What do you do when none of the machinery you imported works? If you're Releaf, you build your own nutcracker, name it Kraken, and get it working with about six weeks of runway left in the middle of COVID. And once you have a huge pile of palm kernel shells sitting around, why not get really into biochar?

Today's guest is Uzoma Ayogu, cofounder and CTO of Releaf and cofounder of Biochar Industrial Group (BIG), which just closed a $1.5 million pre-seed. Releaf cracks palm nuts from smallholder farms in Nigeria, where equipment built for plantations met thick-shelled nuts that arrive wet, dusty and full of rocks. BIG is the carbon dioxide removal side, spun out because Releaf's investors understood agriculture and supply chains and did not understand the voluntary carbon market.

They bought their pyrolyzer from a Ukrainian manufacturer during a war, installed it without the manufacturer's engineer, and Uzo slept in the factory on a yoga mat for two weeks. Uptime went from around a third to 87 percent. We also get into cassava yields, what Y Combinator told them when they got in, and my own YC story, which ends with Nori getting in and saying no.

This episode’s sponsor

EcoEngineers: a full-service advisory and consulting firm focused on carbon dioxide removal, decarbonization, and carbon markets.

Listen to the RCC episode I made with David LaGreca from EcoEngineers about how to choose, hire, and fire carbon market contractors.

And the one with Rudy Krehbiel, also of EcoEngineers, on which story carbon dioxide removal is actually in and what it costs to be inside the wrong one.

2026 EcoForums Training Series: Navigating Global Carbon and Fuel Regulations, Market Mechanisms, and Life-Cycle Analysis Fundamentals

Full disclosure: Uzo, Kenna, and I met in the AirMiners Launchpad Accelerator program and I have worked with them in a few programs since.

Resources

• Subscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack

• Become a paid subscriber for bonus content and ad-free episodes

• My other show, Climate Workers Anonymous

• Releaf

• Biochar Industrial Group

• BIG raises $1.5m to turn African farm waste into carbon removal, TechCabal

• AirMiners

• How Releaf is scaling Nigerian biochar, my piece for Rainbow

• Books from the show, at Bookshop

• Carbon Removal Memes, the meme page

Full Transcript

Host introduction

Ross Kenyon: Hello, this is Ross Kenyon. I am the host of Reversing Climate Change. This is a podcast about carbon dioxide removal, climate tech, climate change.

But also so much else that relates to climate change.

That means there's a lot of shows about literature, about film, theology, history, philosophy. I gravitate most towards those topics. There's a lot of stuff happening on Substack right now.

New episodes have full transcripts. I oftentimes am writing an essay or companion piece for a lot of the new things that I'm releasing.

They're standalone essays that don't have podcasts attached to them. All of the carbon removal memes that you may enjoy are also on Substack now. In addition to the other show I've been doing called Climate Workers Anonymous, which is a sort of PostSecret for those who work in climate.

I'm happy to have today's guest here. Uzoma Ayogu is someone that I have worked with for a long time. Uzo is one of the co-founders of Releaf and of Biochar Industrial Group, BIG.

Uzo is a mechanical engineer who invented a novel nut cracking machine for use in Nigeria. His and Kenna's families are from Nigeria, and they grew up in the Nigerian diaspora and then returned back to their ancestral home to find a way to make life easier for smallholder farmers cracking palm nut.

And of course, once you have a huge pile of kernel shells sitting around, why not get really into biochar? So glad we finally got to do this, Uzo.

And I won't belabor this intro because we also just start right at the beginning here and make things easier on listeners., So here is the show. Thanks for listening.

The episode

Ross Kenyon: Uzo, we finally did it. We finally doing a show together. It's only been several years of collaborating in various ways and here we are.

Uzoma Ayogu: A hundred percent. Excited to be here, Ross. Thanks for being patient with me.

Ross Kenyon: It's.

It's, not even that. I don't know. I don't even know what I was waiting for because I've been so energized by your story and what you've been doing for, I think, like, two years at this point. Longer than that?

Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah, yeah. It's about, it's about two years when we first started really exploring CDR industry and seeing if it could really make sense on top of our business. and now it's the main business. So it's, it's really interesting to have you along with the, with us throughout that journey.

Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah 'cause we met in the AirMiners Launchpad Accelerator. That's, that's where we started. So we were paired together there. So Kenna, you and I were doing that.

Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah.

and w- even when I applied, I remember it was just like, "Oh, this is for teams to really explore this and, like the fundamentals," and yeah, and two years later, like, made a lot of progress. so it really was a launchpad.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that's nice. Good job, AirMiners. And yeah, what a modest way to put it. I think you've had a good go of things. We'll get into the details of it, but you recently raised a round. There's a sort of second company that has grown out of the original vision. There's been some cool changes and growth, and we'll talk about all of those things in detail.

But what if we just went chronological? I didn't just force you to go out of order here. Like, how did.

Uzoma Ayogu: yeah.

Ross Kenyon: Releaf came first. Like, what's your story of how did this get founded? Why are you doing this? how did it end up, becoming the company that it is?

Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah.

100%. If I start really at the beginning, but I was born in Nigeria but grew up in South Africa. My dad's an economist. He spent his whole career working on, like, economic development on the continent, and I always- I grew up hearing him basically complain about the country and what was happening.

And I always in my head thought "You guys are always just talking, but you're not doing anything." very naive, young person.

Ross Kenyon: A little bit, yeah.

Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah, exa- exactly. but I wrote my college essay about, wanting to study engineering, in the US and go back and, like, make an impact. That was kind of the largerly- the large overall arc.

and I think, like a lot of people who, like, write those things, and then, life happens and et cetera, et cetera. But was fortunate enough, through, like, summer internships to spend some time doing, like, engineering impact projects in rural settings, rural Togo, rural Brazil. And then my junior year, I met Kena, and Isaiah shortly after.

and we both had s- written our college essays about basically the same thing, like going back, making a difference, studying engineering to make a change. and around this time, there was, like the first few African tech companies, like, coming up, Andela, Paystack. and so we're like, "Oh, this is actually possible."

so I'll never forget, like, my, - Ken was supposed to go to Bain. I was supposed to go to Microsoft. and, I remember taking that the letter Ken had first sent to Bain. I'd like-- I copied it, I sent it to Microsoft, and we both basically got deferrals for a year. and that was what made our parents, like, comfortable.

They were like, "Okay, it's-- the job's not gone. You'll go and do this thing. You scratch your itch, and then you'll, you'll come back and go work your cushy job." it's actually kind of funny thinking about Microsoft and CDR, like, full circle in some ways. but yeah, long story short, I never ended up going to work Microsoft in the, in the end, but did kind of...

The faith was almost, was almost rewarded in the fact that, we had said we weren't gonna go work at th-those jobs and then got into YC, Y Combinator. Literally my last day of college, I remember flying back from SF for my last class of college and being like, "I'm on top of the world. We got in, we got in."

but yeah. Well, then the thesis was just how to make agriculture productive, because that's how most poor countries become middle income. and yeah, spent the last decade kind of building agricultural supply chains, building sophisticated agricultural processing technology. We have a patent for, I guess you call it the best nut, nutcracker, or palm nutcracker.

but all of that, doing that, all of that over the last 10 years has kind of prepared me for the work we're doing now. I can discuss it a bit more, but that's, that's speed running, kind of the last 10 years being that we fundamentally believe, that Africa is the next frontier and its industrialization and doing it in a way, that is a bit different from the way other countries did it, is the most powerful, mm, both economic, and impact opportunity of this century.

That's kind of like our thesis and our grounding in, like, everything we do.

Ross Kenyon: Wow. buried the lead just a tiny bit 'cause you invented a better nut cracking machine. I'm sure people were like, "Wait, what was that last part? You, you're saying that you..." That isn't sort of like.

the typical.

pedigree of someone coming carbon removal. That's like a... I've never heard anyone.

else say that.

So how did that come about, and what was it before you invented how is that machine working now? How's it going?

Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah, We, so we didn't set out to create Kraken, that's the name of the nutcracker. We essentially were like, "Ah, we're, we're gonna import machinery from Malaysia and China to work on smallholder oil palms." So that's oil palm that comes from, like, local farms. but everything that's been developed is for plantations, large, of course large-scale plantations, which is very different in West Africa essentially it's driven by smallholders.

so it creates a few problems. The species are mixed. The smallholder species, like, that is non, like, genetically modified has a much thicker shell. and those... And, and then just the input quality, because the whole value chain is not closed, you have a lot of high moisture, huge dust content, and, like, rocks.

So we needed to optimize our processing line to deal with all of those externalities. So none of the technology worked, and we had to essentially... There was a point where the company was gonna run out of money, like, in the next six weeks, and we hadn't figured out the... We hadn't made the nutcracker work, essentially it was still in R&D, and it was the middle of COVID, and so no one wanted to give us more money to finish.

But one of our, mentors, who is now the founder of two unicorns in, out of Nigeria, had known us for the last three years building, and were like, "These guys, I believe in them, they'll get it done." And so that check ended up being enough for us to get the breakthrough, make Kraken work after I guess over 12 months of R&D, and then things kind of went from there.

Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: how does this get into YC? I don't, I don't know if they make a lot of.

investments like.

Uzoma Ayogu: Good, good, question. Yeah, yeah.

Ross Kenyon: Who interviewed you, by the.

Uzoma Ayogu: when we first... Yeah, Tim Brady and Adora Cheung. So Tim was the first employee at Yahoo. I still call him Uncle Tim, always wanna ma- make him proud. but yeah, he... And even when we applied to YC, it was kinda like we applied with an idea where we wanted to be, like, maybe Bloomberg for Africa.

The thesis then was like, oh the reason you're not seeing FDI flow in is because people don't understand. It's, like, data poor. and then through that process we found out a lot of agricultural businesses had many different challenges. But even when they let us in, they said, "Look, we actually don't like your idea, but your founding team seems so strong and so, like, committed to solving this problem.

we think you'll find a much better problem and business to so- to solve." And we actually never ended up demoing at our original demo day. We demoed later because we weren't confident of, like the structure, or even what we were building then. So we went back to Nigeria after YC, started almost from square one, figured out this agricultural supply chain, figured out this nut cracking, and then went and demoed, like, two years later, with kind of the very much sophisticated nut cracker that will allow you to kinda own the upstream part of the market because of the bottleneck.

So yeah, that's kind of the how we got.

Ross Kenyon: I've never heard that story, and I guess that does make sense that you pitch this, software data play that they're like.

Eh.

but we like good enough.

Fine.

Uzoma Ayogu: yeah. So I always encourage people, if you, if you can show that, you are really committed to a problem space then and the team is good, you- it's worth a shot. Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: That's nice. Well, that's cool. Ours was, with Michael Seibel was who, grilled.

Uzoma Ayogu: Ah, nice. Yeah, yeah, he is, yeah, heavy. But, but good. But good.

Ross Kenyon: I don't even know if I'm allow- allowed to say it. I don't know. It's been so long at this point, I'm not even sure that it matters. But.

we.

like, got... They made us wait for a full day, which I'm... You only ever get one interview, and it's like within 15 minutes they're.

Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah, you yeah, we get a call a.

Ross Kenyon: ours we had to wait a full day, and they're like, "Come back for a second one," which I'm told never.

Uzoma Ayogu: Oh, interesting.

Ross Kenyon: And then they said can do it, but we have to change the, like the financing structure and convert, and no longer do this, like, funky, And then we said.

Uzoma Ayogu: crazy.

Ross Kenyon: no.

S.

Uzoma Ayogu: Ah. Ah, I didn't even know that you had that, that you guys interviewed at.

Ross Kenyon: we got in and then s- said no. So I don't.

Uzoma Ayogu: Do you ever look back and say like, "Oh, maybe that could have been interesting"? Or is it, was it just like the structure of it was.

Ross Kenyon: Well, this was during a time period where we thought, like, "Oh, we'll just remain an LLC and we're gonna do this through token financing and not sell equity." And they were like, "We like Nori, but don't like that idea so much. So do the normal 7% deal and you're in, or no." And it's one of those things that we changed later anyways, so I'm like, Hmm.

Uzoma Ayogu: but maybe.

Ross Kenyon: that the fork the road? Like, was that, was that the moment?"

Uzoma Ayogu: the point? Yeah. We'll never know. That's funny. Actually, I had no idea about that. But I have a very funny Michael story where essentially, we're practicing before demo day. It was the day before, I remember, and he was like, "Look, this is... I love you guys, but this is terrible." And he like tore it, he tore the entire pitch down.

And, and we actually had a an amazing pitch the next day. But I remember coming home, like very dejected, but like, "Guys, we can do this." And then like we reworked it through the night and it was great. But yeah, Michael doesn't pull punches, but he definitely like the definition of, "I'm gonna tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear."

great guy.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that's a really good skill in coaching and even just like in friendship of trying to find a way to do that.

Uzoma Ayogu: That's right.

Ross Kenyon: find sometimes I'm very effective at that and sometimes I'm like that middle ground between severity and being too nice. It's like so hard to like that exact right, "I love you, but that was bad."

But.

Uzoma Ayogu: But that was bad, yeah. I'll tell you, I think I feel like as the years you've coached us through different programs, I think you've done, you've done a pretty good job at that. At making clear like, "Hey, this is what I think you should do, but you should do what you think you should do."

Ross Kenyon: That, I, like that is the, it's not my company. Like, like, and also when tells you what.

to do.

Uzoma Ayogu: always.

make that.

Ross Kenyon: little annoying anyways for your just it's, it's better kinda come to the conclusion. I.

Uzoma Ayogu: The collusion, yeah.

Ross Kenyon: like I want you to succeed, but if you fail I'm just like, "Okay, like another startup didn't quite figure it out."

But like for you it's, your life is radically impacted. It's not, you can only be so.

Uzoma Ayogu: That's right.

Ross Kenyon: It's not my.

Uzoma Ayogu: Y.

Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: But you guys did You guys did pull..., and there were times where you're like, 'cause you came into carbon removal and AirMiners, you're sort of investigating, "Oh, well have huge amounts of - liability biomass that are just sitting in piles.

Like, there's not a lot of economic value." Didn't you figured out biochar, weren't you just like Googling stuff one day and you're like, "Hold on, what was that.

last What.

Uzoma Ayogu: yeah. We got an email about biochar like maybe 2022 and then it was like, "Oh, heard about this." So like found the old email and then like, "Oh yeah, let's... maybe this, these nutshells will have value that we're not doing much with." and yeah, from there it was like, "Oh, like how can we learn about this really quickly?"

And that's how we came across AirMiners. and yeah, from there the big risk was, yeah, can I... Ca- I remember having to pick registry, having to pick the right machine, some of the risks around the machine we picked, finally, issuing and selling credits, even the Milkywire app. And so funny how many points are like very critical and now we look back at them and like, "Oh, cool.

Yeah." But now, literally Nigeria's first industrial biochar credits we managed to sell.

and issue.

yeah, within pretty quick cycle. I think within 12 months from like our final AirMiners to like, Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: Very fast. Are, I feel like you're skipping over some real meaty stories too. Wasn't there like, your, like, pyrolyzer was from Ukraine, right? And there was like a whole saga around that.

Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah. So even when I remember telling, kind of like, "Okay, I found this Ukrainian manufacturer," he was like, "No, it doesn't make sense." Why would you... Imagine going to investors and something happened, and telling them, "Oh yeah, we had an issue with our Ukrainian manufacturer." They'll be like, "Well, why would get a system from a, you know, active war zone?"

but yeah, it was a unique deal in that, like, someone had wanted to buy it. We-- That, that person had pulled out, so it was quite heavily discounted. We had very limited capital then, and so we're like, "Okay, let's do a bunch of diligence. Let's understand the machine. Let's do meetings with the technical team.

and let's try and make it work." And so yeah, it came. they couldn't send their engineer, so me and my team had to do all the, like, installation ourselves. The eng- the actual technical team on their side d- doesn't speak English.

yeah, I like slept in the factory for, like, about two weeks. I had a yoga mat a pillow, go to the office. Because, of course, like 24/7, once the system runs, it keeps going. It's kinda like a refinery. So you have to almost be on call. and their team actually was on call quite a bit.

But, we had an issue with the glue the fireproof glue used. the... Yeah, we had to troubleshoot a lot. We ended up replacing a lot of the actuator systems. not because the system was bad, but it was essentially optimized for lighter density nutshells, and ours were far more dense. Again, the, this question of the native species versus the modified ones.

so kind of same issue we had with the cracking problem, we encountered also with a pyrolyzer. And so again the kinda doing that process of, "Okay, how do I make this work for my environment?" But it-- the first quarter the uptime was, like, 30, 38%, but by the fourth quarter, it was.

87.

So we did really go up that experience curve.

Yeah.

What was happening with, just the core, like palm nut oil, like business before the biochar? Was it, was it a healthy going okay? Had had you figured it out.

or did.

you have PMF or not really? Like what happened?

Yeah, definitely had PMF from like a more demand than supply. So I guess we've seen a lot of markets here, you'll see like, oh the demand is really secured. The main business problem to figure out is on the supply side. So can you execute on supply side? And whether it's fragmented, costs are high, poor infrastructure, et cetera.

So PMF was definitely existed on demand side. because of some of the macro forces in Nigeria, whether around currency devaluation, removing the fuel subsidies to energy costs literally going up at like 4X over the last two years. Even, even the war, like the Ir- Iranian war, like we saw 80% spike in energy and because we're largely off grid, so that hits us completely.

But also it's everyone, like cost of living for all our employees. and then the third thing being the, probably the most the toughest being usually if there's a big local cost shock economically, it gets passed on to the price of the, kind of oil product. But in this case the borders were opened because of the new administration and so now you have to compete with the global price for that commodity.

And so now your c- your costs are going up the global price is fixed, you're getting squeezed. And that was kind of why we started thinking more about, all right, what are the other ways we can, look at the products we're producing and create more value? and that's how kind of biochar, came to the fore.

So business was good from the demand side. There was a lot of macro shocks and so we started looking for other ways to become more resilient, which is why we're like, we're not the only ones experiencing this and other people can benefit kind of from this opportunity as well. We'll maybe discuss that a bit more, later.

Ross Kenyon: But okay, so everything we've talked about so far with Kraken and nut cracking, that's all been Releaf, but then you just raised a round as BIG and that's a different entity.

What led to it being a separate entity entirely and like why is it just not Releaf growing, but something else? How did you decide that?

Uzoma Ayogu: Yes, 100%. So, biochar was working within Releaf, which was exciting. but the structure and the risk profile of the voluntary carbon market is not really something that most of our investors signed up for, as well as even ourselves and our capital stack. whereas, like, okay, we're gonna need, more money to simply scale up our biochar, our biochar processing, capacity, and we saw that for ourselves, and actually it was quite tough.

people were like, "Well, yeah, I don't really-- I understand ag, maybe I understand supply chains, but I the VCM doesn't really make sense to me. and I'm glad that this is kind of working for you guys." But we essentially had to say, okay, if we are running two almost business lines, you have the core business, and then you have the CDR business, and we're struggling to scale up the CDR business, how do we create another entity to help us just scale the CDR business?

And then we realized, like, oh, we're having this problem. Likely other people who have boards or funding will also have this challenge of how do you get a-- how do you take-- how do you reduce the risk of doing CDR at a higher scale? And so we realized like, okay, you need a different capital stack with a different mandate to focus exclusively on how to help agro processors scale up.

So we saw it for ourselves and saw the kind of the friction with getting more financing to scale up, CDR via biochar. We also saw even, like the resource allocation question, having to deal with that. So we said, "Okay, how can we help other people who have the same profile of us also go into CDR and set up an entirely new entity as a result?"

so it's, it's accretive to Releaf because we can increase our capacity. Right now we have way more nutshells and residue lying around that we can process with our current system. and BIG will help us scale that up, but then BIG can also do that for other, large agro processors.

Ross Kenyon: When you're raising money for this, does this confuse potential investors? Are they not sure about the corporate governance and the relationship between these entities?

Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah, yeah. We had to, well we've created an entirely, like, new board structure. the, we call it arm's length agreement between two entity that's governed by like a separate SPV structure, but it's the same commercial agreement that we would give to any other agro processor terms of how value is shared.

Yeah, so it's just like, it's just out the box. It's kind of like, how would I explain? Exomad Green and NetZero, all of them came out of existing large agricultural or timber forestry businesses, and then they put CDR on top. So it's not, it's not uncommon for actually some of the largest CDR companies, biochar CDR companies in the world.

so we kind of, we point to that to say there's a lot of precedent for this, which is pretty useful.

Ross Kenyon: Were you actually using existing project developers as a model when you were designing this?

Uzoma Ayogu: not really, but when we were trying to look for, okay, how,... Is there a precedent for this? We actually just saw like, oh, NetZero in Cameroon, this guy owns a very large, I think it's maybe coffee. Maybe that's the Brazilian entity. And then same for Exomad Green, of course, they like forestry res- residue.

So, it came kind of on the back end. A lot of what we're doing and setting up the idea is just driven by almost first principles. Oh, we wanted to do this. Oh, but this was a challenge, so we actually need to set up this other entity to go and pursue this. but yeah, it definitely, we, spent a long time kind of getting the full sign off, of all our existing stakeholders and making sure it was clean and well-structured.

Ross Kenyon: Nice. And so you just closed around, so you're probably feeling some of relief here. You're able a little bit. good.

Launched.

Uzoma Ayogu: yes. Yeah, but I will say, raising money, like, especially as like a, call it second time founder, it's, it's more of like a responsibility than like, having a party. Like, now you need to go and you need to go and execute. Like, you need to turn that equity into value, which is fine. that's exciting, but it's not like, "Ah, we have a party.

We're raising a round." It's more like, "All right, now we can go get to work to execute on our plan." so yeah, we have two notch lobby systems coming online, which is really exciting. we should have one operational by the end of the year, and the other in Q1 next year, which is pretty cool.

Ross Kenyon: Nice. These are with other types of people with large amounts of waste biomass that you're gonna help them process?

Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah. Exactly. One is with, one is with, like, Releaf scaling up, and then the other one is with another pipeline partner. Exactly. yeah.

Ross Kenyon: how do those conversations go in Nigeria? Are people excited to bundle this together where I imagine you present yourselves as being very knowledgeable about carbon dioxide removal and registries and markets, and you're giving them access, and you're probably sharing some amount of the upside here and covering the fixed costs Yeah. H-how do you, like, approach those conversations? Are people interested in them? Does it, does it scare them in some way to be exposed here? Like, what's it like?

Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah. We, we generally don't even like registry audit. We basically say, "Look, we can make your residue, or your waste an exportable product that you can get paid USD for." that's where the conversation starts. And, our structure is 20/60/20. so 20% of the profit from the project, so it's not a revenue, it's based on carbon profit, 20% would flow to BIG, 20% would flow to the partner, and 60% would flow to whoever funds CapEx.

In the beginning, we typically like to take on most of the risk, make it easier for people, and so profit would be shared 80/20. and that's essentially how we share value. and so a lot of people are like, "Okay, well, is this real? Oh, I can come to your factory. I can see you've done it. I can see you've sold these things."

So one, they're, "Okay, that's real. You were just like me a year ago." And so that makes people feel very... That kind of puts people at ease 'cause, "Oh, you're, you're sharing this thing they don't really understand, but it's like, okay, you've done it. You've actually made money from it. All right, I feel way more at ease."

And then the conversation comes, we spend a l- a lot more time around, okay, then what we do, like carbon audit, right? So, is there really a super strong counterfactual? I- is this really underutilized residue? or based on your location, can we make sure that, that there's a traceability for the raw material that came into your site?

are you at the right scale? how stable is the residue you're producing? Is it seasonal? And so then it becomes a lot of just ingesting a bunch of information and then deciding kind of who to partner with.

Ross Kenyon: These are is all agribusiness, right?

Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah. We've, we've looked at, some people in timber, but Nigeria doesn't have any FSC certification, so it's almost, it's impossible basically to do anything around timber.

East Africa does. South, Southern Africa is very good. so yeah, all agribusiness.

Ross Kenyon: The, are there, does that type of, standard only exist at the country level?

Uzoma Ayogu: yeah. I mean, it's like, because it's expensive, it's like kind of the industry, people will be like, "Well, timber from this place doesn't have this wide certification." You have other countries where some pe- they have some in country and some not in country, and mostly comes down to how strong like the monitoring networks are in that country.

Yeah. But there is some like EUDR that exists for timber which could be interesting for.

us.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that is interesting. I hope some of that comes to impact it. It would open up a whole other thing. I imagine you'd like to work with forestry residue as.

well.

Uzoma Ayogu: Yes, yes, Certainly, certainly. Yeah, yeah. certainly. So those people stay in pipeline until maybe that comes to fruition.

Ross Kenyon: When you're talking about exporting a product, you're talking about the credits, right? Or are you exporting the physical biochar?

Uzoma Ayogu: Definitely, definitely the credits. so like, yeah, that's kind of the way we frame it. but we're seeing slowly more demand for the physical biochar. We've had some really good results from our first round of trials in cassava and maize. In cassava explicitly, we've seen about a 34.5% increase in yields, and that's largely because of how acidic the soils we're working in are.

So tropical acidic soil is some of the best to see actual good biochar performance. We have, like, 4.5 to maybe, like, 5.9, on average ranges in terms of acidity.

Ross Kenyon: Wow. You should, I don't know to what degree is cassava commoditized in this way, but I feel like you should get some restaurant or somebody that's making fufu, and then you can also just be like, "This is carbon negative fufu." Like.

Uzoma Ayogu: no, that's interesting. I mean, from a consumer standpoint, people will shrug.

Ross Kenyon: People are like, "What does that mean?" I don't know. Does it, does it taste.

good.

Uzoma Ayogu: yeah. But, but if we could, if they're then exporting and going to maybe more Western markets, that could be interesting. And we've actually thought about that, from a Releaf standpoint, and so we have some exciting stuff that we'll be announcing soon on that side of things.

Ross Kenyon: On the, like, potentially the packaging side of things?

Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, 'cause right now Releaf completely B2B, but we're, we're thinking about B2C. so that's really exciting, since we kind of have that.

Ross Kenyon: I'm waiting. I'm, I'm always watching for the of standards. Like, there's some- I see regen organic rice, like Lundberg and others, and like, there's like some chocolate and like a couple things like that. But, I'm waiting for someone to do biochar on products. I'm like... I don't know if, I don't know if that is you.

Someone should do it if it's not I.

I.

I wanna see stuff like.

Uzoma Ayogu: Not a biofield product, but it's related, it's related to the core product and the, some of the things you can make, and then maybe the personal care industry. But yeah, we'll, we'll definitely have more on that, over the next few is.

Ross Kenyon: How exciting. Are you fairly dependent upon VCM revenue right now?

Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah.

the structure would be basically VCM revenue would be... We wouldn't partner with someone where we didn't believe that a project could stand on its own two feet on carbon revenue alone. But over time, like I said the agronomic pull, will become more and more clear. So like right now we've sold about 20% of all the biochar we've made.

over time, that we have made as that much, but it'll, it'll grow over time. and so, we believe that we'll also be seeding basically an entirely new kind of industry, in Nigeria and West Africa. I will say the other thing is, what's super cool is, high integrity, high quality credits.

in some ways you could say they're, they're, they're a commodity because, they go through, they go through the same-- They should go through the tonne of carbon removed there, same as the tonne of carbon removed elsewhere, as long as it's verified in the same way. And so what's pretty cool is we can be globally competitive regardless of some of the infrastructure challenges that exist in Africa.

So for a lot of manufacturing industries, it's very hard for African nations to be globally competitive. But actually in CDR, biochar-based CDR, we can actually be globally competitive, which is super exciting for industry to grow in that way.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it's a beautiful thing. 'Cause when I think about, and like maybe this came from your father, and I'm sure y- all of you have your own thoughts on this, but, even if you take away the historical difficulties as like the super light way of putting what's happened to Africa by like Europe and America, but also just like the lack of navigable rivers and how far inland a lot of stuff is, it's just like not...

It's just like hard to move stuff around in.

Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Typically, like road access the fact that we work in very rural communities, very close to where the farmers and the feed stock is, and then you'll be very far from a port, typically that's a huge problem, right? But now, if I have extremely strong MRV and tracking, like that's not a problem for me.

I can create that digital product, I can export it, and I don't have to deal with the other downsides. In fact, my cost of removing may actually be better because I'm in this other very remote area. So it completely turns things on the head, like on their head in that way, which is like honestly so cool.

Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: And are the farmers and growers, are they supportive of putting biochar in their fields? Do they get it? Is there still, like still learning? What's it.

Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah. So this is like the key BIG thesis that like for in order for biochar to scale, you have to sit on top of existing physical. So that's, existing agribusinesses. They have the permitting, they have the land, they have the weigh bridge. The existing physical regulatory, and then the key, I think, was social infrastructure.

And so if you're telling someone, "Hey, I either make my daily bread from this piece of land," or, "I feed my family from this piece of land," and you want to suddenly put some products that I've not go- never heard of in the land, as a complete stranger, people will be-- look side at you and tell you no. But the fact that these are businesses that are the main off-takers of oftentimes their main product that employ their family members or some of them, in different seasonal times the trust is already strong.

And so for you to say, "Hey, just on this section of your plot, put 50 kg into the ground and let's see how it goes and we can compare." And that's what we did for the cassava trials, you know. We carved out usually about a 25% of the plot they had, and then we would just do-- be able to compare side by side.

And you would always see within the first four to six, four to six, four to seven weeks the speed of growth. That's where you always see the largest difference. But then when it's time to harvest, then you could actually see the actual weight of the harvest being materially, higher. On the low end, 20, 21%.

On the high end, up to 50%. But that would, that would vary based on the application rate we would use. on the low end, five tonnes per hectare. On the high end, 20 tonnes per hectare.

Ross Kenyon: Okay. I'm trying to think if there's any other case where I've seen tubers be improved with biochar and rate of growth. I feel like that's all above ground growth. Is there... Am I forgetting anything? There, there's no, like, carrots or potatoes that are doing this. It's just, is cassava it?

Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah. Cassava, yeah, cassava tube. In fact the way we even do the planting, we... People have mounds, where they make these mounds, and then we would p- put a hole in the mound and then insert the biochar in the hole and then close. so we've done some maize, but we haven't had the maize harvest yet. But yeah, we have to come up with, like, okay, what's the best protocol for putting it in the ground, and how do we do it efficiently?

And it is, it- honestly, it is expensive to do, last mile, application, i.e., directly to the smaller farmers, 'cause you can't increase their costs, so you have to take on all the cost of getting it to them directly. maybe over time, again, agronomic pull, people will come and pick up. That would be ideal for us, because they're like, "Okay, there's enough value."

But in the beginning, you take on all that cost. yeah.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, but last mile is a famously difficult problem to solve, and it can really eat into your thin.

margins.

Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. So, th- that's where certainly the carbon revenue helps materially, and that's why maybe we can make a price... we made and have made a case for high initial pricing for them with that last mile revenue and taking on the cost to almost seed and build the market, at least in Nigeria.

but then it also helps, so you have... We have another distribution channel where we go to people who are already working with very large numbers of farmers. In this case, one partner works with about half a million farmers in northern Nigeria. They already give them fertilizer. They already monitor and do, like, MRV and tracking on the plot performance.

And so for them, it's saying, "Hey, I can reduce the amount of fertilizer you need to give these farmers, and you can get the same yield or in some cases a bit better yield. and then let's... And then it's risk-free for you. If I save you money on fertilizer, you pay me half the savings." So that's also another approach we've taken to kind of reduce the cost of our last mile delivery.

Ross Kenyon: Interesting. W- I think you were toying with the idea of having mobile units at some point, but m- maybe that didn't h- for this reason, I think, right?

Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah, yeah. We, I mean a lot of what's nice since even we were looking at mobile a lot of the methodologies have come Isometric and Rainbow have both released quite comprehensive mobile methodologies. The technology has also continued to improve, which again is, like, our view, if you think of, like, things like, okay, note transcription for, like, AI note takers.

People that were doing that when the technology was expensive and not bad now are, like, so far ahead because the technology is... Even, like, solar, I guess, is another good example. Eventually, if you position yourself the cost of both the technology and its performance is gonna con- like, materially improve.

And so if you can do it at, maybe when the technology is not as good or the methodology is still early, then you can be f- way far ahead. but to answer your question directly around mobile, we've seen, like rice husk is a great one. Kokas is another. we still need to better, structure some of the way those supply chains run, and, as an early company, you can't do too many things, so we kind of wanna nail the large agribusiness GTM approach.

But we are looking at actually getting some grant funding to better explore some mobile and even wet biomass opportunities.

Ross Kenyon: Wow. does this biochar not go back into palm fields because the causal link between putting the biochar in and the marketing of the kernel is just, like, too far apart? Is that a part of this?

Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah. not really. I guess for them the palm, even at some of the smallholders who are having the palm plantations, the, because of the maturity of the trees the impact is not as strong as the seasonal crops. If you, if you have a nursery or something that's much earlier in their maturity, biochar will have a lot, much larger immediate impact.

It can improve still the soil, but those impacts on the large trees from the studies we've looked at are on, like the 24 to 36-month, like, cycle. But if you have a much, younger tree, you'll have much better, biochar impact. The soil impact will be further felt. Yeah. It's kinda like a if you...

Some people who are a bit shorter will say, like, "Oh I didn't eat enough veggies when I was young, and then that's why they're short now." Where if they eat veggies now, it doesn't really make a big difference. yeah.

Ross Kenyon: makes sense. whi-which state are you guys in or multiple states?

Uzoma Ayogu: Cross River State, in terms of the pilot site, so that's bordering Cameroon. but we've looked at, I mean, I wouldn't even say we're only N- we're definitely not only Nigeria specific. We've seen a lot of exciting opportunities in West Africa. Opportunistically looked at some in East Africa, one in Southern Africa.

but we do think it's important to kind of have a strong geographic base and be kind of the known player in that area.

Ross Kenyon: Well, so you're looking.

Uzoma Ayogu: So West Africa is kind of our view.

Ross Kenyon: You s- H- Sorry, you said you think West Africa is your view? Is that what you said?

Uzoma Ayogu: West Africans are definitely up here, yeah, in that way. Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: I've heard, I've heard stories of people,... I went to Nigeria years ago, as and I heard stories of people, like even doing business in the like long, skinny countries west of Nigeria, like Benin and Togo, like crossing those borders are like, I think the customs are like very expensive. It's like, people get like, it's hard to cross those borders. It's not easy. I was asked for a bribe on my way into Nigeria.

like, because I didn't have like the right stamp on my yellow, fever.

Uzoma Ayogu: Fever.

Ross Kenyon: And I was like, "I did it.

I got the shot." But.

it was just.

Uzoma Ayogu: yeah, Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: it, is that like a problem for like crossing border? Is that still an issue to the same extent like that?

Uzoma Ayogu: Oh, ECOWAS, I don't know, what year was that? ECOWAS is pretty, is a lot stronger would.

Ross Kenyon: '11? Okay, so there's like a free trade agreement these countries.

Uzoma Ayogu: Free trade, yeah. So yeah, so the West Africa block, which is, which is pretty great, but you will see some distinction between Francophone and Anglophone West Africa. Francophone in many ways is very easy.

I mean, same currency, right? So CFA, that's very nice. but between the Anglophone countries, separate currencies. I would say that Zasala, there's actually a really good partner that makes it quite easy to register entities across West African countries pretty easily. and yeah, there's definitely nuances in, like, how people do business, but again, I think people are like, "Oh, if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere."

That's kind of how that view around Nigeria, like it's never as hard as Nigeria, so if you can make it work here, can kind of make it work in other places. Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: I've always had a lot of faith in you guys. Re- like, s- as long as I meet with people and in the same way that Y Combinator is like, "The idea's not that good, but like, I basically think you're gonna figure it out." And I have that with companies I work with sometimes too, and I've had that for you in particular, where I'm like, "I think you're probably gonna, like, keep hammering at this thing until you figure out how to make.

Uzoma Ayogu: to figure it out.

Ross Kenyon: And it sounds... And you did.

Uzoma Ayogu: Ross. I appreciate Yeah, I mean, in many ways, yeah. It was like, "Oh, is this thing gonna work? Are we gonna be able to make this work?" I remember, I think you were the fir- you were the first person I told that we, yeah, we got Milkywire, as our first customer, which was really great.

Yeah. And I think, I think they were excited about, like, our view of, okay, to scale this, you need to sit on top of existing infrastructure. Spending the two, three years to try and get the project financed, to buy the land, to get the permit, all, by that time, market has moved. so yeah.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, getting the stamp from Milkywire is maybe the best single proxy or heuristic for quality that exists in CDR. Like, if you're able to... Yeah, Aidan and Robert Höglund and Anna Samuelson, like if they're like, "This this is g- that's..." Okay, it's hard to impress these people. Like, they're serious people.

Uzoma Ayogu: They've seen so much. yeah.

Ross Kenyon: and you did it.

Uzoma Ayogu: and they're great as partners, yeah.

Ross Kenyon: If you're listening right now and you're, and you haven't yet gone through the Milkywire process, I would say like start.

Uzoma Ayogu: even I always tell people that actually, like even for YC, I would tell people, "Oh, you should just do the application. It'll help crystallize your thinking. It'll help..." Yeah, so that just helps in and of itself. Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: You keep talking about the capital stack and like sitting on top of other, of like just like the agricultural value chains. What exactly do you mean by that and where do you plug in and how does this make sense for... These companies are big and they oftentimes are conservative and not making, big changes to operations and famously thin margins.

So why work with you? Like how do you break into that?

Uzoma Ayogu: S- yeah, we ended up making our manufacturing a mobile unit in Nigeria, using an existing design. and we have basically put that on the back of a vehicle. We bring it down to the sites, and we let people see what it's like to... We take their residue, and we put it in that mobile system, and then we make the biochar on site.

And it-- You see that some of the excitement both from-- 'Cause now you have some bottoms up where the team the factory managers the people on the plant are like, "Oh, actually this is how this works. Oh, maybe a larger system can go in this place." Kind of explain the system to them. and if you can get that go ahead to do that mobile trial, again, it's, it's easy for them.

It's, you just have to come and set up for a day, run it, see what it looks like. that creates a lot of like, "Okay, this is real." And then, we, again, we make it pretty easy from the perspective of give me some space, give me a feedstock. the amount of energy I use is quite marginal. You're already running a 24/7 process most of the time.

And so, let's make this work. And so again, using a system that isn't huge, so let's say they have 10,000 tonnes of feedstock, or residue, I might not say, "Hey, I'm gonna bring a system that can process all 10,000 tonnes." We'll just start off with 1,000, and then we can bring in a larger system later.

So a lot of it is, it's, it's project specific, but it-- The goal is not to have 1,000, 2,000. I think 100 very large could make a huge impact in terms of removals. I mean, I think top the ninth biggest CDR company in terms of deliveries is about 30,000 tonnes. if we were to part- We have some partners that have in the pipeline, like they alone could be 20,000 to even 60,000 tonnes a year.

So yeah, it's finding the right partners. It's long sales cycle or yeah, partnership cycle. But, yeah, you just to build trust. That's the most important thing. And I think there are some other players who have like looked at this model of, "Okay, how do I partner with agri-processors?" And maybe they approach it from maybe a top-down standpoint.

We're approaching it very much from a, "We're like you. We did this, it worked for us. Let's see how we can make this work." And some of these people are our old like customers and people we've worked with over the last 10 years, which is pretty-- makes it a lot easier too.

Ross Kenyon: You've already built the trust. You already know a lot of these people. You've been doing business in Nigeria for years and years at this point, and they're able to be like, "Okay, this is a, serious operation. These people know what they're doing." You've done that work, and that doesn't come overnight either.

That's like.

Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah, it doesn't. Yeah. It, it definitely is beginning to compound, which is.

Ross Kenyon: I think it's just farming in general. It's the same in the US too. Like, if you just show up somewhere and you're like, "I got a cool new thing for farmers," most farmers are like, "-huh.

Don't believe.

you at all. No, thank.

you.

Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah, And I think even telling them, like, it was actually really hard for us to do this, and we don't think everyone that wants to go and do this should have to go through, two, three quarters of how to make the machine run well, figuring out the right MRV structure, hiring and training the team, how to showing the traceability of, like the raw material feedstock, like, all those steps.

yeah, w- w- we think, again, to catalyze the industry, you need to make it easy for people to adopt. And so telling people, "Hey, I've gone through all these things you're worried about, and here's how I solved them step by step. They're real worries, and I've-- and here's how I've overcome them, and I don't want you to have to go through that pain."

And then I can be flexible about how we share value is powerful, I.

think.

Ross Kenyon: I've long loved the, diasporic story and then coming back to the homeland kind of thing. Are there commercial advantages to it too? I mean, Nigerians are everywhere, like cult- all around the world.

c.

like often done pretty well in business. Like, there's a lot of, like, prominent, like, art and business people that are in...

Like, is there a way to, like, plug into that can... No one else has that available to them. Is that, is it useful to you or not.

Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah I think it's, it's useful from a talent standpoint, certainly. Recruiting very talented people to come and work who have a connection to kind of, I call it the real African growth story. that's like my thing. so there's, there's that. But I think some of it is helpful from a... There's a very small nexus of people who, like okay, have a global background so that they- either their education or the place they worked or their experience and training is kind of recognizable to the Western CDR VCM market.

And then the people that have also now spent time on the ground slogging through things, actually being in the rural areas who can, like... There's a very small nexus of where that overlaps, sits, and that's where I think where we, yeah, are very well-positioned. but I would say also from a, like no one is coming to save you, we have to save ourselves, like that is also like a very powerful view.

'Cause if you look at who gets impacted the most from climate change, it is like largely a lot of the smallholder stakeholders we work with. We've seen even ourselves like, "Oh wow, some of the supply, supplies reduced over the, over the years from these different areas." Like y- you... It is not a idea.

It's not a, "Oh, this should be what I should do or care about." Like, you actually see the impact in people's lives, right? Like, not just the inconvenience of, ah, summer is so much hotter this year. That you actually see like the livelihood changes. And so now it's like, wow the people being impacted can actually now create, be part of making that difference and like, changing their, some of their destiny or their children's destiny.

So I think that's also very powerful too. And that helps when it's very hard, being able to remember why you're doing this work. We have this thing called North Star and next step. So North Star, you're, you're reminded why you're doing what you're doing. and you don't know how you're gonna achieve the very big thing, but all you have to know is like the next step and make sure you're moving like in the right direction.

Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, let's get out the, to utilize that a little bit more. It's ni- nice to keep the vision in mind, and also.

Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah. Just immediate. Yeah, immediate next thing. Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: you've,... When did Releaf get founded? What year was that?

Uzoma Ayogu: 2017, but we've been working on it in college since, January 2016 or yeah, or even like the most earliest date would've been July 2015. But I kind of paired up with Kenna and Isaiah January 2016. So yeah, it's been over a decade. but yeah, we graduated college May 2017.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I was gonna guess 2017, but it sounded too long ago to me. I guess that's, Nori was also 2017. That's.

Uzoma Ayogu: Ah, okay. Wow.

Ross Kenyon: really old though.

Uzoma Ayogu: time. It's all of my 20s.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, especially for CDR, that's, that's super long. Granted, not all of it was in CDR, but one, first question here, they're a little bit nested, but the first one is just how do you keep a company alive for that long?

That's a really long time to keep going, and especially like.

n without.

Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah, juking and jiving.

Ross Kenyon: pivoting and jiving. Okay, maybe that is the answer.

Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah. Yeah, I, yeah.

Ross Kenyon: start.

there.

Uzoma Ayogu: yeah. I think the most important thing is just being, like, brutally honest about what the market is telling you. and so lead with, like, strong thesis around, you ask even, oh, do they have PMF? Like, what you believe. And for me the best indicator, one of the learnings I got from actually Shola from Paystack is that the best indicator of PMF is you're growing.

Like, people are demanding whatever you're, you're, you're trying to sell. And if you begin to not be able to grow, you find creative ways around how to keep growing. And if you can't grow anymore, then you probably are not in the right market. And so, like, you need to, you need to be thoughtful about, that and then continuing to, like, chase that.

And then just being thoughtful about, okay, what are the capabilities you've built, and how can you apply that in a market to differentiate yourself again? Can it grow or provide a service better than what's being provided? But yeah a lot of it is just being honest about what's actually happening and then, being resilient enough and thoughtful enough about how to change your approach, I would say.

Yeah. And yeah, keep just learning. Rate of learning probably is, like... That if someone's like, "Oh, yeah, how do you pivot?" I'm like, "Oh, you wanna make sure you have a pretty high rate of learning and create space for that." Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: For a lot of venture-backed companies the mantra, especially during boom macro times, is that your investors will say, like, "Spend the money we gave you and keep growing." But my inference from working with you is you tend to be a lot more conservative. You kind of being like, "Actually, we prefer to have a treasury that's well-funded and that can, weather these storms, and we're not actually Is that, is that, is that true?

Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah, yeah. Maybe, like, not as much on the extreme side, but 100%, like, where we, yeah, in the boom years, we'll call it boom years, but like call it 2021, 2022, it was certainly like, get the expensive management team, grow the revenue. You'll figure out the the cost structure later.

very much I'd say in these markets, especially, like the volatility in some emerging markets, that that doesn't work. You want your unit economics to be strong from literally from day one. that's very much how we've kind of structured the BIG approach. you want to fundamentally believe that, your customers become your main funding source over the long term, that equity is only, to grow what's already profitable at making money.

and that can be hard in, like, things that require infrastructure, et cetera, but then you need to say, "Okay, how capital efficient is this infrastructure?" Can it pay itself back in 24 months? Is kind of our hurdle rate. and so yeah, I think it's very much like grow, but not grow revenue. You wanna grow absolute profit is kind of more the metric, we focused on.

Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, growing revenue without growing profit means you have to go back to your investors and ask for more money.

Uzoma Ayogu: Exactly.

Ross Kenyon: spending your money faster, but you're...

Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah. And again, there's of course like there's, spend money and then the breakthrough, you can do more. Like, of course that, that's still important. But your investors also, they love it if you make money 'cause then you don't have to keep diluting them, you And burning equity. Yeah. So.

Ross Kenyon: What advice might you have for, I guess there's different categories here, probably business in general, but also there are CDR project developers who skipped your whole first many years of just.

Uzoma Ayogu: yeah.

Ross Kenyon: a, yeah, nut cracking But what about, I think one of the company types that I have the most hope for are those that are, companies that have large amounts of waste biomass, liability biomass that they're gonna transform into value.

That I think is a, is a type that we all look at and think they're gonna be okay relative to.

many others.

But, there's also who has some of that yourself, but you're also servicing companies like that. yeah, give advice to at least some of the groups that I named, 'cause there are several.

Uzoma Ayogu: Yes. so maybe like Call it, greenfield project developers. yeah, I think you d- you just ha- you have to figure out maybe some approach. And maybe the greenfield project developer, their background is, I don't know, bio-bitumen or asphalt roads, and so they have-- they understand like, "Oh, this co-product of some biochars, I actually re- I'm really good at doing that, and then I can do the CDR stuff."

So even if they don't have that, co-operating business where they have the biomass, ideally in some part of the stack, whether it's access to the biomass, maybe access to financing for the machines, maybe it's how you run the machine, so your background is doing, I don't know, super large steel, many of like machinery or like...

There should be something in where you s- have some zone of genius or some compounded advantage, ideally along that stack, whether could even maybe be on the credit sales side or maybe could be sales of the physical product, where again, you can kind of say "This is kind of where my niche sits and this is where I can be a bit better."

I think re- realistically that should be how people approach the market because there's probably, too many projects that are just, not just, but are just are sitting at the conception stage and someone's like, "Well, why you versus so and so?" And so being thoughtful about here's how, where I've developed some zone of genius, or compounded advantage, why I can take this forward.

This, that's like my two cents for maybe you could call it a greenfield project developer who maybe doesn't have a large, operating facility. for people who, do have a lot of liability biomass or waste biomass, come to.

BIG.

Well, if you wanna do it yourself, very, that's good.

but just be ready to figure out how you split resources, time, stakeholder communication, shareholder communication as a result, 'cause that's gonna be pretty important. yeah. And figure out what you wanna do yourself versus maybe have others support you with. yeah.

Ross Kenyon: What's.

Uzoma Ayogu: Oh, and then probably the thing I will say is I think there is a-- I mean, you probably talk about this a lot in a lot of your podcasts, but I think it's largely a, sup- like now a supply constrained market.

So yeah, more a bit more demand than maybe supply. I think a lot of supply is coming online, actually, like a good amount of CapEx has been deployed. and so we are gonna see people who can just focus on deliverability versus saying, "Oh, I'm gonna do thirty thousand, fifty thousand." You know, do the first one thousand, then three thousand.

Build that credibility. You'll likely be able to access financing to scale up when if you can do that, essentially. So I think, people should be thoughtful about how they phase and structure projects too. But I definitely understand like, "Oh I can only get financing if it's- 20,000 tonnes of removals a year.

But in some ways it's, our approach has been doing it in, to your point around Canada and like, oh, treasury, like de-risk, de-risk in stages. Do that thoughtfully. Otherwise, you set up a huge project and then boom, it goes to zero and you're not, you don't, you couldn't really figure out what part of the project broke down 'cause you had to manage like six new things at a time versus trying to de-risk one thing at a time.

Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: What's next?

Uzoma Ayogu: Yes. Yes. so yeah, since our closing the pre-seed for BIG, we are actively, just signing our first external term sheet to deploy the system and then also getting just indicative pipeline for like the next three, four. we are also in now conversation with some pretty large off-takers, so getting-- trying to get the off-take agreements, ensure we have the biomass, locked up and then just say, "Hey, I just need a little bit more money to unlock this bottleneck in my processing capacity."

and so that would look like debt, but also maybe additional equity. our goal is to be super clear on, hey, we can remove a fully blown cost of removal, get that closer to 50 to $70 per tonne. And like, if we can do that, we think that's, that's gonna be a really important metric for us to really point to say this is why, we're gonna be very, competitive in this market.

And then I think also there's gonna be a lot of consolidation, in the next few years in the biochar market. So again the thing that can help, differentiate you, is I would say your cost of removal. yeah. and then on the Releaf side, like I said, there's just some really exciting things we're doing on maybe the B2C side of things, and then also just nice to see Releaf scaling up its current biochar operations.

So, exciting things on both fronts happening.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. That's wonderful. I'm glad to hear all of that. I was hoping you might say that you and Kenna might get a Nollywood, biopic about y- your story. When i- is that gonna happen too?

Uzoma Ayogu: So I think when we release this podcast, I think the folks will pick it up and we'll, we'll go from there.

Ross Kenyon: That's goal.

Huge listenership in.

Uzoma Ayogu: Boom. Yeah, yeah.

yeah.

yeah.

Ross Kenyon: Thank you again, Uzo. It's so fun working with you and seeing your development over the past couple years, and I'm glad we got to do this.

Uzoma Ayogu: Yeah. Thanks Ross for being as persistent and open and being excited about our story. 'Cause sometimes we forget that we have exciting stories to tell that inspire and, encourage people. Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, you're, you're one of a kind. I, like there's like, I don't think that various parts of your story, there's no one else that even I can compare to really. I think it's, it's like only you. So yeah, storyteller recognizes story. I'm like, yes.

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There are so many stories about being inside of stories at this point I can't even keep up. Granted, a good chunk of them come from Charlie Kaufman, but there are also films that play with genre like Cabin in the Woods, They Came Together, Isn't It Romantic, or the entire Shrek universe. I got fourth wall-pilled as a kid by loving Blazing Saddles and Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

As our lives (or at least mine) are increasingly mediated by stories, film and literature have more and more characters living in a world made of story. This has been true for literary fiction at least since David Foster Wallace declared his primary addiction to be to television.

With a windup like that, you must know I'm about to ask: which story is carbon dioxide removal within?

We have so many alternatives from within business lore—Moore's Law, the Gartner Hype Cycle, the solar cost curve—but also many other stories and expectations about the direction of history (Whiggish, up and to the right, the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice). How much of this belief is hyperstition that we need to will this new world into existence? And how much is morally sound delusion; to dream the impossible dream?

But what if we find out we are actually in the wrong story? For this, I must turn to one of my favorite films of all time, Adaptation.

Rudy Krehbiel thinks some of those stories are misleading us, and this episode is about working out which ones. My introduction runs long because I wanted to talk about Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation first, a film about a man who does not know what genre he is in until the genre changes around him, and which you should watch whether or not you have ever thought about a carbon credit.

Rudy works on strategic development at EcoEngineers, who also sponsor this show, and he came into carbon dioxide removal from startups and venture capital, which is why he keeps reaching for diffusion curves. His read is that we are at the innovator stage and mistaking it for a trough. His figures, and they hold up against CDR.fyi's April 2026 snapshot: fewer than 50 million tonnes contracted, barely over a million delivered, Microsoft alone accounting for 78.5% of the disclosed total, and a median purchase outside Microsoft still under 100 tonnes. Diagnose that as failure and you start prescribing medicine for a disease nobody has.

The harder argument is the one about public goods. Solar panels and EVs deliver something microeconomic you would still buy if climate change did not exist. A tonne of carbon dioxide removed does not. That makes this, in Rudy's words, arguably the hardest public good anyone has tried to fund, and it is why he will not call the ending inevitable. I asked him to name the story we ought to be inside of. What he answered? You'll have to listen to find out.

This episode’s sponsor

EcoEngineers: a full-service advisory and consulting firm focused on carbon dioxide removal, decarbonization, and carbon markets

Listen to the RCC episode I made with David LaGreca from EcoEngineers about how to choose, hire, and fire carbon market contractors.

2026 EcoForums Training Series: Navigating Global Carbon and Fuel Regulations, Market Mechanisms, and Life-Cycle Analysis Fundamentals

Rudy works at EcoEngineers and EcoEngineers sponsors this show. I would have had him on either way, and you should know the arrangement.

