What's the hallway buzz about carbon removal in Dubai? Is carbon removal a fringe topic or top of mind for attendees? And what's it mean for major climate events to happen in petrostates? Who's ready for Baku, 2024?!
It’s COP28, the 28th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the international gathering at which member nations converge to outline their ambitions and responsibilities in regards to climate change.
Reversing Climate Change host Ross Kenyon spoke with Tito Jankowski, CEO of Airminers, who was literally in Dubai while recording. Tito shared a firsthand account of what it is like being on the ground at this controversial COP chatting about climate action and carbon removal.
Tito finds that the critical question he keeps coming back to is “Do you think carbon removal is necessary for a sustainable climate?”If the answer to that is no, where do you go from there? Every nine days we put another billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Ross and Tito talk about temperature control as a possible reframe (and its possible geoengineering connotations and whether that matters), the cultural landscape of the UAE, and whether next year's COP in Azerbaijan gives OPEC nations a stake in fossil fuel phaseout or enables delay.
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 going.
Resources
Tito’s previous episode on the Kiloton Fund
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change. Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon, and I’m one of the co-founders of Nori, which is a carbon removal marketplace based in Seattle, WA. Today I have with me Tito Jankowski, veteran of the show many, many times — I think third or fourth time at this point, maybe even more — coming live from COP in Dubai. He’s the CEO of AirMiners. Hi, Tito.
Tito Jankowski: Hey, Ross. Hey, everybody.
Ross Kenyon: You didn’t expect that entry to end so rapidly, and yet it descended upon us rapidly.
Tito Jankowski: Here we are. I’m in Dubai, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve never been. What’s it like over there?
Tito Jankowski: It’s cool. It’s my first time too. First time to the Middle East, and it’s definitely culturally very different from the West Coast of California. The people are super welcoming. It’s a very risk-friendly town. I’ve been reading articles about how to think about Dubai, and it’s really this convergence of the place where many different cultures come together. I heard that the population is something like 60% Indian, so I had some excellent sambar and idli for breakfast. So yeah, that’s what it’s like. It’s kind of a convergent, touristy, Las Vegas-y kind of place.
Ross Kenyon: 60%? I didn’t realize it was that high. I knew there were many Indians there, but I didn’t realize it was that high. I’m always really interested in micro-states, and I was like, visiting the Luxembourgs and Liechtensteins of the world, which is like, how did this not get subsumed into some bigger political organization at some point? Same thing with Qatar, UAE. I need to look into that. I’ve always meant to. I imagine it’s some royal family somehow was friends with the British or something, and then they liked them, as though it happened in Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Do you have any idea? Blank stare.
Tito Jankowski: No idea. I’m remembering that you are like a historian type person. So the story that I got — I went to two cultural exhibits on Dubai and the history of the UAE — and my understanding coming away from those, that limited exposure admittedly, is it was basically where there were a bunch of different states called the Emirates. At a certain point, they all joined together and became the United Arab Emirates.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, but I think Emir just means prince in Arabic, right? So it’s the same thing as being a principality like Monaco or Liechtenstein or these other weird little — so anyways, this is not about COP. This is me indulging in my own weird world-historical obsessions. So why don’t we talk about climate change, as is our mandate? Tito, can you explain what COP is? I often find myself mentally blocked whenever there’s big convergences of international things, especially if there’s a UN tinge to it. I find I just do not process the information successfully. What even is COP? What does it stand for? How many have there been? Why does it exist? Help us.
Tito Jankowski: Yeah, I definitely admit a bit of a feeling of — there’s that Andy Dwyer meme that’s like, I don’t know X, and at this point I’m too embarrassed to ask. So I get that vibe with COP. I’m here, it’s COP28, so it’s the 28th COP. The COP is the Conference of the Parties, and it’s a global climate convening of state-level, government-level negotiators who are getting things together on the climate side. And at this COP they’re discussing the phase-out or phase-down of fossil fuels as one of the topics that’s on the table and apparently still under negotiation and being talked about potentially even at this moment. Sounds like the negotiators doing this work, they work off the record, Chatham House Rules, and they are working to make it happen.
