, or even just political-philosophy lines? Or is it more complicated than that?

Charles C. Mann: Well, it’s a little bit. It’s certainly the case that at various times... For instance, as we speak, there’s a relatively recent, Michael Moore–produced documentary, Planet of the Humans—

Ross Kenyon: Oh, I saw this. Everyone’s been yelling about it, so let’s dig in.

Charles C. Mann: Yeah. Well, in my opinion, it’s not particularly good — let’s put it that way. But one of the things it does is it calls various environmentalists who have embraced larger-scale solutions — which are typically wizards — corporate sellouts, and the implication is that they’re sort of playing into the hands of the right and the capitalists. So there’s a kind of political gloss you can put on it. But I think at bottom it isn’t really like that, so much, because there are plenty of people on both sides who like the different values. Typically wizards are the ones who argue that technology will let everybody pack in together into these super-dense cities, where knowledge can be centralized and accumulated and passed on better, leaving the rest of the world for nature. And the prophets typically are small-town-type people, who like the idea of these smaller-scale communities and regard the mega-cities embraced by people like Ted at the Breakthrough Institute as kind of cesspools of corruption and inequality. And you’ll find people on the right and left on both sides of that debate.

Ross Kenyon: Absolutely. And when I think about this too, especially within the prophet camp, I can think of many conservatives I know, thinkers I like, who prefer much smaller institutions that are much more local. And I also know a lot of people who are more in the permaculture, small-farms movement, who very well might end up neighbors and agreed on that one thing, even though their lives may look very different.

Charles C. Mann: Yes. And one of the things I was pleased to see — it’s not really something I thought of when I first started — is that it occurred to me that if I looked at things from this viewpoint, I might get a little past a kind of partisan divide right now that has devolved into often a kind of score-keeping that isn’t really particularly useful.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. When you say something like that, it reminds me of — I think I got this from Nathanael Johnson at Grist — that fights over nuclear power are more symbolic of a values divide than actually about the science of whether nuclear is good or not. Is that what you’re hinting at?

Charles C. Mann: Yes. The thing I’d slightly amend is that often it’s said that these fights are “just about values and what you prefer,” rather than about science — and that’s said to dismiss the values. But I actually think the values are really, really important, and the discussion would be much more useful if it were actually about the values, rather than the sort of pretend argument about the science.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, so there’s a proxy war way downstream that we’re fighting, but you want to go back and say, “What kind of world do you actually want to create?” You think we should be talking on that level?

Charles C. Mann: Yeah. The reason that people I know of don’t like nuclear power, at bottom, is not because of this or that radiation counter, this or that environmental footprint. It’s because they see it as this giant facility that’s tinkering with things people should have a lot more humility about.

Ross Kenyon: Got it. Yeah, I think that’s a very fair point.

Charles C. Mann: And that’s not a bad argument, to me. The idea that we need to think about our place in the order of creation and respect it — that’s not a terrible argument. But people are afraid to make these kinds of spiritual or religious or moral or ethical arguments — whatever word you want to use. And so instead they drag in these proxies, as you pointed out, where they say, “Oh, it’s unsafe,” or something, when at bottom, even if it were somehow proven to be safe, they just don’t want to go down that path. And very similar logic applies to GMOs.

Ross Kenyon: Oh, Charles — I remember I wanted to do this, and I’m glad I recalled it. I think I found basically the perfect summation of the prophet way of thinking at its most extreme, and it also fits very neatly in here. I don’t know if you know this, but have you read The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft?

Charles C. Mann: Well, that sentence did not end up like I expected it to. Uh-oh. Yes, I read it, but a long time ago.

Ross Kenyon: All right, check this out. I love this paragraph. It’s beautiful, and a bit terrifying. “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” What do you think of that? Phew.

Charles C. Mann: That’s pretty close. That’s pretty close. Vintage H.P. Lovecraft — super overwritten, but onto something.

Ross Kenyon: Well, yeah, absolutely. There’s an ornateness there that’s out of fashion these days, among many other things he thought.

Charles C. Mann: Yeah. I read that when I was 17 or 18, and it certainly left an impression in general, but obviously I didn’t remember that paragraph. Terrific — thanks for sharing it.

Ross Kenyon: No problem. Sorry to just add a non-diegetic insert there, for my own edification. Well, okay — one thing I wanted us to get to: when I think about schools of thought or paradigms, I like to think of them kaleidoscopically. I like being able to flip through them and say, “Okay, if I think about a problem this way, it illuminates this thing, but it also has its own blind spot in this way.” And I think one of the signs of intelligence I look for — because I value this, I’m sort of placing myself, but that aside — is that the more of those you can hold, oftentimes the better off you are at understanding problems. So if we’re able to treat the wizard and the prophet paradigms kaleidoscopically, what do you think they’re showing us, and what do you think they’re obscuring?

Charles C. Mann: Interesting. So you’re saying that a point of view is — I guess I’d think of it this way — like a spotlight. It casts intense light, but also dark shadows.

Ross Kenyon: Yes, exactly.

Charles C. Mann: In this particular case, I’d say one of the things wizards often do is make a kind of pragmatic case that this is the way to go, because these features of the prophet’s worldview are counterproductive, or don’t make sense, or will make things worse. So you see all the time calculations like: “If all farming were organic, we would produce much less on much more land, and it would be an environmental disaster.” I’m sure you’ve read things like that.

Ross Kenyon: Mm-hmm.

Charles C. Mann: And I want to say to them that what’s missing here — and missing from many of these things — is that the current type of farming we have is a social arrangement. It’s been carefully put together in some places and haphazardly in others, but it depends on an entire body of institutions and laws and practices that have largely been created since the 1940s and ‘50s. There’s nothing inevitable about that. So one of the exercises I did: I went to northwest Illinois, and I met this guy who’s kind of a model prophet farmer, and his neighbor is a kind of model wizard farmer. And I got them to write down all the subsidies of various types that they were eligible for. Essentially, the wizard farmer produced an entire page of different programs devoted to helping his kind of farm go. And the prophet farmer had nothing — he didn’t exist, as far as the state, local, and federal governments were concerned. And the wizard farmer cheerfully confessed that without all these federal, state, and local initiatives he was embedded in, his farm would collapse. So it’s very difficult to make that kind of comparison, because they exist in such different worlds. And often the wizards forget about the social, legal, historical, cultural aspects of this. The prophets, meanwhile, are often quite strong on the potential risks of these things. They’re much less good, in my view, at understanding the nitty-gritty social changes that would be required to achieve their vision.

Again, to talk about the same example — the fundamental difference, as far as I could see, between the organic farm and the farm next to it, which was all GMOs, with corn and soy... it wasn’t what they were growing, it was the different labor amounts. The smaller-scale, much more complicated farm needed many, many more workers. The one was 1,200 acres, and it had two workers and two million dollars’ worth of equipment. The other one had a thousand different crops and was recreating natural ecosystems — it was an amazing place, but it had 30 different workers. And the need to pay those workers meant his prices were very high; you couldn’t charge cheap for this. The reason is that there are a zillion subsidies for agricultural equipment, but zero subsidies for farm labor. The fundamental difference between them was social. And I typically think that people who are very embracing of these ideas don’t see how contingent their successes would be on these social, historical, and cultural arrangements.

Ross Kenyon: That’s an interesting angle. I hadn’t thought about it that way. When I think about prophets, their aesthetic ideal strikes me very much like The Shire — and they’d like to recreate that.

Charles C. Mann: Yeah. And the thing is that The Shire presumably had a whole bunch of institutions — I don’t know what Tolkien was thinking of; presumably they were similar to the ones that existed in the English countryside in the 1920s. But there are hundreds of years of history that underlie the fact that the English countryside worked in the 1920s. So I think it’s very easy for both sides to dismiss the others as not being likely to exist for pragmatic reasons, when the real reasons have to do with institutions. There’s no particular reason we couldn’t, if we wanted to, subsidize farm labor. We subsidize labor all the time. For example, recently Amazon wanted to create its second headquarters, and states and cities competed for it, and they offered Amazon millions of dollars — what they were essentially doing was subsidizing the labor of Amazon workers. New York offered several billion dollars, and in return would get 50,000 jobs. That’s subsidizing labor. We do that all the time for labor we consider valuable. The reason we don’t do it for agricultural labor is that we don’t consider it valuable. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be done. And if you subsidize the hiring of labor, the prices from these small-scale farms would drop dramatically, and much poorer people could afford the produce from them.

Ross Kenyon: That’s a fascinating point. What do you call it when there’s a tendency of the human mind to view whatever is around us, that we’re acculturated into, as natural, quote-unquote? What’s the name for this way of seeing that’s clearly blinding us to how constructed our reality actually is?

Charles C. Mann: Yeah, I don’t know what it is. Possibly it’s related to what historians call presentism—

Ross Kenyon: Hmm.

Charles C. Mann: —which is judging the past by the standards of the present, something you should avoid. But there is this idea that these things around us are, quote-unquote, “natural,” when in fact they’ve often been constructed. That doesn’t mean they’re bad, but it does mean they can be changed, if we want. So note: I’m not advocating that we should subsidize farm labor — that’s not the point of the argument. The point is that people who say this or that is inherently less productive or inherently less affordable are missing the point that there are reasons underneath what they do that have nothing to do with some imagined agricultural productivity.

Ross Kenyon: Oh, sure. I’ve seen arguments like that all over the place. Perhaps most famously against Norman Borlaug is Vandana Shiva’s work, saying, “If you take into account all the ecological costs and the subsidies, is this actually feeding the world? Is this actually cheaper?” Answer: probably not.

Charles C. Mann: Yeah. And I’d take her calculations, like all these calculations, with a grain of salt, because it’s very difficult to imagine what the actual cost would be in some completely different social arrangement.

Ross Kenyon: Oh, sure. I think that’s perfectly fair. I don’t have the chops necessary to evaluate these competing, highly technical claims either. So I read these things and go, “Hmm, seems plausible.”

Charles C. Mann: I just think you should be skeptical of them. To take the Vandana Shiva argument about industrial agriculture — what she’s essentially saying is that there are environmental costs, and the environmental costs are so high that they wipe out all the gains. And you could say, well, there’s an entire literature of economics about how to handle those kinds of external costs; they’re called externalities. The first textbook on externalities was written back in 1918. So there’s a whole lot of things you could do that would dramatically reduce it. For instance, there are all kinds of reasons right now that farmers way overuse fertilizer — because it’s cheap, and it’s cheap because it’s subsidized in all kinds of different ways. If it were less cheap, possibly people might look at using it more sparingly, or in ways less likely to cause washout into rivers and streams, or it might be formulated differently. There’s nothing inherent about the way we do fertilizer right now, which is one of the main costs — because the fertilizer goes into the streams and the rivers and ends up in the ocean. Fertilizer in the ocean is still fertilizer; it causes these immense blooms of algae and other aquatic plants. They die, drop down to the bottom, bacteria eat them, the bacteria multiply in such a frenzy that they suck up all the oxygen, and you get these dead spots. There’s one in the Gulf of Mexico that’s about the size of New Jersey. There’s one in the Bay of Bengal that’s three times bigger than that. That’s a huge environmental cost. So Vandana Shiva is totally right to draw our attention to that, because when we eat our Wonder Bread or whatever, we’re not thinking about the fact that producing it led to this gigantic dead spot in the Gulf of Mexico. She’s dead right about that. But there’s nothing inherent about using fertilizer that automatically gets you there.

Ross Kenyon: Okay, yeah. This is great nuance — thank you for bringing it here. Charles, I’m going to reveal my bias here, and then maybe you can tell me what I’m missing. Nori as a whole — I believe the company is premised around the idea that technology can help us solve environmental crises, notably climate, and help us wrap our heads around that, and help us get to a healthy level of PPM, get that carbon down to a safe, stable level that we can build expectations around, based on what human life has come to expect and depend upon. Then I was watching Planet of the Humans too — because I had to, because everyone was yelling and saying not to watch this movie, so of course I had to watch it immediately. There’s a line in there that always bothers me — I’m paraphrasing — that the same way of thinking that got us into this problem cannot get us out of it, and it was applied to industrial technology. But it was posed in this rhetorical fashion: “Can we use the same technology that got us into this problem to get us out?” And me at home is just, “Yes. Yes, we absolutely have to, because we can’t just walk away from this.” There’s already a certain amount of warming that’s locked in. We have to start pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. We can’t just retreat and go to Hobbiton and live our little permaculture lives. That’s a great thing to do, but we also need large-scale technology to make that sort of prophet’s lifestyle even possible at this point. What am I missing?

Charles C. Mann: So, first, I’m not going to argue with you. What’s wrong about the argument is that it’s not the same technology. The kinds of things you’re talking about — carbon-eating, photovoltaic panels, windmills, power lines that don’t waste 50 percent of their power in resistance — that’s not the technology that got us into the problem. The technology that got us into the problem is coal-fired power plants, and we’re dramatically reducing their number. So to me, it’s like you’re saying, “You’re allergic to apples, therefore you shouldn’t be eating oranges.” It’s a nonsensical statement. So that part I’m not going to disagree with you on. What I would argue is that this living in Hobbiton, in a modern sense, involves all kinds of technology; it’s just different kinds of technology. Right now, if you put solar panels on all the roofs, and little ones in the backyards, and made them much more efficient, and developed methods of localized storage — the sort of idea Elon Musk talks about, storing in his batteries — I just don’t think we know how much that could do. Right now the most efficient solar panels are on the order of, I think, about 48 percent of the incident radiation coming in. They’re very, very expensive, because we don’t choose to subsidize them. There are lots of things in our society we choose to subsidize; if we wanted to, we could choose to subsidize that. We could kick up a lot more research into how to switch power back and forth. And we could get a lot of the way toward Hobbiton if we wanted to. It would be difficult, but all paths are going to be difficult. Doing the other kind of path — where we construct large-scale, centralized installations and somehow send the power all around, like the square mile in the Sonoran Desert — that’s also extremely difficult. So I just feel that we just don’t know.

If you don’t mind — I’m going to go on a little bit of a tangent. Is it okay if I go on it?

Ross Kenyon: Please do.

Charles C. Mann: Okay. I feel that the role of ignorance is insufficiently appreciated. There are lots of things we simply don’t know whether we can do, and that means we don’t know that they’re not possible, and we don’t know if they are possible. All we can really say is that we could go quite a bit of the way toward Hobbiton if we wanted to, or we could go quite a bit in the opposite direction if we wanted to — and we don’t really know, because we can’t predict the future, what the fundamental consequences would be. So I tend to get upset, or annoyed, when I hear people saying with great confidence that this or that is not possible, because I think the answer is: we just simply don’t know.

Ross Kenyon: And it all comes back to that gigantic Lovecraft quote that I forced into this episode. I think humility is underappreciated all over the place, and we try to do that. Basically, the number of things I hold with any degree of certainty shrinks as I get older. Are you that way too?

Charles C. Mann: Mm-hmm. Yeah. One of the things this also tells me, though, is that because we’re very lousy at predicting the future, maybe both sides should be a little bit less dogmatic. We should investigate what you can do with very, very small-scale nukes, for example — I don’t think we know the consequences well enough for either side to rule it out. Similarly, we should look at what GMOs can do. And we should also try to see: well, how much can we get with neighborhood solar? Why not really kick it up and run some serious demonstrations of the best neighborhood-solar technology we can, and see what we get?

Ross Kenyon: I think that’s a fine way to go. I think we need all the experiments and all the bets we can get.

Charles C. Mann: Right. And it wouldn’t be so hard. My wife is an architect and designer, and she’s very interested in sustainability, so she’s been building these small-scale, near-net-zero-energy homes. There should be some way for her to convert them into totally neighborhood-locally-powered grids and see how that worked.

Ross Kenyon: Seems fine to me. I’d certainly be interested in that.

Charles C. Mann: To build a little version of Hobbiton and then look at it.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Charles, one of the applications of your ideas that we played with in the Nori Patreon book club is: to what degree does this apply to how one lives one’s personal life? And I ended up seizing upon a passage I really like. It’s the most famous passage from Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. It’s called “The Poor Man’s Son.” Are you familiar with that?

Charles C. Mann: I read the book in college, so the answer is I should be more familiar with it than I actually am.

Ross Kenyon: It might be worth revisiting this section. It’s definitely the most famous, and it’s beautiful. It starts with, “The poor man’s son, whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition,” which I think is such a powerful opening. Adam Smith sees ambition and this desire to get rich as a form of a curse. Granted, the person, in the process of trying to get rich, develops many instruments and technological advances that make our lives better — but this burden of ambition doesn’t necessarily produce the most livable life, one could say. For instance, I don’t personally want to be Elon Musk. I don’t want to live that life.

Charles C. Mann: I was just thinking the same name. It’s funny.

Ross Kenyon: Oh, yeah. Well — I’m glad he’s a father now, and that’s great; he and Grimes have better behavior than I saw. But he’s also got, like—

Charles C. Mann: Six other kids. Geez Louise.

Ross Kenyon: Oh, and that too, I guess. Yeah. That one just caught my imagination. But that life seems so demanding. Basically, I’m relatively prophet-esque. I don’t expect to be remembered very long, especially not by people far removed from my own family, and I’m relatively okay with that. I think the most important thing most people will do is raise children who are halfway decent, compassionate, kind people. I think that’s great, and I have the same ambitions myself. Anything I get above that is just happenstance. But I’m so glad there are Elon Musks out there, because ambition is a form of human sacrifice. This wizardly developing of new things — we need that. But I think they lay themselves at the altar for the benefit of humanity, by their own curse of this ambition. Does that halfway make sense to you?

Charles C. Mann: Yeah. And I should, in fitting with our theme, point out that on the opposite side, Bill McKibben has sort of wrecked his life to lead 350.org. I know him very slightly, and I can tell you he does not enjoy being a public and political figure.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah.

Charles C. Mann: It’s not fun for him. He’s doing it because he believes it. And by the way, that documentary we were talking about — something that really annoyed me about it was the idea that Bill is a corporate sellout. I’ve disagreed with him plenty; sometimes he’s been so mad at me we haven’t spoken. But geez — the idea that he’s not a figure of huge integrity is completely ridiculous. He’s kind of sacrificed his life, in exactly the same way, to try to create a political movement for fighting climate change. And I think that’s — again, with the theme of social and political arrangements — absolutely necessary. No politician’s going to stick their neck out to do it unless there are a lot of constituents behind it. They have to show it, and organizations like 350.org are for that.

Ross Kenyon: That’s great — a great additional example, from a totally different angle. Yeah, I don’t know that I’d want to change places with any of those people. That sounds very stressful. Everyone scrutinizes everything you do and calls you a bad person. Doesn’t sound fun.

Charles C. Mann: People call McKibben — you know, “if his ideas were followed, we’d all die,” this sort of thing. That can’t be pleasant.

Ross Kenyon: No, no. Well, one thing that’s comforting, in the darkest of ways, is your relationship with Lynn Margulis. That’s one thing we haven’t even gotten to. What was that like? And also — does this wizard-and-prophet dynamic even make sense in the face of her insights? Which — what even were they?

Charles C. Mann: So that was part of the reason I included her: because she’s a critic of the entire thing. I wanted to incorporate the idea that there are perspectives from which everything I’m talking about is just stupid and isn’t even worth considering. Lynn Margulis is this famous biologist, famous especially for her contributions to understanding the micro world of bacteria and viruses and protists and all these other tiny creatures. From her point of view, which is pretty justifiable, they’re what’s important about life on Earth. They’re 99 percent of the biomass, 99 percent of the evolutionary creativity in terms of genetic variability. They’re just amazing. And so people are like this epiphenomenon. Her point of view is that we’re just a species like any other — like protozoa, not fundamentally different. And she argued that this was Darwin’s key insight. Darwin talked about evolution, but before you could talk about evolution, you had to have the idea that there was a single set of laws that applied to everything, no exceptions. It’s not like dogs have special rules that apply only to them. Evolution applies to everything, including us. We’re just part of nature, just another species among all the others. And one of the other rules is that species that are inordinately successful don’t live very long, because they either wipe themselves out, or drown in their own wastes, or exhaust their own resources — or all three. So she saw that as happening to humans. And the idea that both wizards and prophets are arguing about ways to save us — if you don’t think we can be saved, because the laws of nature say no, then it’s sort of stupid to have an argument between them.

Ross Kenyon: On the one hand, I like that she just out-pessimists the prophets, in the most serious of ways. But I also find it kind of comforting. It takes the pressure off the human race a little bit. Whenever I zoom out and think in deep time, it really calms me.

Charles C. Mann: She regarded me as a sort of sentimental sap — reading books about polar bears and the like. She thought we were completely deluded if we thought we were special. She liked to say this. I didn’t know her well, but she knew me well enough to prick my bubble whenever she could, and she’d say, “Oh, you think we’re special — somehow a different species from everybody else. How nice it must be to be you.” That kind of thing. And if you look at it her way, you can say, well, we’re conducting this gigantic experiment now to find out if we’re just a species like everything else, or if we’re actually capable of changing in ways no other species can. She would say, as a betting person, the odds are very definitely that we’re not special.

Ross Kenyon: This is a favorite theme of the show too. We get into the Fermi paradox, and whether this is a great filter event, and whether human beings will supersede this challenge. I hope so. The reason I do what I do is that I hope we’re able to do it. But there’s a chance Lynn is correct, and we’re just following the pace set by every other creature that’s been so successful that it’s killed things off.

Charles C. Mann: Right. And I think, though, that if she were around, and we were talking now, even she would say that if we were successful, that really would mean we were special. That would be an astounding thing.

Ross Kenyon: It totally would be.

Charles C. Mann: It would be really cool, right? If success is not given, then to actually be successful would be just awesome.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think so. Well, Charles, we didn’t even get to talk about your other books. 1491 and 1493, which I’ve read in the last year — I read both of them, and they made a really big impression too. I like this focus on... Well, one thing that’s come up quite a lot inside Nori, and also in the book club, is this idea of Native Americans as this sort of noble savage — this romantic idea of them interacting with a primeval force and not changing it. And now, of course, we know — and your work has documented — the degree to which humans, and Indigenous people in particular, have shaped these environments. So I think that’s a really cool insight. But I’m wondering, bigger than that: is there some connection between your work on Indigenous peoples and the Columbian Exchange, and wizards and prophets? What’s the connection?

Charles C. Mann: Well, I thought of these two books mentally... I should first say I’m kind of embarrassed to talk about this, and I was hoping you wouldn’t bring it up, because the answer I give is going to sound really pretentious. And the reason it’s going to sound pretentious is that it actually is pretentious.

Ross Kenyon: Oh no. I’ve got to know what this is.

Charles C. Mann: So I apologize in advance. I thought of these books as a trilogy — already bad.

Ross Kenyon: Wait, why is that bad? That’s not necessarily bad.

Charles C. Mann: Oh — everybody wants to read a trilogy. In their past, present, and future: the past represented by 1491, about the world that was created; the present being 1493, which is this ricocheting of environmental consequences around the world; and then the future, which is how we’re going to get out of the situation we’re in — which is what’s discussed in The Wizard and the Prophet. But unlike normal trilogies, they don’t say one, two, and three, and you can read them in any order.

Ross Kenyon: That’s cool. So that makes sense to me, because you’re saying that the world we live in — from 1493 and the Columbian Exchange, when you have various organisms crossing giant barriers that had never previously been superseded in a large way — that’s still the world we’re living in right now.

Charles C. Mann: Right. And it’s a world of globalization. So one of the funny things is that there are these various protests against globalization, and I’m sort of thinking, “Man, you’re locking the door 500 years after that particular horse has been stolen.” We’re living in a globalized world, and the current president trying to stop that — who are you kidding?

Ross Kenyon: Fair enough. So our choices for the future are whether we follow a wizardly or a prophet-esque path — or maybe some hybrid. What’s the choice in front of us?

Charles C. Mann: Oh, we can decide. Because these are all human arrangements, there’s nothing that says you couldn’t combine parts of the wizards and the prophets. It’s not like we’re dealing with laws of physics. I can certainly invent scenarios of greater or lesser plausibility that would combine them. But people seem to typically fall onto one end or another of this particular spectrum. It could be different. And I guess, a little bit in the back of my mind, I hoped that reading it all in black and white in my book would inspire the reader to think about ways of escaping that particular paradigm.

Ross Kenyon: How are you feeling, you personally, yourself, Charles C. Mann — more wizardly, or more like a prophet these days?

Charles C. Mann: Oh, boy. I guess in a certain way I’m feeling both, because you’re seeing in the current crisis with the coronavirus the necessity for both science and community. We really need to come up with some scientific advances, test them properly, and rapidly disseminate them — and that’s going to be very difficult to do without some kinds of centralized controls. But while we’re doing that, we also need to have functioning communities in which we all look out for each other. So here’s a case in which both are needed. And you see people splitting into this funny thing, focusing either on the community measures or saying, “There’s going to be treatments and vaccines, so we don’t have to worry.”

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I suppose so. And it appears that The Wizard and the Prophet, as a set of paradigms for understanding these decisions, goes far beyond just environmental ones. It seems like maybe this is much broader than that.

Charles C. Mann: I think so. You can find echoes of this in Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson’s famous arguments about whether the real heart of the country was located in the city or the country, right?

Ross Kenyon: Federalists? Anti-Federalists? Oh yeah, sure. I could see that.

Charles C. Mann: And Locke, and Voltaire versus Rousseau. These are modern versions of philosophical disputes that have been going on for centuries.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I love that. I think this is such a good way to teach these concepts and to play with them. If I were trying to bring someone into the environmental space, I think this is a very useful rubric, and also a heuristic for testing what people’s inbuilt assumptions and values are. It’s a great tool. Kudos for that.

Charles C. Mann: Well, thank you.

Ross Kenyon: My pleasure. Well, Charles, if someone wanted to keep up with your work, obviously they should read your masterpiece — your trilogy, your pretentious trilogy. It’s not that bad; that wasn’t the most grandiose thing I’ve ever heard on this show. I’ve probably said worse myself, so don’t be too hard on yourself. How should someone keep up with your work?

Charles C. Mann: Oh, I don’t know. I’m working on another book, and when it comes out, you can buy it.

Ross Kenyon: Buy it in the hardcover, people. Really, really help this guy out.

Charles C. Mann: Yeah, exactly. Buy them — and apparently now what they want you to do is buy it all in the first week, so that it rockets up the bestseller list. I was told by my publisher recently — I hadn’t really thought about it — that pre-orders on Amazon are gold.

Ross Kenyon: Oh, is that right? That’s good to know. Are you able to tell us — tease us a little — with what it might be about?

Charles C. Mann: Yeah. It’s a personal thing for me, related to stuff I’d done before, but personal. When I wrote 1491, it was originally supposed to have a final chapter about the North American West. That’s where I grew up. It’s an area that has special personal meaning to me — kind of about the deep history of the West. When I outlined it, the outline for the chapter was longer than all the other chapters. I tried to cut it down, and it just didn’t work, so I ended up cutting it out completely and papering together an end. If you look very carefully at the end of 1491, you can still see the sutures and the scars where I lashed together an end. This has been sticking in my mind, and I finally thought, “Well, I’ll see what I’ve got.” Last year I wrote out a lengthy outline, and I realized — wait, this actually is a book of its own. It’s about trying to consider the West in terms of its future as part of its ancient history. What we know about the West, without going into too much prediction, is that it’s going to be hotter and drier than it is today. We know it’s going to be roughly 40 percent Hispanic and something like 8 percent Asian. We know water issues are going to be really, really important. And we also know — this is probably the most, quote-unquote, controversial thing — that the 274 federally recognized tribes in the West are going to gain more and more sovereignty. That’s the trajectory they’ve been on since the 1960s. So in 2050 or so, there will be essentially almost 300 small nations in the West, in this time of environmental convulsion and tremendous mixing. So the conventional history of the West — which involves the frontier, people coming in from the East, nature being tamed, and the West essentially disappearing — just doesn’t seem very relevant to that. So it’s a history of what the West might be in the future.

Ross Kenyon: I love it. I want you back on the show to talk about it. We can even time it so it helps with your publisher.

Charles C. Mann: Oh, gee, thanks.

Ross Kenyon: I’m from Arizona, and I have a lot of affection for the Southwest — spent so much time out there. I’m very interested in this. I can’t wait. When might this come out?

Charles C. Mann: Well, I’m hoping — it would be next year sometime, probably a year and a half from now.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, book publishing, with their long lead times.

Charles C. Mann: Well, this is actually good, though — because if you think about it, it forces you to try to imagine something and to write something that will have some value beyond the immediate.

Ross Kenyon: That’s a good point. That makes me feel better about it.

Charles C. Mann: And I’m hoping — you know, I wrote 1491, it was published in 2005, and I was kind of tickled to hear that you read it last year and it had some value to you. I thought, “Oh, wow, it’s sticking around a little bit.”

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that thing holds up, as far as I can tell. It’s great. And you’re also on Twitter, I see.

Charles C. Mann: Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: What’s your handle there?

Charles C. Mann: @CharlesCMann.

Ross Kenyon: All of these links will be in the show notes, if you’d like to buy Charles’ books or follow him on Twitter. Is there a website too?

Charles C. Mann: It’s actually down. While it was down — while I was tinkering around with it — my website expired for, I don’t know, an hour, and a domain snatcher got it. So I have to deal with that, which I will do as soon as I finish this chunk of the book.

Ross Kenyon: Okay. Good luck. I’ll keep my eyes peeled.

Charles C. Mann: This is what happens when you’re just a person and you’re fighting algorithms.

Ross Kenyon: Man versus technology. There you go.

Charles C. Mann: Unsuccessfully versus technology.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. You lost. You got Skynet-ed. Oops.

Charles C. Mann: Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: Well, thanks for being here, Charles. That was a lot of fun. I learned a lot, and thanks for stimulating my mind — and the Patreon book group is grateful too, for giving us such fruitful terrain to march over. So thank you.

Charles C. Mann: Oh, it’s my pleasure. That’s what I wrote the book in the hopes it would do. So thank you very much for the kind words.

Ross Kenyon: Well, thank you so much for listening. If you like this show, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts and/or Stitcher. It really helps us a lot to get this content to a wider audience. If you think what we’re doing is useful, interesting, fun — hopefully all three — we’d certainly appreciate your rating and review.

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Somehow, I don't believe I've ever rereleased any old episodes. But there are many great ones buried in the archives. I am going to start bringing more of them out that remain relevant.

If you aren't familiar with Charles C. Mann, he's written a bunch of great books including 1491 and 1493, both of which I'd recommend.

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Charles C. Mann on Wikipedia

The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann

You can listen to this Reversing Climate Change bonus podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or the entire thing in full right below this paragraph.

Climate Workers Anonymous

PostSecret for climate. Anonymous stories from the climate industry trenches.

By Ross Kenyon

Working in climate is hard. We all have things we wish we could say. What if we could actually say them?

If you love the Reversing Climate Change podcast, you should check out the new show I’m working on, Climate Workers Anonymous.

It came about as my work has become more emotional in nature. Working with so many founders has led me to see that many business problems are less about GTM motions or product-market fit. They’re often about identity, attachment, and shame. Being able to speak openly about those feelings, even if anonymously, can be an enormous relief.

Moreover, many people in climate have strong feelings about who they do business with, how their companies are structured and make decisions, and maybe think the entire space has deeply lost its way. Can they say that in public? Sure, but that could have career repercussions beyond what many are able and willing to tolerate. It reminds me of the old joke, “all mushrooms are edible. Some are only edible once.”

And yet, are those feelings any less true? No. They are not. And thus, Climate Workers Anonymous was born. People fill out a Tally survey with their unattributed takes and send it to me to publish in written form on Substack and as audio in your podcast feed—it’s the old Carbon Removal Newsroom feed if you’re still subscribed to that.

Please go check out Climate Workers Anonymous, give it a great rating and review in your podcast apps, subscribe on Substack, become a paying supporter of the show if you believe in what it’s doing, and thanks so much for supporting creative media in climate and carbon dioxide removal!

If you’d like submit your anonymous (and unverified) hopes, fears, or experiences to Climate Workers Anonymous, you can use ⁠this Tally survey⁠ or email climateworkersanonymous[at]protonmail.com, though I believe the Tally survey is more secure. Do not communicate anything you wouldn’t want a hacker to have access to, including an email address that could be linked to you if you email the account on Protonmail.

And thank you to the legendary PostSecret, which I suspect all elder millennials reading this will know, for showing us the way.

Sincerely,

Ross Kenyon

Climate Workers Anonymous

PostSecret for climate. Anonymous stories from the climate industry trenches.

By Ross Kenyon

If you love the Reversing Climate Change podcast, you should check out the new show I'm working on, Climate Workers Anonymous.

It came about as my work has become more emotional in nature. Working with so many founders has led me to see that many business problems are less about GTM motions or product-market fit. They're often about identity, attachment, and shame. Being able to speak openly about those feelings, even if anonymously, can be an enormous relief.