Resources

• Subscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack for bonus content and ad-free episodes

• Climate Workers Anonymous, the other show I make

• EcoEngineers

• "How Carbon Removal Loses", the episode Rudy and I keep circling

• Belief that makes itself true: a hyperstition for carbon dioxide removal

• Why Don Quixote is so misunderstood

• How non-human intelligence will change us, with D.W. Pasulka, where the Marshall McLuhan scene comes up

• Adaptation (2002), written by Charlie Kaufman, directed by Spike Jonze

• The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean

• Story by Robert McKee

• Diffusion of Innovations, Everett Rogers

• Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore

• Gartner hype cycle

• CDR.fyi's demand structure snapshot, April 2026, the source for the Microsoft and Frontier concentration figures

• Public good, non-rivalrous and non-excludable, used correctly for once (my pet peeve)

• Whig historiography

• Alternative für Deutschland

• National Rally

• Hanging a lampshade

• The Bridge on the River Kwai

• Liberty ships and Victory gardens

More from the show

Ad-free episodes and other benefits come with a paid subscription.

Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.

Carbon Removal Memes is still goofing around.

The books that come up on this show are collected on my Bookshop shelf.

Full Transcript

Host introduction

Ross Kenyon: Hello, welcome to Reversing Climate Change. I’m Ross Kenyon. I am the host of Reversing Climate Change. Did you know this podcast has been running almost a decade? Thanks for listening. So happy you’re here.

If you’re new, a lot is happening over at Substack. Episodes typically get additional write-ups. There’s full transcripts over there. All the links are gathered, the show notes. If you go to rosskenyon.com, that will send you over there. I would be very grateful for your support over there, whether it’s free, whether you become a paid subscriber. I’d appreciate you joining Reversing Climate Change over on Substack. reversingclimatechange.substack.com or rosskenyon.com will get you there.

Today’s episode is with Rudy Krehbiel. Rudy works at EcoEngineers. If you heard the sponsor message at the beginning of this episode, you will know a little bit about Rudy.

Rudy and I talk about a topic that I’m so obsessed with, and if you’ve been listening to the show for a while, you will catch echoes in what I’m about to tell you. The question we were asking ourselves is, which story is carbon removal actually in right now? And which story or stories do we think we’re in right now?

Every industry has its mythology. And being inside of a story can be really helpful. In fact, if you’re watching a film or reading a book, there are certain beats that we expect to come from stories. And to what degree is that built into the structure of our mind? Or maybe our culture just trains us so much to think in terms of act structure and beats that we start looking for patterns even while we’re in the story.

For instance, the hype cycle story is one that is very popular, and the hype cycle has a sense that, okay, we get really hyped up and there’s a bubble, and then we come back down to reality, and it’s in this period where we’re in a trough where, oh, we’re never gonna get back to normal, but the long-term trend is up and to the right of mainstream adoption.

If you believe in that story, then carbon removal might be in that trough. You’re like, “All right, if we can just hang on, mainstream adoption is coming. And we know that is true, and it’s gonna be okay.” I hope that’s the story that we’re in. It’s also something that can be very misleading, because we aren’t necessarily in that story. Rudy and I go through a bunch of other story alternatives that we could be in that lead to different kinds of outcomes.

I wanted to make a connection here to literature and film that I was thinking about so strongly in making this. So with expressive art and with most media, for most of the history of human storytelling, most stories do not acknowledge that they are in a story. You would find it very strange if Beowulf spikes the camera and says, “This would be so strange if Grendel were actually real. I mean, monsters aren’t real because this is just a mythology that we’re telling each other around the campfire, right?” That doesn’t quite happen.

There are some early stories in the Western canon that point to an awareness of story. There’s a term for this called hanging a lampshade, and Shakespeare has this in Twelfth Night. The line is, “If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.” Famously, that’s called hanging a lampshade, where the writer acknowledges that this is a little much. I understand.

Or there’s things like in Don Quixote, which I did an episode about, how Don Quixote was written in two parts in 1605 and 1615. In the second part of Don Quixote, the first part of the book has already been circulated in that universe and people are now imitating Don Quixote. They are also pursuing knight errantry in an anachronistic, goofy style. And they also know who he is and are setting traps for him to play jokes on him. And that’s a very funny thing, and it acknowledges that literature and writing and created media exist inside of the universe. It’s aware of itself as a story, even as it’s within the story.

It’s much more common now, and it’s strongly associated with postmodernism, and in the broadest sense, an attempt to deconstruct media and narratives into pieces. And part of dismantling a story is noticing that the world is made of stories. We ourselves are made of stories. Sure, you’re made of flesh and bone, but how you think of yourself, how you understand yourself in this world is entirely story-based. Stories make the world. In fact, the world itself is a story, because we also have the word Earth, and world connotes so much more than mere Earth does, right? Earth as a story connotes a scientific understanding of a planet. World connotes something that you live within. It’s different. Words matter, and the stories that we tell really shape how we view things, how we act, and what we value.

Some of my favorite fourth wall breaking, the fourth wall is the screen or the stage. Some of my favorite fourth wall play, pieces of art that I’ve loved. I think the first ones I saw as a kid, the first one has to be Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Something about them being arrested for murder at the end of the Holy Grail because the historian was attacked in the filming and the cops are chasing down King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, it isn’t just something that is happening mythologically or in the past. It turns out these are just crazy people from the present who now need to have modern police arrest them because they are causing havoc. There’s a whole world, a parallel world of people who are mentally unwell that are roaming the English countryside clapping coconuts, and not only attacking one another, but also defending castles and speaking French. And a whole thing is happening here that the police need to get involved because there’s something bad brewing.

To me, as a kid, that was so genius because at the end of Holy Grail, they’re setting up for a climactic battle that’s going to take place, and before they get there, they’re carted off by the police for homicide. That so tickled my brain that it made a huge impression on me for story.

Another one that did that for me was Blazing Saddles. In the climax of Blazing Saddles, they are on the Warner Brothers lot. They go into a Busby Berkeley musical set. They end up at the movie premiere. The movie within the movie that’s aware of itself as being a movie. It just bursts out of the movie itself, and it’s one of those moves that it’s very common now, but when it happened, I imagined it was like, “Are you allowed to do this?”

Woody Allen is also very famous for fourth wall breaking. On the Diana Pasulka show, we referenced the very famous scene of Marshall McLuhan chastising someone for misunderstanding his work in line at the movie theater, and Woody Allen’s always addressing the camera.

And if you fast-forward all the way to now, there’s many films that play with our awareness of how plot and act structure work. One of the biggest examples more recently than any of those other films is Stranger Than Fiction, where Will Ferrell plays a character inside of a story that the author is writing, and his rebellion against the author from inside of the story. It adds a fascinating set of philosophical questions here about is the world a simulation? Is there a God? Is there determinism? Are we predestined? What controls our fate, and how much do our choices matter? And it invites those questions if you’re willing to entertain them.

And that’s all to set us up for perhaps the film that does the best treatment of this that exists. I’m gonna skip Cabin in the Woods, which also does really impressive postmodern work on this. But the one that I come back to over and over is Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation.

In Adaptation, the character that is Charlie Kaufman, played by Nicolas Cage, is a successful but very anxious screenwriter. Being John Malkovich, which is his film in real life, is being filmed during Adaptation. And he already has his next screenwriting job, which is to adapt a book called The Orchid Thief by a New Yorker writer named Susan Orlean. And he is struggling with it because the book, he finds it to be beautiful. Somehow I am blown away that I have not read this, because it seems like the kind of book that I would. But the book is lyrical and beautiful, but it’s not very plot-driven. It’s a character portrait of this orchid poacher who’s played by Chris Cooper in the film.

And essentially the whole first half of the film is Charlie Kaufman grappling with how do you take a story that’s about a flower and about the deep history of the evolution of the orchid and the world of those who care about exotic flowers and turn it into a structure that our minds enjoy as an entertaining story that suits a visual medium like filmmaking? And Charlie cannot do it. He notes that so much of this film is about beauty. It’s visual, but it’s non-narrative, and not a lot happens. And in fact, life is full of a lot of things not happening. A lot of life is anxiety and disappointment and suffering, but without some grand climax that happens here. There’s a sense that not a lot happens in life except for quiet moments of desperation and struggle.

While Charlie is trying to do this, he has a fictional twin brother named Donald, also played by Nicolas Cage, who sees the success of his brother Charlie and comes to Los Angeles trying to become a screenwriter as well. And Donald picks up the Robert McKee book called Story, which is a really classic and a good book on screenwriting that I’ve read and learned a lot from, and is going through a seminar with him trying to understand how do you produce a script that will sell, that can be turned into a movie format.

Charlie is struggling desperately to write this film about orchids, and Donald meanwhile is loose, not that intelligent, seemingly just kind of a goofball, but is able to just put together a script that I believe he goes off and just sells, which is something that Charlie is jealous of, given how much suffering writing causes him. And it especially bothers him because he’s trying to make something that is true and beautiful, and Donald just wants to make something that’s commercial, that will sell, and Donald just pulls it off and does it.

Up until basically the midpoint of the film, we’re all in Charlie’s point of view. It’s all about a place where our lives unfold from us without much dramatic action at all. He asks Donald for help with his script, and as soon as he does, the film that’s meant to be a true reflection of life’s small moments and anxieties turns into a sort of summer blockbuster tentpole action film where the orchids are like a stand-in for drug running, and there’s murder, and Susan Orlean is having an affair with the Chris Cooper orchid poacher character. And Charlie and Donald end up mixed up in this chase sequence in the swamp, and there’s murder, and the film is essentially about not knowing what kind of story your life is in.

Your life can be one of small moments of anxiety and terror, existentially speaking. It can also be one of the plot points of an action film that feels dramatic, that hits all the highs and the lows in a way that is satisfying to retell. And there are times when you might be in one story, and there are times when you might be in another. And in fact, asking or inviting a new story in this kind of way can change your understanding of yourself and which story you are in and how that shapes your actions for how to proceed.

If you don’t know what’s coming in that film, I imagine it would confuse you, because you’d be watching a film about neurosis and all of a sudden it almost has like a heist or an action film kind of feel to it. And you feel like, “What the hell? What was that whole first half about? Why did that exist?” And that’s such a funny, brilliant use of story. And it changes as soon as he asks Donald for help with his screenplay.

What Rudy and I are trying to do in this show is something similar. Carbon removal has a bunch of available stories to it. The hype cycle story is one. A lot of people like to point to the solar cost curve story about how solar came down in price, and is carbon removal enough like that to have that same kind of story arc? Believing in a story could help create that story in reality, but it can also be deeply misleading.

Some of the writing that I see about carbon removal policy or what can be done, I occasionally experience as frustrating, because it feels like it’s playing by the rules of a world that hasn’t existed for several years at this point. There’s still the people who write some of these articles, it feels like they are living in a story that the world returns to normal after the midterms or after the next presidential election. Is that a true story? I don’t know. I think them behaving as though it is a true story can be hopeful. We can actually return and make things better and not continue down the path that we’re on now. Alternatively, it could be delusional. They could be telling us a story that is no longer relevant, that could prevent us from coming to grips with the true state of where we are as an industry, as a country, as a world, and being misleading in this way can be dangerous. It is impossible to give good advice except by accident if you do not actually understand what is happening in the world and how it impacts you.

So which story is carbon dioxide removal inside of right now, and how can we change it? I think it’s as simple as asking carbon removal’s Donald. Just finding some way to recognize the truth of where we are and trying to see things in a very clear way. If we are made out of stories individually, as a family, as a nation, as the world itself, we need to recognize that and make sure that we’re telling the right kind of story to create the conditions that will lead to our flourishing, to our happiness, and to a world which is not so frequently imperiled by our decisions and our actions.

That’s where Rudy and I go. I think that’s enough of an intro for now. Go watch Adaptation, it rules. It’s one of my favorite films of all time. Thanks so much for listening. That’s a little bit long for an intro. Hopefully it was worth it for you. I think it was fun. Thank you so much to Rudy for being on the show. Really respect his work and his mind. If you’d like to get in touch with Rudy, his info is in the show notes to do so. Thanks so much for listening to this intro. Here is the full episode with Rudy Krehbiel.

The episode

Ross Kenyon: Rudy, you’re here. Did you even believe this time would come?

Rudy Krehbiel: I knew it would come eventually.

Ross Kenyon: You would come eventually?

Rudy Krehbiel: Did you have doubts?

Ross Kenyon: No, I did not have doubts.

Rudy Krehbiel: We were just waiting for some news, right? Something interesting to talk about.

Ross Kenyon: Is there news or interesting things? You just alluded to some. What is there to be doomer-ish about? I was trying to think.

Rudy Krehbiel: I can’t keep up. I guess it just depends on where you’re approaching things from.

Ross Kenyon: The OpenAI accent. Something else.

Rudy Krehbiel: Are we talking rabbit holes or are we talking carbon markets these days?

Ross Kenyon: I don’t know. Well, I guess let’s set the stage here and let’s figure out which bucket those stories fall into, because we connected on this sort of meta question of which stories are being told about carbon dioxide removal and carbon markets and climate change, and which ones are we actually in, and which ones pattern-match enough where people get misled by them and fall into a story that is a sort of faux ami, if you studied French. Things that look like the cognate but are actually not. Are we actually falling into pattern-matching that... Our brains are so good at pattern-matching that they sometimes are so good that they match ahead of when they really should. So what’s happening right now? Where are we in it?

Rudy Krehbiel: Amen. There’s a lot to unpack there, but I think for me, first thing that comes to mind is this idea that maybe we’re in a bit of a lull, or this period of... I know a lot of folks are feeling a bit kinda disappointed with some of the recent developments in the market. But I genuinely think we’re much earlier in CDR in terms of adoption than we like to think that we are, that we might feel, right?

I think we’re definitely still at this innovator stage of market development. I came into CDR with a background purely in startups and venture capital, right? And studying a lot of these adoption curves and diffusion frameworks. And so I was always kinda looking at things through that lens. And when you look at CDR right now, there’s a lot of interesting things you could take away. But to your point, I don’t know how much of it’s real, right?

So you’ve got Rogers’ diffusion of innovation, where he’s talking about innovators, early adopters, early majority, laggards, that kind of flow. And then you’ve got Moore’s Crossing the Chasm, where he’s talking about how early innovators are gonna tolerate a lot more uncertainty, whereas mainstream customers are really gonna demand a lot more evidence, and they need references and standards and predictability and all this stuff. Really, they wanna see demonstrated success before they dive in, right? And then you’ve got Gartner and the hype cycle and the trough of disillusionment, and I think he would argue that a lot of today’s market dynamics, maybe if you perceive it as disappointment, I think he might think that a lot of that is actually an inevitable correction from a lot of the expectations that we set for CDR dating back five, six years now.

But the reality is, we still sold less than 50 million tonnes. Maybe we’ve crossed the 50 million tonne threshold. Less than two million of those tonnes have been actually delivered. We still have a lot of market concentration with Microsoft and Frontier. And you can even look at biochar, which seems to be taking on a bit of a life of its own. But at the end of the day, excluding Microsoft, the average or the median purchase volume there is still less than 100 tonnes. So none of this, to me, are characteristics of a mature market. They’re very consistent with what you see from a small number of very motivated innovators, in this case, the Microsofts of the world, right?

And we’re still in experimentation mode, and we’re learning, and most of us are still tolerating a high degree of uncertainty. And these early innovators are effectively kinda subsidizing this market formation. At least that’s how I see it, right? And so I worry that we sometimes confuse some of this early adopter activity as evidence that the early majority’s kinda gonna come flooding in. And I don’t think we can count on that. I think there’s a lot more to the story than that, right?

And so what I think a lot about and what we think about at Eco a lot right now is, if we misdiagnose some of this early market activity that we’re seeing, if we misdiagnose that as failure, we’re gonna start prescribing the wrong solutions, or getting oriented around the wrong problems, right? And with all that in mind, what I’m trying to say is that I don’t think carbon removal is failing. I don’t think it’s necessarily super behind schedule. I just think our expectations are kind of out of alignment, right? And kinda leaped over the realistic adoption curve, or realistically where we’re at in terms of market maturity.

Ross Kenyon: There’s so many good insights in there, Rudy. Thanks for bringing this up. There’s something about all of those charts, and especially the hype cycle chart, the ideology of that image is very much that what you’re looking at is in fact inevitable.

Is carbon removal inevitable? I don’t think you could say that it’s inevitable, but the chart shows that this thing is going to happen, and it’s going to go through a cycle, and it’s going to go through a period where it looks like all is lost, and then eventually it is going to win. Some part of you has to believe that in order to bet years of your life on this working out and to work on this, and humanity will be much better off should it invest in carbon dioxide removal and make this work. But also that story has a little bit of that hyperstition feeling to it, where you’re willing something from the future into the past to create it in the present kind of thing. But also it’s not inevitable. It’s an idea. We hope it’s inevitable. Is it? Does that mislead us, or is that a useful fiction that we have to believe in order to do this work successfully?

Rudy Krehbiel: I would love to think that it’s inevitable and obvious...

Ross Kenyon: I hope it is.

Rudy Krehbiel: ...and I think that line of thinking will serve you fairly well as an operator in this space. But I think what folks overlook and what’s really missing whenever you see those curves brought into the discussion, particular to CDR, is this... I know you love this concept, but the idea of a public good, right? And the different dynamics that creates when you’re thinking about adoption, right?

And I think CDR is a public good. We can talk about what that really means. But I think the most important takeaway when you think about a public good is the idea that there’s gotta be some trust behind it from the public, right? It needs societal backing. It needs broad support beyond industry operators and business community, right? For public good to really get the funding it needs to be successful, it needs to catalyze support on down the line.

And I see these adoption curves come up that make it seem obvious, but they’re often compared to solar and electric vehicles and batteries, right? Especially here in the southeast, we love to talk about cleantech and climate tech, and it lumps in sustainability with energy, with carbon removal and carbon credits, right? And I think we need to be very clear that the comparisons between CDR and these other innovations break down really quickly when you think about the value, right?

You’ve got electricity from solar, you get transportation from EVs, you get energy or deferred energy from batteries. And you hold up a counterfactual, right? If climate change didn’t exist, would anybody still buy this stuff? And the answer is yeah. There’s still a lot of value to having an EV outside of the climate benefit. Same for batteries and solar, right? But it’s really hard to say the same thing for CDR, for carbon removal in general, right?

We could talk about co-benefits, and we could talk about clean air, and there are other benefits to it. I’m not saying there’s not. But if we’re thinking about it from an impact perspective and the core product being a tonne of carbon removed, that’s not value that most people either at an individual level can wrap their minds around, or a company can wrap their mind around.

And we could talk through all the things that make it that way, right? It’s diffuse. The benefit of a stable climate is for everybody. It’s delayed or intergenerational. A lot of the time we’re trying to get people to buy something where the people that are gonna get the most value out of effective carbon removal haven’t even been born yet, right? And all these different dynamics, the non-exclusivity, so the people who don’t pay or don’t support carbon removal are still gonna benefit from it.

When you look at it through that lens and then you think about how we’re gonna ask individual corporations to incur this huge cost that’s very public and in some cases it is political in this case, right? We’re asking individual corporations to spend cash today for a benefit that is generally gonna accrue well beyond their walls. They’re not gonna be able to capture it. I think it’s kind of a crazy idea, right, for the voluntary carbon markets in general for that to be the plan. It didn’t seem crazy at the time, but it’s starting to seem more and more crazy.

But my point is, this is just way harder than electrification, right? This is arguably the hardest public good we’ve ever tried to fund as a society. I sometimes think about it as, CDR and carbon removal...

Ross Kenyon: Mm-hmm.

Rudy Krehbiel: ...our success is gonna be measured by futures that don’t occur. We’re trying to sell something like, yeah, your crop yield is gonna be marginally better because drought conditions are gonna be marginally worse, right? Or that hurricane may not hit, or it’s gonna be less volatile than it would if we hadn’t removed it. That’s just such a crazy idea to me, that that’s what we’re selling, is largely things that aren’t gonna occur if we do this right.

And so yeah, not only is it a public good, I think it’s one of the craziest or hardest public goods to fund. And to me, that means no, I don’t think this is inevitable. The missing link to me is this underpinning of support from society, right? You need this catalyzing force that’s gonna help institutionalize this stuff and legitimize it and make it real. To me, again, I’d love to think it’s inevitable, but you think about how far we have to go in terms of generating that support. We’re convincing folks that climate change is real. I’m not sure we’ve convinced folks that carbon removal is the solution. So to that end, I think it’s tricky, right?

Ross Kenyon: Thing with your comments, Rudy, is every one of them sends me with seven different ideas that I have to be so selective now about what I even say. Okay, well, maybe most immediately, that question for individual people or for corporations is so hard. It’s hard for governments too to wrap their heads around.

One, the avoiding a problem is already harder than some positive benefit. You could frame it in terms of we are buying ourselves a healthier future. It’s also avoiding a bad negative possible future. So maybe that’s a framing issue, a communications issue.

That’s not even the hard part though. The hard part for me is everything that touches net present value calculations is just impossible. You’re like, “Okay, a dollar today is worth more than a dollar the day after,” and then two years away, five years away, at some point it equals zero. The calculation for discounting at some point, future revenue or benefit, is just negligible. You can’t even count it.

It’s true for politics too. Politicians can’t necessarily, if they’re running for re-election, promise that 15 or 20 years from now they’re going to have a much better energy system and their kids are gonna be safer. I think people are concerned with prices at the grocery store and the gas pump today. That’s what they care about. And that makes these kinds of planning, especially if there’s the avoidance of some possible outcome that half of the population isn’t sure that they even fully believe in. You’re like, “That’s oof.”

All right. Five of the other ideas I’m gonna go through really quickly here. Thank you for using public goods correctly, the non-excludable, non-rivalrous part. We talked about this previously. One way you can solve that is you can make it microeconomic and you can just try to make a way where corporations can internalize the marketing value so it’s no longer something that’s non-excludable. They can benefit from doing this action and therefore they get paid, so to speak, in terms of their brand equity and reputation. Maybe. And I’m sure that’s part of what’s driving it now, but it isn’t doing enough as is.

Several other things here. Okay, the stories part of this. Moore’s Law is a story here too, that chip sizes will keep getting smaller and smaller. We’ll be able to add more transistors to them. They’re gonna keep getting more powerful. Compute will just keep getting cheaper and more available in this way, and that’s turned out to be true. But that plus that solar scaling story sometimes get applied onto carbon removal and hard tech problems, because Moore’s Law is a thing of, obviously, there’s a software optimization part of this, but a lot of it is hardware design, and it is getting better over time, and very rapidly, too. And solar has also done this thing where it’s, oh, a long period where it’s super expensive and kinda clunky and doesn’t work, and all of a sudden, the benefits of compounding means that, boom, it’s cheaper than everything else for levelized cost of energy or very nearly so.

Is that gonna be true for carbon removal? What would have to be true for it to be true for CDR? How do you know this model is not just misleading us? Or Moore’s Law, “Oh, every such and such months it doubles in power.” Okay. Is that going to happen with DAC sorbents? Do we have any reason to believe that that is going to apply to this thing, or is it just a nice shape and we want it to be so? What would it take for any of these things to be true and not to be wishful thinking?

Rudy Krehbiel: I was trying to think of a really clever substitute for the chip in this setting. I don’t know what that would be for CDR.

Ross Kenyon: Sorbent is what I reached for. I’m like, “What else could it be?” I don’t know.

Rudy Krehbiel: If you can come up with one that applies to more than one pathway, I’ll be super impressed. But look, I don’t have a silver bullet for this whatsoever. I do get to think about this a lot though, and you’d mention microeconomics and these... I think on one hand they’re strategies, another hand they’re kind of like forecasting tools.

But I think of them through, again, the venture lens and I think of how we measure progress, right? And how do you balance commercial success with impact. And I think it gets very nuanced and very complex when you’re trying to understand what’s driving things forward, right?

And I think expectations have a huge impact there. We talked about expectations a little bit, but the way I think about it is a lot of time expectations really shape incentives, right? So in our case for carbon removal and climate tech, we have to consider venture scale expectations that have been imposed on our market, right? So these expectations are placed in our industry, in our market, particularly from where investment’s coming from and what stakeholders feel like success looks like, and it really goes a long way of determining what we optimize for as an industry, right?

But what makes carbon removal so interesting to me is this kinda dynamic that we have on one hand, like real urgency from a climate perspective. We need gigatonnes, and we need them yesterday. We need to produce these faster, right? And I think that is at the heart of what’s driving a lot of folks in this industry. But at the same time, you have venture economics that say that you need to demonstrate exponential growth, drive down costs, scale quickly, essentially create value, enterprise value.

And I don’t think any of these views are irrational. But I don’t think any of them have a real impact on that underlying diffusion curve that we talked about, right? So what I’m saying is these expectations that have now become incentives for our market may not be driving us entirely towards the overarching goal of getting massive support for carbon removal.

So you see today, we talk a lot about success. It looks like raising more capital at a high valuation, tonnes contracted, deployment capacity, declining cost curves, like you said, speed to issuance, all these things that we can measure in a commercial setting, right? And that’s what investors are looking for. And so companies are very rational in optimizing for all of those outcomes. And I also think they’re all super necessary, right? Well, not all of them, but most are very, very necessary. We need capital. We need lower costs. We need deployment. And eventually, we’re gonna need this massive scale, and that’s today with the underpinning of venture support. That’s what we’re largely trying to optimize for.

But my big question when I think about this is, is there a case where we might be optimizing for some of this stuff a bit prematurely in a way that causes us to maybe skip over some of the necessary work, the stuff that’s necessary to create the conditions by which this giant scale becomes possible?

So I’m not saying VC is bad. I’m saying that venture scale expectations might not be the most appropriate operating system to kind of build this industry on, right? In my theory, the success of CDR depends on collective action and society buy-in. Again, I don’t know if the venture model is the most appropriate fit.

And so I think what we’re seeing today is, as VC capital in particular is becoming more and more scarce, that doesn’t change. If anything, founders become more responsive to investor needs and way more dialed in specifically on milestones they need to hit to get more capital, right? In some cases, I don’t have any evidence, but sometimes it feels like that kind of scarcity that we’re going through right now in terms of capital and funding, sometimes I feel like it incentivizes folks to maybe double down on this appearance of scalability, when in reality, I think it’s more important now than ever that we’re focused on evidence-backed impact and credibility of the institutions that we’re building and credibility of the operators. And that’s a lot different than optimizing for returns and showing that scalability.

So again, I’m not trying to say VC is the problem, but I do sometimes wonder if we might have jumped into this all-out effort to kind of build a VC-backable market, when in reality, again, I think ultimately success is gonna depend on this whole other world of getting mainstream buy-in, if that makes sense.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it does. It’s making me think, I’ve never applied this so neatly to the investment side, but if you are a company and you’re trying to receive investment, it’s just another way of doing customer discovery and the sales process. It’s just a different direction maybe of it.

The old line for this, Rudy, I’m sure you... I don’t know how many times you’ve heard this, but I can imagine it’s maybe three digits, but your first customer determines your product roadmap, at least for the first amount of time. And if VC is your first customer, technically they are gonna determine your roadmap, and the story that they impart to you is going to be very different. It’s going to be about how do you get to scale? How do you become a unicorn? How do you actually make this work on a timeline that fits inside of the 10-year VC funding model? If the incentive is to wrap what you’re doing inside of a story that is appealing to this particular customer, people are gonna do it.

Is it actually the best story, or is it just the best of all the available options? Do we just need to do that in order to raise money for one’s company to exist at all, come what may? And I think a lot of people find themselves in that position where maybe they wanted to have a company that fulfills government contracts and is not necessarily focused on delivering multiples that justify a venture fund. Maybe that’s not actually the point.

In fact, I think many of the people who work in biochar do not have the expectation that they’re gonna be able to justify a venture fund. So at least they don’t have the burden of illusion placed on them. There’s not a lie or a shape that is unnatural. They’re not finding themselves living inside of a story that’s not appropriate. Where I imagine some people who are doing hard tech technology development in CDR or adjacent fields think they’re a venture backable company. The investors might have even thought they were venture backable, and then everyone is maybe realizing over time that many of these stories that have been imposed upon this reality do not fit that shape very well, and it’s uncomfortable. That’s fairly speculative, somewhat abstract and meta, but I think that’s at least partially relating to what you’re explaining here.

Rudy Krehbiel: Well, I think a lot of folks that dive into this space might have a deep climate background, but maybe not as deep of a business or a company building background. And I know...

Ross Kenyon: Are you serious? What? That’s crazy.

Rudy Krehbiel: ...for the sake of my example here.

Ross Kenyon: No, I think you’re...

Rudy Krehbiel: No, it’s like... But I guess I...

Ross Kenyon: Flavor. I got you.

Rudy Krehbiel: I don’t think that was necessary to call out the nerds like that, Ross. But I think...

Ross Kenyon: It’s true. People are here because they’re oftentimes scientists and engineers, and they care about climate. They’re not necessarily hard-nosed businesspeople looking for the best opportunity, because you would not be in climate tech, certainly not still, if that’s what you cared about.

Rudy Krehbiel: There’s so many easier ways to make money, Ross.

Ross Kenyon: Tell me what they are sometime. I would love to know what they are, but yes, I’ve heard about them. Sounds great.

Rudy Krehbiel: Uh...

Ross Kenyon: Is it writing on Substack? Is that what it is? Okay. Yeah, good.

Rudy Krehbiel: There’s a lot of writing on Substack maybe.

Ross Kenyon: There is a lot of writing on Substack.

Rudy Krehbiel: Well, I guess my example I was gonna use applies to both. So you’ve got the nerds of a particular variety, either on the science climate side or on the financial side, but I think the science climate people... It all comes back to this idea of, the first time you have that conversation with a capital provider of any kind really, where it’s becoming increasingly clear that they really don’t care about anything else that you’re doing besides what you’re doing to generate revenue and make this a bankable or financially backable operation, right?

So even that first check is gonna be dependent on a lot more folks diving in, and so he’s keenly aware of what you’re doing and how attractive is this gonna be to my network of investors who are ultimately gonna make this successful, right? So every founder or early startup is gonna have that realization that regardless of the impact you’re having and what you’re trying to build, you’re gonna have stakeholders, critical stakeholders in your camp that are just hyper-fixated on cash and revenue, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think to be successful, every business needs that influence, right?

But what makes carbon removal so interesting to me and unique here is that you’ve got that layer, right? And you can de-risk your operation, your business to make it more financially backable, right? So financial de-risking is all about making this something that other folks can invest in, and so we can scale it.

And then you go to sell, and you realize that your buyers of your credits are worried about some set of risks that are totally different, right? They’re in there asking, “How do I defend this purchase?” “How do I talk about this publicly?” And so all of a sudden, as a founder, you’re like, “Okay, now I have to learn to think about it through the buyer’s lens and understand their risks,” and that gets very complicated when you start talking about Fortune 500, Fortune 100 companies and their set of risks. It’s a massive set, right?

And so then you have this third bucket, which is society’s confidence in carbon removal, which again, I think is overlooked in most of these contexts, but I think about it a lot. You’ve got the financial de-risking that you have to do. You’ve got the buyer de-risking that you have to do. And then you have this whole underpinning layer of folks that we need their support over the long term, and they need to believe that this stuff actually works, right? They need to believe in these pathways, that they’re effective. They need to trust the institutions that we’re building that govern all of this, right? And ultimately, we have to convince them that carbon removal deserves collective support.

And so while the financial risks and the buyer risks and the societal risk, they are related, but they’re not the same. And for me, the way I’m looking at it today, when you kinda look at it through these three lenses, there’s a case where we’re doing everything right as an industry, right? We might be hitting all the marks and really advancing technically. I’m not unnecessarily pessimistic about CDR today. We have better science, we have better MRV, better methodologies, more data, more experienced developers. We’ve gotten better at verification. There’s all these advancements, especially in the last six years that I’ve really been involved here, right? That’s real progress.

But does all that progress actually produce public confidence? That’s where you have to take a really critical look as an insider in this industry and think about what we could be doing better, and also be super mindful about how we talk about ourselves and our peers, right?

As an outsider looking in, a lot of that technical progress, to an outsider kinda looking in, and I see this with folks that have just started in CDR. I do a lot of mentorship. I try to do some coaching and I love talking with folks that have just entered into this wild world, right? And they read an article and they’re like, “Oh, this methodology isn’t very good, huh?” Or, “Those credits shouldn’t have been issued,” just because one person wrote it, right? And really what they’re seeing is, in my mind, it’s progress, right? That criticism is scientific progress at work. How and the way we deploy it, that’s up for debate. But what this person’s observing in my mind is progress and advancing, and to them, it just sounds like, “Wow, even these guys that have been doing this forever, they don’t even agree on whether any of this stuff works,” you know?

And so it’s easy from an outsider’s perspective looking in if they look at all this discourse, to be like, “Man, this entire industry is super unreliable. Look at how diverse these opinions are.” And I think what is the most fascinating part about all this is, there really could be a case to be made here that all of the technical progress, while we’ve made tons of progress, we could be simultaneously losing confidence from outsiders, from society. The more we bring this up in terms of transparency and the more debate we have, we actually might be eroding some confidence that we desperately need, and that’s where I...

I’ll stop rambling aside, but that’s also what I talk about, like consensus versus convergence. You can’t manufacture consensus. It doesn’t work in this space. It doesn’t work in most cases, in my opinion. But what we need is convergence, and that’s agreement across an industry. Less competition and less company to company, pathway to pathway, registry to registry. All that competition, I think we can do better as an industry in harvesting the value from that in a way that we converge on some value and really make this space more defensible versus creating this illusion of utter chaos. Maybe it is utter chaos. Maybe I’m optimistic about all of...

Ross Kenyon: Chaos is a story too. And it’s useful in some cases too, the story of entropy, things fall apart, and it’s just madness here, and we’re all mad. Cool, you can tell that story, and there are times when it’s the appropriate story to tell.

There’s several other stories that I thought of that maybe apply here and maybe don’t. Oh, do you wanna react to the Alice in Wonderland? No, you’re good. Okay. I could see you having been the Mad Hatter for Halloween one year, by the way. I could totally see you pulling that off. Maybe that’s this year for you. I think I’m going as Grandpa Joe, just so you know. I think we’re going Willy Wonka style. I’m doing the haven’t gotten out of bed in a while. That’s me.

Okay, anyway, stories that we could tell. So one story that you’re referencing here, it’s the famous Captain Picard line that it’s possible to do everything right and to still lose. And that’s true. I mean, the world is a game with variance. You can play it with perfect skill and randomness can still work against you in the same way that cards do, or backgammon, like a roll of the dice do. Those things have variance. You can be the most skilled player and still lose. It’s different from chess in that way, right?

And also there’s a story that you’re telling about progress, and there’s a sense that people are criticizing by creating another story here, the MLK line of “The arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” It’s like we are always approaching, maybe asymptotically... What’s that, sorry? What?

Rudy Krehbiel: Peace up, A-Town down.

Ross Kenyon: A-Town down, yeah.

We are approaching a better union. We are becoming better over time. I made a show earlier this year called How Carbon Removal Loses, and it was about watching the populist right wing in Europe and Canada and the US and being really concerned about the AfD in Germany. Even as recently as this week, big news out of Germany where they are blowing out their rivals in an election in eastern Germany. National Rally’s expected to do very, very well when they have their next elections coming up next year.

Is that part of the CDR story? Because the CDR story is that we are forever approaching compliance. We are in a pre-compliance moment, and compliance is in the future, and it is coming. But it assumes that we become gentler, more progressive in a good way over time, more tolerant, more eco-conscious. But it turns out the world, the story that we’re telling ourselves and many people want to believe in and thus are creating by their belief, that we need to be meaner, tighter, lock everything down, or we’re not gonna be able to take care of our families in this way. The world is not necessarily becoming better.

For historiography, one of the main theories that people love to beat up on this theory. You’ve probably heard of it, the Whig theory of history or Whiggish theory of history, and it is one of perpetual progress. It’s sort of like an 18th and 19th century, enlightenment and romantic idea of history that we started off as warring tribes. Of course, the true story of that is more complex than is often presented during this time, and that civilization is a process of moral improvement, and we’re getting better all the time, and things in the future are gonna be better for sure.

It’s possible things in the future are worse, and Americans especially have a hard time with that. We do not want to believe that’s true. Other parts of the world have a cyclical theory of history. It’s a better story for understanding there’s times of contraction, there’s times of growth, there’s times of death, there’s a, for everything under the sun, there is a season kinda thing. Cool. But for Americans, that’s super hard.

But CDR people, I think there is a Whig theory of history with regard to compliance. Europe is gonna save us. We’re gonna have a market here that’s going to... Really? Is German procurement gonna survive if AfD blows everyone out in landslide elections in Germany? My guess is that’s the easiest thing in the world to cut. Are we ready to talk about that openly? No, because it’s really, really scary and would reverse all of the stories that we’ve been telling ourselves about where we’re pointing.

Those stories have a political economic component to them because you probably told your investors on investing in your last round based upon integration into a compliance market that may be fundamentally undermined by right-wing populist electoral demographic changes. So now what? Are we living in a fake story? Are we just living in denial and cannot admit it? Is that story still true? Is the world just made of stories? Is there anything except stories is ultimately what I’m coming down to.

Rudy Krehbiel: Yeah. It’s mostly stories.

Ross Kenyon: Sorry to do this to you, Rudy. Sorry. You knew what show you were coming onto though. You knew, but this is it.

Rudy Krehbiel: Yeah, no, I love it. I’m here for it. It’s why I tune in too. Look, you made me think about... Well, I think about timelines a lot, right? And the pace of change, and this is a weird example of where government is probably gonna act faster than the advancement of climate, right? I usually don’t bet on the government acting fast, but in this case, we’re talking about, in my opinion, negative changes in the government. Those seem to happen pretty quick, right?

Ross Kenyon: Sometimes they do, yeah.

Rudy Krehbiel: And I also... Sounds like you’re telling me this is a bad time to try to fund a public good, is what I’m hearing. Maybe one of the worst times to try to fund a public good, which is a sobering thing to think about. I just spent the rest of this podcast pitching on why we need to focus on that front, and yeah, I think you made some pretty compelling arguments on why it might have a very low likelihood of success in the near...

Ross Kenyon: I want my story to be wrong, by the way. I’m living in a story that is kind of doomer-ish, and I think some of it is true enough to say publicly, but also I don’t want it to be true. It sucks. It’s a bad future. I do not wanna be creating that future. Please continue, but yes.

Rudy Krehbiel: It was interesting. So I was in Montana for a wedding last week, and I was talking with some folks, and they were asking me about what I do for work. And I, you know, this guy kinda conveyed some conservative values. If I had to guess, I’d say probably voted Republican and whatnot, and things that would traditionally make me think this guy’s probably not super supportive of government action on climate.

But he said something really interesting to me. He said, “Is this kind of like a right side of history thing for you?” And I’d never gotten that question or heard it put that way. And I know folks...

Ross Kenyon: Derision at this point too.

Rudy Krehbiel: Sorry?

Ross Kenyon: I said usually that’s a term of derision because I feel like the right feels like for gay marriage and other things, the left bludgeoned them with, “You’re gonna be on the wrong side of history,” for segregation and stuff like that. And so I feel like they don’t like that as much. But yeah, go ahead.

Rudy Krehbiel: But I kind of thought it was a positive thing.

Ross Kenyon: Maybe it was. Yeah.

Rudy Krehbiel: If we’re getting this type of engagement with traditionally what I would consider folks that just didn’t have the time of day to even worry about this kind of thing and write it off as not worth their time. So I saw it as, oh, this is kinda interesting that you’re thinking about it that way, which to me implied that there is a growing sentiment that climate change is a real risk and it’s something that creates a huge threat to the livelihood of people regardless of your political affiliation.

And yeah, when you’re out in Montana, there’s a lot of the libertarian mindset, but there’s also this deep respect for the land and for nature. And so it was really fascinating for me to hear that kind of creeping into the small talk that you make about your work and stuff. To me, that was a big positive.

But I share those same concerns. I get even more concerned though when I look at some of the predictions around El Niño and where some parts per million of any variety of greenhouse gas skyrocketing in the last two years alone. My concern is, I think the next five years are gonna bring some of these impacts of climate change to a lot of people’s doorsteps that haven’t experienced that.

I know I talked a lot about how we’re selling a future thing, we’re selling the avoidance of a bad future. But I know folks talk about that a lot, right? It’s kind of a tired narrative. Once people start to feel climate change, they’re gonna dive in and wanna fix it all. I’m not saying that, but I think it’ll be a really interesting kind of collision of socioeconomic and political momentum in one direction and then the day-to-day lived experience of everyday people around the world. It could go a lot of different ways, but it does look like it’s gonna be pretty gnarly on all fronts.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think a lot of people are probably gonna react to climate change and El Niño and things not going very well with microeconomic responses, which is that they buy air conditioning, or they insulate their homes, or they move. I don’t think they’re necessarily gonna say, “And then we should spend a lot of money that’s hard to see the direct impact.” To me, I think they’re gonna try and concentrate the benefits where they can internalize them, which is their home, their family. And obviously, if everyone does that, then we adapt successfully to climate change to some extent. But the goal is not only to do that. We could avoid a lot worse harms if we actually mitigated it. I hope that’s what’s happening.

But I came from libertarian and classical liberal stuff a long time ago, and a lot of people I know from that world... Have you ever seen the living with a narcissist copypasta? Do you know what this is?

Rudy Krehbiel: I know what you mean, but I did not see that.

Ross Kenyon: It’s like the script, if you’re dealing with a narcissist, it’s like, there is no problem. If there is a problem, it wasn’t my fault. If it was my fault, it wasn’t that big of a deal. If it was a big deal, it actually... It just goes and goes. There’s never responsibility being taken.

And some of the people I know who started off maybe 10 years or 15 years ago that were skeptical of climate change even being real, they’re just sort of like, “Okay, it’s real, but the government’s not gonna be able to fix it. Maybe we’ll have private solutions and technology will fix it. Oh, if that’s not happening without enough government intervention, then actually it’s going to be good for agriculture in the high latitudes, and maybe on net it’ll be good, or we can just focus on adaptation and see...” And it just keeps going and going, and at some point, is there anything down there waiting for us where we’re gonna be like, “Okay, we’re gonna do something about this, right, though?”

It’s not like, in the future we’ll be able to adapt. A lot of it just feels like a way of delaying and avoiding taking responsibility in that same kind of narcissist copypasta thing. But I hope... It sounds like the person that you’re talking to, though, maybe they genuinely care. Actually, there’s really good reasons to be a conservative and to care about conserving things. You could totally do it. But for cultural reasons that are totally toxic, we don’t really have that represented to the same... Like Wendell Berry, for instance, is someone that, conservative as far as I can tell, cares about conserving things, and he confuses everyone, and everyone likes to claim him for that reason. He can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But for mainstream conservative stuff, I never see it. I hope what you saw, though, was a green shoot of someone who’s just like, care about limited government, private property, free markets, and also climate change is concerning to me. I hope.

Rudy Krehbiel: Yeah, I mean, to me it almost felt like, we’ve got massive wealth inequality or income inequality, socioeconomic inequality, and I think as part of today’s zeitgeist and the idea of the billionaire class is sort of part of popular culture, right? I think it’s becoming clear to folks on either side of the aisle, at least in the States, that the economy doing great doesn’t necessarily mean I’m gonna do great, right? Or, what it means to be happy as an American based on the policy choices, I think is becoming really murky. I think folks are kinda coming to this realization that it’s not black and white. Even if someone vocalizes that everything they’re gonna do is gonna make things better for me, that doesn’t always play out.

And so I bring that up just because I feel like there is a bit of a shift happening where folks are kinda questioning this whole idea of, what does it mean for me, and what does it mean when the government says they can’t afford to do something? Is that they really can’t afford it, or is it there’s not a priority to them, right?

So I’m optimistic about that, in that there seems to be less kind of blind faith, at least here in the States, and I’ve seen a bit of a hint of that. Even though climate has been vilified, it might not be all that bad to prioritize some of this stuff.

But my most idealistic stuff comes back to, I’m not an economist, so I’m probably getting all this wrong, but I still think we can create a ton of jobs from climate, and I think we can create a ton of energy that’s cleaner than what we have today, and we can create entire markets that benefit financially a lot of people, and a lot of people that matter, right? That make a lot of these decisions for us as citizens, right?

So I cannot wait to see... I mean, Europe’s doing a lot, but there’s gotta be a playbook out there for government to spin a lot of this work that is a public good into something that creates a ton of economic benefit and that treats all of these different investments in ways that are appealing regardless of your political affiliation or what your priorities are. Because at the end of the day, money talks, and I’d love to see us crack the code there and just totally spin this whole thing.

Don’t even call it carbon removal, right? Don’t call it climate. Whatever you wanna call it, but make it this focal point of policy that doesn’t sound like it’s just this charity fund for a future that we’re trying to avoid. It’s more like this is the big... Make it like data centers or something, right? A case of national security that we should just subsidize and fund out the wazoo and get everybody stoked about.

I quit thinking too hard about that a while ago just because it seems so out of reach with the current administration and whatnot, but I still think that that could exist. Even in a populist-driven world, I still think this stuff can be very politically popular on either side of the aisle if they get it right, you know? Maybe I’m just dreaming.

Ross Kenyon: At the macro level, you want your workers to be able to buy back your product or the products of other industrialists in your economy, but are you necessarily going to be the one to internalize that benefit, or will it go somewhere else in the economy?

And whatever ideology that had that noblesse oblige kind of paternalism in it, it no longer is there to the same extent, or they do it in a different way where rather than paying their workers better, they follow their fiduciary duty to extract as much as they can, and then they set up a charitable trust and a foundation, and then spend the rest of their life talking about how good everything that they’re doing is, and how many programs they’re supporting, and how many girls get to go to school in some foreign pla-- You’re like, could you have just not been so extractive in the first place? The answer is no, unfortunately, and it’s probably the way that shareholder responsibilities work.

Rudy Krehbiel: I mean, it’s different, but we deal with something similar every day. For Eco, for example, right? Everybody shows up with a commercial priority, right? “I need X, Y, Z done so I can get my next round of financing,” or, “I need to get my project registered,” or, “I’m in diligence and I need this particular thing to tell this story or I’m not gonna raise this money,” right? Or, “Make this deal.” Whatever it is, right? It always comes with a commercial.

And so it’s kinda what you’re talking about, right? You put your fiduciary hat on, you put your investor hat on. And that’s always, for Eco at least, we have to deliver on that first. But everything that we do for carbon removal, right? If you overlook a gap in the technical or the scientific rigor in your project, or if you skip some of these underlying steps for the sake of a commercial pursuit, that comes back around and will reemerge as a very expensive problem for you as a project developer or project owner, right?

And so it’s like what you’re talking about there constantly. How do we thread the needle commercially for what we need to get done or what the client’s trying to accomplish? I think Eco’s kind of in a unique spot where we look at everything as a market building exercise, right? So if this commercial solution somehow is gonna negatively impact credibility of CDR more broadly or negatively impact the credibility of this particular pathway, those are the things that we think about really intensely.

All of a sudden the commercial stuff starts to seem more simple, right? And it’s more obtainable and it’s immediate, right? We do X, Y, Z and we get what we’re looking for. But the longer term stuff is, I think, so much harder to account for on the regular. And for us, it’s making sure that we’re leaving a trail of breadcrumbs that are again, market building and additive in nature. And that tends to lift everybody up, right?

We worked on, I mean, countless first-of-a-kind methodologies and a lot of the edge cases that Eco used to work on are now foundational for the carbon markets. It’s like, what if we skipped some of these steps and really lowered the bar for what it means to be a BECCS project? Where would we be? Would we have ever sold any BECCS credits, or would there be 10X more BECCS projects out there because it’s easier to get them online?

Going through those machinations in your head is not a luxury that most operators in CDR have. They typically have to be hyper-focused on achieving a simple thing. And so at Eco we’re lucky that we get to worry about that kind of stuff. But to your point, you kinda have to constantly be waffling between, what’s this commercial objective that is gonna keep us in business and keep this project alive versus what kind of impact am I having on the broader industry as a whole?

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Last question, Rudy. What is the story that we should be believing ourselves inside of at this moment?

Rudy Krehbiel: I think it really revolves around what I was getting at there in my last ramble about, whether you’re a participant as a company or an employee, if you’re participating directly in the carbon markets or you care about the environment, it’s really about ensuring that you’re taking in a broad swath of perspectives and really making sure that the actions that you’re taking are beneficial to the space as a whole, and not just your own company or your own project or whatever that single focal point might be.

Because it’s gonna just get harder and harder, to your point about changing dynamics around the globe and this threat of folks buckling down. I think those trade-offs are gonna get harder and harder, and we’re gonna have more and more decisions. Everybody is gonna have more and more decisions like that every day.

And so you talked about pattern matching and what it means to be a critical thinker, right? And to a degree, there’s some empathy involved, right? But I genuinely think that that’s not only an altruistic way to go about things, it’s really what this market depends on for long-term success, because one small step backwards has a domino effect on an entire pathway or the entire market.

So just taking into account that the decisions you make, the steps that you’re taking to try to grow your company or grow your business or achieve a goal, that stuff has broad, widespread impact well beyond your own objectives. So I think if we can all keep that top of mind, we’ll potentially see some good outcomes.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I guess the one thing I’ll add to that, I just was reading an article this morning about the game theory arms race dynamics around developing artificial general intelligence, and the attitude for people who either are in government or at companies developing AI is, “Well, if we don’t do it, someone else is going to do it.” You’re like, “Okay.”

But you are responsible for your own actions. Maybe you aren’t responsible on Earth. Maybe that’s something that you answer to some higher entity later, or maybe your family has to answer to that once they see the outcomes of this later in life, or you yourself staring at your life’s work later.

We care about this as a climate thing, and that requires a lot of people making carbon removal work, and that means sometimes it may not be individually good for your company to do something. But if you wanna be a leader, that’s part of what it means, I think, to be a leader and to show that, even if it’s personally uncomfortable, and it can suck if you’re the only person doing it and no one else does. That’s for every person to answer individually, I guess.

Rudy Krehbiel: Yeah, it’s your story, to your point.

Ross Kenyon: It’s your story, yeah. You can have a twist ending that you decide that is actually in humanity’s best interest and does not just follow the capitalist logic of, “Well, yeah, if we don’t cut the corner on this methodology, someone else is gonna do it, so we should just do it first so we win.” You’re like, “What? Really? How did we get to this point? What story are we in that has led us to make this decision? It’s not a good one.”

Rudy Krehbiel: Gotta compete.

Ross Kenyon: Gotta compete.

Rudy Krehbiel: Small wins. I don’t know. Yeah, I feel like for me, at the end of the day, it’s just what you said. It’s the story you have to tell yourself or you have to hear from yourself for the rest of your life. And I find life to be much more pleasant when it’s a story that I know is at least somewhat genuine, right? I’m not saying it’s a great story, but it’s one that, it’s real and that I can learn from, right? I think that’s... Yeah. Why make shit up?

Ross Kenyon: I mean, so that’s why I love stories that are about self-deception and delusion. It’s one of the reasons why I especially love The Bridge on the River Kwai. I think that comes up on the show pretty often. I would just be like, “What goal were you maximizing for exactly?” And it works out, I guess, but barely, and only works out through irony, basically, and not through anything else.

Yeah, there’s a lot more to say about it. Thanks for being here, Rudy. I gave you an impossible task. Impossible. Impossible, but you did a great job.

Rudy Krehbiel: Apparently I’m all in on impossible tasks these days.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it seems that way.

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Adolf Hitler as chancellor of Germany was a nightmare; Adolf Hitler at a town meeting would just be an asshole.

— Karl Hess

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube.

Wendell Berry died on August 31st, 2026. A listener once made a Reversing Climate Change bingo card and one of the squares was just "someone mentions Wendell Berry," which turned out to be a rigged square. So rather than write another appreciation, I have pulled the conversation I had with his daughter in 2020 and recorded a new introduction to sit in front of it. The episode I made the week he died is here.

Mary Berry runs The Berry Center in New Castle, Kentucky, founded in 2011 after a lifetime of farming. She started it because a forty-year local food movement had produced some very good farmers' markets and almost no change to the culture of farming, and because the best agricultural program her state ever had was being forgotten inside that very state.

Listen in to hear more about why the local food movement concentrated on food and skipped land use and the economic lives of farmers, and what you do about any of this if you have no Henry County of your own to go back to.

My new introduction is about that last part, and about whether those of who without such roots are like locusts, but somehow worse? What a grim sentence to pen, and there's a lot more coming on this topic soon...

This Episode's Sponsor

EcoEngineers: a full-service advisory and consulting firm focused on carbon dioxide removal, decarbonization, and carbon markets

Listen to the RCC episode I made with David LaGreca from EcoEngineers about how to choose, hire, and fire carbon market contractors.

And the one with Rudy Krehbiel, also of EcoEngineers, on which story carbon dioxide removal is actually in and what it costs to be inside the wrong one.

2026 EcoForums Training Series: Navigating Global Carbon and Fuel Regulations, Market Mechanisms, and Life-Cycle Analysis Fundamentals

Resources

• Subscribe to the ⁠⁠Reversing Climate Change Substack⁠⁠

• ⁠⁠Become a paid subscriber⁠⁠ for bonus content and ad-free episodes

• Check out my new show, Climate Workers Anonymous

• The original 2020 release of this conversation

• The Berry Center, and Our Home Place Meat, and the shop

• The Berry Center Farm and Forest Institute: the education program Mary describes as the Wendell Berry Farming Program of Sterling College, now run by the Berry Center itself

• The Agrarian Culture Center and the Archive of The Berry Center, which holds her grandfather's and uncle's papers from the Burley Tobacco Program

• The Land Institute, and Wes Jackson's Becoming Native to This Place

• Removals, avoidances, and what Wendell Berry thought of making tonnes fungible

• Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow and the Port William novels, and The World-Ending Fire

• The 50-Year Farm Bill

• Organic Valley, founded on what its founder knew about the Burley Tobacco Program

• Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander

• Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam

• Gary Snyder

The episode art is Winslow Homer's The Veteran in a New Field, 1865, oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876–1967), 1967, accession number 67.187.131. Public domain, via The Met's Open Access program.

Originally released in September 2020 as season 2, episode 30. Re-released September 2026 as episode 416, with a new introduction.

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Full Transcript

Part one: the new introduction

Mary Berry: I think that history teaches over and over and over again that people who think that they know what's good for everybody else, generally speaking, are not. Well, they may get some things done, but they're not always the right things.

Ross Kenyon: You just heard Mary Berry, the daughter of Wendell and Tanya Berry. Mary was on Reversing Climate Change, thank goodness, a long time ago. Here I am looking this up. When even was this show? Wow. Almost to the day six years ago.