Ross Kenyon: I think one of the reasons why I find it to be a bit confusing is I also am seeing lots and lots of friends, acquaintances, contacts. There’s people I see on LinkedIn, they’re in various — I’m in the Canada room, I’m in the Ecuador room. I’m like, what relation does that have to the real people doing real things? And how much of this is everyone just shows up with their own dog and pony show trying to say we’re actually important too? Is that what you’re doing there? Are you also bringing in your carbon removal dog and pony show?
Tito Jankowski: The good news is I’m not in any of the rooms. I’m not in the—
Ross Kenyon: What? You’re in the hall? Where are—
Tito Jankowski: There’s the Blue Zone, which is where my understanding is the negotiations happen, and you can get observer status on these negotiations. You can apply and get accepted to that, and that puts you in the rooms. But the real people that are doing the work there are the negotiators. There’s also presentations that happen in the Blue Zone. I’ve been in the Green Zone, which is the go online a week before COP and sign up for tickets. So I have plumbed the depths of the Green Zone, so I can talk more about that. But the Blue Zone is kind of this much higher security place where the negotiations around COP actually happen.
Then, as you can imagine, when you bring together the world’s climate leaders, there’s kind of this halo effect of, well, a lot of other people, myself included, decide, hey, that’s a place that we want to be for these two weeks as well. So that’s where Blue Zone comes in, and Green Zone, and there’s all these other even conferences that happen in and around COP simply because you really have this hot core of climate action in the middle of it. So that’s the Blue Zone, Green Zone, and kind of the satellite events.
Ross Kenyon: So is it safe to say that you’re a camp follower? Is that—
Tito Jankowski: Camp follower. That’s it. That’s it. I’m a groupie. I’m a groupie. I don’t know what — I don’t know what a camp follower is.
Ross Kenyon: It’s the service providers and prostitutes who would follow armies around just to be like in the mix and to make money off of armies in the field there.
Tito Jankowski: There you go. In the Green Zone.
Ross Kenyon: OK, sorry to be — OK. So, carbon removal: the UN, various bodies. There’s been discussions over what kind of carbon removal will be acceptable by UN standard bodies. That’s a big deal. That could impact quite a lot. I’m not sure how much. So I’m not sure if the UN does something extremely affirmative for carbon removal, how powerful that would be. If it does something that is not tech-neutral, that favors some tech and disfavors others, what the ripple effects might be, relative to something like the Brussels Effect of what happens in the EU with GDPR, which has a huge implication for everyone else no matter where you are in the world and how you process data.
I never know how much of that to rate quite exactly. But carbon removal is being talked about in these very fancy, high-rung, high-status kind of places. And what’s been the vibe of the carbon removal scene at COP, of which I’m seeing there’s tons of? I’m surprised I’m not there, because there’s so many people I know that are there representing carbon removal.
Tito Jankowski: Yeah. So the vibe of carbon removal at COP — I set up a WhatsApp group for everybody that’s working on carbon removal who is on the ground at COP, and we have 61 people in the group. I’ve added as we find the parties, people are adding new people they meet who are working in carbon removal. So the group has grown from one person, whatever it was, Monday last week. So that really represents the carbon removal community that’s here. In terms of kind of the official discussions, you mentioned the UN — people probably remember signing or at least seeing the AirMiners letter to the UN that we put out over the summer.
And that was after I visited the UN negotiations going on in Bonn, where they were talking about really getting the details of how carbon gets removed. And we issued this letter that was like, look, we really need to set goals around how much carbon gets removed, but please leave it as open as possible around how the carbon gets removed, being agnostic to the method. And my understanding is that part of the urgency around that UN meeting was because that was kind of queuing up the discussions — some of the decisions that were made at the UN would then be carried over into this COP conversation. And so all these policy-level discussions and negotiations are all linked together, and kind of step by step they move things forward from the discussion at the UN now coming into COP.
That said, what I have seen at COP is the latest draft of the agreement seems to include carbon removal. It says something, something carbon removal including carbon capture, which is like, oh wait, we’re kind of mixing together decarbonization and carbon removal as kind of the same thing. So that’s where it’s at. Like, the negotiations aren’t finished, so a lot of that is still up in the air as to what actually the end result is. But being on the ground here, there’s a lot of people looking at carbon removal, there’s a lot of people interested in carbon removal and looking at it from a policy standpoint, from an investment standpoint, from a storage standpoint. There’s four carbon removal companies that have been through the AirMiners Launchpad program that I’ve seen here. They’re on the WhatsApp group too.
