Carbon removal isn't that old. So for someone who's been involved in it for almost fifteen years... that's an elder. And today he's bringing the wisdom he earned the hard way.
Dave Addison is formerly the Virgin Earth Challenge Manager, an effort he began working on in 2010. That's about six years before I had even heard of CDR, so a long time indeed!
Last year, Dave started Planetary Practitioners, a consultancy founded on a long-run vision of helping much more of humankind access decent work in net-positive industries. You can read his writing and keep up with his work here.
One pattern you might notice in shows is that many of the lessons aren't merely about commercial strategy or TRL or unit economics. Much of the best advice is how to walk upon the Earth in a way that shows you belong here. So today, it's more emotional than average. For those of you who want or need such an experience, it is here for you, and I hope you enjoy this conversation with my good friend, Dave.
This Episode's Sponsors
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Resources
Become a paid subscriber of Reversing Climate Change
"Keep Going", from Dave's Substack for Planetary Practitioners
Carl Sagan's Cosmos: A Personal Voyage
David Grinspoon's Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future
Charles C. Mann's The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World
"It's Just a Ride" by Bill Hicks
"The Darmine Doggy Door" from I Think You Should Leave
Charlie Chaplin's speech from The Great Dictator
N.B. The meme thumbnail is not original content and is intended for thematic discussion in this episode and its accompanying bonus episode, and is just a common theme whenever Dave and I chat.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hey everyone, thank you for listening. This is Ross Kenyon, and I’m your host. I have two sponsors that I’d like to tell you about today. They’re both organizations doing valuable work within carbon removal. One of them is a new sponsor of the show and the other one has been with us from the start, so I’m going to start with the new one. I’m going to give them a chance to go first. It’s ClimeFi. Personally, I think they produce some of the best content within carbon removal. Their reports are top tier. I always look forward to reading them. I’ve learned a lot from them.
There’s one in particular that I like that I referenced in a blog post I wrote a while back called “Bridging the CDR Financing Gap: The Comprehensive Guide.” Just really powerful, great work. If you’re looking for good intel on carbon removal, check out the ClimeFi reports. They’re really good. There are lots of intermediaries within carbon removal. If someone wants to buy carbon removals, many people will heed the call and try to sell them some. ClimeFi is a group that I see almost more as a white glove service. They’re quite selective in what they choose to do.
The way that they put it is that they empower companies to develop and manage robust, high quality, durable CDR portfolios that’s built upon market intelligence. They have a proprietary rating system. You may have heard that they just gave Deep Sky in Canada a very high rating. They’re involved in the procurement themselves, of facilitating, sourcing and managing RFPs for companies. So if you’re looking to run a carbon removal RFP, a request for proposal, so you could have carbon removal companies coming to you with proposals for what they might be able to do, ClimeFi is a group that can very much help you with that.
Perform the due diligence, structure the portfolios, negotiating, executing transactions, that’s all something that they can help you with. And then also just managing the portfolio, of making sure that the projects are monitored, warehoused appropriately, and then when the time comes, retired. ClimeFi’s project database covers about 95% of all the durable CDR projects globally, but out of the 500 plus projects reviewed by ClimeFi, only 15% meet their standards for delivery and integrity that they look for. And eventually only 5% of those projects are included in client portfolios. If you’re looking to buy some carbon removals, if you want to run an RFP, follow the link in the show notes to learn more about ClimeFi.
And of course, I’m also very happy that Arbonics is sponsoring the show again. Arbonics connects European landowners to corporate credit buyers in order to remove CO2 and protect biodiversity. They’re very data-driven. They’re trying to turn degraded and abandoned land in Europe, in the Baltic States, back into biodiverse forests. That’s a really impactful good thing to be doing for its own sake. Outside of carbon removal, it’s a good thing to do, but is also very much focused on how much carbon can be sequestered while also pointing us towards the importance of co-benefits and ecosystem services. I think sometimes carbon removal people forget about — we’re pretty focused on the PPM, but the other stuff is really important too.