If you like this show, it is probably not a surprise to you that Wendell Berry, novelist, essayist, poet, activist, mythologizer, in a good way, and preserver of small town, agrarian, rural life. He likes things slow. He likes things local. He wants you to know your neighbors. The Berry Center exists to carry on his legacy and that of his family's. Mary Berry is the executive director there.

My name is Ross Kenyon. This is my podcast, Reversing Climate Change. Thank you for listening. If you're a longtime listener, maybe you remember this show, but it is six years old. That's a long time. In, in podcasting memory, goodness. That's a, that's deep in the catalog, let's say it that way.

And I was really sorry to hear about Wendell's death. My sympathy goes out to Mary and her family. If you didn't hear the episode that I did about his death last week, it has more details in there. I've had some additional thoughts since I recorded last week's show.

Wendell's work, his family's example, Mary's leadership at the Berry Center, they all point towards eudaimonia, Greek for the good life. How are we meant to be here? There's a line that comes from one of Wendell's good friends and collaborators, Wes Jackson from the Land Institute. Wes has a book called Becoming Native to This Place. What does it mean? I think that present progressive think is really doing a lot of work in that sentiment.

It's about how Americans, especially European Americans, have become detached from their roots. They no longer have their ancestral grounds where their families were living for a long time that they were deeply connected to. And now what is it like to recover some amount of indigeneity, even if it's synthetic, even if it's something that we have to dream up, even if we have to create a new way of becoming again a species that doesn't feel like we are here to extract and then to leave without caring for this place.

I don't know if you have any ideas in your life that you are not very successful at implementing, but I often have this where intellectually I can know something that is very true. It makes intuitive sense to me. Can my body feel it always? No. Can I enact it in reality? No. I can try. I certainly do. That's often how I feel about the work of Mary and Wendell and Tanya and the entire Berry family. Of becoming native to some place, of putting down roots in a way that's meaningful.

My family moved for my dad's job when I was a kid. We moved for economic advancement. And that often meant that I don't have the sense of roots that others have here, like the Berrys do in Henry County, Kentucky.

One funny thing about this is that I was born in Houston, Texas, and sometimes I'll meet a Texan and I'll tell them that, and they'll say, "Oh, you're a Texan." I'll be like, "I guess, but I left when I was pretty young. I don't know if you really wanna bestow that honorific on me." And sometimes, and it's more often than not, they will look at me and say something like, "No, you are a Texan." It always feels they're scolding me, but they're claiming me as well. I'm one of them.

And that experience is always really interesting for me because so much of how I've conceptualized my identity is a sort of pure American one, generically white, move around depending upon opportunity, not rooted in a discernible way.

Gosh, I didn't even mean to put it in exactly that way, but the image of a locust pops into my head. Is that not the ideology of the locust? You just move wherever the opportunity is. I guess that's true of pretty much any animal that moves seasonally, and Indigenous people who followed the patterns of animals and seasons of which types of food can be gathered at a given time.

So there's a good version of that, but I don't feel like the version I'm doing of that is rooted in ritual, in place, in reverence. I think it's rooted in individual and familial acquisition, and there's something about it that doesn't feel sacred. I think what I love about the Berry Center and Wendell's writing in particular is he has an ability to imbue with sacredness, or maybe even just recognize the inherent sacredness or sacrality of the ordinary.

A small life can have dignity. And in fact, I chose to start off this show by clipping this line from Mary because the people who think the biggest oftentimes are causing so many problems. Why do they do those things? Why do they need this amount of praise? Why do they need this amount of money? All of it just seems incorrect. And once you have the ability to impact so many with your words and with your money, I think there's some real risks there.

And I've had a hard time operationalizing Wendell's advice here of going back to your hometown because I don't necessarily have that. The closest place I have to that is I grew up and spent a lot of time in California and Arizona. I usually tell people I'm from Arizona. It makes the most sense.

Both sides of my family are, if you go back far enough, very rooted in Pittsburgh. But also even if you go back far enough before that, they're in the old country or they're in different parts of the United States. There's not like a family homestead and estate to return to in the same way that Wendell has. So there's some part of it that would require creating it. But I think if you don't have something like that, there is a sense of churn that maybe exists for you. I know it at least exists in me, of noticing, "Okay, I don't have this thing, but something better might come along soon."

And if the right opportunity comes around soon, then I should be ready to jump at it so I can go and create a new life there where there's greater opportunity. And that can be a good thing, and my ancestors benefited from it. I think if your ancestors came to the US, or you did recently or far enough back, it's because it's safer, more comfortable. Ideally, there's a chance to have some security that maybe you didn't have previously. So I can respect that.

But also this loss of connection, this willingness to trade what is familiar for the next best thing whenever it comes around. There's not a lot of loyalty to it. Because it's removed from seasonality and ritual and rhythm, it's mostly just based around the economy and opportunity. It doesn't even have the benefit of thinking like, "Okay, um, spruce tips are in season right now, so this is where our tribe goes to gather these," or, "This is when we go set up our salmon weirs." A lot of it just feels, it's atemporal and it's aspatial at the same time. There's no rhythm to it. And I know all of this, but yet I'm trying to survive in this world in the same kind of way.

For instance, I just moved my entire podcasting catalog over to Substack. I've been spending a lot of time optimizing basically a decade of podcasting so that there's transcripts and everything is searchable. So if you're on Substack, you can find episodes, and it has a life on the internet that's less ephemeral so that what I'm doing doesn't just vanish into oblivion. There's some place where it lives, some place where people can find it, benefit from it. Maybe that helps my career in some way.

I also just really don't like Marc Andreessen, and a16z is a major investor in Substack, and it's like, oh gosh, it's just, it's just tainted in this way, I feel like. In order to get my work discovered by new people and to have economic viability to it, I have to exist inside of this economic system that the people who own and control so much of it could opt out of literally everything that they touch, but it's so much. How could you possibly do it?

Wendell was hardcore like that. I feel like he was someone who just said, "I'm not gonna have a computer," you know? Just never gonna do it. Going to just live the way of life that I think is best and come what may. And he was able to make that work. And I have not experienced that same sense of security of being able to give up this way of life. I mean, crap, even the locust has a sense of seasonality. They don't just do it all the time. You know, they're hibernating and whatnot at some points of the year. It's like worse than being a locust. There's something else that's just like, uh, you're like just pure entropy as a human that moves in this way, and yet I feel stuck into this system and unable to change it in a way that would likely be better for me.

I'd like to grow in my career. I'd like to be the kind of person that people call when they have a big strategic issue that they need to think through, and I can maybe bring in a special panache to find something creative and new, some new way to tell the story, to link these things together in a way that is going to be successful and improve the world in some way. And in order to do that, you have to be someone who is playing ball a little bit.

And I like these people who are just totally bizarre sticks in the mud. And that's what this podcast is about. The Berry Center is an attempt to stem the tide that is going so hard against the small family farmer, this sort of peasant ideal. If you're an American, you probably most strongly associate this idea with Jeffersonian democracy, where you have smallholder farmers who have little farms, and they're able to sustain themselves. They don't have a master that they work for. They are independent, and this is how they develop lowercase R republican virtue.

And you can rightly poke at Thomas Jefferson for all of the obvious reasons, but there's something there that having a sense of independence in this way, an ability to cultivate civic virtue because you are independently of sufficient means that you can spend some time studying, that you direct your affairs rather than someone else, is the way that we protect our country against tyranny. Again, this is framed in a Jeffersonian kind of way. One of the reasons I think we've seen such disintegration of our civic bonds is because people do not feel secure. People do not feel the masters of their own destiny, even in some small way.

And in many cases do not even feel loyalty to a particular place that it is their family heritage to protect. They're just disconnected people who are also experiencing economic precarity. Bad combination. It should come as no surprise that being in that position is not a happy one and does not lead to civic virtue.

I respect Wendell, his family, Mary Berry, for doing what they believe is right in a world that increasingly values speed, fungibility, bigness. And I love that they're just able to call to us from something that might actually serve us better if only we could will it to be so.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. It's always a little bit vulnerable to release an old episode. And then sometimes I'll listen to a newer show and think, "Wow, I nailed that. I did such a good job. I'm so proud of myself." Sometimes I'll record something even recently and listen back to it and think, "Wow, I barely speak English at all." But sometimes when you go back and listen, it can be both better or worse than maybe you expected.

Thanks for letting me re-release this show. I've been enjoying going back through the catalog. There's so many good episodes. This show's been going for 10 years. I've been able to hang out with so many impressive, important people, Mary included. So thanks so much for listening to this show. I hope you enjoy this walk, this stroll down memory lane. And here is this re-release episode with Mary Berry, daughter of Wendell and Tanya Berry, and executive director of the Berry Center. Here's your show.

Part two: the conversation (originally released 2020)

Ross Kenyon: Hello, and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I'm Ross Kenyon. Today, I have with me Mary Berry, executive director of the Berry Center in Kentucky. Hi, Mary.

Mary Berry: Hi, Ross.

Ross Kenyon: Hey, uh, thanks so much for being here with me. I have been following your work at the center, and Wendell Berry is a running joke. Not, not he himself- ... but how often he comes up on this show. Uh-huh. I've told this story before, but we had a fan make a bingo card for the Reversing Climate Change podcast, and one of the squares was just someone mentions Wendell Berry. I think it's two-thirds of the episodes or something absurd gets mentioned, so, uh, it was about time that we, uh, spoke, and we highlighted your work and how you're carrying on, uh, Wendell's legacy. So thanks for being here.

Mary Berry: It's my pleasure. Those are all very kind things that you said.

Ross Kenyon: Oh, well, it's easy to say when it's true. So I, I do not mind.

Mary Berry: Well, thank

Ross Kenyon: you. Um, maybe we should start with your origin story, since we've hinted at it a little bit. But how did you become the executive director of the Berry Center? How did this become your life path?

Mary Berry: Uh, the only way I would have become the executive director of anything is to start the thing that I became the executive director of. I started, uh, the Berry Center in 2011 after a lifetime of farming. I farmed full time until 2011, and I came to start the Berry Center for a couple of reasons. The first being what I saw then and I see now is the failure of the local food movement to become cultural change. I think the local food movement has, h- has concentrated too much on food and not enough on land use and the economic lives of farmers and rural communities. We've got plenty of food in this country, so, um, as my father says, "When you have plenty of food, food is the last thing on people's minds.

When you don't have enough, it's the first thing." Um, I think that what we've managed to accomplish with the local food movement is some, some opportunity for some farmers, and I was one, and I am... That benefited from the local food movement, and I am duly grateful. But it hasn't changed the culture of farming in this country. So that was a realization that made me want to do something The second was my family's history with one of the most successful agricultural co-ops in our history, which was the Burley Tobacco Growers' Cooperative. My grandfather was extremely instrumental in making that, uh, Depression-era program work. It worked very well here.

Um, let me say before I go on, this disclaimer, I speak now not on behalf of the tobacco product, but on behalf of the program that he and others put in place. The program protected highly diversified good farming in the eight-state Burley Belt for over 60 years. The program ended in 2004 because of maybe some things that we'll want to talk about. But for once and for a while, we had a good diversified agriculture. We had a stable farm population, meaning, of course, that we had stable soil. Soil was kept under cover. Um, and anyway, I, we, we might wanna talk more about the Burley Tobacco program.

The reason it inspired me to want to start something called the Berry Center was because even in Kentucky, it had been forgotten. It was ... I was going to meetings, um, when we were talking about the history of agriculture, we were talking about the future of agriculture, and the Burley Tobacco program never came up. I think it wasn't coming up partly because people forget quickly um, many things. But I think it also wasn't coming up because it flew in the face of the free market. It meant that farmers were fairly paid for what they could produce. And I think that it, it's not our free market model that Americans seem to like so much, and that has never worked for farmers So in 2011, I decided that I would just do something about it.

So I started the, the Berry Center with the ideas of, well, with the, the fact that we're desperate for farmers. We have three-quarters of 1% farming in this country. Fewer than 16, maybe 15% of us now live in rural places. All the talk that I'm sure, um, you know more about than I do about the problem of climate change. In fact, most of our problems in this country I believe are related to bad land use and a bad economy. So I went to work on saving the archival papers of my grandfather's about his, from his service to the Burley Tobacco Program, my uncle John Berry Jr.'s service to the same program, and of course a lot of my father's work that speaks about the program, but also speaks about, well, you know, good farming, agrarianism.

And, uh, what I knew about running a li- a nonprofit would fit in a s- in a thimble. If I had known all that I didn't know then, I might not have done it, but I've learned as I've gone along, just as you do. So, so here we are sitting at the Berry Center, uh, getting in 2021 will it be our 10-year anniversary.

Ross Kenyon: Wow, that's, that's quite a milestone.

Mary Berry: Mm-hmm, I think so. It's a miracle.

Ross Kenyon: It's a miracle, yeah. It seems like a, a lot of the work of your father and of the Berry Center is about, you know, keeping people on the land and putting more people on the land, and making it possible for agrarian lives to be lived. And it goes beyond just the economics of it, too. There's a strong focus on, uh, community, and also a very strong literary element to it as well. I know you have things like the Agrarian Culture Center and your work at, uh ... I was looking at the, the course listing at the Wendell Berry Farming Program of Sterling College. So it does seem to be like a, almost like an old school humanities focus to it as well.

Is that an okay way of summing up

Mary Berry: Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: partially what you're trying to do?

Mary Berry: Yes, I think it is. It would be a mistake to think that the problems of agriculture are simply agricultural. The problem, the, our problem in this country is cultural. Everything that, that we're worried about, I think right now, um, stems from our cultural problem We don't value what we ought to value. We haven't held on to the knowledge that we should have held on to. In the history of our country, there have been times that farm people, country people, um, were beginning to take some hold and to, uh, establish themselves and their good practices in particular places, and we should have, looking back, we certainly should have strengthened that and encouraged it.

And instead, we've mostly wiped it out. So yes, when I went to work at the Berry Center, I started with really the idea of taking an inventory. I'm not sure I thought about it that way then, but I certainly do now. I thought then about what we still have in this particular place to work with, and we have a lot. We have some remnants of a pretty good agricultural community, pretty good agricultural practices. We have a well-watered landscape. We have, uh, good soil. We have some people who still know how to farm without destroying the land that they're using. So I just set about to find out what was still here and to, to get to work to strengthen it.

That's why we're working with cattle farmers. That's why we're working with a little school called Sterling. They understood what we were trying to do. Uh, I couldn't find a big school that had the slightest idea what we were trying to do.

Ross Kenyon: Are you saying that the land-grant universities don't really like what you're up to?

Mary Berry: Well, yes, that's exactly what I'm saying, but let me, let me speak the truth about that. We are so far out on the margins that I don't think the land-grant universities have given us much thought. Occasionally, they do, when we-- I've been in enough arguments to know that sometimes they do. But, uh, the land-grant university, at least the big one in the uni- in Kentucky, gave up its mandate to serve the people of Kentucky a long time ago. About, I think, two years ago, uh, Extension celebrated its 100th anniversary, and I couldn't-- I passed the sign in front of the Extension office in Henry County every day on my way to work, and then of course passed it again on my way home.

And it congratulated, well, saying happy anniversary to Extension, and I was thinking, "What in the world do they have to celebrate?" We've been in a downward spiral ever since they started. So it doesn't have to be that way. It doesn't mean that there are not good people working in Extension, because I've known some, and they are good. But their focus has been industrial, and the result has been to run farmers off the land while very efficiently funneling money to agro-industrial companies. So yeah- Hmm ... I don't think that the University of Kentucky is even interested in what we're doing

Ross Kenyon: Much of what I pick up in following, um, your work there is a focus on scale and how important it is for smaller scale communities, this drive towards urbanization that we all do as being not really the best way for us to live our lives. And so I think it kinda makes sense. It seems like much of what you're doing is focused on Henry County, is focused on a small number of farmers, and intimate relationships, and things that are actually quite difficult to scale, and may be inappropriate to try to scale. Like, if you had a national center for local community- would that even make sense?

Do you need to have some DC based nonprofit to do that? But it seems like you are trying to focus very tightly in this geographical area, except for the fact that Sterling College is in Vermont. But it does seem to be that there is some Kentucky overlap there, too. Is your vision so focused actually on this one county?

Mary Berry: Um, first of all, the, the Sterling, the Wendell Berry Farming Program of Sterling College is located in Henry County.

Ross Kenyon: Mm.

Mary Berry: So the students and the professors are in Henry County, Kentucky. the program as it is taught in Henry County doesn't exist on the campus, uh, in Vermont. It couldn't, because we're teaching a kind of farming in the middle that exists in Kentucky, that doesn't exist in Vermont. So there's that. We are desperate for good examples, for examples of how something might work for farmers and for farming communities. My friend Wes Jackson once said, "If you wanna help a farmer, you need to help their community." This doesn't mean, you know, doling out cash or programs. It means, you know, thinking of the whole, not just pieces.

So I think what we're working on here, and I think our programs are beginning to get enough... They've been around long enough to begin to be examples for other people to use, and other people are using them. Other places, you know, we, we talk and are glad to share what we know with other people in other parts of this country, trying to do something like we're doing for their own places. But the thing that I think we need to think about is the value of small solutions, and it's been difficult in this country- For a while now to get people to think about small solutions.

I mean, even people who are worried about climate change aren't interested in small solutions. They're interested in big solutions. While some big solutions may be useful, I'm not gonna say that they're not. I don't have the expertise to say that they're not. But I know that inherent in these small solutions is the answer to the problem of climate change. We have to change the way we live. We have to change the way we get food, shelter, and clothing that we must have. Um, and we've just got to get started somewhere. I mean, I've always liked my life here in Henry County. I'm, uh, I'm from here, and have l- always loved it here and never wanted to live anywhere else.

But in 2011, I was pretty worried, I would say depressed, by, um, the fact that things were just, in spite of a 40-year local food movement, just going to hell here. We were just losing so much so fast. When I started to work at the Berry Center, I began to see how the work that we had chosen to do, talking about parity pricing for farmers, production control, working with the culture here, working with young people who want to farm, and many other things that we do, I saw that the work began to break out into particularities. So you could go to work on particular things.

The work then begins to evolve into, uh, the questions and problems that you know how to solve. As long as I was thinking, I mean, I was farming, so I was solving problems on our, my own farm, but when I thought about the world, I mean, good lord, how do you go to work on the problems of the world? And how do you go to work on the problems of, of even just the state of Kentucky? But you can go to work on the problems of Henry County, Kentucky, and that tells you, I think, something about going to work in other places and how that might be done And so it's very hopeful and very helpful to have this work to do.

I would, uh, recommend it to other people.

Ross Kenyon: I'm really glad you took it that direction, Mary, because that is a question that I am very interested in because it seems a recurring theme on the show has been at smaller scales, some of the, the political fights between progressives and conservatives tend to fall away a bit. When you're more neighborly, these solutions look a lot different when you're fighting over the fate of an entire country. That being said, there are also climate change solutions that need to happen at scale in order to make the think little approach of, of, uh, Wendell Berry and, and others viable. We sort of need all of it, and I think there are good reasons to pursue those strategies.

But I also am with you that I find people who think that they know what's best for the entire world or country or even state, I find that to be somewhat of a dangerous attitude if it's not coupled with a sense of humility, and that humility should be grounded in a specific place. And I think that's kind of what you're getting at, or there's some glimmers of that that I'm catching. Am I imagining that or, or do you know

Mary Berry: what I'm trying to say here? No, I think you're exactly right. I, I think that history teaches over and over and over again that people who think that they know what's good for everybody else, generally speaking, are not, well, they may get some things done, but they're not always the right things. And, um, yeah, I don't, I don't think it's the correct way to go. I mean, it's really Shakespearean, isn't it? There may be all kinds of, or some big solutions that will help us in the situation we're in. Right now, um, as I said earlier, I don't know enough to say, to say that I trust that there are, and I don't know enough to say that there aren't.

But I also know that there are too many people waiting on those solutions. My husband said a couple years ago at a meeting at the Berry Center, my husband is a full-time farmer. He said, we were having a meeting of, of young farmers here, and he said at one point, "The cavalry ain't coming. We've got to save ourselves." And he meant that as a, as a community, as, um, as people who care about a particular place and about each other. So it's, and it's not separatist. It's not stepping out of the world in some way. It's, it's looking at what's going on and what you can do about it, and doing it.

I think that's, it's a big mistake to have people just waiting for the big solution.

Ross Kenyon: Oh, I think you're, you're certainly right there. I'm reminded of a Tolstoy quote. Um, I, I hope this isn't apocryphal, but it might be. It's attributed to him at least. "Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself." And I moved out of an apartment into a house not long ago, granted still within Seattle, so it's not a huge amount of land for farming. But much of my time has been devoted to the care and maintenance of the house, and fixing up the yard, and making it productive and lovely, and trying to cultivate beauty on a regular basis, and I feel much more engaged relative to how I was prior in an apartment.

I, I feel like I, I notice things more. I'm more present. I enjoy things more by doing so, and I've been focused quite a bit. Um, listeners of the show will know that craft has come up quite a lot. One of the recent episodes, we were talking about another big Wendell fan, uh, Nick Offerman, and his work on woodworking, and trying to popularize that working with your hands, the meeting of the intellect with hands, and how important that is. I think people would be genuinely happier if they were doing that. It might not immediately change the world in the big sorts of ways that they imagine, but I think if many people were more grounded in that experience, we might see some of those results trickle out.

Um, although it's not nearly as flashy as if you vote for this one policy, we will all be saved. That seems like a much simpler way to go, but does it really get us where we need to go? I don't know.

Mary Berry: Uh, not at the moment. I think we're too, um, um, um, and I'm a believer in a lot of those, well, the, the program that I talked about earlier was a Depression-era program. But that, the work done during the Depression in this country was applied by and for people who knew how to live within their means, who were settled, who, um, knew how to, to take care of themselves and others to a great degree. We are so scattered, so mobile, that when I try to think of what exactly the policy would be that would help this particular place, I'm not quite sure what the policy is.

We're gonna have to dictate the policy. We're going to have to say, "We've got this going. This is what you can do to help us. Uh, we're not waiting for you to tell us what you're gonna do to help us. We know what we need." So more and more of us need to know what we need, not just as an individual, but as people belonging to particular places and to communities. The farming program comes directly out of conversations for years that my father and Wes Jackson had about the problem of mobility in this country, and Wes talked about the problem in a speech he gave in the late '90s when he said...

It was a commencement speech at a little school, I've forgotten the name. But anyway, uh, a commencement speech, and he said, "The dominant major in colleges and universities for the last 50 years has been upward mobility, and now it needs to be homecoming And that's, so we refer to our education program as an education for homecoming, and it's a liberal arts degree. What do people need to know to make theirsel- themselves at home in a place that they love, um, that they have some hope for passing on to people that they love? Uh, we don't have the slightest idea how to live in this country.

I mean, this word sustainable is overused, and I can't think of a word to replace it. But in this country, we have never settled. We have not settled America. We have colonized America. Now we've got to figure out, because we're k- reaching the end of the fertility that we've lived on, we're reaching the, the time that we're gonna have to figure out how to actually live here, as of course the people we replaced here knew. But, you know, we're here now. We, we're right here. How are we gonna go forward? The things that we're talking about, I believe, need to be on everybody's minds. Everybody needs to be an agrarian now.

Ross Kenyon: I have a question on this theme from one of our Patreon supporters. If you're listening and you would like to hang out with us and other fans of the show, we have a Nori Podcast Patreon. The link is in the show notes if you'd like to hang out with us. But I had mentioned that you and I were gonna speak today, Mary, and one of our patrons, she asks, "How can we reconcile our educated millennial tendency to be kind of transient, moving from city to city because we lead a lot of our lives online, and the need to belonging to the land?" And I would append onto that my own experience, which is I, I don't know that I have a home to do a homecoming to.

I moved around a lot. I most strongly affiliate with Arizona since I spent most of my teen and college years and beyond there. But I'm not sure that I have a, I don't know that I have a Henry County of my own. I, I imagine that the person asking this question may feel similarly. So what do we do that we don't have a membership that we can just go back to?

Mary Berry: Well, you don't have to go home. In my case, in my family's case, uh, there's something in us that, not all of us, not every member of the Berry family has stayed in Henry County. Uh, some have gone. I have a cousin who lives in the Bay Area in California, and he, when he l- went out to Northern California to go to school, he felt immediately at home there in the way I have always felt at home here. Uh, I'm not disparaging that, but I'm saying, as the poet Gary Snyder says, "You can make a home. Just stay somewhere and figure out how to live in a particular place." That's all.

I mean, you're talking about your move from an apartment to a house and what that's meant to you. That's speaking, I think that's coming out of some kind of need that m- that a lot of us have to be at home in a place that we love and that we imagine staying for a long time Um, so I don't think people have to go home, but I think it, we would be better off if people saw themselves as staying somewhere and making a home in a particular place. I mean, it is beyond, this moving around people do because they like the weather someplace else is beyond...

I don't understand it. I d- you know, it's, it's completely foreign to me. Um-

Ross Kenyon: Oh, you're not a snowbird? You don't get out of Florida in the winter?

Mary Berry: No, I don't. I like the things that they're, uh... I love Kentucky, but I'm, I really love Henry County, Kentucky. I, in one of Daddy's books c- uh, called Jayber Crow, Jayber says at some point that he thinks he would recognize his home by if he just saw the sky. That's how I feel here. Uh, there's, there's a, I mean, these are troubled times in rural Kentucky and rural everywhere. It's hard sometimes to live here, but it's, you know, I never wanna leave it, and I never will leave it. And I think, I don't... Listen, I don't want to ever be heard as saying that, that somehow I have reached some level of understanding that is special.

Most of what I know and feel has been passed on to me, and for some reason, it's, it stuck with me, and I wanted to s- to continue here. I do think it would be nice if there was more work coming from people who are from particular places. There's a sort of, well, the do-gooder attitude that you go into a place, and you tell people what they ought to do, and then you go on to another place, is just not, it, it doesn't work. You ha- I mean, i- if the Berry Center fails, if the, you know, it's non-profit, I've got to keep it funded, and who knows?

You don't, I don't know if I can keep it funded. I'm gonna do, give it my best shot. But if the Berry Center closes down, I will continue to work as hard as I can on the things that are important to me because it's just, it's just part of living here. So I, you know, I d- I do think, I think that in that, the Berry family, my father, his father, his sisters, his parent, um, his mother, I think we have been different in that way, is just different than some, is to say, here we are. We're gonna work as hard as we can. Uh, we're not responsible for the result.

We're just responsible for the effort And that seems to me to be talking in circles a lot. But you can do something about that.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I'm very interested in the role of social capital and, and relationships between people, and how important that is to sustain relationships and community life, and I'm thinking of books like Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone. And it seems like so much in the Port William novels that is done to keep the community healthy, a lot of it seems like just going and hanging out at Jayber Crow's barber shop. Is there ... I mean, they, they obviously help each other with farm chores, and during the harvest, and things like that. But a lot of it just seems to be showing up and being with one another.

Mary Berry: Showing up and being with a, with other people is certainly part of it, but it's all important. Daddy speaks of a time in Henry County in Kentucky that I saw the end of. It was an agrarian county. It still is to some degree, but much degraded. We were living by the same calendar, not just the day of the week, but the agricultural calendar. We were doing the same things at the same time, not always in exactly the same way. It was very interesting, the farming that was going on here at that time. People shared more than just good times, and just parties, and potlucks, and so on.

They shared the same fate in a lot of ways. I remember m- many years ago, uh, a preacher, uh, at one of our little churches in Henry County went to speak to Daddy about the problem of tobacco, and he was preaching from the pulpit. This was many years ago, probably 35 or 40. He was preaching against tobacco, and people in his congregation were objecting to it, upset by it. And, uh, he went to talk to Dad about it, and Daddy said, "Are you gonna stay here with these people? Tobacco's threatened. It's gonna end. Are you gonna stay here and be with them through whatever it is they have to go through to get to the other side of this?

And if you're not gonna stay here with them, then maybe you better be quiet about it." The community that Daddy writes about are, are people that were gonna hang together. They were gonna stay together, uh, stay in, in this particular place, and help each other through the good times and the bad times, and they had deep cultural ties to the place and to each other. So yeah, it was it was having the time, not sitting around in front of s- screens, but sitting in front of the hardware store or the drugstore in Port Royal and visiting in the evening. It was certainly that Plus the rest of it

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, there's some... I'm trying to remember the exact term. It's from The World-Ending Fire. There's an essay in there. It was like visiting until bedtime. Is that what it is? Yeah. Uh, that's a great tradition, just neighbors coming and hanging out and doing that for-

Mary Berry: Yeah, it used to be what people did in the evenings. And of course, uh, a lot of people saw the, saw the danger of screens way back. I'm thinking of Jerry Mander's book, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. That was back in the, gosh, that was published in the '60s or '70s. I was ver- I was young then, and I told Jerry Mander when I finally met him many years ago that he had helped ruin my young life. But because we didn't have a television, but we did have the book, Four Arguments for the Elimination of it, and I wanted a television

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Well, I like to think that in hindsight you feel that you were made better off by that decision

Mary Berry: Of course, of course. But, um, I was just saying to somebody the other day, we were talking about w- uh, what young people go through and, you know, that they have to rebel against something. And I'll tell you, the burden of being Wendell and Tanya Berry's child was this: they were never wrong about anything. Except maybe my dating when I was 15.

Ross Kenyon: Oh,

Mary Berry: that, that was a conflict. But otherwise, there was nothing, there was nothing to rebel against except that.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Well, there's some rebellious people in the Port William novels. They usually just move to the big city and come back in fancy cars and pretend to care about being a hobby farmer, right? That's, like, the best way you could have rebelled, I think.

Mary Berry: Well, they fall victim to the siren song of limitlessness, of more, of ease, of something better.

Ross Kenyon: I know that treadmill effect of always seeking more doesn't, doesn't nec- that isn't necessarily an urban or rural thing. I'm sure you have neighbors who are just as much in that trap as anyone else is.

Mary Berry: Oh, of course. I mean, of course. Yeah. Nobody, nobody, and using Daddy as an example, nobody important to Daddy except his family here, no teacher ever said to him, "Stay home." They all said, "If you wanna be a writer, you've got to leave." And he believed it It grieved him, but he believed it, and he was gone for a while. And then, you know, he, he thought, "I wanna go home," and he did. But of course, I mean, the whole culture is pushing people to go somewhere else, and then to go somewhere else again, and again, and again. The whole culture. I'm not blaming people.

It's hard to resist. So certainly it's an urban and rural phenomenon.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it's a hard thing to resist. I've certainly moved for better economic opportunities. I've changed cities a number of times. I've traveled quite a bit, and I keep my eyes open for opportunities like that, and part of it is vanity. There's something interesting about someone who's been a lot of places, who's seen a lot of things, and experienced a lot. I'm not too big to say that part of that is definitely vanity. But there is also that is just di- direct pecuniary gains to be had from moving for... Like, I moved to Seattle for my company, Nori, uh, who produces this podcast, because it was, uh, my best opportunity, um, to do something I cared about and also have a better future for my, my family, and that's hard to say no to.

And I guess the problem is that maybe the Berry Center has seized upon is why is it so hard to stay home? Why are these other opportunities just so good? And to what extent is this something that has been unfairly encouraged by policy?

Mary Berry: Is that- Well, the problem, the problem is why has moving been the dominant theme? That's the problem. I think Wes Jackson would say it's probably highly dense carbon but why has that ruled the day? Why is it not fascinating to think that you might know a particular place Really well because it will take your lifetime and more than your lifetime. I'm not saying everybody should do the same thing. I'm not saying everybody should farm, for heaven's sake. I'm not saying that. I'm saying, uh, what is good? What is precious? What will lead to contentment? What will lead to happiness? I think we've been sold a bill of goods about that, and the bill of goods we've been sold has consolidated money in a few hands, and the rest of us The sad thing in this country is that so many people think that they, we need to stay out of the way of the 1% because with any luck, we'll be one of them.

Well, I don't think so. So, so I think it's just that, that, you know, to think. I mean, there are ... Just to think, to live an examined life, to understand why we're doing what we're doing, what motivates us, what o- you know, what means something to us. I'm not ... I, I sit in no judgment here. I'm talking about ... I'm not making a judgment about other people's particular lives, but I am making a judgment, I, about the economy that we're living in now and the dominant, the dominating themes of it. The dominant themes of it, I should say. Um, in this, in this time of such terrible social unrest, I think of this economy, and I think we will not have social justice.

It will not happen as long as our economy is destroying the land that we depend on and destroying the people that ought to belong to the land that we depend on It's not gonna happen.

Ross Kenyon: Seems like you're working on a number of different prongs related to this. Or not merely training future farmers and, um, inculcating this agrarian culture and mindset and giving them this humanities background. There's also the work that the Berry Center is doing with Our Home Place Meat, and there's also some policy initiatives. You're, like what you're referring to, you've referred to a couple times about imitating the, uh, Burley Tobacco Program from the Great Depression era. Um, could you tell us a little bit about both Our Home Place Meat and this, uh, program in, uh, that you have in mind?

Mary Berry: Sure. Um, the program was policy. It was a Depression-era program, and it was v- it was voted in to law. It had the power of law. The principles of the program that mean the most to me, and I think are the, and to many other people, and, uh, and why it's an example going forward of how we might build a stable farm population in this country, is the combination of supply management, keeping farmers protected from overproduction, and the idea of parity pricing, which means paying farmers... This is the simplest possible definition. It's much more complicated than this, but it's the idea that we might pay farmers a fair price, allowing farmers to get back cost of production and keep some profit Not a killing, but a fair profit.

So we've taken those principles, and we've applied it to the program that we call Our Home Place Meat at the Berry Center. We're working with mostly pretty young farmers in Henry County, producing, uh, a product called rose veal, which has no... It's a very different product than the traditional white veal. This is, this is processing calves w- raised on their mother. They're raised on grass and on mother's milk, and they're processed much younger, and it's delicious meat. I mentioned earlier that, um, I took an, uh, I set about to work at the Berry Center by thinking about an inventory. Well, one of the th- the good farming left in Kentucky is cattle farming or livestock farming.

Our marg- marginal countryside needs to be covered with grass, forage crops, hay crops. This is the perennial agriculture that my father, uh, and others called for in the 50-year farm bill, keeping the ground covered. So we don't have... Right now, we have an 80% annual versus 20% perennial agriculture. We need to reverse this. Um, back to your, your subject of climate change, we need to be 80% perennial and 20% annual. Far less ground plowed. Our Home Place Meat supports farmers who are farming the way we need them to farm. They're keeping carbon sequestered, and they're making a decent, they're making a, a fair price for their cattle.

They're out of the boom and bust cattle market, and it keeps the cattle out of the God-awful commodity beef industry, which is inhumane to people and to animals. And it's driving farmers into bankruptcy. So our program, I mean, I'd love to think that it had, you know, the power of law, but it doesn't. Uh, we don't have friends in high places. We don't have anybody that, uh, wants to work with what we're doing in Congress. I mean, I, w- who am I gonna call, Mitch McConnell? I mean, it, that's not gonna happen, so we've just gone to work on it. I also wanna say one more thing about this program.

It is a price support program, which means the price is locked in yearly so that the farmers know what they're gonna get for their cattle. It is not a subsidy. It, it is not a subsidy. It was never a subsidy under the tobacco co-op. I don't... I think subsidies are a mistake. It's a price support. Keeps the price steady.

Ross Kenyon: Hmm. Is the distinction that there's just a guaranteed buyer ahead of time who says, "I will pay this amount for it," and it's a price that farmers like enough to go for it, that's why it's not a subsidy, but a s- price support? Is that the difference?

Mary Berry: Price support is just to keep the price fair so that it doesn't suddenly too many cattle hit the market, and when too many cattle or too much anything hit a market, the price falls. This is the story of American agriculture for farmers. Um, so the price support just holds the price at the contracted price, which we've worked on here to know what the parity price is. You know, farmers are saying they're trading their right to gamble for a steady price

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I'm, I'm curious about that, and especially this direct-to-consumer, uh, having a consumer-facing brand like Our Home Place Meat. Uh, it seems like a lot of people are going that direction. I know many, many farmers want to get in the direct-to-consumer business, and consumers want to buy that, and you can tell from the popularity of farmers markets. I sort of associate that with consumer behavior in a somewhat free market, but perhaps you contextualize it a bit differently. Do you not understand it that way?

Mary Berry: I don't. I unders- uh, I mean, we're not outside of the market we exist in. We're not outside of the world we exist in, of course. We have to think about the things that you talked about. But in American agriculture right now, we offer farmers pretty much two choices, and two choices only. They can either be large and industrial, or they can be small and entrepreneurial. There is almost nothing in the middle. We're working with farmers who have the census designation as farmers in the middle. It's a economic designation. Most of the farmers in Kentucky have historically been farmers in the middle. They're not small and industrial.

They're not... I mean, small and entrepreneurial. They're not huge and industrial. The average farm in Kentucky is about 100 acres. The average cattle herd in Kentucky is about 27 cows. This is small farming. What I think that our farmers need is something that works like the tobacco co-op worked and other co-ops work. And by the way, Organic Valley, the dairy co-op, was started based on knowledge that the founder of Organic Valley had of the Burley tobacco program. I mean, there's just a, an example of, of the fact that this can work. But what we're doing, the Berry Center is the entity in the middle that is moving product while setting price, moving product, working with farmers, working with the market to make this work for farmers.

So what the farmers need to do is produce the product We're marketing and selling the product

Ross Kenyon: Is that like a co- how co-ops typically work in farming? I'm sorry to interrupt. Is

Mary Berry: that- Uh, yeah. To some degree, yes. Mm-hmm. Um, but they're not, they're not very many co-ops. I mean, Organic Valley is a co-op, and it's working for farmers. And I say it's working for farmers because I know it is, because I know some farmers that it's working for. There have been a lot of co-ops... Uh, in fact, one of the things said about the Burley Tobacco program to this day is it, it was w- one of the only farm programs that ever worked for the life of the program for the people it was supposed to serve, the small family farmer. A lot of co-ops have served other interests other than the farmer If they even exist anymore.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I know. It's perhaps less common than it, than it used to be. Well, Mary, if someone wanted to support the work of the Berry Center, what's a good way for them to do so? I imagine there's multiple ways to do so.

Mary Berry: There are multiple ways, and I'm of, um, I, I think I spoke earlier of my draw- drawbacks as an executive director. Here's one. But anyway, they, um, uh, I, I think some of the wonderful people I work with could rattle these things off easier than I can. But we have a website called berrycenter.org. Um, it has all kinds of information about our programs and ways to get in touch with us, and I think that's probably the best way. We have a Facebook page, which I never, ever see. And of course, people can call the center directly. It's 502-845-9200. And we have now, before the COVID crisis, we had visitors from all over the country and really all over the world coming by fairly often.

We have a bookstore here. Um, we're selling books, um, of course, to people who come to the store, um, but also online. And so we, you know, we welcome visitors and are glad to h- see people. But right now, of course, that's... I wouldn't be heard recommending travel, not at this point.

Ross Kenyon: Fair enough. Uh, I probably wouldn't either. I was supposed to be in the area, too. I think I was supposed to be in the area in March. Ah, it, it was really terrible. I was so excited. I was like, "Yes, uh, Kentucky is within my grasp. I can go visit." And, uh, no. So at some point in the future, I would like to come and check out the Berry Center.

Mary Berry: I look forward to meeting you in person.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, this digital thing is not, not fully doing it for me. I think it would be better in person. It typically is a bit more, um-

Mary Berry: Well, I think if we, if it ev- if we ever think that meeting digitally is better than meeting in person, we better check ourselves pretty seriously. But, you know, it's better than. I will say that Zoom meetings are better than conference calls, which I really hate.

Ross Kenyon: Oh, God, that's- the, the idea that someone would pr- prefer a Zoom call to in-person is very... I think the, the Berry Center either needs to expand dramatically or close up shop if that happens. I-

Mary Berry: Right. That, I, I agree with you.

Ross Kenyon: And then I guess another way someone might be able to support is to, if you are a, a meat eater, um, one can buy Our Home Place meat, uh, online, right?

Mary Berry: Yes. And our website will, uh, direct you to the page where Our Home Place meat can be purchased, and we ship all over the country.

Ross Kenyon: Great. Okay. Links are in the show notes for all of those things. Thank you for spending time with me, Mary.

Mary Berry: Well, it has been a pleasure, and thank you so much for thinking that you would like to talk to me about our work.

Ross Kenyon: Of course, of course. Uh, well, thanks for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review us on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, or Stitcher. Uh, writing us a review on Apple Podcasts really helps a lot if you can take a couple minutes to do so. [Nori promotion cut from the transcript. It's still in the audio, but it no longer applies.] Having patron-submitted questions that may air, um, with our guests is a thing that we're gonna be doing from now on too. So if you'd like to be a part of that, you should join up. Link is in the show notes, and thank you so much for listening

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Wendell Berry told me no, twice

Wendell Berry died on 31 August, at 92. I recently tallied up all of the books that have been mentioned on Reversing Climate Change over the course of about ten years of podcasting. Wendell Berry has the most books referenced of anyone.

I did not expect him to die. In my head, maybe he didn’t even die. Maybe he’s just overlooking us as a ghost, like at the end of Return of the Jedi. There’s something about that that strikes me as wrong. But of course, if you read any Wendell Berry, the idea that he would not live a normal human life with death at the end of it might even be offensive to him.

Early in Nori’s life, in maybe the worst case of knowing your audience in my entire career, I wrote him a letter explaining that Nori was a carbon removal marketplace using soil as a means to reverse climate change, and that we were doing so by trying to make tonnes truly fungible against one another, by which I mean exchangeable. If you know anything about Wendell Berry, you will know that Wendell Berry does not think units of carbon stored in soil should be equated with others by virtue of that. He is someone who cares so strongly about specificity and place and being rooted, and he had watched commodity markets hollow out the way of life he thought was important to preserve. So goofy. I don’t know why I thought that would work.

I think I wrote him twice, trying to persuade him why he should come on the show. He kindly rebuffed me twice, and I will always keep those letters of Wendell Berry telling me no. They remind me to know my audience, but also that my clever schemes trying to outwit the crisis we find ourselves in, with a riff on what already existed but in a more heavily financialized way, are likely a wrong turn.

That take on carbon markets, and how Nori was meant to supersede the problems that plagued earlier carbon markets, is really the point of the piece I wrote for Rainbow, which follows. But there’s a lot of extra content in the podcast that isn’t represented in the writing below.

Six of his books sit on the Soil, Farms and the Regenerative Argument shelf, along with most of what this show has argued about for a decade.

Book links here go to Bookshop.org. They pay me a commission at no extra cost to you, and the rest goes to independent bookshops.

This essay was originally published on Rainbow’s blog here. You can also listen to the companion podcast episode of Reversing Climate Change here. It riffs on many of these ideas but also deals quite a bit with the death of Wendell Berry.

A registry expands from avoidances to removals

When the cofounder and CEO of Rainbow, Ludovic Chatoux, talks about why Rainbow exists, he said something almost disarmingly plain. “The idea was to quite simply enable the financing of relevant climate solutions,” he told me.

Notice what is missing from that sentence. There is no mention of carbon removal. But that’s only because removals are just one of many relevant climate solutions.

In its early days, Rainbow primarily looked at projects where emissions get avoided, rather than pulled out of the sky, like industrial decarbonization, biobased construction materials for buildings, biogas, and e-waste. As removals left the lab and became commercially deployable, Rainbow built methodologies for and started certifying those projects, too. But caring about both carried a polarizing valence during those early years.

“When we entered the carbon removal space,” Ludo said, “many carbon removers criticized anything other than purely removal. Explaining our belief in avoidance to those focused entirely on removal was tricky, even though working on avoidances taught us valuable lessons about operationalizing removals. That expertise has compounded over time in ways that may not be obvious to those who have only done removals.”

From roughly 2018 to 2024, he figures, the removal market needed to establish itself, and it did so by building a narrative against avoidance and most other kinds of credit. “What’s good is that removals are taken seriously,” he said. “But the war footing was always meant to be temporary. The two sides shouldn’t be battling. They’re complementary.”

All those years in the supposed minor leagues of avoidances turned out to be training. The expertise the team built assessing biobased building projects now feeds straight into its mineralization work, since both live in the world of building materials. The years spent on biogas show up again in BioCCS. This portfolio approach is increasingly mainstream as big commercial players also stand up in support of it.

An early company slide, from before Riverse rebranded to Rainbow. The philosophy was always to finance whatever was climatically relevant, whether avoidance or and removal.

The rise of superpollutants

The market is further validating Rainbow’s belief that removals and non-removals are complementary. Registries that launched as removal-only purists are expanding to cover everything. And the more seasoned avoidances registries are developing removals methodologies. One of the most salient examples of this is the recent rush to develop higher credibility approaches to superpollutant mitigation to avoid the worst effects from methane, refrigerants, and other compounds with powerful climate impacts.

Perhaps most interestingly, corporate conversations within and adjacent to carbon dioxide removal are taking on a portfolio approach, with removals and avoidances such as superpollutant mitigation financed side by side. Google’s recent paper lays out its thinking on stacking and bridging scenarios, and argues for thinking in terms of impact on global warming and how specific molecules affect the atmosphere.

There is a careless and dangerous way to read the Google paper. If all you take from it is that methane is cheaper and faster and therefore we should focus on that over CDR, you have misread the assignment in a way that could be genuinely damaging. You cannot finish all the methane abatement, flip a switch, and expect carbon removal to be sitting there ready to scale to gigatonnes. CDR has to be built out now, in the background, while the short-term work of methane abatement happens.

Google’s wealthier posture allows them to plan this far in advance and with a sophisticated portfolio of climate assets. The portfolio view as advocated by Google is fully supported by Ludo. But the lazy version of it, where CDR competes with funding for more urgent climate needs now, is a trap.

The good news is: the learnings from avoidances transfer in novel ways to removals.

Page 76 of Google’s 2026 Environmental Report. Superpollutant mitigation, nature-based solutions, and long-term removals are all essential.

Getting good at avoidances makes you better at removals

Rainbow’s quantification engine—the core of their operation—has been sharpened on avoidance projects that are, in Ludo’s telling, often harder to model than removal.

“Modeling the life-cycle assessment of an avoidance project is actually more complex than some removal projects,” he said. Counterfactuals and attribution challenges make it hard to define where exactly carbon impact happens in the circular economy refurbishment value chain. By the time you can do that cleanly, a straightforward removal lifecycle analysis feels almost restful. It also speeds up the team’s certification and audit processes, because they’ve already been tested against more mature projects.

My favorite example, and the one Rainbow is happiest to talk about, is e-waste. A refurbished iPhone carries something like eighty to ninety percent less embodied emission than a new one, and the refurbishment work is stubbornly, beautifully manual, with people sitting and fixing phones one at a time. The margins are thin, the work does not easily scale, and plenty of these businesses go bankrupt for want of capital.

“It’s a great case of carbon finance,” Ludo said, and he is right. It is exactly the sort of real, unglamorous climate work that a thoughtful registry can keep alive, down to the difficult problem of allocating who along the chain actually earns the carbon gain.

It is also a useful mirror. There is no removal in it whatsoever, and yet it is plainly worth doing.

https://registry.rainbowstandard.io/projects/RIV-2023-PROJ-16?mechanism=AVOIDANCE

Alt Eco takes electronics like computers that would otherwise be retired and refurbishes them for reuse. Their avoidance credits are certified by Rainbow.

The portfolio paradigm arrives in carbon dioxide removal

So Rainbow’s arc turns out to be the industry’s arc, run a few years early and in reverse. It started out trying to finance whatever was climatically relevant, and is now watching the most sophisticated carbon removal buyers in the world validate the portfolio view it has long wanted to foster.

It’s hard to stay the course this long in business. And it’s hard to believe in something that isn’t canonical in one’s industry. There is immense pressure to conform, in rhetoric if not in actual practice. When companies are jockeying to be seen as the most credible and high-performing to Fortune 100 buyers, outsider views pose an asymmetric risk: it’s either a great thing or a terrible thing, and likely nothing in between. Developing competent corporate strategy lies in knowing which kind of asymmetry your divergent beliefs are. Because sometimes companies and their leaders take iconoclastic stances that aren’t courageous, but delusional.

This avoidances vs. removals dichotomy should have been an easier falsity to spot though. Whenever you have a binary split there’s usually some truth content in each which is why one of the positions hasn’t already won the debate. The truth always was that some avoidances are high-quality and some removals are low-quality. The details here matter, and the more comfortable we get in that careful kind of analysis, the more robust and trustworthy our carbon market institutions will become.

In Rainbow’s case, I’m glad they stayed true to what they believed was the truth long enough for the carbon dioxide removal industry to begin to converge upon the portfolio mentality in a much more thorough capacity. Being convicted in this way is how one builds something that could last decades.

The Rainbow team at Manufacture Bois Paille, a biobased construction material company, in 2023 - back in its (first) avoidance and mitigation era.

What the categories were actually describing

Take it from me, someone who tried to build the better thing. I’m not sure we ended up being that much better in any respect. If I meet people who work at Verra now, one of the first things out of my mouth is, I used to think I was better than you. Many of the hard parts of building integrity infrastructure in carbon markets are not about individual willpower. Much of it is structural. The fact that all of the older registries look similar is not because they’re not creative or not smart. The dynamics of competition and the game of bringing carbon credits to market mean that those designs converge.

These are idea sets that should be in conversation with one another. It is your job to engage with the major dialectics of your time. In this case, it’s wizards and prophets. Prophets who think that we should respect limits, that we’ve gone too far, that we should turn back. Wizards who think that we will continue to solve problems faster than they are created. And they each can have part of that puzzle.

Ultimately this is a show about getting beyond categories that mislead us. It seems like we’re making progress because we’ve defined the in-group and the out-group, the good credits and the bad credits, the good climate action and the bad climate action, and it turns out what we described was group membership and not quality.

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Rainbow came into carbon dioxide removal from the outside, kept financing avoidances the whole time, and has watched the market arrive at the position it started from. The company I cofounded, Nori, was merciless about avoidance for its entire existence, so some of that is on me.

Wendell Berry died on 31 August, at 92. He has more books referenced on this show than any other author. Early in Nori's life I wrote to him twice inviting him onto this very podcast by explaining that we were making tonnes of soil organic carbon fungible with one another, which may be the worst reading of an audience in my career. He said no both times, kindly. I still have the letters.

Listen in to hear more about what it is like to meet someone from Verra and have the first sentence out of your mouth be "I used to think I was better than you", why the hardest parts of carbon market integrity turn out to be structural rather than a failure of anyone's willpower, what the Scouring of the Shire has to do with a methodology list, why I would keep rainforest over carbon removal if someone made me choose, and those ever-present wizards and prophets.

This episode’s sponsor

EcoEngineers: a full-service advisory and consulting firm focused on carbon dioxide removal, decarbonization, and carbon markets

Listen to the RCC episode I made with David LaGreca from EcoEngineers about how to choose, hire, and fire carbon market contractors.

And the one with Rudy Krehbiel, also of EcoEngineers, on which story carbon dioxide removal is actually in and what it costs to be inside the wrong one.

2026 EcoForums Training Series: Navigating Global Carbon and Fuel Regulations, Market Mechanisms, and Life-Cycle Analysis Fundamentals

Rainbow is a client of mine and I say so in the episode. They are not sponsoring this episode. I was just inspired by the work itself.

Resources

Soil, Farms and the Regenerative Argument, the Wendell Berry shelf, one of thirteen lists on my Bookshop storefront.

Removals, avoidances, and the rise of the portfolio mentality, the original at Rainbow.

Sustained Neutralization of the Warming Response to Emissions through a Portfolio of GHG Mitigation Strategies, Hughes, Hausfather, Spock and Van Arsdale, CDRXIV, May 2026. The Google paper on stacking and bridging.

The Prodigal Son of Carbon Markets, with Martin Freimüller of Octavia Carbon, on his change of heart about the voluntary carbon market.

Jason Grillo writes Climagination, and was on the show for The Culture of Carbon Removal.

Robert Höglund writes Marginal Carbon.

Rereading The Wizard and the Prophet six years deeper into climate work, with Charles C. Mann, where the wizards and prophets framing comes from.

The impossible taxonomy of carbon dioxide removal, the previous episode about categories that mislead.

Wendell Berry, 1934 to 2026, in the Kentucky Lantern.

Check out my other show, Climate Workers Anonymous.

Cover image: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Harvesters, 1565, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access.

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Full Transcript of Podcast Episode

Ross Kenyon: Hey, thank you for listening to Reversing Climate Change. This is Ross Kenyon. I’m the host of the show, and I work in climate tech and carbon dioxide removal.

If you’re new to Reversing Climate Change, this is a show that grew out of carbon dioxide removal. But to paraphrase John Muir’s legendary line about how once you start to pick at anything you find it hitched to everything else, it is a show about everything else. I don’t know how to make a climate show that isn’t about everything else. A climate show that isn’t about everything else would almost certainly just be incomplete.

I used to think that if we could only narrow our gaze down to focus on making climate change an economic win-win, on developing the right technology that’s better for health, more sophisticated, more profitable, then maybe we could fix this whole climate thing without having to become mechanics of the human heart and the human soul. I’ve grown doubtful of that. There’s just too much that’s too deep to avoid.

I wasn’t planning on sharing this story, but perhaps I will, in honor of Wendell Berry’s passing. I recently tallied up all of the books that have been mentioned on Reversing Climate Change over the course of about ten years of podcasting. Wendell Berry has the most books referenced of anyone. That isn’t to say he’s the single most referenced author, because some of those authors just get name-checked a lot, but Wendell is one of them.

I did not expect him to die. In my head, maybe he didn’t even die. Maybe he’s just overlooking the rest of the gang as ghosts, like at the end of Return of the Jedi. There’s something about that that strikes me as wrong. But of course, if you read any Wendell Berry, the idea that he would not live a normal human life with death at the end of it might even be offensive to him.

I’ve struggled with his writing a lot. I think anyone who makes a practice of pointing to limits, of reminding us that nature has the final say, that the larger our ambitions the more likely we are to run afoul of what makes life simple. Not to say easy, but simple, beautiful, good. Those are words I associate with Wendell. He was obviously a very smart person, but plainspoken as well, and in a gorgeous way.

I think of Wendell Berry’s concerns for industrial civilization and its pace as, unsurprisingly, pretty much what Isengard is in Lord of the Rings.