So it’s been — carbon removal has a ton of events, like you saw. Was that the carbonremovals.org website? They were awesome, putting together everything carbon removal related at COP. So I use that all the time for checking out which events were where and what was happening. So there’s a ton of carbon removal stuff happening kind of in and around COP. Although, like I said, that hot core of actual negotiation — I don’t know how much carbon removal was actually getting discussed within that, but there’s plenty of events in the Blue Zone, there’s plenty of events in the Green Zone and satellite events about carbon removal and for carbon removal people.
So it’s certainly a place to be this week, and that’s probably why I wanted to speak with you today: to encourage people as they’re thinking about COP next year. If it’s something that you’ve thought about doing, start setting your sights for it. It’s really a global convening of climate leaders, and I encourage anybody listening to this, whether you’re new to carbon removal or you’re kind of on the periphery and you’re curious and you want to contribute — it’s open to anybody. You can come in and get tickets and plan ahead, and you can be part of what’s happening here.
Ross Kenyon: I like doing a show in medias res like this. Plenty of shows I’m sure are going to do the post-COP postmortem, if you will, and I’m sure we’ll probably end up doing something like that too, if Carbon Removal Newsroom doesn’t. But it’s nice to just get a sense of the boots on the ground, what happened at the grassroots level, rather than just what’s kind of going to come out of the — which Blue Zone is about fancy pants? Is Blue Zone—
Tito Jankowski: Blue Zone. That’s it. That’s it. Yeah. The stuff that you hear on the radio is like, that’s all the official stuff. And again, what I wanted to share from is, I’m not the official stuff. I decided to come to COP last Monday. So it wasn’t like planning ahead and being in the Blue Zone. It was, hey, this is the place to be for what’s next for AirMiners, what’s next for carbon removal. And this has been my experience diving in at first.
Ross Kenyon: Last time we spoke we were in Detroit for TED Countdown, and you can agree or disagree with this, but the attendees, I thought overall, were more mainstream environmental people. The kinds of conversations I ended up finding myself in were: should carbon removal exist? Is direct air capture a scam by oil and gas? Do we need to be doing this at all? Can’t we just plant trees? And I was disappointed that the level of discourse was in some cases quite, quite low, at least for someone who is seasoned in carbon removal. It was sort of surreal in that way. It felt like going backwards. This carbon removal in Dubai, with the COP — does it feel a bit more sophisticated, or do you find yourself in rooms sometimes where it almost feels like the conversations were on carbon removal a decade ago and we’ve never advanced?
Tito Jankowski: Let’s see. So my experience at COP has mostly been one-on-one meetings, so I haven’t been doing panels and speaking and hearing rooms full of people. So just in terms of that context, what I’ve found is, if anything, Ross, after that experience at TED and listening to Al Gore’s speech, I really got into the weeds on my own understanding of how to listen to other people and their understanding of carbon removal. And I would say across the board there is a general need or opportunity for alignment around that carbon removal is necessary.
That is where, if I think back to those TED climate conversations I had, if I go back to the speech from Al Gore, it’s unclear to me, in those conversations, are we aligned that carbon removal is needed in addition to decarbonization? So in a sense what I’m saying is, it feels like I’ve leveled up in my ability to talk to people. So it’s like, yeah, look, if people aren’t on board with carbon removal being necessary, then we’re not talking about how to do it. Then we’re not talking about, oh, do you like direct air capture, oceans or soils? We’re talking about, do you think carbon removal is necessary? And so I’ve certainly been able to change how I engage in those conversations.
So for me it’s very different from the experience of TED Countdown, where it’s kind of like going into a conversation that just wasn’t at its core aligned around, well, do we actually need this? Because if we need it, then we can talk about how to do it and how much is needed.
But if you think we don’t need carbon removal, then all this is silly — anything to do with taking carbon out of the air. If you don’t think carbon removal’s needed, then all the stuff in the ocean is silly, all the stuff in rocks and back is all a waste of time. And so being able to really see that in conversations and say, OK, where are you at on, do we need carbon removal? So that’s a bit of a longer answer, and I’m getting plenty of conversations around do we need carbon removal and why. So I’ve had conversations with people working in different areas of climate, whether it’s energy or decarbonization, really being curious with people about where are they at on whether we need carbon removal or not.