Moreover, many people in climate have strong feelings about who they do business with, how their companies are structured and make decisions, and maybe think the entire space has deeply lost its way. Can they say that in public? Sure, but that could have career repercussions beyond what many are able and willing to tolerate.

And yet, are those feelings any less true? No. They are not. And thus, Climate Workers Anonymous was born. People fill out a Tally survey with their unattributed takes and send it to me to publish in written form on Substack and as audio in your podcast feed—it's the old Carbon Removal Newsroom feed if you're still subscribed to that.

Please go check out Climate Workers Anonymous, give it a great rating and review in your podcast apps, subscribe on Substack, become a paying supporter of the show if you believe in what it's doing, and thanks so much for supporting creative media in climate and carbon dioxide removal! And thank you to the legendary PostSecret, which I suspect all elder millennials reading this will know, for showing us the way.

Sincerely,

Ross Kenyon

Resources

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Check out my new show, Climate Workers Anonymous⁠⁠⁠

Subscribe to the Climate Workers Anonymous Substack⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

An amazing rating and review on the podcast apps does a world of good. Would you please do that for me now? Here’s Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. Subscribe as well while you're there!

If you’d like submit your anonymous hopes, fears, or experiences to Climate Workers Anonymous, you can use this Tally survey or email climateworkersanonymous[at]protonmail.com, though I believe the Tally survey is more secure. Do not communicate anything you wouldn’t want a hacker to have access to, including an email address that could be linked to you if you email the account on Protonmail.

The great carbon crossover

For most of the last decade, the carbon market has sorted itself into two camps that don’t talk to each other much.

There’s the established avoidance side, which has been around for longer: REDD+, cookstoves, improved forest management, and conservation, with its own investors, registries, and political baggage. Then there’s the carbon dioxide removal side, which is largely newer entrants to the market: direct air capture, enhanced rock weathering, biochar, and a habit of defining itself against everything the first camp built.

Whatever the messy terms, the two sides have spent a lot of energy being unkind to each other. But some players are waking up to relinking this estranged family.

Substrate Biochar is one of the companies healing this rupture. Rainbow was a natural registry partner for them in part because Rainbow also straddles both worlds (they cut their teeth on non-removal credits before expanding into removals). This overlap is becoming less of an exception and more of a pattern, and is worth paying attention to: it may say more about where carbon markets are heading in 2026 and beyond than we realize.

What Substrate is building

Substrate Biochar is a UK-registered, South Africa-based biochar project developer founded by Oliver Glanville and Charlie Cornish. Their first production facility, near Port Shepstone on the KwaZulu-Natal coast, is commissioning a roughly 5,000-tonne-per-year carbon removal operation. They plan to double capacity on the same site. They have a pipeline of additional locations targeting around 50,000 tonnes per year. And they’re unabashed about their mission to scale biochar carbon removal in Africa.

The feedstock is what drew them to the region. South Africa has a large forestry industry, and the small and midsize sawmills that serve it have a genuine waste problem. Wet sawdust accumulates in massive piles, and until recently, many mills simply burned it in the open. That’s no longer permitted, and some mills have had to stop operating because they have nowhere to put the material.

Substrate collects the sawdust, runs it through continuous pyrolysis using rotary drum kilns, and produces biochar with physical offtake into three markets: low-carbon asphalt, large-scale organic fertilizer companies, and mine rehabilitation. They’re also seeing early interest from the macadamia and citrus farmers that surround their site, drawn to biochar’s benefits for soil health.

It’s a lean operation by design. The model, which relies on large, point-source forestry biomass, is built for scale. It’s what drew Substrate to South Africa in the first place: the existing biochar and forestry market meant they could produce a high-quality biochar product without taking on extra value-add in-house, like mixing their own fertilisers to sell into an early market. Glanville had seen other biochar companies, particularly across Africa and the Global South, try exactly that and run into complexity that didn’t work at scale. Substrate’s approach freed the founders to apply what they knew best - carbon markets, engineering, infrastructure project development at scale - to the market in as lean a way as possible.

The same logic extends to how the business is financed. Glanville is direct about the reasoning: if your ambition is to scale carbon removal, the business model can’t rely on a single revenue stream. Substrate deliberately positioned itself where there is existing demand for physical biochar, not just carbon credits. The company is also structured to be capital-efficient enough to reach cash-flow-positive operations without the kind of fundraising that most CDR companies treat as a prerequisite. The carbon credit is one revenue line in a diversified model, not the entire business.

Why this investor, and why this structure

Okavango Capital Partners is a small impact investment firm with a portfolio concentrated in Africa. Their track record on carbon is mostly focused in nature-based avoidance projects like conservation and REDD+, though their investments include exposure to removals around forest regeneration, improved grazing, and savanna fire management. Their thesis has long been that protecting and restoring ecosystems in emerging markets is both good impact and good business: it creates diversified revenue while reducing exposure to risks like flood, drought, fire, and soil degradation.

Okavango recently invested in Substrate through TerraLabs, its carbon-focused holding. At first glance, it might seem strange for an investor who’s been in carbon markets for so long to branch into something new like biochar. Normally the communities between novel and legacy credits remain divided with not a ton of crossover.

But Okavango Managing Partner Josep Oriol frames the move as evolution, not contradiction. Biochar, in his telling, sits at a natural intersection: you take refuse biomass that would otherwise rot, burn, or become a hazard, and you transform it into a stable carbon store that also happens to be a high-quality soil amendment.

“It’s an incredibly nice story,” Oriol told me. “Not everybody does it that way, but one of the things that we really liked about the guys at Substrate is they got very right the value chain they wanted to affect.” The forestry waste, the agricultural demand, the mining rehabilitation market, the carbon credit… they all reinforce each other in a way that makes the business more resilient than a company that depends on any single one.

The investment was made through Terra Labs - a holding company, not a fund - and the distinction matters. Oriol is blunt about why: carbon doesn’t lend itself well to limited-life fund structures. When you raise a typical ten-year venture fund, you’re eventually dragged by your investors toward liquidity events, which means you end up incentivizing quick exits rather than patient company-building. Terra Labs’ preferred investment period, borrowing from Berkshire Hathaway, is “forever.” If Substrate gets the model right, it will be a cash-flow-positive business that can fund its own growth. And the right structure for that is a long-term hold, not a countdown clock to a sale.

Oriol was also candid about what he saw in the broader biochar landscape and why Substrate stood out. His team looked at multiple companies. Some were well run, but many struck him as overvalued; biochar companies were pricing themselves at venture-capital multiples as though they were Silicon Valley software businesses. “Biochar is an industrial endeavor,” he said. “You’re moving atoms, not bytes.” Substrate’s founders came with a reasonable valuation, a lean setup, and a plan that didn’t require magical thinking about the market. For an investor who has watched carbon project scandals erode trust across the sector, that sobriety was part of the appeal.

Choosing a registry

Substrate evaluated multiple registries before landing on Rainbow. Oliver described the decision as partly about methodology fit: their project produces biochar that goes into applications like asphalt, which not every methodology accommodates cleanly, and partly about operational reality. For an early-stage company, the speed of the certification process and the responsiveness of the registry team are not minor considerations; they’re existential. Cash flow matters, and the time between starting a project and issuing a credit is time you’re burning runway.

Rainbow, by Glanville’s account, moved fast and stayed engaged. The co-founders were personally accessible. They answered technical questions quickly and walked through the process in a way that felt built for a company at Substrate’s stage. “They’ve been incredibly helpful,” Glanville said. “Rainbow really bent over backwards to try and demonstrate it had what we needed.”

Bringing together an estranged carbon family

Substrate’s story hints at a much-needed maturation and bringing together of an estranged carbon family.

Rainbow and Okavango both straddle the line in dealing with removals and non-removals alike, and they both see a future with more companies like Substrate. Carbon dioxide removal project developers have focused to date on seeking new investors and new buyers from outside of the “legacy” carbon space. Bringing new interest in is, of course, a great value for growing the industry. But we need the expertise from those who have been doing this work for decades.

If more investors make that same move, it changes the capital landscape for biochar in particular and CDR more broadly. The money that has historically backed nature-based projects at scale is orders of magnitude larger than what’s available in the CDR-specific investor pool. When that new synthesis occurs, old rivalries and positioning narratives can fall away, and we can focus on delivering high-quality carbon projects, whether they are removals, avoidances, or whatever categories we create next. When that happens, it’s going to be a big day for carbon markets, and those carbon dioxide removal project developers savvy enough to build this future.

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This blog is based upon a Reversing Climate Change podcast that just came out. You can listen to it on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or the entire episode in full right below this paragraph…

Be not afraid!

I know “hyperstition” and “dialectic” seem scary. They’re words that in an earlier era would have had a clove cigarette dangling from their lips.

There is so much to say about all of this. Frankly, I don’t have time to do this topic justice today, and I don’t want to just ship out some AI slop. Consider this a placeholder in lieu of a much more full post. I have a lot to say on this one.

For now, the best I can do is show you some worthy clips. I’ll be back.

No joke, this is a genuinely wonderful intro to Immanuel Kant.

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Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Thanks for listening to Reversing Climate Change. This is Ross Kenyon, host of the show. Today’s episode is a monologue about some big ideas from media theory, from film, from literature. And it might get just a little bit weird.

Before I go there, a couple of quick shout-outs. I have another podcast that I’ve recently started up. It’s on Substack, as writing and as a podcast. If you were a follower of Carbon Removal Newsroom, that feed has now become Climate Workers Anonymous, where people can share their anonymous and unverified information, experiences, and feelings about working in climate. If you want to support that show, please subscribe in your podcast app, or even better, on Substack itself. I’m trying to do a lot more on Substack for both Reversing Climate Change and Climate Workers Anonymous, and Carbon Removal Memes is doing more stuff on Substack now too. It’s still very early, but I’m trying to figure out how to make the best of the platforms without getting endlessly sucked into distribution and self-promotion — the things you have to do in this world to seemingly get stuff noticed.

Today’s show is about two big concepts, two big scary words that are likely to alienate perhaps as much as they provoke. These two words are hyperstition and dialectic. And if you’re scared and you quit right now, I can’t say I’d fully blame you.

Coming soon is a Reversing Climate Change episode I did with D.W. Pasulka. Dr. Pasulka is a religious studies scholar and author who’s written several books that I found to be genuinely fascinating. She started her work as a Catholic historian, as a religious studies professor. She was interested in stories of the saints and hagiographies, and how some of those themes and experiences overlapped with modern UFO — unidentified flying object, or UAP, as the term is more in vogue now, unidentified aerial phenomena. I’m not asking you to engage on whether any of that happens to be true or not; it’s not germane to this episode. But much of the work she points to in media theory and media studies, and some of the people who work on these strange phenomena, have interesting ideas that I think have something to teach people who work in climate. And I very strongly connect this work to my thinking on climate.

In order for this to make sense, I’m going to start with the term dialectic. If you have any association with it, I have to imagine it’s likely negative. It’s one of those terms that’s sometimes abused. Okay. So it’s most famously associated with Hegel, but it goes back to ancient Greek philosophy, and it’s basically a way of discerning truth. It’s a method. It has some commonality with dialogue — it’s between people who are speaking. And in its simplest form, you might have a thesis: someone sets out a thing they believe to be true. An interlocutor, their conversant, has an antithesis, and they sort of battle. And ideally there’s a new synthesis, a new understanding between these two unresolved wholes. And in this resolution, one can progress.

One association you likely have with Hegel and the term dialectic is Karl Marx’s famous inversion of Hegel. Hegel was part of the German idealist tradition; he was working on the level of spirit, or geist — you know, zeitgeist, spirit of the times. Hegel has this line that the state is God marching on Earth, which I always thought was a really powerful, strange sentence. And the historical process is a dialectic that’s working its way toward human freedom. As human civilization grows in complexity and transforms, it engages with both the ideas of the future and its concrete historical past. And it’s in constant negotiation and synthesis between these various forces — huge forces.

One of the big questions of history is: how much do ideas drive progress, and how much of it takes place at a more material level? So if you’re familiar with how Marx inverted Hegel — what determines history is conflict between classes. Aristocrats and peasants, factory owners and the proletariat. In their friction against one another, history advances. We come to a growing sense of freedom and of self-actualization, one might even say.

Once you start thinking in these terms, it’s really easy to see how history might have an endpoint, or a teleology. Humans have something they’re pointing themselves toward that is, frankly, inevitable — it’s going to happen. You don’t have to buy this, by the way. You can obviously see history as chaos, and you can see the various forces running into each other and battling as leading to sound and fury signifying nothing. It doesn’t have to have human freedom as the endpoint. History is not necessarily the development of human freedom. It could be, as is said in Game of Thrones, a ladder. It might just all be power, and at some point it might seem like the average person has a leg up, and then something else will happen and they’ll take a big step backwards. There’s no guarantee that we’re progressing toward greater spiritual and material freedom.

It’s actually genuinely challenging to look at history and not see some amount of teleology in there. You look at human civilization in prehistorical times, and there’s a sense that things are developing, moving — something is coming, something is arriving. Some part of that may be true. Some part of that may just be how our brains work. Our brains think in terms of stories, and we’re guessing the ending before it’s even arrived. In the words of Tom Waits, “How’s it gonna end?”

At this moment in history, it’s hard not to start peering into the future and wondering just how radically our lives will reorient with the ubiquity of artificial intelligence — especially if artificial general intelligence does arrive. That would be the moment when human beings are no longer the top species on the planet, but you have a self-reinforcing system of intelligence that is non-human, that doesn’t require human inputs to grow smarter and better — at least in terms of its abilities, if not its wisdom, kindness, or the other things we consider to be humane.

One way I like to think about the dialectic as it applies to working in climate goes back to the fights between wizards and prophets. I had Charles C. Mann on many years ago — journalist, author. He wrote 1491 and 1493, both really interesting books about the so-called Columbian Exchange and the American civilization that preceded it. And also his book The Wizard and the Prophet, about how these two paradigms — ways of seeing reality — exist within environmental movements, and also within human debates writ large. Wizards are people who think technology will improve things, that the future will be better than the past, that we’re largely on the right track. Prophets are those who wag their fingers and say we’ve gone off the track — the course we’re on is bad, we need to revert to an earlier time, a simpler time, a more spiritual time. What’s coming may in fact be worse.

You’ll likely have your reactions to the way I’ve characterized these two groups. You might like one and hate the other, or vice versa. You could probably think of examples of wizards and prophets that you like, and versions of each that you don’t like as much. You could see yourself as a sort of yin-yang, with a little bit of wizard inside a swirl of prophet, or a little bit of prophet within a swirl of wizard. You are large and contain multitudes. You can do that if you want. No one’s stopping you. You can think that all you like, and that’s fine with me.

One place I see this especially come through is in debates about whether or not humans should leave Earth and settle other planets. For the people who say we should leave Earth, the Arthur C. Clarke line is something like, “Earth is the cradle of humanity, but we were not meant to stay in the cradle forever.” Meaning we should expand and grow. It might be a good insurance policy. There could be an asteroid that hits Earth and wipes us out, or sends us down an entirely new evolutionary pathway that would take who knows how much time to come back from. There could be any sort of disaster here that would make this really challenging. Or they point to the fact that once we’re doing off-world projects, we’ll have access to microgravity, and that will have pharmaceutical impacts. We’ll learn so much more, and technology will grow so much faster if we’re doing this.

Prophets would say, “We are not living well here on Earth. Things are not going especially well. We are harming the biosphere tremendously. We’re stressing all of Earth’s systems, and until we’ve figured out how to live well without greatly harming one another or the systems upon which we depend, what right do we have to influence another planet?” Alternatively, someone could be a prophet and say even that is not something we should do — that there’s something transgressive about leaving Earth, that this is actually not what we’re meant to do at all. Even if we’ve earned the right and live peacefully on Earth, it signifies some greater dissatisfaction with life on Earth to seek to leave it, that is spiritually, symbolically unwise. We should listen to Indigenous wisdom, stick our toes into the mud, feel the earth, feel our bodies, stop trying to escape all of that. Be content with what we have.

A wizard would retort something like: we have to develop new solutions to the problems in front of us, and that depends upon growth and expansion and trying new things. We can’t solve the problems we’ve created with the technology of today. We have to keep going. I’m doing my best here to represent these opinions faithfully and non-pejoratively.

Of course, a synthesis between the thesis and antithesis here would be to say that if we are to expand and become a trans-Earth, trans-planetary civilization, we need to be at home on Earth. We need to be wise. We need to earn that so that we can leave in the first place. We need to develop good institutions on Earth — not merely so we can live well on Earth, but so that we can become a truly permanent civilization, one that’s not at risk of wiping itself out, but that can explore the universe in perpetuity, in peace and plenty, as a wise human order. And this is very akin to something like David Grinspoon’s Earth in Human Hands — if you’ve heard any of the podcasts I’ve done with him, or a recent episode where I summed up some of his work. This is a big influence on the show. So the synthesis between these two ideas, between the wizard and the prophet, is ideally to earn the right to be wizards by being good prophets. That’s how you synthesize this — not by choosing one over the other, but by trying to unify them and discarding the versions of each that are toxic. That is my synthesis of that key wizard-versus-prophet dialectic.

I suspect we need both of those things. You shouldn’t want one to permanently win over the other, wizard or prophet. The reason this is a dialectic is because these forces are archetypal. If this were an opposed set that could be easily synthesized in a permanent fashion, then one would likely permanently win. But that isn’t the case. There are times we need the bold creativity of wizards, and times we need the stern warnings of the prophets.

And you can tell that you have both of them in you in how you play against others you speak with. If I’m with people who are strongly wizardly, the prophet parts of my personality will come out. They’ll be provocative in ways that I think need to be checked with some of the wisdom from the prophetly tradition. And when I’m with prophets, I often play the opposite role and represent the wizard. The bad way of reading this part of my personality is that I’m a contrarian and I just like picking fights. Maybe there’s a piece of that that’s true as well. But I think what this signifies is that we’re in constant dialectic over these issues.

And you can get to synthesis, but it’s a constant re-becoming of synthesis. It’s almost like — if anyone listening has read Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, an early piece of queer theory about how, quote-unquote, coming out of the closet is not a singular event so much as a process of re-coming out of the closet in various social scenarios, in various ways — it’s not just a one-and-done kind of thing. One is constantly re-coming out of the closet, again and again. And to theorize the closet and the coming-out as a singular, time-bounded event is to misunderstand what it means to do so.

By merely listening to this show, you are participating in this wizard-prophet dialectic with me. You might write me an email, you might run into me in public somewhere. Or maybe you’re just going to be having a conversation with these ideas in your brain about this process of synthesis and its continuing recombination and reforming of both the ideas and the material reality that creates space for these ideas to rub against each other.

If you have more of an idealistic basis — and I don’t mean that in the romantic sense, I mean if you think ideas move the world — you’ll see that in our literary life, in the images we use. If you have a materialistic basis for understanding how the world changes, you’ll see this in fights over data centers. You’ll see it in fights of political economy. And again, even as you try to split idealism and materialism in this way, you’ve just created a new thesis-antithesis complex. Which is the foundation? Which is the structure, and which is the superstructure? Is the basis of reality material — about conflicts between classes and who controls the means of production? Or is it about ideas, and ideas determine those things? And how do those more abstract parts of our reasoning about freedom and identity and ideas generally shape material reality? Is that actually the substrate, and the material stuff is just on top of it? My guess is that the correct synthesis is yes to both. How could you possibly distinguish between these two? Ideas and material reality are so intertwined — how could you possibly think to split them?

In fact, one of the good rules that’s also annoying to operationalize — and many people have grown impatient with this way of thinking — is that whenever you do have a dichotomy, it’s always threatening to break at any moment. If you start pulling on stable categories, even a small amount... what’s the John Muir line? You realize that everything is hitched to everything else. Should it really be a surprise that it’s that way? My guess is no.

I really like the idea of the Lindy effect. It’s one of the ways I choose which books to read. If books have been around for a long time and are still being discussed, they’re often worth reading for that reason alone. They’ve informed civilization in some persistent way. It’s one of the reasons I come back to the classics over and over again. And I tend to be more skeptical of recent literature, because I’m waiting to see which of those will truly be worth reading and stand the test of time. Many of the novels or works of art that later proved to be prophetic, or genre- or zeitgeist-defining, were not that way at the moment of their creation. Sometimes it takes a while. Sometimes it’s only in hindsight that we’re able to look back. Again, the Hegel line — I’ve quoted this before on the show — “the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk.” Wisdom arrives in hindsight, looking backwards after it’s done.

That dialectic — of carbon dioxide removal, climate tech, working in climate — runs through the show at such a core level that if you at all enjoy the way I present ideas and engage with them, it’s because you probably have some of that in your brain too. You might not have known — until I just explained a little bit of how my brain works — that you can see, “Oh, that’s why I like this,” because it’s not editorializing in the same kind of way that maybe other places do. If the show annoys you sometimes, it might also be for that reason. Maybe you want something that has a sharper edge, that stakes out a much stronger position in one of those dualities. Either way you go, you’re probably going to enjoy the show I’m working on about the Bhagavad Gita. Get ready for that. That’s another one of these that’s coming soon. Whoo. Keeping things weird over here at Reversing Climate Change. Okay — I think that gives the dialectic a fair shake, in how to think about it with regard to climate change and carbon dioxide removal.

One way to reach through the dialectic entirely is something called a hyperstition. There are many ways to explain this funky concept. I think the easiest way is through narrative, and it’s going to be through two films that, funnily enough, are contemporaneous and very similar with regard to their use of hyperstition. If you have not seen Interstellar and you have not seen Arrival — both of them use hyperstition in really fascinating ways.

I sat here for a while trying to figure out the exact right way to introduce you to hyperstition. I’ll share a couple of definitions that live online, and then I’m going to riff on that and add a little of my own complexity and flavor to it. On Wikipedia, hyperstition is a self-fulfilling idea that becomes real through its own existence. It’s also described as memetic ideas that bring about their own reality.

This show is a sort of intro prequel to the D.W. Pasulka show that’s coming out soon. There are some people who work on the paranormal, the occult, new religious movements, new spiritualities. Some of the people who study those ideas will sometimes theorize that what people experience as cryptids — like Sasquatch — or unidentified aerial phenomena, or things like that, are hyperstitions. They are some kind of transdimensional being that exists outside of a human sense of linear time. Humans, as far as I know, experience time in linear, backwards-to-forwards directionality.

As physics has gotten weirder and weirder as time has gone on — and this is especially linked to things like quantum theory — there’s a sense that time can be experienced all at once, going backwards and forwards, forwards and backwards, all of it at the same time, and that the way we’re seeing things is because that’s how our senses have evolved to see and experience reality.

If you want to liken this to someone like Kant, and look at Kant’s relationship to someone like Descartes — Descartes’ very, very famous “I think therefore I am” is his attempt to use deductive reasoning outward from the fact that he’s aware of himself. All he knows, essentially, is that he has consciousness in some way, and there is sensory input flooding into his body through his senses. To what degree can one trust the senses? That’s one of those super-basic questions in epistemology — the study of what we can know — that opens up so many questions. Can you trust your sensory input? Descartes was a rationalist of the highest order, and thought that the experiential nature of the senses was fundamentally untrustworthy. He could only trust the pure rationality of his brain’s intellect, and distrust the material world.

In fact, Descartes for this reason is often pointed to as, quote-unquote, “Western man’s split with nature,” because it alienated the mind from the body, and in doing so, it privileges the mind over the body — and that’s extended onto material reality, into which we abuse nature because it’s part of a collective body that we misunderstand. Like all good dualities, it eventually gets linked to Christian Gnosticism, which is a well-known heresy, at least as it’s considered by mainstream Christianity. The world is controlled by a demon. Pure spirit is good, but the world — material reality — is controlled essentially by the devil. And the point of Gnosticism is to become pure spirit and to not trust the things of the material world.

If you run with this idea, it’s really interesting to see how it plays out in something like Hinduism — and, as I mentioned, the Bhagavad Gita show that’s coming. It has a really interesting, nuanced take on material reality beyond what’s typically considered to be part of Hinduism. But Buddhism, and various types of asceticism in general, is very much about rejecting the senses, the body, and focusing on spirit or mind or nothingness, and getting beyond maya — the things of this world that are distracting to us.

In fact, a lot of people see Protestantism especially as a very cerebralized version of Christianity. Older forms of Christianity were much more embodied and sensory, and focused on what’s called smells and bells — incense, songs, liturgy that’s meant to be impressive. Protestantism, in its focus on the written word, so deeply prioritizes being able to articulate ideas in finite form. Protestantism may in fact only be possible because of the printing press. This ability to access the written word privileges reading and writing to such an extent that it reordered our minds. Much of Catholic and Orthodox practice is about the body; it isn’t purely a cerebral exercise. In fact, Orthodoxy is famous for being less intellectual — I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense here. I think Orthodoxy privileges a mystical experience, and the Desert Fathers, and things of that nature.

Judaism is interesting too. I read Daniel Boyarin’s book The No-State Solution recently, which is a really interesting Jewish studies, sort of critical theory / cultural theory text. A lot of it was spent trying to analyze what makes a Jew a Jew. He argues that it’s not Halakha — Jewish law, and whether or not someone is matrilineally descended from a Jewish woman — but much more about connecting to a text line that runs throughout Jewish history. Do you engage with these texts, yes or no? And if so, one has a claim to Jewishness, in a way, among other things. And while that might sound like it privileges the intellect and cerebralizing God’s law or something like that, so much of what is debated — “disputing for the sake of heaven,” as is often put within Judaism — is about what we do with the body, about how the body is meant to be treated. So it’s one of those things that’s both extremely high and cerebral and intellectual, but also heavily embodied as well.

I’m realizing that the way I’m framing this may not feel super great to Protestants, and I’m not doing that intentionally. They’re all different ways of comprehending reality, and I’m trying not to say one of these is better than the other right now. This is something people point to Descartes on. And anyway — back to Kant.

Kant very famously has the split between phenomena and noumena. Kant has this way of understanding perception: that we are locked into our bodies, that what we experience is a set of phenomena, and phenomena are inherently subjective. And there may be a trans-subjective nature to it — maybe — we may not be able to know that, because we cannot see outside of our senses. We cannot sense out of our senses. We cannot reason outside of the rational structure of how our brains work. And so there’s this noumenal realm that might be outside of what we can sense, and we’ve only evolved senses for very specific evolutionary purposes. Does this help survival, yes or no? If the answer is yes, those senses will likely be enhanced and protected over time. If no, less so. And how do we know that we’re perceiving the full range of what’s available in terms of information that exists? We don’t know. And in fact, we get better at knowing this all the time.

If that’s true, one must be open to the fact that there must be information — at the very least, there may be information — that exists outside of our ability to perceive it right now, or perceive it in full right now, or maybe perceive it in full ever. Maybe that’s something that exists beyond human capacity, ipso facto.

If one is open to the idea of ultimate unknowability, and open to the fact that physics may be far stranger than our experience of it — and that, by some accountings, time may not only move backwards to forwards — and it’s possible that non-human intelligence exists, which is another huge question. I did a show about this as a thought experiment last year, about great filter events, with David Grinspoon, that you should check out. Because, again, I’m not claiming there are non-human intelligences in this way — I’m not trying to convince you one way or the other. Right now we’re talking about it in a very theoretical, thought-experiment kind of way. Then there may in fact be entities who are able to access time in the opposite direction, or to experience time in full, all at once. And a hyperstition is something that comes from what we perceive as the future, reaches back in time, to either create itself or create the conditions for itself in the past.

If you haven’t seen Arrival or Interstellar, I basically need to spoil them to discuss them. That’s the tough part about using literature or film as an exploratory device here — there often isn’t a good way to do it otherwise. If that bothers you, go ahead and pause and come back to the show another time. But also, I think it’s okay to have movies spoiled a little bit and then go back and watch them. Sometimes I feel like that even increases the enjoyment of them. For instance, I just watched Mother! by Darren Aronofsky, and I wish I’d read a little bit about it before I just dove in. Sometimes it’s nice to go in with literally no information. Sometimes it really does help the enjoyment to know a little bit about the symbolic order that’s being presented.

In Arrival, extraterrestrials arrive on Earth. Various humans are sent to try to make contact with them, to learn what they can, and to figure out what exactly is happening — because the extraterrestrials are just parked on Earth, floating above it. Amy Adams goes with a couple of other people, chosen from various scientific disciplines, to do this work, and she’s a linguist. Her job is to figure out what they’re saying. She notices that they have a unique orthography. Actually, it’s not even orthography, because they’re not letters — they’re full ideas. The language is circular. The symbols they use are these circles with various types of definition on the outside. It almost looks like black paint has been splattered.

Everyone thinks that what’s going to be learned about these creatures is going to be learned by the other scientists, and that the linguist is essentially there to assist them in figuring out the important stuff. Only it turns out that the language itself is what’s important. Their language is circular, and it conveys an awareness that time is not linear, backwards to forwards — it exists all at once. As Amy Adams learns how to speak this language, her awareness of time also changes, such that she experiences time all at once as well. She experiences her entire life, and can see her entire life and what that means for her.

Near the end of the film, things are not going well. Various governments have sent up their own representatives and scientists to speak with the extraterrestrials in their vehicles above various world cities. There’s tension between the US and China at this point in the film. And because Amy Adams has learned how to see reality in this alien way, she’s able to pull... she knows that she can call the Chinese leader and tell him something that no one else would know, that would get him to stand down and relax this escalation. Amy Adams pulls a memory from the future — which, in our view of reality, hasn’t happened yet — into the present, in order to create that future. Hyperstition.

But funnily enough, almost the same mechanism exists in Interstellar. Matthew McConaughey, an astronaut on a dying Earth, goes through some wormhole — much like Contact — and ends up in a tesseract. Or at least what the movie says is a tesseract: a sort of four-dimensional cube that has a temporal element to it that I’m still trying to wrap my head around. What exactly this might be isn’t super important for the purpose of explaining this. But inside this tesseract, Matthew McConaughey is back where his daughter is, when his daughter hears a ghost in her bookshelf — and it’s Matthew McConaughey, trying to reach her from the future, or a trans-temporal dimension, to tell her to do something in the present, as she experiences it, that will impact the future. The future calling back on the present to change, or to enact, the future. Hyperstition.

It’s a very cool literary device. Or you can be critical of it and say it has a little bit of the deus ex machina. There’s a famous scene from South Park where they make fun of the fact that the rules of time-travel movies never really make sense. Maybe I’ll put the link in Substack if you really want to watch that little clip. But let’s just take for granted that this idea of hyperstition is a worthwhile literary term. Ignore all the other stuff about whether or not this exists in some sort of real sense, and just think about it as a story about history that we tell ourselves.

Our ability to handle climate change is a hyperstition. Think about it this way. Future humans — whether ourselves or our descendants — are calling to us from the future to create the conditions of a planet they now live in, with a stable, livable climate. It’s only a hyperstition if we hear it this way. If we don’t do it, it’s a daydream. But if we’re able to pull it off, it’s because in some sense the future has called to us in the present to enact the future that they now inhabit.

It’s a weird way of seeing this. It may not be immediately actionable to understand it this way. But I find this way of experiencing working in climate to help me make sense of it, and to work toward making the daydream a hyperstition. It’s motivating. It’s beautiful. I like to be open to the possibility of things like this, because I used to be much more closed off to them. And I’m just open to the fact that reality might be a really bizarre thing that we’ve all sort of lost sight of.

It reminds me a little bit of when I was a younger person — I really liked Bill Hicks. If you’re out there listening and you like Bill Hicks, shout out to you. He reads as so much angrier now that I’m older, but there are parts of him that I find helpful. I especially like his famous speech from one of his standup specials — that life’s just a ride. We get so distracted by conflict and by pleasure and by our own suffering that we forget that this is a... what is this thing? How did we end up here? We have bodies, there’s an atmosphere. We grew out of a space rock — and isn’t that amazing?

And I think spiritual practice should do at least two things. It should probably do some others too, but the two I’m going to focus on here are: it reminds us that we ultimately are not in charge of everything. It reminds us that whether it’s a living Earth, whether it’s the cosmos, whether it’s a god or gods — humans are not the ultimate power. We don’t actually have to decide literally everything. It’s too much responsibility for us. And moreover, believing that we can and should be this powerful can have a toxic effect on us, and it’s better that we don’t embrace and try to do this in that way.

Secondly, it should remind us that life is incredibly sacred and important, but also kind of funny. It’s amazing that this exists. And if it’s amazing that this exists, and it’s kind of funny that we control bodies and are on a space rock, then can’t we just be nicer to each other? Can’t we just laugh about why we set everything up like this? Why are we choosing misery when we could have a world that’s beautiful for everyone? And ideally that should make us more humane and connected with one another, and better able to do this work. Because life’s just a ride, right? We can laugh at it a little bit, right?