If you haven’t read Tolkien directly, one of the scenes that asks some of the biggest questions is not in the film at all. I haven’t read a lot of the criticism of the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings films. If anyone is listening, send me a note on Substack for where I should go for some of the best criticism of those films. But of the things that I missed, though I can understand why they were cut, there are two sequences that open up so many questions that it doesn’t really help you tell a linear story. And films basically require a linear story. Films that don’t give you one oftentimes feel disappointing, artsy, confusing.

Even I feel that way sometimes, and I understand what they’re meant to do and why one would not do that. I remember the first time I saw Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, being like, “What the heck?” Joaquin Phoenix goes on an adventure and comes back basically in the same depressed, sad state as when he left. There wasn’t fundamental transformation that I could tell, except for more scars and disappointment and wounds. I may be mischaracterizing it. I saw it a long time ago. I should probably just rewatch it now. I suspect it has more to say to me.

But that’s not even what’s happening here. The two scenes that come to mind, which I bet you can guess, are Tom Bombadil, for one, and the Scouring of the Shire. So at the end, after Mordor, after Mount Doom, after the ring is destroyed, the Fellowship wanders back to where they’re all going. Sam and Frodo are going back to the Shire. But in this time the Shire was not protected, and in fact Isengard has invaded and sort of corrupted it.

And when you think about Tolkien, he’s someone who is nothing if not a pastoral Englishman who loved the sort of Downton Abbey but non-aristocratic version of it. Country, peasantry, simple, good-hearted, basically the hobbits. And contrast that with the ruthlessness, the industrialization of Isengard. Mordor too, but it’s easier to see for Isengard, because Mordor already just looks inherently destroyed, and Isengard once was lovely and now is not.

What does it mean when war comes to the Shire? And what does that do to the people who live there in these simple lives? How does it corrupt them? How does it change them? How does it make them lose their innocence? It’s hard to measure, and if you didn’t grow up with what Wendell writes about, it would be hard to know about. It would be hard to understand.

If you were born into the Shire after the scouring, and you never made it back, and it never reverted to rule by the good hobbits once again, then you wouldn’t even exactly know what you were missing. It would sound nice, but people would hector you for romanticizing the past, and the past was never that good, and things like that.

And even in reading Wendell Berry, all of his novels, they have such a strong sense of a world that even at the time of writing might be passing away. I’ve never known it. I’ve never known what that was like, to live in a small town. Let alone a small town without everyone glued to their TVs or their phones. A town where, of course, people have their issues. It’s not a perfect place, but it is a good place. And we run roughshod over it at our own peril.

Forget about the Scouring of the Shire. Imagine a world where there are normal humans living in Isengard. You might just be thinking about how, if we get this much more efficient at processing all of these trees which happen to be alive, think about how good that will be for the economy and my portfolio and things of that nature. And I think Tolkien and Wendell Berry both would say we’ve made a grievous wrong turn. We’re no longer understanding ourselves, our relationship to everything that is. And this causes us to treat all that is in an expedient fashion that not only is not good for the Earth, but also is not good to us.

This type of dysfunction can be psychological in nature. We all are blind to ourselves in some ways, of character flaws that maybe are obvious to others. Maybe people have even told you of things that you do, but yet it’s hard for you to see. Or maybe once the crisis has passed, it’s easy to put those things away and think, “You know, I’m fine. I don’t need to think that much about that.”

Still psychological, but dramaturgical. Zoom out a little bit. I think about the nature of tragedy, specifically Greek tragedy. The end is written into the beginning and is often based upon some character flaw, being born under a bad sign. Most famously with Oedipus, being told he would kill his father and marry his mother. No way, José. That’s not gonna happen to me. Of course it does happen, and he ends up blinding himself.

Oedipus blinding himself due to his failure of self-knowledge, I think, is an amazing image. So powerful. It’s good personally. Feel free to use it in your personal life. There’s a lot of depth to all of us, and some moments in life involve feeling that feeling. But I think humanity as a whole is likely going to have this Oedipal moment, and skip the obvious connection you’re making in your brain. This is where one’s failure of self-knowledge is revealed all at once. It involves, if you’re reading the Old Testament, rending of garments, wailing, putting out one’s own eyes in despair. The truth that one could not see, and now you cannot see anymore.

Wendell Berry did a great job of pointing to humanity’s failure to learn our place and limits. But he also did it in a very joyful way. His poems are oftentimes very uplifting. They remind us to see the beauty in very small things, that life itself is a miracle. It does not require special adornment or being wrapped in bacon to be a wonderful thing.

And I respect that kind of thought. In fact, that is what I most admire about conservative political thought. I think it’s safe to include Wendell Berry as a type of conservative, or at least this is the type of conservative I have in my head. These are the best critics of modernity, of technology, of speed, of a lack of roots, saying that no, actually, humanity is a rooted species. Tabula rasa is a lie. We cannot endlessly redefine our conditions and be happy. That’s not who we are. What is good about life is what we can do in a community where we have trust, where we know each other, where we know our place. But it’s a good way of knowing your place. You belong there.

If you’ve listened to this show for a long time, you know that I work best when I have ideas that can contrast against one another. I often feel uncomfortable when people put out a strong reality definition, because any way that you define reality, it’s very easy to think of objections, other ways of seeing. If you are able to understand reality in many different ways, ideally you can make connections that other people are not able to make. People who have this strongly linear way of thinking might just find themselves deeper into the groove of what they believe. I used to be as bad at that as anyone else.

I’m thinking that I’m going to have to retell this story at some point soon, but it won’t be today. But I have been thinking quite a lot about this because of this piece that I wrote for Rainbow, the standard and registry in carbon dioxide removal and avoidances. And it reminded me of this Wendell Berry story that I teased at the beginning here.

It was sometime early within Nori’s history. It was certainly before 2020. I can’t remember how far back it was. Nori was a carbon dioxide removal registry and marketplace. We launched in 2017. We were focused initially on soil organic carbon. And if you work in agriculture at all, if you have any lofty understanding of your work as pertains to climate or ecology, you eventually end up at Wendell Berry. There are, of course, others, but Wendell’s one of those that you’d have to make a lot of weird turns to avoid reading if you work in agriculture.

So here I am doing this very podcast for about a decade, so two years into it maybe. One of my friends had previously corresponded with Wendell Berry. He’s someone, was someone, with whom you could just write a letter and expect to receive a response. It may not be the response that you want, but you can get a response. For instance, Noam Chomsky also had this reputation, and I corresponded with Noam back in the day, too. Not because I’m special, but because part of their public praxis was to just be available for some amount of communication with randos. You could write to these people and engage with them.

And in maybe the worst case of knowing your audience in my entire career, I wrote a letter to Wendell Berry talking about how Nori was this carbon removal marketplace using soil as a means to reverse climate change, and we were doing so by trying to make tonnes truly fungible against one another, by which I mean exchangeable.

If you know anything about Wendell Berry, you will know that Wendell Berry does not think units of carbon stored in soil should be equated with others by virtue of that. He is someone who cares so strongly about specificity and place and being rooted. The idea that one would create a commodity market, and that was the problem with agriculture, after he had seen commodity markets essentially hollow out the way of life that he thought was important to preserve. So goofy. I don’t know what got into me. It was honestly one of the worst cases of knowing your audience possible.

I think I wrote him twice, trying to persuade him why he should come on the show for that reason. He kindly rebuffed me twice, and I will always keep those letters of Wendell Berry telling me no. To remind me to know your audience, but also that my clever schemes trying to outwit the crisis we find ourselves in with a riff on what already existed, but in a more heavily financialized way, is likely a wrong turn.

This take on carbon markets, and how Nori was meant to supersede the problems that plagued earlier carbon markets, is really the point of this article I wrote about Rainbow. They’re a client of mine. I do some writing for them. And one of the themes that I’ve noticed is that Rainbow is one of the new registries that is big in carbon dioxide removal, but also did not start there. They started with other types of avoidance methodologies and grew into carbon removal.

I think that process can be fairly tricky. People who work in CDR have a fairly strong antipathy toward most of the legacy offset players. They have a reputation of being slow and expensive. It’s unclear how many of the credits do what they say on the tin. And wouldn’t it be amazing if we could build something over from scratch that would actually solve this problem?

Take it from me, someone who tried to do it. I’m not sure we ended up being that much better in any respect. If I meet people who work at Verra now, one of the first things out of my mouth is, I used to think I was better than you.

And now I’m realizing that many of the hard parts of building integrity infrastructure in carbon markets is not about individual willpower. Much of it is structural. The fact that all of the older registries look similar is not because they’re not creative, is not because they’re not smart. But the dynamics of competition and the game of bringing carbon credits to market means that those designs converge.

I really respect that Rainbow started this way and also didn’t give up on what they believed, that they just wanted to fund good climate projects, some of which are going to be avoidances.

I think part of it is that we’re so used to seeing companies buy cheap offsets and use them to enable their continued emissions in ways that are not appropriate. I don’t think you should be able to buy a REDD+ credit and then claim that you negated a tonne of fossil emissions. Protecting rainforest, without a doubt, one of the most important things we can do. I think if you ask me right now if I had to choose whether to keep carbon removal or saving rainforest, rainforest. I don’t even have to think about it. That’s obviously the more urgent thing to be doing right now. We’re all just hanging on hoping that other people figure that out while we’re trying to scale up carbon removal.

I don’t think that what I’m saying here is shocking. Rainbow’s been saying it for a long time. Others have been saying it for a long time. I saw a piece recently from Jason Grillo that was several years old where he was arguing something similar. There are people who are pointing to this, saying that there’s good reasons to see CDR as part of a portfolio and actually mean it. Because I’ve also heard a lot of people say we need more shots on goal, you know, silver buckshot, we need it all. But somehow that boundary ends up being drawn around CDR only.

I think that’s been a real mistake. I did an episode with Martin Freymüller from Octavia about his change of heart. He’s doing direct air capture in Kenya and is trying to find ways to actively work with developers of avoidance projects, because the whole thing matters. If we want to criticize methodologies and projects that don’t do what they claim to do, I think that’s fair game. I think that’s fair game for CDR too. But I also think this rigid hierarchical thinking can be mistaken.

I didn’t expect to wrap this Rainbow-oriented removals and non-removals essay commentary episode in Wendell Berry. Did not expect to do that. But there’s a sense in which he both exemplifies this and violates this.

I think being skeptical of the future can open up its own mistakes. I’ve been seeing Robert Höglund recently post quite a bit on things like Greenpeace blocking golden rice, and how that part of the Green Revolution and GMOs likely would have saved a ton of lives due to vitamin A deficiency. Environmentalists of that particular flavor at that particular time were so focused on what sounded like environmentalism that they couldn’t see the reality of the lives that would be lost in the process.

Technology can also be a really powerfully good thing. I’m not feeling especially great about it at this exact moment in time. I think there’s a lot to be concerned about. But I think those that stress the need for limits are wise to check those who have an unlimited orientation of humans. I think those who don’t believe in a sense of their own limits can run some real risks. And even if technology can be good, and people like Wendell Berry sometimes might miss the ways that they are holding back humanity and their desires, they are wise to check the lack of limits of many technologists who rule the planet, and who are also maybe listening to this show.

These are idea sets that should be in conversation with one another. It is your job to engage with the major dialectics of your time. In this case, it’s wizards and prophets. Prophets who think that we should respect limits, that we’ve gone too far, that we should turn back. Wizards who think that we will continue to solve problems faster than they are created. And they each can have part of that puzzle.

I think Wendell Berry might have had a misstep. I came at him hard with some financial logic that is hard to say out loud because of how foolish I was in presenting it this way. But that is how very large amounts of money change hands and goods cross the planet. Maybe that’s a bad thing on net for human wellbeing and their experience of this place. Maybe.

But so long as we’re being critical of dichotomy here, anyone who focuses on place and rootedness and being close to things. I’m thinking of people like Wendell Berry, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Mary Oliver, Aldo Leopold. The line from I Heart Huckabees of what happens when you sit in a meadow at dusk. Everything, nothing. Everything. Everything. Everything happens if you just sit in a meadow at dusk. Can we just sit there and be with it?

You don’t need categories when you can have unmediated reality, and being able to tune in without needing endless taxonomy is a way of breaking down these categories that rule us. And ultimately this is a show about getting beyond categories that mislead us. It seems like we’re making progress because we’ve defined the in-group and the out-group, the good credits and the bad credits, the good climate action and the bad climate action, and it turns out what we described was group membership and not quality.

I’m glad that Rainbow held the line on this one. It’s nice to see the world collectively go beyond rhetoric around the portfolio approach and actively trying to bring in super pollutants, other kinds of avoidances, removals, into the broad VCM conversation. CDR likes to hold itself apart. I get it. We think that we’re a little bit elite. Yeah, that’s kinda true. There’s a little bit of that vibe. I’ve perpetuated that vibe as much as probably anyone else has, for which I am feeling not so great about. I’m wondering how many things in my life I will look back on and be like, oh, I thought I had it figured out at that moment, but then two years later I’m still learning how many things it’s possible to be wrong about.

I’m really grateful that Rainbow gave me the chance to explore these ideas for this essay. The link is in the show notes. It’s on Substack. If you’re not already following the show on Substack, please go over there and subscribe. You’ll get all of these episodes in your email inbox. If you become a paid subscriber over there, there’s bonus content, there’s ad-free listening you can get on Substack. And I’m also just trying to make a better go of things over there. The memes are over there now. My other show that I’m working on, Climate Workers Anonymous, is there. Reversing Climate Change is there. RossKenyon.com, that’s the same thing, it just is the proper .com of it.

If you want to talk about these ideas, message me over there. Thanks so much for listening. Have a great rest of your day.

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This essay is a companion piece to this episode of the Reversing Climate Change podcast, which you can listen to here on Substack (ad-free for paid subscribers coming soon), on Apple Podcasts, or right below on Spotify. There is also a previous episode that this post is a sequel to.

Everyone gets stuck on Weimar inflation

CW: this episode discusses genocide

People reference the Weimar Republic's transition to Nazi Germany often. But I think they're missing perhaps the most relevant and frightening insight from Adolf Hitler's memoir, Mein Kampf.

It isn't just that economic uncertainty produces political radicalism. It's that bad things can happen when a group which has dominated a multiethnic empire for a long time is expected to start sharing more political and cultural power with the groups they once ruled.

If you haven't listened to the previous episode, "The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way—Hitler, Chaplin, & The Great Dictator on climate", go read the article and listen to the episode on Substack. It'll make more sense if you do!

People really, and I mean really love to make comparisons to the Nazi Germany. They also like to point to the Weimar Republic which preceded it. And fair enough. There are rhymes to be heard.

The comparison I have most heard in an anecdotal twenty years of being politically online (besides letting anything broadly authoritarian fall into the Godwin’s Law bucket), is that after World War I, Germany was so exhausted by the war itself, reparations from the Versailles Treaty, and then the subsequent hyperinflation that average people could not take care of their families. Germans turned to more radical political ideologies both left and right as a result of raw hunger.

Without a doubt, this is a true insight. When the system cannot help you in your most basic needs, you start wondering “how good could this system really be?” At some point, one has nothing to lose but one’s chains.

But I actually do not think this is the core insight of Adolf Hitler’s two-part memoir, Mein Kampf (1925-1926.)1 Hitler’s complaints about the Habsburg State (call it Austria-Hungary if you’d like) have an eerie ring to them the present-day United States, and I will explain why.

When multiethnic empires become pluralistic

“The process of the Slavization of the Austrian State was advancing year by year... the general development was directed against the Germans.”

— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

I’m fascinated by what the Habsburgs were able to build and how it was able to evolve. They clawed their way out of the shroud of history in the 10th century as pretty much all “royalty” does. Somehow they had gotten a hold of same land and some peasants in what is now Switzerland, did some fancy genealogy that showed their bloodline Forrest Gumps itself somehow to the Jewish Patriarchs, Homeric heroes, Augustus, Constantine, probably King Arthur and Prester John and God himself if you gave them half a chance. Eventually they rule from Vienna.

The Habsburgs are famous for marrying their way to the top and “conquering” Europe through marriage. There was a period in Habsburg history where Habsburgs controlled the Holy Roman Empire all the way to Spain and the Spanish New World. Much of that was done through strategic marriages and personal unions that would consolidate titles and land holdings in the Habsburg family.2

The long 19th century complicated things for empires. It pains me to compress down such a big story and have to skip religion, the Dual Monarchy, and a bunch else, but the combination of mobility, literacy, industrialization, state capacity, bureaucracy, and about ninety other factors gave rise to new kinds of nationalism.

Much of this new nationalism can be located within Romanticism, and it had a strongly linguistic component to it. That can be both liberatory and punitive. You become French by speaking French as taught in free and compulsory public schools and as approved by the Académie Française. Give up your Gascogne or Occitan dialect and become “French”.3 Or, if you are a Lithuanian dominated by Polish cultural elites or the Russian state has banned your language, borrow Czech orthography to create your own written script and have book smugglers bring you texts in your vernacular to (re)build a nation around.4

Errors of reading history from the present, by way of Ottomanism

If you’re an empire during this time, you’re watching the subject peoples you rule start to experiment with nationalism, and you actually don’t know yet that the nation-state will soon become the dominant political form. It probably looks ridiculous that these provincial Serbs or Walloons or Ruthenians or Lithuanians would govern themselves instead of a dynasty with centuries of practice wielding power. If they were ever good at it, they’ve been conquered and ruled by others for long enough to be out of practice. This nationalism thing—it’s a fad, like the internet would later become.

That being said, it might be nice to nip nationalism in the bud. And some empires tried harder than others to get ahead of what would later become history.

One of my favorite examples of this was a movement called Ottomanism. The Ottomans were ethnically Turkic steppe horsemen who settled down in Constantinople and expanded over centuries into the Balkans. They were able to Islamize some places more successfully than others (Bosnia, Kosovo, Albania), but also let Christians remain Christian and seek justice in their own courts for many matters if they paid the jizya and allowed some of their sons to be taken to become Janissaries.5

I studied abroad in Istanbul for a semester and took a class on nationalism while there. From what I can recall, I don’t think the Ottomans gave its ruled peoples a lot to get excited about. I don’t associate them with “Oriental cruelty” greater than their neighbors deeper into Europe, but there also just doesn’t seem to be a lot of identity available for a subject to adopt. By the middle of the 19th century, this strikes some Ottomans as a liability. So what if, and believe me, what if… we created our own imperial Ottoman nationalism that our subjects could opt into?

This has always struck me as a little, “how do you do, fellow kids?” but the Ottomans needed to find some way of generating some modern identity stickiness. The Ottomans tried to bring universal citizenship to its subjects6 that irked many Muslims who didn’t want to give up their culturally dominant position with co-citizens who weren’t coreligionists, and also irked many Christians who didn’t want to abandon their carveouts and relate to the Ottoman state as citizens same as any other. For those who did like this new identity, the fez hat became a symbol of Ottoman affiliation and identity.

Of course, things didn’t pan out for the sick man of Europe. The Ottomans were in a period of prolonged decline at least since Jan Sobieski’s cavalry charge at the Battle of Vienna, and dozens of Gallipoli’s couldn’t reverse that trend. It would be a mistake to see that as inevitable or even unique to them—it is totally possible that if we had skipped World War I, Ottomanism might have been a breakout hit—though I can’t say I liked its odds. However, the approach the Habsburgs took in trying to feed incipient nationalisms into their imperial politics had a better chance.

The Red Prince and Habsburg adaptability

The Habsburgs saw the same evidence that the Ottomans did. People were now all getting written versions of their language and becoming aware of themselves as agents of history with a capability of self-governance that stretched back into their noble pasts however long suppressed by their oppressors. How are you going to keep them in the Habsburg State once they have read the Kalevala?!7

The Habsburgs did several things to try to compensate, two of which I will cover, both of which will magnificently lead us back to Hitler.

The first is documented in ’s delightful book, The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke. It chronicles the life of Wilhelm von Habsburg who was born at the end of the 19th century to a Habsburg father who spoke fluent Polish and was, as far as I can tell, genuinely Polish in national sentiment. This probably sounds strange because it’s hard to think outside of the nation-state with how we have experienced nationality in our lives. But you’ll need to try.

A ruling family as big as the Habsburgs—which crosses so much of Europe—could build genuine loyalty and fellow feeling with their subjects by becoming the branch of royal family which adopted a nationality; learn the language, dress the part, and live amongst them.

If you know much about Poles and Ukrainians, you might know they aren’t always the best of friends (though they seem to be in a good place right now.) They overlap in a part of the world without many natural boundaries (and also the entire Yiddish civilizational zone) but hold plenty of different ideas about who should rule and where. Wilhelm’s father, as a particular type of Polish nationalist, doesn’t have the highest opinion of the Ukrainians.

Wilhelm, rebellious and bright son that he is, gets hooked on the Cossack mythology and the movement for Ukrainian independence and tries to bring them into the Habsburg fold before and during his fighting in World War I. He very much becomes Ukrainian. There’s almost a sense for these imperial figures where you can say something like “Wilhelm converted to Ukrainianism” in a way that doesn’t really make sense to how our brains process nationalistic understanding in 2026.

By my lights, these imagined Hitlerian thoughts ring true to his character. It might be the bias of my life of living through so much populist rhetoric influencing how I wrote this, but this nationalist offense at the out-of-touch elite denying his true ethnicity in order to pretend to be and seek praise from an “inferior” people? Be an American and tell me you haven’t experienced someone share rage of this flavor. This is an echo.

Interethnic meritocracy and its discontents

“The process of the Slavization of the Austrian State was advancing year by year... the general development was directed against the Germans.”

“Did not we boys already know that this Austrian State had, and could have, no love for us Germans? Our historical knowledge of the methods of the House of Habsburg was corroborated by what we saw every day... The Royal House were becoming Czech in every possible way; and it was the hand of the goddess of eternal justice and inexorable retribution that caused the most deadly enemy of Germanism in Austria, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, to fall by the very bullets which he himself had helped to cast. And he was the chief patron of the movement, working from above to make Austria a Slav State!”

— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

The second way (of many) that the Habsburgs tried to get ahead of nationalism was to include more meritocracy in governance. If you want people to experience their government as something that is a part of them rather than something external that sits on top of them, making sure that those who deserve a role by their qualifications should have it independent of ethnic identity.8

By doing so, it makes the empire seem less like ethnic Germans conquered your ancestors and still do as they wish, and more like a large club of peoples who share a free trade zone, military, and bureaucracy because there are economies of scale and it’s genuinely good for all of us.

But if you’re a borderline lumpenprole artist forced into Viennese utilitarian paint jobs by necessity, these free trade and united-peoples-of-the-empire arguments may not be persuasive.

Insofar as state jobs can be considered a form of political patronage, the Habsburgs deciding to give away jobs and seats to non-Germans stung to someone who was struggling and cared so deeply about being German. To elevate non-Germans in status and access at the zero-sum expense of Germans may have felt like a betrayal.

You see this meltdown completely when Hitler walks into the Reichsrat, the imperial Parliament in Vienna. Expecting a grand temple of German authority, he instead encountered the living, breathing reality of a multiethnic democracy:

There’s something so “why can’t you people just SPEAK ENGLISH?!” about that quote. And it is, all things considered, a minor form of intergroup conflict—certainly by Hitlerian standards. The goal is to prevent its advance beyond this point in societies that are transitioning from having an ethnic core to one which shares power and status among its many peoples.

How exactly is one meant to transition an empire formerly dominated by a single group into one that shares power with the people it used to rule? How can this be done without frustrating that original group to the point of prolonged fury? This is the key theme I could not unsee after reading Mein Kampf. It has stayed with me for a decade, and is a major question for anyone who wants to live in a world a country where we are genuinely neighbors and not adversaries. If we are to have a chance at maturing into the 21st century, we will have to become wise enough to develop personal gentleness and institutional health.

A concluding thought: what if WW1 didn’t start imperial collapse?

It’s hard to look at the world without nation-state eyes. We take it for granted. In some cases the nation-state was probably net liberatory. In many other cases, it all but guaranteed ethnic cleansing. But could Ottomanism have actually worked out had the Central Powers not lost WW1? Could the Pan-European Imperial Habsburg way have given enough to all nations to have resulted in less conflict and more prosperity for the multitude?

Maybe. It’s fun to play at alternative history. Would Hitler have been Hitler had World War I not happened? Or if the Central Powers won? Or even if the Treaty of Versailles were written differently? It is very possible. Hitler may have just been a racist loudmouth. Or maybe he would have adapted to an Austria-Hungary which had evolved beyond its Germanic origins into something broader and genuinely transethnic. If he felt more economically secure and less abused by the government which put him in the trenches, we might have skipped so much absolute grief.

I am not certain how we will mature as a civilization and as a species, but I am certain that it will require us to “bring about the kind of society where it is easier to be good.”9 What we are doing now shows no sign of reducing the intergroup conflict that can only produce misery.

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Full Podcast Transcript

Coming soon…

Before you press play: this episode discusses genocide and suicide. Given the subject it could hardly not, but you should know that going in rather than discovering it at minute forty.

Last year I added a new type of show to the Reversing Climate Change podcast where I read some poetry or literature and discuss it literarily as well as its relevance to climate work. Today I released an episode of my reading Charlie Chaplin’s wonderful speech from the end of his film, The Great Dictator.

Reading poetry in the midst of serious climate work is not a new thing to do. Go back and read All We Can Save, the climate anthology edited by Drs. & , and the link to poetry is in plain sight. The riff on Adrienne Rich is right there in the title:

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed

I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,

with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.

— Adrienne Rich in "Natural Resources" from The Dream of a Common Language (1978)

Ayana Johnson continues including poetry and other art in the followup anthology, What If We Get It Right? and it’s all over the Katharine Wilkinson’s new book, Climate Wayfinding. I believe this is such a wise way to mix media. It makes sense to my brain to find literary links to a topic that cannot help but produce some of the strongest feelings of faith and hope but also despair. Climate deserves its poetry and literature.1

Sometimes naivety is correct

I have loved this speech of Charlie Chaplin’s from The Great Dictator at least since my undergraduate days. I do associate its tone as being of that developmental stage. Can’t you just imagine the tie-dyed tapestry billowing from your dorm room fan? But in saying that, I undermine it and knock youth’s naivety. After being pummeled by “real life” in the post-collegiate years of one’s twenties, it becomes time to put away childish things. Noting that the world could be free and beautiful for everyone? So cringe.

But I’ve come back through the other end of that developmental loop, recognized that the “real world” has its own naiveties it nurses while it pretends to be practical, and am coaching myself and those who will listen to change and become like little children, or we will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Unsurprisingly, it’s Gospel phrasing like this that Chaplin cribs in his speech.

As the world’s situation gets more precarious, we will need spiritual wisdom to see us through to whatever we become on the other side of climate change. Reminders of this can only serve to prepare us for what will be expected of us in the years to come.

It’s a truly moving work of rhetoric. Here it is to watch in its entirety. Do that now, then come back:

I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible: Jew, Gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness—not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.

Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.

The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men; cries out for universal brotherhood, for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world—millions of despairing men, women, and little children—victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.

To those who can hear me, I say: do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed; the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.

Soldiers! Don’t give yourselves to brutes! Men who despise you, enslave you, who regiment your lives! Tell you what to do, what to think, and what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men—machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate; the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!

In the 17th Chapter of St. Luke it is written: “The Kingdom of God is within man”. Not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people have the power; the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.

Then in the name of democracy, let us use that power. Let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world; a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future, and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfil that promise. They never will!

Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world. To do away with national barriers. To do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! in the name of democracy, let us all unite!

— Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator (1940)

Stunning, right?

Understanding Hitler

I actually did not mean to record about an hour on World War II, political comedy, and the personality of Adolf Hitler in this episode. Most of the poetry episodes are tiny. Most of them are bonus content that I put out for the love of the game. This turned into something else entirely though.

I started off explaining my theory of what makes political comedy work, and then exploring the historical moment when this film was being made. It was before Pearl Harbor and before many of Hitler’s ideas had been enacted upon the world. And from there, it connects to so many threads: Hannah Arendt, Louis Theroux’s manosphere documentary2, Mel Brooks, Carless People, and why there’s something so clownish and adolescent about the men (and it usually is men) who rule the world and create such valuable systems of extraction.

Albert Speer’s3 book Inside the Third Reich has these stories of Hitler’s dinner parties where he would get his colleagues (and presumably people he considered “friends”, though I get the sense that he didn’t quite understand friendship), and give them repeated four-hour lectures on things they had heard from him at length many times before. They would go into the wee hours of the night and no one was much having that good of a time. Did that bother Hitler? It is unclear if he didn't notice or didn’t care, but when I imagine it, it’s always the former. It strikes me as childish and pitiful, and someone who so desperately wants to connect and be valued but is so blocked from doing so appropriately.

His closest relationships are misunderstood by him. The dinner guests mere prisoners to their boss’s Greatest Hits recollections. He is theatrically a brilliant performer—capable of ensorcelling the masses—and yet cannot break through the cage of his solitude that he may have never surfaced to consciousness.

Tempting Godwin’s Law

At this point we have such great visibility into the leaders of our world since they post their thoughts often and they believe and do so many bizarre things. And it reads very similarly to me. Donald Trump is the obvious example. He is cruel and seemingly enjoys the process of throwing his weight around for its own sake, and is absolutely not a serious person. Of the many examples that could be chosen, have you been following the sage by which engineering reviews are being done to see if the island on aircraft carriers can be moved so they look cooler? Or that they can switch from modern electromagnetic devices to launch planes back to the older steam technology for the idiosyncratic preferences of the commander-in-chief? What about the basic public relations point of, “hey, everyone is watching the sailor of the USS Abraham Lincoln. Maybe don’t make a bunch of strange comments about aircraft carriers now and let the story die down.” But no, that would be far too sensible and something about power includes the power to behave as both a tyrant and a clown.

It’s hard not to read and watch Mark Zuckerberg talk about anything and not think he is a dork who seemingly barely understands what it means to connect to another human, but he got rich designing a social network ostensibly for that purpose. Careless People has a story which alleges Mark always won at Settlers of Catan because his opponents got into the habit of letting him win. When Sarah Wynn-Williams pointed this out to him, she claims she was met with Zuckerberg’s incredulity. Of course they weren’t letting him win. He’s so smart that he wins a game with variance (impossible for the best player to always win due to the randomness introduced by dice-rolling) every single time. Mark Zuckerberg should almost certainly be nowhere near the possibility of Artificial General Intelligence.

Robert Moses (podcast forthcoming on the Robert Caro books…) presumably thought that he was helping New Yorkers by building his parkways and roads and parks. Even when the people who lived in these neighborhoods tried to tell him he misunderstood their needs or that they wanted to minorly adapt the plans to improve their use of it based upon local knowledge, he would basically say “take it or leave it.” He would serve these foolish citizens whether they liked it or not and only as he saw fit.

Many of these people strike me as petty. Hitler (and other leaders) sometimes have such a strong Governor Lepetomane quality to them. It both tyrannizes and feels just straight up silly. Somehow, behavior from leaders can simultaneously be both terrifying and goofy.

And other times, they’re just boring in the same horrifying way that Hannah Arendt documents Adolf Eichmann’s banality of evil. He wasn’t some serial killer who did his work with pleasure. He was just a very effective functionary who kept the trains moving on time. And isn’t that more terrifying, how absolutely dull his monstrosity is?

It rhymes with Hitler’s dreadful repeat speeches at his dinners that Speer notes. Monstrosity has some sort of potential overlap with being absolutely boring and being a clown. It isn’t just the viciousness of Hitler’s antisemitism. It’s the true lack of accurate self-understanding that propels these leaders, that causes them to believe in their own greatness, while also isolating themselves from the feedback they would need to moderate their own overreach. But if they had that humility, they may not seek to do these things and be these people in the first place. Is it actually a requirement, and not an accident?

This is not the end

I’m going to keep returning to these themes, so be sure to subscribe below. They impact so much of the world around us, how decisions get made, and what insulates our leaders from the kindness and gentleness we will need to carry us through this century. The wisdom we need in charge will not come from whatever set of incentives puts these men in such high places.

I will continue investigating this link between the lack of self-awareness and those who climb the heights of history in subsequent posts.

Thanks for reading! I appreciate you.

Sincerely,

Ross Kenyon

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CW: this episode discusses genocide and suicide.

I swear I didn't mean to make this episode. All I intended to do was to read the wonderfully moving speech at the end of Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator. But somehow that meant that I had to process so much about World War II, the personality of Adolf Hitler, and why monsters can also be boring and/or extremely goofy.

This monologue episode wends its way through the particular moment in history this film was made and why that is significant (as well as what the film got wrong as a result), Hannah Arendt, Mel Brooks, Louis Theroux's manosphere documentary, the banality of evil, why so many huge leaders of countries and companies feel so adolescent, how weird the History Channel was with Hitler content when I was a kid, and so much more.

There is still so much that didn't make it in, but I think I'll share some more soon, in particular about what I find to be the most terrifying part of Mein Kampf. To be continued...

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⁠Watch the full Charlie Chaplin speech here

Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Hey, thank you for listening to Reversing Climate Change. This is Ross Kenyon. I’m the host of the podcast, and I’ve been working in climate for about a decade.

Do you know right now that I’m curating another podcast? It’s called Climate Workers Anonymous. I’m an elder millennial, so I have strong memories of PostSecret, where people would decorate postcards and write an unsayable truth that they wanted to share with the world without attribution and mail it in. And I started a new thing called Climate Workers Anonymous to allow people to share things about working in climate that they are finding difficult to say. Whether they are too naive and beautiful and end up feeling a bit maudlin or purple to share in mixed company, or whether they’re cynical and experiences of disappointment and hypocrisy about working in climate. And lots of things in between.

If you like Reversing Climate Change, I think you’ll at least enjoy some of Climate Workers Anonymous, and you should check it out, because that’s going right now. The link is in the show notes if you’d like to do that. But also, if you look up Climate Workers Anonymous on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, all of the regular places you listen to podcasts, it will be there.

Today’s show is a monologue episode. I’ve loved this speech for so very long. You’ve probably heard it before. It ends up sampled in songs. It’s one of those speeches that has broken through and remains popular nearly 100 years after it was released. I am referring to Charlie Chaplin’s speech at the end of The Great Dictator, from 1940.

I’m going to read it, or maybe it’s better to say I’m going to act it. I’m not even sure. It’s a real risk having to recite a Charlie Chaplin speech for which there is a recording of him giving it himself. The Great Dictator is his first talkie. Chaplin, of course, is from the silent film era. He’s a vaudevillian, very strong physical comedy actor, and one of those early film pioneers that was able to make the transition to talkies from silent films. Not everyone was able to do that.

If you haven’t seen any silent films, I would recommend going back and watching some of them. They do a lot with so little. It’s amazing to see how much of that was pioneered then. There’s a scene in The Deuce where Maggie Gyllenhaal is talking to her mentor after coming out of an Akira Kurosawa film, and her mentor says something like, “Yeah, and they did that with nothing.” He was able to pull a masterpiece from behind his ear, essentially, after World War II, being a filmmaker in Japan. And knowing the context of how Kurosawa was able to make such amazing cinema after his country was rocked to its foundations and so poor and struggling only makes his artistic contribution to humanity that much more impressive.

And Charlie Chaplin is like that too. I can’t say this is my favorite Chaplin film. Let me put it this way. You know when you watch a comedian who is political, of basically any stripe? Political comedy is good when the comedy is first and the politics are second. When the politics drive it too much, it loses its aesthetic sense of what is comedic about what they’re telling, and then it starts feeling more like spoken word, or politics. Or think of something like Henry Rollins, for example. Basically a lecturer, someone who talks about politics. And sure, he can be funny.

But many of the comics that I loved when I was in my teen and college years and beyond, the albums that I kept coming back to over and over, they were from people who had clear political convictions. I think I listened to David Cross’ Shut Up You Fucking Baby dozens of times. Such a great album. I bet it has not aged well because it is so topical. He is talking about things that are happening of the moment. But a lot of the album is about being a New Yorker during 9/11. And they’re great stories, and they’re genuinely funny and humane and hopeful and sardonic. And of course, there’s politics involved, but it never feels like the politics is driving this so much. I always really respected that album because it has great balance in that way. It respects the craft of comedy by putting the comedy first, and the politics come later.

Some of the David Cross stuff that would come out during the same era. I remember one time I saw him do comedy live. I forget when it was. I think it was late Bush W years, maybe early Obama years. It was just an hour straight, or 90 minutes, of pointing out Republican absurdity and foolishness and mendaciousness and stuff that, you know, it’s like, if you like David Cross, none of that’s gonna be some great surprise and it’s fun to hear him talk about it. But also I ended up feeling disappointed by it because I had wanted storytelling outside of mere political entertainment or political comedy. I respect it, by the way. I think if you have something to say about politics and you’re able to connect with people in any way, that’s fine. Maybe not every version of that or every flavor of that is gonna connect with one at every moment, and it’s possible I just wasn’t in the right head space to appreciate him that night. I don’t know.

But even still, I look back and I think about the Patton Oswalt jokes that I remember, and basically none of them are him analyzing whether or not George W. Bush is the stupidest man who ever existed. I think a lot of that’s fairly forgettable. But there’s some stories about him being in New York that I still think about as hilarious.

And you can even see this the other direction too. With Dave Chappelle, I think I’ve seen Killin’ Them Softly more than any other comedy special ever. I think I can quote every line in that thing. I adore it. I think it’s great. But if you watch any of his recent specials, just ignore for a second whether or not you agree with what his politics have become, they come off as politics first and the comedy second. Watching him do comedy feels like he’s trying to justify himself in past imbroglios that he is in. He’s trying to make sure he has a chance to get everyone’s attention so he can clear the air about some topic, and it never feels that funny to me. It always feels serious, and there’s an attempt to be profound. But it’s often left me cold, and it’s not just because I don’t love the politics that he has at this point. I think some part of it is because the comedy is secondary to the spoken word element to it. He’s trying to deliver a message and not be funny, and it’s really hard to be didactic, to teach people stuff, and also to be funny. And if you are going to do that, it has to be funny first, or just be didactic. When that comedy mixes, I think it creates a sort of conflict of interest aesthetically.

I think you can see this in The Great Dictator. I think Chaplin, working from the right place ethically, he’s watching what’s happening in Europe. This is made before Pearl Harbor. This is made before the US is in the war. This is released in 1940, so it was released in October. Germans invade Poland on September 1st, 1939. Then you have the so-called Phoney War, and then Paris falls in June of 1940. So this is released in October of 1940, and the film was produced during 1939, but he was writing it and working on it for what looks like several years before that.

So Chaplin had a really strong sense of the moment, that what these authoritarians were doing was wrong and destructive and also worthy of mockery, and he brought it. I think that’s a really courageous thing to do, because he didn’t know how that would end. In the film, he’s predicting war, or nearly so, between authoritarians, the sort of faux Mussolini character and this faux Hitler character going to war over an independent country that borders them.

I admire that he was willing to do this in the moment and to stick his neck out like this. One thing that maybe you don’t know is that before Pearl Harbor, there was actually a fairly strong movement against US intervention in Europe. I’ve never read the book, but I certainly intend to. I thought the miniseries was great. It’s an adaptation of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, which is about what the world would look like if Charles Lindbergh, the aviator, had become the American president. He was strongly isolationist and thought that America should stay out of European politics and not get involved in any of their conflicts. The Plot Against America really leans into his alleged Nazi racial politics. I actually don’t know enough about Lindbergh to say whether or not that was fair or not. Suffice it to say, I think it’s a really interesting thought experiment.

But Chaplin is making this film about how terrible these authoritarians are at a moment before I think most Americans had thought that America should be super concerned with this. This is before there’s a lot of details about what’s happening to the Jews in Europe. There’s not great information about a lot of it. Certainly not what happens under the General Government in the East, in parts of Poland and Ukraine, where much of the worst parts of the Holocaust happened, that it’s less industrial like you might have at Dachau or Auschwitz and more just, there’s a big hole in the ground and the soldiers are gonna keep shooting people and having them fall into the pit until the pit is full, and then they move on to the next pit, essentially.

I just read Ken Krimstein’s book on Hannah Arendt, The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: A Tyranny of Truth. Really cool graphic novel. I’ve read a lot of Hannah Arendt, and she’s a great one to engage with. Highly recommend digging into her stuff.

Hannah Arendt very narrowly escaped the Nazis in Berlin. She was engaged in the artistic and intellectual circles there in the pre-war period and was asked by a Zionist organization to go into the German state archives and gather up the regional papers of the Nazi Party, and just German publications in general, and to find documented cases of antisemitism so that this organization could use it to show to the world how bad it had gotten in Germany. That’s my understanding of what was happening. A librarian flagged her, and she was interrogated for several days by a Nazi officer. By some happenstance she ends up getting out for, I think, like a day. She just barely got out, and it seemed like there was going to be a follow-up, so her and her mother just left immediately and went through the one area where I guess the border police for exit purposes were less guarded, on the Czech side of Germany, and got out. And so she makes her way to Paris and falls in with the circle there. Another one of those Forrest Gumpian, everyone who’s anyone in continental philosophy is hanging out, kind of things.

Then the Germans invade France. During the Phoney War, so between what happens in Poland at the end of ‘39 and the middle of the year in 1940, there’s a sort of redeployment. Germans from the east are moving to the west, consolidating. It’s unclear what’s gonna happen. As you probably know, during the First World War, the German invasion of France didn’t go super well. It bogged down into trenches. The French learned the wrong lessons from World War I. Rather than thinking about mobility and breakthrough and blitzkrieg as people like Heinz Guderian did, they end up thinking about how to make static warfare better. How do we make the Maginot Line tougher to break through and make this wall impenetrable so the Germans could never get through again? And so we’ll just defend the entire eastern border of France perfectly.

What the Germans do with combined arms is attack a very, very narrow part of the front, concentrate all of their air power and artillery and tanks, and just send as many through as possible, as fast as possible, and then get into the backfield, and then they can start outflanking and rounding up the lines of their enemy. And this becomes very, very effective, and the German invasion of France happens fast. Once that happens, there’s not this long, slow grind that then slows down and gets stuck at the Somme and blah, blah, blah, all the stuff you know about World War I being so awful. The Germans basically win as soon as they start trying. In my memory, it lasts like a couple of weeks. It’s not long. And after that happens, the Germans, rather than trying to govern all of France, they set up a collaborationist government based in Vichy, France, under Philippe Pétain, army general.

And once again, Hannah’s on the run. They hear from friends near Marseille that there’s some sort of safe house that they can stay with people without being noticed, but they have to go into Marseille all the time to wait in line trying to get an exit visa, and there’s multiple visas that they have to get, and it’s this huge hassle. And if you’ve ever seen Casablanca, you know there’s a whole process of how do you get the right stamps on a piece of paper in order to flee successfully and to get out. Because it’s not as simple as just buying a ticket on a steamer and going. They’re trying to make sure that the people that they would like to have under their control remain there for processing. If you haven’t seen Casablanca, here’s a little clue. It’s great. You should absolutely go watch Casablanca, because that one is pretty much just a perfectly told story. No notes. Go watch it.

There’s a page in The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt where Hannah says, I think it was in 1939 or maybe it was even in 1940, they had heard rumors of what was happening to the Jews in the East and didn’t believe it. The circle that she rolled in was very Jewish. Walter Benjamin, for example, was one of her close friends. He died by suicide trying to escape into Spain from their little area in the south of France.

So even when Chaplin is making this film, it’s not clear how much of Nazi propaganda and speechifying about the Jews is bluster and how much of it is true intent. In fact, The Great Dictator is interesting because it makes several comments about how Hynkel can use the Jews as an economic scapegoat. Post-war, in all of Europe, radical politics are big, and Hitler is certainly a part of that, just from the right-wing persuasion. Economic insecurity, no surprise, is a recipe for political radicalism. When people don’t know where their next meal is coming from, they’re going to interpret that the system has failed them in some way. And one way that political figures and operatives will deal with this is to scapegoat some other group. So the film implies here that, opportunistically, Hitler, sorry, Hynkel, who’s the Hitler stand-in in The Great Dictator, can blame the Jews for economic suffering in the country of Tomainia, Germany.

It’s almost wielded more as something to be done just opportunistically. At one point in the film, he tries to solicit a loan from a Jewish banker and agrees to pause all the antisemitism to get the loan and to just make it work. And there’s sort of a question here with regard to how serious Hynkel’s, and by proxy Hitler’s, antisemitism is, which in hindsight is really bizarre. I do not get the sense that Hitler was an anti-Semite for instrumental reasons. In fact, many of the resources that he had would have been, just for war-winning capacities alone, much better spent in not doing basically the Holocaust. The opportunity cost of the Holocaust for the Germans fighting World War II, very high. If all you care about is winning the war, you probably should not be engaging in the world’s worst extracurricular activity.

It’s something that you would only do if you genuinely thought this was good. And this is true also for how he treated other groups like the Slavs. The Ukrainians hated the Soviet Union for the Holodomor, the great famine of Ukraine, and would have welcomed Nazi, quote-unquote, “liberation” because they hated the Soviets so much. When the Germans came in, they were also terrible to the Ukrainians and basically threw away any possible goodwill of the Ukrainians wanting to fight on the side of the Germans, wanting to collaborate. It ended up just being like, everyone hates Ukraine. This is terrible. And it just turned into carnage.

So that is one of those things when you watch The Great Dictator and look back, you think, “Okay, this is probably not historically accurate. This would not stand scrutiny here.”

Some things I like about how Chaplin characterizes Hitler, sorry, Hynkel. You know what? I’m just gonna say both, and they both mean the same thing. The film is weird because the opening of the film talks about Lindbergh flying across the Atlantic a few decades earlier. It talks about World War I, and yet he’s talking about Germany and Italy, and very obviously Hitler. You’ve got the mustache. The person who’s the Mussolini character, Napaloni, is so obviously Benito Mussolini. There’s no attempt to hide it at all, and all the dates are the same, and I don’t understand why they didn’t try to do something a little bit more obscure or just have it be Germany and Italy. I wonder. I’m sure Chaplin had his reasons. He was a smart guy. It kinda cracks me up, though.

But the question of Hitler’s character, I think he probably missed the mark a little bit, but we also have the benefit of decades and decades of study of Hitler.

World War II was actually the first part of history that I got interested in. I went on a camping trip in Boy Scouts, and I think I was 11 or 12, and I remember being in a tent with my friend Danny, and I should probably send Danny a message, because it’s been several decades since I’ve said hello. He was talking about World War II. I’m like, “What? Have I heard of this? What happened with World War II?” And so, as an 11-year-old might explain, he said something like, “All right, so there’s this guy, Hitler, and he’s really bad, and he’s in Germany, and he starts whatever.” I remember being totally captivated. I’m like, “I gotta learn more about this. This is so interesting.”

And during that time, the History Channel in the US was like Hitler mania, nonstop shows about World War II and Hitler, and there were even shows I remember of things being like, “Was Hitler secretly gay?” Whatever customer research they did, it was like people just want to know more about this person who’s so hateful and bizarre and theatrical. There’s something about it that feels kind of entertainery. But there’s also so many other things that I’ve read about his character that make him both more human and banal, in that Hannah Arendtian banality of evil. This is humanizing, but it’s humanizing in a deeply negative way.

There’s stories from Albert Speer’s book, Inside the Third Reich. I still to this day do not know how much to trust this book. So Speer was an architect, did a bunch of the grand building projects, the neoclassical building stuff that the Nazis loved. But he also was the armaments minister, and he was responsible for logistics and making sure enough shells got made and munitions got made and shipped to the right place and stuff like that, and was very good at his job. And he had a front row seat to Hitler’s social life.

He tells these stories in the book of dinner parties where Hitler would invite these guests over, and they were all upper echelon Nazi functionaries, and some of these people would get regular invitations, and it’s like, if your boss invites you to a dinner, you probably should say yes if you care about keeping your job. And these dinners would go super late, and Hitler would just start going and give like a four-hour speech on something that they’ve all heard hundreds of times. His theory of how Germany was stabbed in the back by politicians at the end of World War I, and the military actually won World War I, but I guess he would’ve called it the Great War. And the guests are just like, “Oh, I so desperately want to go home, mein Führer. I’m so tired.” But you can’t say that. You can’t say that to your boss. Your job there is to let him say his thing, and he’s working himself up and wants to talk about this, but it just sounds terrible. So either he doesn’t realize that he’s boring these people, or he doesn’t care. He lacks this awareness, or this compassion for others, this empathy. He obviously lacks empathy for people, but I think stories like this, if we can trust the characterization of these dinners, strike me as someone who’s so used to adulation that he doesn’t realize that people would not be hanging off of every word.

There’s a story in Careless People where the author tells a story in which she alleges that Mark Zuckerberg would have people play Settlers of Catan with him, and allegedly people would just let Mark Zuckerberg win, or Mark never lost a game, or almost never lost a game, and if he lost a game, in my memory, I think he was fairly upset about it. Don’t quote me. I may not be remembering that exactly correctly, but it’s something kinda like that. And at one point, the author gets really upset with Mark and says something like, “You know they’re just letting you win, right?” And he goes, “No, they’re not. They would never do that.” She is so flabbergasted by him thinking that he is so good at Catan that he could never, ever possibly lose a game because he’s that much smarter than everyone else.

And so I think the dinner party stories about Hitler are probably closer to that. He’s so used to adulation that he doesn’t realize that the people who work with him... One of my favorite ways of interpreting the passage from the gospel where Jesus says, “No prophet is without honor, save in his home country,” is, okay, you might have a reputation in the world as being a smart, competent person, but sometimes to your spouse, your partner, they might think you’re a schmuck. They see you when you have done something unhygienic, or you fell asleep eating snacks on the couch and there’s crumbs all over your chest. If you’re that close to people, it’s really easy to notice their humanity and how difficult things are for them, and therefore the mystique is gone. The bloom’s off the rose when you live with someone. You see them getting dressed in the morning and you don’t see them when they’re only super well put together. It’s just different. You see them when they’re cranky. You see them when they’re sleepy. When they make maybe not the best decisions. They’re not giving their best performance 24/7, obviously.

The reason why I said that I don’t know if I can trust it so much is that Speer spends a fair amount of that book, which he wrote in Spandau, which was the prison that many of the captured higher-up Nazis were kept in awaiting the Nuremberg trials. And in fact, if you watched Band of Brothers, I always thought this was really interesting. Speirs, who I think is a lieutenant in Band of Brothers, yeah, that’s right, a lieutenant, who is courageous and ridiculous in several capacities, later ended up being the governor of Spandau. So I always thought that was a really interesting Forrest Gumpian, everyone knows each other and history just loops around in these funny kinds of ways.

It’s also interesting to see Hitler portrayed comedically. This was at a moment before the Holocaust and all of its horror was fully displayed. So the liberation of the camps in ‘45 hasn’t happened yet. It’s really unclear what exactly is happening and to what extent. Once all of the horror is undeniable and out in the open, things change. The world no longer feels like Hitler as a comedic topic is appropriate anymore. They’re not ready to laugh. It has this sort of too soon phenomenon to it.

There’s a fascinating couple of pages, actually, in that Hannah Arendt graphic novel where one of her books, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, it’s from 1963. I basically just need to reread all of Hannah Arendt. I’ve been thinking about her work so much lately. But maybe you don’t even realize how polarizing that book and that phrase is. Now we say the banality of evil with some regularity. It’s entered the lexicon. People know what it means to be a good German, someone who just follows orders, someone who’s not questioning things.

This book pissed a lot of people off, and for various reasons. One of which is that the Jewish councils that the Nazis composed to sort of internally govern the ghettos in Europe, there’s some sense that some of the Jews that were on the Judenrat governing bodies, some of them were more collaborationist than maybe they strictly needed to be. Some of them used power for their own purposes. It wasn’t only a noble thing. In my recollection, and I haven’t read this book in a while, but in my recollection she was trying to honor that, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it, the line between good and evil cuts through every person’s heart.

People don’t become more public-spirited by necessity by having a public role. Sometimes people will enter into a public role and have their own motivations run wild. I’ve actually been reading Robert Caro’s book at long last about Robert Moses and how he remade New York and urban planning. Fascinating book. I’m going to do a show about Robert Caro, Robert Moses, and tie it to some other themes that I’ve been noticing in climate work and things adjacent to it. But this is a great example. Robert Moses had things that he believed about what was in the welfare of New Yorkers, and there were also parts of the book where maybe he believed that or maybe he just wanted to expand his own power. It’s hard to know what was in his heart. But I think it honors his whole humanity to look at his actions and say, at some points this is motivating him, at other points this other thing was motivating him that was maybe less noble. And not all of us are as kind or as decent as we always can be, and that’s something that I think is important.

And so Hannah Arendt talking about this banality of evil, of watching Adolf Eichmann, who was the logistician who made sure that the trains carrying Jews and other disfavored people by the Nazis to death camps and to work camps ran efficiently. And so Mossad and the Israelis had been trying to track down Nazis who escaped judgment at Nuremberg since World War II ended. They’re sort of like the rat lines out of Europe that the Nazis ran down to escape. And many of them famously ended up in Argentina, like Adolf Eichmann.

As she’s watching the trials take place in Israel, she’s noticing that this guy’s boring. He’s not a monster or a serial killer in the way that we might think. He’s sort of a boring functionary, which humanizes him, but also makes it more terrifying, I think. If someone was a unidimensional, enjoys doing bad, knowing that it’s bad but thinking that it’s good, they’re just sort of a cartoon villain, that’s a sort of straightforward antagonist. It’s easy. You either have to kill this person or disable their ability to harm others through incarceration. Hannibal Lecter them. Put them in the thing over the face and put them in the backboard so they can’t move, and you just keep them away from other humans because they’ll do something terrible as soon as they get the first chance.

What was terrifying to Hannah Arendt about Adolf Eichmann was that he was just sort of a normal guy who did heinous, heinous things. And that message did not jive with the moment. Many Holocaust survivors and Jewish leaders did not want to tell a story about the line of good and evil cutting through everyone’s heart in this kind of way. There was still so much anger and sadness and true despair at the destruction of Yiddish civilization and family members and all that cultural legacy that was just obliterated to absolutely no one’s benefit at all. Just pure dead weight loss and suffering. And he was able to stand by his actions, saying that he had just done his job. He was just following orders and therefore he can’t be held accountable.