Ross Kenyon: I respect that, and we need it. I think there’s a tendency for people who work inside of a field to drift towards inside baseball rather than outward evangelization — or that word’s pejorative and kind of tainted, but we’re just trying to reach people who don’t already know the good news, see, and I’m just going further and further into the evangelical territory and framing here. I had a friend once upon a time — I haven’t spoken to him in several years — but he was an actual Leninist, which is fairly rare to find in the wild. They’re out there, but they’re not super common. Our conversations were always so basic, and you have such little practice with people who disagree that much.
Where you’d be like, well, yeah, prices are important. If you don’t have prices, you don’t know where things should go. Then, well, a computer could do that. And you’re like, well, parliamentary democracy is clearly important because we have groups that see things differently. No, actually, that’s not true. Like, what do you do when people need to coexist together but they don’t actually share the same vision of the good life? Well, they’re going to learn it, or they’re going to be re-educated. You’re like, so how do you exactly communicate? I feel like those assumptions were so different. And then sometimes I have to refresh myself too. I feel out of practice even making the case for why carbon removal is necessary.
So if you’re out there and you’re listening and you feel passionate about that, that is an area where, once you’ve been in this long enough, you can lose practice unless you’re out there engaging all the time. And I think you could probably add a huge amount of value by being good at that.
Tito Jankowski: Yep, absolutely you can. You can add value and you can grow your own understanding. I’ve learned a ton by engaging with people around how do they think about decarbonization, how do they think about carbon removal. And it’s changed my own understanding of what it is we’re up to as AirMiners and people removing carbon from the sky. So wherever people are adding that — I mean, a year ago I used to describe that my role in carbon removal was that my doorway was just packed full of people who were rabid about carbon removal, and I wanted to talk to them and work with them. And now today I’d say somewhat differently, like I’m going out and talking to people about, hey, where are you at on carbon removal? What are your concerns about carbon removal?
If you remember our discussion about the Kiloton Fund and doing investing in carbon removal startups, that all came from talking to 30 investors in carbon removal. Instead of saying, you know, I’m evangelizing carbon removal, get on board, it was, hey, what’s your biggest concern about carbon removal? And it turned out they all had the same concern, which was, I get that it’s going to be a big industry, but I don’t know how to invest right now because it’s unclear how real the market is. It’s unclear how quickly it’s going to grow and how profitable it is, right? So by engaging in those conversations and the reality of it, you can really come across opportunities — opportunities to actually make things work.
And that’s what we’re here for. That’s what everyone is here for — is a stable planet and thriving human civilizations, right? So under that umbrella, if somebody’s got ideas about how to make things work, I’m in for that conversation. And even if it’s a concern about investing, it’s like, cool, well then let’s figure out a solution to that. And now, coming out of that type of conversation, is the Kiloton Fund, which is a solution for investors that are concerned about the profitability, or the growth and the profit margins, or the dilution of early-stage carbon removal companies. I said profitability there twice, which is like, it’s so important. But yeah, that’s again — by engaging these conversations, that’s how we build solutions, and we’re here for solutions, you know.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, enjoying conversations of all types like that. Sounds like you’ve leveled up in listening, which — I think at least the way that I subconsciously presented the beginning of this conversation was that there are people who disagree, they have wrong information, and if we go to them and present correct information, we will win. And it turns out, I don’t think the human mind really does work like that at all. I think by being a better listener and making people feel like their concerns are valid and heard — and in many cases they are valid too. I think if the assumption is that oil and gas is very involved in DAC, and we can’t trust oil and gas companies, therefore — like, that is a syllogism, it’s tight. And if you accept all of those premises, why shouldn’t you follow the conclusion as well? I think you’re obligated to, logically.
So I think if you’re able to hear that and try to find if there are ways where — well, what if there was a DAC company that actually forswore oil and gas involvement? Does that change anything for you? What if there was something else, some other governance mechanism? I think, or even just being able to listen to that concern may in some ways make people feel like they’re not just going to be run over by technological progress that may or may not actually have an impact on climate. I don’t know. What do you think about that?