And if you’re thinking about that hyperstition reaching back into the present, I imagine it just piercing all the way through synthesis, all the way through thesis and antithesis, breaking that dialectic and sort of shaking us out of this conflict, and getting us to think about: how do we create the world that is calling to us from 2050, that needs us here to create it? Some of the dialectical suffering we’re experiencing may not be necessary at all. Maybe some of these things we can set aside, so we can make sure we’re oriented in the right ways to achieve the things we so desperately need to, in order to become the species we must be for us to continue and to develop as a permanent civilization on Earth.

We can do it. If I didn’t believe we could, I’d be building a bunker somewhere. That’s not what I’m trying to be about. And some days, ideas like the hyperstition just give me that little boost I need to stay on track and continue with this very difficult work.

Thanks for listening. Hope you loved a strange, monologue-y kind of show. Tell you what — think about this. Don’t tell anyone about it. You can just think about it privately for a while, and don’t do anything on any of your apps. Just think about this privately, and I’ll consider that a win for this one. Ugh — you made it to the end here. You’re one of the real ones. I really appreciate it. Hope this gave you something new, something to chew on. And be sure to listen to the show with D.W. Pasulka that’s coming out, and the episode about the Bhagavad Gita. Bye for now.

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Today's a biggie. We talk about some huge concepts, but don't be scared. They're simple enough. You'll get the hang of it while walking your dog and listening to this and soon you'll be able to wow your friends and family with some fancy new $5 words.

In all seriousness though, I think these concepts are genuinely useful, and have helped me make sense of my own feelings, how my brain works, and how to understand what it means as a little person to relate to ideality, materiality, and the Antropocene.

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Oh my goodness. There are so many references in this show. I will come back and add them, but if I could only choose one...

"Immanuel Kant song"

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This is a summary of episode #405 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen to it on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you enjoy your shows. You can also listen to the full thing in its entirety right below this paragraph. Attached to this blogpost is a full transcript of the episode and some brief additional points of analysis up top.

Varsha Ramesh Welsh, cofounder and CEO of Offstream, was on the Reversing Climate Change show this week to talk about her work living and breathing MRV (Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification). To my delight, we sketched out what a future might look like where humanity gets much better at measuring what happens on our planet. But first, some quick definitions…

Key taxonomy: MRV, dMRV, and Managed MRV

• MRV (Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification): This is the overarching process that must be followed to get credible carbon credits issued. It involves a project developer or a contracted third party monitoring developer operations, reporting on that data, and having an auditor verify it in some way. Depending upon the project type, it often requires detailed plans that outline exact sensor placements, hardware usage, and monitoring frequency. Historically, this was often done using pen and paper.

• dMRV (Digital MRV): This refers to the category of software platforms built to ingest various sources of operational data, visualize it, streamline reporting, and send it off for verification. Despite the “digital” label, Varsha notes that 95%-plus of projects still rely on some human intervention, such as combining a digital truck odometer reading with a human-taken photo or bill of lading. It perhaps just shifts the wet-to-dry system ratio to dry.

• Managed MRV: This is the service model Offstream leans into, recognizing that simply selling a dMRV software tool still leaves the project developer with the burden of managing the software. This can literally require a full-time hire. Managed MRV combines the software platform with human expertise to make critical judgment calls on what data is most efficient to track, while handling the administrative heavy lifting of actually collecting that data every month.

• Unmanaged MRV: is just a joke because I spend too much time on memes it turns out. Willem Dafoe implies the existence of Willem Dafriend…

Anyways, here are some big thoughts:

Does Carbon Dioxide Removal Have a Surveillance Capitalist Future?

It shouldn’t be surprising I lit up when Varsha started talking about a future where our ability to gather improves so much that essentially all infrastructure has a positive or negative carbon benefit that is monetized. It’s such a fascinating thought experiment, not least of which because it tells you a lot about a person by how they react to it. Any world sufficiently advanced to have that type of tracking surely has it for much else.

What does the world look like when we (or really I should say, some) have access to so much granular detail about humans and their behaviors (I mean more than now, by way of Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism)? Are you happy that your car insurance goes down because your insurer knows you drive less and stop less rapidly? Or do you get the sense that over the coming years you will be more measured than any previous generation by many fold? Will it stop at some dignity-respecting limit, or will our thoughts eventually be read? Will it be advanced punitively, or because it saves us money to provide our data? (Likely both.) Before you know it, the whole social contract around data and what we opt-in to might make it too expensive or annoying to opt out of.

And with so much riding on behavior prediction, it’s hard to see how we wouldn’t end up in some Minority Report world, or even a world where those with the access to the best datasets and AI models use it to accrue massive wealth via markets of all kind, including prediction markets. Those not on the right side of the K-shaped economy will have their data help the well-off make more money off of the data which they can’t afford to opt out of giving. It’s easy to see why those inclined to Marxian thought liken this to a new form of primitive accumulation.

Varsha is nonplussed by this grim scenario I painted. She thinks it’s a pretty good deal if data lowers transaction costs and lots of other costs and we can solve some of humanity’s persistent issues with a tighter feedback loop around accountability both good and bad. A world that rewards carbon stewardship and punishes pollution would certainly be a cleaner one. It might be a healthy and happy one, where good habits result in wealth and we lower the gains that come from charm, deception, and life’s soft skills. It might be a more meritocratic and just place. It might even permanently end debates over theodicy, which will disappoint many working theologians.

If things get weird, she has faith in humanity rising to overturn the bad social contract and replace it with something new. I’m hesitant to expect that, but I can respect difference on this matter. Kudos to Varsha for presenting a bold envisioned future and making me think of how this could play out.

How’s it make you feel? Hopefully, at least conflicted. If I could introduce some of this energy to your life, I consider this entire podcast a success.

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Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Hey, thank you for listening to Reversing Climate Change. This is the host, Ross Kenyon. I am a climate tech and carbon dioxide removal entrepreneur. Before I introduce today’s guest, do you know that there’s a second podcast right now? I took the old feed of Carbon Removal Newsroom, which has been sitting dormant for a couple years, and I just built a new show on top of it called Climate Workers Anonymous. If you’re a millennial American, you probably know about PostSecret, which is where people would anonymously submit things that they were too embarrassed, ashamed, scared to talk about publicly, mail it in, and it would be published as part of a collective art project. And that’s what I’m doing for people who work in climate. You listen to this show, it would not surprise me if you did work in climate or something adjacent. If you have something that you’d like to share that you would not like attributed to you yourself, you should go check out Climate Workers Anonymous. Subscribe on Substack, whichever podcast apps you use.The link to do that is in the show notes.

Also, if you wouldn’t mind, before we start, opening up your podcast app and giving this show, Reversing Climate Change, a great rating and review on whichever podcast apps you use. I’ve been noticing a lot of people on Spotify recently have been giving me five stars. Thank you if you’re listening. I really do appreciate that a lot. And if you aren’t over on Substack following me, Climate Workers Anonymous and Reversing Climate Change, you’re missing some really cool content that ties in with the audio versions of the show. So if you are on Substack, you want a little extra, let’s connect over there.

Today’s show is with my friend Varsha Ramesh Walsh. I invited Varsha on to untangle essentially what the D is in MRV.There’s MRV, there’s DMRV. I used to see people talking about MMRV, where these fault lines are, how that’s changed over time. And I asked Varsha on to explain taxonomical differences between all of these various approaches, as well as specifically what Offstream is doing at this moment, because I know that they’ve grown and changed a lot. Essentially Offstream helps biomass carbon credit producers or those who might theoretically like to produce carbon credits figure out how to do so in as easy a way as possible. It’s a huge lift to figure out how to quantify all of these things and then also to figure out the relative merits of which methodology to use, which registry to issue your credits through, and about a thousand other questions. There’s a lot to know.

And also coincidentally, Offstream was the first sponsor, I believe, of Reversing Climate Change. When I started taking sponsorships a few years ago, Varsha was an early supporter of trying to stand that up, and I am very grateful. So thank you, Varsha. Appreciate you helping validate that as a way of valorizing the podcast. You help other people valorize their carbon removal projects, and you helped me valorize mine, funnily enough. Thank you so much to Varsha for being willing to hang with me on this level without a lot of warning. I had a lot of fun hanging with her. If you like what she’s doing, you should definitely check out Offstream. The link to do so is in the show notes. Thanks for listening. Really appreciate you hanging out. And here’s the episode of Reversing Climate Change with Varsha Ramesh Walsh.

Ross Kenyon: At long last, Varsha, thank you. We did it. We’re in the same room together digitally.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: I was explaining to you earlier that you’re in this very unique spot that a lot of friends of mine find themselves in, where you’ve got a lot to say, you’re very experienced, you’ve been doing this for a long time, and somehow that disadvantages you for coming on the podcast because then I second-guess myself. I’m like, “Varsha can do so many things. We need to wait until for the exact right, perfect thing, and then we’ll do it.” And that just means we’ve been talking about doing this for, like, two years or something foolish.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: It’s probably been two years. Yeah, but I think that it’s perfect. And I appreciate it, one, because I don’t get that many chances to come on your podcast, so I really wanna make it worth it. And I feel like I did a lot of podcasts when we were about maybe over a year ago now, and they all capture how we thought about what we did at Offstream then, but it has actually evolved a lot. And so this is my first podcast in quite a while, and I think that the way we understand what our customers need and support them today is actually sort of different and much clearer than it used to be, so I’m really excited to get to talk about it. Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: It’s a really cool thing to talk about because you started off doing one thing, it sounds like, and maybe the market changed or your customers changed or you understood yourself in a different way than you do now, and it’s changed over time, which also isn’t that easy for people to do. Sometimes people get really stuck on the way that they set out to do things, and it’s hard for them to change, and maybe you’ve held this a little bit more lightly than others.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Sure. I mean, I think if you’re game, I can go into some of the evolution and also, I mean, you’re a founder too, like why we... Like founding’s a little bit of the story, but I think the way I like to think about it is that our North Star has actually always been the same, which is true. Not everyone gets to have that. And I think I’ve been really clear that since starting Offstream, our goal is to help project developers get carbon credits more seamlessly. And that North Star is broad enough that I think what we’ve learned is the way we do it matters a lot, and that has been what’s really refined.

So when we started, I think SaaS was king. I was obsessed with this concept that it was gonna be a software platform. But I also believed that the best way to build good software was to do the work yourself and then build software once you figure out the work. So I actually have to thank Grant Faber suggested... Our very first paid customer at Offstream was actually just a climate accelerator called Brink. But Grant Faber was doing a...

Ross Kenyon: Brink was your first customer?

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Brink, the APAC, yeah.

Ross Kenyon: I worked in their climate tech accelerator. That’s-- I didn’t realize that was your...

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Yeah. I mean, when you think in the sense that like Offstream LLC was a thing and they paid Offstream LLC to give a workshop on carbon credit certification. And when you’re early, all you’re looking for is someone to pay you to do something in the realm of what you’re thinking of. So they weren’t paying us a subscription or anything. But I was like, “This is sick.” Like Grant introduced me to Nina at Brink. She was sold. Like we put a contract in place. And doing that content, like it was validating that people had questions about this process and needed support, right? Like that was all I was looking for. The bar was much lower then.

And we had a couple projects like that that we did, and then we were starting to really hone in on things. But anyway, the broader philosophy was that, you know, if you think about what you want to build a platform to support, if you can break it down into 10 pieces and try to do the work at each of those 10 stages, it’s the best way to then figure out what can you automate? What can you not? How do you build a platform to support it? So we always had that philosophy at Offstream, and so we were kinda just doing the work for our customers while we built the platform alongside them. And that really started to accelerate through, I would say, late 2024, all of ‘25, and in early ‘26, we had kinda been doing that now for over two and a half years, and what we realized was what our customers wanted was actually someone to just do the work for them.

And so we had kept thinking we were gonna automate our human team out of doing what they were doing, and then at some point we were like, “Oh, actually, this is the thing people really want.” Like, this is why they’re choosing us. This is what makes it actually work. And it’s allowing us to deliver more value than we would if we were just a software platform. And so kind of what we first started doing by necessity turned into exactly what I think we’re meant to do now, which we’re calling Managed MRV. But the way I like to think about it is we’d always been doing it. We couldn’t really articulate to the market and to customers what it was called or why it was different from the many, many software platforms out there. But finally, the words came together and I think we wrote a blog post about it, and it’s really caught on. Like, I think the language Managed MRV resonates with people. I like to think about it as just we get the job done, but you can’t sell a product called We Get the Job Done. So instead, we came up with this. And it really is just words to describe things we’ve been doing for a while. But I think that that’s an important skill for any startup to really get right is how can you differentiate what you do and embrace it? So yeah, it’s been really energizing.

Ross Kenyon: If you want to understand the wormholes that have been chewed through my brain by the internet, the way that I’m gonna ask this question will elucidate that for you, which is, do you know the... God, I’m so, so sorry to do this to you, Varsh. Do you know the meme format of the X implies the existence of Y? It’ll be like, Willem Dafoe implies the existence of Willem the friend and stuff like that.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: I...

Ross Kenyon: It’s like managed MRV implies the existence of unmanaged MRV. Is that a...

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Yes. Oh my gosh, that’s such a good meme format. Should we...

Ross Kenyon: Oh yeah, ‘cause there’s a crossover with, by the way. I don’t know if you wanna reveal that or not, but you have...

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: I will reveal that one of my moments of pride was when our teammate Emma was accepted into the Writer’s Room of Carbon Removal Memes, and apparently she’s doing well. I mean, I only hear from her, but she’s really...

Ross Kenyon: Reliable narrator.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Yeah, we have a moderately reliable narrator in Emma, but genuinely, no, memes are a big part of our culture at Offstream, and it’s actually... It’s like, I’m so happy that... Like, Emma came to Offstream not from carbon removal, not from anything in climate. And so a proud moment is just that she understood the market enough to be able to contribute with humor, which I think is a really good milestone, so...

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, to be funny about something, I think you need to...

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: You need to get it. Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: About the fault lines, and you need to... Yeah, there’s a lot you need to know. Yeah. She’s up to speed.She’s very good.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Good. I’m so glad. Yeah. So yes, for managed MRV, the existence of managed MRV does imply the existence of unmanaged MRV. Maybe the way I’d frame it is just somebody has to manage MRV, and it’s just a question of who. So, unmanaged MRV might be somebody purchasing a software tool that hooks up to their machines and pulls data in, collects it, has some automations like looking for anomalies, and then prepares that data to be pushed out, usually to a registry, maybe to a buyer or another intermediary. Like, I think every good software DMRV platform does that.

And I think what we realized through doing our work and building, like, we do have a software platform because it’s hard to do managed MRV well without it, is that there are lots and lots of steps that require both expertise, like making a judgment call. What should I track? If I could choose to track a photo of this versus an invoice, what’s better? What’s more efficient? And then advocating for it, kind of like what’s easiest, and then managing the admin work of actually getting all the data every single month, making sure it gets collected, and making sure systems are designed well, that they’re actually working, and then reminding people, following up with them, kind of looking at it with the human touch and then pushing it out the door. Like there’s often a full-time person, whether they’re a head of carbon or a head of MRV sometimes, using that software platform. And so the management has to be done, and from our perspective, it’s more expensive in many cases to do it in-house than to purchase something like managed MRV.

Ross Kenyon: Okay. What do even people mean with MRV and DMRV? And I see these things get thrown around and we didn’t really define it for people.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Oh yeah, we didn’t...

Ross Kenyon: People probably listening, I imagine that they know, but these terms are alienating to some extent.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: They definitely are, and we actually shied away from the acronyms for a while as a result of that.

Ross Kenyon: Or did it make it more confusing paradoxically?

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Hard, right? Because, so I’ll define... I’d like to define MRV and DMRV, but before I do so, I’ll just spend a second on this. Like, we see that DMRV is something that gets asked a lot about in requests for proposals, RFPs, and then as a result, lots of early-stage developers are going around with a checklist. They’re like, “Okay, well, what’s my registry? What’s my DMRV? Like, what’s my path forward?” Like, years before they need those things. But we sort of started to see that that acronym, as well as registry selection and some other choices, were signals that developers felt they needed to send to the demand side of the market to show them they were serious. And so, since we did that thing, we kind of embraced the category acronym. But in embracing it, we’ve also had to sort of figure out how to articulate our unique approach to it.

But we can start with MRV, which is a much broader category. Stands for monitoring, reporting, and verification. It’s basically the process that needs to be followed to get credible carbon credits issued. Like, monitoring needs to happen of what’s going on, it needs to be reported on, and then somebody needs to verify it. And actually, often there are three different parties doing those three things, right? Like, the project developer is monitoring, a platform is helping them take that data they monitored and report out on it, and then an auditor is usually verifying it. And so when people refer to MRV, I think they have different definitions, but often we’ll hear it described like, “What registry did you choose? What methodology are you following?” And like, “What are you monitoring? Who are you gonna report it to, and who’s gonna verify it?”

And so that is like a much bigger umbrella category, and within it, there are these specific deliverables. Like, you could have an MRV plan, which essentially is a more detailed version of like what exactly are you gonna monitor with what sensors and what frequency? Where is that data gonna live, and where is it gonna go? And depending on the project type, that MRV plan might be 80 pages. Like a BECCS project has to, in an MRV plan, identify every single sensor placement in the capture process and the storage process, and then also report out on often like the specific hardware that’s gonna be used. All of that kind of lives in the MRV world, and then the DMRV acronym stands for digital MRV. And it’s been kind of co-opted by the category of software platforms that ingests various sources of operational data, visualizes them, helps to make reporting easier, and then sends them to be verified. And the D standing for digital is kind of funny to me ‘cause like everything’s digital in 2026.

Ross Kenyon: It’s like kind of my follow-up here. Like how... Is there someone just standing there monitoring in person with a clipboard? And like, no...

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Okay, so yes, yes. Like early, early MRV was done on pen and paper. So that’s why the D had to be added. But...

Ross Kenyon: That’s just the default, so maybe it’s just MRV as well. Are there any more dudes with clipboards or is that fully...

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: I think there are still dudes with clipboards. I think the reality of most DMRV platforms today, even that have the D in front of them, have some data that might’ve been originally captured via clipboard. Yeah. And I think that if that data on the clipboard is accompanied by some other data, I’m actually totally okay with it, you know?Yeah. I think people get on their high horses about data collection and data integrity, and there are things that are just impossible in certain contexts and often those specific projects are the ones that potentially have the most social benefits or just are creating the most jobs. And so in an ideal world, there would be no human intervention in any of the data that is collected as part of a carbon credit. But I’m confident that in most projects today there is, like 95%-plus projects. So, it is what it is. And I think credit buyers understand that, and when there’s human intervention, they just look for two or three different data points to back up the one that was touched by a human so that they can have confidence in it. And that’s okay.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. So the project type you’re describing strikes me as something like the work that’s being done with distributed biochar, and there’s cameras that are being installed on kilns so that they can theoretically have that captured digitally. No one can-- Of course, I think probably any system can be gamed, and I’m wondering if you’ve seen much of that come through your system. But...

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: It doesn’t have to be distributed biochar. Like, we work with a ton of North American lumber mills, and they receive feedstock deliveries and they need to track them. And so that feedstock is being delivered by a human driving a truck, and often the way we track them is some combination of the truck odometer plus a bill of lading plus a photo taken by a human, you know? And it doesn’t have to be a rural distributed project to have these data collection limitations.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, you’re like, “Okay, so what? You could put a transceiver on the car. You can track the mileage if you wanted. You could have cameras doing things.” Like, I could see how if you had a perfect panopticon of a surveillance state, you could perfectly measure all of this, and like maybe that’s the direction that the world is heading.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: I don’t think so. Yeah, no, I don’t think so.

Ross Kenyon: You don’t think so? I’m being a little hyperbolic. Not really, but a little bit. What here, take issue with it.What do you...

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: No, I think that we have two forces. One, akin to what you’re saying, like, there’s definitely a lot more private data just in the public ether. But I also think that people are much more aware of data privacy and trying to push back in some instances. So I think those will be opposing forces for balance. That’s all. Maybe I’m just less sold that that’s the direction. You know, I think we’ll see. Yeah. But I think the art... Maybe just to bring it back to projects for two seconds. Like, I just, I think that in the future, every type of operator with a physical asset will be a carbon project developer, and we’re already starting to see that. Like for...

Ross Kenyon: Everyone?

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: What? Everyone. Like, if you own an asset that could either avoid emitting carbon or remove carbon, at some point like you will be removing it and then getting credits for it, or avoiding it and getting credits for it.And this isn’t actually that crazy. Think about it. Like, you buy a heat pump, you get a tax credit for that. It’s just an extension of that. And so anyway, the reason I believe this is ‘cause we’ve seen it in like the biomass space, carbon removal space. So, you know, three years ago, the folks developing projects were all startups. They were all like biochar project developers, and that was their full-time job. Now, there are these operating companies that have wood waste that just want to produce biochar, and the carbon credits are mission critical to the economics. So now they’re a project developer, but not really, right? Like they’re not gonna necessarily... They’re like a lumber mill operator that needs another revenue stream. And so I just see it going that way. And as a result, we can’t have these gazillion hoops that everyone has to jump through to get one credit. Like the way we get data needs to feel flexible to them so they can just keep doing what they’re doing and we can get the data we need. So that’s...

Ross Kenyon: Don’t mess with our hoops.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Yeah. I, the hoops are... I’m for hoops. I’m for hoops. But...

Ross Kenyon: Heard it here first, Varsha’s pro...

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: I’m for hoops. I’m kind of bummed actually that the NBA finals are over. I wanted another game.

Ross Kenyon: Mm, yeah.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Call myself a Knicks fan or a Spurs fan, but that’s okay. I just wanted more hoops. So, no, I think that the hoops, like it’s a delicate balance, right? It’s like you need to set rules and people need to adhere to them, but also we’re... And they need to improve. But at the same time, like there’s... If we want this industry to scale, it can’t be so expensive in both paying for vendors like Offstream, paying registries, changing your operating a lot, asking people that pay you for information that’s really proprietary for them. Like I think there’s just some things that are challenging about the hoops. So our philosophy is like how easy can we make it to get the data we need with minimal changes to your operations? Um, so you can just text us your data if you need, or you can WhatsApp it instead of using an app because we all know apps are dead. It’s 2026, so...

Ross Kenyon: This vision of the future you paint is so interesting to me, where it’s like everyone who could theoretically create an avoidance or a removal will eventually do so. I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone make such an all-encompassing prediction about that. It’s really fascinating to me. It makes me think of... There are both good and bad ways to view this, but there’s car insurance you can get now that’s much cheaper because it measures your mileage and it has algorithms it runs it through and knows that youre low risk or high risk. And...

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Totally. And you need your phone in the car all the time, right? They...

Ross Kenyon: And there’s a thing that you plug in and you’re like, “Okay, this will save a couple hundred bucks a month,” but there’s also this lingering thing of like, what else are you learning about me and how-- is that gonna be monetized? Or like this is starting to creep me out. And also everyone who has anything right now in AI, if you can build a proprietary data set that’s industrial or something like that that has value, that’s the new moat that everyone is looking to have so that they can train their own smaller sets and build their own models off of these smaller sets, and that’s really gonna be the future. The way that car insurance works in that case is it makes your life cheaper and easier in so many regards. But also you’re just increasingly tracked and you’re incented positively. It’s not like there’s some big brother watching you. You’re just like, “Oh, I’m saving a couple hundred dollars a month.” And if you have all of that stuff that you’re like, “Okay, I’m making carbon credits over here. All of my health data is going into my app here. This is saving on my health insurance. All of my life is being quantified by algorithms outside of my control by billionaires who are frankly very bizarre men,” then is that the future that we’re heading into? And some of it’s good, like obviously better health decisions, better driving, better carbon credits, but also we’re being observed constantly.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: Out? Is that too much for you? Have I...

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: No, I mean, I think that it doesn’t freak me out, the future you just painted. But this is... I think it’s a social contract, and if I wanted to opt out of it, I would just opt out of it. Like, I would move somewhere, I would go off the grid, I’d get rid of my phone. I wouldn’t participate. But I am happy with the contract. I’ve opted in, and it serves me today. Like, they already monitor my energy consumption, you know? Like, they already know what I’m doing. They know when my sprinklers...

Ross Kenyon: Are they in the room with us right now?

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: They might be... And I think, you know, with AI as a great example, like, I know we pay for the tier of AI that doesn’t train on our data, so we have to, so we do that. But like, it still has our data, and it’s a contract that I opt into because the utils I get from the AI are higher than the downside of my data being out there, and that equation may change, and if so, I would just opt out, you know? So that’s how I feel.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I wonder too, this is maybe going too far I feel, but it’s all related here. I wonder as remote imaging and sensing gets better, you’re just like, “Oh, if you’re outside, everything’s being captured and that’s being fed into various systems.” You’re like, “Cool. Is there...”

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: See that you’re really concerned about the surveillance state, Ross. I am seeing...

Ross Kenyon: I had zero idea this podcast would go this direction, and I am really sorry if that’s not what you wanted it to be.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: No, it’s okay. I actually just don’t share the concern. Like, I hear that you are, I think I probably don’t know enough and I don’t want to. Like, I’m currently opting out of learning about that.

Ross Kenyon: What?

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Yeah. And this is something we talk about a lot. I think that as a founder, you kinda have to control what data you take in versus not, and you just ignore some. You just actually ignore some data sometimes. And this is a category of information I’m just not actually gonna open the door too much. So yeah.

Ross Kenyon: You’re one of the few people who talks to me in this kind of way. I remember we had a conversation at Carbon Inbound, which I can delete this part if you don’t want, where you’re just like, “You know what? That’s not a thing that I need to be thinking about, and it’s gonna pollute my information...”

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: It is. Same. Yeah, no, I agree. I love that I have that, but go ahead. I’m one of the only people who talks to you in that way.

Ross Kenyon: I just think I like that idea. I’ve read books about controlling what goes into your brain so you have enough space, your RAM isn’t eaten up by a bunch of foolish things and blah, blah, blah, or just things that you can’t control and like you shouldn’t be focused on. But I’ve never heard anyone block a conversation topic in that same kind of way where you’re just like, “I-- No, thank you. We will go somewhere else.” Like, okay, fine, Varsha.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: You’re right. Well, perhaps there’s a more tactful way to do so.

Ross Kenyon: You weren’t rude about it. I’m being a little bit silly, but...

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Was being open with you because we’re friends, you know? Yeah, I actually think that’s been really an important tenet of my growth. It was the ability to decide that like I didn’t need to process all the information that was thrown at me all the time, and this came up for me during COVID when I really struggled. Like, I had a hard time with the news. Like, I just was anxious all the time. I mean, the news was insane. There was so much uncertainty and like I didn’t like it, and I was like, “I could just not watch the news ‘cause what’s gonna change? I’m in my home.” Like, you know? So for some time I just didn’t, and it really helped me because I think there’s so many problems in the world and like I really think it’s my job to focus on the ones I can fix.

And so as a leader of an organization, I think I have an obligation to keep myself educated on world news, and I do through channels that are less alarming, let’s call it. And then I choose to like read a ton about energy policy and that sector of the news and then I just listen to our customers and I just have faith that those are the sources of data that I need.And so that means turning off faucets where like I don’t wanna have that in my sink. I don’t know if I love that acronym, but I just turn off the channel if I don’t want it, and it’s really served me actually. So, yeah.

Ross Kenyon: I have so much envy for this, and I wonder what my life would be like if I were that because I’m the opposite. I’m like, well, clearly I need to read the entire Talmud and clearly James Joyce. I’ve only read a little bit of James Joyce. I need to read all of that too and all the energy policy and all the other stuff and the news at the same time.And it’s cool that you get to sound smart when you make connections that maybe other people aren’t connecting in that way, but it’s not like laser-focused.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Probably more worldly than I am in this moment, Ross.

Ross Kenyon: How valuable is that though? Like you’re serving customers, you know what they want. You’re building something that is actually doing a thing that you think is really important. I hope that I’m on that track for my own specific customer set. I never think of them that way, but...

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Yeah. No, I think it’s also, it’s like chapters, eras, as my favorite artist likes to say. Like, I’m definitely in a very focused chapter right now, and I think it’s actually important to be able to modulate, right? Like focus and then zoom out if you need to. And so I do zoom out from time to time, but I zoom out within the context of typically the energy sector and decarbonization and climate, and more broadly, like infrastructure. Like, the question I ask myself a lot is just like, “What’s getting built?” Because of my thesis that everything that’s getting built has the opportunity to be a carbon removal asset in the future. So like, how can we just get it to do so, basically?

Ross Kenyon: We’re talking about hooks. How come that’s not the hook? I’ve never heard anyone say such...

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Oh, well that’s actually my whole thing. Like, every piece of infrastructure today is clean infrastructure, even if we don’t call it that. And we’ll need to generate some sort of credits and do reporting. Yeah. I really believe that. Like, it just is.

Ross Kenyon: And so whenever you’re in investor meetings, you get to say, “Our TAM is the entire world.”

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Yeah, pretty much.

Ross Kenyon: Everyone loves that, right? That’s a great thing people love.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Yeah. No, I try not to spend too much time in investor meetings, one, so in terms of channels.Two, it is actually what I’ve always believed and the big question, like whenever we’re interviewing candidates, they always ask me this too. It’s like, I wish I knew our path from where we are today to that future, you know? That’s the part that’s uncertain for me that I’ll likely share in your new project on things that bring me... Like, things that make me... I wish I knew the perfect clear path how we, where we go from, okay, there’s this really small segment of the population today who’s doing these projects that utilize physical assets, whether they’re new or existing, to remove or avoid carbon.Like, everything that’s happening, low-carbon materials, CBAM, like, all that’s happening in parallel, but how do we get from where we are to then this future economy where everyone is incented through capitalism to reduce their footprint and then remove carbon, because I just, I think that’s inevitable. It’s just the direction we’re going. It’s just like those steps.I wish I had the perfect plan ‘cause then I think we could... But I think the market will evolve, and it’ll be very interesting to see the journey.

Ross Kenyon: Uh, I know you don’t think of it this way, but is it a nice version of surveillance capitalism? That’s like, is that actually what that fut- maybe?

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: I don’t have enough-- I haven’t thought about it enough. I mean, I think surveillance is like a negative way to put it, but I think humans are sharing a lot of their data today with various stakeholders as part of a social contract and like if that’s no longer serving the human population, like we will figure it out and get out of it, you know?Like, collectively. So I guess I just believe in the future collective action of humans figuring it out. You don’t, it sounds like. You’re like really worried about it. Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: No, I have like, you know, inside me there are two wolves, and one of them is George Orwell’s, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face forever.” And like that’s in me a little bit. And then I also have this naive, beautiful version where we figure it out and we stop being so cruel to one another for very few real reasons, and we sort of get it together before our technology outpaces our politics and we kill ourselves off before we can...

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Yeah. That is a concern for me, the slowness of politics and policy. Um, you may or may not know I was actually a political science major.

Ross Kenyon: Did not know that. That’s so interesting.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Yeah. I had aspirations of serving in the Foreign Service. I wanted to work in the government, and then I realized everything moves so slowly, and I would lose my mind. But, you know, like, I get it. My personal experience aside, I think that is one of my concerns is that partisan challenges globally. Like the US is particularly challenging, but even ex-US, like there’s just really not this... We’re so far from, I think, where we need to be, which is that people put policy, politics aside and pettiness aside to just come up with some solutions that align with whatever their monetary policy is, whether it’s capitalism or something else, and then other priorities. And the change takes so, so, so long no matter what. Like even in our current administration and in the US right now, like the farm bill is such a challenge. Like it’s not even that partisan, you know what I mean? And so that’s probably the thing that concerns me the most of everything you just said is that the policy will take too long to catch up with some of where technology is going.And so the solution for us is the way I bring peace to my own brain in that is just like, are there-- can we continue to find private sector standards that companies choose to hold themselves accountable to? Because then at least there’s some quasi-regulation. So yeah.

Ross Kenyon: Okay.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: I wanna ask you before it gets away from me. We were talking about words, and it sounds like not only did finding the right words unlock new customer relationships or how you pitch Offstream to customers, but maybe it even helped you personally change how you understood what you’re doing in your business. Did I understand you correctly?

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: That’s right. Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: Tell me about that.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Sure. So I guess by embracing, like by having this language, like managed MRV to describe what we do, it definitely has helped us communicate to external parties the difference between what we do and just standalone software. But also, it has meant we have leaned into who we hire, how we staff the team, how we build product, and how we then want to grow. So we’ve always had customer success leads who were really talented, like typically engineering background or carbon science, and really understood the methodologies. And now that we’re leaning into this managed MRV, we’ve doubled down on that. Like, our most recent CS hire was a carbon science PhD. She’s our first PhD, which is very exciting, but she’s not too PhD about it. She’s like really talented and humble and awesome and very customer-oriented as well. But I’m doubling down on the basically expertise within our customer success team is a big change.