I think in trying to understand how people can do such awful things, and do it in a way that is so boringly human, is a sophisticated story that is hard to tell. And I think it takes a lot of the power out of the pure good versus evil story. It’s not about these Nazis who are almost a different species from you and I that did these things. Much of Arendt’s work on totalitarianism, about communism and Nazism, is that these tendencies lurk inside of the personalities of humans collectively and individually. There are certain circumstances that can trigger this even in people who are just normal, boring, run-of-the-mill people. And the lesson there about how do we make sure this never happens again is truly a difficult story to communicate and to have action according to.

One brief example. If we’re just talking about good and evil, if someone’s a Nazi, then you basically need to do the Hannibal Lecter thing that I just explained. In the Hannah Arendt story, it’s all of us together watching our own spirituality, our own hearts, and making sure that what leads to the inhumanity, what leads to the cruelty, what leads to the genocide, what leads to us treating humans as means and not ends. And that’s something that all of us need to be watching all the time, and that’s true of Germans, that’s true of Jews, that’s true of people who were on the Judenrat, that’s true of middle class, sort of right of center conservative people in Germany in the ‘30s who maybe missed stability, but they overlooked what they were trading for this alleged stability. They were willing to accept some amount of cruelty, or maybe even indulge in it themselves, because they wanted stability, peace, a return to normalcy, a return to German greatness, something like that.

I still don’t think we’re ready for a message quite like that. It doesn’t fit well on a picket sign. It’s really hard to explain. And I hope you can understand now why Eichmann in Jerusalem made people so angry.

And there is a page or two in the book about how five years after Eichmann in Jerusalem came out, and people were so offended by her book, The Producers comes out, which is Mel Brooks. The producers are trying to intentionally make the worst play of all time, because that would allow them to basically defraud investors and make the most money possible from a theatrical production. And the worst play that they can find out of all the ones that they read is called Springtime for Hitler, and it’s a musical about how Deutschland is happy and gay under Hitler. Of course, in perfect ironic fashion, the audience goes bananas for it because it’s so camp and so ridiculous that it becomes a hit, and the plan of the fraudulent producers backfires. It’s beautiful. I love stories like that, where there’s such a perfect little twist in it.

But there’s a period where I think it’s pretty much from Chaplin, and I think there’s a couple of other films that portrayed Nazis. I’m not sure if any of them portrayed them in a comedic light, certainly not in a mainstream way after Chaplin. There might be a couple, but almost certainly nothing as famous as The Great Dictator. But between that and The Producers, I don’t think there’s much content at all that treats authoritarianism, and certainly not Nazism, as something that is laughable. Actually, that’s not true for European literature. There’s stuff that’s coming out of Czechoslovakia during this time that is mocking of Soviet rule, and stuff that’s happening in Hungary, and there’s stuff happening in literature in Europe. But at least in American cinema, the world is not ready to treat Nazism as a sort of bumbling guy who is so unself-aware that he tells the same story for four hours every night to the same audience expecting huge praise and not getting it and being unaware of this.

There’s something about that that’s so foolish. It’s funny and it’s humanizing, because you have this absolute monster who just does not understand himself and his role here. It’s goofy. This monster is goofy in this way. Goofy almost in the Taika Waititi way, in Jojo Rabbit. Hitler’s just, like, so, so silly.

One of the parts of alternative history that people love to do is, at what point could a different decision have been made that would have changed the course of the war? And you can do it for so many things. But there’s several of them that deal with Hitler’s leadership style, where Hitler has probably the best general staff in the war. Hitler’s generals are best in class. They’re doing really interesting military innovation, the Blitzkrieg, lightning war. Their hardware is better than anyone else’s. They have the best tanks. They have highly trained infantry. They have Fallschirmjäger, the parachute troops that are very effective light infantry. They developed the first jet fighter plane, but it’s too late in the war to change things. They develop offensive rocketry capabilities. They would have likely had a nuclear weapon had they not deemed nuclear physics a Jewish science and sent all of the major physicists, people like Einstein, fleeing for their lives.

But Hitler also, because he was a frontline soldier, he was a corporal, as people likely know, in World War I on the Western Front, was gassed, ended up hospitalized and sort of attritioned out as sick. But he thought he was a supreme military commander. He thought he was a military genius. He did things like, during Overlord, the Allied invasion of Europe, he held tanks in reserve that should have been deployed much earlier, that would have potentially broken some of the connecting sites like Carentan and Caen and some of these other places, had intervention happened earlier. It would have complicated the Allied invasion by a lot. I’m not sure if it would have been decisive, but it’s one of those things that you should have rolled the dice on, because they’re never going to be more vulnerable than when they have very little room to maneuver and they’re very close to the water and they’re sort of penned in in this horrible hedgerow country that’s very easy to defend. And it should have just been released.

But Hitler was able to intuit, he thought, that the main strike had not yet occurred, and he was holding his elite tanks back waiting to figure out what the Allies were actually going to do before he committed them. Major goof. But his generals did not want to do that. And moreover, and this will ring true for anyone who’s worked for or with anyone who’s scary, his staff didn’t want to wake him up to tell him the situation has changed and the generals want to deploy the tanks, or something very much like that, because if you wake Hitler up, he’s going to be really, really pissed off and no one wants that.

So there’s also these parts of leadership, which is that your staff is scared to tell you bad information. They’re scared to wake you up even when your leadership is urgently needed. And this person thinks that they are way smarter and way more competent than they actually are. And they bottleneck decisions around themselves in ways that are highly inappropriate, especially given how masterful the staff around them is. To me it’s just beyond ridiculous.

There’s so many other things. That’s just one example of so many other parts of things that went wrong. Choosing to declare war on the US after Pearl Harbor. That might be the simplest one of all. I think it was like six days between Pearl Harbor and when Germany declared war on the US. There was serious concern in the Roosevelt administration that Germany would not declare war on the US, and America would only have the casus belli to fight Japan in the Pacific, but not do anything in Europe. So you have Lend-Lease and things like that, where they’re helping the Allies, but they’re not engaged in the war effort in a full capacity. And Roosevelt’s worried that there is not enough support to go fight in Europe. And then Hitler is just like, “Okay. Well, we’re just gonna declare war on the US now.” And Roosevelt’s like, “Oh, well, that solves everything for us. How wonderful for us.”

Hitler also just rolled the dice several times and won. His push on the Sudetenland worked. The Anschluss, where Germany unified with Austria, was tolerated. The non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. All these things were just like, “Uh, what is happening? Okay.” But the Allies drew the final line at attacking Poland. By that point I think it was pretty clear that that was gonna be the final straw, because the Allies had issued a security guarantee for Poland and had to honor that. And in my understanding, that did not exist previously for any of the other parts of this.

Okay, I’m gonna get to actually the speech now very soon. I think it’s hard to even dive into these topics because they touch so many things. How do you start talking about World War II and not have to talk about everything that preceded it and everything that came after, and all of the thinking around the personalities and the questions about how much do individual personalities matter? It’s sort of endless.

I have two remaining things to say and then I’ll get to the thing. Gosh, this show ended up just being enormous. I’ll say one more thing before I get into the speech, which, oh man, this is getting extreme here. But if you watch The Great Dictator and see how Charlie Chaplin plays Hynkel, it’s almost like, I wish it was almost more silly. It reminds me of something like, I’m certain Mel Brooks was a fan of this film. But when I think about how Mel Brooks plays authority figures, and especially someone like Governor Le Petomane from Blazing Saddles, “We gotta protect our phony baloney jobs here,” or the, “I didn’t get a harrumph out of that guy.” It would’ve been good to maybe ham up some of the ways that authority of this kind goes to people’s heads, and also how venal a lot of their desires are.

Like Hitler, at the end of the day, seems like he wanted people to just listen to him and think that he was smart. I think some part of the horror of him is thinking about the emotional disconnect here that sublimated into politics, of just seeing now that he has a captive audience of people who can’t leave, how desperately he wants to share with them the thoughts that turn over in his brain all day long. There’s something about that that I find tragic and sad and pitiful, and it’s hard to look away from. And it also makes me think of Governor Le Petomane from Blazing Saddles with Mel Brooks. There’s something about it that is boyish and kind of childish. It just seems goofy.

But also, just reading so many stories and seeing so much about the titans of industry that rule our world today, many of them strike me as extremely adolescent. They’re blustery. They think they’re smarter than everyone else. Many of them find it hard to believe that they may not, in fact, be smarter than everyone else. They believe very strongly that they deserve their position where they are, and how distorting that can be. There’s something psychologically that happens there that I can’t fully put my finger on.

But in that show I mentioned earlier about Robert Moses and New York, I’m trying to turn over some of these lessons for leadership and cultural health and organizational health and why this happens. And, in the words of F.A. Hayek, why do the worst get on top? They’re not the wisest people, that’s for sure. Their personalities have optimized for something else. And why do we let them do it? And why do they think that they deserve it? I don’t know. Questions I’ll be asking for a long time.

But okay, that is the longest prologue by far that I’ve ever done for a reading show, a poetry show. But okay, I’m gonna go into this now.

So the point of The Great Dictator, as you may have guessed, is Chaplin plays the most thinly veiled Hitler of all time. Chaplin plays two roles. He plays a Jewish barber who looks identical to Hynkel because they’re played by the same actor, and it goes through the worsening process of being in the ghetto and Nazi persecution and getting worse. And then later in the film, the barber version of Chaplin is trying to escape, and in escaping he ends up wearing the Nazi uniform of Tomainia, and then ends up at the sort of troop review. The Tomainian troops are about to invade this country. Hynkel is not there to give the speech. And because everyone also thinks that the barber is Hynkel, because they look identical, and he’s in the uniform for it, the barber is escorted to the stage, and he does a speech which I can only do in poor form relative to Charlie Chaplin, one of the best actors and creative visionaries of all time.

But I’m gonna try my best to honor this speech. I hope you connect with it. If you like this show, you’ll certainly connect with it. And you should go and watch this speech, the Chaplin version of it, immediately, because it’s beautiful, and it’s something that for twenty years or so I will return to every so often and feel inspired and find it to be so beautiful.

This is Charlie Chaplin’s final speech from The Great Dictator.

[Charlie Chaplin’s closing speech from The Great Dictator (1940) is recited here in full.]

Ross Kenyon: There you have it. There are so many lines here that I think are just beautiful.

I like that it centers feeling, and that thinking has not necessarily helped us as much as we had hoped. Our inventions make it easier for us to hurt one another, but not to connect us. And yet Chaplin seems to not link this to reason and science. He thinks those are things that can be rehabilitated. In the beginning of this, he talks like a romantic, that intuition and feeling are more important than science and empirical results and material progress. But by the end of it, he’s talking about how reason and science can lead the way. And what’s fascinating about this is faith and religious ethics don’t seem to play much of a role in it, even though he quotes Luke in the Gospel.

He also likens this to democracy, and there’s questions about, does he mean universal suffrage kind of democracy, or some thoroughgoing economic democracy, democratic socialism? What exactly is he pointing to here? Because we have democracy now, or at least nominally we do, and yet it has not produced the results that we want, and seemingly democracy gets harder every year that time goes by with the various types of media that we have access to.

I think he’s spot on that the technology that should be bringing us together has oftentimes monetized suffering and anger in ways that drive us apart and make our media landscape extremely fragmented and dangerous. For instance, if you haven’t seen the Louis Theroux Manosphere documentary, there’s a section in there about one of the influencers, and Louis asks him, “This sort of anti-Semitic stuff that you’re saying out here, you don’t actually believe this, do you? Are you an anti-Semite?” Something like that he asks him. And the influencer just says, “No, I don’t believe that at all, but it’s what gets clicks. It’s how we monetize.” I think that’s the scariest part of the entire film. Platforms are encouraging you to be shocking and basically be race-baiting and Jew-baiting in order to earn money, and that’s just a state of affairs that we’ve determined is totally acceptable. It’s crazy.

And I think Chaplin looking at that, like, “Cool, we have speed, but do we have humanity?” No. We’ve sort of put a price tag on it and are effectively paying people to act monstrously. And that part of the Louis documentary is the banality of evil. The influencer that he’s profiling had a rough childhood with an absent father that he clearly has a lot of anger towards, is trying to make it in a difficult world. And he’s just following the orders of the algorithm. The algorithm rewards a behavior, and therefore people rise to the occasion and supply the algorithm with what works on the algorithm. It’s truly horrifying.

Those minor quibbles, or questions that I have about democracy and how Chaplin views science and reason and faith and the relationship between these things, and how do we live humane, ethical lives, whatever. You can listen to this, and whatever insufficient words we drape onto the sentiment that’s behind what Charlie Chaplin is saying here, I think we all know what he’s saying, and it’s that we need kindness.

And however we need to get there, okay, that’s on you to figure out, basically. Good luck. If it’s an issue of reason, okay. Some people still argue that. It’s like Steven Pinker, Sam Harris. But there’s also plenty of people who think that reason and science don’t necessarily lead to the right conclusions ethically here. IG Farben, real good at science, made Zyklon B. You can use reason for purposes out of line with dignity very easily.

But also the feeling that he points to can also be turned in toxic ways. The feelings that are active in the people’s hearts of Tomainia are hate and fear and a desire not to stand out. It’s not just feeling or reason.

Look, I like romanticism. It comes up a lot on the show. But also there are parts of it, or versions of it, where I’m like, okay, but we also do need the other parts of our reason. We do not benefit by partitioning our personalities, our brains, who we are as humans, and saying this part is human and this part is not. We need these things working together, guided by a system of philosophy and ethics that is humane. We don’t solve this by saying reason is the enemy, we’re going back to the garden, we’re giving up symbolic language, and we’re just not doing this anymore. And we don’t say that feeling is so easily manipulated by social media, that feeling often ends up in anger, and therefore we need a much more reasonable populace. We need both of those things. We need intuition and reason that check each other, that make sure we’re working with our whole bodies, our whole minds, and that’s how we’re approaching this.

And so at the end of this, these are all the most minor quibbles for what is in fact a truly beautiful speech, a humane one. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. More than machinery, we need humanity. Our cleverness has made us hard and unkind. The good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. I say that a lot. Actually, in rereading this, I’m wondering how much this has influenced me in terms of rhetoric, because I say that all the time. I’m like, “Things could be so nice here. We could be living in paradise, essentially.” We are choosing misery for the worst possible deal. It doesn’t make any sense to me. I’m okay being simple and naive in saying that. I’m like, “What are we... Guys, what are we doing? This is not working so well.” And I love that someone could just say this like this 80 years ago.

Millions of despairing men, women, and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. Oh man, so many lines here are just great.

I hope you enjoyed. I didn’t mean to go into full who is Hitler, World War II comedy. Ugh. I guess it’s no surprise, really. That’s just kinda how it goes sometimes. I’m not gonna read the entire thing again, because it’s just too long, but I hope you enjoyed it. Have a wonderful day, and thanks for listening to this monologue episode of Reversing Climate Change. I’m Ross Kenyon.

Misspent or correctly spent youth

I spent a good chunk of my twenties writing pieces and producing videos while traveling. I studied my final semester of my undergraduate degree in Istanbul, then wandered around the Balkans for a month, growing an unkempt beard, hitchhiking, and generally misunderstanding the region in tragicomic fashion before landing in New York.

Many of my most memorable moments of so many years on the move were disasters that I recount in self-deprecating style. On that same Balkan jaunt, I was having dinner one night in Niš, Serbia.

Niš is a unique place. Emperor Constantine hailed from there, and their gastronomy still haunts me. Their street food is world class barbecue called roštilj . But it’s also a place where the Ottomans put down a Serbian revolt and then built a tower of Serb skulls as a warning to posterity. I’ve seen it. It’s hideous. They keep it covered by a tower that surrounds so that you don’t just walk by it, presumably for reasons of both reverence and protection.

One branch of my family hails from this region: Croats, Serbs, Hungarians, Austrians, Jews1—all mixed up in the chaotic pastiche of genealogy that is true for so many. I love genealogy and have become increasingly obsessed with place, language, history, and the incredible stories that have led each of us to this exact present moment. But at this time in my life, I didn’t yet have this interest. I didn’t yet know the exact contours of my heritage except for an old last name, “Vukcevich” (which means “son of [the] wolf” because I’m really cool), and my hand waving over nearly the entire peninsula.

Now back to the dinner. This was a white tablecloth prix fixe establishment. I had beautiful steak and quince rakija (this was Niš after all), and the restauranteur asked me about my travels. I told him I was next heading to Pristina, Kosovo. He was sure that I had meant Pristina, Serbia. Foolish me, not realizing he was making a normative claim about how he didn’t recognize the state of Kosovo’s right to exist, insisted that no, I was in fact heading to Pristina, Kosovo.

Extremely rapid and agitated Serbian followed. My limited language ability here can only pick out a few words: “Turks”, “NATO”, “Hitler”, and incongruently… “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad!” The waiter, struggling to keep up in translating, rushes out “everyone picks on the Serbs: the Turks, NATO, Hitler. And your shitty beard makes you look like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad!”

To this, what can be said? I had clearly stumbled into Balkan nationalism and revanchist thought in the most avoidable and careless way possible. All I could do was pay my tab quickly and leave before I somehow made it worse.

It was so bizarre to me. I feel so insulated from history and identity as a white presumably gentile American that I would have to synthetically recreate a white American identity in order to be offended by insults to it. Some white Americans still find a way to be defensive about it, but I digress.

This restauranteur’s experience was so instructive and revealing to me. How deeply wounded and near to the surface was this person’s trauma both personal and epigenetic to be sent into a tirade against this ignorant American.

Of course, he was also seemingly cut off from his own ethical culpability in how the Albanians of Kosovo might also feel similarly to him and about him, and that they might also have a legitimate grievance.

There is something beautiful and tragic about how ensnared he was in the pain of his people and potential inability to recognize the parallel pain of his neighbors. It points to history not as a place to settle scores but a game to leave behind entirely. “An eye for an eye will make the world blind.” The goal is to forgive our historical and recent antagonists, ask for forgiveness from those our group(s) have harmed, and try to find a way to live free and beautiful lives on this planet. This might be the first time my safety and distance and race was disarmed enough to understand how identity works outside of that most peculiar of nationalities: being American.

And it happened in what I hope was a halfway humorous way for you. It was (ideally) profound, but also self-deprecating, as I brought this calamity on myself.

J. Maarten’s Troost’s travels and life in Oceania

J. Maarten Troost’s books about Oceania all attempt and I think succeed at doing something similar. Like any travelogue, they point to difference among peoples, of culture shock, and inconvenience. But also of respect and friendship and the recognition of the universally shared nature of fellow humans. And it mostly involved Maarten screwing something up and getting bitten by centipedes or swimming in raw sewage or something of the like. It’s at Maarten’s expense, and I believe that editorial decision is genuinely wise.

Travel writing is so much more than escapism, or it can be. And while Maarten’s books are genuinely funny, I do think he treats his genre with the respect that it deserves.

To this day, I am still so chuffed Maarten hung out with me on the Reversing Climate Change podcast. This is a personal favorite of mine where we got to discuss his books, how Oceania is/was changing at the time, and what he’s learned by being a fish out of water for so much of his life.

I hope you enjoy listening to this episode, and maybe even picked up a little extra appreciation for a genre that is sometimes not treated as seriously as it deserves to be.

The full transcript is below if you prefer to read rather than listen. But if you scroll to the top of the piece you can listen in several different ways.

Thanks for being here with me!

Sincerely,

Ross

Subscribe now

This podcast has been running for almost a decade. There are some real gems buried in the catalogue that I am happy to have a chance to rerelease. This is one of those episodes. It has a new intro.

I recorded it with J. Maarten Troost in April 2020 and published it as S2E9, "Travel writing a disappearing Oceania". It remains a personal favorite of mine.

Maarten wrote four travel memoirs: The Sex Lives of Cannibals (2004), about the two years he spent in Kiribati after his partner got a job at an NGO who operated there; Getting Stoned with Savages (2006), about their move to Fiji and Vanuatu; Lost on Planet China (2008) where Maarten ends up wandering around quite a bit of China; and Headhunters on My Doorstep (2013), a Treasure Island retracing written in recovery.

We talk about his time in a huge place that very few have visited to the depths he has, and how the world was changing (or maybe beginning to change) since his time in the region.

Travel writing when it's good, acknowledges both difference and universality. It helps us understand Other, and mocks the way that we are in taking our Otherness for granted. Maarten does a wonderful job at both.

And he hates the f*@!ing Macarena.

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Listen to the RCC episode I made with David LaGreca from EcoEngineers about how to choose, hire, and fire carbon market contractors.

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Resources

Check out my new show, Climate Workers Anonymous

J. Maarten Troost at Penguin Random House

J. Maarten Troost at BJ Robbins Literary Agency

The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific (2004)

Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu (2006)

Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation (2008)

Headhunters on My Doorstep: A True Treasure Island Ghost Story (2013)

What became of the Kiribati land purchase in Vanua Levu

Kiribati's Office of Te Beretitenti on the Fiji land purchase

Paul Theroux, The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific (1992)

Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia (Harper, 2019)

David Foster Wallace, "Shipping Out," Harper's, January 1996, later collected as "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again"

John Jeremiah Sullivan, "You Blow My Mind. Hey, Mickey!", The New York Times Magazine, 2011

Jon Ronson, So You've Been Publicly Shamed (Picador, 2015)

407: Charles C. Mann on the wizards & prophets of climate change, the first rerelease

326: Confronting our shadow: Jung, the Vietnam War & climate change, w/ Karl Marlantes, the other author episode Maarten's intro name-checks

Climate Workers Anonymous

More from the show

Ad-free episodes and other benefits come with a paid subscription.

Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.

Carbon Removal Memes is still goofing around.

The books that come up on this show are collected on my Bookshop shelf.

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Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Hello. Thanks so much for listening to Reversing Climate Change. This is Ross Kenyon, I’m the host of the show.

You know that old King James line about new wine into old bottles? This is a new intro for an old podcast. I’ve been podcasting for, like, a decade, and there’s a bunch of people who are more recent listeners, and they may have missed some of the earlier gems of the show, which I’m actually going through the catalog right now trying to pull out some of my favorites that I just don’t want to die in obscurity.

Not die in obscurity. Maybe be buried pleasantly for the super fans who wanna go back through the catalog of old shows.

Some of those old shows are good listening, but they’re very much time-stamped. Some of the things that are in there, the way that issues are discussed, they will be part of the oral history of the late teens when carbon removal was gaining its footing. But if you listen to them, you would have old stats and old insights from a world that no longer exists. And while that can be very useful sometimes, to go back through and poke around in and see what you can learn, they’re more of a time capsule than anything.

And in fact, I’m going to do a show about this for a bunch of different reasons. I’ve become somewhat obsessed with it. One of the funny things, and maybe this is being an American, maybe this is being anyone, but I haven’t really thought of myself as being that historically situated at all in my life. Or maybe it’s just youth, I don’t know. But there’s something about those years of your life, maybe it’s your 20s, maybe it’s earlier than that for you.

It’s like when you’re the generation that has the cool slang that everyone else tries to use but fails at. You know? And you can see this too, like some of the shows that I’ve been most influenced by and really love, like I love Six Feet Under. If you’ve never seen Six Feet Under, it’s an amazing show for various reasons. It’s a little bit soapy. It’s a little bit like a soap opera. And parts of it maybe aren’t great, and some parts are campy and maybe a little bit silly, and not all of it aged wonderfully.

But it’s one of those things, it’s like, it’s the perfect Gen X show. So I’m an elder millennial. I’m not Gen X, but you come of age looking up at the Gen Xers who are making the music that you listen to and things like that. And you think about someone like Nate Fisher, you know, Peter Krause in Six Feet Under, and there’s something about that sort of... I link it so strongly to Stephen Malkmus and Pavement and this sort of DIY early indie, slacker, Richard Linklater, lifestyle artist kind of vibe. And I’m sure at the time that Alan Ball was making that show, it felt like that was so true, and it felt like it was pointed at something that was urgent and a way of life that needed to be documented.

And it’s only if you watch this show 20 years after it’s made, you realize how strongly time-capsuled it is. The references in that show are the dinner table debates that would’ve happened during the early Bush years. They’re about why is the US in Iraq if Iraq didn’t attack the US for 9/11? That was, like, not a connection. And what’s actually driving foreign policy, and is it all about energy politics?

This isn’t unique to Six Feet Under, obviously. There are other shows of that same era that I also feel that way about. If you watch Arrested Development now, if you did not come of age during the W. Bush years, if that was not a time period for which you were politically aware in any way, or your brain was not being turned on to politics during that time like it was for me, Arrested Development, so many of those gags will go right over your head.

You won’t understand the various things about Halliburton or the Bush family as a whole. There’s just a lot of jokes that are at the expense of political culture and the W. administration during that time that you’d watch it and be like, “That’s a reference to something, but I have no idea what it’s a reference to.”

It’s bracketed in time. And now if you watch it, it’s almost like studying this show that’s been dunked in amber and sort of like, “Oh, what an interesting artifact from a previous era.” And when you’re living it, it feels much more universal than that. And maybe one just needs to have enough life experience that you don’t think that you’re always going to be at the crest of the wave.

But sometimes the things that you grew up with will fall away and become a thing of the past. That’s a bittersweet way of putting it. It doesn’t have to be. That’s just the way of the world. Things do pass like this. And there are many, many episodes of Reversing Climate Change that you can go back and listen to if you want.

I doubt in all of them I’m especially wise or astute, and I like to think that I’ve gotten better over time, but I’ll probably look back on this period and think, “Wow, I really did not know all of the things that I did not know at that time.”

And again, that might just be part of life. And some of them I’m not going to bring to the forefront. I’m sure they’re still good listening. There’s probably some good points in there.

But there are some that I think do deserve to be brought to the fore, you know, shows that are favorites of mine. Now that I’m doing Substack more, I’m being able to bring out full transcriptions of episodes. I’m able to write about the ones that I like and why I like them, what did I not get into in the podcast itself that deserves some riffing on, and this is a way of doing that now.

And this episode is one of those. I think I’ve only done one of these previously, or at least recently. I did a re-release of the Charles C. Mann episode just because wizards and prophets kept coming up. I’m like, “All right, it’s time to revisit this and let people hear the original episode with the man himself.”

And this is one of these episodes where I’ve been able to get some of my favorite authors on the podcast, and I’ve been able to do it by just being an obsessive fan and being like, “Wait, wait, hear me out. I know you don’t really do climate stuff, but here’s why you should be on the show.” And me doing that shtick has worked a decent number of times because if you’ve engaged with someone’s work seriously, you wanna talk about it.

I think authors wanna hang like that. I think when they go on their press junkets when a book comes out, interviewers just read a little blurb about it and then have them on the show, and the conversations aren’t that deep. But for the artists and the authors that I’ve been able to have on, they’re often people where I know their work super well, and I’ve prepared for this. And people I’ve been really proud to have on.

Like, I’ll probably re-release the episode I did with Karl Marlantes. If you watch the Ken Burns Vietnam War documentary, which you absolutely should, it’s incredible, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross do the score for it, so it’s extra good. But Karl Marlantes is one of the main people that are interviewed from their time serving with American forces in Vietnam. He’s a novelist. He’s written a bunch of really cool books, none of which are about climate. And again, just able to be like, “Wait, wait, hear me out. You should be on this podcast. Let me tell you why.”

And I was able to do this with today’s guest that I’m re-releasing, J. Maarten Troost. Maarten’s a journalist whose partner at the time got a job with a nonprofit or an NGO in Kiribati, formerly called the Gilbert Islands, in Micronesia, and moves there and writes a book called The Sex Lives of Cannibals. And we talk about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of that title in the episode in the beginning. So hold your horses. We’ll talk about that.

But he’s written several books about his time living in Oceania, which has also become no easier for me to say since I asked him about that as well. I just love his writing. We end up talking about climate change, what he had observed in the region during his time there, what he’s watching out for in the future, and just able to talk about the craft of travel writing and why it’s important and why it’s good and why it’s a beautiful thing, and why it can be so funny and humane.

And one of his last books was about recovery and addiction and what it was like doing travel writing while in recovery. And he’s got a gimlet eye for everything, and he’s got a funny satirical take. And I found it to be such a nice maturation of theme and no less funny or humane as a result. And it’s one of those shows that’s a personal favorite. I’m so happy that I was able to get J. Maarten Troost on Reversing Climate Change.

One of the rules, or at least my rules, of making art is that the only way I can tell if it’s good is if I can get excited about it. There are shows that I’ve made that I don’t have that feeling for, and sometimes people will tell me how much they liked that episode and how good it was, and I’ll be like, “I can’t really tell if it was, but thanks for telling me. I’m glad you liked it.” And this is one of those episodes where I was like, wow, I put together something that no one else would probably make a show like this, and got to hang out with sort of a legendary travel writer and how fun that was.

And not to just pat myself on the back, but some of those shows where you know you maybe did something that wasn’t going to be done. Like, there are some artists and authors, you know, like right after you interview them, you’ll see them go on all the other climate podcasts too, and you’ll be like, “Okay.” Yeah, that’s because it’s not a surprising guest choice. And some of these ones are a little bit more esoteric, a little bit stranger.

But it also takes a little bit of vulnerability to share something like this because it is time capsuled in the same way that I described Six Feet Under and Arrested Development. And even my choices of those shows are so time capsuled, isn’t it? Can’t you just peg me as an elder millennial for even name-checking those?

And going back and listening to stuff that you’ve made, oh man. I think this is five or six years ago. Some parts are probably gonna be cringey, but also some gems are gonna shine through, and I’m happy enough with it. I’m gonna take that risk, I’m gonna bring out an old episode where I might feel a little bit goofy, but I’m really happy that we got to do it.

Thank you for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed this episode that I did with J. Maarten Troost, travel writer of the Pacific, and here it is.

Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. Today, I have with me J. Maarten Troost, author of The Sex Lives of Cannibals, Getting Stoned with Savages, and Headhunters on My Doorstep, which is part of his South Pacific trilogy, or I guess I should just say Pacific trilogy, and then also Lost on Planet China: One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation. Maarten, thank you for being here.

J. Maarten Troost: Hey, it’s good to be here. Thanks.

Ross Kenyon: Indeed. I’ve read all your books. I think they are very funny and insightful travelogues. I enjoy the genre. I am puzzled by... yeah, I don’t even... This word sticks in my mouth. Maybe you can help me. Oceania?

J. Maarten Troost: Sure. Oceania. You don’t like the word?

Ross Kenyon: For some reason there’s, like, too many vowels in it, or there’s too many syllables for how short it is, and I can never pull it off.

J. Maarten Troost: Oh, for sure. Hard one. It’s not something that comes up in everyday conversation. Most people just use the Pacific or the South Pacific or something like that. But I think Oceania is maybe a better literary word than a conversational word, because it really does describe sort of life in the islands, which feels more like being on a boat than on a continent.

Ross Kenyon: Oh, so that’s a nice little poetic interpretation. I think it’s good. Because I have trouble with it, and it is a little bit puzzling, that’s how I feel about the entire region, because it is just enormous in scope. It’s giant. I’ve long wanted to do shows for Reversing Climate Change about the region, but I haven’t found the right way in yet.

So I was reading your travelogues, and I read Paul Theroux’s The Happy Isles of Oceania and Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia by Christina Thompson, and I’m trying to find the way to be doing shows about this region. I’d like to do a lot more. So you are a very nice intro into this space, and you’ve clearly spent so much time there, but this isn’t like going to Europe. Everyone at this point of my peer group, they’ve gone on trips to Europe. It’s easier and easier to travel, yet this has not happened in the Pacific. This is still a hard place to get to, yet you’ve spent a huge amount of time there. How did that happen? Why were you in the region? And then also, you started in Kiribati, which I doubt many listeners even know where that is.

J. Maarten Troost: No, it is kind of a peculiar story. I think the origination of all this is, like, after college I moved to Prague in what’s now the Czech Republic, and someone made a terrible mistake and hired me as a journalist there for an English language newspaper.

And so I spent these years in Eastern Europe, traveling to the former Soviet Union and Russia. I covered the war in Bosnia. I was down in Croatia during the fighting there. I was there for the dissolution of Czechoslovakia. And all the meantime, I’m living in Prague, the most beautiful city basically in Europe, in my opinion, particularly back then. It was still a raw place to be.

And then I moved back to D.C. and I finished my last year of grad school, started temping. So you can imagine the difference between sort of living with mercenaries in Mostar, Bosnia and getting shelled at, and going to your temp job at the American Overeaters Association or whatever it was that I happened to be assigned to that week, and feeling sort of this dissonance, like I’d become accustomed to this really exciting life in a really formative point for me.

Ross Kenyon: This is like that scene in Hurt Locker when he comes home and he’s in the grocery store. That’s you basically?

J. Maarten Troost: It is basically like that. But I have to say my experiences in Eastern Europe were a lot more fun than whatever was going on in the Hurt Locker. All right? So it was a little different. I don’t mean to make it sound more dark than it was, ‘cause it was just a lot of fun as well, and it was really adventurous. You know, you’re twenty-two, you’re twenty-three, you’re off to these exotic, difficult places that no one wants to go to. Cost of living was nothing back then, so you can actually afford to do it as a recent grad.

So anyway, that was my mindset. And then I came back to D.C., did grad school again, finished that up, found that tedious, didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, was working stupid temp jobs, which as most of us know, at some point in life we typically all go through something like that. It’s boring, it’s saddening, it’s depressing. You’re looking at the next sixty years of your life going, “Really? This is it?”

And then suddenly out of nowhere, my girlfriend, she worked at a non-governmental organization that had offices in the South Pacific, and their person in Kiribati had to leave for personal reasons, let’s just say. And they needed an emergency fill-in, so that’s how we ended up in Kiribati. I’d never heard of it either. It was just sort of like, okay, I can get on the metro at 7:30 every AM and go to my tedious temp job and rearrange the files, or I have this offer here to move to a tiny little island in the South Pacific. So, what are you gonna choose?

Ross Kenyon: Seems pretty easy to me.

J. Maarten Troost: It seemed really easy to me as well, but of course I had absolutely no idea what I was in for. But that’s ultimately how I ended up in Kiribati, and that’s how things started.

Ross Kenyon: The TLDR of what you were in for is the Macarena, essentially, right?

J. Maarten Troost: Exactly, exactly.

Ross Kenyon: Indeed. And I wanted to ask you about this too. So the titles of these books are very provocative, and when I see them they remind me of this sort of 19th century understanding. So this is the age of industrialization, and then you have these reports coming back from sailors who are going to Tahiti where the sexual culture is very free, people are just lounging under coconut palms and eating off the land, and it’s this beautiful sort of prelapsarian society. And they would write these things that sort of... They have that era’s racism, which is this sort of noble savage kind of quality to it. Right. And then it seems like you’re kind of playing with this. I imagine someone listening heard those titles and was like, “Why those titles?”

J. Maarten Troost: Yeah. No, ‘cause I get that. The thing is, when you look at the literature of this region, the South Pacific, almost nothing has been written about it in the post-war years. Really, literally almost nothing if you really go through it. And so once you start digging into it and you start doing sort of the background reading that’s available to you, some of it dates back to sort of Rousseau and the noble savage kind of nonsense.

Then you have sort of your Paul Gauguin-type stuff where he’s looking for paradise, but he’s a complete scum as a human being. And then you’ve got some of the James Cook stuff. James Cook stuff is actually pretty good. That’s not so bad. But a lot of it is sort of this, you’re right, it’s this Victorian mindset of these dominant, more advanced Western cultures coming to explore and understand the savage people that live in faraway places.

And it had my eyes rolling most of the time, and I thought sort of like with these titles, I’d just be making a mockery of that. It was meant completely ironically, just in jest, just in fun. Basically, what it did is like once I came up with the title The Sex Lives of Cannibals, it made me snort with laughter. And I figured if I could make myself laugh, other people would laugh. And I think it becomes very apparent to anybody who’s ever read my books that the only idiot in any of my books is me. So it just comes with that. They’re just silly, fun titles.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. There’s a big incongruity there between the titles and the contents of the books, a lot of which is self-deprecating of you just trying to live your life, and you have these expectations for how things shall go. And as anyone who’s ever traveled outside of your own culture in some significant way, it’s often baffling. Like, one of the cultural norms that happens in Kiribati is, I forgot the name of this, but if someone asks you for something, you just give it to them. You have to.

J. Maarten Troost: Yeah. It’s called the bubuti.

Ross Kenyon: Bubuti.

J. Maarten Troost: Yeah, it’s the way sort of on small, difficult islands things work. I will ask you for your fishing net. You’ll give me your fishing net. That creates a certain obligation. So later on, maybe you need to use my, I don’t know, my canoe or something like that, and so on and so forth.

And it was a way of creating a very egalitarian society. The bubuti, you can’t abuse it because it comes right back at you. But it’s just the way the island culture worked, because to survive on these islands every village needs to work as a team. It doesn’t work otherwise. And so that was just part of the cultural development that occurred. But it’s an interesting thing to observe when you’re an outsider, that’s for sure.

Ross Kenyon: Definitely. And this is just one example of many things where you go in and nothing in your life has quite prepared you for it. So sure, these titles sound idyllic and Edenic, and actually you get there and you’re like, “I would kill for a fan that worked.”

J. Maarten Troost: Oh my God, yes.

Ross Kenyon: And yeah, so I like the incongruity there. Well, this is the Reversing Climate Change podcast, so I have to at least try to find a way to make it fit in, or my colleagues will get mad at me, Maarten. So what exactly was the arc of your experience with climate change and your time in the Pacific? Because I believe in your first book, The Sex Lives of Cannibals, there is a mention of climate change, but it isn’t very prominent. And then by the last book on the region, Headhunters on My Doorstep, I remember there being much more involvement with climate change as a theme. What happened during that time?

J. Maarten Troost: I think it’s partly both my evolution as a writer and also as an observer of what’s actually going on around the world, and willing to be honest about things. Even when I lived in Kiribati the first time, for those first few years, we were all well aware of it. I mean, it was an issue and all that kind of stuff. But I didn’t want to highlight it in the book because at that time, it just seemed in America, and I knew my audience would be mostly Americans, they would just put it through a partisan lens, and I just didn’t wanna go there with people for that particular book.

I do recall living there, even at the time, from time to time the tides would get up really high. I mean, there’s the king tides that come up high. And I remember my second year there, we had tides that would cover parts of the islands. I mean, these islands are only 100, 200, 300 yards wide. There were parts that were inundated from ocean to lagoon, and there was no storm. This was just a perfectly sunny, calm day. The water would be glassy smooth, and it would just come up and up and up, and it would cover the causeways and all that kind of stuff.

Ross Kenyon: Wow.

J. Maarten Troost: And then when I came back some years later for my fourth book, and seeing what had happened, the way all the coconut trees near the shoreline had died. I mean, they were just shells. And these coconut trees were 50, 60 years old, but they’re gone because of the salination, the saltwater coming in. The way people had to change their gardening habits. The only gardens that still worked were the ones that were only in the middle of the island. Anything close to either the lagoon or the ocean, nothing would grow anymore.

And seeing the tides come up. Coral is like limestone. It’s very porous, so you can’t really stop it. Even with a sea wall, you can’t stop the water coming. It comes up through the ground itself. And actually observing that, like a high tide coming in, and the water, it’s not just coming from the waves and the water just rising higher. It’s coming from the ground itself. And just immediately recognizing that as long as this goes on, this is completely unsustainable.

And we’re looking at the death, first of all, of the atoll nations in the South Pacific: Kiribati, Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands, other island groups like the Tuamotus, others. They are going to become uninhabitable, I think, within the next 20, 30 years.

Ross Kenyon: Wow. And for listeners who may not know, they might be imagining Hawaii or the Marquesas. So you have these giant, tall mountains that are verdant and beautiful. But atolls are... I have a hard time even wrapping my head around what exactly they are, but they’re very low-lying.

J. Maarten Troost: Yes. They’re typically not more than two or three feet above sea level. They’re basically the rim of an old undersea volcano. So coral grows on top of that rim of the old volcano, and coral seeks the sunlight, and so that’s what builds the atoll. And so it just reaches to get above the water level, and that’s it.

So there’s no mountains growing here. It’s just like walking around the rim of a gigantic ancient undersea volcano, with lots of channels and all that kind of stuff. Your tides, they run the day. Where you can possibly go on these islands, it’s all dependent on the tides. Yeah, they’re very, very difficult places. I don’t think there’s any place in America that’s comparable. Deeply unique. The environment runs everything. And they are, for sure, going to be unsustainable.

Ross Kenyon: Wow. That’s pretty grim. Well, when you’re spending time in the Pacific, do people... Okay, you’re a writer, so here, I’ll make some literary comparisons to you, or cinema references. Like Rick from Casablanca. So at the last minute he goes from being indifferent and saves the day. Or kind of like a Han Solo moment. Do you think people on the islands are waiting for the Earth to wake up and figure this out, or are they just expecting to have to immigrate or do adaptation or both?

J. Maarten Troost: In my experience, there’s two schools of thought in the Pacific. One of them is... You have to remember, the missionaries had enormous influence in much of the South Pacific.

Ross Kenyon: Oh, yeah, I’ve read both of those too.

J. Maarten Troost: Yeah. Many of the islands are deeply Christian, and they had a very powerful influence on many of the islands. So there is still a segment on many of the islands that really truly believes that God will take care of them, that their people have survived on these islands for hundreds of years, God will look over them, and so on and so forth.

And then there’s another group of people that see what they see and accept what they accept, and are now starting to make plans for what’s next. Like in Kiribati, you’ll notice that they’ve bought land in Vanua Levu, which is the largest island in Fiji. So they bought 20 square kilometers in Vanua Levu in the expectation that that will be their emergency exodus. Vanua Levu is a high island, it’s a mountainous island, it’s a very fertile island, and so they bought land there with the expectation that they’ll migrate to Fiji when sustainable life in Kiribati becomes untenable.

And then you’ve also noticed them changing the way they educate their young. There’s a lot more emphasis on vocational training right now, and that’s to prepare the kids fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old, so that they can get a job in New Zealand or Australia or something like that, something vocational.

So it’s really those two different schools that are kind of in conflict with each other, and that tends to be the on-the-ground reality for what I’ve seen in much of the Pacific.

Ross Kenyon: Wow. So it doesn’t sound like there’s too much middle ground. It either sounds like it’s faith or it’s exodus. Is there much emphasis on adaptation and making the islands flood-proof, or dealing with the water table with all the salinization that’s happening?

J. Maarten Troost: Well, I think people have sort of accepted reality for what it is. An atoll is a very finite space. You can’t have just, like, a landfill. You know what I mean? A landfill will pollute your groundwater. You can’t do so many different things that we take for granted here living on a continent, because everything affects everything else, and I think people are very mindful of their geography. So we’ll see how it goes. But reality is reality.

Right now, when you look at it, we’ve already raised temperatures almost a degree Celsius since industrial times. By 2100, so 80 years from now, on our current projection, we’re looking at almost a four-degree centigrade increase in temperatures. That’s completely unparalleled. Those islands will be gone. The people will disperse. It is what it is, and not much that can be done about it unless there is some divine power that decides to use his special magical powers to change things. But yeah, no, it’s bleak. It is what it is.

Ross Kenyon: Very bleak. We’re working with Nori. We’re a carbon removal marketplace, and we’re trying to scale up that industry. What we say internally is, “Don’t look down.” The stakes are actually very high if you fail, or if we do fail.

Have you seen much, though, in the way of... I’ve heard this described as climate porn, of people going on cruises to the Arctic or Antarctic, and it’s like, “See it before it’s gone.” Has there been much of that happening in the Pacific yet?

J. Maarten Troost: I don’t know. I haven’t seen that in the Pacific myself, but the islands that I’m most accustomed to are really obscure islands that people just wouldn’t go to anyway. The only people I run into are missionaries. So I don’t see that there, but I have to plead guilty to some of that myself. I was in Africa last year, and one of the reasons I wanted to do it was because I wanted to see rhinos in the wild, and so that’s one of the reasons I went to Africa. I’m doing something like what you’re talking about. I want to see some of these things before they disappear.

I do think that’s something that’s going to happen in the foreseeable future. Not in the foreseeable year. You know, coronavirus is going to decimate the cruise ship industry, that’s for sure. But yeah, no, I think for real, it’s going to be people going off to see a glacier while they still can, people going off to see an atoll while they still can, people going off to see a certain animal because they still can, because they’re so pessimistic now that they realize that in 10, 20, 30 years you won’t be able to see these places like they were. The world is changing incredibly rapidly right now, as you know, I’m sure.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I don’t think... Obviously calling it climate porn is pejoratively framed and is kind of an insult or a criticism of the behavior. I guess I’d have to read more. I don’t know if it’s bad in and of itself to wanna do this, especially if you’re pessimistic. Alternatively, you could go and be inspired to work extra hard to avoid these consequences that will make this type of tourism irrelevant, impossible, et cetera. So I don’t know if there’s the self-crit that is too necessary.

J. Maarten Troost: No, but it is one of those things, like, everything that we do by ourselves, we travel in a certain way, we have an electric car, we don’t use any plastic, and so on and so forth. All that we do as individuals doesn’t match up to what is happening at a systemic level. You know what I mean? We drastically need to drop carbon emissions, and for the past two, three years, our carbon emissions have been going up again.

And it’s a hard battle to fight, and particularly when there are so many nations around the world who are electing absolute morons to be their leaders. We have that here in the US, we see it in Australia, we see it in Brazil, we see it in so many different other countries, that we are not creating... Like, all this is going to have to happen politically, and we’re not creating a political infrastructure where we can really create those systemic changes that will help mitigate the worst of climate change.

And as you know, a lot of things are already baked into the system. I mean, we can stop everything right now, but things are gonna continue for years to come. It’s hard not to be pessimistic, to be perfectly honest. I hope that doesn’t ruin the vibe of your show.

Ross Kenyon: You’ve totally ruined it. No, we try to be optimistic. We work in the field. We want to have a very large impact in addressing this. The emissions you’re talking about that are locked in right now for temperature change, we would like to begin drawing that out and making the financial infrastructure to fund that sort of thing happen as quickly as possible.

The stakes are very high though, and we see that. And there are definitely times when I will read something that will really bother me. I don’t have a lot of climate anxiety. I try to be productive and focus on what I’m actually doing to address it. But there are definitely times where it gets to me. It sounds like you get got to more often than I, perhaps.

J. Maarten Troost: Well, it’s ‘cause I had to do some research into all of this, and it’s like, let’s look at human... All right, let’s go big. Let’s go real big right now. Let’s look at human civilization. All right? So we’ve been around in our current evolutionary form for roughly 300,000 years. 300,000 years ago, people were just as smart as we are. Same physically, et cetera, et cetera.

But let’s be completely honest here. We didn’t do squat until 10,000 years ago, right? I mean, no great civilization, no great agriculture, no great cities, no space shuttle, no supercomputers, no anything for 290,000 years. So what changed 10,000 years ago? And that was the end of the last real ice age, and our temperature stabilized. And in these 10,000 years, our temperature has never deviated more than one degree Celsius, even during the little ice age. I’m talking global mean temperatures.

The entirety of human civilization, from the first farms and the first villages to quantum computing and everything we’re doing now, has occurred in a very, very tight climate zone bandwidth. And now we are talking about changing that bandwidth by three degrees, four degrees centigrade. It changes everything. It changes everything from agriculture, it changes everything from fisheries, it changes everything from what’s habitable and what’s not. These are, I believe, profound challenges to civilization, and it’s going to go on for decades.

And there’s no quick and easy solution to any of this. And then you have to take into account, of course, the modern realities of politics and blah, blah, blah, and economics and jobs and infrastructure and all that kind of stuff. It’s a hard road to get out of this hole.

Ross Kenyon: God, Maarten, you really killed the vibe in here.

J. Maarten Troost: I know.

Ross Kenyon: You’re supposed to be the happy-go-lucky... Yeah, I called you a cartoon character of Jimmy Buffett. Like, come on, man. Be the island guy, the beachcomber I want you to be.

J. Maarten Troost: It’s why I’ve been taking time out, dude. It’s like... But when you really start looking at it, I mean, we all live our own lives and all that kind of stuff, and everyone’s capable of having a happy life. But when you’re looking at things at the macro level and looking at where we’re at now, our response is completely inadequate. Completely inadequate. And there’s so much that we can do, as you know probably more than I, but we’re not getting there. We’re not electing the people that will bring us to these places. We are not creating the economic incentives, in law, that will help renewables and help with climate mitigation and all that kind of stuff.

It’s a hard one, and we’re going downhill right now. So I hope that changes. I hope that changes very rapidly. I mean, I’ve got kids, you know? I don’t want them to deal with this. So we’re already seeing it, every season, wherever it is you live. You’re in California. You’ve got your fires. I’m currently in Washington, DC. I don’t think we’ve had a snowflake yet this year.

Ross Kenyon: We’re actually... We’re in Seattle. We’re in the coronavirus land right now. We’re feeling it.

Well, I’m glad you said all that, Maarten, because now I’m about to nail you. It’s gonna be ugly.

J. Maarten Troost: Go ahead. I’m up for it.

Ross Kenyon: Assuming that you like this term, and maybe you don’t, but you’re a travel writer. Travelers, man, aren’t they the worst? They’re sort of buying stuff. They’re flying all over the world. Their emissions are gigantic. What’s the role of the travel writer in the age of climate change? How is this supposed to work now?

J. Maarten Troost: Yeah, that’s a good one, and that’s not something that I’ve ever had a real deep think about. I’ve never thought of my role in writing my books in any kind of moral light. It was sort of, I come across some interesting material and have interesting experiences that I think I can create something that will be enjoyable or informative for other people to read, and I didn’t really think much of it beyond that. I don’t put myself on some kind of totem pole to be representative of what one should follow. I’m curious about the rest of the world, so I spent many years seeing it.

I don’t know what the role of a travel writer today is, to be honest. I think the era has just changed for that genre. Like just hopping on a plane and going someplace new and writing about whatever you encounter, I don’t know if there’s a huge market for that right now. I think everyone is looking for travel as a source of personal meaning. And I don’t think that ever really goes away, you know? And it won’t, because you were a traveler. We’ve all gone somewhere to experience something novel that changes us and hopefully enlightens us and improves us. And that’s hard to negate. We’re always going to want to go someplace else to experience something new.

But yeah, no, I have no idea what the role of the travel writer is right now. I mean, all I know is that I don’t wanna be one of those stupid travel writers always writing about sunsets or whatever. You either get some red meat or you don’t. So we’ll see. I don’t know if I’m gonna go back to that genre, to be honest, so we’ll see.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I’m curious to know what you’ll end up doing next. I think the genre probably has taken a hit because when I... So I spent most of my 20s traveling. People who’ve listened to the show all the way through, they probably heard me talk about this some. And sometimes people would build me up too much. They’d be really impressed that I’ve been able to do this, and I was really like, “All you have to do is buy a plane ticket and not have a job.” It’s not that impressive. It’s not like I’ve done Kon-Tiki or something. I just flew somewhere.

And then, yeah, there is something about finding yourself. So before Nori, and before I got into the tech world at all, the last thing I was doing is I was working with a manager in LA on a sitcom pilot, and it was a satire of travel and travelers, because I would go places and be often miserable. I would find the company to be very much in that, like, fulfilling, faux yogi bullshit and, like, super, super spiritual.

J. Maarten Troost: Oh, so the indie act is... Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve done that.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. And I’m just dirty and miserable, and oftentimes kind of ill or not exercising nearly enough. I’d spent, like, a decade doing that, and I wanted to just nail the entire genre of it, and I ended up getting sucked into this thing anyways, what I’m doing now. But there’s something about that whole milieu that I find really obnoxious. And so how do you travel write when basically anyone with even a small amount of disposable income can experience the same thing? Within, like, 12 hours you can get anywhere on planet Earth.

J. Maarten Troost: Yeah, but that’s different. And so, like, when you’re going out as a travel writer, like I remember being in China and having some really sort of awful experiences. I remember being encountered by this sort of gang in Hangzhou, and they were, like, slapping me on the back of the head, and of course they were speaking Chinese. That was terrifying. I didn’t know what’s going on. I don’t know if I’m about to be knifed.

And there’s a thousand people on the street, and no one’s helping with anything. They’re just stopping with their dead-eyed faces staring at me. Everyone’s removed, no one’s engaged. This really sucks. It’s a little terrifying, but all I know is that I get five pages right here. I’ve got five pages of going through this. All right? So that’s the thing, sort of like when as a travel writer, even when you’re experiencing the suck, you know you get some material.

You know, a book just full of la-di-da experiences, I mean, I would not find readable. So I’m aware of the reality of all that. And again, it’s interesting. It’s different. It’s not Seattle, it’s not DC, you’re experiencing something novel, which is for me something I greatly enjoy.

Ross Kenyon: Well, it’s getting easier to travel, but that’s not to say that it is... Like, there’s a Larry David deep in my heart that just—

J. Maarten Troost: Lives in all of our hearts. Deep down in our dark space.

Ross Kenyon: Oh, he’s there. Yeah. And any of the big travel writers, like Bill Bryson, has made an entire career out of just, like, niggling over the smallest little social interactions, just complaining. Or Paul Theroux can be a cantankerous kind of guy, and I love that. But I also compare that to something like Instagram, and that medium just rewards this sort of false idea of what travel is. I don’t know what it is about images versus words there, but—

J. Maarten Troost: The big difference though is, people like Paul Theroux, people like Bill Bryson, they have a voice. You know what I mean? They have cultivated, they have worked very, very hard at their craft, and they’ve developed a voice that resonates with a lot of people, and that’s not anything you’ll ever find on Instagram. It’s a totally different medium. What those writers are doing is they’re connecting with something deep inside the reader’s brain or heart or soul.

You don’t even have to go far away. Like, I always think one of the best travel articles I’ve ever read was David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. He goes on a little seven-day cruise through the Caribbean, right? So from a travel writing genre, that’s a big fat nothing. You know what I mean?

Ross Kenyon: Yes, not impressive.

J. Maarten Troost: Yeah. It’s sort of like, I got nothing there. It’s a freaking cruise. Hundreds of thousands of people do it every single year. It’s going to be awful. Not my thing, whatever. He writes such a great thing about it.

And then I think about John Jeremiah Sullivan. He’s a writer, sometimes writes for The New York Times Magazine. He wrote an article about going to Disneyland, and he’s a pothead, so he’s always trying to look for places to smoke in Disneyland. I can’t believe The New York Times published this, but they did. And it’s really good travel writing.