Tito Jankowski: Yeah. I wrote a newsletter about this after our experience at TED Countdown, and it was that I have like two questions to slice through conversations — and not like to get — slicing sounds sort of aggressive, but just for my own understanding, to kind of really get what somebody’s saying. Which is two questions: do you think carbon removal is necessary for a stable climate? And, like, how much by when, how do we do it? And that whole, you know, direct air capture is an excuse for the oil industry, or sort of stuff — I found that’s often coming from a place of not actually being aligned on that carbon removal is necessary. Because if carbon removal is necessary, then you’re probably going to be talking about like, oh well, then we need to do enhanced rock weathering and soils and ocean-based carbon removal, and like maybe DAC is at the bottom of your list. That’s fine.
But that’s very different than being like, oh, DAC doesn’t matter, like we’ll wait. But if we need to remove carbon, then DAC is somewhere in the list of priorities, you know. And that’s being, like, neutral in my own excitement or enthusiasm or lack of it around DAC. But it’s just, if we’re agreed on that carbon removal is necessary, it really does change those conversations. Like, that does come up — a lot of people know about that, many people think that carbon removal is direct air capture, like it’s the same, right? And so you start talking about enhanced rock weathering and ocean and soils, and people are kind of like — that’s when it goes back to, what are we talking about when we’re talking about carbon removal anyway? I’ve written that on my newsletter. It was a helpful tool that I built for myself about these two questions to help me understand where people are coming from.
Ross Kenyon: Seems like a good way to frame. Probably just to ground yourself, so you’re not running people over and losing sight about actually having a human conversation. Changes doing it in person too.
Tito Jankowski: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, sorry. Go ahead.
Tito Jankowski: Yeah, yeah. Oh, doing it in person is good, yeah. But yeah, being in conversation, I found myself even on, like, AirMiners Slack, moving more towards setting up calls with people rather than trying to discuss stuff over text. Yeah, it’s real. I’m really grateful for all the people that are at COP who ask those questions and have this understanding. It’s like, oh yeah, this is cool. One shift in my own understanding — well, I could share about that, or we could talk about something else.
Ross Kenyon: Go ahead. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tito Jankowski: Like, my understanding — I was talking with a professor at MIT tonight about this. You know, because you go back to like, well, do we need to remove carbon from the air? And actually there’s a question up above that, which is like, do we need to remove carbon from the air? Like, well, why? And it’s all around temperature stability, or temperature control rather, right? And so we’re AirMiners. Our goal is — we say greenhouse gas removal, which includes carbon removal, right? Because there’s other greenhouse gases, which kind of is this pointer towards, hey, why do we care about carbon dioxide again? It’s like, oh, because it causes warming, which is temperature increase, right?
So just something shifting in my understanding around this kind of category of climate intervention, or temperature control — this umbrella that carbon removal fits into, that methane removal also fits into, that other ideas of how to change the temperature also fit into. And that’s kind of fundamentally what we’re talking about when we’re talking about carbon removal: it’s like controlling the temperature. So for me, in all these conversations, what I found is there’s maybe another kind of step up from, you know, why carbon removal matters, which is temperature control.
Ross Kenyon: Man, I have so many thoughts on that. On the one hand, I almost don’t really care that much on the taxonomy. Just tell me, what’s the thing we call it so that everyone is on the same page? I think the word games of what actually is carbon removal — yeah, should this be some bigger category? Is it greenhouse gas removal? Is it carbon dioxide removal rather than carbon removal? But carbon removal can also include methane. Just tell me what to say and I’ll say it. I don’t even care, in some cases.
Temperature control is an interesting one. I think for PR reasons that has such a strong geoengineering connotation to me, where it does feel like that global thermostat. Can we set the temperature of the Earth? To someone who’s a bit more prophet than wizard, a bit more green than a bit more engineered, it sounds like dominion and we’ll face some opposition. But I do broadly have that sci-fi David Grinspoon orientation of humanity essentially needs to learn how to manage the global climate, because it’s too late not to intervene in that. So we need to learn how to intervene for good, or we probably won’t make it to permanent civilizational status, right? I don’t know.
Tito Jankowski: Yeah. It’s probably a temperature management, right? I mean, every nine days we put another billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. I guess that makes sense.
Tito Jankowski: Like, we’re doing this. We’re adding a billion tons of carbon dioxide.
Ross Kenyon: That’s sort of like an incidental — incidental byproduct. I get in the car and I push the pedal. It’d be manslaughter versus first-degree murder, right? So, do you want to escalate to having a sort of direct planning, like — indirectly, because cyanobacteria indirectly influenced the global thermostat. You know, does it have culpability once you own that responsibility of doing so, the pressure of never being able to walk away again, and the hubris of humanity deciding that? I guess if you do it in a mature way, it could be great, and we’ve been doing it in an immature way and that’s not great.