We build a ton of tooling that our team uses internally. So from a product perspective, we have a roadmap that’s pushing things to customers, but where customers just don’t wanna use software, we’re like, “Okay, they can just notify us some other way, and we’ll do it with our own software in-house.” And like, I do think that’s the future of software. Like I’m not necessarily into all of my apps replacing their dashboards with AI agent type things, but like I do think user interfaces are going to go away over time. And then the third thing is like as we expand, we’re really focused on biomass-based CDR right now, but we’ve always wanted to support other types of projects and other types of credits. So we already do work in tax credits, specifically a lot in 48E ITC, which is for energy production today. But as we do that, this managed MRV just parlays into managed compliance basically, right? It’s like, I think we’re gonna really stick with the managed part of it because it lowers risk for us, it lowers risk for our customers. It gives them what they want. And it also, I think, is potentially required to be successful in any sort of compliance field because everyone thinks compliance is black and white, but it’s actually just a bunch of gray area, you know?

Yeah, I actually broadly... Like, that was something one of my, one of our advisors said to me early in Offstream’s existence. He is just a close mentor. His name’s Gabe. He used to work at Indigo with me, and then he was at Ripple buying carbon credits for a while, so he’s really familiar with the market. And yeah, I do think most of compliance is gray area, and so having management of it with a human who can reason and make judgment calls better than AI will ever, and just hold AI accountable is actually just the future where we’re heading. So yeah.

Ross Kenyon: Oh, Varsha, you’re such a strange, interesting combination of a person ‘cause you’re... Okay, so there’s really big thoughts, but you also block out a lot of information. I think also, my guess is you probably had dreams about the soil enrichment protocol, and you dream in details, too. And so it’s both of those, but then very, very practical. Like, I would trust you to get stuff done, for sure. But also our long-running joke is you are such a noticer of body language that I will have the most small thing. I’m like, “Okay, Varsha, I know that you notice everything emotionally that is happening here at the same time.” The combination of things that you are is so bizarre and fascinating to...

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: That was really kind of you to describe me so well. Thank you, Ross.

Ross Kenyon: I got it right, broadly?

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: So. Yeah. Yes, and like I’m actually a big believer in that. Like, everyone’s got a lot of parts, and I just let mine shine. So...

Ross Kenyon: I think you definitely let them shine.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you.

Ross Kenyon: Varsha, we did it. I’m not even sure that it was the show that we intended to make. It’s okay though, right?

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: I think it’s a great show. I think it was a perfect balance of everything I wanted to cover. Thank you for having me, and we’ll talk soon.

Ross Kenyon: Okay. Thank you, Varsha.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Bye, Ross.

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In this episode of Reversing Climate Change, host Ross Kenyon sits down with the cofounder and CEO of Offstream, Varsha Ramesh Walsh, to untangle the complicated web of carbon credit data collection.

Offstream has evolved significantly after realizing that carbon project developers don't just want another software tool to manage... they want someone to simply get the job done for them. Varsha introduces us to the concept of "Managed MRV," explaining why handing off the heavy lifting of Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification can sometimes be cheaper and far more effective than trying to handle it all in-house.

But this show also gets big. Varsha argues that practically every piece of modern infrastructure has the potential to become a carbon dioxide removal or environmental asset. For that to be true, we would likely enter a world where we are all much more persistently observed and quantified, and with rewards and punishments to match. Is the future of carbon crediting one of surveillance capitalism with the social contracts of data sharing to match? Would that solve more problems than it creates? How are we even meant to live?!

Varsha also shares her incredibly disciplined approach to information consumption as a founder, offering a highly focused counter-narrative to being "well-informed".

Turns out nothing is truly small when you start to poke at it just a little bit.

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Offstream

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff

This is a summary of a bonus episode of the Reversing Climate Change podcast wherein I read the poem, “Jerusalem [and did those feet in ancient time]” by William Blake. You can listen to it wherever you enjoy your podcasts, such as on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or right below this paragraph—and in full!

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Some of the best art I’ve ever consumed has been Harold improv. And it’s also been some of the worst. An improv troop will start with a single audience-suggested word or phrase and build an hour-long set of interconnecting sketches that ideally tie everything back up with a nice bow by the last gag. When done well, it’s as impressive as any symphony or painting I’ve admired. When bad, imagine watching comedians flailing to find connection with theme and one another for a painful hour—not good! Cringe, even!

This is why with podcasting I always try to leave a little room for randomness to find me. I trust the process. Sometimes it’s a failed joke or reference that doesn’t ultimately make sense and it gets cut. Sometimes that means I get inspired to start singing a hymn that Monty Python’s Flying Circus taught me as a young teenager.

I recently made an episode of the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Tom Mills from Mati Carbon. Tom is formerly a Stripe Climate Fellow, where he busted his hump trying to embed carbon dioxide removal into agricultural supply chains. You can find the full episode and some writing about it below this paragraph.

Tom’s love for rural England, where he still lives, came out. And coincidentally, this very hymn/poem made an appearance at his wedding. It was originally composed in the first decade of the 19th century, and during WW1 it was turned into a popular hymn still well-known today.

In this bonus episode, I spend a few brief moments discussing this poem, William Blake’s relevance to climate and also just humanity’s persistent struggles, and why Romanticism’s simplicity can sometimes do enough and say enough (but not too much) that it can keep coming back again and again and again.

To this end, I recently heard Liel Leibowitz in How the Talmud Can Change Your Life discuss Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature by Erich Auerbach. Auerbach argues that Homeric poetry overdefines character motivation such that it is basically exactly as you read it. Biblical writing is so robust because it presents characters and ideas in a way that invites active hermeneutical participation. It isn’t something to memorize and learn so much as something to notice, critique, and dispute for the sake of heaven. It is an invitation to a discussion always in media res, always being recreated by you and those with whom you debate.

Does William Blake get here in this poem? I think that, despite my preamble, it is simple but also tells you essentially how to think about industry and nature. It is simple yet overdefined. It can still be a great and memorable poem (and work of music!) but simplicity alone does not achieve the high aesthetic standard Auerbach lays out (but maybe “Auguries of Innocence” does?)

Judge for yourself.

“Jerusalem [and did those get in ancient times]” by William Blake

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!
 
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
 
Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
 
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

What does this poem make you feel? Do you miss the slower and simple pre-industrial life (and atmospheric concentration of carbon)? Can a plaintive call to these mountains green inspire you to notice where you are today and what it must have looked like before we put a data center on top it? Or does it make you worry that greater cataclysm is coming if Jerusalem is being rebuilt—surely a sign of the end times? The foreshadowing of the battle to come for the future of England—and maybe by way of synecdoche, the future of the world itself?

Chew on that for awhile. I’m not here to tell you what it means. I doubt I’ve earned the right. And even if I had, why ruin you connecting synapses yourself? Wouldn’t I be doing you some artistic disservice?

I believe that engagement with the arts and humanities can make us better at our climate work and also—dare I say it—live better lives. Sometimes a simple bucolic image can do the work of biophilia and rootedness that something more “serious” could never. But also, it made me notice my environment more today. For this reason, my sincere thanks to William Blake!

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Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Hey, thank you for listening to Reversing Climate Change. This is Ross Kenyon. I’m the host of the podcast. I did a recent episode with my friend Tom Mills, and somehow we ended up talking about... what do I mean, somehow? I brought up the fact that something he said made me think of the song I originally heard from Monty Python — “And did those feet in ancient time”—which Tom Mills very eruditely pointed out is a poem called “Jerusalem,” ultimately by William Blake.

William Blake is an early Romantic British poet. His work pops up in film and television a decent amount; there are lines that get quoted quite a bit. I originally heard the famous lines from “Auguries of Innocence” by William Blake in Dead Man by Jim Jarmusch, which is a really amazing film that you should see. I actually saw it in a film theory class years and years ago, in my undergraduate years, because it’s considered a revisionist Western. In most films with cowboys and Indians, the cowboys are the good, civilizing force, and the Indians, or Native Americans, are the sort of bad savages who are preventing civilization from advancing. And Dead Man is a really cool film because it flips that. White, quote-unquote civilization is a toxic presence that’s encroaching and corrupting, and it’s actually the Indigenous way of life that’s the thing to be preserved here. I really loved that flip, and it’s a beautiful film. Neil Young does the score; Johnny Depp stars. It’s a good film.

And the famous lines, if you don’t already know them, I’ll read them for you. This is from “Auguries of Innocence,” which is only a small part of the poem:

Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born.
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.

More recently, outside of Dead Man, you probably associate this with Westworld. This is sort of the leitmotif of the entire show. A thematic core of the show is that some beings are meant to suffer, are born into a system that causes them to suffer, and some are born into one that provides them with pleasure, often at the expense of those experiencing endless night. The endless night is dependent upon the sweet delight, at least in a show like Westworld.

And one thing I like about William Blake is that his poetry is so earnest. It often feels very simple. The rhymes are not complicated. “Auguries of Innocence” is a complex poem, and there’s a lot to it, but at least superficially it doesn’t have a lot of technical chops to it. I don’t feel like it’s intentionally obscure. I don’t feel like it’s doing a bunch of fancy footwork meant to throw you off, or something that requires the close reading of modernist poetry. It’s very straightforward. And you’ll see what I mean here. This poem is “Jerusalem,” also known as “And did those feet in ancient time,” by William Blake.

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!
 
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
 
Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
 
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

Ross Kenyon: A fairly simple poem in many ways. There’s a strong contrast between a mythological vision — there are artifacts that have spiritual power, weapons, a bow of burning gold that shoots arrows of desire, war-fighting and conquering — and, of course, William Blake observing England during the Industrial Revolution. He’s looking at England’s land being transformed from this bucolic, Old English... you know, you watch something like Downton Abbey — ignore the class dynamics and all of that for a second, but think about what rural life is like, at least for those who enjoy such a thing. It has the slower pace of life connected to the natural world. And then he’s staring at the dark Satanic mills, where people are working very long hours doing repetitive, dangerous tasks, and William Blake is declaring war upon it.

And he also links it to building a new Jerusalem. You’ll rebuild the temple. This is the end times, and any time we’re talking about building Jerusalem, there’s a sense of the apocalypse, of a new world being born. And what a short, effective poem this is. It has Christian eschatology in it, apocalyptic thinking — it’s an apocalyptic poem; he’s got a lot of those. It’s where “dark Satanic mills” comes from. Everyone knows this phrase; it’s very, very common. And is it any surprise that this is sort of a national British hymn that people listen to? A connection to land and its people, lamenting our disconnection from nature, the old pastoral, bucolic, agrestic ways of being.

So, in case you weren’t familiar with that poem, here it is — that was “Jerusalem,” “And did those feet in ancient time,” by William Blake. Hope you enjoyed it, and have a wonderful rest of your day, with or without any more poetry that you add to it.

I only knew about it due to a childhood obsession with the dvd boxset of Monty Python's Flying Circus, where in the S1E4 episode, "Owl-Stretching Time", Eric Idle sings this song while being seduced. Unfortunately, I cannot find a good link to this sketch... I can't say I ever fully understood what was happening beyond just the earnestness and absurdity of the situation, but somehow Tom helped me unlock it.

In any case, this is a very very quick dip into Romantic poetry (industrialism bad, nature good; analysis bad, intuition good; simple good, complex bad), William Blake's prominence in films like Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man and HBO's tv series Westworld by way of his poem, "Auguries of Innocence", and how the sometimes something can actually be this simple and stand the test of time.

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"And did those feet in ancient time" on Wikipedia

This post originally appeared on Rainbow’s blog here. Thanks to Rainbow for their support.

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A good idea on paper

A few years ago, if you were paying attention to the rise of CDR-native registries, you probably kept hearing the same word: modular. The pitch was legitimately compelling, and I bought it when I first heard it. Writing methodologies is slow, expensive, and repetitive work. A huge fraction of what goes into any given CDR methodology looks more or less the same across pathways. How to source biomass, account for lifecycle emissions, handle leakage, quantify uncertainty—they don’t vary widely. Why not write those components once, as clean reusable modules, and snap them together differently for biochar, BECCS, BiCRS, enhanced rock weathering, and whatever comes next?

Every engineer I know would look at that and nod. It’s how you build software. It’s how you build anything you expect to scale. The alternative—writing each methodology as a single giant standalone document that repeats the same biomass-feedstock rules and the same LCA boilerplate in slightly different words every time—looks wasteful and brittle by comparison. Bespoke and expensive methodologies at legacy registries was a huge problem, and new players were sure to point to that issue.

Newer registries made modularity a central part of their pitch to buyers, investors, and the serious methodology-assessors at places like ICVCM and Microsoft. The story was that modularity would let them move faster, maintain consistency across pathways, and produce a higher-quality standard with a smaller team. Rainbow went the same direction, building its biochar methodology as a module underneath a broader “BiCRS” methodology, with the expectation that the biomass-feedstock logic would be cleanly reusable across technologies.

And then something interesting happened. They started walking it back. Not all of it, and not loudly. But the architecture of the methodologies that are actually being written is shifting.

Who pays the complexity tax

I sat down with Rainbow’s Erica Dorr and Clément Georget to try to understand why. Erica leads methodology development. Clem leads product. Their explanation is among the most honest I’ve heard anyone in this industry give about a design decision that didn’t work out the way they hoped.”

Our dream was to have these cleanly defined little building blocks that are modules, that are totally reusable, plug and play,” Erica told me. “It was all very promising.” The problem wasn’t the dream. The problem was that when you actually write a methodology as a set of modules, the neat edges between them dissolve. Every module turns out to have exceptions, caveats, technology-specific tweaks, edge cases that don’t quite apply to the next pathway over. So you need a second layer of requirements somewhere–as caveats or exceptions written directly into the modules, or in a methodology document on top of the modules—to say which modules apply, which ones have carve-outs, and how those carve-outs interact. Pretty soon the reader is chasing requirements across three documents and a footnote.

And that, if you think about it, is the exact experience the modular approach was supposed to prevent.

Clem framed it in the language he actually thinks in, which is software engineering. “It’s really like software development,” he said. “Who do you want to expose the complexity to? Who cares about the modularity is us, because we have to maintain this code base. The user doesn’t care. They just want to go through the requirements.”

That’s the thing the original pitch missed. Modularity on the backend is a good idea for almost exactly the reasons it sounds like a good idea. But modularity on the frontend—modularity that the reader of the methodology has to reassemble in their head—is a tax the reader pays. And the reader is a project developer trying to figure out whether their site meets the bar, not a software architect who finds the elegance rewarding.

The Torah vs. the Talmud

The analogy that came to me while I was listening to them was Judaism. You have the Torah, one of the core texts and the document the tradition is built around. Then you have the Talmud, which is the commentary, the arguments, the exceptions and rulings and edge cases that the tradition accumulated on top of the Torah over centuries. Both are load-bearing. If you really want to understand Judaism you need both. But you don’t hand someone the Talmud on day one.

A modular methodology stack, done badly, is kind of like handing a project developer the Talmud and the Torah at the same time and telling them to cross-reference. The expert who wrote it can navigate it fine. They wrote it. The developer who just wants to know “does my closed-kiln biochar site in India qualify, and what do I have to measure?” is drowning.

What Rainbow is doing now, and what Erica and Clem both described as the corrective, is keeping the modularity where it does real work, which is internally, and presenting the user with a single self-contained document that has everything they need in one place. “For them, it should read like a step-by-step; a single, self-contained document with everything they need,” Erica said. “We shouldn’t make it the user’s problem to go find which document has the requirements.” The modules still exist on Rainbow’s side. They still power the certification platform, the lifecycle assessment tooling, the eligibility questions. That’s where the scaling benefit was always real. It just turns out that making the modularity visible to the reader was a different decision from making it exist at all, and it was the wrong one.

The shifting shape and rhetoric of modularity

The braggable rhetoric of modularity has waned since its peak. It’s hard to say if that reflects a departure from modularity, a shift in how registries define and implement modularity, or an evolution in how modularity is experienced by developers. It may be a mix of all of them.

It echoes my experience building Nori, which was, as far as I know, the first dedicated carbon removal registry. We started off being so critical of the way legacy registries did everything. And the longer Nori operated, the more sympathy I had for them. What they had built made sense. It wasn't just the Innovator's Dilemma and incumbents can't do big new things. It's that they made design choices based upon real constraints and those proved to be stable equilibria once found. This is true for scrappy tech-forward entrants as well. Sometimes innovation is overrated, and a change like modularity can make things more complex—not less.

What I find admirable about how Rainbow handles this change in the meta-methodology is that Erica and Clem just told me about it. There was no spin. No cliche “we’re evolving our approach.” They said: the dream was elegant, the reality was confusing for users, we’re changing it, and the reason we’re changing it is that we were optimizing for the wrong person. You don’t hear that kind of honesty from institutions very often, and you almost never hear it from institutions that are still small enough that admitting a mistake could be read as weakness by potential buyers.

The builder-user gap

The part of this I keep coming back to is not actually about methodology writing. It’s about what happens when a good engineering idea collides with a human reader. This isn’t by accident. It’s what Rainbow is aiming for as a developer-centric registry.

These tensions between stakeholders, and the persistent awareness that “you are not your customer,” requires continuous self-examination and stress-testing. We have explored these themes in several recent blog posts and a podcast on the tensions between commercial, scientific, and engineering teams within carbon dioxide removal. These clashes are common enough to be archetypal for anyone trying to commercialize climate tech.

Modularity is an abstraction. Abstractions are useful right up until the point where the cost of maintaining them is paid by somebody other than the person who designed them. Rainbow’s rethinking of visible modularity is, in a way, a small piece of product management wisdom delivered to a field like registry design, which historically has not thought of itself as being in the product management business.

Modularity is a tool, and tools are judged by how well they accomplish a task. They aren’t good in and of themselves. If the cost of the tool is too high for the user, or just doesn’t do the job well, then it is time to find a different tool. Rainbow’s awareness of and adaptation to the fact that their initial tooling wasn’t the right fit for the job is the kind of learning in public I like to see from the institutions I support. Honesty builds trust. And I think the carbon industry could stand to see a whole lot more of it.

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Like this kind of content? Check out my new podcast and written publication Climate Workers Anonymous.

Climate Workers Anonymous

Welcome to Climate Workers Anonymous

Welcome to the first episode of Climate Workers Anonymous. If you are listening on your usual podcast app, you might notice that the old feed for Carbon Removal Newsroom has been officially repurposed for this new project. It’s hosted by me, Ross Kenyon. I’m a former cofounder of the Nori carbon dioxide removal marketplace and registry. This show is a d…

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24 days ago · Ross Kenyon

This is a summary of episode #404 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to it literally right below this paragraph, and in full!

Also, there is a little poetry bonus episode coming soon where I read the poem Tom and I discuss, “Jerusalem ["And did those feet in ancient time"]” by William Blake. The episode art is from the same work that William Blake made himself; a man of many talents!

Thanks for listening to this episode! A brief plug before we begin…

I launched a second podcast and collective art project called Climate Workers Anonymous where people will submit their unfiltered takes on working on climate for me to read on their behalf. Please subscribe and check it out!

Climate Workers Anonymous

Welcome to Climate Workers Anonymous

Welcome to the first episode of Climate Workers Anonymous. If you are listening on your usual podcast app, you might notice that the old feed for Carbon Removal Newsroom has been officially repurposed for this new project. It’s hosted by me, Ross Kenyon. I’m a former cofounder of the Nori carbon dioxide removal marketplace and registry. This show is a d…

Listen now

24 days ago · Ross Kenyon

Tom Mills has had a heck of a career. He’s worked around the world in mining and agriculture. He was a Stripe Climate Fellow trying to figure out how to embed carbon dioxide removal in agricultural supply chains to create a stable demand pathway that is also delivering real agronomic and social benefits. It’s no surprise he ended up at Mati Carbon, doing enhanced rock weathering on farms in the Global South.

Here are some of his biggest takeaways from his Stripe Climate Fellowship:

• Context is Everything: The benefits of these climate interventions depend heavily on where they are applied. That’s true whether it’s improving water-holding capacity, pesticide efficiency, or fertilizer reduction.

• Awareness is Low: The gatekeepers to international agricultural policy and climate finance have surprisingly limited knowledge about these CDR methods.

• Coffee is Leading the Way: Certain commodity value chains are far more interested than others. Due to strict EU deforestation regulations (EUDR) and consumers who are willing to pay a premium, the coffee industry is highly motivated to adopt solutions that prevent farming from moving to higher altitudes as the climate warms.

• Carbon Accountancy Standards Can Block or Enable Progress: If the taxonomy isn’t clear for which types of credits can count against which scopes of emissions, CDR might just remain invisible. Various efforts like the Greenhouse Gas Protocol don’t have an easy system for figuring out how CDR can fit into agriculture, and thus Tom has to look for other ways to stick CDR into the value chain. This isn’t a bad thing—it forces Tom to look to non-carbon benefits that deliver good things to farmers who need help. But it take a falsely-simple carbon crediting angle and turn it into a Rube Goldberg machine of stacked assets.

“The coffee industry was just a great place to be operating. It was solving a real problem and there was a lot of energy and movement in that industry.”

—Tom Mills

And what even is “insetting” anyways?

I think I’ve heard it used in every conceivable way. Sometimes it is expansive and is closer to what I call “thematic offsetting”—you sell an e-waste disposal credit to a computer company whose e-waste is not being treated directly in this disposal pathway. All the way to a sugar company literally has a biochar unit on-site processing their bagasse against their own emissions. And a lot in-between.

Right now, it isn’t super cost-effective for industry to decarbonize using carbon removals given that certain pay-for-practices insets are two orders of magnitude cheaper than equivalent removals in enhanced weathering or biochar. Unless that can be externally monetized via carbon crediting (which typically exports a carbon removal credit to a buyer outside of the company that produced the credit—read, offsetting), or by selling a differentiated product that consumers can recognize. Tom points to a coffee company that literally has biochar on their bag, but I need to track it down for myself and presumably drink some…

There’s a lot more detail in this episode. Tom is one of the most knowledgable people in the world on carbon dioxide removal in agricultural supply chains. I hope you enjoy the show.

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Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Hey, thank you so much for listening to Reversing Climate Change. This is Ross Kenyon, host of the show. I’ve been working in climate for about a decade, and running this podcast basically the entire way through. If you go back and listen to some of the early episodes, it’s me learning in public, and I guess I’ve never really stopped doing that. If you’re new here, welcome. Much of the show is about carbon dioxide removal, but it really is about a lot in climate. And climate touches so many issues from the humanities: what it means to be human, where our species is going, what’s happening with our status as beings on this planet, and all the connections to history, philosophy, literature, film, theology, and so much else.

If this isn’t your first time listening, you know what I’m about to do, right? I would love it if you could open up your podcast app and give this show five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and subscribe so you get the podcast delivered to your phone regularly.

There’s a Substack for this publication, and the link is in the show notes if you’d like to subscribe there. I’m actually trying to move a lot of stuff over to Substack. And I just launched a new podcast over there too. It’s different from this one. Reversing Climate Change is interview shows and monologue shows; this other show is on the old Carbon Removal Newsroom feed, which has been inactive for a couple of years, but I hung onto it knowing that at some point I’d like to repurpose it. There are still a lot of people subscribed to it who are passionate carbon removal people. So I built a new show on top of it called Climate Workers Anonymous. I’ve been describing it as a form of PostSecret for climate.

If you’re in your 30s, if you’re a millennial of some type who grew up in the United States, you probably know about PostSecret. People would decorate a postcard, write on it a sentiment they felt uncomfortable sharing themselves, and mail it in anonymously to be published. I wanted Climate Workers Anonymous to be a space where people can share some of their true feelings about the difficulties of working in climate, about caring about this and daring to believe in a time when climate is not the world’s primary focus. When the world is looking elsewhere and things are difficult. And even when things are not difficult, I wanted a space where people could share things that felt naive, optimistic, evolutionary. What could our species become? What if we were a kinder species? What if we were able to solve some of the persistent, deep, fundamental problems of being human? Or, what if we just need to stare into that void a little bit and sit with it? That’s totally fine too. I’m not trying to find a right answer. I’m trying to make space for people to express their feelings, to feel their feelings, and to connect with others who want space to do so in a way that’s not going to negatively impact their careers.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that if you post optimistic things on LinkedIn, they do fairly well. Whenever I post something critical, or a bit negative, or anything that leads the algorithm to think there’s some sort of theological content in it at all, the algorithm is frowning so deeply at me. LinkedIn is one of those places that feels very booster-ish. That’s what it’s for, you know? The tool is the message, as some people say. And it’s not my job to get mad at the tool for not doing what it was designed to do. But that’s at least partially why I’m moving some things over to Substack.

So if you’d like to follow along with Climate Workers Anonymous, and if you want to submit an anonymous feeling, idea, sentiment, or story for me to read on your behalf, you can submit that over on Substack. I’ll put the direct link in the show notes here.

And if you’re willing to become a paid subscriber of the show — if you love this, if you keep coming back and listening — if you’re willing to chip in a couple bucks a month, I would be so grateful. I’m asking you directly: will you please become a supporter of the show and pay a couple bucks a month to make sure this can keep going? It’s a lot of work. I love it. I do it for its own sake, but some days you wake up and you’re just like, “Ugh, what if I just didn’t?” But no, the show must go on. If you’re a listener, if you love what’s happening here, if you think you can spare the money, please become a paid subscriber. If you can’t, I appreciate you anyway. You’re no lesser in my sight for being an appreciative listener, and that’s wonderful as well.

Today’s show is with Tom Mills. Tom does a great job explaining his background, so I don’t need to spend a lot of time on it here — otherwise you’ll hear a lot of the same stuff when Tom starts explaining it. But Tom’s had a fascinating career working around the world in mining and agriculture. He was a Stripe Climate fellow, which was a very prestigious program that collected a sort of who’s-who of carbon dioxide removal, working to figure out how to advance the industry. His year-long project was trying to figure out how to embed carbon dioxide removal into agricultural supply chains. Sounds easy. Everyone points to it. Everyone wants to do it. Tom’s the guy with the receipts. Tom alleges that there are people who have studied this more than him. I’d like to meet them, because I have a hard time believing it, almost. I really enjoyed speaking with Tom.

He’s now at Mati Carbon, which was the XPRIZE grand prize winner for carbon dioxide removal, and they’re doing enhanced rock weathering in the Global South. We actually don’t talk much about that. If you want more info on Mati, I had their CEO Shantanu Agarwal on several months ago — or maybe more like a year ago at this point — and I’ll put the link in the show notes to that.

In any case, thanks so much for listening. I hope you’ll subscribe to Reversing Climate Change, and especially Climate Workers Anonymous, on Substack. Thank you for listening. I’m so honored that you would spend time hanging out with me. My friends, my colleagues, my peers: thank you for doing this. Here is your show. Here is Tom Mills.

Ross Kenyon: Tom, how many times have we tried to do this? And last time you deliberately staged a power outage to get out of my hard questioning — just nailing you. Why won’t you answer my vicious questions about your career at Mati? Why do you do this?

Tom Mills: Ross, I’m sorry. I think this is our fourth attempt, isn’t it? And yeah, you’re right — the wind was blowing last time and we just couldn’t do it.

Ross Kenyon: I think we were 20 or 30 minutes in, and then it just — poof. I’m like, “What now?”

Tom Mills: Although — we’re in quite a rural part of the UK, and if the wind blows too hard, the trees do fall on the line. So that happens, what, a couple times a year. But it was incredibly unfortunate that we were mid-flow when it hit.

Ross Kenyon: You know what my first instinct was when you said that? I wanted to do “And did those feet in ancient time,” which I only know because Eric Idle just starts singing it in a Flying Circus episode I saw as a child. I’m like, “What is this super-British hymn thing that’s happening right now?” But that’s me transmitting some Anglophilia across the podcast.

Tom Mills: No — we had it at our wedding. And do you know why? Because there’s this line in it about England’s green and pleasant land, amongst those dark Satanic mills. So, you know, during the Industrial Revolution — and my name is Mills. And hopefully I’m not that dark. Well, I’m quite dark, but I’m not that satanic. Anyway, we thought it was a nice reference, and we had to talk about it during the speech and stuff. So we had it at our wedding. It has a place in my heart, that hymn.

Ross Kenyon: Is that line Wordsworth? What is it? It’s obviously a Romantic poet of some stripe, but I can’t... all right, looking it up right now. What’s the — not that I really listen to this — but what’s the Joe Rogan assistant? It’s like, “Jamie, go look that up.” Okay: dark Satanic mills, look that up for us right now. “And did those feet in ancient...” That was William Blake. Okay. William Blake is good too.

Tom Mills: That’s great. It’s a banger — an absolute banger. I like that song. It’s a beautiful one.

Ross Kenyon: But what’s the connection? The dark Satanic mills — skip that part, because ideally you’re not dark or satanic. What’s the wedding connection?

Tom Mills: It’s just — when you’re all together with your closest friends and everyone’s singing it at the top of their voices, it’s incredibly magical and powerful, that song. There’s a power to it as a community that’s pretty wonderful. So yeah, it reminds me of my wedding, so thank you for raising it.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. You did not expect it to go this direction. Neither did I. That’s improv, baby. That’s how it goes. I love that. I feel like that’s such a nice version of national connection, because it’s some type of British national connection that could have been about anything, really. So — we’re really off topic at the moment, but you know, there are three. The UK’s national anthem is obviously “God Save the Queen,” or the King now. Not the greatest singalong in the world. Then we have “I Vow to Thee, My Country,” a better singalong. And then I would argue the best is “Jerusalem” by Blake.

Tom Mills: And they sort of are — at international events, you know...

Ross Kenyon: Not “Rule Britannia”? You’re not putting that in there?

Tom Mills: I feel like that kind of went out of fashion. It’s not in there for me, unfortunately.

Ross Kenyon: Not enough for you, fashion-wise? I don’t know, I think it’s a fine place to start. The thing with improv is, sometimes — I’ve seen a lot of improv in Chicago and Los Angeles, in comedy — sometimes you’ll see the most well-regarded troupe and they’ll have an off night, and you’re like, “That’s worse than the amateurs I’ve seen.” And some nights amateurs will capture lightning in a bottle, and it’ll be the most sublime piece of art I’ve ever seen. Like, how did you possibly tie all these things together? This is truly incredible. So I always try to make room for a little bit of magic here. Whether or not we achieve it is a separate question, Tom.

But okay. So part of this is — there’s a nice bit of Englishness in here. There’s a nice connection to national community, and there’s also a connection to Romantic thought and poetry, which I’m not sure how deep you are into personally. But when I think of those things, I do think of them as very much connected to agricultural supply chains — although no Romantic writer would ever say “supply chains.” That’s not a Romantic phrase. They’d say something else. But that bucolic connection to the land is something you’re pointing to, I think. Am I right?

Tom Mills: No, I don’t think you are. I think — yeah, everything that’s described in that Blake hymn around the rural idyll, around use of the land — there are some wonderful connections you can draw here. Where we’re maybe stretching it a bit is that my work is pretty Global South–focused, and we’re transporting that hymn from the bucolic pastures of these rolling English hills outside into these amazing tropical landscapes where these practices are. So: agriculture, yes. Romantic, yes. Location — maybe, maybe not.

But for me — I’m back in the UK now, but most of my career has been spent living and working in those rural communities in Africa, and to a large extent in South Asia as well — where there is obviously an English stamp on some of those countries. And there are some interesting parallels. I did a lot of work in the first half of my career in the governance of the mining industry, and I think there are some interesting parallels and learnings between those two industries — mining and carbon removal. They both have a global marketplace. You’re looking at very physical things linked to place — you’re linked to the geography, the climate, the rock. You have a lot of government engagement because you’re trying to export something. So there are interesting parallels there. And also learnings around how you ensure benefits are shared. For me, looking at what’s gone really wrong in the past in some of those mining examples, and what’s gone right, could be useful learnings we can take into this industry going forward.

Ross Kenyon: You might be the most employable person I’ve spoken with. You somehow have deep mining experience and deep agricultural experience simultaneously. I feel like that’s not that big a crossover territory.

Tom Mills: Do you know what? I became really fascinated because both of these things are incredibly physical. I came out of university in 2008, where the big thing was technology, computers — and I wanted to do something very physical. So that’s the reason I went into it. I just found all of those ingredients — geopolitics, logistics, heavy engineering, all those things that we have in the CDR world — I absolutely love it. And that’s why CDR is a pretty exciting place to be working as well, because it shares all of those challenges.

Ross Kenyon: Without a doubt. It’s hard. The combination of those things you’re at least halfway competent at is large. So wait — are you saying you came out of school with... did you do software, or are you saying you—

Tom Mills: I think a lot of my peers were going... the super-smart people were going into finance, or into early-stage software startups, SaaS startups, at the time. And the not-cool kids were going into heavy industry, into mining or these other industries. So that’s where — and I thought, “Yeah, I’m not quite cool enough,” or, “I want to go do something very physical,” as opposed to looking at the SaaS side of things.