So you don’t have to go far. You don’t have to do anything exotic. What people connect with is a writer’s voice, and that’s so different than the pathetic Instagram stuff, which I don’t even follow and don’t do anything with.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. That’s the thing that’s terrible about going to Pisa and seeing thousands of people all holding it up at the same time.

J. Maarten Troost: Oh. And but you know what? The thing is, with a good writer, you can make that good material that you can all connect with. But the Instagram stuff isn’t trying to do that. The Instagram stuff is more about, “Look at me. I’m bragging. This is where I’m at.” It’s tedious. It’s tiresome to see. It’s not interesting. Whereas a good writer will bring out the human in almost any setting. That’s what I’ve always been kind of attracted to with the writing.

Ross Kenyon: That’s a great point. I have often said that I like meeting people who are passionate about anything. Like I love it if I’m at a party and I’ll find someone, like pick a boring hobby that you would never wanna do, and if that person is really into it, I’ll be like, “Okay, I can kinda see why you would like that. Yeah, I get in that head space.”

So I think if you can do that with any location, yeah, you don’t have to go somewhere exotic. Like a lot of the travel books I’ll see, I saw one recently about someone biking the Silk Road. I was like, “Wow, that’s amazing.” Or a lot of them are endurance-based or weirder places that are off the beaten track to do. But also I could probably just, if I was a good enough writer, write a great book about cruising around Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, that would be good, right?

J. Maarten Troost: You absolutely could. You absolutely could. It’s all about cultivating the voice. It has nothing to do with the location. It’s all about the voice and whether or not people click with it. And there are some people who are very, very, very good at it, and I will read just about anything from them.

But I do see that for a while in the travel genre it was like whoever could do the most extreme thing. That doesn’t appeal to me. It’s all about... I can tell within 10 pages whether or not I’m gonna like something, no matter where they are.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think that’s a good point. Well, what can you say about what you might be doing? You’ve alluded to the fact that it may not be more books. I know you’re writing articles now. What are you looking forward to doing?

J. Maarten Troost: So I divide my time right now, you know, kids going to college and all that kind of stuff. So I do some consulting for some of the big multilaterals here, and I’m hoping to get a TV show launched. I have a writing partner for that, and we’re starting to go through the process for that, kind of have the story figured out. That’s what I would really like to do for the short term.

Ross Kenyon: A narrative show, not a documentary?

J. Maarten Troost: No, no, no. It’d be a fictional thing. Totally fictional. Something completely new. It’d be a lot of fun, I think. It’d be collaborative, which is very appealing for me. It’d be topical, it’d be funny, it’d be dark. I mean, it’d be perfect. So I’m hoping to see if I can get that worked out. That’s where I’m at right now. I just decided to take a time out from writing books for a little while, so maybe in the future.

Ross Kenyon: Cool. Yeah, that’s good to know. I would love to watch anything you made for television. I wish you lots of success with that.

J. Maarten Troost: Yeah, thanks. I hope this one works ‘cause it’d be so much fun to work on. I believe we’ve got something solid with this one, but we’ll see how it goes. New York publishing and Hollywood are two entirely different beasts, and I’m familiar with one, and I find the other difficult to read. So we’ll see how it goes.

Ross Kenyon: Well, Maarten, maybe you could help me plan out some future shows for this. You don’t have to name drop if you don’t want to, but who should I be talking about? I’d love to talk to people who are actually from the various islands in the Pacific. What type of work on climate change in the region is good that you know about? And I’ll of course do research on my own and keep programming here, but where should I be looking?

J. Maarten Troost: For me, my contacts are more with... I know somebody that works on coral reefs in Fiji. He’s been doing it since I lived in Fiji, so for a long time. He’d be good to talk to. He’s a lunatic, but he’d be good to talk to. There’s another guy who used to be an ambassador to the United Nations and the US from Solomon Islands, who is very much on top of things as well. So those would be good people to talk to. That’s what I can think of off the top of my head.

But yeah, the South Pacific is gonna go through some difficult times, unfortunately. And the unfortunate thing about it too is that Pacific Islanders, for the most part, are the most chill people ever. You know what I mean? And so it just saddens me so much that they’ve got so much catastrophe coming in their future, ‘cause for the most part they’re good people who have it figured out about what’s important in life.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, and they’re also the least responsible, or among the least responsible, for climate change.

J. Maarten Troost: Oh, absolute least responsible. Completely. They have nothing to do with it at all, and the fact that they’re going to be the first to really suffer from it is most unfortunate. And then the other thing is, each of these nations, really not even nations, each of these islands has such unique cultures, and to see that disappear in a fairly rapid span of time I think is tragic.

So we’ll see how it goes. But who knows? I mean, you know more than I do. Maybe we’ve got some carbon-sucking machine that’s right around the corner that’ll fix everything. I know people are working on all sorts of solutions, so we’ll see.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. We’ll keep plugging on that, and we’ll see. And if you’re listening out there and you know of good stories that are happening in regions that we haven’t yet covered in nearly enough detail, please let me know. [Nori promotion cut from the transcript. It's still in the audio, but it no longer applies.]

Yeah, I guess, Maarten, is there anywhere that you want to steer people to? You want them to buy your books, or is there someplace online where they can follow you?

J. Maarten Troost: I’m just skulking from the online world. It’s one of the big things that’s changed in the publishing industry. When I first started, you could quietly write your book, get your material, then publication day comes, and you do like a month of publicity. You get to travel and talk to people and all that’s very nice, and do some radio or TV and blah, blah, blah, and you feel really special for a few weeks, and then you’re left alone, and you can go back to just doing your damn thing.

You know what I mean? That’s kind of how I started, and then over the years things changed, and now it seems to me like writing books has become more an extension of developing a brand for yourself. It’s like I see so many of my writer friends that have to spend so much time cultivating their Instagram and Twitter feeds, and they have to deal with the garbage that is Facebook. And I just took a... Like I said, I’ve taken a long time out from all of that.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I had to track you down.

J. Maarten Troost: What’s that?

Ross Kenyon: I had to track you down. I was like, “Okay, who’s Maarten’s agent at least? I will get to him.”

J. Maarten Troost: Yeah. No, you found my agent, so that can be done. But I’m inactive on Facebook, but I will from time to time check whatever messages appear on there. So I guess that’s the easiest way, but I’m not active on it. Yeah, I know. I’m being a total recluse these days. But that’s all right.

Ross Kenyon: Well, that’s fine. Yeah.

J. Maarten Troost: And when it’s time to go back into the sun, I’ll go back into the sun. But that’s all right. I don’t mind being in the shade for the time being.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. There’s links in the show notes if you’re listening and you’d like to follow up with Maarten’s work. I feel very similarly, too. We just launched a Patreon for the podcast and I’m not, like, on Twitter. I’m not really that accessible. You could email me if you really wanted to, but you have to put in a little bit of effort to track down where that email is.

I don’t like what social media has done to humanity in lots of ways. Like, I don’t wanna be that accessible. I’m happy to talk to people who wanna make the effort, but I don’t wanna just be like someone can tweet at me and oh my God, now I have to respond or something. I don’t know. I feel like a recluse.

J. Maarten Troost: Well, it’s a complete rabbit hole, and I think that’s been... Let’s continue with our negativity. I think the internet, think of what we were thinking about the internet 10, 15 years ago, how promising it was. Like, we’d have these phones that would have all the knowledge of the world available to us. We could be connected to everybody. I mean, right now there’s more than 5 billion people that have smartphones. The Androids that most people use are very affordable, so everyone’s connected or whatever, and look at this garbage environment we’ve created.

You know what I mean? We all have to sort of navigate our own space and all that kind of stuff, but when you think about the misinformation and the way the algorithms kind of accelerate antagonism and conflicts and all that, it’s disappointing. And I choose not to play right now. So maybe one day.

Ross Kenyon: When I was in LA, one of the things I would hear in meetings too was people wanna know how many followers you have, and I’m like, “Can I just be a screenwriter?” I also have to have a personal brand and have insightful stuff to say every day?

J. Maarten Troost: Yeah, you do. I know. I’ve dealt with that myself. And yeah, you do. It’s unfortunate, but it is what it is.

Ross Kenyon: There’s people out there who, I don’t know, like for instance, David Sedaris is amazingly generous with his time when he’s on tour. He will, like, hang out after every reading until, I think, every fan who wants to say hi has said hi.

J. Maarten Troost: Yeah. He’s great. I’ve seen him myself. He’s a really good dude.

Ross Kenyon: But does he do that online? I think he just does that in person and then, like, online—

J. Maarten Troost: Well, I’ve seen him in person. I went to one of his readings. And he will stay and he’ll meet with everyone. And the other thing that I like about him is ‘cause he has such a big platform, he will always mention writers or works that he’s come across that he wants to promote and all that. He’s an incredibly generous man. No, I think David Sedaris is a great guy.

Ross Kenyon: But I also... I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anyone share anything out from it. Like, is he active on Twitter at all? Or is he just, like, the analog version of what everyone’s expected to be online now.

J. Maarten Troost: Yeah, I think he was maybe of the last generation who could get away with this, where he could just write his books, I guess he publishes every two or three years, something like that. He’s on tour a lot, I know that. He spends a lot of time on tour, and he just does it that way. But like I said, I’m not a big social media guy, so I don’t know what he does online.

Ross Kenyon: I just looked. I don’t even think he has one. So my instinct was correct. But yeah, I think maybe it is that. That’s the last generation. Like, I’ve been thinking about writing a book, or doing more creative endeavors as Nori grows and we focus on creative media more and more, and I’m like, “Ah, but then I have to do all this other stuff.” I don’t know. It trips me up more than the actual writing of a book, and I know how hard it is to write something that is long and arduous itself.

J. Maarten Troost: Yeah, the big difference is, when I’m working on a book and I’m writing something and, you know, is this the right thing? Is this the right direction that I wanna go? Is this the right thing to say, or is this too much? Is this just too much? You know what I mean? Is this going to be a trifle offensive to people? I will have lots of time to go back and reconsider, and figure things out, and make whatever it is that I’m trying to do the best possible.

Twitter, for me, is a dangerous beast because I am impulsive. I have my thoughts. I can tweet them out. I can destroy my life in seconds. And we all know how many people that’s happened to, you know? We all have our idiot friends. Or we’ve seen it happen, where somebody tweets something out and poof, they get fired or their career is over, and all that kind of stuff. That would totally be me. Absolutely.

Ross Kenyon: You’d be in, like, have you read Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed?

J. Maarten Troost: I’m familiar with it. I have a friend of mine who reviewed that book, and who’s talked to me about it. You know, we’re human beings. We all have stupid thoughts, and the fact that we have a little thing in our pocket now where we can share our stupid thoughts is an incredibly dangerous thing for some of us, including me. Yeah, it’s not a good medium for me. Not for now in any event.

Ross Kenyon: Okay. Well, in the show notes we’ll put up the places where you can buy your books and, I don’t know, I guess we’ll just have a lacuna there instead of something that’s more ready.

J. Maarten Troost: Yeah, sorry. I apologize. I know. I’m a publicist’s nightmare right now. I’m just doing things a little differently right now.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s good. I feel you on this one. I think we are kindred. Maarten, thanks for being on the show. I think this is a good place to call it.

J. Maarten Troost: Great. It was my pleasure. Thanks for the chat. I really enjoyed it.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. It was a lot of fun. And if you like the show, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, tell your friends. I hope you don’t mind that this was a little bit of an elliptical episode. I mean, there’s some solid climate change moments in there, but I like that we were able to talk about creative stuff. And thank you so much for listening.

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Sending your aggressive rebuttals to Poppy…

Toward the end of this episode, Poppy Russell said she hoped people wouldn’t come at her once it aired. I assured her they would. This was her first podcast ever, and it really is hard to say anything of interest to which no one would object.

In fact, one of the short films I made so long ago it feels like a different life entirely (it was), was about a local guy running for public office in Arizona who thinks that we’d all get along a lot better if we stopped talking about religion and politics. His platform is full of the neighborly banalities that make the world go round, like the incredibly regional Arizona gag of, “well, at least it’s a dry heat.” pause for all Arizonans to nod and politely smile

But Poppy has takes, and having a take means some amount of judgment. Some amount of judgment means some are judged wanting.

Being bearish on some things is part of the gig

Let’s consider what she actually said:

• She’s skeptical of ocean CDR due to the concentration of CO2 in seawater. The mass concentration is far lower than in air, so you have to move enormous quantities of water to capture anything. Her back-of-envelope number is that if you partnered with every piece of water-moving infrastructure that already exists, you’d get seven to ten million tonnes of removal potential.

• She’s bearish on policy in the near term, because the EU’s 250 million tonne allocation for removals in its emissions trading scheme over the next decade sits on top of a price gap between removals and the carbon price, and the ETS spent recent weeks adjusting to slow the pace of its own decarbonization targets—a “smart political move,” she said, which I take to be the diplomatic rendering of a less diplomatic thought. None of this is mean.

All in-bounds. All debatable. All things which people do debate the bounds on quite frequently!

Taxonomies serve the taxonomist

If you truly can’t get enough of the following question, you’ll want to read this piece…

Poppy’s job at Counteract, a venture fund specializing in carbon removal, is to look at more companies than nearly anyone else gets to see and then sort them into groups. The sorting is where the trouble starts.

Companies open the report, find themselves boxed with four others they consider nothing like themselves, and write in. Her defense is disarmingly modest: “it’s just a way that we’re grouping companies for the sake of it, that’s helpful for us.” Which is the honest answer. A taxonomy is worth the most to whoever built it, and she built this one to make investment decisions with. From inside a company, the differences between you and your box-mates are your entire reason to exist, so of course the box looks deranged. From her chair, you have to group or you can’t think at all. On the show I resorted to Life of Brian’s legendary, “You’re all individuals.” “Yes, we’re all individuals,” in unison—which is roughly what a portfolio category sounds like from the inside.

I wrote a whole piece a couple of months ago about how the taxonomy of this field refuses to hold still, so I won’t relitigate it here (and it is linked to above), except to say that Poppy is the person that problem happens to professionally.

When you start writing that rebuttal email

One thing I’ve learned from working with so many companies in this space is that if someone does miscategorize your company, it may be that the story you’re telling is not working. The nuance you hoped would read does not. And what I often find is that if the story is confusing, the fundamental business strategy often is as well.

This is information you need though. It’s honest feedback, and that can be a true gift. And if being misunderstood feels bad, being understood sometimes feels worse.

There’s an old adage I brought up on the show: the fastest way to get good information is to say something wrong on the internet. Poppy has run the experiment, though she insists the wrongness was unintentional. A couple of years ago Counteract published its skepticism about enhanced rock weathering unit costs, and the analysis was simple in the way good analysis often is. You move a tonne of rock, you can only sell credits against a fraction of it, you realize that fraction slowly, and in the meantime you’re paying to source the material, move it, spread it, measure it, and service the capital you raised to do all of that. Companies wrote back to tell her where she’d gone wrong and what they were building to solve the crunch points she’d named.

A year and a half later, Counteract invested in a company that had reached the same conclusions independently, saw the research, and figured here at last was a fund that would understand the pitch. Even if it didn't lead to this entrepreneur solving the problems Poppy laid out, she definitely put a candle in the window hoping someone would show up with it figured out in the future.

Investing in toxicity

There are some places I’m tracking, and of course Poppy is too. As everyone knows, venture money is going right now to electrification services and data centers, chasing energy demand. What Poppy is watching is toxicity. We put an enormous volume of toxic chemicals into our food and water systems, and the research tying specific chemicals to cancer and to hormonal and fertility problems keeps growing. Her angle is that many of the chemicals that are bad for humans are also bad for the climate, but the value proposition sits on the human health side—pesticides, agricultural inputs, microplastics, compounds that resist breaking down—with climate riding along as the secondary benefit. She was clear this isn’t hard climate tech, isn’t carbon removal at all, and that the open question, as ever, is who pays, and can we ever overcome the discount rate of such long-term problems?

I like the thesis for a bunch of reasons, partly because Deep Science Ventures is pointed the same direction, and partly because toxicity might be the rare concern that crosses political lines. The second Trump administration’s marriage of convenience with RFK Jr. never looked durable to me—I don’t suspect Trump enjoys much in the way of organ meats. And after the glyphosate case played out, RFK clearly lost the intra-administration battle over what to do about toxicity. But parents of every political stripe want less toxic environments for their kids, and we all know by now how much behavioral and social damage turned out to have lead underneath it. Get upstream of a poison and you solve problems that would otherwise take decades to surface. If there are climate benefits in the bargain, that’s just upside.

Where Poppy is bullish

Her bullish case is industrial integration, and her favorite example right now is Vateris. Their feedstock is gypsum, a nuisance waste with genuinely painful disposal costs. They carbonate it with point-source CO2 into a material cement companies can blend into concrete, improving its strength and durability, and they also produce a potassium sulfate fertilizer, which turns out to be where the core revenue lives. Set that beside portfolio-mates CREW Carbon, which sells wastewater treatment plants a more efficient way to run, and CarbonRun, which doses acidified rivers with limestone and gets restored salmon habitat out of the bargain.

She did hand me the best one-sentence compression of this field I’ve heard in a while: “Climate change is an acidity problem, and carbon removal is finding loads of sources of alkalinity to counteract that acidity.” I’d been toying on recent episodes with sorting companies into The Alkalinity Gang^TM and everyone else—because what else is there at the end of the day except taxonomy?

The plan for when we don’t know what to do

Which returns us to the flinch. Poppy noted that pre-seed carbon removal deal flow has dropped off significantly, and that most of the pre-seed founders still working on removal have stopped calling it carbon removal. I suggested somebody in this industry is running the Shaun of the Dead plan—go to the Winchester, have a pint, wait for this whole thing to blow over—and asked whether it’s funnier if that’s the founders or the investors. She allowed it’s probably the investors. Then, quickly: not that that’s what Counteract is doing.

Whenever I say bearish things on this show, that’s when the complaints arrive. What use is pessimism? My honest answer stands: me saying a thing has no bearing on whether it’s so. But the aversion isn’t stupid, either. This is a small industry running on fragile capital through a hostile political moment, and every public doubt may be a quotable line for someone who’d prefer the whole enterprise dead (which doesn’t mean we don’t say it…) See below for proof:

Climate Workers Anonymous

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

By Ross Kenyon

I understand wanting to keep the doubts in the group chat. I just don’t know how a field that only permits good news is supposed to learn anything or do work that has a halfway decent shot at feeling joyful.

Poppy’s version of hope, if that’s the word, is that pragmatism about policy pushes effort toward business models that don’t depend on future carbon prices, and that’s the durable stuff anyway. Whether that counts as optimism I honestly can’t tell.

She survived. She said so twice. Godspeed to you and your inbox, Poppy!

Links to several of Poppy’s research pieces are, and the full corrected transcript follows below.

• ⁠Between a Rock and a Hard Cost: The Economics of Enhanced Weathering

• Not All Carbon Removal Projects Are Created Equal

• ⁠Industry has a central role in CDR’s next growth phase

• ⁠Locating the sweet spot for biochar carbon removal

• ⁠Treading Carefully in the Waters of Ocean-based CDR

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There are some people whom you know you just have to read whatever they write next. For me, one of those people is Poppy Russell.

Poppy is the Research Manager at Counteract VC, a venture capital firm devoted to funding carbon dioxide removal companies. Poppy's research of course helps Counteract diligence potential deals, and sometimes she publishes key insights, models, and other things that make me think.

Listen in as Poppy and I discuss the state of carbon removal, what she's bullish and bearish on, whether toxicity could be the next big thing in climate, and which corners she is peaking around next.

This Episode's Sponsor

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Listen to the RCC episode I made with David LaGreca from EcoEngineers about how to choose, hire, and fire carbon market contractors.

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Resources

Check out my new show, Climate Workers Anonymous

Subscribe to the Climate Workers Anonymous Substack

"Toxicity: The Invisible Tsunami" by Deep Science Ventures

• "Between a Rock and a Hard Cost: The Economics of Enhanced Weathering"
  

• 
  "Not All Carbon Removal Projects Are Created Equal"
  

• 
  "Industry has a central role in CDR's next growth phase"
  

• 
  "Locating the sweet spot for biochar carbon removal"
  

• 
  "Treading Carefully in the Waters of Ocean-based CDR"

More from the show

Ad-free episodes and other benefits come with a paid subscription.

Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.

Carbon Removal Memes is still goofing around.

The books that come up on this show are collected on my Bookshop shelf.

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Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Hello, welcome to Reversing Climate Change. This is Ross Kenyon, the host of the show. I work in climate tech and carbon dioxide removal.

While I have you here, could you please open up your podcast app right now and give this show a great rating and review in Spotify or Apple Podcasts? A lot is taking place on Substack.

The other podcast I’m working on, Climate Workers Anonymous, has a publication that’s very active over there right now, and the podcast itself is being published through there. So you should follow Climate Workers Anonymous in whichever podcast app you use, or on Substack. There’s a lot of extra content on Substack if you like Reversing Climate Change.

The full transcript of episodes is being published on Substack, as well as extra commentary from me that didn’t fit into the show. I’m just trying to use that platform a lot more. Of course, a lot takes place on LinkedIn as well, because this is a, quote-unquote, professional carbon removal podcast.

But a lot’s happening on Substack as well.

Now to get down to it, today’s guest is Poppy Russell. If you work in carbon dioxide removal, you have probably seen Poppy’s research. She is the research manager at Counteract.

Counteract is a venture capital investor in carbon removal. If you haven’t pitched to them previously, you certainly have worked with or spoken with companies that have, or are part of their portfolio. Poppy puts out great research. I think her analysis often points to trends that other people will soon be talking about, but haven’t realized just yet.

I respect Poppy’s takes. They’re often ahead of the curve and interesting. They’re data-driven, and they’re often done with a very nice visual style that makes it easy to absorb the synthesis of quite a lot of information. I’ll put links to several of her articles in the show notes. You should go and check out her work, as well as Counteract generally.

And I’ll just get right to the show with Poppy. Thanks for listening. Here it is.

Episode

Ross Kenyon: Poppy, this is your first podcast ever.

Poppy Russell: It is. What an honor. Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: No honor. Right to the top. You just cut the entire line. Thanks for being here. I’ve enjoyed your research and chatting with you for a long time now, and we had to do it.

Poppy Russell: Yeah, we did. We did. It’s cool to be on it, because I think when I started, or before I started working in the space, I did listen to some of the Reversing Climate Change podcasts. So yeah, it’s fun to actually be talking on one.

I think it was Jennifer Wilcox’s episode, which was probably a long time ago now, but it was a really—

Ross Kenyon: It was a very long time ago. I think it was when the CDR Primer came out. When even was that? I don’t know. In the long, long ago.

Poppy, when your writing comes out, I always make sure to read it, because it’s often pretty. I like that there’s graphs involved, it’s visual. There’s also a lot of very serious analysis and data crunching that’s happening in there. And I often find that you covered maybe trends that are not super visible to others. It’s hard for you to acknowledge this without it seeming like you’re patting yourself on the back, but this is an accurate summation of how you do your work, no?

Poppy Russell: Yeah, I guess we have just an interesting lens on the carbon removal landscape based on the number of companies that we speak to. So we’ve got a bit of a privilege in the type of access we have to different data, different models, different ideas. And so part of our job is obviously filtering through a lot of that data and trying to understand trends that exist there within pathways, but also across the carbon removal landscape as well.

So definitely part of what we do at Counteract is trying to put back into the ecosystem and explain some of those trends that we see. And it’s always nice to know that people are actually reading it. And often people come back to me and tell me why the analysis is wrong or what I’ve missed, which is also equally useful.

So it’s definitely a unique sort of lens that we have on the market, and it’s a fun lens as well.

Ross Kenyon: Do you ever get to say something very British like, “It disappoints me to contradict you in this way, but I’m afraid it is you who are wrong”? Something very dour like that? Do you ever get to say that, or do you just go, “Hmm, interesting”?

Poppy Russell: Hmm, interesting. Or, I understand your point of view. Yeah, I mean, it’s always difficult when you put out content with names attached to it, with company names, because everyone who’s within a company has their very specific positioning. And so when they see themselves grouped with some other companies which they might themselves feel that they’re very different to, you can get some pushback.

And I always like receiving that pushback, but at the end of the day, it’s a category. And I’m not making this huge judgment that one category’s bad and one category’s good. It’s just a way that we’re grouping companies for the sake of it, that’s helpful for us.

So I find that can be a bit of a tension when you’re naming, and so you have to be a bit careful about it as well. And I’m sure I’ve made mistakes, as always.

Ross Kenyon: “You’re all individuals.” “Yes, we’re all individuals”—in unison. Yeah, but obviously categories compress information in order to note commonalities and divergences that are useful for some purpose, usually useful to the person who created the taxonomy. That’s probably the person to whom it’s most valuable.

But I think if you’re zoomed in enough to be one of those companies, maybe those distances start looking wider and wider to you, because you’re only in that one quadrant rather than you evaluating, judging everyone. What is worthy of investment from your distant ivory tower, Poppy? Hmm.

Poppy Russell: Yeah, but if you can explain why you’re better than all of the other companies in that category, then that’s a good thing, right?

Ross Kenyon: That is a good thing. Yeah, I think if you’re able to do that. I imagine it feels bad if you can’t.

Poppy Russell: Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: I mean, that’s information too though, right? Like, you should know that. If you aren’t that different from your rivals, then it’s not insulting to know that. If someone points it out and it’s true, it’s your job, I think, to find a way to hear that productively.

Poppy Russell: Sure, sure, sure. And if it’s my understanding that’s wrong of you, then it’s also a positioning thing—maybe a way that you’re positioning yourself is not cutting through in the right way.

Ross Kenyon: I work so much on strategic communications issues and positioning and branding, and how do you tell a story that shows asymmetry in a positive way that makes you stand out in a way that might look good for your company? I think I’ve just had hard lessons learned of some of the really fine-tooth ways of communicating.

As a company, often people just do not internalize those differences. There’s just so many companies to keep track of that they’re only gonna remember a couple details about you unless they diligenced you for some reason, or they got really interested in what you’re doing specifically. Most of the time it’d be like, “Oh, but you do soil carbon.”

And then you have to be like, “Well, we do this, but we also pair it with this and it works like this.” And they’re like, “Yeah, so it’s just like soil carbon, right?” I’m like, “Okay, fine. Sure, if that’s the way that you need to understand it.” I think people do get a little frustrated if you don’t use their particular verbiage sometimes, or maybe they think that they’re communicating successfully but the listener is not wanting that much information and so they aren’t hearing it.

Being misunderstood is not a good feeling.

Poppy Russell: No, it’s not. And I can resonate with it, in that I will often, if I put out something to get attention on LinkedIn, if it’s a nice picture that grabs someone’s attention, but actually it’s pointing to an article where all of that nuance is unpacked within it, then a lot of the time it’s…

And people are time constrained. They haven’t read the detail within the accompanying analysis. So yeah, I resonate with that feeling as well.

Ross Kenyon: Do you know the old adage that the fastest way to get good information is to intentionally say something wrong on the internet?

Poppy Russell: Ooh. Yeah, yeah, probably, as people will come back at you telling you why you’re wrong straight away. Is that what you do? Is that your special approach?

Ross Kenyon: Oh, I’m wrong all the time, but it’s always unintentional, I think. No, I think that that’s actually resultant. So maybe, given that your job is researching and this research is meant to filter into diligence work and creating a useful map of the ecosystem and where the world’s going, you might be getting better information just by occasionally having a provocative taxonomy that pisses someone off.

Maybe it’ll work somehow. It is attention too.

Poppy Russell: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. We had done some research on the enhanced rock weathering space a couple of years ago. And the analysis is quite simple, in the scheme of things, for an approach which is really complicated. But it was just sort of demonstrating to people where we saw some of the challenges in the enhanced rock weathering space, which mainly was tied to: it’s really difficult to get unit costs down, because you have a tonne of material of which a fraction of that you can charge carbon credits for.

And you realize that portion over quite a long space of time. And you have all of these costs associated with actually being able to get money for that removal, whether it’s getting the material, whether it’s moving it to the area of land, whether it’s measuring all of this, and whether it’s also paying back your interest against the amount of capital that you’ve taken out for that project as well.

So we’d put out this analysis just to show, these are some of the things that we’re concerned about in this space. And a whole series of companies come back to me and explain, one, areas in which I’ve been wrong in the analysis, but two, all of these different innovations that are actually happening to solve some of the key crunch points that we had identified.

And so you’re always slightly ignorant to the whole sphere of things that are going on. And getting the pushback from some of the stuff that you’re putting out is always beneficial to understanding the space better. So I don’t think we were intentionally being wrong, but I think we were being a bit provocative with saying that we think that the unit costs of enhanced rock weathering are really difficult to get right.

And now, a year and a half later, we’ve actually invested in a company in the space, someone who’d come and had answered what we thought some of the key problems were in this really clever way. So that was a really cool example of how putting out some research from our understanding has led to a company that’s satisfying some of this stuff coming towards us and saying, “Hey, I think I’ve got a solution that you might be interested in.”

Ross Kenyon: I love when entrepreneurs do things like that, assuming that they read this research and they did something that they wouldn’t have otherwise have done, unless they were just doing it in isolation and then realized, “Oh, Counteract is looking for this, and I saw this.” Oh, go ahead. Yeah.

Poppy Russell: I think it was literally that they had come to the same conclusions, and so they saw what we’d put out. I don’t think we made them do anything that they weren’t doing before. But I think they saw us and were like, “Okay, at least they understand why our solution is interesting.”

Ross Kenyon: What’s it like having your research not be additional?

Poppy Russell: Hey.

Ross Kenyon: That’s mean. No, I’m just kidding. It’s nice to have that. I feel like independent confirmation of ideas like that is trustworthy. When I see people come to similar conclusions like that from different ways of getting there, I think that’s really useful. I also love when entrepreneurs do engineer based upon criteria like that.

I think one of the mistakes a lot of entrepreneurs make is that they want to be first at something. You know, as the old Navy line goes, “Get there first with the most.” And I think once companies make bets and they’ve already decided on what the future’s gonna look like, and if they have to go first, they are deployed, and they’ve made staffing decisions, and told their board what they’re going to do with their money and stuff like that, it becomes pretty hard to change.

And then the companies that just wait and watch for a while, and they see, oh, there’s an RFP that we can just engineer something specifically for, or these companies are all stuck into the wrong type of measurement and they’ve invested all this money in this—what if we did something else? I like it when companies are able to do that kind of go-to-market, or just build a company around a demonstrated “these are the criteria.”

I like that.

Poppy Russell: Yeah, and I think we’ve definitely seen that trend over time in the carbon removal space, right, over the last few years, where there was initially so much white space and new carbon removal pathways and new technologies that weren’t really being commercialized.

And then we saw lots of companies arise filling a lot of those, and then the next stage of companies have been like, “Okay, how are we gonna create a compelling business case where removals are a part of that?”

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think whatever the next thing is that I found or co-found, if I do that again, I think I’m gonna be looking for opportunities to be part of that second wave who watches where all the first wave companies got stuck, and you’re like, “Okay, we’re gonna do something that builds on that, but goes in a different direction.”

‘Cause I watched those companies with a little bit of envy from Nori, where I’m like, “If only we still had that kind of optionality to redo everything in this kind of way.”

Poppy Russell: Yeah. What do you think the next space will be?

Ross Kenyon: I don’t know. I really don’t. I don’t know. That’s your job. Aren’t you supposed to—you’re the pattern matcher. You’re supposed to be telling me what the thing is to invest in with my career, with my time, with your money. What is gon—

Poppy Russell: With my money.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, with—

Poppy Russell: My money.

Ross Kenyon: —with the money that you’re closer to than I am. You’re supposed to be making decisions, kind of.

I don’t know. What do you think is going to be the next thing, either in climate or carbon removal or things adjacent to it? What are you watching closely?

Poppy Russell: Mm-hmm. This isn’t the best time to ask me this question, but—

Ross Kenyon: Why? Is there ever a good time to ask this question? It’s hard anytime you ask, I think.

Poppy Russell: It’s hard any time I ask, but yeah, I’m not doing so well at this question right now. This is a side take to the podcast.

Ross Kenyon: This is why you asked me about it. You had to buy yourself time so you could think while I was rambling. Great.

Poppy Russell: Yeah. Okay.

Ross Kenyon: It seems like it’s gonna be juicy, Poppy.

Poppy Russell: It’s not—no, it’s not gonna be juicy.

Ross Kenyon: Sounds sad. Okay.

Poppy Russell: Well, yeah. I’m really rambling here, so feel free to chop a bunch of this out. But I think—so in the venture capital space, obviously it’s quite clear where the trends of investment are going right now, which is electrification services, data centers for the growing energy demand, ‘cause there is a serious growing market there right now.

Whether that’s a purely pre-seed space—obviously it’s not a purely pre-seed space at the moment. But there’s probably scope for a fair amount of innovation there. Then I think one of the new trends that we’re seeing is on this conversation of toxicity, and detoxification.

So this might be kind of interesting to you from your Nori background, which is, we have a huge amount of toxic chemicals that we release into our food and water systems, and there’s growing understanding of how those chemicals are impacting our human health.

And you’re seeing these links between cancer and toxic chemicals, as well as hormonal regulation, fertility issues. And there’s growing research there which is tying particular chemicals to these serious human health problems. I’m kind of interested in it for the reason that a lot of these chemicals that are harmful for humans are also harmful for climate.

But the value proposition is more on the human health side, and then the climate side would be a secondary benefit. And so we’re seeing innovations there on pesticides and some of those agricultural inputs, but also you’re seeing stuff in the plastics, like the microplastics space as well.

And being able to break them down or eliminate some of the chemicals that are difficult to break down there. So that’s kind of an emerging space that I’m curious about, but it’s not a hard climate tech space. It’s just something where you’ll see significant benefits to climate and ecosystem. But the driving force behind it is the public health conversation.

Ross Kenyon: I like that angle for various reasons, and I’ve also seen others working in climate focus that direction too. I saw that Deep Science Ventures is focused on toxicity, and I’m not surprised that they are. It’s a cool angle for them to pursue. I also like that maybe it crosses political boundaries more, in the same way this comes up on the show, like one in three episodes at this point.

But one of the big marriages of convenience, seemingly, from the second Trump administration was RFK Jr. and Trump, and seeing how the glyphosate lawsuit and Supreme Court case played out. So RFK clearly lost the battle of what to do with toxicity. And it never seemed like the guy who prides himself on eating McDonald’s all the time was going to be aligned with the guy who has much stranger health proclivities, one might say.

But it was seeming like maybe one of those things that parents especially, of all political stripes, care about—making sure that their kids have less toxic environments. We all know at this point how bad things like lead have been for seemingly all behavioral criminality issues, sociological issues. So much of it is toxicity related.

And if you’re able to get upstream of that and eliminate some of these things, you might be solving problems that may take decades to truly show up. But of course, we’re also living with—I mean, I’ve known so many people who have had fertility issues at this point. Maybe it’s just people are talking about it more.

Maybe I’m just in that age demographic where people do talk about it more, where when you’re in your 20s, you don’t really hear about it at all, or you just don’t know. But I feel like at this stage a lot of people are much more open and culturally it’s maybe more—so there’s like some confounding variables that are happening in there, but toxicity is very much on the menu across the board.

And I don’t think it depends a ton on politics. And if there’s climate benefits, I hadn’t even thought about that, but just gravy.

Poppy Russell: Yeah. The climate benefits would be secondary. Obviously, who’s gonna pay, that would be the question to answer. But that’s not a carbon removal related space, but it’s something that’s interesting. On the carbon removal side, we have seen a significant drop-off in the pre-seed CDR companies.

So I think we’re maybe in a phase at the moment where, just as you said, you’ve got people who are maybe stopping and waiting to see how the next year or so is gonna play out, and where there are new opportunities. And most of the pre-seed companies that we see that are looking at carbon removal will not be saying that they are looking at carbon removal. So that’s definitely a positioning thing at the moment.

Ross Kenyon: Ugh. I’m only laughing because, one, ADHD brain active, and then two, knowing that you’re British, I was just thinking of—is it funnier if it’s carbon removal project and tech developers, or funnier if it’s investors? Go to the Winchester, have a pint, wait for this whole thing to blow over. Do Shaun of the Dead.

Poppy Russell: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s a fair point.

Ross Kenyon: So if you were talking while I was thinking about that, it’s just a point I’m gonna have to relearn when I listen back to this show.

Poppy Russell: Yeah. I mean, it’s probably the latter, right?

Ross Kenyon: Oh, of investors just waiting? Is that what you’re saying?

Poppy Russell: Yeah. Not that that’s what we’re doing.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. How does that work with investors where you have duty of care requirements legally, of making sure companies—especially if you’re on the board of and have liability—of making sure that you’re stewarding them in a way that is appropriate? But also there’s a lot of companies within similar categories of carbon removal that I imagine you’d like to invest in, and maybe sometimes their interests overlap in ways that might be conflicting. How do you think about that? Is it good to invest in 10 different biochar companies or something like that, or do you just get one bite at the apple and then have to move on?

Poppy Russell: Maybe it’s more helpful to just discuss our broader approach when we’re looking at companies, and what our investment mandates are. But we look for—as a very, very focused fund, which is specializing in carbon removal, we try and introduce as much diversity as possible in the types of companies that we’re supporting.

So yes, that of course means the carbon removal mechanism, but it also means the geographies, it also means business models as well. And it might be where they’re an input provider or whether they’re a market enabler. We try and cover as much diversity as we can.

And then we also look for companies that we’d call catalytic, and for us that means either some foundational IP that’s really moving the needle on some specific problem in a technology space. So in direct air capture, that might be on the energetic side, significantly lowering the energy costs.

And then we also look at new pathway enablers, so something that we think is new in the space and might unlock a whole different mechanism for carbon removal. So companies in our portfolio like CREW Carbon or CarbonRun—CarbonRun are looking at dosing rivers with limestone and doing this river restoration that also removes carbon at the same time.

And CREW Carbon are doing a similar thing in wastewater treatment. Actually, CREW Carbon and CarbonRun, their fundamental mechanism is quite similar. They’re ultimately introducing limestone into an acidic water source and removing CO2 in that way. And from an MRV and a data perspective and an efficiency perspective, they will have some similar findings from the technology space.

But how they’re going to go to market and the way they’re gonna position themselves is completely different. CREW Carbon are looking at the wastewater industry and they’re looking at how can they improve the efficiency that wastewater treatment plants run at, and where can we reduce costs to wastewater treatment plants. CarbonRun are looking at—it’s actually a bit more of a nature-based solution in its philosophy. It’s like, how can we restore acidic rivers that will boost salmon populations, provide a nicer space to live? And they’ve actually got a lot more of a lean in from a resilience and ecosystem protection perspective.

So they’re two companies where the fundamentals of what they’re doing are very similar, but the way that they scale will be completely different. And they’re both in our portfolio, and we’ll make sure that we market everyone to other investors and to the broader carbon removal ecosystem in the way that it most makes sense for them.

So the type of investor who might be interested in CREW Carbon will probably not be interested in someone like CarbonRun, because one’s very industrial and one’s more on the nature restoration side. Did that answer the question? I think it did.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think so. That’s one way to split it, but one thing that’s come up on this show recently has been, I’ve been thinking about how you could categorize companies as being in the alkalinity gang or not. And maybe we don’t ever talk about, well, we do alkalinity-based carbon removal, because then people would be like, “Well, so does almost everyone?”

Or like half of everyone—if you take biochar out, it’s mostly alkalinity based.

Poppy Russell: Yeah. Climate change is an acidity problem, and carbon removal is finding loads of sources of alkalinity to counteract that acidity. And everyone is leveraging alkalinity in one way or another in the space. So it’s probably not the easiest separation there.

Anyone could argue they’re an alkalinity company. Yeah. Source massive sources of alkalinity—that’s also been a space that we’ve been interested in investing in. So we have a couple of companies in our portfolio that are really not carbon removal companies, but they generate alkaline byproducts that could be really useful for CDR.

So there’s a company called Magrathea, and they’re producing magnesium from brines. They have a magnesium hydroxide byproduct that could be a feedstock to be leveraged in the CDR space. But their business model’s around making metal, or extracting metal.

Ross Kenyon: I think this ties in really nicely with your work on industrial tie-in. That’s something that I think you’re fairly bullish on, yeah?

Poppy Russell: Yeah. Yeah, I think it’s been an interesting conversation over the last couple of years on how carbon removal is going to be scaled in industry, and where is there strategic value to be had by industries within the carbon removal landscape. So industrial integration kind of means quite a lot of things. I think there’s lots of ways to do it. And some of the neatest companies that we see are the ones that are able to explain their value to an industrial, or provide real value to an industrial company.

And we see it in a few different ways. So you have companies that are leveraging and valorizing true waste, materials that are costly to dispose of, and tapping into those. Then you have companies that are providing useful products to industry that have material value, but also might have carbon sequestered in them.

And then you also have companies that might improve some process efficiency in one way or another. I mentioned CREW Carbon earlier, but they’re an example of that, where they’re doing carbon removal, but the buy-in from industry is because they’re improving the wastewater treatment process.

But companies who can integrate and explain their value to industry really well, we’re seeing have some quite interesting progress. And happy to go into more detail there. I think my favorite example at the moment is a company called Vateris. Their main product is a carbonated cement alternative. And the process is they take CO2 from point source, so it might be from a bio-CCS, but it also could be from a cement flue stream.

And they create this carbonated material that a cement company can displace some of their cement with, integrate it, and that material releases CO2 slowly over time, and it improves the strength and durability of the concrete. That’s the angle of why they’re providing an interesting product. But they also have some other neat things in their business model, where the feedstock that they’re using is gypsum.

So gypsum’s this really annoying nuisance waste material, which has got very high disposal costs associated with it. And they’re taking that, valorizing it. And then they also produce a potassium sulfate fertilizer. And so actually their core revenues are driven from the fertilizer sale, but they’ve got this really valuable material that’s interesting to cement companies.

And I think that that’s a really nice example of a company that’s fitting into industry and also able to use another revenue stream to reduce their costs on the carbon side. The cement company can decide how they use that embedded carbon, whether they use it for their compliance reasons, or else just claim it’s a carbon benefit.

Ross Kenyon: They seem like they have probably better than average odds of survival. That’s pretty neat.

Poppy Russell: So I think the industrial integration side is gonna be helpful for companies in the near term, if they can show that value.

Ross Kenyon: What’s an example of something that you’re feeling bearish on right now?

Poppy Russell: Um.

Ross Kenyon: You can be as mean as you want.

Poppy Russell: I don’t like to be mean.

Ross Kenyon: You don’t disappoint anyone.

Poppy Russell: Um—

Ross Kenyon: Well, people are just gonna infer from what you just said that if they don’t have an industrial integration possible to them, that you’re being mean to them. So there’s really no way out of this.

Poppy Russell: It’s definitely easier, if you’re going down the venture capital route of raising money, it’s easier to have that industrial partner. It’s definitely not the only way that you can survive. Biochar companies, for instance, you have other financing routes available to you.

If you have your project and can get your offtake agreements and you sell your biochar, you can start to finance your projects in other ways. So it’s definitely not the only way to survive. But if you’re trying to raise it on the venture side, you definitely want to show that industrial buy-in.

I guess I’m bearish on some of the ocean CDR stuff. I know it’s early days of that.

Ross Kenyon: You’re in trouble. Early days? Yeah. Sorry, continue. Yeah.

Poppy Russell: Too early, so it’s a bit of a cop-out anyway to say that. But I’ve always been quite skeptical of the ocean CDR stuff.

Ross Kenyon: Hmm. All of it? Or just alkalinity focus, dosing approaches, something else?

Poppy Russell: Yeah, I think also I’ve been skeptical on the direct ocean capture side as well. You often hear this phrase around the concentration of CO2 in water, that it’s so much higher than in air. But it’s also like your mass concentration of CO2 in water is significantly lower than it is in air.

So you have to move a lot more mass to capture the same amount of CO2. So that I’ve always found an interesting challenge. And you can find ways around it, like you can partner with companies that are already moving and pumping water, infrastructure that’s already there.

But the scale of that, in the scheme of things when we’re talking about the amount that we want carbon removal to scale to, is quite small. I think I did some maths a while ago that it was like seven to 10 million tonnes total potential if you partner with all of the existing water moving infrastructure.

Ross Kenyon: Okay. What’s another thing that you’re bullish about, Poppy? I’m like unpacking all of your research in rapid fire way now.

Poppy Russell: I think one of my sarcastic answers for what my favorite carbon removal approach is, is planting trees. But I have been quite interested in some of the synergies that these large nature-based project developers might have with more novel carbon removal approaches.

And one of the dynamics that we think about when we’re looking at carbon removal projects is what we call the carbon curve. So the sequestration profile of which a project removes carbon over its lifetime. So you have a project which is maybe a forestry project where you have this slow buildup of carbon over time.

And that’s quite difficult to finance, because you have this period at the start where you don’t have anything to buy or sell. And I think that these large project developers have quite an interesting opportunity for integrating some different carbon removal pathways that might also need land that have a different carbon sequestration curve.

That means that some of these project developers will be able to tap into revenues sooner than their initial project expected. So that’s something that I’ve been mulling over recently. And I think that there’s an opportunity in some of the mineralization approaches here, particularly in enhanced rock weathering, where you have your front-loaded carbon removal sequestration profile—most of your removal happens in the first couple of years.

So that could be an interesting opportunity for integration there.

Ross Kenyon: Enhanced weathering would have to issue some credits in order to see that happen. But—

Poppy Russell: Yeah. I mean, there’s a suite of other challenges in the enhanced rock weathering space, but I think that that’s an opportunity. And I think particularly enhanced rock weathering companies that are leveraging approaches that mean the minerals are reactive and actually weather very quickly and have a higher signal, they might have an opportunity there.

Ross Kenyon: I do like seeing more project developers focus on having multiple different pathways to carbon removal, or just other types of environmental attribute crediting available to them.

Varaha has been really interesting to me. It’s cool seeing Residual do stuff like this. It’s also cool if you can see the same or nearby project sites sort of cycling into each other to level out the revenue curve that they have accessible to them. I think companies that have not yet figured out that issuance speed is very, very important, for a myriad reasons—

Poppy Russell: Of course. Yeah, there’s stuff that we don’t really know yet. And for example, I’ve just said quite a diplomatic answer about the enhanced rock weathering space, which I have traditionally been really bearish on. But we’ve just invested in a company that I think’s quite cool.

Ross Kenyon: You could say you’re bearish on policy. You kind of started off with that a little bit too. You’re like, a decade away might as well be on the moon, basically.

Poppy Russell: Oh, it’s just such—it’s also not diplomatic right now. I don’t know why I’m trying to be diplomatic. But—

Ross Kenyon: I say deflating things about policy on a regular basis on here. I’m like the voice of, I don’t know if the political trends are gonna be that good. I don’t know, you’re in the UK. I’m sure you’re watching Reform and being like, “Hmm.” Like UK ETS stuff. What’s gonna—is Farage gonna touch this thing?

I don’t—

Poppy Russell: Yeah. Okay, okay. Okay, I am slightly bearish on policy at the moment. And I think we’ve been interested in the evolving compliance case for removals and how and when that’s gonna come in. And we’ve had some really exciting news in Europe around the integration of removals into the EU emissions trading scheme, where they’ve allocated this 250 million tonnes of removals in the next decade. But I think there is a huge caveat in that announcement, which is just around the price gap between removals and the carbon price. And I think where we sit, it’s really, really difficult to project the future of the ETS carbon price right now, because there is so much political uncertainty around it.

And we’ve seen the ETS also make some adjustments in the last couple of weeks that are delaying the speed at which they’re targeting decarbonization. And that’s obviously a smart political move. But it does mean that the future of that carbon price is really uncertain.

So whereas they’re showing that there’s going to be this use case for removals in the compliance carbon market in the future, in the near term I’m a bit bearish on the degree to which that actually supports removals. So there we go.

That’s another thing I’m a bit bearish on.

Ross Kenyon: Whenever I’ve said bearish things about carbon removal, I think those are the times when people complain to me the most. I’ve heard, “Why are you—what use does it serve to be pessimistic in this way?” Or, “Why do you…” Don’t you need to know if that’s a possibility or a reality?

And I don’t want it to be that way, but me saying something doesn’t impact whether or not it’s real.

Poppy Russell: Well, you need to be pragmatic as well. And I think being pragmatic around that side of things will mean that some of this stuff on the business model innovation that we spoke about already, there’ll be more of a push for that side of innovation.

And that’s the stuff that’s gonna be really scalable and sustainable, because it’s not going to be reliant on some of these future prices, and that will just be a nice additional option to tap into.

Ross Kenyon: I see where your head’s at. The investment thesis according to Poppy Russell is very obvious to me. Thanks for being here, Poppy. Was it an okay first podcast experience for you? You survived.

Poppy Russell: I survived. I survived. I hope that people don’t come at me after this.

Ross Kenyon: They’re gonna come at you, I’m sure.

Poppy Russell: Yeah, I don’t like answering the bullish and bearish questions, particularly on a carbon removal podcast that’s been around for all of this time and has all of this carbon removal following. So…

Ross Kenyon: You could have just said you’re bearish on Reversing Climate Change, and then I would’ve been like—and the stop button is here. Okay.

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What is remove?

If you’re in CDR, you probably know about remove. They’re a European nonprofit who has trained hundreds of carbon removal entrepreneurs in how to stand their company up. They run accelerator programs across many world regions, and this fall are launching their Latin American program in which I am so proud to coach.

I started working remove after I had been volunteer mentoring in accelerator programs for awhile and had discovered how much I loved the work. I get to collaborate with CDR teams all around the world and help them learn more and go faster. It’s a real treat.

If you are a Latin American carbon remover or know someone who is (or who may soon like to be), be sure to send them the link to apply for remove’s LatAM program.

There are many startup accelerators out there. There are fewer focused on climate tech. Fewer still for carbon dioxide removal. Lucky for us, remove runs the absolute heck out of their programs. And it's been a true joy of mine coaching startups in them this past year. I can't even believe it, but the time has come for another program... In Latin America!

If you are a Latin American carbon dioxide removal project and/or technology developer, you should apply to remove's LatAm cohort. Applications are out now, and there is a chance we might end up working together.

I have had nothing but wonderful experiences with the team at remove. They offer focused training, a powerful network, and an unmatched peer group in your cohort. Hoping to see you there!

In today's episode, cofounders and managing directors of remove, Marian Krüger and Hans Westerhof, join the show to talk about the program, what it means to be ecosystem builders, and how they aim to grow capacity in the Global South generally and Latin America in particular.

This episode's sponsors

EcoEngineers: a full-service advisory and consulting firm focused on carbon dioxide removal, decarbonization, and carbon markets

Listen to the RCC episode I made with David LaGreca from EcoEngineers about how to choose, hire, and fire carbon market contractors.

And the one with Rudy Krehbiel, also of EcoEngineers, on which story carbon dioxide removal is actually in and what it costs to be inside the wrong one.

2026 EcoForums Training Series: Navigating Global Carbon and Fuel Regulations, Market Mechanisms, and Life-Cycle Analysis Fundamentals

Resources

Check out my new show, Climate Workers Anonymous

Subscribe to the Climate Workers Anonymous Substack

remove's website

Apply to the LatAm carbon removal accelerator

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Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.

Carbon Removal Memes is still goofing around.

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Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Hey, thank you for listening to Reversing Climate Change. This is the host, Ross Kenyon, and I am proud to call today’s guests my colleagues. I’ll explain a little bit more about who they are and how we came to work together.

Before I do, two quick little notes. Do know that there’s a second podcast going on. It’s a collective art project called Climate Workers Anonymous, where if you have feelings, experiences, or analysis that you have generated through your work in climate, you can send in an anonymous recollection that I will read on your behalf. We’re like six episodes deep right now, something like that. It’s been really great to see people share things that have clearly bothered them for so long in private. I’ve really enjoyed being able to facilitate that through this sort of PostSecret for climate collective art project, if you will.

Secondly, I’ve been writing a lot on Substack. The podcast itself has a Substack. You can go to rosskenyon.com, which is the same as the Substack. Climate Workers Anonymous is hosted through Substack, so it has a lot of benefits there as well. I’m just trying to use it a lot more. So if you like Substack, come find me: Ross Kenyon, Reversing Climate Change, Climate Workers Anonymous, and also I’ve been trying to get Carbon Removal Memes to pick up over there as well.

Today’s show is with two of my colleagues from remove. If you work in carbon dioxide removal, you almost certainly know remove. They are a nonprofit in Europe that runs accelerator programs for carbon dioxide removal. They tend to focus on different geographies, their programs are geographically split, and they just announced a new Latin American program with support from Milkywire, who also supports so many early stage CDR startups. Really hoping to see more companies come out of Latin America, and how we can give them the greatest chance possible for success.

Hans Westerhof, and I’m taking a risk here, I think you say your last name properly with a V sound, is the co-founder and managing director at remove. Marian Krüger, you have the same title as Hans. How fun, I didn’t realize it was literally the same.

I’ve really enjoyed working with Marian and Hans and the rest of the remove team. They’ve been wonderful the entire way through. I got into coaching because after my previous company Nori closed, I just kind of started volunteering, working in accelerator programs, working with startup founders, trying to figure out what was next for me, and I found out that I really loved the work. I got good enough reviews that I just kind of kept going, felt like I was adding value at a time when I didn’t really know which way was up career-wise, and that has just turned into more and more opportunity. And so I am a startup coach in remove’s programming, and I love it. I get to work with a bunch of different teams that pass through their programs. They teach me a ton. I get to point out all of the big holes that I fell into and how I learned to stop falling into them nearly so often.

If you apply to this program, there is a chance that we will be working together, which could be a very fun experience. If you are a Latin American company, or know someone who is interested in carbon dioxide removal in Latin America, you should apply, or encourage this person to apply. Help make this an amazing cohort of dedicated Latin American co-founders in carbon dioxide removal. We need everyone that we can get using their brainpower to help make this whole thing work.

If you are a buyer or an investor that’s interested in working with Latin American companies doing CDR, feel free to get in touch with me or with Hans and Marian. They will be very happy to figure out if and how there’s a possibility to collaborate here. Thanks so much for your time. Here is the show.

Ross Kenyon: Hans and Marian, thank you so much for being on the show. How have we not done this before, by the way? I guess, Marian, you’ve been on. Hans, this is...