So maybe if we could mature at the same time that we developed the tech to do this kind of — can we do this, though? There’s nothing new under the sun. We’re sort of fallen, depraved beings. So are we going to be able to figure out the governance mechanisms for literally the entire planet?
Tito Jankowski: I’m in Dubai, baby.
Ross Kenyon: You’re in Dubai, baby.
Tito Jankowski: Right. Like, that’s where that governance conversation is happening. It’s happening right now. It’s happening all around the planet, and it’s happening most concentrated right here. That’s why I’m here.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, you are here. You were there, I guess I should say. And sounds like you see a lot of reasons for hope. Potentially feels good to be there. I don’t want to feed back to you what you actually feel.
Tito Jankowski: Enjoying this, I feel hope, I feel curiosity. Like, I’m learning about the process and where it’s at. I’m seeing what it’s like. I mean, here in Dubai — in terms of, where do we need to be to have a planet-wide conversation? Dubai is a place to do it in 2023.
Ross Kenyon: Sounds like it’s going to be in Azerbaijan next year in 2024. Why are we going to all the oil places, that Baku is like also one of the most intensely oil-driven municipalities probably in the world?
Tito Jankowski: Yeah, there’s a COP process for deciding where the location is. I don’t know the details of it, but somehow that’s—
Ross Kenyon: They would think they would choose someplace less controversial, given how much flak they got for the choice for this year. They’re going to, like, petrostates, essentially, in a row?
Tito Jankowski: Yeah, they are.
Ross Kenyon: Wow.
Tito Jankowski: Yeah. Yeah, I’ve got nothing to say. Yeah, I mean, I think that — I mean, where else, or where would be better, where oil companies can’t hear us or something? Like, I just don’t — I’m like, cool, great. Let’s go right into the conversation. Let’s have the conversation here.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I guess, where could you go? I guess there are even places in the rainforest that are getting cut down for oil exploration. The US itself a petrostate, given our oil and gas industry too.
Tito Jankowski: Yeah, does it — what? So is it having it at the first step of the process better than having it in the suburbs of Houston where the refineries are, or where it’s consumed? I guess, would this even matter? Maybe not. But you know it’s going to — that’s going to poke people.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t — I don’t think many people know about Baku and talk about it.
Tito Jankowski: Just talk about it. Unless they learn. They’re going to — they’re going to know about it.
Ross Kenyon: What’s that you said?
Tito Jankowski: You mean in terms of poking people? Like, yeah, this is the future of the planet, right? This is like a civilization-scale challenge, and so we need places where civilization agrees to come together. And this is where it is.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. And I’m wondering too, counterintuitively, if you invite the UAE to host COP, maybe you get increased buy-in or movement from them, in the same way like maybe the Azeri state is. Maybe it doesn’t, because the interpretation of this is, oh, COP is corrupt, it’s clearly just favoring these oil nations. But what if it’s a way of having them much more prominently figure in, and show them that there is an honorable way to proceed? That is the silver lining, charitable best case, right? Is that possible?
Tito Jankowski: Yeah, it’s possible. I mean, every taxi in the country is driving people around for COP, and some of them are having discussions about this stuff. So yeah, people that work in different ministries of the government and such are engaged in this conversation, whereas if it’s happening somewhere else then only a couple of those people end up going. So it’s possible that Dubai is the best place for the COP discussion this year, and that’s an idea that’s been growing as I’ve been here. It’s like, OK, this is — we’re here. This is where the discussion is happening. We can’t ignore the role of oil and gas in fossil fuels, or in the climate. And so yeah, let’s go to Dubai, talk about it, work it out.
Ross Kenyon: It’s one of those cases where I never know if I’m selling myself a bridge in Montana or whatever, or if I’m — am I? Should I be cynical or optimistic? Is this a really smart decision that I don’t know enough about to speculate upon? Or is this as bad as critics say, or somewhere in between? I never quite know. But surely it has to work. Surely it must result in progress. I don’t know.
Tito Jankowski: Possible it does. I think I’ve said this at the previous AirMiners town hall, but pessimism and optimism are the same thing. They’re kind of a fixed view about the future, and the future is unknown, right? If you’ve ever tried to do any sort of prediction about the future, it is just really challenging.