Ross Kenyon: Did you read Ernest Scheyder’s book, The War Below — that book about mining? He’s been on the podcast before; he’s a Reuters reporter, and he works on mining and things adjacent to it. He was saying — pardon me if I’m mischaracterizing this — that there’s basically a huge shortage of people who want to work in mining. A lot of young people don’t even realize it’s a field that’s going to be really important. Everyone knows now that we need way more copper and things like that, but the amount of time it takes to train people, and then advance them through seniority to fill all the roles that will need to be filled, is going to take a long time. I think everyone got so focused on the quick wins of software — software eating the world, as Marc Andreessen once wrote. Now what? Is physicality returning? Is it more important than we once thought it was? What happened? Why did we lose sense of the physical world?

Tom Mills: I think it’s a really good question. That point you make around trying to convince people to go into these industries — like going into mining, where we know there’s a massive reliance on critical minerals. I did my master’s research in an area called the Kivus, in the DRC, where the three Ts are — tin, tungsten — this is where a lot of these critical minerals come from, and really understanding the politics around it. It’s incredibly complicated. You need geologists, engineers, social scientists, political scientists — this whole raft of skills. But the industry, because it had a massive amount of challenges and has been extractive — a lot of the profits have been taken out of a number of countries and exploited — there are obviously a massive amount of challenges the industry has faced. And I can see why fewer people are interested in going into it.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it does have a feel of — maybe you have to explain yourself to a lot of people for going into that field. Whereas, I don’t know, if you go into software I feel like you’re less likely to face critical comments — though maybe that’s changing with AI now. I imagine if you work in oil and gas, or in mining, or even in agribusiness, you probably get questions on Thanksgiving or Christmas, or whatever holidays you attend with your family, where half the family is like, “Why would you ever want to support these companies and do this kind of work?” I can imagine that probably culturally dissuades people from a career like that, or they know they have to answer for themselves — even though, of course, everyone depends on mining for basically everything we do, and depends on agribusiness for so very much that we do, and same with oil and gas. But I imagine you get uncomfortable questions.

Tom Mills: Yeah. And I think there’s this interesting piece around the fact that a number of those industries will determine the climate — they’re the delta between the amount of emissions you have to make to extract that mineral, or within that land-use change in agriculture. These are where you could really make the big gains, the Pareto gains. I’ve done quite a lot of work in scenario planning in my career — forecasting the future and trying to understand where...

Ross Kenyon: Which I bet you loved.

Tom Mills: It was really fun. Anyway, as part of that work, thinking through where the highest-leverage points are for interventions to do with the climate — a lot of those industries are obviously very high-leverage points to change.

Ross Kenyon: When you’re approaching these high-leverage points, did that lead you into the Stripe Climate Fellows program with a focus on agricultural supply chains? Is that the next big lever to pull — or is that just the next big lever for you personally to pull, with your experience? How do you conceptualize that?

Tom Mills: So I spent the first bit of my career working in the mining sector, in India and in Africa, then I moved over to working in industry, then I moved into working as an advisor within ministries of mines and energy in Africa, but also extensively in South Asia. When I decided I wanted to set up a small business, it was around the time China looked as if it was going to invade Taiwan, and India became this real hotspot of interest, because when people were looking to diversify their supply chains, they were looking at India as the key area. We saw this with Foxconn, with Apple. My clients at the time were asking me to go work out in India. So, having done quite a bit of work in this region, we moved out to India.

And while I was doing that work, I was writing quite a lot — writing a bit academically, on the energy sector — and also doing the scenarios work. It became very clear that India had a massive problem, but also a big opportunity from this area of carbon removal. I stumbled across it when I was writing these academic papers, and I was like, “This sounds incredibly optimistic. This is really exciting. This is a solution.” All the things we get excited about — it has technology and physical environment. And then I was like, “Wow, this could work so well in this context.” Here in India, where I was living, I was like, “This could be the world leader.” This country has all the characteristics to make it an incredible place to produce biochar and to draw down carbon from ERW. It has the Deccan Traps, the Rajmahal Traps — these amazing geological formations. It has heat, humidity. It has degraded, beaten-up soils. It has people who are crying out for this remineralization of their land. And it had shedloads of biomass — it had problems around biomass burning, around methane emissions, that it needed to solve. I was like, “This is a great solution. How do I get in on this?”

So that was my entry point. And then I decided I wanted to invest my time and energy into it, and slowly migrated out of that business and looked at these other options across Africa and Latin America. I was lucky enough to be picked up by Stripe. I invested quite a lot of time building up this trade association, the Carbon Removal India Alliance, which is now doing some great work. So yeah, that was the genesis. That was how it came to pass.

Ross Kenyon: I like seeing more people cross the methodology types. I think it’s really interesting that there are several project developers doing both biochar and enhanced rock weathering — some of which are in India as well — under the same roof. It’s nice to see that you’ve also crossed over there. Historically, we’ve seen them segregated. Do you think we’ll see more people like you, and like Varaha, doing both at the same time? Is that a future pathway for project development?

Tom Mills: I’m speaking for myself here, but I think this is a sensible move. Especially if you’re working and have the trust of a farmer base and a geography, you have different solutions there. I think the holy grail would be seeing how they operate together. I know Maria-Elena Vorrath is doing some amazing work on it — how do we get the MRV to work? The agronomics probably do, but how do we get the MRV to work in that regard? For me, yes, this is something that could work very nicely together — maybe not in the same field at the same time, but in the same geography.

Ross Kenyon: Maria-Elena knows there’s an open invitation as soon as the time is ripe to do so. I’ve long been stumped by her research, and obviously it would be amazing if you could find ways to do these things at the same time. But I have no idea how you can untangle the two active variables here, even at the superficial level of just biochar and enhanced rock weathering. Obviously there’s a bunch of variables nested underneath each of those — how can you attribute causality within an open system like that and make the science good enough? There are a lot of open scientific questions just on those two things separately, especially for enhanced rock weathering right now. So how could you possibly combine them and do good science? There’s a Reversing Climate Change episode that will come out on this topic, because I can’t fully... I’m not a scientist, so I don’t know — is it as I characterize it, or is it somehow easier to do good science on that interaction between the two?

Tom Mills: I’m not a scientist, and I’m not going to try to warrant any opinion on this at all. But what I’d say is, if the agronomics are demonstrating some positive agronomic benefit there, I think we can lean on that and then work out — as the first step — really understand the agronomics. Is this an agronomic tool? Can we utilize both in certain conditions to raise the productivity of the land, and ensure that productivity can increase over the long term? Then there’s a benefit there worth exploring. I have no idea how to untangle putting ERW on the Brita filter of biochar, so I just don’t know. I’m not going to even try. There are some incredibly smart people out there, and I have no idea.

Ross Kenyon: Okay, I won’t force you to answer. I have no idea either. I also respect when people can just say, “That’s beyond the limit of my knowledge — please ask someone else.” A lesser person, Tom, might just ramble some BS and hope that it kind of hung together.

Tom Mills: I can ramble on the agronomics, but definitely not on the drawdown component.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, fair enough. What did you learn through your Stripe Climate Fellowship? What was surprising to you? What was confirmed? What did you walk away with?

Tom Mills: I went in with a hypothesis: that today there are a number of benefits from biochar and ERW in Global South agricultural contexts that aren’t currently being valued, and therefore aren’t currently being monetized. And if we’re able to monetize them, we’ll be able to spread the cost and therefore go down the cost curve faster. That was the hypothesis. I think about this a bit like shining a torch at the wall — that beam of light is just one white dot. When you put it through a new lens, like a prism, you can see those colors stacking out. But we’re still resting a lot of the weight of the benefit on the carbon.

So for me, one of the big findings was that those benefits are highly dependent on the context in which you apply it. Having gone in pretty gung-ho — “this will work in a majority of contexts” — actually getting to grips with the specifics of what will work where, and which of those benefits will work where... Is it going to be related to the water-holding capacity of the soil? Or to pesticide? Or to fertilizer use efficiency? Those are all slightly different depending on the context. So that was one thing: this is more complicated than I thought.

The second thing was around the awareness among key stakeholder groups. The groups I was targeting — those gatekeepers to international agricultural policy, and the gatekeepers to financing adaptation, resilience, and agricultural and rural development — I was surprised at how limited the knowledge was in this area. That surprised me quite a bit.

The third area was related to which commodities this is of most interest to. During the course of the year, I saw that certain commodity value chains have far more interest than others when it comes to application. The coffee industry was just a great place to be operating. It was solving a real problem and there was a lot of energy and movement in that industry. Other value chains — cacao, sugar, cotton — will probably catch up. Rice will probably catch up as well. But some value chains are further ahead than others. So those are my three takeaways.

Ross Kenyon: What is it about coffee supply chains that makes them so amenable to applying certain types of minerals to their fields?

Tom Mills: I’d say this more on the biochar side — there are just starting to be trials on the ERW side. But, first of all, there’s regulation out of the EU — the EU Deforestation Regulation puts a lot of burden on ensuring those supply chains don’t start to move up the hill as it gets hotter, because that would be a breach of the EUDR. So they’re actively looking for solutions to allow amendments, to allow that soil — to allow that farming to occur at those lower altitudes. That’s one.

The other is that, because that commodity doesn’t get mixed, there’s a direct link between the farm and the consumer, and the consumer is willing to pay a certain premium. So there’s interest from the large CPGs, the consumer packaged goods companies, around achieving their net-zero targets, and it’s very clear, that line between the two. From that you can get both a reduction and a removal. You can get a reduction in methane, which is a big problem, at both the farm level — from the husk — and the milling level. A lot of biogenic waste is going down, getting moved out with water, and there are big methane challenges there, plus the potential to reduce fertilizer as well. And there’s starting to be a cachet around biochar and coffee. There’s a brand in Colombia that has a biochar coffee, which is quite cool.

Ross Kenyon: Where can I buy that, by the way? I want to support it — put it on the bag.

Tom Mills: I think Caravela sell it.

Ross Kenyon: Coffee — obviously there are versions of it that aren’t a luxury product, but especially single-origin coffee is a prestigious product, so it makes sense they’d have enough margin to invest in something like this and put it on the bag, and their consumers are highly engaged. This is not just, “Put it in a little pod, get the caffeine into me, get the brown juice working as fast as possible in my system.” And I imagine there are probably similar dynamics with the luxury-goods phenomenon we’re seeing in carbon removal broadly, on the buyer level — the people who buy it are there because it’s a little bit of a showy thing. It’s way more expensive than what they technically need to do, in many cases. You’re also able to see things like — I think some of the best and most beautiful branding and visual assets that come out of carbon removal are from Alt Carbon. I really love seeing the Darjeeling fields. I get transported just looking at them. I’m always like, “Well done.” I stop to look at this. I don’t always do that for a lot of things. I imagine that has a strong potential single-origin dynamic to it — I drink a lot less tea, so you’ll have to correct me if I’m wrong, but I suspect there’s also a bit of that prestige feeling to it. So will luxury goods, or more prestigious products, continue to lead some of these trends?

Tom Mills: So that’s one avenue — the coffee avenue. But also, coming back to the ERW perspective, I think we’re starting to see these kernels of really interesting outcomes around biofortification — around nutrition, around a better quality of product coming out. I think that’s a driver as well. And I also think yield is a driver. We talked on the coffee side about EUDR, about climate-smart ag, whereas in other commodities — say rice — it’s yield. If you’re providing a soil input into degraded land, you’re also remineralizing those soils, so you’re getting — we’re starting to see this really interesting biofortification within that food source as well. So when we’re talking about food security, we’re not just talking about volume, we’re talking about the quality and nutritional density of that food type as well. I think that will and could drive demand.

One of the other things I should have mentioned with the Stripe Climate Fellowship is that a big driver — maybe this is more of an insetting conversation — but a big driver was around productivity. That’s where this starts to make sense: if you can gain that productivity from an economic perspective. Which sounds quite simple and obvious, but that’s where, on the models, this really starts to make a lot of sense.

Ross Kenyon: On nutrient density — this is one of those things I’ve been hearing about for a long time, and as far as I can tell it hasn’t really mainstreamed, even into the big organic-ish grocery stores. Nutrient density isn’t something we’re measuring, at least not in a very wide way. I’m wondering if technology is going to unlock that. Is it just another thing consumers need to be educated on? Because from what I can tell, a carrot now versus a carrot in Nantes, or a carrot 50 years ago — it’s almost like a different thing entirely. You might not even know what you’re missing. Is there a way we’re going to mainstream that? Is that coming?

Tom Mills: Yeah, and I wonder if this is not going to be driven by the luxury sector. I wonder if it’s going to be driven at the opposite end, when we’re talking about places that need nutrition and are lacking in nutrition. Where’s the margin on this? It could be in producing those foodstuffs in areas where there’s a nutritional challenge.

Ross Kenyon: Is it like when riboflavin is added because there’s a deficiency—

Tom Mills: Yeah. Or where — say the Food and Agriculture Organization — there are places in the world where there’s a nutritional deficit, or a food security challenge. How do we get the most nutrient-dense food? The equation starts to add up in those areas. We’re also seeing investment starting to go into ingredients that have a greater nutritional density — there are equity investments in those entities. So I think there’ll be two poles: one coming up from these areas that require more nutrient density because their population requires it, and also potentially from the higher, more luxury market — and they’ll probably converge somewhere in the middle.

Ross Kenyon: The luxury story is so obvious to me. What’s the name of the grocery store in Los Angeles that’s better than Whole Foods but way more expensive, and has almost become... okay, Jamie, look this up: fancy grocery store, Los Angeles, organic. I’m going to say it, and you’re going to know it — oh, Erewhon. Do you know Erewhon? Erewhon is like the new Whole Foods, the post-Amazon Whole Foods, and it’s very notoriously expensive. If you shop there, it’s very much a conspicuous-consumption status symbol. So the story for nutrient density there is so obvious to me. The kind of person who’s going to go there — if there were a chart they could understand for nutrient density, they’d opt for the nutrient-dense food. But for the low end, the commodity end of this, unless people are trying to avoid something like pellagra and are going to become physically ill, I think the name of the game is cheap calories. Is it not? Or are there places where that’s actually changing, through government or private industry? I just don’t know.

Tom Mills: So there are, in some countries around the world, national programs around nutritional density. That’s where — a lot of my work now is around engaging with these multilateral agencies that can unlock policy, or unlock agricultural policy, or unlock capital. There are programs within certain countries that are being supported, and I think that’s a lever we can pull on that I get quite excited about. Alongside — if we can unlock and demonstrate fertilizer-use-efficiency increases, that for me is another sort of holy grail area as well.

Ross Kenyon: So many people in carbon dioxide removal, and maybe carbon markets in general, look to offsetting, which people know very well: you have a credit originated through some activity, sold to a third party to account for their emissions in some way — or ideally to account for it in some way. And insetting is one of those terms that, frankly, I’ve seen abused. It’s not even clear what it means sometimes. People will use it in ways where it’s like, “We created a thing that was sold to another company in the same industry.” And I’m like, “Okay, is that — that’s offsetting, though, right? It’s thematic offsetting, or intra-industry offsetting, but people call it insetting.” That’s just one example. So, canonically, Tom — explain what insetting is, once and for all, indisputably, inarguably, so we can move on and just call the taxonomy exactly what it is. What actually is an inset?

Tom Mills: Ross, that’s an incredibly difficult question.

Ross Kenyon: I know it is. That’s why you have to do the answers and I just have to do the questions. That’s the best job of all.

Tom Mills: It hasn’t been fully defined, but I’ll do my best. An activity that removes — well, for us, working in carbon dioxide removal — an activity that removes carbon dioxide within the supply shed. And the definition of “supply shed” bears a lot of weight in that statement. It’s a really interesting area where the norms are being set by the industry, and also by people just doing it. Some companies are willing to say, “Well, this is my supply shed.” Some will say, “My supply shed is the physical farm my produce comes from.” Another group will say, “My supply shed could be a farm five farms away. I’ll apply biochar, and I don’t really know exactly which — but within those five, ten farms in that area, I’ve applied it within the region, within the small closed supply region, because I have a trader who has a trader who has a trader, and I know within that it’s going to come from this area, but I don’t know the exact farm. And that farm will change on the day, and then it’ll get blended, and blended again, and end up being part of this mass balance.” So the definition of supply shed is very difficult. It’s definitely not a different country. I’d argue it should be the same region, and the same sub-region. But how you define supply shed is currently still being worked out.

Ross Kenyon: Does an inset require that the carbon negativity produced be consumed by the host organization? An example might be a sugarcane manufacturer. They have an enormous pile of bagasse sitting on their land, and one of the many biochar project developers camps out there and starts pyrolyzing all that bagasse, and then that sugarcane manufacturer is counting the negative emissions from the biochar against the emissions they produce in making and transporting sugarcane. Is that an inset?

Tom Mills: It depends how they use it. If they’re then adjusting the emissions factor of their product, that would be a product claim. If they’re working with, say, Tate & Lyle or Associated British Foods or another company that can claim it against their Scope 3, then that would also be an inset. It sort of works its way through the value chain. But the point is, it’s not sold outside the value chain, and there’s a direct link from the production to reducing or removing within that direct value chain — however you define the end of it. But yes, I’d define reducing the emissions from the bagasse decomposing as an inset, if it’s not sold and it’s utilized within that value chain. However—

Ross Kenyon: Oh, come on, Tom. Come on.

Tom Mills: —the way the carbon accountancy works today makes it incredibly complicated from a durable-removals perspective. We have the GHG Protocol and the Land Sector and Removals Guidance, which makes accounting for both biochar and ERW within value chains, from a Scope 3 perspective, difficult — because it has to sit on a separate ledger to your Scope 3. In the biogas example, that’s a reduction, so that would reduce — that’s quite easy, that sits on your Scope 3. But then the removal from the biochar would sit separately. So there’s not an obvious use case today for that activity, and that’s a real problem.

However, from a product perspective, there is a use case: if we can get the attributes of biochar and ERW somehow included in a product footprint, and have that registered in the Cool Farm Tool or another tool, then that could be a driver of this activity. We also see really interesting work being done in Europe on net-zero oat bars, where biochar is spread onto the oat fields — working through a really innovative substrate company. I believe Carbonfuture is working on that, and they’re able to claim a net-zero oat bar, which has a premium to it. But corporate claims are currently difficult from a reductions perspective.

Where I think insetting could really work is where you start to monetize the other benefits of that activity. Say, in rice, there are big challenges around pesticide residue management — rice coming to the UK is very often rejected because it has a pesticide residue, and obviously that has a financial cost attached to it. So if you’re using ERW to reduce your pesticide requirement, that could have a substantial benefit in terms of less product being lost at the borders. And there’ll be other use cases within these value chains where you can start to inset and stack multiple benefits on top of each other — you’ve inset all those benefits into that value chain, and maybe you spread the cost over a number of different benefits.

I also think about insetting on a municipal or payment-for-ecosystem-services level. Could we say — the UK has the Wye Valley, this beautiful river, the Wye, between England and Wales, which has really large challenges around eutrophication, nitrate runoff from chicken farms? Big problem in the UK. Can we use biochar within that poultry value chain as a way to reduce that nitrate leaching — effectively charge the biochar and use it elsewhere, as a decontaminant? There are these other use cases we could use within certain value chains that aren’t directly related to the carbon removal benefit, that I think would start to make sense over time.

Ross Kenyon: My intuition here is that you studied this carbon-accountancy issue — that carbon removals aren’t snugly fit into the scopes, at least for value chains as you describe — and then looked for other ways in. Like, how do we just not fuss around with this, and find the open window and climb in a different way? Is that kind of how your brain worked on this?

Tom Mills: Yeah. And — we talked about this a bit last time — if we think about that prism, there are these different potential attributes we can monetize. For me it’s about finding who values them, who’s going to pay for it. It may be separate from the carbon. And can we stack them on top of each other? Is an adaptation benefit — when we’re talking about coffee moving up the hill — is that resilience benefit the thing that’s going to monetize this? And then can we sell the reductions, or internalize the reductions? And then can someone sell off the removal? It’s these innovative business models that I really want to try to understand more, and start to unlock.

Ross Kenyon: You could also go in through the front door with a nice suit on, and work with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol people, and try to get them to recharacterize removals.

Tom Mills: Yeah. And Ross, I’m with you entirely on that. In terms of these high-leverage points for policy change, this is one of them — this, and also having these practices included in the emissions-factor tools that corporates use.

Ross Kenyon: My guess on this — and please correct me if I’m wrong — is that it might be parallel to what we’ve seen with SBTi trying to figure out how to make sense of carbon removals, where, as I’ve said on many shows, no matter what they do, someone is going to be very, very angry with them. The politics of how to characterize new assets and fit them into old paradigms that people have built businesses around is very, very touchy. Does a similar thing take place right now if you were trying to change the carbon-accountancy rules for carbon removal within the Greenhouse Gas Protocol?

Tom Mills: So, the honest answer is, I haven’t got in depth into the next iteration of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. I think it’s worth engaging in some advocacy around it. I don’t know the process well enough, but I think it’s worth us, as a group. I also think a lower-hanging fruit could be around emissions factors.

Ross Kenyon: Is that managed in the same process, or is that external?

Tom Mills: External — and there’ll be a number of providers.

Ross Kenyon: Oh, so you can touch that—

Tom Mills: So, the Cool Farm Tool — there are a number of different providers, and companies themselves will determine, based on academic research, what that emissions factor could be as well.

Ross Kenyon: Oh, so it’s not like WRI manages this?

Tom Mills: There is some — it’s fragmented, but there are also some sources of truth that could be good points to engage in as well.

Ross Kenyon: Okay. One of the bigger insetting issues in carbon removal that I’ve stared at for a long time is that, for whatever reason — I don’t know if this is still true, but it was true when I was looking at it much more closely — Scope 3 reductions are less valuable and less checked than other types of carbon assets. Whereas using an offset for your Scope 1 emissions — those are the things you’re more likely to get dinged on than some pay-for-practices Scope 3 change in agribusiness. I don’t know if that’s true. You’re thinking. That’s part one. Tell me.

Tom Mills: I think there’s a priority here. What can you change, first of all? What can you ultimately change? Where’s the low-hanging fruit? Where are the things we can do immediately? And then you work your way down into the Scope 3 area. For food and beverage, the vast majority of those emissions are obviously going to be Scope 3. And you have a challenge: you share that supply chain with a number of your competitors as well, so you have to get over the free-rider challenge that’s inherent in these industries. And those supply chains are fragmented — you could have quite small end supply chains that you’re working with. So there’s a complication there. However, I think there’ll be a level of optimization for Scope 1 and Scope 2, and then, where all the low-hanging fruit has been achieved, there’ll be a focus on Scope 3. And there is, at the moment — there’s interest in having lower-emission products going up through your supply chain.

Ross Kenyon: Is the value from that high enough to justify the price of producing biochar or enhanced rock weathering? I feel like some of this stuff is still single-digit integers’ worth for Scope 3 insets.

Tom Mills: I think it depends on the commodity type — we may start to see this in some commodities — and on what other problems you’re solving. If you’re trying to stack the whole benefit onto just the carbon cost, then it’ll be a stretch. But if you’re able to come up with an innovative way to monetize a number of those benefits, then it starts to make sense. And as I said before, on an insetting front, if there’s a yield uplift, that drives a lot of this. That drives the economics.

Ross Kenyon: Why didn’t you solve everything for me today?

Tom Mills: I know, Ross. I wish I... why don’t we have this conversation in 2035 and see where we are? I think—

Ross Kenyon: Okay, when it all takes effect. How fun. How fun for us.

Tom Mills: There is one thing I think is interesting that may be worth talking about, and that’s this thing around decentralized or distributed versus centralized on ERW. I think there’s a misconception here. One of the things I was really interested by, going to work for Mati, was that they’re looking at the ERW landscape — and one of the key risks we have now is around delivery risk. If you’re working with a number of very large farmers, you have quite large counterparty risk. Whereas if you’re working with a whole host of small farmers, your counterparty risk is vastly reduced, because even though it’s incredibly complicated, you can have a number of those farmers drop out and it doesn’t matter. Also, there’s a real use and need for it in these environments. So that’s something I think about quite a lot as the sector develops.

Ross Kenyon: I just need to have you back on another time, Tom. I don’t think we really finished. I think there’s going to be more here.

Tom Mills: Let’s do it. Let’s do it.

Ross Kenyon: Thanks for being here. I’m glad we finally made it happen. Thanks for keeping me on my toes.

Tom Mills: Hey, Ross. I enjoy these things a lot, so thanks so much for getting me on.

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In this episode of Reversing Climate Change, host Ross Kenyon sits down with Tom Mills to dig into the physical reality of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and its intersection with heavy industry, mining, and global agricultural supply chains.

Drawing from his experience working in mining governance across Africa and South Asia, Tom shares how the physical, logistical, and geopolitical challenges of heavy industry perfectly parallel the hurdles facing the scaling of CDR today. The conversation explores Tom's journey into carbon removal while living in India, where he realized how the region's unique geology and agricultural needs make it an ideal landscape for scalable climate solutions like biochar and enhanced rock weathering (ERW).

Tom was a Stripe Climate Fellow, where he focused on embedding CDR directly into global agricultural supply chains. Tom breaks down why certain premium commodity value chains—specifically coffee—are leading the charge in adopting these practices due to strict European regulations and high consumer engagement. From there, the conversation tackles the messy realities of corporate carbon accounting, untangling the nuances of "insetting" versus "offsetting," and exploring how project developers can monetize non-carbon benefits like yield optimization, nutritional density, and watershed protection.

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Stripe Climate Fellows

Mati Carbon

"Jerusalem ["And did those feet in ancient time"]" by William Blake. In fact, the episode art for this episode is from the piece that we discuss. Jerusalem, Plate 1, Frontispiece, 1804 to 1820, Bentley Copy E, © Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

This is a summary of episode #403 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast with guest David LaGreca. You can listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, etc. or literally right below this paragraph.

These are distilled from David’s advice throughout the conversation, which you should listen to in full since there’s a lot more than what is below.

If you’re a climate tech founder or project developer trying to figure out the contractor question, start here. You can also comment or send me a message if you’d like advice or a connection to EcoEngineers.

Choosing the Right Consultant

• Match the expertise to the specific problem, not the brand. A firm that’s brilliant at nature-based removals might be the wrong choice for your DAC project, even if they’re the most respected name in CDR. Look for direct experience with your mechanism or market.

• Evaluate the team, not just the company. Ask who specifically will be working on your project. Some people at every consulting firm are better than others. You’re paying for the individuals, not the logo.

• Check for intellectual honesty. A good consultant will tell you your project might not work. If every consultant you talk to says yes without caveats, somebody’s may be lying, and possibly by omission.

• Use the intro call as a personality screen. Most consultants will take a 30-minute introductory call for free. Use it to assess whether you actually want to spend dozens of hours on calls with this person. The relationship is going to be intensive.

• Beware the self-made AI expert. If your entire feasibility analysis came from prompting ChatGPT, and it told you your idea was brilliant, you should be more skeptical, not less. AI will validate almost anything. A consultant who pushes back is giving you the more valuable service.

• Consider the network you’re buying into. When you hire a consulting firm, you get access to their contacts: verification bodies, ASTM members, LCA teams, finance connections, hardware vendors. That network took them a decade to build and you get it immediately.

Hiring and Structuring the Engagement

• Start conversations earlier than you think you should. Pre-revenue with a pathway to revenue? That’s a fine time to call. A quick intro call costs nothing and might reframe your entire go-to-market.

• Do a feasibility study first, or have them do one. Zero-based thinking on your own project before you start spending on consulting is the single highest-ROI activity David recommends. If a firm offers this as a first engagement, take it seriously.

• Run the cost comparison honestly. A consulting engagement might be $50K–$100K over a few months, but a full-time hire at $150K–$200K with benefits, onboarding time, and the risk they leave in 18 months might cost more for less flexibility. People generally assume FTEs are the better deal, but the scope of work and labor market details matter a huge amount in getting it all to math correctly.

• Don’t treat consulting as a one-off. David’s best client relationships are on their third, fourth, fifth projects. The consultant gets better at serving you over time, and the switching cost of starting over with someone new is real.

• Ask about registry selection early. This is one of the most consequential decisions a project developer makes, and it’s one where a consultant with cross-registry experience can save you from an expensive mistake.

When to Fire (and When Not To)

• Make sure it’s not a miscommunication first. David says this happens a lot with strategic advisory: the client feels like they’re hearing things they already know, but sometimes those were things the consultant brought to them weeks ago. Clear the air before you cut the cord.

• Fire when you’ve given clear direction and they’re not executing. If the deliverables are defined, the timeline is agreed, and the work isn’t happening, that’s straightforward.

• Fire when they’re actively holding you back from your mission. Sometimes a consultant’s risk aversion or narrow focus becomes a bottleneck rather than an accelerant.

• Don’t fire just because you’ve learned enough. That’s actually the goal. If you’ve absorbed enough expertise to handle things in-house, the engagement was successful. Move on without guilt, but recognize it as a win, not a failure.

• Don’t fire over cost alone without running the numbers. Sometimes a piece of advice in a tight cash-flow moment is worth the scant dollars. Saving on consulting by making a $500K mistake is not actually saving.

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Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Hey, thanks for listening to Reversing Climate Change. This is Ross Kenyon. I’m the host of the show. I’m a climate tech and carbon removal entrepreneur. I’m an executive in residence at Maritime Blue. I produced the Green Blueprint for Latitude Media. Someone was asking me the other day what exactly I do, and it’s often a lot to explain. I’m a commercial strategist working in climate tech, and I often work at the intersection of commercial strategy and storytelling, is usually what I say to someone to get them to stop asking me that question.

In any case, I’ve been making this show since 2017. I have a strange background in the humanities. I did a year of PhD work in political philosophy. I’ve worked in filmmaking for a long time. I’m interested in ideas, but also how ideas get deployed into physical instantiations in the real world. Many of the shows that you will hear on this podcast will have really strong practical applications for those working in climate tech, deep tech, carbon dioxide removal, things of that nature, things adjacent to those spaces. And also crossover with some of the biggest questions from the humanities, which are all things like, as my dad likes to say—I don’t know where he got this, it sounds so vaudevillian to me—the “Who am I? Where am I? Who ordered the veal cutlet?” So the show has some of the episodes that are definitely more like in the “who ordered the veal cutlet” territory than average. But a lot of them are questions of who are we, why are we here, what’s going on?

Why is it so hard for us to live well on this beautiful planet and treat each other halfway decently? And climate is one of the ways that this lack of care is expressed, and the ways that we are working to try to ameliorate that before the cost of inaction or bad action sweep over us.

If that sounds good to you, subscribing to the show is very much appreciated. If you already like the show, ideally you love the show, a great rating and review in your podcast app of choice would be greatly appreciated. On Apple Podcasts and other apps like it, you’re even able to write a review. So if you could just take a couple seconds now to open up your podcast app, give this show a great rating, write a review if you can. Stuff like that adds huge amounts of value, helps bring new people into the show. You can become a paid subscriber on Spotify for five bucks a month and get rid of all the ads. I do not read myself if you use Spotify. I’m using Substack a lot more. Thank you so much for people who have subscribed, especially as paid subscribers on Substack. And it may not seem like a huge contribution sometimes on your end, but it is, and it’s appreciated and noticed, and they add up and really change the equation of how it is to keep this work going.

Today’s guest is a friend of mine, David LaGreca. His company, EcoEngineers, is an advisory and consultancy firm within carbon markets. They are also a sponsor of this podcast, so you have heard their little bumper at the start of the show where I discuss what a great organization they are. David and I joke about it in this episode, that we would often find ourselves getting onboarded into a project and be like, “Oh, you’re here already? Oh, you’re—okay, cool. I guess that makes sense then.”

David does a really good job explaining what it is that EcoEngineers and his team likes to focus on, so I won’t belabor the point any further here. Except to say that EcoEngineers grew out of biofuels and working on things like carbon intensity scoring with regard to biofuel tax crediting. And they have become one of the biggest players in carbon dioxide removal, helping those who are trying to stand up new technologies, new methodologies, get these projects over the line, figure out what types of credits they can qualify for, how to make all of these equations sort of work in favor of the companies with whom they’re contracting.

I have a bunch of friends over at EcoEngineers. I would have no reservation sending you to them. If you would like to be connected to EcoEngineers, you can reach out to me personally. You can also tell them that I sent you. They are a sponsor of the show. They care about producing good carbon removal content. They care about having these kinds of conversations. I’m not just saying this because it benefits me, which it does, but I think that shows a lot of leadership that they would sponsor some of these shows that are dealing with big ideas, that are engaging people within our shared work that we believe is so important to the world, and I am really grateful for them for that. Rudy Krehbiel is someone that I can connect you with over at EcoEngineers as well, if you would like to get into their system to figure out where you can plug in and how and who you should meet. Rudy’s a really great close friend of mine. We’ve collaborated for a long time and I think I will just be steering you into Rudy’s hands.