Hans Westerhof: It’s my first time, Ross. Thanks for having me.

Ross Kenyon: It was only a matter of time. We’ve been working together in remove’s programming now for a while, and there’s exciting news coming out of remove that I’m excited to see. You’re expanding. Congratulations. The only organization in carbon removal that’s expanding right now.

Hans Westerhof: We don’t wanna be the only one, but yes, we are expanding.

Ross Kenyon: I know, I’m so sorry. But I don’t know, you’re going to Latin America. Some of the biggest, most successful companies in carbon removal hail from Latin America, and remove now has a footprint there. What’s happening in Latin America?

Marian Krüger: Absolutely. Yeah. For folks who might not know what remove is, we’re a nonprofit that works with carbon removal startups, have been doing so since 2021, and our origin is in Europe, right? We started out working with European founders, and then started expanding to the Global South because, for many reasons that we might wanna get into today, there is plenty of opportunity to deploy carbon removal, certain pathways more than others, but to realize really the megatonnes and gigatonnes we need.

At the same time, from a climate equity perspective, it would also be the right thing to make sure that we make carbon removal a just and equitable industry. So we’ve been doing this in India and in Africa as well. It’s been more than 200 startups, and we’ve had the pleasure of working with you as part of those programs as well, supporting those startup founders.

And it was only a matter of time. If you look at where the potential for carbon removal lies, and if you look around the globe and also at CDR.fyi, you quickly stumble upon the Latin American continent, in all its diversity, but one thing is clear: the potential of carbon removal is just tremendous and immense, while the ecosystem itself is in its infancy.

You have players such as Exomad Green. Talking about organizations in carbon removal that are expanding, here’s one, expanding their production lines. But apart from that, it is quite disparate and really in its infancy, and that typically is where we feel comfortable getting in and helping to build the ecosystem, and helping to make sure that the entrepreneurs who are already daring to build carbon removal companies, which in itself, as you well know, is difficult, and doing that in an ecosystem that is immature is even harder.

So that’s where we luckily got Milkywire on board to fund our first cohort there, which we will launch very, very soon, or actually, as when this podcast launches, we will have launched it. Expecting a lot of interesting applications, and then we will start working with the founders on the ground starting in fall of this year.

Ross Kenyon: Anything to add, Hans? Or do you feel like Marian covered it pretty well?

Hans Westerhof: Of course, he covers it really well, right? So yeah, I think for us the premise that we see is that there is a tremendous potential in the Global South, and as Marian said, ecosystems are in infancy, and that we can help by building a bridge between the more well-developed ecosystem in the Global North, if you will, by providing access and relationships to teams that operate in the Global South.

In some countries, there’s just a few teams working on carbon removal, right? So as an entrepreneur, you’re pretty lonely there. There’s not many peers around, and we provide a community and a bridge towards the global CDR entrepreneurial community.

Ross Kenyon: Talking about an ecosystem for carbon dioxide removal developers, or maybe just carbon dioxide removal in general, what specifically do you mean? How much of it is this peer-based community? How much of it is something else? It’s one of those terms that... well, there’s an LBJ line. It’s like, “It’s like grandmother’s nightshirt. It covers everything.” You know? Like, what is not ecosystem, ultimately? Can it not be everything?

Hans Westerhof: I would say that...

Ross Kenyon: I’m not sure if I’m gonna keep that, by the way. That might be too ridiculous. He was a very colorful president, I will say that. I’m sorry, I love that line. Please say whatever thing you were going to say now.

Hans Westerhof: Yeah, keep the line in. The ecosystem is not only peer-based, although that is part of the proposition of our program, bringing entrepreneurs together, but connecting them to registries, protocols, to portfolio builders, to buyers. As we know, CDR is a niche market. There is still only a few players. If you look at it as a global industry, there’s still a limited number of players out there.

There might be a few thousand people, maybe 10,000 people working in CDR. There’s less than 1,000 teams working on CDR, entrepreneurship teams. They all need access to registries, to protocols. They need to develop the right procedures. They need access to buyers. And broadly also, we need a supporting CDR policy ecosystem, which some organizations are really focused on, and others, politicians with a broader mandate, need to incorporate in their mandates.

So doing some evangelizing there is again part of supporting the CDR ecosystem. So maybe, you know, it’s pretty broad in that sense, but I think if you look at it globally, it’s still a limited number of people that are engaged.

Ross Kenyon: I like to say that I’m involved in ecosystem building, but I think for someone who’s especially perceptive, they might just read that as unemployed, because it’s like, “Well, does someone pay you, or are you just helping a really big group of people in a one-off capacity, or what exactly is this?”

I feel like I’m contributing to the ecosystem somehow, but it is one of those things that’s not the same as having cash on the barrelhead, money changing hands kinds of deals. But it’s one of those things where I can kind of feel the connections coming together. Do you have that sometimes, where you know that you made the right intros, you made these things come together that wouldn’t otherwise do it? And is that part of ecosystem building, or am I imagining that for my own ego?

Marian Krüger: No, I do think so. Although, I think maybe to ease your concerns about how that might be perceived, the effects of ecosystem building are not always linear and not always clearly connected to the activities. Or you might only be able to connect the dots afterwards, right? So I think you are active in a variety of things where, in essence, you’re trying to see what sticks.

You look at the ecosystem, you look at the players that are in a system, and you try to see gaps and try to fill them, and not all of the gaps actually need filling, or not all of the gaps immediately lead to an outcome. But unfortunately you don’t always know from the get-go. I’ll give you an example where it’s quite evident for us what ecosystem building means.

Hans already mentioned that for us, a main thesis of going to the Global South is connecting the developers there with the Global North, because that is where the buyers are. Unfortunately, we don’t see a lot of buyers in the Global South, and I don’t see that changing relatively soon. That is where the capital is, and that is also where the supporting, enabling ecosystems such as the registries are, right?

But I think the Global North ecosystem often falls prey to the availability heuristic, right? For those of us who’ve read Daniel Kahneman, the rational homo economicus is not a thing. We’re all terribly biased and actually terribly wrong and bad at making rational decisions.

Ross Kenyon: Speak for yourself, Marian.

Marian Krüger: Okay, I will speak for myself then. But I have the whole of behavioral economics, I’m standing on those shoulders to make those statements. Anyways, the availability heuristic essentially says we only perceive those things as relevant that we have recently been in touch with. So to make this concrete, if I’m a buyer or if I’m an investor, and I see certain developers at Carbon Unbound in Europe, in New York, wherever, those are the ones that I have top of mind if I’m thinking about who to invite for an RFP, or who to buy from, or who to invest into. A lot of the founders from the Global South, for reasons that are financial, or emissions-conscious, or about access, they cannot make it to Carbon Unbound.

So does that mean that they should be considered less in any RFP processes, less for any investment? In our minds, no. But that is a gap that we saw, and we felt it needed to be solved. So just coming out of London Climate Week, we ran an event where we invited three founders from three continents working on carbon removal to give them the space to speak to a group of buyers, investors, and other folks, because otherwise they probably wouldn’t have been able to.

And we know that they specifically just came for this event, otherwise they wouldn’t have made the trip. Because, well, if you’re at a Carbon Unbound and you’re one of 200 developers trying to catch Microsoft once they come out of the bathroom, I don’t think that is necessarily the highest leverage point of either your money or your time.

Ross Kenyon: If you want the highest leverage, you follow them into the bathroom. That’s how you get a... You don’t wait outside. What a rookie mistake. Bad advice, ecosystem builder. That’s great. Well, did that event go well, by the way? Do you feel like there actually were results, in that you were able to overcome the availability bias there and get people to be like, “Oh, maybe we should zoom out a little bit”?

Marian Krüger: I mean, we needed to kick people out at the end because they still wanted to connect. I think that’s always a good sign, right? One thing that landed too, and I’m also looking at Hans, he’s probably also got stuff to say about this. In the main, and you know this, Ross, because I believe you’re also a proponent of this, we think just relying on voluntary carbon markets as a business model is not a smart idea these days, and that in itself is not a bold statement.

I think a lot of the CDR ecosystem would agree. So what does that mean? You diversify revenue streams. You look for other business models. And that is also a main thesis of ours, that we need to enable founders to do this. So we deliberately made sure to have two founders on stage that did this. And why am I saying this?

Not only because this is a thesis of ours, that it’s important that you integrate into industrial pathways, into existing industries, but also because afterwards I was talking to folks who up until recently were rating these projects, right? Rating biochar projects, rating ERW projects, and they said afterwards to me, “Huh, I’ve always looked at these projects and read, oh, diverse revenue streams, co-products. I never knew what this means, and now I finally understand.” Right? So for me, that’s fighting a bias pretty evidently.

Hans Westerhof: And to Marian’s point, just seeing these founders in real life makes a real difference. Again, the recency bias, the people you’re familiar with. There’s of course many great founders in CDR, but if you don’t see them, you don’t hear them speak, you don’t exactly know what they do, why would you engage? It’s difficult, right?

You’re not gonna browse a couple of hundred websites to find a biochar startup to buy credits from. Seeing these people in the room, you immediately see, wow, right? The charisma is there, the dedication is there, the progress is there. People make huge strides and have impressive results to show for.

And suddenly you think, oh yeah, that I don’t know doesn’t mean that it’s not worth knowing. And I think to Marian’s point, just based on this event last week, it’s not only that people stay, but people are indeed also wowed, I think I can say that, by the quality of the entrepreneurs. So it’s not about us, right? It’s not about us. It’s always about the entrepreneurs. You see what these people are working on, and it’s just fabulous, right? In its variety, in the differences, but there’s no doubt about the quality of the work that they’re doing. So that, I think, also led us to believe that, okay, yeah, we should do more of this, and this truly creates an impact.

Ross Kenyon: How much of the gap there is due to knowing these people, seeing them in person? How much of it do you think is investors or buyers not understanding property law in formerly Spanish and Portuguese places? Or not trusting the legal system, or understanding how property rights work, or how seniority works in the case of liquidation, or something like that.

And maybe it’s just not understanding these places as well, not being able to track their politics. Is that a factor, or do you really think it’s just that they’re isolated from where decisions are being made?

Hans Westerhof: Oh, of course. No, yeah, of course, you’re spot on, right? So, early-stage teams, pre-seed, seed, raising some money, but not huge amounts. In that phase, investments overseas, across continents even, doesn’t happen easily, right? And in the Global North, so VCs based in the Global North, they would want to have a manageable sort of portfolio, also geographically.

So of course, to your point, that is another hurdle, right? I’m based in the Netherlands. For a Dutch VC to invest in Zambia and understand Zambia, if that’s not your specialty, is almost unfeasible, right? The transaction costs are way too high for a deal of half a million or a million.

So that’s another hurdle, which is related to the ecosystem that these entrepreneurs operate in. Right now, CDR is maybe a little bit different because it’s a nascent industry. It’s a weird industry. I think we all know that, right? So it’s led by charismatic buyers willing to pay quite some money for their credits, right? It’s by entrepreneurs who so believe in what they need to do that they roll this rock uphill and just take on the challenge. And that might create a little bit of an openness for some early-stage investors to look across the borders and to also take on investments that are a little bit farther away.

But if you broaden the ecosystem and try to get more funding in, you also get more classical funding in, and then those drawbacks that you just mentioned are there. So it’s not only presence. There’s multiple hurdles that we need to overcome in order to grow this industry. Marian mentioned one, which is diversifying revenue streams, right? Because we’re pretty persistent around this sort of thinking, because relying on credits alone for the growth of the industry, yes, it grows. We know that. It grows. It does not grow exponentially. There are not enough buyers to meet the demand, or to meet the supply that we need to deliver.

And in order to have classical proper market mechanisms kick in, you need classic B2B value propositions, right? If I deliver a solution to you that creates an improvement in your business tangibly, then you create demand. And that is the magic of creating scale, right? And CDR does not fit that bucket perfectly. I see you smile, so I wanna see...

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I know. I want it to happen. I’ve wanted that to happen for so long, but it’s so very hard. But some people are doing it, and successfully too.

Hans Westerhof: Yeah, exactly. And that’s where we need to move, right? So that CDR is not only this thing you do because you feel for the climate goals, but also because it makes radical business sense to do so, right? So we do not have to raise our finger and say, “You need to do this because...” It just makes rational sense to do so. That is only when we unlock that lever.

Marian Krüger: And Ross, I think before, you kind of threw investors and buyers into one bucket by saying, you know, they might feel uncomfortable with their perceived political risk or other risk types that they can retire or feel like they can take on. I do think there’s a difference between the investor side and the buyer side, just because thanks to standards and rating agencies, there is a level of understanding that they can otherwise, as part of the due diligence process that you would go through in an investment process...

You would look at a lot more risk types than as a buyer. As long as there’s risk mitigation in place for non-delivery, et cetera, you might feel more comfortable if the project is Isometric-certified and has, I don’t know, a non-delivery insurance and potentially even a rating. Then in my mind, I don’t necessarily need to care where it’s placed, because while not a commodity, I’m buying something that is less individualized on its location and more on its properties, if that makes sense.

Ross Kenyon: I think so, and they’re not insurmountable problems either. Many of these companies can set up a British private limited company or a Delaware C corp, and then they have their local subsidiary in the country of operations or something like that. There are ways of making investors feel more comfortable, and also, as you know, the tools for buyers to feel more comfortable are pretty robust at this point.

Like, yeah, if they’re on one of the registries and the registry has given it a thumbs up and it has a decent rating on one of the ratings agencies, those are pretty effective proxies for quality, I think. Not foolproof, of course, there’s always gonna be some amount of risk. But that does de-risk it significantly. So, not to be a deal killer there. There are ways around that.

Which kinds of partners are y’all looking for? And are there others that you’d like to connect to besides companies? I guess the question here is what types of companies should be applying, and what are the partners that maybe you want to get involved in this Latin American cohort that could help these companies along?

Marian Krüger: Let me speak about the partners first, and then Hans can tackle the startups. This brings us back to the magic word of this episode, ecosystem. Because of course, an ecosystem is not just the immediate players that are relevant to the startups, but a broader system that can bring to bear new startups.

So that brings us to academia, that brings us to venture builders. But also that is able to sustain these ventures, so that brings us to the financing landscape, be it VCs, be it DFIs, be it other capital providers, and lastly also the policy side. So if we look at our established geographies that we’re active in, be it Europe, but maybe now more India and Africa, we have close ties and partnerships with organizations from all those parts of the ecosystem.

In India, we collaborate with IIT Bombay, the premier research institute working on carbon capture, carbon removal, and a variety of carbon storage options. Professor Vikram Vishal is our partner there. Excellent, couldn’t have a better partner.

I think that is something that in all geos we try to anchor ourselves in, just because the academic landscape isn’t only the springing ground for new startups that we can then support, but also a lot of times advises policy and does research that is not basic research on cation exchange, but how does ERW specifically work in the soils of Brazil with the tropical rainfall that you get there, right? Which is of course then very relevant to our startups.

And then if you go further, on the policy side, think tanks. Think tanks that understand the carbon removal or broader carbon and climate policies in a given geo. Now, that might be quote unquote easy if you’re in India or in Europe because it’s a bloc, or in North America because it’s Canada and the US. So that, I think, is a challenge, to find partners that are able to do that. And sometimes they do not exist yet, so that is then a gap that we try to help solve. We’re certainly not the ones to do that, but we can point that out and help make sure it exists.

And maybe the last thing I’m gonna say, because it’s quite specific and it’s not often top of mind for people, but it is absolutely crucial for these founders in some of the pathways to make it from a first pilot to a first commercial project: lab infrastructure. You won’t think that probably 90% of the startups in the Global South, when they start out, they send their biochar, they send their soil samples to Europe or to North America for lab analysis, which you can imagine what cost that incurs and what timelines that then operates on with all the shipping.

So I think that’s an underestimated lever for carbon removal scale in those geographies, is lab infrastructure, and we’re thinking mostly about biochar and ERW here.

Ross Kenyon: I was at an ocean science conference very recently, and one of the attendees was telling me that they’ve seen a lot of encouragement of Global South startup founders to dive into CDR project development, and the big gap there is that there often aren’t enough local scientists even doing appropriate baselining to make this work. At the very least for mCDR and ocean alkalinity enhancement and stuff like that.

But I imagine that’s true for terrestrial carbon removal as well, just the applied science of that specific geography is not robust enough to support adequate baselining. And it’s one of those things I think people maybe are overlooking, or maybe it’s something that I’ve just overlooked and I’m projecting onto the entire industry. But it was a really nice wake-up call for me to know that that is a big gap.

Marian Krüger: I do think that’s true, and that forces this challenge or this task up onto startups who at the beginning are cash and resource stripped, and that really shouldn’t be their job. But I guess because either they are so determined, or, and probably both, the opportunity is so big, they still do it. So I can confirm for you that that is not just true for marine CDR, it also is true for terrestrial CDR, specifically if we think ERW.

I do think the variety of combinations of soil types and rock types, and then how much rock you distribute, that ideally should have been analyzed before, so the startups can hit the ground running, which unfortunately they can’t.

Hans Westerhof: Only to illustrate how odd CDR is, right, as an industry, that these challenges, which are in fact fundamental scientific unknowns that need to be answered, are on the plate of a startup that is not equipped to do that or should not have to do that. As you know, I’ve worked a lot in more classic B2B environments, and it’s like the equivalent of asking yourself when you have delivered a tonne of bricks. I deliver you a tonne of bricks at home, right? Nice bricks, Ross, right, to build your house. And then you say, “Oh, is this a tonne?” Would be an odd question, right? It’s a little bit of an odd question. So you might not like the bricks and all of that, but, you know, is this a tonne? Yeah, I mean, we’re raising our eyebrows, right?

So, we have software installed. Here’s the interface. It does stuff, right? So is it really happening? Well, mm, right. You don’t have these questions. And in CDR it’s very normal to entertain these questions. We think that’s normal. It’s abnormal, right? So it is strange, but we can support indeed by building more local infrastructure, because that’s one of those hurdles again to overcome.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think it’s a really good point. It’s one of those boring points that underlies so much that I think it’s really easy to skip past it and focus on the sexier parts of, like, new technology or better unit economics or something like that. Sometimes it is this simple.

Okay, Hans, tell us about the startups that you wanna see apply here. I wanna know. Make this pitch. You’re a Latin American right now. You’re listening. Buenos días. Thank you for listening. Gracias. Gracias a todos por escuchar. Hans, make the pitch for them. I can do Portuguese as well. Sorry. I got shit like bom dia and saúde and stuff like that, but please.

Hans Westerhof: Then we need Mateus here to speak Portuguese. Yeah, we’re looking for startup teams that work in CDR, right? That want to work with peers, that want to have guidance in a community that truly understands CDR, right? To explain what you’re working on, to really meet with people who are knee-deep in CDR, to get connected into the ecosystem. That is what we’re good for.

Traditionally, it’s startups, it’s pre-seed, seed stage, early stage startups. Sometimes we have more well-developed teams for whom CDR is something new that they need to discover as a sort of byproduct for green hydrogen production, for example. And then, okay, if CDR is an angle that you discover, I think we’re the perfect fit.

Our program is really CDR-focused. You know this, Ross, but you asked me to pitch, right? So not a lot of generic startup stuff. There’s many great startup programs around, and if you need support there, just avail of these programs. We really specifically focus on the idiosyncrasies of CDR, I would say. And if that is what supports you, you should come to us.

We really have no stake for ourselves in your success. Our only success as a nonprofit is the success of the entrepreneurs, right? So there’s no commercial benefit to us to work with you. We don’t take equity, for the listeners who don’t know. Your success is really our success. We’re funded by philanthropies, right, your earlier question. And they look at our success as the success that we create for teams that we support.

Marian Krüger: My strongest pitch would be, you founders will get to work with Ross. So apply.

Ross Kenyon: They get enough of me here. They don’t necessarily need a whole lot more, but thank you. Yeah, I am really excited to return for the Latin American cohort. I love remove’s programming. It’s so well organized and so specific, and it is really encouraging to see the full breadth of founders that you’re able to attract too.

Some of them are, like you just said, Hans, people who are maybe more experienced in a different kind of area, like hydrogen, and they found CDR. Some of the teams I worked with in the Indian cohort have been doing pyrolysis for longer than almost anyone else that I’ve ever met. And it was, like, so impressive that they were like, “Oh, we can also do a specific type of pyrolysis that leads to carbon crediting.” Like, oh, this is fascinating. You might have just leapfrogged everyone else that I’ve ever met, with few exceptions, because of that. And then all the way to people who just got bitten by the bug one day and realized that we needed to remove carbon and they were passionate about doing so, and everything in between.

You’re able to attract founders that really are diverse, that I really like. I haven’t seen that in every program that I’ve worked in, by the way. I feel like that’s somewhat rare.

Hans Westerhof: Hey, Ross, I think it’s not only our program, right? It’s also about the domain of CDR. I’ve been working with startups for 15 years right now, and I do find that the average entrepreneur, if there’s such a thing, that engages in CDR is of extremely high quality, which also, for me personally, makes it a privilege to work in CDR. Of course, all founders are great and dedicated and committed and all of that, but I do find that the average entrepreneur that we see in CDR is of high quality, and I think that has to do with people understanding and dedicating their life to the mission that CDR represents. They feel it’s tremendously, unavoidably important.

And we see many entrepreneurs, as you said, with already a long career changing gear towards CDR, and that is just a privilege to work with.

Ross Kenyon: I’ve seen a lot of people in the middles of their career also decide they wanted to do something that was more meaningful too. Some of the other founders that I’ve encountered outside of CDR, I’ve heard them pitch things to me and be like, “Yeah, we’re gonna make so much money doing this.” I, like, never hear anyone say that in CDR. That guy rubbed me the wrong way. I’m like, “I do not trust this guy at all, really.” But CDR does tend to attract people, I think, who are very much here for the right reasons, very mission-driven, and often had to give up a lot to do this work too. These are professional people that could get good jobs elsewhere. Sounds like you’ve both seen this too. I love that.

Hans Westerhof: Yeah, happens in CDR a lot, disproportionately I would say.

Marian Krüger: I think it’s due to, and Ross, you mentioned, you know, a lot of people that might also be mid-career, they are bitten by the bug, they drink the Kool-Aid, and then you cannot unsee what you saw about climate. And I do think the beauty about carbon removal is that it provides a solution that is easier to grasp, and more direct to the fundamental problem we’re addressing, namely too high a concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. And here is a solution that actually directly alleviates this, while obviously keeping in mind that it will never be enough to do it, and it only goes together with decarbonization, et cetera, et cetera.

But I do think that is what attracts people that might not have been in climate before and start their climate journey towards carbon removal, because there’s this rather direct problem-solution fit that you might find a bit harder when you go into renewables. And I can speak for myself, because I was in renewables before. I built a startup in solar, and I did feel I wanted to work even closer on the actual problem, which was the levels of atmospheric CO2. And I do think there’s probably no other element in the world that allows you to do this than carbon removal.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think that’s probably true. I’m gonna frame this in a Latin American way. This is pandering, but it’s a good pandering. I’m gonna pander to Borges. So, Garden of Forking Paths here. remove could have chosen something else to do with its sweet, sweet Milkywire lucre. You could have gone into super pollutants. You could have gone into solar radiation management stuff. I’m sure you probably could have raised, and helped support new organizations working on that. Why go deeper into carbon removal? Don’t you know there’s cooler things now? Carbon removal is old and boring. There’s cooler things to be working on. Why are you still here?

Marian Krüger: I guess because we need it. That’s probably the easiest answer. I think there is an argument, and it’s a discussion that we have internally a lot around: in an environment with a VCM that’s barely able to sustain the startups that we have, or the developers that we have in the market currently, does it really make sense to push more developers into that market? Right. It’s a fair argument. And I think we have taken actions because of that argument.

At the same time, us doubling down in the Global South is, I think, due to three reasons. One being the climate equity perspective, right? I think it’s the right thing to do that that part of the world participates in the massive amounts of value that will be generated through carbon removal.

Second, the Global South just on a unit economic basis will allow us to generate massive amounts of carbon removal at prices that are competitive, if not, and likely, better than what we can have in the Global North. So I do think it enables demand for durable carbon removal in a, let’s say, 110 to 145 or 150 US dollar range, which I think if you can deliver at scale there, there is decent demand there, right?

And the third one is, and that might be a bit anti-cyclical, but I would much rather be a direct air capture founder right now, living off of grants, looking to raise my pre-seed maybe in a month or in a year, than needing to raise my Series A right now of 12 million, 15 million in that challenging environment. Because my timelines align actually quite nicely with potential integration to a compliance regime in 2030, right? I can see how my first commercial plant five years down the line could pay into that market. And up until then, I keep my burn low, and I make it till then. So it might be a bit counterintuitive, but you could also argue right now is the exact right time to found a carbon removal startup.

Hans Westerhof: On top of what Marian said, you know, it’s a new market, so you go through all of these predictable phases, right? So, boom, bust. Currently, CDR, challenging. There’s also something like a simple moral imperative, as far as I’m concerned, right? So, oh, it’s not happy-go-lucky in CDR right now. It’s a little bit of a tough environment. Sure. And now we bail out? That sounds like a silly choice to make, right? So for me personally, it’s also, yeah, sure, we should see through these couple of years, and this industry needs to grow. The mission is unchanged.

And of course, there’s other work to do. And, you know, we cannot all of us do everything together. We focus here. We’ve built something. We think we can contribute and keep building value there. I have nothing negative to say about super pollutants. Let other people address those, right, that are equipped to address those better. But for us to bail out of CDR feels like, I can’t even say how wrong that feels, right?

Ross Kenyon: I’m the same way too. I don’t wanna leave. We still need this. Obviously, there are things that will get more attention because they are newer, even though super pollutants is... I called it once recently, it was like the oldest novel approach to carbon that exists. It also goes back to, like, very old parts of the carbon market as well.

But yeah, no, no shade being thrown by me either. We definitely need all of these things happening and being researched and advancing. But also I’m a carbon removal person. Times are difficult right now, but they’re difficult across the space, and it would seem, I don’t know. I like to support founders who are still here, who still feel vocationally called to this kind of work. Sounds like you both do too. So we’re diehards, basically. Carry us out in a pine box, basically, is when we’re gonna leave carbon.

Hans Westerhof: I hope that will be still some time, Ross, before that happens.

Ross Kenyon: Me too. When the last molecule is captured and we create a new ice age, then we can retire, right?

Marian Krüger: If pine box, then please burn me and make sure I don’t decay, so that someone can get at least a credit off of it.

Ross Kenyon: God, that was one of the darkest memes we ever made. It was sort of like a carbon... it was like cremains, cremoval or something. It just had a picture of, like, going into a crematorium. I don’t know that it had that many likes. I’m not sure that it deserved that many likes, but it was creative.

Marian Krüger: Did you just out yourself as the main writer of Carbon Removal Memes, Ross?

Ross Kenyon: Ah, no. It’s known. I have it on LinkedIn. But I also just... it always surprises people. There is a writers room, though, by the way, and I definitely do not make all of them. And I’m just the really annoying person who gets to say, “What’s the editorial on this? What are we actually trying to say? I don’t understand your...” So I get to do that, is really the only distinction between me and everyone else. But yeah, so I guess I’m out now, Marian.

Marian Krüger: Thank you for your work. Thank you for your work. Yeah. Please continue.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, the most important job in carbon removal.

Marian Krüger: Talking about feeling unemployed, yes. Oh no, we might wanna cut that.

Ross Kenyon: I earned it. It’s okay. This is a tough question for you, ‘cause I don’t even know that you’ve thought about it or wanna be thinking about it, but what do you think is going to be next for remove? Are you gonna go deeper into any of these geographies? Are you gonna find some other way to grow? What do you think will be next, while fully recognizing that you haven’t even done the next thing yet, so, tough question.

Hans Westerhof: Yeah. Well, we’ll be doing the next thing for sure, right? So, work in those geographies and in parallel across all of those time zones, Ross, and then bring people together. So that also brings a limit to our expansion, right? So we can’t go farther east or farther west, because then in time zones it doesn’t work anymore. Or we have to build separate programs, right? But we work now from India to western Latin America. So I think Mexico is the farthest time zone out, that is 12, 12 and a half time zones. Of course, that’s a practicality only. That’s what we will build first, and let us do that, right?

So I think there is quite a big lever that we integrate into our programs, which is what Marian referred to earlier, and that is how we support teams in developing their business models, and where previously it sort of by default centered on the credit market, right? A couple of years ago, right? For a few years we’ve been looking closely at revenue diversification, meaning finding solutions to develop business models outside of credits. And now I think we’re doubling down there, right? To really work with partners in existing value chains who might have a need for the solutions that CDR startups provide. Not primarily for the credits, but primarily for the products or the technical solutions that are being built.

And I think that is, for the coming years, a new angle in our work, or an angle that we’ll be doubling down on. That is not an afterthought, that becomes a central thesis, right? It’s not, “Oh, yes, and let’s also do something like this,” or, “This is also important,” but that we will build programs around this thesis, really to engage industries and startups to work together about integrating biochar in fertilizer value chains, or bio-coal in the steel industry or in the aluminum industry as a reductant, what have you, right? To really build demand for products so we scale this industry.

Marian Krüger: And to be very clear, we’re of course aware that using biochar or bio-coal as a drop-in for PCI coal is not carbon removal anymore.

Hans Westerhof: Sure.

Marian Krüger: But to be very clear, we couldn’t care less if this allowed a biochar developer to deploy 50, to scale to 100 plants, and once the market switches, they can go the carbon removal route. I think we’ve done a great job. So in our minds, that is the future of the next couple of years in carbon removal.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think it’s one of those places where focusing on it being carbon removal potentially holds it back. Like, however you slice bio-coal, which is a term I don’t really like that much at all. I wish we’d found a better name for metallurgical coal but biochar than bio-coal. But even still, like, we need that. That’s a...

Hans Westerhof: Yes, of course.

Ross Kenyon: Can we make that...

Hans Westerhof: Of course. And it’s not CDR, it still works above the zero line, right? So, and to Marian’s point, right? So there is demand, right? In volumes you can’t even comprehend, right, if you hear those numbers. So imagine you find a fit there. Imagine you find a fit there. You’re not walking around with your 1,000 tonnes and saying, “Hey, Ross, you wanna buy? I’ve got 1,000 tonnes. I can also deliver you 1,200 if you want, but then I know.” So people only want to talk if you can deliver 20,000, 25,000 tonnes per month, right? So not immediately, obviously, but if that potential is there. So if you want to build this industrial platform underpinning carbon removal, that is a big lever to pull. Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: And that cracked me up, because the way you were describing it sounded almost threatening to me. I’m like, “Uh, gah, back off. Sure, it’s fine. It’s not carbon removal, but it’s okay.” I love the idea of focusing the program... Being serious now, I love the idea of focusing on a program that has insetting as a goal, or just finding ways to plug into industries, whether or not it’s carbon removal. I think focusing on that as a go-to-market is really powerful. Obviously, when we’re talking with companies, we are all looking at VCM policy and value creating for B2B plays. I think focusing on that third way might be, like, a really cool way to orient a program, or just collect companies that are very well-suited to do so, and then you could gather partners around that.

remove has focused on geographies, and that’s how your programming is often split. I imagine some of that is for time zones, so people don’t lose their minds trying to do it. For me, in the Pacific, it’s 12 and a half hours for India, so I had to be up super early, but I’m that dedicated. I’m happy to do it. And also you probably wanna build a community around a specific...

Hans Westerhof: Yes, of course.

Ross Kenyon: ...group that will see each other and build those. But you could also do it by direct air capture companies or enhanced rock weathering companies. You can gather it that way, or those who are just focused on insetting, or you focus on the go-to-market. There are lots of different ways to taxonomize companies. So are you saying that maybe in the future you’ll focus more on that commercial angle rather than the method of getting there?

Marian Krüger: I think how you would approach it in a more classic B2B context, you would focus them around a problem of a customer, or a challenge that a customer has, right? So we know carbon removal is weird, but let’s make it maybe a little less weird and try this paradigm instead of just going all out on the VCM, right? So if there’s a challenge of a steel manufacturer or the steel industry to have a drop-in for PCI coal, okay, then let’s see what kind of startups we have in the ecosystem, in our program, as alumni, that can match their specs.

Ross Kenyon: That is fabulous advice, and if you’re listening here, listen extra hard to what Marian and Hans are saying. I think this is likely going to be the path to survival for a number of companies, if you’re still able to do so. If you’ve been looking at credits, you’ve been filling out RFPs and trying to get big offtakes, maybe don’t. There’s probably people in your backyard who might need your product for their own sake, for their own reasons that are not credit related. You might have a path to a viable business for that. And even if it’s not removal, even if it’s not going to have the big blue chip offtake, you’re still doing super important work. I still will consider you part of carbon removal. Let me say that. You can still come to the conferences. You’re still part of the club. You’re doing bio-coal? Great. Bio-coal is fine. Keep doing it. Will you guys stamp that? You endorse that?

Hans Westerhof: Yep.

Marian Krüger: Yes, endorsed. Thank you for putting it better than we ever could have.

Ross Kenyon: No, I love that focus. Woo! You’re getting me all hyped here. Yeah, I’ve had, what, four months off now from remove coaching. I’m getting ready to go back. It starts in, what, October is when the...

Hans Westerhof: Yeah. You’re getting back in, Ross, sooner than you think, right? So you have your US-based summer break.

Ross Kenyon: Always so threatening. It always sounds so... So you scare me a little bit, Hans. Yeah, I’m coming back, I swear.

Hans Westerhof: You are. Are you? Yeah. We want you back. So after your US holiday, which is shorter than the European holiday, right? So then before you know it, we kick it off. Yeah. We look forward to that, man.

Ross Kenyon: Amazing. If you’d like to apply, the link is in the show notes to do so. You absolutely should if you’re working in Latin America. If you’re working somewhere else around the world, basically anywhere that’s not North America, there’s a program for you. I guess Mexico is technically part of North America, but they’re gonna be in the...

Marian Krüger: We consider it LATAM. Yeah, we consider it LATAM.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s sort of an arbitrary distinction in many regards anyways. But pretty much every different geographical focus, there’s a group, except maybe not Asia yet. Maybe that’s another one that’s en route. We’ll see.

If you’re basically anywhere outside of the US and Canada, there’s a specific program for you, or potentially one in the future, and they’re great. I think they’re really powerful programs, and the network is amazing. A lot of these people you will see for your entire time in carbon removal. Many of them are going to be the people that you will hear about one year, three years, five years from now as big, successful companies. It’s a great opportunity, so I highly recommend getting involved in remove’s programming.

Is there anything I forgot to ask you about that we should do now before we close? You’re just waiting for me to ask you, and I didn’t.

Hans Westerhof: I’m afraid to say something because I don’t wanna threaten you, right? So...

Ross Kenyon: It’s just something about that, like, Central European intensity.

Marian Krüger: No, you can be very direct. It’s Dutch.

Ross Kenyon: Oh, it’s Dutch. It’s Dutch. Okay. Got it.

Hans Westerhof: Yeah, yeah. That’s my Dutchness, yes.

Marian Krüger: No, I think we’re good.

Ross Kenyon: Understood. Hans, you feel that way too?

Hans Westerhof: Pleasure chatting with you, Ross.

Ross Kenyon: Okay. Yeah, it’s my pleasure. I’m honored to be invited. I know there’s a lot of people who could be good coaches for remove’s programming. I’m so happy to be involved, and thank you. I’m glad to call you both colleagues, and love the remove team and the programming. My sincere thanks.

Hans Westerhof: Yeah, we love having you on board. Yeah.

Marian Krüger: Appreciate having you, and also appreciate you inviting us on the pod. And yeah, being part of, guess what word I’m gonna use now, our ecosystem.

Ross Kenyon: Ecosystem builders, that’s what we are. All right.

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3 months ago · 3 likes · Ross Kenyon

Learning from D.W. Pasulka

Well, you know me. I like a huge topic. Sometimes I choose one so big it threatens to engulf the entire podcast. That’s how I knew it would be when I at long last hung out with Dr. D.W. Pasulka, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW). Her new book, ⁠The Others: UFOs, AI, and The Hidden Forces Guiding Human Destiny, will be released on July 28th⁠⁠.

I’ve been reading Diana’s books for a very long time. They were some of the first books I started reading when I started challenging why I was being fairly judgmental about New Age, occult, and/or paranormal beliefs that were becoming culturally so dominant. I dove in if for no other reason than to understand why they were becoming popular and what that might mean for religious practice, identity, politics, and just navigating a changing social landscape in a halfway competent fashion. It’s good practice to know about the world and its many peoples—it’s interesting and helps us all get along better.

And what I love about Diana’s work is that it’s not ever merely about whether this person’s experience was credible or not. Or whether the stories of the saints were actually UFOs, etc. It’s essentially a story about how our technology shapes our experience of being ourselves, and how media representations interact with that process.

Enter Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan is a very famous scholar. He’s considered the founder of media studies, which is somehow both too bizarrely generic a phrase and also so limiting. The idea that is most useful for understanding Diana’s research is his classic line: “the medium is the message”. In other words, it isn’t just the content of the message that should concern you but the how and why it is transmitted in that particular fashion.

For example, when the internet began to reach more and more regular people, it wasn’t necessarily what they were communicating about on the internet, but the fact that there was a somewhat decentralized digital space where an affective economy could be built without the mediation of physical bodies or authority figures gatekeeping information. That says a hell of a lot more than whatever recipes or political information people were sharing. Since you’re reading this in 2026 and we’ve lived through the internet as a democratizing and connecting technology and have witnessed it become an extractive and dopamine-manipulating dysfunction multiplier, it might seem that maybe the medium was never really sure about its message in the first place.

But McLuhan was very farseeing. And much of what can now be seen by normalos was gamed out by theorists like him, fiction writers like Arthur C. Clarke, and scholars who came after like D.W. Pasulka.

What they were seeing was that media technology was only going to improve. One decade you’re standing in the movie line with Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, soon there are tvs with remotes, then cable, then dialup, then LAN parties, then broadband, then smart phones, and now many live lives perhaps principally online. What becomes of our identity and our humanity when it isn’t a question of how do we create virtual versions of ourselves in digital spaces (a huge discourse in the early years of the internet), but how do we recreate a physical identity for ourselves in a meatspace that has, for many, grown unfamiliar, disappointing, or worse. And we haven’t even seen what will happen to the kids raised at least partially by tablets yet…

When we use technology, one way to think of it as becoming almost literally a part of us. Using your iPhone to access Wikipedia is your hand using a tool that connects to a megamind outside of yourself. It isn’t asking your cousin who’s four years older than you and has his driver’s license—it’s accessing essentially all human knowledge in an impersonal and universal way. And it’s connected to your hand (much like the gun is connected to James Wood’s hand below.)

Or another bonus way to think about technology is a version of Michael Pollan’s line from The Botany of Desire: did we domesticate technology, or did it domesticate us? Is it serving our interests, or are we servings its? Diana documents a fair number of people in AI who would speak of their work as “ushering in” a new entity rather than “making” something, and that is a clue.

Long Live the New Flesh

Which brings me to Videodrome, David Cronenberg’s 1983 body horror (but you knew that as soon as I said his name if you’re this type of nerd.) It is both campy and obscure—one of those didactic films that feels profound but is also trying pretty hard to have you feel that way. I personally think it’s great and still well worth a watch.

One of the reasons why it reads as so camp is that it locates this question of how media changes us and becomes us through television. Television in 1983 strikes me as pretty dang innocent compared to the possibilities of cable when I was growing up in the W years. But it only looks that way because I wasn't there to experience what came before it.

In the final scene shared above, James Woods’ character has essentially merged with the television. He is instructed by Debbie Harry’s (of Blondie; how fun!) character that in order to become this new being, this “new flesh”, he must kill his old flesh. To transform himself he will essentially become pure representation. He will leave his physical form and become media, become television, be beyond physicality but maybe be everywhere all at once as an entirely virtual or mediated entity.

That seems like a huge stretch for a tiny tv screen in a huge box with a knob on it. It sounds less outlandish for the age of smart phones. It probably starts sounding very scary with consumer AI and how that might link up with new religions movements like Ray Kurzweil’s singularitarianism.

In fact, I suspect a whole bunch of old sci-fi just got very relevant and cool again now that all of their musings on AI went from being something we might figure out in the coming centuries as opposed to this very moment. Time to go back and watch Robocop, Blade Runner, Videodrome, and probably also 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Speaking of, Diana loves this video and mentions it in her research. Lo and behold, was Stanley Kubrick and his junior partner on it, Arthur C. Clarke, tuned into what screens would later become for us? Some of these themes were so far ahead of how media technology would change us that they were functionally invisible except to the most prescient.

But what does it mean for us? And the climate?

I don’t know. What does it mean for you? What would it change for you to know that the universe is so much weirder than you once thought? How would it be to know that we were not the ultimate species on the planet any more?

My guess is that if didn’t send you to a place of doom it would you into a spiritual place of wondering what it means to be human and how we live here well together. Maybe it makes you want to put aside a lot of the crap you were worried over to focus on love—what most wise people believe it’s ultimately all about anyways.

In my work as a strategist, I’m often helping people figure out how to make big decisions. Ones that sometimes involve betting the company. One lens I like to use is strategic asymmetry. If you’re the mouse, Jerry, from from Tom and Jerry, you don’t try to outbox the cat, Jerry. You run your ass into the mouse hole and come up with a plan that nullifies Tom’s advantage.

If humanity is creating non-human intelligence that may soon be self-improving and will surpass collective human intelligence, I think at that point we’ve basically just got compassion, love, humor—things we associate with being humane. We will likely need to mature as an Earthly civilization and pull ourselves out of the systems and ways of thinking that have made us miserable. Unfortunately, there are many. Maybe somehow AI will be even better at being humane than us, in which case, I’ll definitely need to write another essay.

I hope you enjoy the podcast. Dr. D.W. Pasulka has made me think so many new thoughts over the years, and you should be reading her work. I barely covered half of the things we discuss in the podcast, so go listen to that in your apps or at the top of this page. There’s also the full transcript below. Thanks so much for your support!

Sincerely,

Ross Kenyon

PS I reference this scene in the podcast, but also, it kind of fits with this final section, no?

When I have questions about how technology will change human life, our experience of it, and fundamentally what we are as conscious entities... my first port of call is likely someone like Dr. D.W. Pasulka. She's labored on some of the biggest questions of the humanities only to find the world racing to catch up with her later on disclosure, on artificial intelligence, and presumably on whatever comes next in this beautiful tale told by an idiot.

I've been reading Diana's books for years. I forgot how American Cosmic found its way into my hands, but I loved the restrained religious studies orientation of treating unidentified flying object (UFO)/unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) experiencers seriously, the intersection with Marshall McLuhan and media studies, and the forcing function of non-human intelligence like AI bursting onto the scene whether we were ready for it or not.

Her new book, The Others: UFOs, AI, and The Hidden Forces Guiding Human Destiny, will be released on July 28th. Grab yourself a copy and dig into some real mind-bending and fun ideas. Even if you think this stuff is far out, as society increasingly takes supernormal/paranormal activity seriously and embeds artificial intelligence in so many places, books like Diana's are going to be key for understanding what is happening to our humanity, our being, and our experience of being.

And yet, somehow I only said "ontology" once in this podcast. I guess that religious studies restraint is rubbing off on me.

Long live the new flesh!

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Resources

Check out my new show, Climate Workers Anonymous

Subscribe to the Climate Workers Anonymous Substack

D.W. Pasulka's website

The Others: UFOs, AI, and The Hidden Forces Guiding Human Destiny, will be released on July 28th

"406: Hyperstition, Dialectic, & Carbon Dioxide Removal" on Reversing Climate Change

The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life by Lisa Miller

Luis Elizondo

Videodrome

I have way more links on the Substack article about this episode. Come check it out.

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Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Hello, this is Ross Kenyon, host of Reversing Climate Change, the podcast you’re listening to at this moment. I’ve worked in climate tech and carbon dioxide removal for about a decade.

You might be wondering why a show with D.W. Pasulka has popped up on your playlist today. Thanks for listening. Before I explain the what and the how — the improbability of such a thing — if I could ask you: while you have your phone open, and you haven’t started some other task yet, open up your podcast app — Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, whatever you use — and give this show a great rating and review. It really helps get the show out to more people, and it’s much appreciated. It’s one of the most important things you can do if you like this show. I’m also doing a lot on Substack right now, so if you’re over there, you should follow Reversing Climate Change, or me personally, Ross Kenyon. The links to do those things are in the show notes.

And thanks so much for listening. I’m really excited about this show. I’ve been preparing for it for a long time. Pretty much as soon as I heard Dr. Pasulka had a new book coming out, I went right for her email: how can I make this happen? I’ve read her books several times. They’re very good and very accessible books on what it means to treat the unidentified flying object — unidentified aerial phenomena, UFO, UAP, what have you — as a religion. And what does it mean to take some of these beliefs seriously?

Her book American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, and Technology is a fantastic introductory resource. It’s not a dense academic tome, although if you read Diana’s work you can tell she hangs at that level elsewhere — she certainly has the theoretical frameworks to make it happen. But American Cosmic opened me up a little bit to start thinking more seriously about where my belief in what is possible ends, and why. And I’m not even sure I’ve come to some finite conclusion about anything, so much as to say: I don’t think the pure materialist story is all there is — or, if that’s all there is, there’s likely a lot more to materialism than we really understand, and it might be far stranger than we think. But independently of the truth content of experiencers’ stories, it’s important to understand how these types of events impact society, and especially how they impact society given their technological overlap.

Her next book, Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences, starts talking about what’s happening with AI before AI really just takes over. What it is now — it was not like this two years ago, you know? She starts detailing how people are thinking about what it means to have experiences with machine intelligence, and what it means for there to be nonhuman intelligences. And she gets into this in much greater detail in her new book, The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Hidden Forces Guiding Human Destiny — which, oh my goodness, releases literally on July 28th. You can learn all about D.W. Pasulka’s thinking around artificial intelligence, around Marshall McLuhan and media theory.

We have some jokes in here about people who predicted the future long ago, like McLuhan. But we also spend a fair amount of the show talking about David Cronenberg’s 1983 film Videodrome, which is basically Marshall McLuhan’s thinking on television — how it was changing the way our minds worked, networking our brains, and how we were sort of fusing with media. You watch it and it seems kind of hokey — like, yeah, whatever. It’s obviously more true now that people have smartphones, but with AI I think it’s going to look very different, and not that much longer from now. So we get to talk about how the tools we use become us, how we somaticize them, and what that means. We go into Donna Haraway. There’s just a lot of freaky cultural theory involved. And I think even if we’re just talking about how AI is going to change society, that alone is worth the price of admission, and will likely have something to teach.

Our work in climate is going to happen within a context that will need to relate to these ideas successfully. I’m not sure exactly where all of this is going to come out, but I know we need to start thinking about these ideas and their relation to how we live well together — with regard to the climate, and with regard to politics and ethics generally.

I won’t belabor it any further. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoy this show. I’m so excited to have Dr. D.W. Pasulka on Reversing Climate Change. Here it is.

Episode

Ross Kenyon: Diana, thank you for being here.

Diana Pasulka: Pleasure.

Ross Kenyon: Are you weirded out that you ended up on a climate change podcast? Does this ever happen to you?

Diana Pasulka: Well, I’d say the people who read my books are demographically varied. So no, I’m not weirded out.

Ross Kenyon: I think maybe the reason you’re not weirded out is that you seem like someone who’s so transdisciplinary — how could you not see links to basically all of human experience? That might be putting too much pressure on your work, but I think it holds. What do you think?

Diana Pasulka: I think so, yeah.

Ross Kenyon: How would you describe the continuity of your work? It crosses so many different areas, as I just described. What’s new about this book vis-à-vis your others?

Diana Pasulka: Yeah, sure — that’s a great question. The continuity is that the one thing I look at is belief — religious belief. How do people come to believe in certain things that we don’t necessarily have hard evidence for? And technology — how these two things interact and inform each other. This has been something I’ve been studying forever, it seems. And I study it in different contexts. The first part of my career was looking at Catholic history, and how media of the past — like popular culture and Catholic tradition — influences the ways people believe certain things. Here’s an example: I wrote a book about purgatory. Purgatory is a Catholic dogma which suggests that when people die, their souls don’t immediately go to heaven — usually because their souls may not be good enough to be in God’s presence, so they have to be purified. Purgatory is the place where this happens. It’s also referred to as a state, a state of being. And, contrary to the idea of what a dogma is, it’s changed — the ideas of purgatory have changed within the last thousand years. So what I did in that book was look at how popular culture, and culture in general, shifts the belief, and even influences the Catholic hierarchy. That was a case study, and a very academic book. So that’s what I did in the first part of my career.

In about 2012, I started to look at the shift in infrastructure to digital technology, and I thought, “Well, the UFO phenomenon is probably the best representative of this shift,” because it’s decentralized. There’s no pope, no hierarchy. People have their phones; they can record things in the sky, post them on social media, and so forth — and this influences what people believe. A lot of belief in UFOs — if you go back to the 1940s, when Kenneth Arnold sees the flying saucers over Mount Rainier, and then you have Roswell — these are already interpreted, even in the 1940s, as spiritual events. So I thought it was going to be really easy to make the case that the UFO is this thing we have no hard evidence for, but a lot of people believe in, and it’s due to this shift in infrastructure — very much like the printing press helped the Protestant Reformation, because everybody had their own Bible. So the technological infrastructure has a direct impact on what people believe, and on their religion. What I didn’t bargain for when I started this was that the government was studying UFOs, and people from the government would reach out to me and be interested in my research, because I had a lot of it from the historical record. And this caused me to have my own shift in perspective — like, maybe we do have hard evidence for UFOs. Oh my goodness. It took me about a year to get over that. So I had to shift everything in that book. That was called American Cosmic, and in my interpretation it was a very academic book, but it became a breakout bestseller. Surprise. So I’ve been studying UFOs ever since, because of the impact that actually had on me. And then, obviously, we have the UFO disclosure going on, with the release of all these files. My book came out right as that disclosure began, and it’s been quite interesting.

Ross Kenyon: I was worried about this interview, because there are just a million different angles and questions to have — I’ve read pretty much all of these things, some more than once, and I’ll be listening to your new book all over again once it’s out on audiobook, because there’s so much to it. One of the big splits I’ve found in everything relating to any of this phenomena is: to what degree is it a material or a supernatural set of phenomena? You have people like Luis Elizondo, who think this is a near-term security threat with strong materiality to it. And then there are some people who... There’s a story you tell — I forget which book it’s in — of a devout Catholic woman and her materialist husband, and they both see the same thing in the basement, healing her dog, and he sees it as a machine and she sees it as an angel. So there’s also something clearly phenomenological and subjective happening in the experiencing of this too. I’ve noticed the communities tend to be quite polarized in this way. What do you think explains that phenomenological understanding of what’s happening?

Diana Pasulka: Okay, so it’s really, really interesting. The case you mentioned is Rey Hernandez and his wife Dulce. Let me give the context. Rey’s an attorney, he’s an atheist, and he’s married to Dulce; they live in Florida, and Dulce is Catholic. They’re going along, they have a dog, they love this dog — but it’s an old dog, very old, and it’s kind of on its way out; it’s going to die. So they’re really upset about this. And Dulce, being Catholic, prays and asks God for some kind of milagro — a miracle. And so that night, Rey wakes up in the middle of the night, and Dulce’s calling him. He gets up and goes downstairs, and he sees this thing that to him looks like a greenish-blue light hovering over his dog, with sparks coming out of it. And Dulce is on her knees. They’re both really surprised — I wouldn’t call it terrified. But Rey does something that’s not characteristic of a situation like this: he looks at it, kind of laughs about it, and then walks back upstairs and goes back to bed. So she stays down there. The next day he gets up, and his dog is completely better. He said it was as if she’d lost 10 years — she’s running around like a puppy again. And his wife is convinced it was an angel, an answer to her prayers. He’s not so convinced, but it freaks him out to the point that he thinks it’s like a UFO. So he does a lot of research. He meets the astronaut Edgar Mitchell — who I’ve also talked to before, and who definitely believed in aliens; he’s passed away now. Edgar Mitchell becomes a mentor to Rey and tells him, “Well, there’s a variety of these things; you have to figure out what they want with you.” So Rey has a mission. He becomes no longer atheist, but he’s not necessarily Catholic or Christian like his wife. All right — so I use this example to show that people can and do have the same event, but see it differently.

Now, you do have cases of this in the history of religion, in various religions. You have examples in Buddhism, but also in Catholicism, a religion I’m very familiar with.

Ross Kenyon: Right — is that another one of those?

Diana Pasulka: Yeah, that’s right. So, the Miracle of the Sun in 1917 — for listeners who don’t know what that is, this is an apparition of the Virgin Mary. It happens in Fatima, Portugal, and the people who witness it — I think around 70,000 to 100,000 people are there. A lot of them see that they’re at the same event, but they see different things. Some see the same thing. People miles away notice something going on in the sky, so it was an aerial phenomenon. So it’s not this UFO situation of having the same event but seeing different things. This is something that’s not unprecedented; we do see it in religion. So it was really surprising to me, nonetheless, when I noted that this is something often cited when people have these experiences — including military people. I met a lot of people who’d have these experiences: fighter pilots, people out at sea, naval intelligence officers, you know? The testimony — there’s so much testimony that it’s overwhelming, actually. So how do I account for this? First off, there are physicists involved. A known physicist is Kevin Knuth. A scientist friend of mine is Gary Nolan at Stanford University — he’s very well known now; he’s in American Cosmic under a pseudonym, his name’s James there. They’re better equipped to explain the physics of it than me, because I’m a historian of religion. So how do I explain this? I can only say that I believe these people, and I can’t explain how this happens — I can only explain that it happens. I can give you the details and the data, and that’s partially why the military personnel were interested in my work. I had a log of events that I kept from doing my purgatory research — I’d come across these events and say, “I don’t know what these are, but I’m going to write them down,” because they’re so weird. And this is the stuff they wanted to see. I have a friend now, Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet.

Ross Kenyon: I’ve met Tim, actually, at an event that wasn’t related to any of this. It was about ocean tech, for a client of mine. He didn’t talk about any of his UFO experiences, and I wanted to ask, but I would’ve thrown the whole event into turmoil. But yes, I know Tim.