They’re doing fascinating work on the data layer side. I’m not sure if you’ve seen the digital twinning of forestry, but they’re making it — it’s exactly what it sounds like. Arbonics is on the cutting edge, trying to make forestry work for carbon removals and turn Europe back into that beautifully forested continent that it once was. So if that interests you, the link is in the show notes to go check out Arbonics. Also, Lisett Luik, one of the founders and COO of Arbonics, was on the podcast earlier this year. Go check that out, because we dig into a lot of the role of temporary removals within carbon removal. It’s a fascinating big topic and Lisett brings her A game to it, so I hope you enjoy.
Links to both sponsors are in the show notes. If you’d like to be a sponsor of the show too and hear more about what that might look like, you can email me. The email is in the show notes. And then also, if you’re podcasting and you want to use Riverside for recording or Descript for editing and transcription services, I have affiliate links in the notes too. And that also helps drive the show’s financial solvency. So thanks so much for listening. Here is the intro to your show.
Hello, thanks for listening to Reversing Climate Change. This is a podcast about reversing climate change. It would be weird if it wasn’t, I suppose. I’m the host, Ross Kenyon. I’m a long time carbon removal and climate tech entrepreneur. Been involved in this space for the better part of a decade, seeing some stuff. Happy to keep talking about it. It has not gotten less interesting to me as time has gone on, and there are not that many people more senior in terms of sheer longevity than myself. They are out there. They are the luminaries of the space. If you’ve been in carbon removal for that long, I tip my hat. Thanks for helping pave the way for the rest of us who followed in your footsteps.
One of those people is my old friend Dave Addison. Dave was an advisor of Nori from the very early days. Pretty sure we got connected with him because he knew Christophe Jospe, one of Nori’s co-founders with me, and Dave has always been very involved. He’s someone that has become a close friend, a confidant, someone who strikes me as a very grounded person, as you will hear in this show. I like how reflective he is. He’s a very careful person. Sometimes he ends up very conservative in ways that are charmingly British.
We’ve been speaking quite a lot lately because his time at Virgin came to an end about a year ago and, like Dave, I haven’t found a full time position as of yet. Everything short of a full time position has been terrific. I’ve learned a huge amount, had a lot of room to reflect upon my experience, figure out what I like to do, the kinds of people that I like to work with, and how I plug into the carbon removal and climate tech ecosystem. And Dave’s been on a similar journey, so we’ve been supporting each other on that.
Dave recently launched a consultancy called Planetary Practitioners. I’m proud of him for doing so. Dave is an amazing systems level thinker, someone with a lot of wisdom, and if you’re looking for some help, particularly if you’re in the UK and care about environmental goals, circular economy, carbon removal, any of those things, Dave is someone that you should know. You can go to a link in the show notes to get in touch with Dave if you’d like to hire him for anything.
So Dave’s been writing and reflecting a lot recently and we’ve been wanting to do another show together because he’s co-hosted the show previously. I wanted him to reflect upon his experiences at the Virgin Earth Challenge and having been in carbon removal for about 15 years — that’s nearly double my experience, or pretty much is double my experience. Reflect on what it was like in the super early days of carbon removal and what he learned from the experience. And as someone that is as wise as Dave is, it will not surprise you to know that the lessons that he drew are primarily emotional.
The three lessons that Dave shared with me is one, curiosity goes a long way; two, discipline too — or discipline as well; it’s weird with homophones like that — and three, grace will help you stay the course. I think we expect advice to come in much more instrumental terms, and it might be a process of maturation to realize how much of the good advice that one needs is about how one carries oneself in the world. I asked recently in a poll on Spotify how people feel about shows that have more emotional content to them. And people seem to like them, which is nice.
I know some of you listening prefer hardcore shows about tech and business news and policy, and I respect that too. If I didn’t like doing shows on those things, I would not be doing them. But I don’t want the show to only be on those topics because there’s so much more to say and there’s a lot more to building an ecosystem than merely succeeding in those very straightforward kinds of ways. Dave’s experience here and his reflections are a good example of why and how that way of being might be useful. It’s less instrumental. That’s less right over the plate than maybe other shows that we do. But sometimes you’ve got to get a little weird with it. That’s all that I can say. It is necessary to sometimes get a little weird with it.