So link in the show notes to Rudy and David. And in this episode, David and I are talking about how to actually use contractors successfully because we’ve seen good and bad versions of people working with contractors in our space. When done correctly, it is a way to have very high bang for buck. I’ve also seen a lot of money be wasted on contractors in ways that were very inefficient. Today was my opportunity to work with David to be like, “How do you actually make this relationship work well?” And to share that knowledge with people who are often trying to decide, do I hire someone or is this a contractor role? How do I know the difference? And David does a really nice job of helping me lay out how to think about this. His insights are things that I’m going to carry with me both for my own work and as I’m trying to advise companies on how to hire for various roles. So thanks so much, David LaGreca, for being on. Here’s the show.

Ross Kenyon: David, thanks for being on the show. Really happy to finally have you here.

David LaGreca: Excited to be here. Thank you very much for the invite.

Ross Kenyon: I’m glad we’re going to do this because this is a topic that I think has befuddled a lot of people, a lot of founders. It’s really unclear. I think people don’t know how to effectively work with contractors, especially for contracting with a group like EcoEngineers that’s doing scientific engineering methodological work. It seems like the default position is that it’s better to bring those people on staff, just hire someone who can focus exclusively on your own company rather than hire someone externally, and I don’t actually think that is true. I’m tasking you with complicating that story in a productive way. How is that to set the bounds of the show?

David LaGreca: That sounds great. I, for anybody who doesn’t know me, I am David LaGreca, close friends with Ross, as everybody that’s in this industry who’s ever heard his sweet voice online.

Ross Kenyon: Okay. No, the flattery—you’re already on the show. You’re already here, Dave. You don’t have to do more. When you’ve made the sale, stop selling. That’s the rule, right?

David LaGreca: I never stop. Never stop selling. That’s the other rule of consulting is you never stop selling. But so EcoEngineers is a full-service advisory consulting company. We are owned by a company named LRQA, based in the UK. But we are an independent entity who is keenly and exclusively focused on energy transition. In my case, we’re exclusively focused on decarbonization projects. Some of those are carbon removal, some of them are offsets, insets. I don’t really care, but we just have to make sure it’s done well. So we worked with, I don’t know, probably a couple hundred project developers at this point in time across the team and find that some companies don’t actually need consulting, and that’s fantastic.

I think those rainbow kind of entities are few and far between, however. Most people don’t know everything, and that’s why consulting exists is to fill in those gaps. Consultants can’t do everything. They can’t take over your team. They can’t make you have a good company. But can sure sometimes add that insight that makes your project actually get off the ground or give you a new idea you didn’t think about.

Ross Kenyon: Go back a little bit here. You said you don’t care. So what, you don’t care about the project type—it’s insetting, it’s offsetting, it’s decarb, it’s carbon removal. You care about them all equally? What do you mean by that?

David LaGreca: Yeah. I care in a way that if the project is doing what it’s claiming to be doing and it’s engaging with the broader market and with the climate change movement in an honest, effective way, then I don’t care what the outcome is. I do care insofar as things that I don’t know about, I don’t advise on. But basically, carbon claims my team and I treat interchangeably as far as whether we’re going to work with them or not. We’re not idealists or ideologues that exclude working with certain types of entities or certain nationalities even. We just make sure that the project that’s being done is proper and the teams aren’t completely horrible to work with. Those are kind of our parameters.

Ross Kenyon: Okay. All right. We just did a show recently that was about how to sell. It was specifically about TerraSet, but the lessons in there were also much broader than that—how to develop relationships, how to make your carbon removal project development company bigger than merely selling credits, how to make this more catalytic, how to think and approach people where they are. And there’s a lot of useful advice in there. I was hoping to duplicate that a little bit here for engaging a consultancy like EcoEngineers. When is the right time to engage? What is a productive relationship? What are times when it’s actually a bad time to bring a consultancy in? How does this all fit together in a way that may make sense or may not make sense for carbon dioxide removal project developers or climate tech companies generally?

David LaGreca: I actually think that’s changed through time. It’s kind of morphed when we engage with companies. In the heyday in 2022, 2023, it was largely new companies who had a new idea that didn’t yet have a direct mechanism or a pathway to the market. So the majority of our revenue and the companies I worked with at that point in time were drafting new methodologies. So we were writing like mad for about two, two and a half years there, getting the industry planted with a lot of these methodologies that we’re using today. We worked across the CDR space about seven or eight different mechanisms, about 10 protocols between those, and then we reviewed module after module.

So at that point in time, consulting for me and my team consisted of writing the new rule book for how to legitimize these project types that hadn’t happened a whole lot prior to that, or they didn’t have a direct pathway on a registry. And that process was everything from scientific validation of the concept—like, does this actually have legs? Do we want to engage with this type of thing?—all the way to bringing them the PDDs and all the draft documents that it actually takes to get registered. Some of the people were, at that point in time, selling credits out of the back of their truck, and we were just trying to make it more legitimate to do so.

That’s kind of morphed through time. So at this point in time, we’re working with big energy companies. We’re working with corporates. We’re working with companies who have actually managed to stay alive through the battle of attrition in CDR these last couple, few years, and we’re working increasingly with companies that are already operating. It’s a little bit of a shift, and that just follows the market trends, I feel like. So in those instances, the larger companies are stepping into a new market, and they frequently assume that the market’s going to be the same as whatever other market they’re selling into. So we quickly dissuade them of that notion that carbon removal is anything like fuel sales or energy sales and kind of tie in the much more bespoke characteristics of the VCM compared to a lot of the regulated markets. And that’s a lot of what we’re doing now.

So the time to speak with consultants varies based off of where you are in your development journey. But if you’re not certain whether the VCM is the right market or you’ve just had a chat with your favorite agent online and it told you that, “Yeah, you can earn a million credits and it’s going to be no problem, you should just go for it,” you should probably call somebody who’s walked those steps before.

Ross Kenyon: Does that happen? Do you actually get inbound for that reason?

David LaGreca: More or less, yes. We get a lot of that stuff like, “Hey, I’ve got a couple hundred hectares of trees. I want carbon credits.” We get, “Hey, I’ve just invented this device, I want carbon credits for it.” “I invented a faucet type, I want carbon credits for it.” Like everything under the sun, people assume that if it has any remote affiliation with energy, efficiency, carbon, that they should get that. And then there’s other much more pre-refined groups that we work with, which I’d say the majority of the people who end up being clients have somewhat more of a refined concept. But there’s still a lot of misinformation out there about what it takes to be a carbon credit developer.

Ross Kenyon: It’s the easiest way to riches that exists.

David LaGreca: Yeah. You and I just tripped and fell into it. Now we’re doing this for fun outside of working hours.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. For the love of the game. That’s exactly right. Okay, but you’re still working with project developers or tech developers who want to create a new methodology or they want to figure out which existing methodologies they should work through. They’re trying to evaluate their go-to-market and how to actually go from cool tech or cool project orientation into commercial viability, and that is something that you’re still pretty focused on though, no?

David LaGreca: Yes. Yes, frequently. We got a new inbound today about some cool new tech that I’m really hoping has legs and we get to write a methodology about it. We don’t get that every day anymore, but it is exciting. But even for companies who are just trying to figure out where to set up shop—do I go with the Puro registry? Do I go Rainbow? Do I go Isometric?—which registry is a very important question that I think people sort of shortchange, because it, as much as it shouldn’t, it determines everything from how many credits you’re going to get, what your commercial engagement’s going to be, how often your credits are going to be verified, and what kind of stamps and letters you can put next to your credits as far as Core Carbon Principle labeling, as far as other types of industry standards.

That decision’s really fundamental, which I think is why we spend so much time and why I would like to just dwell for a second on the crazy importance of upfront diligence on your own project. Everybody thinks of project diligence, and I’ve spoken about this elsewhere about project diligence from outsiders being really critical and how to do that. But you’ve got to be critical on your own project, and that’s one thing a third-party advisor can provide that can’t be provided necessarily by anybody within your team, is kind of looking at it again. Because EcoEngineers does not have skin in the game besides wanting to do the work and to keep doing work for you. We don’t take equity positions, and that’s a really unique place to be in the market, is to have that independent eye and to be able to tell you to your face that this project can work under XYZ scenarios, and if you follow those scenarios, then you might have a path.

But we definitely have a small graveyard of projects that don’t call us back because we’ve told them that we think you need to do a lot of work to get it off the ground and to make it viable in this market.

Ross Kenyon: Well, one of the reasons why we know each other is because we will often end up consulting or working with teams and be like, “You’re already working with them? There’s already an Eco contract with you guys? Oh, okay. So again, David. How funny.” I suspect we also probably take some of the meetings with those types of entrepreneurs where one of the recurring challenges of my consulting is determining whether a particular company—they’re like, “Is this person the smartest person here, or is this the biggest crackpot idea that exists in this space?” And some of them I have a hard time telling. This might actually be genius or maybe just a fever dream. But those people don’t really like being told no either, though. I lose those contracts. I think if anyone’s paying me, I’ve said this before, if you’re paying me, I’ll tell you my true thoughts about it. I won’t lie for the sake of keeping the job. But they don’t always necessarily want to hear that information either.

David LaGreca: No, they absolutely don’t, and that’s—but if you’re blowing smoke, if you’re—you can straight up lie to people and that’s—I mean, it’s also a lie of omission sometimes if you’re not telling it how it is. You don’t have to be a jerk, but to kind of misconstrue somebody’s likelihood of success in a market—the only way to do that nicely is to do it in a spreadsheet, where you kind of show them, “Here’s how many credits you can actually get based off of your scenario.” And that can really break people’s hearts, but in a non-verbal way, which some people take better.

But most of the time projects have some way to get off the ground. There is viability, so it’s just getting to be a higher threshold for what kind of projects actually succeed. We’ve kind of increased our level of honesty in that way—as far as, “You can do it, but here’s where you’re going to be losing out. Here’s who your competitors are. Here’s what it looks like if Microsoft’s not in the picture,” which isn’t always as big of an issue in some sub-markets as people think it is. It’s a vibe thing to some degree.

But yeah, it is a small market too, and I always love that. Clients we work with that you’ve worked with—we just come across the “Oh, you’re already working with this digital MRV provider?” “Oh, yeah, well, we’re friends with them too.” Different parts of our company, people don’t know that we do either one side of the fuel market or the carbon market, and so it’s fun to be at the intersection of the industry in a lot of ways.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. It’s a good reminder as a general principle, beyond just it’s nice to be nice and it’s good to be nice to one another as sort of a baseline. All of these fields, even fields bigger than carbon dioxide removal, are small enough where you end up running into the same people all of the time, and everyone pretty much talks. And so even if you’re just purely self-interested and Machiavellian about it, it usually makes sense to try to treat everyone decently well. And whenever I come across someone where maybe social graces did not enter their brain or body or both to the degree that was necessary, I’m like, “You know we’re going to see each other three months from now, right?” So anyways, yes, that is a good rule of consulting and contracting too.

I imagine that there are probably opportunities that come up for project developers that you are able to connect people to, and sometimes companies that are difficult to work with or maybe a little bit prickly, maybe fewer opportunities might accrue to them. I don’t even know. Is that even true? Do you do business that way?

David LaGreca: Everybody does, intentionally or unintentionally. There’s parties that you make referrals to and you don’t make referrals to other parties, and sometimes it’s directly technical, other times it’s like you just don’t want to work with that person. That’s just how it is. And I think this is networking, right? We get the majority of our leads through the network. We do a lot of thought leadership and stage talking and things, but the majority of what we get is from referrals and people who are just reaching out because they heard of us or Ross said good things on his podcast, and then we get to—those sorts of things. We get a lot of it.

But it is a very small world and bridges are easily burned. But I do think that one advantage of bringing in consultants is that the network that myself and others in my team have been building for 10 years—you just immediately enter that network, right? Just like meeting anybody in your world, but you just kind of have access to dozens of different verification bodies and different ASTM members who are developing systems. We have an LCA team who’s working on writing EPDs. Just basically other parties that you’re going to need in your project. And we’ve got forestry subcontractors, soil subcontractors, other parties we’ve worked with that we try to connect. The finance side—we’re not out there raising money for folks, but we do connect people where it fits.

And we’re on that circuit together as you were talking about seeing people in three months—it’s the CDR circuit and we see each other three to five times a year in various forms, and everybody knows everybody and it feels like you just picked up the conversation yesterday. But some of those contacts, that’s where the business comes from for us, and that’s who we like to connect people with is the friends in the industry.

Ross Kenyon: Indeed. Okay, let’s go back to this original question here. The original question of this podcast was how to effectively work with a contractor, and I think probably the place to start is why hire a consultancy like EcoEngineers in the first place? I’ve worked at companies that have thought that we’re investing in people over time. We want to get them on a sort of wholesale pricing. We want that knowledge to stay inside the company, which is not even true because people leave companies. They don’t always stay there that long either. But you want people inside the company who are accruing this knowledge and experience rather than paying someone to take it with them outside of the company as a contractor. How do you know which of those approaches is correct for your particular company? How do you begin to figure that out?

David LaGreca: I’d say if you’re working on acquiring somebody with decades of experience, you’re just kind of buying that in-house consulting help. But then that knowledge is limited in some way, shape, or form. Nobody knows everything, so you need to kind of fill your team with advanced experts in the field, along with the analyst level as well. Where it makes sense to bring in consulting contractors is on markets that you are just now getting into, or you’ve been in for a while, but the going gets more complex than you assumed, when the market shifts and you just want to make sure it’s still viable.

When you get hard questions from your diligence parties about how you did this, why you did this, how this conforms, what it’s going to look like in five years, and you can’t just rattle that off because that’s what you talk about all day—it’s probably good to at least consider it. You pick up contractors for hardware when you need somebody, because you’re not going to produce your own meters. You’re still going to probably pay somebody to sell them to you and to install them at your facility if you’re doing any kind of measured activity. You might not need to have a party on board who is absolutely an expert at soil science unless you’re running Nori, and then you do, right? But you don’t want to necessarily have every expert on board at all times.

So when you work with a consulting company, you get their entire breadth of expertise on hand. And some people at every consulting company are better than others, so it is critical to assess who the team is along with the name of the company that you’re working with. So you want to make sure that the people you’re working with directly are going to add that value beyond just the name on the block.

So that name can be really important—signing up with EcoEngineers, Deloitte, whoever you’re working with. But if the party you’re working with isn’t the knowledgeable one, then you might not be getting the full value. And we make sure that we’re teaming things properly, where we’re not putting somebody on that’s going to frustrate the client. Because every client—I don’t know if anybody else has been in consulting—everybody you’re consulting with, they already know it, of course, but you’re just kind of reflecting back to them what they already know, and that’s a subtle trick in the consulting world to just recognize that they already know it, but you’re just kind of confirming what their thoughts are.

But no, in all seriousness, you just have to have the right team. And those team members get brought into your company most of the time at a lower net cost. So instead of bringing somebody on for a 12-month position at $200,000, $150,000, you can get 90% of the same amount of work done in a brief amount of time with a fraction of that cost. So frequently consulting is an expensive out-of-pocket one-to-six-month endeavor, but it can oftentimes be cheaper than actually bringing on a full headcount.

And there is that changeover period between when it pays. If somebody stays at your company for two to three years and you can just know that from day one, and you have more than just a half a percent of equity or something over them that you can just kind of let go or use as a bargaining chip—you want to make sure that if you’re going to hire, it’s got to be really well worth it, and that that person’s got to be valuable on the recurring basis, not just on a one-off. Where consulting also can be more than a one-off. That’s not exactly my point, but it’s a relationship. And the parties that we work the best with, we’re on our third, fourth, fifth projects with. We’re doing multiple tasks, multiple years on, because they just like the way it flows and they get their results. They know it. If they don’t, they know who to yell at.

Ross Kenyon: I can imagine someone listening to this episode and thinking, “David’s really smart, has a lot of experience. Why don’t we just hire him out from EcoEngineers?” Why shouldn’t they do that? Or are you willing to entertain their offers? And I’ll send—I’ll list your personal email in case they’d like to talk to you.

David LaGreca: Oh, man. Sometimes people do reach out in that capacity. And I’d say that happens to a lot of consultants, and I think what they don’t recognize is what is super curious, what fulfills my curiosity and a lot of other people that I work with, and other consultants in the field too. I mean, there’s a lot of really smart people out there who are taking past experiences and leveraging that for another consulting company or for their own. And I think what keeps me excited is working on a variety of things.

We’ve worked on many dozens of project types, and I really get my kicks off on that. Working internal is valuable in that you build one thing, but when you’re consulting, you build many things for many people, and you can kind of extend and leverage that expertise across the field. Nobody stays at a job forever, but consulting is a unique process that anybody who does it probably ends up growing to hate it at some point because of the demands on you. You can’t just tell your boss to shut up because you don’t have one boss. You’ve got a client who owns you for X number of hours, for X number of weeks or whatever. But it’s a different process than working in-house.

Ross Kenyon: If you don’t already have one, you could just take that answer to a psychiatrist and get an ADHD diagnosis. That’s considered diagnostic, David.

David LaGreca: Yeah, I’ll consider myself diagnosed.

Ross Kenyon: I like that too. I’ve actually thought a lot about that for myself—would I like to be at a company full-time? There’s obvious benefits and stability to that, but I think I am a really effective synthesizer and combiner of things in novel ways, and having more independence I think allows a bit more truth to come through, and I think that better serves my personality in some regards. Although I think for the right company I could be quite powerful in those roles too. But I also like going between things. I think that sort of connective way of being in the world I think suits me very well in a way that I don’t know, I would feel different if I had just one employer or company that I was focused on.

David LaGreca: Yeah. No, it really can, and I think that’s part of the fun. It is a challenge though, especially early on in a consulting career to try to be an expert in all the things and not know what the focus is. It’s nicer to be farther into a career and be able to actually recognize patterns. Even if you don’t know every detail, I mean, you still have to research. It’s part of advisory is to research and get up to speed, but you can kind of reach into your past and reach into your network more and understand things better and improve the outcomes for the parties you work with too.

So that’s a key advantage is being able to really leverage those decades of broad-based experience. Like my experience was in coming from the audit space—I didn’t have an anal retentive right-angle component in my body, and then after auditing for five years, that still shows up. Whether I want it to or not, I still have that auditor nagging at me in the back of my head to make sure things will pass muster through an audit lens at the end of the day, and I think that’s really helpful to have, not just stayed as a consultant my whole life. It’d be really tough to be a consultant day one till the end, because without direct experience doing some kind of project development phase verification—I’ve kind of built up about a 360 view of this industry at this point from the project development side, from consulting, from auditing, the advisory side, the in-house side.

So it’s kind of this view around it. I can try to pull myself back from the situation and look 360 around the project and say, “This is going to blow up on this side.” You’re not even looking at that side of the moon, but things are going off over there that you’re not thinking about. It’s hard to put an example without using specifics that I’ve worked with, but let’s say your equipment is undersized or improperly tailored for the type of biochar you want, and you’ve gone off and you’ve already got an investment and you don’t want to go back and tell them that it was based off of a flawed premise, but here’s how we can do things that are a tweak as opposed to telling your investor that you may have been incorrect on this. So more about subtle changes than radical shifts in projects.

Ross Kenyon: I think both of those are variations on a similar theme, and they both hit on—for listeners that have a Reversing Climate Change bingo card—the old familiar things that I go back to. But yeah, I think having familiarity with different roles and different archetypal approaches to problems gives you a lot of fluidity, and I’m sure you’re kaleidoscopically oriented. Being able to have multiple perspectives and professional experiences like that, I think really makes people robust and good thinkers. I really do like that. And I also like being more independent because the pattern-matching practice that you get is so robust.

And for you, I don’t know how many project developers you’ve worked with and how many methodologies you’ve written or have your thumbprint on, but my guess is dozens, hundreds. That’s enough where you see commonalities. And what comes out of that pattern matching that I think is really important—and if you have pattern-matching experience to the depth that you do, or like a lot of people who remain independent hopefully do, then you’re able to apply those in ways that it’s not just the boilerplate advice that you give everyone. Sometimes I’ll give two teams entirely contradictory advice that if they consulted with each other after they talked to me, they’d be like, “What the hell? Does Ross believe literally anything at all?” And I’d be like, “No, the context was the important thing, the wisdom. I know that you are more like this and therefore this piece of wisdom applied to you here and vice versa.” And if you don’t have that sort of experience or that ability to zoom out and have enough pattern-matching experience, I think you maybe are more fragile on that. Please tell me if you disagree with any of that.

David LaGreca: Yeah, we’re getting deep over here. But sometimes CDR is, at least historically, has been such a cancel culture as far as who you talk to. I can’t tell you how uncool I was that I had done 40 methane project verifications coming into CDR. Like, “Oh, you’re old school. You’re from that passe era.” I’m like, “Okay,” or I know something. You choose. And now it’s cool again, right? So now super pollutants are cool again, and now it’s back up on top.

But for a while it was so uncool to have been working with large waste management type companies in the US, and now that’s okay again. But I also feel like it’s partially my obligation and my pleasure to be able to talk to hundreds of people every month. No joke, I just try to pack the calendar with conversations because you learn something from everybody. And some of those people end up being fools, some of them end up being just passing acquaintances, and some of the people you don’t necessarily put on the top of your list to follow up with emails on.

But that’s how it is. I feel like you can’t learn unless you talk to everybody in the market and everybody who wants to get into the market. I do have to put up some kind of a threshold. We fortunately do have some—I do have a team that I get to work with who help to screen sometimes. But it is the more conversations the better. The more you know, the more perspectives on the market there are. You’re not just reading one report by one entity who has a fixed interest, but it’s a broader-based understanding of how it is. The market is not one thing or one company.

Ross Kenyon: If someone’s listening to this and they like you personally, they want to work with EcoEngineers, or maybe they’re just ready to find the right consultant or contractor for their particular problem set—what is the right moment for them to start that engagement, start having those conversations? How should you take meetings with these people and figure out what is the right fit for you? How do you begin to sort through that?

David LaGreca: Yeah. For early-stage people, you can’t talk early enough, realistically. Once you have a concept and you’ve thought about it for more than a week, and it’s more than just back of a napkin, but you actually have put some concept together—I think that’s about the right time to start getting strategic advice and input.

I would say that it’s honestly never really too late. So we get calls from people who are doing—they want a pre-audit equivalent. Like, “Can you do the diligence for us that we’re going to get done by our offtaker, or that the investment company is going to do, or the auditor is going to do?”

But it’s as simple as sending an email or picking up a call. Most people that—myself and most of my colleagues and people that report to me—are more than willing to pick up a call, schedule 30 minutes. I’d say if you are pre-revenue with a pathway to revenue and you want some input on what your project will look like or what it’s going to take to get to the point of having enough revenue to pay for some consulting, that’s a good time too. We don’t advertise free consulting, but we do take short calls that are introductory in nature and provide guidance that will support you in getting along the journey. That type of quasi pro bono work pays back in droves, both with goodwill and with understanding and with kind of positive relations.

I am almost always willing to have a call with people, assuming they’re not literally calling me to ask a Googleable question, right? I’m fine to opine on Googleable questions or your ChatGPT theory of the universe, which is sometimes very entertaining, but it’s not always bankable. And I’d say the time is whenever you have a thought that you can’t justify on your own without some degree of uncertainty.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I wonder if they’ve corrected it at this point, but I suspect if you said something like, “Hey, what if you used biochar as a direct air capture sorbent? Would that be a good use, ChatGPT?” And it’d be like, “Wow, that is such a creative, brilliant combination.” And you’d be like, “Okay, I’ve got to go talk to David right away. Wait, has no one thought of this before?”

David LaGreca: Oh yeah, that’s the new dynamic—self-made experts. You can get pretty far along on a lot of pathways. I feel like without a particular expertise, you can get halfway anywhere. You could write half of your own methodology, you could write half of anything. With expertise, you can get to 70% or so, I think is my kind of going value. And then it takes manual manipulation for that last 30%. And sometimes that last 30% is always the most time intensive. So the net savings of just going AI is not always 70%.

I would say that you can get a long ways, but if you don’t prompt your AI bot properly—it’s only as good as the questions you put into it. And then I’ve got an algorithm in my system with Claude to push back on things and to, rather than just kiss my ass on it. But either way it can drive you the wrong direction if you’re just taking any one perspective, honestly. And that’s the thing about consulting too. If you have a guru in your life, that can lead you wrong as well if you just have one person you listen to, especially if that one person has a very narrow corporate focus rather than a broad-based market understanding. Asking an investment banker what’s best for you—you might get a different outcome than asking an independent consultant. And you might need to ask both because I’m not going to tell you the same advice they are.

Ross Kenyon: Okay, so some of the advice we’ve gotten here is that it’s never too early to take some of these calls. Consultants and contractors are often willing to take these introductory calls, give some free advice, build some goodwill. That’s something that people listening here, you can literally do with EcoEngineers. I suspect that’s true of others too. And then another one of these early-stage pieces of advice I wanted to make sure I got your answer on: how do you know if a consultant is the right fit for you? How should you be evaluating that? Is it any different from hiring an employee? How should you be diligencing a potential contractor, both professionally and just the personal nature of the relationship?

David LaGreca: I think you should be able to get a closer fit to what you’re going for with consultants than you can with an in-house person. Because unless that in-house person has done exactly what you’ve done before for multiple decades, people usually just say, “Yeah, it was similar what they’ve done.”

Ross Kenyon: “It’s a wonderful new challenge for me. I’m great at this thing and I can also grow into it in a new way.” How many times have you said that, person listening? Myself? Yeah.

David LaGreca: Yeah. Right. And that’s also bravado of consulting. Be wary of that. Everybody, every consultant thinks that they can do everything, and they claim that they can, and that’s also a big risk. So it’s not universal that an employee’s going to oversell, but how often are you going to hire a consultant who says—when you’re reaching out for somebody to evaluate your sorbent technology and you’re going to have somebody who’s like, “Yeah, I built a biochar project once.” You’re not going to do that. But for an analyst-level role in your company, you might be like, “Yeah, you know CDR stuff. You can do MRV maybe.” Maybe.

Ross Kenyon: Such a good point. Whoa.

David LaGreca: But I think the fundamental thing is that it’s got to be a personality fit too, and that’s a big piece of it, because it is—you don’t have to love each other, but you do have to hang out a lot on calls. You do have to respect each other’s approaches and each other’s time, and I think that’s a big part of it. I think somebody that—just like you’re not going to hire somebody who’s a total ass on the call in your interview, you’re probably not going to do that for a consultant either. Even if that bravado comes across as, “Oh man, they must know their business.”

It’s a lot of it’s going to be that gut check, but also the actual technical match with what you’re looking for. And if you’re doing something brand new nobody’s ever done, it’s better to work with some group who’s more creative than somebody who’s hyper-focused. Once again, just the DAC company example—you want somebody who has some kind of industrial or sorbent or CCS type knowledge, even if you’re doing something new with one of those approaches. Somebody who might be absolutely brilliant at nature-based removals and agroforestry project development might not be that helpful, even if they are the most regarded firm in CDR at that point in time.

And I use that specifically because there aren’t any disparagements, and I try not to be disparaging in any of this, because we have some competitors, but it’s a small little world, and I feel like most of the people who have survived this long in CDR are doing pretty well. So we—I like to play nicely with them. Doesn’t do a lot of good to talk trash. I really liked your episode with Martin from Octavia about that. It’s just, I really jive with that—the market’s small and people should get along instead of tear each other down. We’ll grow a lot bigger that way.

Ross Kenyon: I bet you like that episode because you’re one of those boring legacy methane development weirdos. You’re biased. I can’t even take that compliment seriously because of your bias, but thank you.

David LaGreca: Yeah, Martin and I click too. That’s probably—

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’m not surprised. Thanks for saying that. When should you fire a consultant? Is it different from an employee, knowing when the relationship’s not working? Or how do you deal with the difficulties that come about from work with a consultant?

David LaGreca: One hard thing about consulting is that people have no trust in general. Unless they already know that you’re the right ones or they’re just out of time, they’re probably thinking skeptically about, “Do I actually need a consultant for this? I’ll just do it myself.” There’s a lot of that bootstraps mentality in CDR.

Ross Kenyon: Wait one second, David. My favorite thing—this has also come up on the podcast so many times—but have you ever seen that show Grand Designs?

David LaGreca: No.

Ross Kenyon: Okay. It’s a British show about people who are doing really ambitious architectural renovation or house building, and whenever someone says that they’re not going to hire a foreman because they’re going to serve as their own project manager, you’re like, “Oh, crap. They’ve never seen this show before? They know this never goes well.” It’s always a terrible—

David LaGreca: Yeah. But it’s so true. People who—the only people I have refused to work with on any basis besides they just didn’t come through for some reason, or I thought they were scoundrels in some way or another, is people who refuse to partake in a feasibility study for a brand-new project. And if you’re not willing to, or you haven’t already done this independently and exhaustively—to really do a pre-mortem and dig into the potential problems in your project and really understand what you’re getting into, making the right decisions up front—it’s really tough to work with people who think it’s already perfect. Unless they are well advanced. There are different stages of advancement, and we’re not going to force somebody to go back to stage one if they’re TRL six and they’re already ready to launch with investment.

But for new concepts, just a little bit of zero-based thinking now and again is really helpful. And not hiring a foreman, that’s—yeah, I was guilty of that in my first two home remodels, and I don’t think I’ll do that again.

Ross Kenyon: No, there’s something about the “I’ll just do it myself” thing where it sounds responsible because you’re saving money. When you do need to end a relationship or change a relationship with a consultant, how do you actually think it’s different from an employee? Is it different? And if so, how?

David LaGreca: I think I dodged your question because I don’t like being broken up with. But I think—

Ross Kenyon: It doesn’t even have to be you. This is also just of general interest. Break up with them and then hire David, I think is what he’s trying to say.

David LaGreca: Nah. The time to move on is when you’ve given—you have clear direction, you have clear understanding between the team, and they’re not executing. Or if they somehow are holding you back from your ultimate mission.

Ross Kenyon: That first step is really interesting. Wait, you’re saying like if there’s a chance that maybe it’s a misunderstanding? Is that—

David LaGreca: Yeah, that happens a lot, especially with strategic advisory. They’re like, “Oh, well, you know, you’re telling me things, but I already know them.” Even if it’s something you brought to them weeks ago, years ago—it’s like, well, what are we getting out of this relationship? And if you truly don’t feel like you’re getting something out of the relationship, that’s actually fine. Or if you’ve gotten enough out of it, you’ve been brought up on education, and you’re just good to go—that’s—like, I would prefer somebody not to be kind of reliant fully on consultants in most instances, if it’s a large enough team or I guess a small enough team where somebody can take that on in-house.

We do a lot of training, and I think that once you understand your market as well as we do, move on. But it’s kind of an osmotic thing. If you hang out with people in your life or you hire people to work with who have a deeper level of understanding, then by passive nature, you’re going to glean a lot of their knowledge, and I like doing that too. Clients know more about their vertical than I could, because that’s all they do—they focus on DAC or ARR or whatever their unique approach to methane removal is. And that’s great. I get to learn from them as well. Selfishly I enjoy that part of it.

But if you’re not getting anything from them, they’re not executing on the task at hand as described, or they turn out to be just bad partners—that’s when you move on. But on the flip side, it’s worth continuing, even if you think that there’s a price encumbrance—if it’s possible with cash flow and you’re going to—it’s one of those paying a consultant versus staying alive, you’re not going to do that. But sometimes a piece of advice is worth some of those really scant dollars for companies.

Ross Kenyon: I’ve used these terms interchangeably—consultants, contractors. They probably are not the same exact thing because there’s different words for them, and is anything truly a synonym when you stare at it long enough? Is there a difference here in your head?

David LaGreca: Well, the inbound we get—people ask for a VVB. They say they need an LCA, they need a PDD, they need—they want a compliance pathway. They want—they need somebody to do their work for them. They want—they need a contractor. We get all of these jumbled-up asks, and frequently, I’d say 9 times out of 10 when somebody asks for a VVB, for instance, they’re not asking for a final verifier, especially in CDR where that person is chosen for you with a lot of the registries.

So it’s—one of those things is just understanding what the client needs. But yeah, advisory and consultant, I’d say synonymous. VVB is an overused term which has a very specific, explicit focus. And as a VVB, EcoEngineers does consulting work for different clients, but that’s one thing that’s jumbled up. LCA is a particular task of—a particular aspect of project development. And then there’s implementers, there’s brokers—everybody works and engages differently in the market. So it is good to know who you’re actually looking for and hoping that the consultant isn’t just morphing into whatever you want them to be.

Ross Kenyon: I have a silly question for you, David. I saved it till the very end out of respect for your professionalism and your reputation. Have you ever been to the overlook of Toledo, Spain and wished that you were named El Greco and not LaGreca? Has that ever happened to you?

David LaGreca: Just wishing that I had a more powerful name?

Ross Kenyon: No, no. Do you know this artist? Do you know El Greco? The—

David LaGreca: I do.