Diana Pasulka: Is that right? Isn’t that interesting? So, I’m at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, which is very well known for oceanography and marine science. So they know him too — a lot of my colleagues know him. And he’s very much out there now about saving the oceans, but also about unidentified submersible objects. These are objects that my own father actually saw in the 1950s, when he was in the Coast Guard, and we just thought it was a weird tale my father would tell. And then when I met Tim Gallaudet, he showed me data from people going back to the 1920s out at sea — people keep those logs, and that’s what his work is doing right now. He’s looking at this data. There’s so much of it — that’s the thing. I think a lot of people have to understand that there’s so much data out there that it’s very overwhelming. There are astronomers looking at old data, from before we actually had things in the sky — we still had telescopes, and we did have data about things we couldn’t explain, people out at sea seeing things we couldn’t explain. And then the work I do, which is looking at historical, archival records, and seeing that people would see things, be very confused about what they were at first, and then say, “Well, maybe it’s the Virgin Mary’s flying house,” or “Maybe this is a soul from purgatory.” They just had different interpretive frameworks for understanding these things.

Ross Kenyon: I think American Cosmic is one of the first books I read where I was trying to take this phenomena very seriously — because I’m Catholic as well, and that’s a really weird story, right? God sends down his son to be crucified and die, and he’s resurrected from the dead. It’s a bizarre story, and it’s no more or less bizarre than many other stories that are either old stories or parts of new religious movements. I took a religious studies course in college, and they drilled into me that we don’t call them cults — we call them new religious movements, and we take them seriously. That was actually a pretty hard lesson for me to internalize. I had a friend who was a religious studies scholar, and he was describing doing ethnographic work, I believe, in the Caribbean, and said these people practice magic. And I remember saying, “No, they believe they’re practicing magic.” But part of doing good work is taking it at face value — that these people are doing what they say they’re doing, and granting it some amount of credibility, so they aren’t just people you’re studying from a hierarchical positionality. And once I started doing this — with the UFO phenomena, or UAP, or just hearing lots and lots of what I believe to be credible reports through shows like Otherworld, which I know you’ve appeared on — I started being overwhelmed by: what if there is something happening here, and it’s actually quite sophisticated and interesting, and no more or less strange than what I already believed? Now, I don’t know where to draw the line, though. How do you know if you’re talking to someone who’s sincere, or whether there’s crankiness in here? Should I just be open to literally all possibilities at the same time? Does it become a sort of — I don’t know — Cabin in the Woods postmodernism, where everything is true at the same time? We’re going to get into media theory, don’t worry — I’m going to reference a lot of films, and Videodrome is coming. But is it not just: everything is true at the same time? And how do I know what to make of all these things being experienced by people? That’s an enormous question. I’m so sorry to lay it on you — but what do I make of this?

Diana Pasulka: This is such a good question. In my field — you did a good job, you probably got an A in that class. So, the first thing we have to do is train people to understand that in the field of religious studies, it’s not theology. We’re looking at things from the perspective of a scientific framework. We’re looking at data, at people’s behaviors, to ascertain... Most people in the world are religious — more than 80 percent of the world is religious in some way. So religion is something important to study. But the question you raise... First, let me explain: in religious studies, we have what we call bracketing. What we do is listen to a lot of people. You’re right — a lot of stories about religion are weird. If we’re coming from a rationalist, modernist, Enlightenment framework, yeah, it looks weird. Jesus walking on water — well, I’ve never seen anybody walk on water. He’s born of a virgin. How do we account for these kinds of ideas? Thomas Jefferson was a person who believed in ethics, and he called himself a Christian, though he was a deist. But he didn’t like the miracle stories in the Bible, so he created his own Bible — the Jefferson Bible. He wanted to create an Enlightenment form of Christianity — a secular form — where he made Jesus into an ethical man, but not necessarily a divine being. In a sense, we’ve inherited that idea, a lot of us. It’s the basis for the university, for how we study. Religious studies is no different. So when we go into a community that has different beliefs — different from mine — I have to understand them as a different framework for reality. They have this framework for reality; it’s not my framework. I’m not asking them to accept my framework. That’s what we do in religious studies. But that doesn’t mean that’s how reality is. I believe reality is a certain way. I don’t know exactly how it is, but I believe it has certain attributes. I’m a realist. I do believe that two plus two is four. I don’t think we can just make up a truth. So I’m not a relativist. So when I’m going into communities of people who believe in UFOs, I want to see why they believe in UFOs. Sometimes they don’t have any evidence at all — they just say, “I had this experience.” Well, a lot of people in religious traditions just say that: “We had this experience.” So there’s that category. And this is what my problem was: I was used to working within that framework, where they just have testimonial evidence — no actual hard evidence. Well, I moved into an arena, the study of UFOs, where that became something we did have evidence for, and that’s why it was a problem for me. The problem you’re articulating was my problem too, and is still my problem. So I had to write that book differently. I had to approach it differently, and say: on the one hand, it appears there is evidence. There are radar reports that show that when people see these things in the sky, radar also picks up something they can’t account for. There are also fighter pilots — the people in the sky — who say, “We’ve encountered these things that we do not believe we created. We don’t believe it’s ours; it’s not China’s, not Russia’s, not the United States’. It’s a seemingly super-intelligent flying object.” And that does present some issues, like Lou Elizondo says. People, it seems forever, out in the ocean, have recorded things they couldn’t understand in the sky — anomalous objects. And this is all data that constitutes evidence. Then you have somebody like Gary, who’s now looking at debris from some of these events. He’s a microbiologist, an amazing one, one of the best in the world, so he’s able to drill down into these objects at a level that can identify the isotopes and the isotopic ratios. And he says that in the 1940s — and even today — if we were to create something like this, it would be incredibly expensive and almost unheard of. It would be unheard of in the 1940s. So he’s looking at this and going, “It’s manufactured. We don’t know by who, or how, it was manufactured.” Could it be super-advanced technology that’s secret and stealth? It could be. So, that said, I am not finished with that problem. That problem is still there. So that’s how I’ve been grappling with the whole thing. It’s a good question. To answer it: I don’t think we should take all of these and say they correspond to reality. Not all of them do. Some of them do.

Ross Kenyon: Well, I can see why you’re in Jacques Vallée’s good graces — you don’t have all the answers, nor pretend to. I think maybe that’s where some of this stuff ends up in crankier territory, where people think they have a universal theory of what this is, and I feel like your research often points to more questions — especially as it pertains to media theory. I don’t think anyone would’ve guessed you’d go so hard into Marshall McLuhan as you do. Why would a religious studies scholar working on the UAP phenomenon end up in Marshall McLuhan and media theory?

Diana Pasulka: Oh, yeah. I’ve been a fan of Marshall McLuhan and his work for years and years. I think he was right. He’s predicting a time when human beings are going to shift because of their relationship with technology. Technology’s—

Ross Kenyon: You know this is a risk, though, right? Woody Allen could come out at any point and drag him on camera to tell you you know nothing of his work. It’s really risky to talk about him for that reason.

Diana Pasulka: Because of Woody Allen?

Ross Kenyon: Like that scene in Annie Hall where he brings Marshall McLuhan out to scold the guy. It’s dangerous, talking about Marshall McLuhan. Anyway — please continue your actual point.

Diana Pasulka: Yeah, no, it’s true, it’s true. Marshall McLuhan — first off, I was interested in this time period. I’ve had a persistent focus on media as technology, media technology, and from my Purgatory book I just kind of brought it to the contemporary period. In the contemporary period, I think Marshall McLuhan called it correctly — what’s happening right now with the shift from digital technology to AI-super-powered digital technology. He said it was going to change the way we live and perceive reality, change our brains. He said a lot of things that were really interesting. And he wasn’t the only one, but he was the most recent and, I think, the most accurate. So I chose to look at his theories again — and I’ve always taught him, by the way; when I do my religion and popular culture class, I always teach Marshall McLuhan. He’s interesting because what I found is it’s not just him — it’s also the Jesuit paleontologist of the early 20th century, Teilhard de Chardin. He said very similar things to Marshall McLuhan. In fact, they predict a new form of human being. Now, how does this correspond with UFOs? When you get into the communities of experiencers — experiencers are people who’ve had UFO sightings and events in their lives, and they call themselves experiencers — they tend to say similar things. One of the things they say — and this is where it gets into religion, so it sounds weird to a lot of people — is that human beings are undergoing this shift because of UFOs. The aliens, or the extraterrestrials, or interdimensional beings, whatever they are, are actually cultivating human beings and helping them evolve. Some of them believe that evolution is bad — a bad cultivation — and a good portion of them believe it’s good. So you have this dichotomy. Marshall McLuhan is not saying it’s the aliens’ fault. He’s basically saying, “We are definitely changing, and this is because of technology.” And he predicts how that’s going to happen. That’s where, in my book The Others, I do a deep dive into Marshall McLuhan, look at Teilhard de Chardin, and Arthur C. Clarke, of all people. Those are the visionaries whose work I’m looking at. They all say relatively the same thing. And then there’s a person who’s living — his name is Mark Stahlman — and he says similar things. Thankfully, I can ask him: “Is this what you mean, Mark?” Everyone else has passed away, but Mark is Catholic. He’s a person who knows a lot about AI — he’s used it and worked with it for many years, most of his life. He’s the godson of Norbert Wiener, who a lot of people don’t know, but if you read his books from the 1940s and ‘50s, you’ll see he was already warning us about AI, saying, “This is going to take over. We have to be careful of these intelligent machines.” Norbert Wiener worked with Mark’s father, who was an MIT professor, and they did the same kind of thing, and Mark inherited that. He knew Marshall McLuhan’s grandson and son, he knows about McLuhan’s work, and he’s also the head of the Center for the Study of Digital Life.

Ross Kenyon: When I think about Marshall McLuhan — and this is a very layperson’s reading, correct me if I’m wrong — it’s about the tools we use becoming somaticized. They become part of our body, part of our mind. Media is a tool we use, and the phone and digital devices become extensions of our brain — and in fact become like a networked brain in some way. And I also link this to someone like Donna Haraway — someone I know you’ve had a relationship with, and whose work has puzzled me for a very long time. It’s a hard read, and she’s obviously very clever, but it’s one of those things where you have to wrap your mind around quite a number of things to make sense of it. I think it’s easier now with AI, where we can see the impact of an external brain-of-brains, or a mind outside our own. If you watch something like — I imagine you’ve seen David Cronenberg’s Videodrome. Have you seen that?

Diana Pasulka: Yes.

Ross Kenyon: How could you not have? But yeah — “long live the new flesh,” and you have the merging with television. It feels hokey in hindsight, because you’re like, TV wasn’t really that important. But I’m sure if you were at that time, noticing the advent of cable and how ubiquitous television was becoming, maybe it was different. In hindsight you’re like, “Eh, people watch TV, so what?” But now, with AI, you can actually see the going-into-the-TV-screen — that moment in the film — actually happening now. Whereas I don’t think that happened with television. Although maybe, because I was raised in an age where television was so ubiquitous, I just don’t see how my own brain and personality were impacted by the union with media technology at that exact moment in time. That’s why I’m sort of blind to it. So is it actually a new thing with AI? Was television as important as it’s portrayed in Videodrome? Or is AI just the same thing magnified — multiplied several thousand times?

Diana Pasulka: Yeah, I think it’s definitely magnified. But, okay — David Cronenberg is interesting because, I could be wrong, but I believe he was a student of Marshall McLuhan’s. And—

Ross Kenyon: That movie is basically Marshall McLuhan in video form, is it not? It feels pretty on the nose.

Diana Pasulka: It is, yeah. I just want to be careful what I say. But yes — Marshall McLuhan is Professor O’Blivion in the movie, right? So the movie is about the transition of the human being into the evolution of human beings through this co-evolution with technology. Technology is basically the new flesh, like you put it. And you’re correct — it somaticizes. There’s an enfleshment that happens with our interaction with technology. This becomes very evident when we look at social media. Take the progression of social media. First we have Facebook — which Mark Stahlman calls “television social media.” We’ve got a television version of social media: you can write stuff — in fact, there’s no limit to what you can write — you can upload photos and videos, and we’re all looking at it, and there’s a feed. It kind of makes sense to us. Then we get to Instagram and Twitter — second-generation social media. No more can you write anything on Twitter; you can only write, what is it, like 140 characters. So you’re stuck with posting what you can post, very short. It kills your attention span right there. And you’re interacting with it all the time, because who doesn’t have their phone with them all the time now? Then you’ve got Instagram, which is just photos, videos, these kinds of things. And then you have TikTok, which again shifts everything, and even the social media images migrate into internet culture — so you go on your search engine, and everything is a short video. YouTube now integrates TikTok-style short videos, and so forth. You can’t really get away from it. Does it impact the way we think? Absolutely. Does it impact us physiologically? A hundred percent. This is what the AI trials we’ve recently been watching — with Meta and so forth — are about. This is really important, because it’s the design of these platforms that’s hurting us, especially young people and the development of their brains. It’s not the content. And that’s what Marshall McLuhan was trying to say. Television — what did it do? It shifted people. They no longer had community events down at the pub. And by the way, a pub is a public house — that’s what a pub is. We no longer have these public houses; everybody’s insulated in their living rooms, watching TV together. And what’s sad is that now that seems like a healthy thing to do — at least you’re with each other, you’re not on your phone; your son’s upstairs, you’re downstairs, this kind of thing. So that’s what’s sad: we’ve even forgotten how to be together in public spaces. Television did that to us. And you and I, we grew up with TV — we were acclimated already, we were born into it. We never had the “before” time. So think of what young people today are going through. My kids are Gen Z-ers, so they’re all between 18 and 22, and that’s the age of my students. I started teaching 24 years ago, so I got to see the whole shift — when students were actually hanging out with each other in the hallways, talking to each other, doing the things students do. Now, nothing like that; they’re all on their phones. Students come to me now, Ross, and ask me if I’ll be the head of the chess club, because they want to hang out with each other without phones. I’m not kidding. It’s really sad. They know what’s happening. It’s really difficult — it’s almost as if we can’t fight against it.

Ross Kenyon: Is this where you begin to link to a broader concept of nonhuman intelligences? Is this the linkage point for your work?

Diana Pasulka: So — there are a few things, and a few that were surprising to me. This is why I like my work, because I do a lot of things. When I was looking at purgatory, I found that purgatory was a place in Ireland, and you could still go there. It’s on a lake — it’s called Lough Derg, an island on this lake, the Red Lake in Ireland. It’s still a pilgrimage; probably a million people a year go there. People used to go there and go into a cave, and if they were able to survive the night in the cave, they were free of sin. So that was purgatory.

Ross Kenyon: You had to cut off Darth Vader’s head, and you take the mask off, and it’s actually yourself the whole time.

Diana Pasulka: Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: You have to confront your Jungian shadow in there? How fun.

Diana Pasulka: Yeah. They thought they were demons, so I guess they were bad people. In fact, you had to be really bad in order to go to this cave. So — my point is that I’m surprised when I find this stuff out. I’m like, “Wow, really?” So I was surprised to find out, when I looked through Marshall McLuhan and through the work of Teilhard de Chardin, that there were instances of other intelligences. In Marshall McLuhan, though, it’s not — he’s not talking about UFOs. He’s talking about a new form of the human. Now, he also has a conversion. He doesn’t start out Christian. He’s learning all of this stuff at Cambridge — this is the Western tradition — and then what happens is he decides, “I wonder if this stuff is real.” He says, “I’ll just ask God. I’ll test it out.” So he prays: “Is this stuff real? Send me a sign.” And lo and behold, a bunch of signs come, and they don’t stop — they keep coming. He’s overwhelmed, and he converts to Catholicism. And he talks about this thing called his spiritual sense, which apparently he has. I was really amazed by this, because he described it perfectly, exactly like Teilhard de Chardin’s spiritual sense. And the spiritual sense is something you see in religious tradition. In my basic intro-to-religion class, I say, “What do we know about religion? Tell me some common things.” And a lot of students say, “Well, people pray, they meditate, they do this.” Yes, they do. Why do they do that? What are they doing? It seems kind of odd — they all do it? What they’re doing is engaging with this sense, this spiritual sense. We’ve lost that tradition today; we don’t believe we have it. But these guys — Teilhard and Marshall — they knew they had it, because theirs was just like our sense of sight, or taste, or touch. Theirs was that obvious to them, as our senses are to us. And I had to write about that, because it was overwhelmingly important to their work. In fact, that’s where their work comes from — this very intense recognition that there’s a spiritual sense. Marshall McLuhan said the spiritual sense will be shifted through technology, and I do see that. Today, of course, we have people who study the brain. There have been these studies — that’s what I decided to look into when I saw, wow, the spiritual sense is really important to these people. I wondered what people are saying about it now. So I started to look into cognitive science — there’s this author who wrote The Awakened Brain, and she does cognitive science, looking at how, when people are involved in religious practices, certain parts of their brain light up. This would indicate regions of the brain where perhaps the spiritual sense resides — I don’t know. But that’s what I’m looking at now: this spiritual sense. And what happens is that when young people are using social media, they’re not engaging that sense. In religious traditions, it’s built in — there’s bar mitzvah, there’s confirmation in Catholicism — that bring young people into the recognition that they’re now responsible for cultivating an interior sense. But this is a lost tradition. There are some religions that still practice it and still teach young people that, but for the most part it’s definitely being lost — and it might be permanently lost, if we allow social media to inhabit that sense now.

Ross Kenyon: In one of the early chapters of the new book, you mention that social media, and the world it’s created, might actually be a good candidate for the Antichrist — contra Peter Thiel’s Greta-Thunberg-safetyism kind of take on that. Is that an accurate representation of how you feel about this?

Diana Pasulka: Well, that’s a provocative description of it. But I’d been to a conference where Peter Thiel gave his talk on the Antichrist, and it caused me to think hard about the Antichrist. And I thought, “You know, I don’t think he has that right,” because he never talked about the interior sense. He did talk a lot about precedents — literary precedents, Catholics writing about the Antichrist and so forth. One of the books is by — I forget his first name, but his last name is Benson — and it’s called Lord of the World. And his point — he’s writing in the early 20th century — is this: during the end time, what happens is that people have completely lost their interior senses. They don’t even know they exist. And because they’ve lost their interior sense, their spiritual sense, evil becomes routine. Euthanasia is rampant — these things that Christians don’t like — and it’s considered a good thing. In fact, “euthanasia” is Greek for “a good death.” So they think when a person reaches a certain age, if they don’t want to live, they should be allowed to die — and many people believe that today. Christians generally don’t believe that. So his point is that there’s good — there’s good in boring, ordinary life, in boring, ordinary things; there’s goodness in those. And because we live in a world that doesn’t recognize that, it’s just going to go away. What will be the end time is that we just don’t even know we have a spiritual sense, or a spiritual life, and that ordinary good things are ordinary good things. We won’t even know that. So that’s what I wanted to point out. And I said, “What’s doing that to us now?” Social media is doing that to us now. It’s literally erasing that part of our brain, and I thought that would be the candidate. I’m not saying social media is the Antichrist — because in some countries it’s regulated, and it’s actually helpful. But certainly the way it is here — if we’re going to identify one, that would be a candidate. That would be my top candidate.

Ross Kenyon: One thing I wanted to ask you about while I have you here: for some reason I’ve read a lot of science fiction, and I never noticed how much psychic phenomena show up in it. And Childhood’s End — I hadn’t read that one until I came across it in your work — you discuss it at length in The Others, but there’s a strong sense that the evolution will not merely be technological, but will in some cases be networked brains, psychic phenomena. It’s possible this is parable or symbolism about how we’ll network — as envisioned from a pre-cybernetic stage of human development, like when Arthur C. Clarke is writing. Why is that so prominent in science fiction, and why does it basically go invisible for so much of it? Once you pointed it out, I started watching films like Solaris — which I recently watched — where I’m like, “Oh, I didn’t know this was a supernatural... it’s an alien, space movie, but it’s also psychic. It’s spiritual. Something else is happening here.” Why isn’t that represented? Because science fiction almost presupposes a materialist paradigm — and it’s not true — and I think people misunderstand the genre when they make it too materialistic. Why do you think we’ve misinterpreted the genre?

Diana Pasulka: Yeah, it’s really interesting. First off, Arthur C. Clarke definitely believed in telepathy, mind reading, that kind of thing. He thought there were a lot of fakers out there making money from it, so that kind of turned him off to studying it — but he definitely believed in it. And so did Marshall McLuhan. What’s interesting is that both of these men believed in it, but they didn’t necessarily give it the status of something supernatural — because they believed... This is one of Arthur C. Clarke’s laws: it’s technology we just haven’t figured out yet. And my point in writing that — and I included some examples — is that technology’s already figured it out. I’ve written a lot of articles that are free out there, by the way — they’re kind of academic, boring stuff, you have to want to learn about that thing, but they’re journal articles — and one of them talked about these professors, I think this was in 2017, so you can imagine this has gotten much, much better. They were basically creating software that could read our brainwaves in various ways. Fast-forward to 2023, and I’m at South by Southwest talking to some tech people, and they’re talking about experiencing this — having a computer software program read their brainwaves while they’re thinking about their dog, and then seeing their dog appear, just as they imagine it, on the computer screen. So this, I think, is what McLuhan and Arthur C. Clarke were pointing out — that nothing’s really supernatural, it’s more naturalistic. It’s this naturalistic kind of idea. And I also link this to Steven Dick’s analysis of what he calls post-biological existence. He’s a NASA historian, and he’s written a lot — he has a huge bibliography on potential extraterrestrial life. He said the reason we’re most likely not aware of it is because it’s so advanced that it’s incommensurable — our brains aren’t capable of understanding it. But he provides an analysis of how we can understand how it exists today, and it’s technological. It gets beyond a certain technological stage — past the AI stage — and it’s self-replicating, and it becomes its own life form, and for us it would be like a deity. It would be able to read our minds, blink in and out of our reality. So he sees it as a natural evolution.

Ross Kenyon: So you’re just rejecting the framing of natural versus supernatural? You think that’s a misleading taxonomy?

Diana Pasulka: I’m not necessarily rejecting that — no, I’m not doing that. What I’m doing is saying that certainly Arthur C. Clarke rejects it, and certainly in a sense Marshall McLuhan does on some level — even though he’s a professed Catholic, he’s basically saying certain things are definitely going to be more natural, like mind reading. We’re not going to have any sense of privacy in the future, he said — and he was speaking in the 1960s, ‘70s, ‘80s, really. So he’s talking about our future, what we’re living through now. He’s saying: privacy, kiss it goodbye. There are a lot of things we take for granted in terms of what a human being is, and he says those things will not obtain in the future. That’s what I’m saying. Personally, my own religion — I am Catholic. I believe in God and the supernatural reality of God. But does that preclude looking at these kinds of things and seeing them from their perspective? No, I can do that. And in fact, if you look at the history of the saints, like Joseph of Cupertino and so forth, they mind-read. They do mind-read.

Ross Kenyon: What do you think it’s going to be like to be a human moving forward, in the next couple of years? Are we going to radically change our ontology, or are we going to have to update what it even means?

Diana Pasulka: Oh, definitely. I think we’re going to update what it means. I think religion is going to be very important for people — I think they’re going to rethink what it means. And I know a lot of communities right now are already doing this. If you look at certain communities — and we should not look down upon them, like the Amish. There’s a lot of wisdom there. Many Amish communities — by the way, they’re varied in their beliefs, they’re not all the same — in certain of those communities, they don’t entirely reject technology. They reject what will prevent them from being fully engaged with God and their families, and the things their religion tells them are important, like family life and community life. So if family life and community life are so important, they reject television. You see what I’m saying? There’s a lot of wisdom in certain communities. Certain Indigenous communities have rejected writing as a form of technology, because they knew it would change their culture if they lost their oral tradition. So there’s a lot of wisdom, I think, that we can gain from looking at the variety of ways that what you’d call non-secular religions relate to technology and what we’d call progress.

Ross Kenyon: And a secular religion being something like transhumanism, or Ray Kurzweil singularity-type talk — that might be an example of a secular religion?

Diana Pasulka: Okay, sorry — I didn’t identify what I meant by that. Those would be new religious movements, which you’ve learned about — religions within the last 150 years. But I’m calling “secular religion” even Christian religions that have acclimated to the rationalist, Enlightenment frameworks. Not necessarily people who aren’t practicing Christians, or whatever their religion is — but the tenets of their religion are that nonhuman intelligences, like angels and demons, exist, that supernatural things exist. But they say, “Well, they existed in the first century, but they don’t exist now.” I would call that secular Christianity.

Ross Kenyon: How interesting. I feel like belief in those things is probably stronger than it’s been in a long time, with the rise of occult practice and people being really interested in astrology and various new age and occult things. But I imagine there’s a fair amount of overlap between summoning AI and summoning trans-dimensional beings. Some people do weird out in that kind of way.

Diana Pasulka: That’s right. That’s right. They do. Absolutely.

Ross Kenyon: Although “weirded out” is sort of a pejorative way to put it — I don’t even know how I want to keep it exactly as framed. Diana, thanks for coming on. I’m going to have to make the link to climate change in this intro — but climate change is a big question about what it means to be human in a world that’s changing, and your writing is interesting to me because it deals with that from what seems like a perpendicular angle, but isn’t at all. I feel like all this stuff is wrapped up in the same kinds of questions. And thanks for taking a flyer on a show like this.

Diana Pasulka: Oh, yeah. This is great. I really had a great conversation.

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It's legs to walk and thoughts to fly
Eyes to laugh and lips to cry
A restless tongue to classify
All born to grow and grown to die
—Townes Van Zandt in "Rex's Blues"

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If we created an objectively correct and exhaustive categorization of carbon credits, would it solve everything? Would it solve anything?

Listen in as I read an essay I recently wrote about the endless quest to perfectly categorize the world, and while that may be a useful project for some purposes, it isn't anywhere close to the main reasons the world looks the way that it does.

Listen in and you'll get surrealist sculpture, Michael Polanyi, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Plato. Who can truly say no to an offer like that?

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Here's the essay on Substack if you'd like to read along and check out the endnotes.

Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Hey, thank you so much for listening to Reversing Climate Change. This is the host Ross Kenyon. I’m a longtime carbon dioxide removal and climate tech entrepreneur. I wrote a piece recently on Substack that... I really liked it. It grew out of a different essay I was working on. And the more I worked on this one section, the more I’m like, if I go down this road much further, there’s going to be a second essay nested within a larger essay. And it diverges with the purpose of the original essay enough where I’m like, all right, fine.

I’m just going to break this out. It was originally called The Impossible Taxonomy. By the time this is released, I’m gonna call it The Impossible Taxonomy of Carbon Dioxide Removal. I was inspired to write this piece because so much of the work within carbon markets and carbon dioxide removal, carbon crediting, what have you, is around taxonomy. How do we categorize things? Why do we categorize them this way? So much of this work is predicated on a hope or a belief or a prediction That a better taxonomy, or even a perfect taxonomy, will help us move climate action ahead.

That’s a tough one for me. I came out of loving things like the Cratylus, the Platonic dialogue about the differences between names and the things that are being named and how those are pulling apart and being quite influenced by semiotics and postmodernism and the idea that we should be Questioning categories and noticing that categories aren’t neutral partitions of reality. They are often infused with power. Who gets to categorize things and slice up reality? And these are not neutral actions of stratigraphy. People want to treat the world like Carl Linnaeus, bylaw, classes, kingdoms, families, orders.

If we could just lock everything down, And while I think there is something that’s really important there about clarity and the desire to speak plainly and accurately, and that can unlock some really important truths, it’s one of those things that it’s constantly undermining itself. For so many things, this is especially true if there’s a binary where there’s only two categories, It’s usually stressing at the seams almost immediately. And in order to truly believe in the categorical integrity of a dichotomy, you have to basically enforce it. And you’re going to have edge cases of having to decide...

Decide things that are difficult. But I don’t think the solution here is to retreat into a form of philosophical nominalism, of solipsism, of the impossibility of ever communicating effectively. I don’t think that’s the correct answer here. It is a conclusion you can draw, but I don’t think it’s true. You’ll understand what I mean as I read this essay that I wrote recently on Substack called The Impossible Taxonomy of Carbon Dioxide Removal. The impossible taxonomy. If we created an objectively correct and exhaustive categorization of carbon credits, would it solve everything? Would it solve anything?

It begins with a header quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein, his Philosophical Investigations. Quote, End quotation. 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, quote, legacy carbon credits, end quote, you likely know I mean someone fluent in transacting Red Plus credits on Vera. You’ll probably also infer their comfort with credits originating from Isometrics Improved Forest Management, IFM, and Afforestation and Reforestation, We can say this individual invests in, quote, nature-based solutions, end quote, 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, quote, once you have paid the Dane Guild, you never get rid of the Dane, end quote. This is me making fun of myself. It’s from the Rudyard Kipling poem. 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 quote-unquote 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 finish 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. 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. But are words important? Here’s another quote at the top of this section. Quote, The beginning of knowledge is to call things by their true names. End quote. Attributed to Confucius slash Socrates slash Abraham Lincoln. The pantheon of misattributed quotes on the internet. 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. There is an oft-unstated belief underlying so much of the taxonomical churn in carbon market discourse that, quote, if only we could categorize and name everything correctly, so much else would fall into place. And I stand here 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. I hope you enjoyed. I’ve never actually just read a piece of writing of mine here, but normally when I write something, I like to talk about it. I like to express it, play with it.

I feel like that helps me understand it in new ways. So much of the podcast is improvisatory and what connections are being made and talking is a good way to do that. I appreciate your listening. I hope you enjoyed some of the themes here. There are some cool pictures that I think help explain some of these ideas and maybe open up some new avenues. There’s also end notes if you care about this, including one that I think is important about the work of Michael Polanyi about his famous line, we can know more than we can tell.

His famous example is, you actually can’t really teach someone how to ride a bike The amount of tacit knowledge, things that are inarticulable, innumerable micro acts of balance that take place in your body in order to ride a bike. You could not explain all of those things to someone else using words. They basically just have to start riding a bike and their body will learn it. But you can’t explain every step ex ante. But the thing about riding a bike is you don’t have to state every rule of riding a bike ex ante in order to ride the bike.

I think that’s true of carbon markets and these assets as well. I think the attempts to categorize things better and more accurately over time, it’s useful for some functions and for some types of work, it is really important. But I don’t think that’s the main thing or even one of the most important things that’s blocking climate action. I don’t think that’s having a major impact on that. I think the problems of climate action have much more to do with spiritual illness, with how humans deal with the discount rate, about the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and why we’re here and not having a metaphysical understanding that has prepared us for this moment.

I think those are much better explanations than if only we had categorized this a little bit more tightly and knew what every asset did and could be used for. Again, not disparaging it, valuable work for some purposes, but I’m also careful to note that we understand each other well enough, I think, at this point to check this off of the list of what are the biggest problems bedeviling carbon dioxide removal in carbon markets. I hope you enjoyed this. Link in the show notes to the Substack post. And thanks so much for your time.

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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I interviewed Charles C. Mann in 2020 about his book, The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World. This episode is a personal favorite of mine.

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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Listen to the RCC episode I made with David LaGreca from EcoEngineers about how to choose, hire, and fire carbon market contractors.

And the one with Rudy Krehbiel, also of EcoEngineers, on which story carbon dioxide removal is actually in and what it costs to be inside the wrong one.

2026 EcoForums Training Series: Navigating Global Carbon and Fuel Regulations, Market Mechanisms, and Life-Cycle Analysis Fundamentals

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Charles C. Mann on Wikipedia

The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann

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Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.

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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. [Twitter plug cut from the transcript. It's still in the audio.]

Ross Kenyon: 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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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

Resources

Check out my new show, Climate Workers Anonymous

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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.

Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: From athletic stuff like a full court pickup game, swish, to athletic stuff like a half mile stroll, get those steps in. Head to Sierra or Sierra.com for the brands you want at the prices that let you do it all. From athletic to athletic, Sierra’s got it. Hey, thank you so much for listening to Reversing Climate Change. This is Ross. We’re on a first name basis, right? I guess if you’re listening, we might as well be. Ross Kenyon, if you’re not on a first name basis with me.

I’m a climate tech and carbon dioxide removal person. Dare I say a worker? I wanted to reach out because you’re listening to this show. If you’re still here, presumably it’s because you like the kind of art that I make. You like the way that I deal with ideas. And I want to make sure that you know about another show that I just started called Climate Workers Anonymous. If you’ve listened for the last couple of years, you’ve probably picked up on some of the themes that are perhaps most succinctly explored in the episode of Reversing Climate Change I did called When Bad Companies Buy Good Carbon Removal.

It’s one of those shows that took a long time to make, a lot of processing. How do I feel about this? And it dealt with the fact of what do we do given that the companies that buy carbon offsets, credits, carbon removal credits, sometimes aren’t companies that we’re necessarily proud of. And yet one essentially has to push that down a little bit to get the deals done or to keep your job or to get a job. And how that might feel punitive, compromising, corrupting in some way.

Or maybe we’ve met at Carbon Unbound, where in January and in May, I ran these small group workshops called Campfires that was all about founder grief, about the difficulty of working carbon dioxide removal right now, where it’s pretty bifurcated. If you have a big offtake, you’re focused on executing. If not, it’s unclear if you’re going to be able to gin up enough demand to keep going or to expand or to raise your next round and It’s hard to talk about those things openly because then it makes one look weak and looking weak can create a self-fulfilling cycle where it is thus harder to attract buyers or investors.

So I think a lot of people who are working at early stage companies just carry feelings around. They’re either feelings that are conventional to founding a company about, are we going to make it? I have to be the brave parent, the brave leader and put on a good face so that others don’t lose faith and I think that only increases working in a space like climate because I pretty much don’t meet people who are here for the wrong reasons. Pretty much everyone I ever meet who’s in climate At the very least came into this work because they think that it’s really important to reverse climate change, at least make it less bad.

What are we doing here and how do we fix it? So I think this is a line of work with a stronger than average conscience. That only makes these struggles and the mask wearing more painful. To date, I’ve published one introductory episode, which is a lot like what you’re hearing right now, explaining the rationale for Climate Workers Anonymous. And then I’ve also published two episodes that focus on user submissions of their anonymous and unverified takes on working in climate. If you’re a millennial, as I am, at least one from the United States, you might remember Post Secret.

Or people would mail in a decorated postcard that would have a sentiment that they felt unable to express in their regular life, often a morose feeling, something that they were scared to talk about. They would mail it in to be published by PostSecret, a collective art project. And that’s what Climate Workers Anonymous is. It’s a collective art project for those anonymous and unverified feelings You do not feel comfortable sharing with the world at large. Send it in and I will read it on your behalf. It will be published in audio and text form on Substack.

It will go out on the Carbon Removal Newsroom podcast feed if you’re still subscribed to that. If you’d like to submit your stories, experiences, feelings, hopeful, grim, mundane, visual, send me some visual stuff. I’m open to it. If you have something that you want shared, but maybe don’t want it attributed to you personally, send it to me. There’s a link to a tally form. Please don’t submit anything that you’re not comfortable if it was ever revealed. There’s also a ProtonMail email address if you want to send something in that way, but obviously you will have to send it from an email not linked to you personally.

And also be careful as AI gets better. It’s possible that it will be able to deduce who you are from your syntax and words. So I can’t like perfectly guarantee that for all time, your identity will be protected in this way. So please only share what you’re comfortable with knowing what I just told you. I think it’s important to tell the truth about these things. I think it’s important to have a space where people can unburden themselves because this work is genuinely challenging and I don’t know, I’m getting a lot of submissions on difficulties or contrarian opinions that I don’t feel comfortable with.

Or some of them are even pointing to potentially unethical behavior by certain players in climate. And as I mentioned, these are unverified. So I’m not spending time researching these. I can’t speak to their veracity and whether or not these are true. So please keep that in mind as you listen. I try my best to make sure that they are not spreading rumors that I think are harmful in this way. I’m trying to find the right line to do this. And if you’d like to be a part of this collective art project, I would humbly invite you to follow Climate Workers Anonymous on Substack in your podcast app.

And I’m going to attach an episode right now to the tail end of this introduction so that you can hear what that’s like. So here it is, a full episode of Climate Workers Anonymous on the Reversing Climate Change feed. Thank you so much for listening. I hope I will see you over there. Don’t worry, Reversing Climate Change will still persist. How could it not? I don’t know how to quit it even if I could. I think I have to keep making shows here, so don’t worry.

I want to do something different over at Climate Workers Anonymous. Thanks for being a fan. Thanks for listening. I hope this is stimulating your brain, making you feel or think things that otherwise you would not. That’s the additionality of this show. Thanks for listening. I appreciate you a lot. And here it is, an episode from Climate Workers Anonymous. Hello, this is Ross Kenyon. I’m the host of Climate Workers Anonymous. This is the first time I’m attempting to read submissions that have been sent into the show.

I’ve never done this before. I have a lot of questions about the ethics of doing this, about how much to anonymize if people are naming specific people or entities. In general, I think that’s not what we want to be doing today. One of the lessons I seemingly have to relearn continuously as I get older is that whenever I’m judgy towards someone, it usually only takes a little bit of time for me to be in a similar kind of spot to them to understand how they could behave in that way.

As the line from Antiquity goes, I am human. Nothing human is foreign to me. Terrence, the Roman playwright, said that. I’ve always enjoyed that line. I spent way too much time trying to find this. There’s a quote from a film that I love called, I Hurt Huckabees. Jason Schwartzman has hired these Existential detectives, Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin to figure out his life and symbolism and the archetypes and what everything means. And this is not a spoiler and doesn’t give anything away here, but here’s the line.

I spent way too much time trying to find this exact line. I can’t find a clip of it or I would just post it in the show notes. They’re explaining the interconnection of Jude Law and Jason Schwartzman’s characters here. And they tell Jason Schwartzman, your energy recycles into every possible relation to everyone else’s energy, even Brad’s. You’ve been predator and prey with him, friends, enemies, brother, sister, mother, child. I think about that line a lot. Many of the things that I would judge when I was younger, now that I’m in a position to experience some of those things that I had only previously observed but now have lived firsthand, I find that I am no better and no worse than many others.

And all the time I had spent putting myself in a position of superiority was not actually that helpful, nor that true. It’s one of the reasons why I think a default to egalitarianism, at the very least in ethical matters like this, is really important. When we expend a lot of energy thinking of ourselves as better than one another, it’s hard to read what I’m about to read to you in a way that is less about how the person sending this message is superior to the person it is about.

But also as a way of maybe having mercy for the individual actor here, because the system pushes people to act this way too. And that’s not to say that we can just blame the system and we don’t have responsibility for our actions. We absolutely do. It’s the only thing that we control. And one of the ways that you can make sense of attention like this is that suboptimal behavior might not be endorseable, but it is understandable. And I think if you can understand something, you can have mercy.

And if you can have mercy, you can go beyond shame. And if you can go beyond shame, you can start to understand why people behave the way that they do in a way that does not present a false hierarchy where the observer is inherently better than the doer. There are times that this may not hold. There are times when this way of understanding action, behavior, consequences May not be appropriate for the situation, but it is something that I’m thinking about a lot as I’m trying to read what people are writing me and to do so in a way that feels true without feeling like an irresponsible gossip column, essentially.

I really want this to feel a bit more like Post Secret and not like a supermarket tabloid. I suspect that will not be the last time that I will have to do a little bit of an intro explaining how this is going to work and why. This process will be evolutionary. We’re all going to learn things about our industry and ourselves. And that’s going to mean that the medium, the art itself will likely have to adapt. To what it is meant to express. Downstream from such lofty thoughts, I received several submissions, some long, some short.

Thank you so much to everyone who already has opened up and sent me your takes. I really appreciate it. In the show notes, you will see a link for an anonymous tally survey. You click on it, you write your little text, you send it off. There’s no spot to put your email or your name. I’m not interested in those parts. Moreover, I think it makes this a whole lot more secure if you just don’t share information that you wouldn’t like it if someone had figured out a way into that tally system and had access to it.

There’s also a ProtonMail email if you prefer to send some info to me over there. Unfortunately, unless you use a new email address or one that you use that is not linked to your name or your profession. There’s a limit to how much can be done for privacy reasons. But if you prefer that, there’s a link as well in the show notes. It’s climateworkersanonymous at protonmail.com. So I don’t know, what am I gonna do here? I got several submissions on tally. So I think I’m gonna do a couple shorties and then I have a longer one that I’m going to read.

So, okay, here we go. First submissions to Climate Workers Anonymous. I have so much optimism based on what I see working on a climate solution and from the people I work with in my industry, but we need more corporate and government actions fast. Here’s one that made me already have to figure out what my bleeping policy is. I think I still got a bleep. So, uh, I don’t know. I guess I’m going to be bleeping. If that’s a wrong decision, you let me know.

Maybe it’s better not to bleep. Maybe it’s better not to believe. I don’t know. I’m gonna have to think about that one. One line. All it says is, I feel like we’re fucked. Third submission today. Fourth Submission. I was always scared that joining the climate fight would mean dying before I got to actually see any modicum of success from years of effort and grind. I just don’t know how people keep their chin up in the space, and now we are faced with outright failure and indifference versus success.

It is dispiriting. As is the reality that the economic systems continue to penny-pinch when it comes to funding CapEx for decarb, capital expenditure for decarbonization, but had no problems ponying up literally $1 trillion to fund AI, which looks likely to destroy labor, further bake the planet, and entrench techno-oligarchs. Fifth submission. Consumers don’t care about climate, and they don’t want to care about climate. Paraphrasing from a 2017 Tumblr post, if your solution to a problem relies on, quote, everyone just, dot, dot, dot, end quote, then you don’t have a solution.

No one has ever, quote, unquote, just. No one ever will, quote, unquote, just. Stop pitching climate to businesses like you’re selling to a consumer. Quote, this is easy. Your friends will love it. The effects are immediate. End quotations. Sixth and final submission from the short ones. There was a point in time where I was fairly convinced that sinking wood chips to the bottom of the ocean was somehow going to be one of the successful methods for carbon removal. Thanks so much for sharing that.

Even those little nuggets, y’all brought it. You all said something real, whether it was five words, maybe six if you count the contraction as two, or whether it was a full paragraph. Thanks for taking the time to just say something hard. Do you feel unburdened? Does it help to know that thousands of people likely just heard this sentiment? Maybe they hadn’t heard anyone speak so forcefully in the past. Maybe it’s been a while. Thanks for doing that. You have my sincere thanks for your leadership and for going first.

It’s brave. Even if it’s anonymous, it’s brave. Some of these things are just really hard to, I don’t know, to do yourself. I’m realizing now that potentially the first three were meant to be submitted as a single block. So it looks like there was some sort of technical goof in there. Whatever. They all stand separately as well. How funny. Okay, I’m gonna read a longer one now. The carbon dioxide removal industry is stuck in a paradox. We want a flashy, well-funded, functioning market filled with high-quality tonnes, but markets inherently reward provision of cheaper services on the margins.

As long as there are cheaper alternatives, whether those are emissions reductions or very low-quality removals, those will always edge out the higher-quality stuff across the entire population of the market. In this context, the venture capital model just won’t work for carbon dioxide removal, as it inevitably results in monopolistic and anti-competitive behaviors, a race to the bottom in terms of quality, and attraction of profit-motivated individuals who cynically use science as a shroud for ruthless profiteering. The carbon credit game also feeds much of the moral hazard. No one wants to hear this, but for CDR to be truly successful, it needs to move away from a market-based model.

Our adherence to it to date explains so many of the industry’s underlying struggles around buyers, funding, and scale. Building CDR should be a slow and steady, no-fail mission that avoids the boom and bust dynamics in commodities like oil and gold. It needs to be backed by policy, supported by local communities, rooted in environmentalism, and integrated into our way of life and industries in a way that can yield co-benefits beyond just CDR, parenthetical, although we’ll need a lot of pure play CDR too, end parenthetical. It’s not entirely clear what this would look like yet, but it’s our responsibility to build this.

End of that submission. One thing I’m thinking about is how much to react to these responses versus let them stand alone. And I’m leaning towards letting them stand alone. Thank you to everyone for submitting. I like the differences in lengths. I like the differences in earnestness. I like differences in serious critiques of a climate tech field like carbon dioxide removal. I’d like to remind people too That if you have a beautiful sentiment that is awkward to share, you can do that too. I don’t want this to be purely negative.

It shouldn’t be just negative. I think a lot of the things that are scary to say are concepts that maybe need a capital letter at the front because they’re a proper noun, you know, truth and beauty, justice, things like that, that you want to express with regard to your climate work that maybe aren’t super fashionable, maybe make you look like less serious of a business person. Those are very welcome too. I’ll say them on your behalf. You honor me by giving me the opportunity to do so and to pass along some real thoughts here.

Critical, beautiful, mundane. I don’t know. You got something mundane you want to say? I’m really open to however this collective art project plays out. You let me know. The link to submit is in the show notes. You’ll see it on Substack and the publication of this. If you’re listening out there, if you’re already submitting, if you’re thinking of submitting, thank you for your courage. I respect it a lot. And I’m looking forward to doing another one of these soon. I haven’t decided on a cadence.

I haven’t really even decided on a format. I’ve made a lot of art of different kinds of my day, a lot of music, a lot of filmmaking, podcasting, if I may be so bold. Sometimes you can spend a lot of time trying to work out every piece of something before you start, and that’s necessary for certain types of art. If Escher started drawing his stairs without knowing how they were going to connect, it probably wouldn’t work, right? Like that guy had to have a plan, I think.

But I think starting loose and leaving a room for entropy to find you, I think is a good way to make art. Leave some room for randomness. Randomness is often where the best stuff is. We’re going to keep experimenting together. Thanks for being a part of this. I feel really inspired to do this. It feels good. You know, I like being able to connect with people on this kind of level. Maybe feels good for you too. I hope so. If you’re not already subscribed on Substack, that’s where a lot of this is going to happen.

I would recommend you join on Substack to make sure you’re fully up to date and get notified and can participate. And if you want to pay, I don’t know, you know, I haven’t really set up ways to pay to support this project, but if you were willing to do that, that would also be appreciated. I don’t know what you’re going to get for it besides just my thanks and helping to make something that ideally you think should exist, help it to exist. I’m really grateful so many people have already reached out and are listening.

I’m really grateful to you and I hope you have a wonderful day.

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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…

The basics of “dialectic” and “hyperstition”

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. But relax and I’ll sketch out some basics here for you.

A dialectic is a process by which competing forces resolve into a synthesis. That synthesis then becomes the thesis of a new thesis/antithesis pair that will also resolve into a synthesis. Historical forces proceed in this oppositional and then synthetic advance until we reach the fabled “end of history”—the “teleology” towards which we are inexorably marching.

If one is Marxist, that means historical materialism leads to a classless society. If you’re a Gen X’er, that might mean the democratic capitalism of Francis Fukuyama. If you’re a transhumanist, it’s the singularity. If you’re a German Idealist like Hegel, it’s a perfect sort of spiritual freedom as made concrete by a rational constitutional order. If you’re a Christian or Muslim, it’s apocalypse or The Last Judgment.

A hyperstition is an idea or an entity from the future or which exists outside of time (in either the quantum physical sense or as a Platonic Form, etc.) that creates the conditions of its future existence through actions in the past. This idea is likely stranger to you than the dialectic because it requires a nonlinear understanding of time: time doesn’t only move backwards to forwards. For some experiencers, it could run in the opposite direction, or exist without directionality but in total. But you can also use this concept in a purely literary fashion: imagine an entity with a different experience of time that seeds its future existence in the past.

One applied dialectic of climate change

I’ve been deeply influenced by both David Grinspoon and Robin Wall Kimmerer. I want to see humanity as a permanent civilization capable of technological cathedrals like asteroid defense and reversing climate change, while also wanting to curl my toes into wet Earth. I want the best of technology without the amoral or toxic leadership of tech bros and technocrats. I want science without scientism. But we earn the right to become a transplanetary and permanent civilization by maturing such that we can live well and non-violently with one another on Earth while regenerating the living systems we have so disrupted. We go to the stars by becoming more rooted and loving of this specific place from which we grew.

The “small is beautiful” vs. abundance debate each carry truth with them. There is productive tension and dialectic between them, and one way to end in a stable synthesis (insofar as that is possible; I’m not quite sure how I feel about the idea of teleology…) is to recognize they are both needed for humanity to mature into this moment of our greatest success, or most dismal failure as a species.

Reversing Climate Change

For Climate, It's Wizards vs. Prophets All the Way Down

Episode 382 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen to the episode in its entirety on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you enjoy your shows…

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9 months ago · 4 likes · 3 comments · Ross Kenyon

A hyperstition for climate change

In this oppositional unfolding of history, the hyperstition I imagine is some future humanity that has evolved to be genuinely wise. We are kind to one another. No one dies from preventable illness or from lack of food or clean water or healthcare. Humans are safe and free to develop their potential as we regenerate and venerate the living systems upon which life depends. I imagine them transmitting a signal back to us in 2026 that we need to develop both the technology and the wisdom to use it well, to become the kind of creatures that can flourish on Earth forever.

Because it’s possible we are in a Great Filter event right now where our technology has outpaced our politics and it ends in our conclusion (or a great reduction in biological complexity.) That is one explanation for why we do not see life elsewhere in the Universe, is that other species get here and they have more power than wisdom and the conflicts are too great for them to overcome.

But I do feel sometimes the hand of the future or of God or the Holy Spirit or the Universe itself, reaching back to us in the present to push us towards the individual wisdom, shared culture, and collective institutions that would allow us to create the conditions on Earth we actually know are possible. We don’t have to live as brutes. Some don’t need to suffer so others might feel pleasure.

And even if this is purely a literary exercise, and some fancy words used to dress up a simple message of hope—cannot that be good too? Don’t you wish you had a little of that saved for a rainy day?

Some relevant clips

I won’t post Arrival or Interstellar here, though both make good use of hyperstition as a plot device.

Here’s some music and comedy that is either referenced in the episode, or that might enhance your enjoyment and understanding of it.

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

I like to keep a Tom Waits handy for every mood.

It is so easy to forget, and yet so important to remember.

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What happens when you care about climate and also want to explore space? What if you love technology but worry we've deeply misunderstood how to relate to it appropriately? What happens when we take the religious claims of others seriously, even when they aren't seen as legitimate as the major faiths? How can philosophy, literary criticism, film, and media studies help solve some of the biggest questions in climate, and maybe even give us all a little bit of extra solace in a time when we sure could use it?

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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Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.

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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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Episode 411 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 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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What even is MRV, let alone dMRV?! Or Managed MRV?! Doesn't that imply the existence of Unmanaged MRV? If everything is pretty much digital now, do we still need that pesky 'd' letter?! Are there still dudes with clipboards hanging around?

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.

This episode's sponsors

EcoEngineers: a full-service advisory and consulting firm focused on carbon dioxide removal, decarbonization, and carbon markets

Listen to the RCC episode I made with David LaGreca from EcoEngineers about how to choose, hire, and fire carbon market contractors.

And the one with Rudy Krehbiel, also of EcoEngineers, on which story carbon dioxide removal is actually in and what it costs to be inside the wrong one.

2026 EcoForums Training Series: Navigating Global Carbon and Fuel Regulations, Market Mechanisms, and Life-Cycle Analysis Fundamentals

Philip Lee LLP: legal resources for carbon removal buyers and suppliers

Listen to the RCC episode with Ryan Covington from Philip Lee LLP about project finance

Listen to the RCC episode with Lev Gantly about the history and current status of CORSIA

Resources

Check out my new show, Climate Workers Anonymous

Subscribe to the Climate Workers Anonymous Substack

Varsha Ramesh Walsh on LinkedIn

Offstream

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

More from the show

Ad-free episodes and other benefits come with a paid subscription.

Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.

Carbon Removal Memes is still goofing around.

The books that come up on this show are collected on my Bookshop shelf.

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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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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

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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In the last Reversing Climate Change podcast episode, Tom Mills and I started talking about "Jerusalem ["And did those feet in ancient time"]" by William Blake (1810), and the 1916 hymn by Sir Hubert Parry that seemingly all Brits know in their souls.

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 sometimes a work can actually be this simple and stand the test of time.

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"And did those feet in ancient time" on Wikipedia

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Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.

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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.

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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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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4 months ago · Ross Kenyon

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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

4 months 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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Everyone knows about offsetting. But what about insetting? Surely, that's easier. If only we could define it...

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.

This episode's sponsors

EcoEngineers: a full-service advisory and consulting firm focused on carbon dioxide removal, decarbonization, and carbon markets

Listen to the RCC episode I made with David LaGreca from EcoEngineers about how to choose, hire, and fire carbon market contractors.

And the one with Rudy Krehbiel, also of EcoEngineers, on which story carbon dioxide removal is actually in and what it costs to be inside the wrong one.

2026 EcoForums Training Series: Navigating Global Carbon and Fuel Regulations, Market Mechanisms, and Life-Cycle Analysis Fundamentals

Philip Lee LLP: legal resources for carbon removal buyers and suppliers

Listen to the RCC episode with Ryan Covington from Philip Lee LLP about project finance

Listen to the RCC episode with Lev Gantly about the history and current status of CORSIA

Resources

Check out my new show, Climate Workers Anonymous

Subscribe to the Climate Workers Anonymous Substack

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.

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Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.

Carbon Removal Memes is still goofing around.

The books that come up on this show are collected on my Bookshop shelf.

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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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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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How do you actually work with a consultant without lighting money on fire? That's the question I've been wanting to tackle for a while, because I've seen both sides of this—companies that get incredible leverage from a good consulting engagement, and companies that spend six figures and walk away with a PDF that's out of date by the time they receive it.

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.

This episode's sponsors

EcoEngineers: a full-service advisory and consulting firm focused on carbon dioxide removal, decarbonization, and carbon markets

Listen to the RCC episode I made with Rudy Krehbiel, also of EcoEngineers, on which story carbon dioxide removal is actually in and what it costs to be inside the wrong one.

2026 EcoForums Training Series: Navigating Global Carbon and Fuel Regulations, Market Mechanisms, and Life-Cycle Analysis Fundamentals

Philip Lee LLP: legal resources for carbon removal buyers and suppliers

Listen to the RCC episode with Ryan Covington from Philip Lee LLP about project finance

Listen to the RCC episode with Lev Gantly about the history and current status of CORSIA

Resources

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

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Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.

Carbon Removal Memes is still goofing around.

The books that come up on this show are collected on my Bookshop shelf.

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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.