And so we get to hold on to things and say, like, we think this is possible. I think it’s possible that we look back and say Dubai was really the best place for moving the climate conversation forward. I mean, the discussions are finalizing, they are not finalized, but going in that — there was potential, there was the possibility of coming out with a phase-down, a phase-out of fossil fuels. Let’s say two weeks from now we had world governments align for a plan for phasing out fossil fuels. That’d be something, and that’s what’s happening here. That discussion is happening here.
Ross Kenyon: Sounds like it could be one of those tarot readings where you’re like, oh, you drew the King of Cups or whatever, and that could either mean a death in the family or one of the two. You’re like, OK, I don’t know. I guess that’s — yeah. Or, like, what’s the — there’s another one too, that the Chinese character for crisis is opportunity and chaos or something like that. What is it? Opportunity and danger, I think it is. Whatever. I like this tarot one better, but that’s just all of these things too. It’s either everything or nothing.
Tito Jankowski: Yeah. Is it everything or nothing? We get to choose, and it’s possible that it’s everything.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Well, in the meantime, if you don’t want to — I don’t like waiting too much on the decisions of too many things so far outside of my control. So if you’re listening and you’re not with the cool kids in the right zone, what are some things you can do in the meantime here? I’m sure — are you still reaching out for investors, or carbon removal startups, or something else, someone listening that wants to get involved with you? How should they do so?
Tito Jankowski: Oh, AirMiners Boot Up. That’s the big one. Like, if you were scouring the web to understand carbon removal and you’re kind of listening to a podcast, you’re there. AirMiners Boot Up is this introductory 101-style — it’s not a course, but it’s a six-week sprint on carbon removal. We match you with like 10 other people who are kind of like you. They want to learn about carbon removal, and then over six weeks, twice a week, you really dig into every aspect of carbon removal. And when you graduate, you earn this AirMiners Boot Up badge. I’ve got one in a pocket somewhere here, but I have too many pockets. But I had — I had brought two, because — actually, no, I don’t have any here. I gave them away.
Ross Kenyon: It’s like, unite the people with them on LinkedIn, yes.
Tito Jankowski: Yeah. So there’s Sarah Beth [unclear] from Nasdaq, is a graduate from Boot Up. She’s now their carbon lead, and her Boot Up badge had gotten lost in the mail. And so I had met her in San Francisco at a meetup, and she’s like, yeah, where’s my badge? And so when I found out I was going to COP and that she was going to COP too, I was like, I’m going to bring her the badge. And so I ended up handing it off to Helen [unclear], who’s the head of policy for [unclear]. And then Helen delivered the badge to Sarah Beth. And yeah, so that’s the power of Boot Up, and the power of getting that badge is, you know, it’s a way to level up your understanding of carbon removal.
It’s not only for people that are new to carbon removal, by the way. There’s people that have worked in carbon removal, they’ve worked for — there was somebody that was really deep in Climeworks working on direct air capture, and they took Boot Up because they wanted to better understand how’s the rest of this stuff work. And I would encourage you, if you’re wondering how these other carbon removal solutions work and you’re working on one particular one, I encourage you to dive into Boot Up, because it goes back to that common purpose, which is we’re here to remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We get to discover together how to do it, and somebody else who is doing a different how is right there with you in pursuit of that.
We actually get it done. And there’s a lot you can learn from this — part of the core of Launchpad, which is our startup accelerator program, which is a direct air capture company can learn a ton from enhanced rock weathering companies, who can learn a ton from soil companies, who can learn a ton from ocean-based companies.
Ross Kenyon: I’m thinking of doing Boot Up, because I’ve not done it previously, although I’ve certainly referenced the curriculum countless times. There’s a lot of great information gathered. Siobhan was saying that she wanted to go back and retake it, and I was thinking, yeah, I’ve been in carbon removal for six and a half years thereabouts, pretty long. But honestly, when you’re working in this space you have less time, unless you’re working on it directly, to constantly be studying all this stuff. I think having a more structured environment would do so, and would probably make me a bit more well-rounded.