Ross Kenyon: You’re so close, but it’s not yours. That’s what I’m trying—

David LaGreca: Yeah. I can claim it though.

Ross Kenyon: You can claim it. You can just switch the gender of your surname.

David LaGreca: El Greco, LaGreca. Yeah, we could, but it would undo the value of the heritage of the LaGreca clan. Moving from Italy in times of strife and tax dodging in the 1700s, so it’s—yeah, we would—

Ross Kenyon: You’re from a family of smugglers?

David LaGreca: Well, depending on who you ask. Some say that we were too prominent and had to leave to manage our wealth better, but others claim that it was for tax dodging. So could be some of both. But if I had the artistic sense of El Greco, I would probably not be a consultant presently.

Ross Kenyon: Is it safe to say you are the El Greco of carbon consulting?

David LaGreca: I’ll go with that.

Ross Kenyon: To go with that. This is too silly of an ending to this show. It probably will stay against my better judgment. Dang it, David. Why did your name force me to do this? Why did you make me do this?

David LaGreca: At least you can pronounce my real name. Many cannot. It’s funny listening to my colleagues pronounce it, like my Latin American colleagues. It’s much more—they put a lot more emphasis on it. It’s like saying, in Colorado it’s like Buena Vista, or Buena Vista.

Ross Kenyon: Oh no, that’s so bad. One of our family jokes is whenever Jon Ronson has a new audiobook out or whatever, we’ll listen to it and he’s always just like “Los, Los Angeles.” And you’re just like—British people who are trying to do Spanish stuff. I grew up in the Southwest, so it’s all very natural to me to say it properly, and when hearing someone just be like, “Oh, Spanish stuff just sticks in your mouth wrong”—and it just doesn’t sound good. In any case, David, thank you so much for being on. I appreciate the good advice. Will definitely impact how I understand consulting and contracting, which are actually synonyms it turns out, in the future. And thanks for doing this.

David LaGreca: It was a pleasure. Always enjoy talking with you, Ross.

Ross Kenyon: Likewise.

David LaGreca is a friend of mine and a managing director at EcoEngineers, which is one of the most active advisory firms in the carbon market and energy transition space.

Full disclosure: EcoEngineers is a sponsor of this show, but that's actually part of the story here. David and I keep ending up on the same projects from different angles, and we joke about the "Oh, you're already here?" moment that happens constantly in this tiny industry. We've both watched founders navigate the hire-vs.-contract decision badly enough times that I wanted to sit down and actually map it out.

David walks through the real math on when a contractor saves you money versus a full-time hire, and it's not the answer most people assume. He talks about how to evaluate whether a consultant actually knows what they're claiming. We get into when you should fire a consultant, why the personality fit matters almost as much as the technical fit, and why refusing to do a feasibility study on your own project is basically the consulting equivalent of being your own foreman/project manager on Grand Designs. If you've seen that show, you know how that ends.

When the mods are asleep by the end, I have to ask David about El Greco, the LaGreca family's alleged history of being Italian smugglers, and whether David is the El Greco of carbon consulting. He accepted the title. I'm not sure he should have.

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EcoEngineers

Listen to the RCC episode with Taylor Insley from Terraset on how to sell in carbon removal: which was the model for this episode

Listen to the RCC episode with Martin Freimuller from Octavia: David references this episode on playing nicely in a small market

El Greco (Wikipedia)

David LaGreca's LinkedIn profile

Rudy Krehbiel's LinkedIn profile

One of the most bewildering parts of language is how something can be so obvious and yet elude strict categorization.

If you are a carbon dioxide removal professional, and I describe an investor as someone who invests in “legacy carbon credits,” you likely know I mean someone fluent in transacting REDD+ credits on Verra. You’ll probably also infer their comfort with credits originating from Isometric’s Improved Forest Management (IFM) and Afforestation and Reforestation (ARR) protocols, even though neither Isometric nor the assets that pass through its registry are generally categorized as “legacy.”

We can say this individual invests in “nature-based solutions,” but the moment we do, we have to carve out an exemption for their support of clean cookstoves. Or figure out what even is biochar?

We could say that they only support high-quality projects of all kinds, but essentially everyone alleges to be an above-average driver, and there isn’t universal convergence on quality. Some carbon dioxide removal partisans insist that avoidance is universally garbage, and if they went to college for too long they may chide that “once you have paid the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane.”1 Avoidance advocates can justifiably retort that nature will be destroyed if not properly financed while we await CDR’s minuscule climate contribution becoming atmospherically relevant.

Even in saying “avoidances,” I am omitting that many classical carbon assets and nature-based solutions aren’t strictly avoidances but likely a combination of removals and avoidances. Before I’ve finished speaking what I believe to be a simple term, I’ve already ensnared myself in a language profoundly contested by science, political economy, and power.2

There are many valid ways to try to categorize asset classes and role archetypes, but I suspect you intuitively understand the kind of projects that would interest this person. I bet if we invented several test cases we would agree with one another on the suitability of the proposed project to this investor. That may hold even if we cannot agree on a simple word or phrase to describe this person, let alone what to contrast them against.3

But are words important?

Do not let this task feel hopeless, because you know what I mean, right? Accept the deficiency of the categories of avoidance, removals, offsets, legacy registries, and so on, because my intention is understood by us both. Even though you can think of counterexamples where the categories of carbon assets break, they hold well enough to make useful communication possible.4

There is an oft-unstated belief underlying so much of the taxonomical churn in carbon market discourse: that “if only we could categorize and name everything correctly, so much else would fall into place.” And here I stand asking—would it?

I believe words are incredibly powerful. I spend so much of my time studying them, playing with them, loving them, and yet the problems of climate change are not that we lack the right way of understanding carbon credits, or the right carbon accounting scheme. If man could give names to all of the carbon credits, we’d stay in Eden just a bit longer. If only that were the unlock.

I suspect the problem of climate change is word-based, but it isn’t taxonomical. It isn’t about categorization. It’s that there are very powerful and dangerous stories some humans tell other humans about who we are and why we are here on Earth, and those stories are deeply flawed.

Hardly are those words out that I realize I’ve committed my own category error. The failure I point to is itself a miscategorization. It just misfiles a different thing. Not carbon, but us humans. Those flawed stories sort us as sectarian and small. They misunderstand our nestedness in a web of natural systems and beings, when what we most desire is to look into the eyes of our fellow creatures and see both ourselves and God in them—to be forgiven all our shortcomings, to forgive all of theirs, and to celebrate, with something like celestial joy, the improbability of this moment and that anything is anything at all.

These paradoxically humble and grand sentiments point to divine truth that can only be harmed by the attempt to contain them in words. But, you know what I mean, right?

I didn’t say it perfectly. I barely said anything at all. I didn’t create the fully exhaustive system for carbon crediting we might have hoped for. I didn’t rebel against the impossibility of words ever exactly corresponding to the transcendent subjects to which they refer.

But I suspect we understand each other better now.

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This is a summary of episode #402 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast, hosted by me, Ross Kenyon. You can listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever else you enjoy your pods. You can also listen to it in its entirety right below this paragraph.

Quick Takeaways

1. Drew Wilkinson helped organize Microsoft employees into pressuring the company toward its 2020 sustainability commitments. His present work with the Climate Leadership Collective gives employees a seat at the table and demonstrated that internal organizing can move even the largest corporations. He’s clear that employees weren’t the only reason, but they were a key reason “beyond any reasonable doubt.”

2. The financial reality of independent climate consulting is brutal. Drew left Microsoft three years ago and has been self-employed since. He doesn’t know where his next paycheck is coming from, buys health insurance on the open market, and acknowledges that his spicy LinkedIn posts (the thing that makes him uniquely valuable) also sabotage his ability to get hired by the companies he criticizes.

3. Most corporate sustainability professionals know the contradictions they’re living inside. Drew’s experience: when you talk to them privately, they get it better than anybody. They’re the ones peddling the incremental progress stories while watching their resources get cut, their influence evaporate, and their job prospects shrink. The GreenBiz conference literally ran a three-hour panel on “how to do sustainability without saying sustainability.”

4. Drew is feeling a shift from prevention to adaptation. After 20 years of fighting climate change from every angle: community organizing, Sea Shepherd, AmeriCorps, corporate sustainability—he’s sensing that some of his energy should move from “how do we prevent the worst case” to “how do we adapt to what’s coming.” He doesn’t have a crystal ball, but he’s honest about where the trajectory is heading.

5. He’s building a shipping container house on five acres in the forest outside Seattle. Friends offered the land. The salvage yard where he works provides materials. He’s treating the project as a personal Petri dish for sustainable, climate-resilient building—including designing for wildfire risk in a Pacific Northwest that’s historically not had that problem but will within five to ten years.

6. Architectural salvage is a genuine climate solution hiding in plain sight. Old-growth lumber from demolished buildings in the Pacific Northwest is higher quality than anything you can buy new. Bricks, steel, fixtures, furniture: all of it has longevity well beyond when the original building comes down. Places like Earthwise Architectural Salvage are the last stop before the landfill.

7. The tangibility of manual labor has been unexpectedly grounding. After years of spreadsheet-based sustainability work where you rarely see the impact of what you do, Drew finds that moving 3,000 pounds of doors in a shift and knowing they didn’t go to a landfill is energizing in a way that corporate consulting never was. He can touch the problem and touch the solution.

8. The reform vs. revolution question applies directly to climate work. Drew frames it as the debate every activist in history has had to reconcile: can the existing system be sufficiently reformed, or does it need to be replaced entirely? Most corporate sustainability people are invested in the reform narrative. Drew isn’t sure that’s enough.

9. Playing it safe is the enemy of climate progress. Drew argues that the reason things aren’t moving fast enough is that not enough people are willing to take personal risks—financial, professional, social. Every successful social movement in history was driven by people willing to accept discomfort. Climate is no different.

10. The shift from prevention to adaptation naturally moves your focus from global to local. Drew doesn’t know how Singapore should adapt to climate change. He knows how his local ecosystem in the Pacific Northwest should. Adaptation is inherently place-based, which means the work gets more tangible, more communal, and more rooted the further into it you go.

“Yes, I care about the marsh and the woods. Albert was not gonna save them his way. You don’t go through the back door with a poem and a bonnet. You go through the front door with a tie, and you own the marsh and the woods. That’s how you’re gonna save them.”

— I Heart Huckabees

The Salvage Yard at the End of the World

Drew Wilkinson got into punk rock at 13, got his first guitar at 14, and never stopped playing in bands. By his twenties he was touring and putting out records at a small punk rock level. Not a PhD, not a climate science background, is how he ended up in Seattle, how he ended up at Microsoft, and how he ended up becoming one of the most effective corporate sustainability organizers a Fortune 500 has ever had.

The punk in the C-suite

Drew spent about five years at environmental nonprofits before landing at Microsoft a decade ago. The contrast was immediate. His previous organization had five people and couldn’t pay the electricity bill if the grant money didn’t come through. Microsoft had 50,000 people on campus, a private shuttle fleet, and a trillion-dollar market cap. He walked in as a skeptical punk rock anti-corporate contrarian who wanted to see what the beast looked like from the inside.

What he found was that the hypocrisies and contradictions are actually easier to see from inside than from outside. Microsoft is the largest cloud services provider to the fossil fuel industry in the world. As he puts it, you literally don’t have digital transformation of oil and gas without Microsoft. And yet, by organizing employees, by giving them a seat at the table, by helping them find entirely new ways to do existing jobs that accounted for sustainability, Drew helped pressure the company into its 2020 sustainability commitments. Employees weren’t the only reason those commitments happened, but they were a key reason.

The best part of that work, he told me, was something he didn’t expect: the feeling of not being powerless anymore. After years of feeling like one person against the largest problem the human mind can conceive of, actually making something happen inside a trillion-dollar company was hard-earned and hard to find anywhere else.

The tension that never resolves

But the whole time, Drew was sitting in a tension that he thinks every corporate sustainability professional shares. You’re doing a little bit of good inside a giant machine which produces tangible harm. He knows it. They know it. In private, off the record, at conferences, in the halls, they’ll tell you. They’re the ones who have to pedal the incremental progress stories while watching their resources get cut and their influence evaporate.

I brought up the Amazon CSO posting about marginal emissions improvements to delivery vans the same week Amazon platformed the Melania documentary. Drew brought up the GreenBiz conference panel that was literally three hours on “how to do sustainability without saying sustainability.” The whole point of that panel was that “right-wing snowflakes don’t like the word climate justice, so here’s how to keep doing the work while hiding it.” At 11:59 PM on the climate crisis, that’s what we’re spending our time on. What the actual hell is going on?

Reform versus revolution

We got into what Drew called the debate that’s as old as time itself: can the existing system be sufficiently reformed to address climate change, or does the whole thing need to be replaced? Most people in corporate sustainability are invested in the reform narrative. Their futures, their fates, their myths are tied to the idea that the system just needs to be nicer, better, greener. You start to shatter somebody’s worldview when you suggest the whole thing is rotten.

Drew doesn’t claim to have the answer. But he frames it through the lens of movement history: what changes injustice, what advances progress for people who aren’t at the top of the pyramid, is movements. Not individuals. Individuals occasionally rise up and become the iconic figure, but even Dr. King without the civil rights movement and without Malcolm X—“two wings for a bird to fly”—is just a man writing letters.

I brought up the Terrence Malick film A Hidden Life, about the Austrian Catholic farmer Franz Jägerstätter who refused to swear the loyalty oath to Hitler and was executed for it. Was he a fool or a saint? On a small enough timescale, he abandoned his family for no regime-changing result. Zoom out and it’s an inspirational story about guarding the state of your soul independent of the outcome. Are you playing by the logic of human life or the logic of something larger? The question applies directly to climate work and the choices Drew makes every day.

The financial reality

Drew left Microsoft three years ago to consult independently. The word he uses is “perilous.” He never knows where his next paycheck is coming from. He doesn’t have benefits. He buys health insurance on the open market. And he knows that his LinkedIn persona: the spicy, contrarian, say-real-shit presence that built his reputation, also sabotages his ability to get hired. He’s literally throwing shade at companies that would otherwise hire him.

He reconciles it weekly. What’s the middle ground between being authentic to his punk rock roots and not shooting himself in the foot? He doesn’t know. But when he looks back on his life, he wants to be able to say: what did you do about the most pressing issue of your time? Did you play it safe? Were you more concerned about what people thought of you than what the world needed of you?

His argument is that the reason climate progress is stalled isn’t lack of ideas or technology. It’s that not enough people are willing to take personal risks. Protesting safely, voting nicely, asking employers something politely… that’s where most people stop. But every successful social movement in history was driven by people willing to accept real discomfort. Climate is no different.

Three thousand pounds of doors

About a year ago, friends offered Drew five acres of forest land outside Seattle. That opened Pandora’s box: if he’s going to build a house, what’s the most sustainable way to do it? Shipping containers for structure. Architectural salvage for materials. Low-carbon wool insulation. Rainwater harvesting. Permaculture. And designing for wildfire resilience in a Pacific Northwest that’s drying out in ways it historically hasn’t.

He got a job at Earthwise Architectural Salvage doing the classic punk rock move of getting a job at a place to get the discount. A couple days a week he puts on overalls and moves doors and lumber and bricks, saving building materials from the landfill and feeding them back into a circular economy. The old-growth lumber from demolished Northwest buildings is higher quality than anything you can buy new. Those were thousand-year-old trees. That wood doesn’t exist anymore.

Yesterday he moved several thousand pounds of doors. He came home covered in dirt. And for the first time in a long time, he could point at something tangible that he did. Not a spreadsheet, not a workshop, not a webinar. Three thousand pounds of doors that didn’t go to a landfill. He could touch the problem and touch the solution.

The shift

The conversation turned when Drew started articulating something he said he’d never really tried to put into words before. After 20 years of climate work focused on prevention (how do we stop the worst case from happening), he’s feeling a shift toward adaptation. Not abandoning prevention. But acknowledging that the longer things go in this direction, the less likely it is that we avoid the worst case. At some point you have to accept that, however painful it is.

On the other side of that acceptance is a different kind of work. Adaptation is inherently local. Drew doesn’t know how people in Singapore or Mumbai should adapt to climate change. He knows how his local ecosystem in the Pacific Northwest should. His shipping container house is the Petri dish. If he can build something climate-resilient and affordable using salvaged materials and permaculture principles, he can teach his neighbors how to do it too.

The zoom setting changes when you shift from prevention to adaptation. Global becomes local. Systems thinking becomes hands-in-the-dirt. The intangible becomes tangible. And the feeling of powerlessness that haunts so much climate work starts to lift, because you’re not one person trying to solve an incomprehensibly large problem anymore. You’re one person helping your community prepare for what’s coming.

Drew suspects others are feeling this same shift, even if they’re not articulating it that way. I think he’s right. And I think the conversation about when and how to move energy from prevention to adaptation is one of the most important ones the climate community isn’t having yet.

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Full Transcript

Drew Wilkinson: You know, I would really have appreciated it if you did a Wayne’s World and did the, do you remember this? And he throws it.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I don’t do that. It’s an obscure reference except to people who grew up watching the SNL best of DVDs and all of the movies that came out of SNL cast members. So, watched a lot of Wayne’s World as a kid. Did you as well?

Drew Wilkinson: I did. I did. I actually remember, I don’t know why I remember this, but it’s lodged somewhere in that nineties brain. You could buy the Wayne’s World VHS tape at McDonald’s. And so I had a special edition McDonald’s Wayne’s World VHS tape. So yeah, I watched it a lot.

Ross Kenyon: You’re talking about trying to find work. You just need to find that VHS and sell it. That thing’s got to be worth something.

Drew Wilkinson: Yeah. I heard VHS is actually coming back big time. Some of my friends are cinephiles and there’s some stuff that never got moved over.

Ross Kenyon: Really? Just like books that are out of print, but they’re only on VHS for films.

Drew Wilkinson: Yeah. A lot of obscure foreign indie films and stuff. Have you been to Scarecrow here in Seattle?

Ross Kenyon: I have been to Scarecrow, yeah.

Drew Wilkinson: Stuff like that. There’s a lot of stuff that you can find there that is only on VHS, it never left that format. So VCRs have gone up, plus everything old is new again. Cassette tapes are having a revival.

Ross Kenyon: This has come up on so many shows. I know you will feel affinity for this, but I miss the days when we had Tamagotchis and Game Boys and stuff like that, and you could go and play video games and the internet was just coming online and there was digital stuff that was coming, but everything was still very clunky. You would go to a Blockbuster and if they didn’t have the game or the movie you wanted, you’re like, I guess I’m not doing that this weekend. I need to find something else for the sleepover. And I sort of miss that. Whereas now it’s just like literally almost anything that you would want except for the stuff that’s only on VHS, in a moment’s notice you can find basically anything. And I liked the anticipation and the clunkiness. Actually, it kind of sucked when you were there, though. I think in hindsight it’s nice.

Drew Wilkinson: I do like a video rental store. I’m like first generation, second generation millennial. I’m right there in the middle, born in ‘85, so grew up with a foot in the analog world and I’m still very much—I have a record collection and I like analog things and I don’t have a smart speaker. So I feel squarely caught between the two eras that I have lived in my 40 short years.

Ross Kenyon: This is obviously mirrored in your career as well. You strike me as someone who does try to straddle multiple worlds, and sometimes that feels really great and empowering and different and gives you a special ability to see things that maybe others in your position do not. I’m sure at other points it makes you feel like a black sheep who’s sort of always on the outs. With your punk friends, you’re sort of a corporate sellout. With your corporate sellout friends, you’re probably a punk. What are you meant to do with these mixed identities, Drew?

Drew Wilkinson: Yeah, great question. It is an interesting tension to have come from an underground subculture. For listeners who don’t know me, I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, Tucson, Arizona. I got into punk rock when I was 13. I got my first guitar when I was 14 and I never stopped playing in bands. By the time I was in my twenties, my bands had gotten serious enough that I was able to go on tour and put out records, all at a very small punk rock level. But that changed the course of my life. It’s how I ended up in Seattle. It’s how I ended up at Microsoft. It’s how I ended up doing corporate sustainability work.

But yeah, it has been an interesting journey to try and reconcile, especially in the professional sphere, the last 10 years where I went from not very professional at all to being an expert in my field, which is a tiny, dark corner of sustainability. But yeah, to straddle that line—I actually struggle with this more than you might even realize, literally on a week to week basis. Because in my heart, in my soul, in my life, I am a contrarian. I am an activist. I am spicy. I want to speak truth to power, especially when it comes to climate stuff.

And yet for the last three years, I’m an independent consultant. I’m an expert in my field, which is employee engagement for sustainability, and LinkedIn is the only social media that I have anymore. It’s an amazing tool, although sadly I do feel like it’s going the way of all other social media platforms and getting full of promoted crap and AI slop.

But I do generate a lot of business from there. I’ve built my reputation on that platform and that is my platform. Maybe because I’m used to performing on stages and in a punk band, I’m literally screaming at people. And while I can’t really do that professionally, I would like to sometimes. So I use my LinkedIn platform to say real shit. To say the stuff that me as an individual, as a human, as an activist, as someone who’s deeply concerned about climate change, wants to say. Things that you’re not likely to hear in a corporate friendly space like this, where everybody’s afraid to bite the hand that feeds. And I know that some of the things I say sabotage my ability to get future business. I mean, I’m literally throwing shade at companies that would otherwise hire me.

And so I have to reconcile with that tension all the time. What’s that middle ground? How do I be true to myself, authentic to my roots? How do I bring what I think is my unique point of view into this industry? But how do I also not shoot myself in the foot so that I can literally stay alive doing it? I don’t know. I’m wondering that all the time.

Ross Kenyon: I feel a lot of affinity for this. Since the podcast has been independent, I’ve progressively let looser and looser with the kinds of things I’m willing to say and talk about. And also just feel the big feelings of working on climate, especially with the way that the world’s been going in the last year. You’re like, cool, we were barely going to make it if we were going to make it then. And now it’s slipping farther and farther away. And you’re like, are we just preparing for a world where we’re adapting or not to a much warmed planet that is imperiled? And that is a terrible feeling.

And I don’t like engaging with a lot of the content that still has a climate boosterism that feels like it would’ve been more appropriate several years ago, but is not calibrated to the new reality. And the—I’ve said this before so many times—it reminds me of when Bernie was in the primary and he just kept getting farther and farther away. People were like, this is how Bernie can still win. It became a meme of itself because it was just 0.001% chance that the electoral map would ultimately turn out this way. And some of the climate stuff feels that way to me too. Are we looking at the same world anymore?

And saying that though puts you at an employment disadvantage because people don’t want you to feel negative or it needs to feel optimistic to make sure that we’re still going to be able to sell credits or that corporations are still going to want to pursue their commitments. And I think pointing out that the world has changed somewhat is not a message that a lot of people are quite willing to have or hear.

Drew Wilkinson: I agree. Especially Americans, right? The answer to that is we know, trust us, we’re exhausted. It’s not just climate stuff, it’s a full onslaught on civil society. It’s all the horrible things that come with Trump 2.0. And so yeah, people can be forgiven, especially sustainability practitioners, from going, I don’t need to hear how bad it is. I live it every day. I’m watching my resources get cut. I’m watching my influence evaporate. I’m watching my job prospects shrink back up.

People in the industry get it better than anybody else, and yet it is so interesting to watch because for those who still do have corporate masters, what do you see? More greenwashing, more AI for sustainability propaganda, more overly—what did you call it? Climate boosterism. Yeah. It’s tough. It’s a really, really difficult moment to be dedicating all of your professional energy to solving climate change right now, for obvious reasons that go far beyond just one administration’s ability to take a wrecking ball to it. I mean, we’re losing everywhere that counts, and we have been for 50 years.

Ross Kenyon: It’s funny to me that you think that climate professionals feel that way because some of the negative reactions that I’ve experienced to some of the more dour predictions that I’ve had or analysis that I’ve put out, whether in private or in public—I’ve had some people who didn’t really want to hear it and they do work in this space. Where they’re like, no, various parts of European or Japanese or Canadian policy is still going to come through. Or look at how China is standing up their own carbon market. And these things are more important than—that’s more signal. What’s happening in the US is noise. The US will double back, the midterms, the Republicans are going to get crushed and the next election’s probably going to be a Democrat. So don’t worry too much about it, and pointing to this only makes us worse at our work. I’ve encountered some amount of resentment for pointing this out among climate professionals. But it sounds like that was not your experience, or has not been.

Drew Wilkinson: Well first of all, nobody has a crystal ball. Let’s hope that those people are right. It remains to be seen.

Ross Kenyon: I so desperately hope so.

Drew Wilkinson: Yeah, right. I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I do know that Trump had already cost us invaluable time that first four years alone. I mean, Jesus, at this point, we are very, very, very late. Emissions haven’t even leveled off, let alone started drawing down. And so literally every day counts, let alone four years thrown in the trash going backwards.

And I think that depends on a person’s inherent faith that these systems will actually respond to the climate emergency, that things like the Democratic Party are even in a position to take meaningful action on this. And that’s not a narrative that I share at all. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise. One is better than the other, but not by much. And on the things that really need to change, they’re in lockstep. And those things are never up for debate or on the ballot. Like endless war and endless growth.

So yeah, I think this kind of gets into the reform versus revolution debate that’s as old as time itself, and certainly not special to climate, but is a conversation that every activist who’s ever fought for change at any moment in history has had to reconcile with, which is: can the system that’s in place be sufficiently reformed to address whatever we’re fighting for? Or does the system need to get tossed out and replaced with something else entirely?

And most people that you’re going to encounter in a professional setting, especially those whose futures and fates and faith and stories and myths are tied to, this needs to continue, it just needs to be nicer and better and greener or whatever—you start to shatter somebody’s worldview if you go, no, the whole thing is rotten and needs to be tossed out. Most people don’t want to acknowledge that, at least not professionally. To a colleague, maybe at home over dinner or something, but I don’t know.

Ross Kenyon: When you were at Microsoft, how did you experience feelings like these? Did you feel enough optimism from your work or enough agency that these feelings were not as powerful, or maybe you even forgot them somewhat? Did you have to suppress them? Did you still feel them but persisted in the work anyways? And is it that once you have a paycheck that is robust, working at a nice company that has retirement and healthcare, it’s really easy to buy into the corporate mythology of, you know what, we actually can make the system a lot kinder and gentler. And when you’re on the outskirts of it, it’s much easier to see the hypocrisy and how a lot of this messaging is BS. How did it feel though, when you were in there? Do you remember feeling like it was a bunch of BS, or did it feel like you were actually a part of something that was meaningful enough?

Drew Wilkinson: Both. Ironically, I would say that for someone like me, again, contrarian coming from a counterculture punk rock that is very anti-establishment, very anti-corporate, coming in with that set of experiences and perspectives, those politics, those beliefs, I was always skeptical. I was like, okay, I’m in the belly of the beast now. Let’s see what the beast actually looks like from inside as opposed to outside. And so I would actually argue that it’s easier to see the hypocrisies and the contradictions when you see how the gears turn than it is on the outside.

When I got to Microsoft, and that was 10 years ago, I had just come from five-ish years of my career in environmental nonprofits. And so the first thing that I noticed coming to Microsoft was, wow, this is not a resource constrained environment. The place I was at right before was five people and it was like, if we don’t get this grant, we can’t pay the electricity bill. And then suddenly the headquarters of a trillion dollar tech company, 50,000 people on campus, a private shuttle fleet. Just that alone was the staggering difference of the venue essentially.

And so yeah, I was the whole time deeply skeptical of how far will one of the largest, most powerful corporates in the world, by any stretch—market cap, influence, longevity, however you want to slice it—Microsoft is about as big as it gets. How far are they willing to go to address sustainability? Knowing that the answer is probably not far enough because again, it’s a single company within a system.

And so as we started to organize employees, as we started to push for more sustainability initiatives, for a more serious set of commitments from the company, which we succeeded in helping get in 2020, I did feel some optimism. That first of all, the company’s going to do more than it was doing before. I tried not—not saying it was all due to me, but employees played a very important part in the years leading up to the 2020 sustainability commitments that Microsoft made in getting them to do that. Not the only reason, but a key reason beyond any reasonable doubt.

So, felt good about the fact I was able to help make something happen that either wouldn’t have happened otherwise or would’ve happened much slower, much later, whatever. But was also pretty clear-eyed about the kinds of things they would do and the kinds of things they probably would never do, and that tension existed the entire time.

But the one thing I will say about it is that one of the worst parts of trying to do anything about climate change, whether it’s in your personal life, your professional life, your political life—ideally, you’re fighting in all three arenas at the same time—but one of the worst parts about this work is feeling powerless. Is feeling like I’m just one person. I’m just a project manager. I’m just a voter. I’m just whatever. I’m nothing. I’m insignificant. I’m small. I’m one person. And that feeling of powerlessness against what is arguably the largest problem that the human mind can even conceive of. Arguably not even accurate to call climate change a problem. It’s a poly-crisis with thousands of problems. It explodes the brain instantly to think about the scale of it.

And so the one really wonderful thing about the work that I did at Microsoft by mobilizing employees, by giving them a seat at the table, by giving them power, by helping them blaze a trail for entirely new ways to do existing jobs like software engineering that take energy efficiency into account—things like that. Super inspiring, super empowering. The side effect of all of that was I don’t feel so powerless anymore. And you really cannot put a price on that feeling because it is hard earned and very difficult to find those moments in your climate work, whether it’s activism or in your professional life, where you go, hell yeah, something I did definitely made a difference. And that’s hard earned.

Ross Kenyon: But still, when you look at the scale of it—

Drew Wilkinson: Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: It makes you wonder, how much of an impact did this really have.

Drew Wilkinson: Over time, yeah. At some point, every single one of us has to find this sort of philosophical middle ground of, I’m doing maybe not everything I can, because if any of us were seriously doing everything we could, we’d probably be dead or in jail, right? Like, let’s be real. So that’s not the right framing of it, but doing enough. How do you get to a place personally where you feel like you’re doing enough?

And I’m not saying I have a perfect answer for that, but somewhere in that is, there’s more I could be doing. There’s a hell of a lot less I could be doing. I’m constantly asking myself if what I’m doing is enough. I’m constantly edging my risk. I’m taking slightly or maybe sometimes drastically larger risks to fight for a climate stable future. And then an acknowledgement that yeah, I am one person. It’s not my responsibility to solve this. I would love to, but I can’t.

And at some point in my own journey, having been concerned about climate for well over 20 years and trying lots of different places and ways—from Food Not Bombs and community organizing to marches, protests, direct action with Sea Shepherd, corporate work—I’ve tried addressing climate change in every single place that I could get myself into.

And at some point I finally just had this moment where I was like, I am doing enough. For now. And letting go of this idea that it’s up to me. I didn’t make this problem. I’m not going to be the one who single handedly has the solutions, although I’ve got some ideas if you want to make me king.

So I don’t know. It’s hard. How do you square that—feeling like you’re doing enough and also letting go of, it’s not all on me.

Ross Kenyon: I don’t know. I grapple with many of these same feelings too. And some days I feel like the work was good and I could detach from the results and be like, you know what? I gave it my all the day. I did the things that I was best suited to do. And also, it isn’t my job to solve the entire planet. And I think that’s a recipe for burnout and depression, because that’s really too much responsibility for humans to wear on a regular basis. I think it can really chew you up badly.

Drew Wilkinson: Oh yeah, totally. I’m not saying I do it perfectly. I’m saying that some days are heavier than others. Some days I’m crippled on the couch and I can’t do anything because I’m so overwhelmed with grief and anger and all the things that come with watching the planet get destroyed so that a couple people can be really rich. There are days when I can barely function and then there are days when I’m just really mad about it and able to channel that into something productive.

And what’s also really hard, especially—and what is different having gone from in-house at a giant company to now consultant—is at least when you work inside the confines of a single company, you mostly get to see the effects of what you do. Maybe not instantaneously, but there’s a ripple that comes out and you can kind of see it. When you parachute into a company as a third party who’s like, I’m here for six weeks, and then hopefully I talk to you again, but I don’t know—I generate these ripples. I generate this change. I often use the metaphor that I’m teaching people how to garden so that they can feed themselves, as opposed to, here I am cutting up your food, and here comes the airplane. I’m teaching people how to create the conditions in their workplaces where this work can be successful.

But what’s really hard about it is that as a consultant, you almost never get to see what happens six months, nine months, 12 months later. If you’re lucky, they’ll check in with you or they’ll respond to your check-in email. Here’s what we tried, here’s what didn’t work. But at some point you just have to trust that it’s rippling out and you’re probably not going to get to directly see, touch, experience the effects of that, but that it is doing something. Whether or not that something is enough goes back to the previous question, but it’s hard. There’s just an element of faith in it that it’s going to do something and it’s what I can uniquely do. And that’s higher up the curve than a lot of people get.