So thank you for listening. I’m going to get to the show, but real quick pitch in case you haven’t heard yet: for $5 you can become a paid subscriber of Reversing Climate Change. It gets you ad free listening, so no Spotify injected ads. You’ll still hear the sponsorships from show sponsors that I read myself, but no programmatic ads. There’s bonus content, stuff that doesn’t make it into the main episode, but still good enough to publish. I think I’m going to do an entire second show with Dave because we had a false start where we recorded, I think, about 90 minutes. That’s really good, but it ended up much too elliptical to just be a straightforward show.
And that was before I made Dave narrow his list down to three core insights. So there’s a lot more to say, and a lot of that content is really good, so I’m going to publish that too. You will get access to that as a paid subscriber. It’s $5 a month. It’s a market signal that makes me know that there are people out there who are super fans who really care about this show. And by the way, if you are a super fan of the show, feel free to send me a note if there’s things that you like about this show that you want me to do more of. If you have feedback, feel free to email me. That is listed in the show notes too.
And there’s a bunch of other ways you can support the show, like giving Reversing Climate Change a great rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. If you want to podcast yourself using Riverside and Descript, I have affiliate links in the show notes as well. If you’re looking for office space and you’d like to be at 9Zero in San Francisco or Seattle, and I imagine other cities too before too long, there’s a link in there too. Thanks so much for listening. Here is your show with Dave Addison.
Dave Addison: That’s, that’s fine. We are, we are here in the pursuit of truth, so you should feel free to say whatever you like within the realms of physics and the laws of our respective fine nations.
Ross Kenyon: I will not abide by those rules. I will not respect Euclidean geometry or real numbers. I’m not here in pursuit of truth. I’m here for an audience, Dave, bringing in that sweet, sweet podcast revenue. So speak for yourself, that’s what I’m saying.
Dave Addison: Fair enough. Fair enough.
Ross Kenyon: Dave, you’re one of my oldest friends in carbon removal and you’ve been here pretty much as long as anyone else has, with the exception of the super old school scientists like David Keith and Klaus Lackner and Julio Friedmann. They’ve got you beat, but there’s not that many people who have been in and around carbon removal for as long as you have. I thought it would be really fun to talk about the early days of carbon removal, how you’ve seen it change, what you learned from an industry that was even more nascent than it is now. People still say carbon removal is a nascent industry. That’s seemingly the most common adjective for it. What was it like working in carbon removal when it was pre-nascent?
Dave Addison: Yeah, happy to talk about that. For the audience’s benefit, I actually wrote down initially 12 lessons and then I pruned them down to what I thought was a very economical seven. And then Ross made me cut them even further, everybody, into just three. So I will go through those.
Ross Kenyon: This is one of the best lessons I’ve heard. I think I got this from my former colleague Heidi at Nori. She passes it along for copywriting. One of the key lessons is that more reasons is dilutive and it brings the average down, and whatever you feel like you have to say in 12 or seven or however many things you have — I find I haven’t felt things were missing when I’ve cut out. I’ve often felt lighter on my feet. I’ve been like, oh, this is actually the most important things here. And those other things were unnecessary adornments that, for the ease of reading, listening, wasn’t necessary.
I don’t know, maybe it’s useful color. In any case, there’s a bonus episode related to this where the musings get obscure. All errata will end up in there. So if you want extra Dave lessons beyond the core three, they exist. We’re just like the kind of people that I think if you turn the recording on, or even without it, we will just go until our spouses are yelling at us to get off the damn phone or there’s a meeting that we’re late for. I think that’s just kind of how we operate.
Dave Addison: Yeah, yeah, I can confirm. And yeah, it’s fair enough. I think especially with this audience, you know, I think if someone’s already got into the Reversing Climate Change podcast, you’d hope that their interest is already slightly piqued. So keep it tight.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, well, you give me confusing feedback where someone else’s feedback, whom I greatly trust, and another good friend of mine, he’s often on me to make shorter episodes. He likes to digest them on the go. He doesn’t necessarily need 90 minutes of blather. But you’re the opposite. I almost feel like, how long can this go? Can I make a day of this?
Dave Addison: Right. Yeah, no, I think you’re unusual in that way though. Yeah, well, maybe, you know, we can kind of get into the — we’re already talking about it, aren’t we? We’ll get into the practicalities, dear listener. I’m not sure I was always like this, because I feel like in the really early days of, for me, carbon removal, which is spring 2010, I kind of — maybe I was wrong, maybe this is not correct — but I kind of feel like I would come into it and go, you know, this thing is important. Here’s what we need to do next. Can we go do it?