Tom Waits has some line where he says he plays different instruments because your hands are like dogs and they’re always going back to what they know. So if you just play a guitar, you’ll play the same couple of things over and over. Like, maybe I should go back and do Boot Up with Siobhan and just make that happen. And also I like that you framed it that it wasn’t just if you’re new to carbon removal. It’s also people that have been working in this space who maybe have become a little path dependent, maybe they’ve become a little too focused on their own thing and they’re losing sight of what others are doing in adjacent fields. I think that that actually is pretty good advice.
Tito Jankowski: Yeah, exactly. I encourage people to look at, like, what you want is a balanced climate, and it’s worth diving into Boot Up, you know, especially if you’ve been working really hard on one particular area. I mean, it’s just ripe with opportunity, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s never too late to go back to school, it sounds like.
Tito Jankowski: Well, yeah. So are you gonna — are you gonna take Boot Up, Ross?
Ross Kenyon: When is it?
Tito Jankowski: The next one’s — we run it about every two months. The next one starts in early January. You have to sign up before January 1st, at bootup.airminers.org for people to type in and go to Boot Up. And we’re doing a campaign on Instagram as well. So if you’re on Instagram you can follow us at airminers_cdr. Jason has been putting together a campaign that encourages people to apply to Boot Up and join Boot Up. When I say apply, it’s signing up. It’s not like — everybody who wants to take Boot Up can take Boot Up. And so Jason and Louisa and Aaron have been working on an Instagram campaign. bootup.airminers.org, sign up. So yeah, that’s the next one, Ross.
So what I’m getting from you is, it sounds like if you did Boot Up, it would be like that Tom Waits-style thing — it would open you up to different instruments and different ways of thinking as you’re writing songs and playing songs.
Ross Kenyon: Pretty much, yeah. I think having new ways of seeing, or just a reminder of what all is happening. I feel like I — I’m less numerate than I would like, and I’m also less comfortable with actual science than I would like. So I think being in an environment where some of that was defanged a little bit might be a nice way to give myself some encouragement and pushing through some of those self-limitations here. But also, just there’s so much that has happened in that time and I have not adequately kept up with all of it, which — I don’t want to sound like I’m down on myself. I think that’s just an accurate representation of being a human with lots of different things competing for your time constantly.
And because it’s no longer a really small field, like when we started, where you could know everyone personally. Now there’s hundreds and hundreds of companies, as we are very fond of saying, which is great. But yeah, a little refresher, polish off some of the edges that I’ve allowed to grow dull, could be useful. I can’t commit right now on the show, but if you want, we could certainly do another one where maybe we could drag some of the listeners of this show over and say, do you want to be in a cohort with Ross?
Tito Jankowski: Then, oh cool. Oh, that’s awesome. We would love to do that, like a get-the-gang-together kind of thing. That sounds cool. Yeah. So I mean, the nature of carbon removal — the edges are expanding faster than ever. I mean, there are thousands of people developing these solutions now, and that just means that the solution space of possible solutions is being explored that much faster.
And I just love digging into the details of how one particular solution works, because I find that the deeper I get on one particular thing, somehow — I can’t explain, but somehow it just seems to give me a deeper understanding of everything. So for example, with the Kiloton Fund, I’ve been talking in a different way to carbon credit buyers. And just that direct experience has changed the conversations with startups. Understanding what buyers are really, really looking for changes how we coach startup teams. It changes how I think about people in Boot Up, like what they’re going to be learning about carbon markets and how these things might form. So yeah, Boot Up.
Ross Kenyon: Boot Up. OK. Thanks for—
Tito Jankowski: And get the badge.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, good update. I would like a badge. Yeah. Thanks for coming. It’s cool to hear about what’s happening at COP. Nice to hear it just from someone who’s out there mucking around with the other carbon removal people, the gate crashers. Just kidding. It’s nice that you guys are doing that and trying to make that conversation a powerful thing where you can. And yeah, thanks for all the leadership you have in carbon removal. AirMiners has touched seemingly everyone within the space, has made their career more accessible, more near at hand. So thanks. I’m, you know, I’m a huge fan, as you know.
Tito Jankowski: All right, Ross, let’s get to it. I’ll see you in Azerbaijan.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, buy my ticket to Baku as we speak. Thanks so much for listening. Hope you have a lovely day.
Tito Jankowski: And I’ll see you in AirMiners. Thank you, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts, or a rating on Spotify, that’d be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people. You can sign up for our newsletter at nori.com, follow us on social media, and we will catch you next time.