You kind of hit on this a second ago, which is there’s so many people right now lined up around the block going, I want a climate job. Climate change is an existential threat. I’m super motivated by it. I want my professional energy to be addressing that somehow. Wonderful. That didn’t exist five, 10 years ago when I was doing this work. And so it’s amazing that there’s so many people, but at the same time, there will never be enough climate jobs title-wise to satiate that demand. And so at some point you have to—yeah, I don’t really know where to take that.

Ross Kenyon: I like your focus on this. Every job can be a climate job and just because it’s maybe not in your title, you don’t have to go for this. That being said though, I can imagine some of this is really discouraging. I mean something like Holly and Will’s work with the enabled emissions campaign, or I had something recently that cracked me up slash really frustrated me, which is that I saw the CSO from Amazon the same week that the Melania documentary was released on Amazon, bragging about how some portion of the Prime Last Mile fleet had some marginal emissions reducing thing.

I’m like, yeah, you’re also giving cover to an administration that is the worst on climate ever. And so I’m supposed to clap for your tiny little thing on your Prime delivery vans? The—do they know? Does she know that it’s a joke or is there a part—do you have to suppress that to do that job? It’s humiliating. I feel humiliated for her by proxy because it’s such a farce. I wanted to comment on that. But also because of LinkedIn, you can’t just be like, this is a joke. You must be humiliated.

But saying that out loud—I’m sure this person is a very nice person and it’s hard to say no to an offer like this, and it’s a prestigious job. But also, come on. That made me feel bad. Anger, sadness, humiliation by proxy. It was terrible to watch.

Drew Wilkinson: Yes. That is the tension that corporate sustainability professionals have to sit in all the time. And it’s tough because most of them are environmentalists. When you get to talk to them in a private setting where there’s some trust—friend, colleague in the halls of a conference or whatever—they trust me. They know. They know as good as anybody because they’re the ones that have to pedal this crap. But it is part of the song and dance of what it means to work in sustainability and make a living wage because so many of these jobs are not that.

So my experience is that most of those people know. And by the time you get to an executive level, like a CSO, I don’t know. I don’t claim to understand the psychology of millionaires or whatever. But I’ll just say lots of people are willing to do anything for a paycheck regardless of how hypocritical it is.

I’ll tell you a really quick, funny sort of anecdote to that. So I just came back from GreenBiz. It’s the oldest, best, well-established corporate sustainability conference in the US. Been around for 20-something years. It’s great. It’s in my hometown of Phoenix, so I get to go home and eat Mexican food and see my friends and family. I went to a three-hour workshop with comms professionals where the entire thing was how to do sustainability without saying sustainability.

That was the whole point. We just did this new survey and shockingly, all these right-wing snowflakes don’t like it when you use the words climate justice or whatever. So the whole thing was, to stay alive in this moment as a sustainability practitioner, here’s how to keep doing the work, but hide it.

And I was just like, this is so insane. We are—it’s 11:59 PM in the climate crisis and this is what we’re spending our time and energy on. But in the US, yes, that is what we’re spending our time and energy on.

And one last piece of the anecdote: one of the panelists on this works for one of the largest PR consulting firms in the world. One that has continued to work with fossil fuel clients, despite public pressure from many groups saying you shouldn’t be doing PR cover work for fossil fuel companies, which their campaign has been really successful—actually a bunch of PR companies have said, we’re not going to do that anymore. Not this one.

And so similarly to you on LinkedIn, I thought about raising a question in front of the whole room and having a gotcha moment, and I was like, that’s not really fair. I actually know this person. I don’t know their perspective. So instead, I opted to go up to them after the panel was done and talk to them privately and ask about this and just be like, I’m not trying to gotcha. But how does it feel? To be leading sustainability work inside of a machine who—and I know the answer to that because I did it, and Microsoft is the largest cloud services provider to the fossil fuel industry in the world. You literally don’t have digital transformation of oil and gas without Microsoft.

But still, it was interesting to hear their perspective on this, and that is the tension that a lot of these in-house sustainability people have to sit with. I’m doing a little bit of good inside of a giant machine whose main objective is to do harm. But isn’t that all of us? I mean, at the macro level, that’s the whole thing, isn’t it?

Ross Kenyon: I think so. You can even see it pop up in other places too. The game theory of something like Anthropic’s refusal to do certain types of business with the Department of Defense and losing that contract and losing access to servicing the US government for other functions, and then who’s waiting right behind Anthropic’s refusal? Sam Altman is ready to just jump in there. So Anthropic saying no, you’re like, cool, that was an interesting, courageous thing for someone who’s historically been very concerned about the risks of artificial general intelligence and the militarization of AI. Cool. But then other people are just waiting in line.

Would it be better to have the more scrupulous person be using their technology for things that they don’t like, because maybe on the margin they can make some changes? Or is it better to wash your hands of it and give it to the less scrupulous person? Which of those is better? And what are you responsible for? Are you ultimately responsible for the outcome or your own, the state of your soul?

One thing I’ll connect this to, have you seen the film A Hidden Life?

Drew Wilkinson: No. What is it?

Ross Kenyon: It’s a Terrence Malick film about a Catholic Austrian farmer during World War II who refuses to swear the loyalty oath to Hitler and everyone in the film’s like, just do the oath. We’ll give you hospital duty. You won’t take up arms. You can just serve out your tenure and survive. And he’s like, no, I think this is an evil organization. I refuse to. And so he’s ultimately executed. And he’s on the road to sainthood in the Catholic church right now. I think he’s been beatified. It’s a true story. It’s a beautiful film too. Terrence Malick, yeah, there’s lots of shots of grass, as he always does.

Drew Wilkinson: Trees, slow motion.

Ross Kenyon: Trees. It’s beautiful. I love it. I think it’s a really wonderful film. But what’s interesting about it is that there’s a sense in which what he did was the peak of foolishness. You abandoned your family and allowed yourself to be murdered by the state to essentially no end. On the small enough timescale, that’s true. If you zoom out a little bit, you’re like, wow. This is actually an inspirational story about guarding the state of your soul independent of the outcome and, what are you responsible for? It’s basically your own actions and what you choose to give moral cover to.

And so is this person a fool or is this person a saint? And maybe there’s a possibility of both being true at the same time. Are you playing by the logic of God or the divine or the logic of human life? And depending on how you answer that might change how you feel about this person, but this very easily applies to what we’re talking about here. Are you meant to be in the system and making things a little bit better, or are you meant to be someone who is out there papering flyers on telephone poles, DIY, Fugazi, sort of punk aesthetic? You’re outside the system. Screw the corporate media. I’m outside of this entirely. Who are you meant to be in a world that demands this of you?

Drew Wilkinson: Are you actually asking that or is that a rhetorical question?

Ross Kenyon: I’m asking anyone who’s listening. And then also you have the impossible duty of answering this question, at least for yourself. If not, offer some advice to everyone.

Drew Wilkinson: Yeah. Well, a couple of reflections on the movie that you just referenced. Number one, I think what it speaks to is the difference between individuals and movements. And predominantly throughout history, what changes injustice, what advances social equity, what advances progress for those of us who aren’t at the top of the pyramid, are movements. Occasionally there’s an individual who rises up and becomes the Dr. King of their movement or whatever. But even so, if you had Dr. King by himself writing letters and you didn’t have the civil rights movement and you didn’t have Malcolm X—I might also add, two wings for a bird to fly—movements are what change things.

And it is almost impossible to put an individual activist person into their context during—that’s a hindsight thing. Outside of some fringe things like Dr. King. And so you could argue that this priest—certainly not the only one to do that. There’s probably thousands of lesser told stories of people also refusing to swear the oath and getting executed without the fanfare or the story. And it also speaks to how important it is for all of us to see our efforts at making change as part of a movement instead of just me, me, me, me. It’s that hyper-individualistic focus that is a product of living in a western capitalist consumer society that also makes us ineffective because when you think it’s all about you—your personal carbon footprint or what have you—then you fail to realize that the only thing that really changes systems are massive amounts of people. Movements.

And then to try and answer the question of how I feel, kind of—because I’ve raged against the machine, I’ve raged within the machine—I think my own personal journey, I have been able to get access to the inner workings of different power structures than most punks have ever gotten. So I’m like, well, I can play that game. I could, when I was in corporate America, be in the room with C-suite level executives and I can talk their talk and meet them where they’re at and be that liaison between an activist set of employees and an executive. I can do that.

And so to me, I never let go of where I came from and who I am. Part of it’s just stubbornness. I am a spicy contrarian activist and I own that for better and for worse. There’s things about it that are wonderful. I definitely cause myself a lot of unnecessary financial harm by being that. But I am that.

And at the end of the day when I look back on my own life, I want to be able to look at myself and say, what did you do about the most pressing issue of your time? Did you play it safe? Were you careful? Were you more concerned about what people thought of you than what the world needed of you? And so almost every time I edge on the—I’m just going to do the thing, take the risk, be the thing.

And so because I have a foot in both worlds, I can be corporate. I also come from Fugazi, like you said, one of my favorite bands of all time. So glad you dropped that. So my unique contribution is being an insurgent, being able to go into these spaces and stir these things up in places where people are normally never exposed to these ideas.

And that is something that definitely comes from punk rock. I’ll never forget the first time I heard about veganism. I was 17 and this militant vegan punk band came and played a show. And they had “vegan” tattooed across their necks in giant letters. And they only had four songs, but they talked for like 15 minutes about each song. Political rants about factory farming, all this stuff. And it was like, whoa. I’ve never even—I remember thinking at 17 when I first heard of veganism, keep in mind this is way before veganism was the mainstream thing that it is now, I remember my 17-year-old brain going, you’ll die if you don’t eat meat. What are you talking about?

But anyways, I come from that world, but I also, some of the Fortune 500s hire me to come in and do work for them. And so that is my unique role, to come in and sprinkle in some of that punk magic dust in the places where people just aren’t getting it.

Ross Kenyon: I’m laughing. I like what you’re saying. It’s fascinating. I’m also trying to imagine Joe Strummer or Tom Morello in a business suit at a company offsite. It’s a category error in some way. But okay, tell me more about the financial hardships of raging against the machine. What’s it like working outside of the system?

Drew Wilkinson: Perilous. Perilous. Insecure. I never know where my next paycheck is coming from. I don’t have benefits. I have to buy my health insurance on the open market like every other schmo that got screwed by the Affordable Care Act. Unstable is maybe if I could wrap it all up in one word. Especially going from Microsoft to self-employment, the difference is stability, instability.

So it’s hard. Psychologically, you just have to steel yourself, and I’m sure you can relate to this too as an entrepreneur. You might think you have the best idea in the world. You might think that lots of people will pay you for that idea. Whether or not that’s actually true based on what you can or can’t actually do to deliver that idea to the world. Or based on market conditions that none of us have hardly any control over. Timing is everything. So you might have the best idea in the world, but it’s 10 years too late or 10 years too early.

Your conviction in your talent is not a guarantee of success without the backing of a large company. And so it’s a leap of faith in yourself to say, wow, look at all of these risks of doing this. I’m going to do it anyways. And especially for people like us who are doing this, not because we’re like, I think I’m going to have the best taco restaurant Seattle’s ever had—which no shade, I want more good tacos in Seattle—but there is a fundamental difference for people who are doing impact work. I hate that phrase. But choosing to take personal financial risks like that for climate change is different. And table stakes, I think, because ultimately why we’re not making the progress we need on climate, at least in this country, is because you don’t have enough people willing to take enough risk.

They’re willing to protest safely, they’re willing to vote nicely, they’re willing to ask their employers something nicely. Occasionally. But we all have got to be taking more risk, personal risk. And again, I’m not saying everybody needs to chain themselves to a pipeline and get arrested. But the reason that things aren’t moving is because there isn’t enough pressure built up and there isn’t any meaningful threat to the status quo. And every study of any successful social movement in history, what separates them is people willing to take personal risks, whether that’s getting arrested or doing an interview or leaking documents, whatever. There’s lots of ways to do that.

And so for me, as terrifying and unstable as it is to be doing this work, especially in the last year at financial disadvantage, it means this is, to me, the appropriate response to a crisis. I’m taking risks. I’m trying stuff that’s uncomfortable. I’m willing to risk my own personal mental, financial stability in order to make the change that I want to happen happen.

And I wish everybody would do that. Not exactly what I’m doing, but constantly be asking themselves, how much more risk will I accept to fight for climate change? Because playing it safe is never going to get us there fast enough, period.

Ross Kenyon: Why is there a disconnect between the financial rewards of playing it safe and doing things within the system? Those jobs pay pretty well. And so much of the work that is even outside of climate that so desperately needs well paid, happy, well adjusted people doing it are not. You see this at nonprofits that are doing very important work or people who are social workers, working with people that have fallen through seemingly every crack that society has opened for them to fall into. And barely make a living wage at all. You can help a company greenwash and make 300 grand, or you could make an order of magnitude less by solving a problem that’s really desperately needing solving.

Drew Wilkinson: Yeah. And I’m not trying to throw shade at anybody at all in any of this, because the flip side to the scenario you just gave is, okay, maybe you play it safe in your corporate cushy role, but you make 300K and you donate 100K a year to various—I mean—

Ross Kenyon: But it’s almost like they did.

Drew Wilkinson: Let’s just say hypothetically, there is a Robin Hood out there who’s taking from the rich and giving to the poor. The point is there are many ways to contribute to the success of the climate movement. Not all of them have to be your job. And especially if you’re locked into a job that is unscrupulous or unsustainable, there are ways to redirect the resources that you get from that toward climate outside of just the 40, 50 hours of labor output that you have a week.

So that’s what I want to be clear is, I’m not trying to say everybody better take financial risks and be consultants now. Not at all. I’m saying the ways that we can contribute to a more effective climate movement is by being willing to take higher risks.

And that can look like a lot of things. For some people, it might be risky to eat a Beyond Burger when all they’ve ever had is McDonald’s. I don’t know. But edging that and getting out of the comfort zone—I think maybe that’s the heart of what I’m saying. We’re all sitting here in the first world, well, I would say increasingly less comfortable as the cost of living makes it insane to even just scrape by, but relatively speaking on the human pyramid, pretty comfortable, pretty safe. Don’t have to worry about food insecurity or poverty or war in the same ways that billions of people in other parts of the world do.

So from that position, it’s easy to just go, well, I’ll try a couple of things, but I’m not going to get in trouble. And that’s what we need to be pushing against—that feeling of, I’ll only do stuff as long as it feels comfortable to me. No, that’s not how we solve climate change. I’m sorry. That’s actually not how we solve any social movement.

It is an uncomfortable process by default. So the faster you get to, yeah, I’m willing to be uncomfortable—and also I don’t have to be uncomfortable alone. You find brilliant, compassionate, green-hearted people everywhere in this work. That’s maybe my favorite part of doing climate work. I have made lifelong friends, colleagues. The kinds of people who are drawn to this work, in spite of the low paycheck and all the things that we’ve ranted about, are generally my people. They’re amazing, compassionate, brilliant, empathetic people, and you could make a lot of great friends just doing this work. So PSA: take more risks and make more friends.

Ross Kenyon: The paycheck portion of this is so relevant to each of us too. I feel like if the cost of living weren’t so high, I think I would choose to reallocate a fair amount of my time away from the pure remuneration seeking. I feel really called to do death and dying work, but also feel pretty penned in by my life and needing to support a family and noticing that every month you’re like, cool, this is not going great. I think—and doesn’t feel like we’re getting ahead.

I imagine it’s probably similar for you, but you’ve also found ways of doing things and maybe have a way forward that give you some access to this. We recently hung out at your workplace where you’re working with salvage materials and trying to help people build in a way that is much less wasteful. And there are things that you’re looking forward to that maybe they’re not the avenue you would’ve chosen in a vacuum for how you would contribute to climate change. You might have chosen something that was higher paying and more prestigious and less blue collar in a way. But also it seems like you’ve grown to appreciate that actually the work that is being offered to you is ennobling and a valuable solution that people are overlooking and should be taking with gratitude as a chance that they have to offer something genuinely new.

Drew Wilkinson: Totally. Yeah, so much to unpack here. I’m glad you brought this up because I definitely wanted to touch on this in our conversation. So just by way of context, my main goal this year is to build my own shipping container house. I have, again, some lovely friends that I met through climate movement building work that have five acres of land in the forest outside of Seattle and graciously said, we want you to come live here and be part of our family.

That opened up about a year ago a sort of Pandora’s box of, well, cool, if I can build my own small house—not tiny, but if I build my own small house—what’s the most sustainable way to build a house? And I’ve been around, I know a little bit about green building and permaculture. But in the last year, I’ve taken a crash course in all of these things to answer this question for myself: how do I build the most sustainable house I can possibly do with my limited resources?

And so this is a very punk rock thing to do—when you want a discount at a place, get a job at the place. And we’re very fortunate that in the northwest we have a really robust architectural salvage economy here. And so for those that don’t know, architectural salvage is essentially saving, reclaiming anything that could be reused from a building. I’m talking bricks, steel, lumber, but also toilets, sinks, furniture—all of the things that make the built environment. Many of them have a longevity that goes well beyond when they’re demolished. And so places like where I work, Earthwise Architectural Salvage, are a last stop to take these materials and redistribute them back out before they go into the landfill.

Yeah, I got a job there about a year ago because I was like, well, I want a discount on cheap building materials. Also, this stuff already exists. Ergo more sustainable. It’s not some cheap, prefabricated crap from Home Depot. In many cases, old building materials, especially lumber in the northwest—because those were thousand-year-old, old-growth trees—you literally can’t get wood that high quality anymore.

But it has been incredible to work there because yeah, it’s blue collar work. It doesn’t pay very much. I’m not doing it for the money. But my early career was all manual labor jobs. My first climate job was AmeriCorps. I was out putting shovels in the dirt doing endangered species habitat restoration. And it’s only the last 10-ish years or so that I flipped and became a desk worker. So the last year has actually been really beautiful because I’m halfway between manual labor—a couple days a week I put on a pair of overalls and I bust my ass. Yesterday I must have moved several thousand pounds of doors. Came home covered in crap. And desk work. So that part of it is really great.

But the other thing I was going to say, and this kind of touches back on something we were talking about earlier, which is the intangibility of sustainability work. You’re in a spreadsheet, you’re in a Google Doc, you’re running a workshop, you’re running a webinar. You’re doing some carbon math if you’re Ross, or whatever.

Ross Kenyon: No one knows, but yeah.

Drew Wilkinson: You do that stuff, you know that it has some kind of impact out in the world, but you hardly ever get to see it or touch it. So that can be really frustrating and demoralizing in a way.

And so I didn’t expect this outcome, but having worked at the salvage yard for the last year, it’s like—I’m hitting my personal intervention point in climate is arguably much lower here, right? A huge part of my own journey and my own activism has been, what is the highest possible intervention point I can access? Given who I am and what I am and all of that. And the large corporate Microsoft was a way higher level than I ever thought I would be able to get into. So arguably working at my local salvage yard is a much lower intervention point. Fine.

But at the end of an eight-hour shift like yesterday, I’m covered in dirt. I’m exhausted. And yeah, I didn’t stop climate change at the highest intervention point I could access. But I did stop 3,000 pounds of doors from going into my local landfill. And there is something extremely energizing about seeing the tangible output of your labor. I can touch the problem, I can touch the solution. My literal blood, sweat, and tears. It’s just different. It’s not computer work. It’s so different.

And that has really been energizing and grounding, frankly, in this era of climate dystopia that we’re heading into. The days that I go there, I like it. I love working there. Plus if you like antiques and oddities and weird old cool stuff—and I do, I grew up pretty poor and thrifting a lot—so there’s that.

But it has been very energizing. And it is a climate job. It is a hundred percent. I’m stopping—I’m saving building materials from going into the landfill and contributing to an entire circular economy in my backyard. And that feels awesome, even though the pay sucks. So I’m not about the money.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I mean, a good chunk of last year too, I delivered farm share boxes. And again, low lever to pull, but also necessary work. And maybe the important thing that’s the commonality here is it’s directionally correct. You may not always have the opportunity to be the big fancy person keynoting a conference. But also we’re all a part of the same directional movement here and that is what is ennobling about it.

I also think it’s wrong to look down on different types of work, blue collar and white collar. And I also think people who expected to have a white collar career getting an opportunity to work in a different kind of field that’s blue collar is also a good experience in the same way that if you know people who never did anything in service, never waited tables, never served bar—there’s something that’s really—

Drew Wilkinson: You’ll never treat service workers the same again after working in that. It’s tough.

The other thing I wanted to say about it and articulate for this is—and you’re one of the first people I’ve ever even tried to articulate this with, so forgive me if it’s not fully fleshed out—but we mentioned a couple times in this podcast that it’s pretty late in the game. It’s 11:59 on the climate clock. 1.5 now seems like it’s in the rear view mirror.

And so none of that is to say it’s too late. Not at all. But what I—this shift that I’m sensing happened within myself just in the last six months or so—is I’ve spent the last 20 years of my life on prevention. Doing everything I can. Again, from on the streets activism to corporate organizing. Everything that I’ve done for environmental issues has been, how do we prevent the worst case scenario from coming true?

And I feel this shift happening in me right now where in order to acknowledge where we are in the moment and where I can most effectively put my own energy. I feel myself shifting away from prevention into adaptation, which is kind of a weird, it’s an uncomfortable feeling. Because on the one hand it’s accepting that we are going to hit the worst case scenarios probably. Again, I don’t have a crystal ball. I’m not saying that to say it’s hopeless.

But I am saying that the longer things go the way they’re going, the less likely it is that we avoid the worst case, period. And so at some point you have to accept that no matter how painful that is cognitively. But on the other side of that is adaptation. If things are going in this direction and if our collective response or even individual response is insufficient to stop that, at what point do we shift our efforts from prevention exclusively into also some adaptation and mitigation?

And this is where I feel this really nice energetic alignment with working at the salvage yard, building my own sustainable house. Because when I say sustainable, I don’t just mean I’m using found objects and low-carbon wool insulation and all of that. I also mean built to withstand wildfires in western Washington, which has historically not happened, but in the next five to ten years, as things continue to dry out, will happen.

So the more I learn about all of this, and again, my house project is my Petri dish to really get my hands dirty with this permaculture stuff—I feel this shift happening of, yeah. Put your own oxygen mask on first. Once I can create this space for myself, that will hopefully give me an upper hand in adapting to a warmer, drier Pacific Northwest. How do I then go help other people in my community do it based on what I learned how to do?

Because most people love the idea. People that I talk to, they love the idea of a shipping container house or a tiny house or a sustainable house or permaculture. People up here want to harvest rainwater and grow food and live on their land in a way that doesn’t come at the expense of the wild animals that they share it with. But they don’t know how. And they think that it’s too expensive to go out and do these things. And I want to prove that it—not everybody’s going to get a job at the salvage yard, but these things are more attainable, more affordable than you realize.

And that shift from prevention to adaptation is also about changing your zoom setting on how you view climate change from the macro—the highest intervention point, systems level thinking, got to have it, not saying don’t do that—but when you shift into adaptation, I don’t know how people in Singapore should adapt to this. I don’t know how people in Mumbai should adapt. I know how my local ecosystem in my region should adapt to climate change.

And so there is this natural shift. You shift from global to local as you move towards adaptation and mitigation. And I don’t know, I’m articulating that because I suspect others are feeling the same way, even if they’re not articulating it that way. And maybe if they aren’t, this gives us all something to really think about, which is, don’t abandon prevention. That’s not what I’m saying. But we all have a finite amount of energy in the world. And it’s probably time to start looking at adaptation and mitigation first for you and yours, but then for everyone around you. Your neighbors, your community, all of that. I’m curious what you think about that. I know you’re really far along the journey too.

Ross Kenyon: I agree. I’m going to do a podcast on this soon that will maybe better answer this question, but I’ve been thinking a lot about what personal adaptation means and to what degree should people who are far-seeing and concerned stay in situ where they are and try and help their community versus going someplace that’s safer for climate reasons. There’s a lot to say about this, but I’ll treat this in greater detail in the future. And we’ll have to have more chats here. Drew, thank you so much for coming on. I know this was a long time coming. I really respect what you’ve done and look forward to learning more about your journey.

Drew Wilkinson: Yeah, thanks. Likewise. Hopefully next time we can record it at the salvage yard.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, sounds good.

Or do you get a job at a salvage yard, start building your own shipping container house, and shift your energy from prevention to adaptation?

My friend Drew Wilkinson chose the second thing. Drew grew up in Phoenix, got into punk rock at 13, never stopped playing in bands, and somehow that trajectory carried him from DIY shows in Arizona to corporate sustainability at Microsoft, where he helped organize employees into one of the most effective internal climate movements a Fortune 500 has ever seen. His work there helped pressure Microsoft into its 2020 sustainability commitments. He knows what it feels like to make a real difference inside the belly of the beast.

But this episode isn't really about that success. It's about what comes after. Drew left Microsoft three years ago and started consulting independently through the Climate Leadership Collective, and the financial instability of that choice has been brutal. He's honest about it in a way that most people in this space aren't: he doesn't know where his next paycheck is coming from, some days he's crippled on the couch with grief and anger, and he knows that the spicy contrarian stuff he posts on LinkedIn (AKA the stuff that makes him uniquely valuable) also sabotages his ability to get hired by the companies he's criticizing.

We got into reform versus revolution, whether the system can be sufficiently reformed or needs to be tossed out entirely, the Austrian Catholic farmer who refused to swear the oath to Hitler (A Hidden Life, go watch it!), and whether Anthropic refusing to work with the Department of Defense matters when Sam Altman is waiting in line behind them. Drew brought up the GreenBiz conference panel that was literally three hours on "how to do sustainability without saying sustainability." I brought up the Amazon CSO posting about minor improvements to delivery van emissions the same week they gave the Melania documentary a platform. We both felt sick about it.

But we escaped that grim discourse when Drew started talking about his shift from prevention to adaptation. He's building a shipping container house on five acres in the forest outside Seattle, sourcing materials from the architectural salvage yard where he now works a couple days a week. Yesterday he moved several thousand pounds of doors. He came home covered in dirt. And for the first time in a long time, he could touch the problem and touch the solution. Three thousand pounds of doors didn't go to a landfill. That felt better than any spreadsheet ever did, and even though he may not have predicted this is where he'd be... isn't that life? Can we not be amazed and grateful for every surprise?

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Climate Leadership Collective

Earthwise Architectural Salvage

Why is everyone looking at distributed biochar?

If you’ve been following the CDR registry landscape lately, you may have noticed something: everyone is suddenly talking about distributed biochar. Rainbow launched a distributed biochar methodology last spring. This spring, two other registries each launched their own methodologies for distributed biochar. All this in a category that, for years, had been largely quite quiet.

Registries are now recognizing distributed biochar as one of the largest sources of actually-delivered carbon removal, and the market infrastructure around it hasn’t kept pace. Whether the timing is coincidence or convergence, the more interesting question is what the new methodologies actually change for buyers. And the answer, I think, is more than it appears.

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The problem with one credit for everything

The single biggest complaint Rainbow heard from distributed biochar developers was about differentiation. Under legacy options, a project running advanced closed kilns with camera-equipped dMRV, continuous temperature monitoring, and rigorous quality tracking receives the same credit as a minimal open-kiln operation with basic oversight.

Erica Dorr, who leads methodology development at Rainbow, heard the frustration directly: “They say, ‘We’re doing such a better job. Our MRV and operations are a lot more expensive, but we struggle to justify a higher credit price because it’s technically the same credit.’”

That’s a market failure worth naming. When a buyer can’t distinguish between a high-investment project and a low-investment one, the incentive structure collapses. Developers who spend more on quality can’t recover that cost, which means they either cut corners to compete on price or leave the market. The projects with the strongest claims end up subsidizing the weakest ones by sharing a label. It’s Gresham’s Law but for carbon credits.

Gresham’s Law is a principle in economics that “bad money drives good money out.” If a ruler declares a fixed exchange rate between two coins (or declares by fiat that two coins of different metallic composition of different values must be accepted at the same nominal price), then people will only circulate the inferior money but hoard the quality money. Why would you give away a gold coin for the price of a silver coin if both have the same legal (and arbitrary) value? The answer is you wouldn’t. It distorts behavior around both assets to the detriment of each.

Two methodologies, two value propositions

Rainbow’s response was to build two separate methodologies—one for closed-kiln distributed biochar, one for open-kiln—rather than a single catch-all. The split is more than cosmetic, and it cuts both ways.

Closed kilns give operators tighter control over pyrolysis, which translates to more consistent biochar quality and meaningfully lower methane emissions. That control also makes monitoring simpler and more reliable. For buyers who prioritize consistency and want to underwrite something that looks and feels closer to industrial biochar, a closed-kiln credit under a dedicated methodology lets them do that with clarity about what they’re buying.

But the story isn’t just about closed kilns breaking away. Open-kiln distributed biochar has its own real strengths, and Rainbow’s methodology is designed to surface them rather than treat open kiln as a lesser category.

Open-kiln systems can scale faster, require dramatically less capital expenditure, and operate in contexts where closed-kiln infrastructure has less history and requires greater upfront investment (smallholder farms, remote agricultural communities). Critically, Rainbow’s open-kiln methodology raises the bar on what has previously been available. It requires more measurements from integrated temperature sensors to prove biochar quality, drier biomass, stricter feedstock criteria. It avoids the potential gaming of using photos. It’s the first Rainbow methodology that mandates an external digital MRV system as a hard requirement, not an option.

These are not the same open-kiln credits that have been available under legacy frameworks. Erica’s team deliberately built something that separates the more sophisticated open-kiln operators from the full spectrum of artisanal biochar.

Erica’s team at Rainbow came to this conclusion by noting that if they had to wait for all open-kiln projects to go to closed-kiln, we would lose years of climate action even though many of those open-kiln projects would add temperature sensors right away if they needed to. If we believe climate change is an urgent threat, we need to be able to find cases where the right balance between scale and quality can be advanced.

The result is that both categories can price on proof. A closed-kiln developer competing with an open-kiln developer is no longer arguing about which one deserves a higher price for an identical-looking credit. And an open-kiln developer who has invested heavily in dMRV and quality controls is no longer lumped in with operators doing the bare minimum. They’re selling different credits, backed by different methodologies, reflecting genuinely different risk profiles and cost structures. Each can make its case to a buyer on its own terms.

Why the co-benefits aren’t a side story

Here is where I think the CDR-native framing sometimes gets in its own way. If you evaluate distributed biochar purely through the lens of measurement certainty, it will always look weaker than industrial biochar. The MRV is harder, the variability is wider, and the process control is less absolute. That comparison is honest and it should be made.

But it’s also incomplete, and Erica pushed back on it when I raised it. If you compare distributed biochar to nature-based removal like afforestation, soil carbon, or improved forest management, the MRV risk profile of a well-run distributed biochar project looks strong enough. The comparison you reach for shapes the conclusion you draw.

And then there’s the question of what you’re actually buying alongside the carbon removal. Distributed biochar generates diversified income for smallholder farmers in regions where agricultural livelihoods are precarious. It converts biomass that would otherwise be openly burned—causing local air pollution and losing all its potential value—into a soil amendment that improves degraded agricultural land. It operates at a scale of capital that is genuinely democratic: you don’t need seven figures of capex to participate. These co-benefits are not a marketing wrapper on a CDR credit. For a lot of buyers, and for Rainbow’s independent standard advisory board, they are the reason the voluntary carbon market was built in the first place.

When Rainbow brought the distributed biochar work to its advisory board, Ludo Chatoux described their reaction: “They were super excited. They said if you can maintain high quality and scientific rigor while opening market access for these projects, it’s amazing.” Clément Georget, who leads product at Rainbow, framed the excitement more directly: it’s about developing-country rural communities where farmers and agricultural lands matter more than anything. Where biochar makes sense for its agricultural benefit and carbon finance creates real incentives for participation.

The price-discrimination story and the co-benefits story are, in the end, the same story. The reason it matters that open-kiln and closed-kiln projects can compete on their own terms. Now, the open-kiln projects with the strongest co-benefits—the ones operating in the places that need the carbon finance most—get priced out of a market they helped build.

What a buyer should take from this

Distributed biochar is not going away. It’s where a large share of delivered volume in the biochar market currently comes from. And the line between open-kiln and closed-kiln is not fixed, with some of the most experienced operators doing both. Carboneers, for example, has delivered over 100,000 tonnes of CDR and is now opening closed-kiln sites. Varaha, whose MRV work helped convince Rainbow to take distributed biochar seriously, is now deploying industrial reactors. Some of the best operators move with fluency between kiln and project types depending upon the commercial opportunities available to them. The question for buyers is no longer if they should engage with distributed biochar, but whether the methodology infrastructure exists to let them engage with confidence.

Rainbow’s bet is that the answer is now yes, but only if the market stops treating every distributed project as the same thing. Two methodologies, two credit types, each with requirements that exceed what came before. Buyers who care about quality now have a way to find it. And operators who have been quietly doing the harder version of this work finally have a way to prove it.