And I feel like sometimes, at least I found, when a conversation was quite early and it was quite technical and you had to sort of argue the case, I often just found it getting more drawn out. And before I do, I sort of turn around and be speaking in the highly caveated paragraphs rather than the sense that this is — and I’m not entirely sure how it happened. I’m not entirely sure I always used to speak that way.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, when your speech contains asterisks and people know that there are asterisks involved, yes, you’re in danger. But also that’s just how it goes. I saw Robert Höglund published a piece recently that’s talking about the various purposes to which carbon removal should be used and how people often mix them without realizing them. I think being able to give enough space to explore rather than there’s only one story — it turns out there’s several stories that have some amount of overlap. As someone who is a semi professional communicator, pretty hard to tell stories like that that the audience wants to hear and will retain. I think you’re someone that you probably want that level of detail. Most people are just looking for the quick and dirty, get on to the next thing too.
Dave Addison: Well, we probably are all alike. There’s probably parts in your life where you’re just like, I don’t care. Tell me the simple story. Yeah, like, you know, if you’re looking how to do a particular bit of DIY and the person’s giving some context about the place of the world they’re in, in your life. I mean, it sounds cool, but yeah, I get all that. I think especially on the more practical side of carbon removal. Fair enough. So if you like recipes online, that’s in the place where it exists. And, you know, so, yeah, fair enough.
And you know, I think when I was on the learning curve as well, I think I was definitely just trying to make sense of everything. So that’s very fair. If you like, I could summarize the three main themes and then we can go into each of them. [unclear], but it’s OK. So number one was curiosity goes a long way. Number two was discipline, too, goes a long way. And the third one was grace will help you just keep moving forward and stay the course. And then I just put down some notes that we can have, like — I think they call it in the academic world — a semi structured conversation around those themes. If that sounds all right.
Ross Kenyon: Sounds great. I was talking about this with you before the show started, that what I liked about your presentation of these lessons is that it’s very much you. I could pull this out of a lineup for sure and know this is Dave Addison wrote this. I think a lot of other people I could ask about this would say something focused on the non emotional components of the work, and less about the way in which we approach things, understand them, how open or unopened our hearts are to new information and to learning. I think it’d be much more like focus on unit economics, you know, tailor your project to get the big offtake.
And that would be a good show too. That’s actually really valuable information as well. That’s not to disparage that, but it’s also just not Addisonian. And so I like the rule that I know is that whatever you do should be unapologetically yourself. And this is absolutely Addisonian. It’s Dave Addison, distilled into three key lessons, for better or worse.
Dave Addison: And apologies if you hear a squeaking chair as I recoil in reaction to your comments, by the way. So, yeah, so for me, I think the reason why I landed on these themes is I often found — not all the time, but just a bit of time and headspace thinking about, if you like, the sort of superstructures behind the more practical questions around everything from techno economics and product market fit and where you’re positioning your brand as a carbon removal venture in the current ecosystem, etcetera, etcetera.
I just often found on my own journey that at least a little bit of time getting into the slightly, like, attempted philosophical side — like where is your head going? Where is your heart going? What bigger visions and purposes are you at least trying to reach towards, however poorly — would then cascade out into what kind of questions you are asking, what kind of analysis you were doing, what kind of things you would be moving forward in the real world. And maybe we can hopefully bridge a bit of some of the divide between those two with some specific examples, but we’ll see how we go, I guess. Feedback welcome, beloved listener, as well. And we do have some questions. I did get some questions because I posted on LinkedIn before. So I’ve got some brief answers to those that we can do at the end.
Ross Kenyon: Interesting.
Dave Addison: OK, how much do you know — not to kind of hijack the direction of the conversation? I’m a long term listener and fan of the Reversing Climate Change podcast as well, so I maybe feel a bit more comfortable than I really should. I’m in your living room, like. How much do you know about the Earth Challenge? And obviously we kind of met quite early on in your journey, but had you kind of heard of it before? Did you know much of the story?
Ross Kenyon: Not really. And even to this point now, it didn’t have an influence on Nori’s work. If it was active while we were active, we wouldn’t have qualified for it. So I don’t remember thinking a lot about it. And I always knew it was one of those things that was on the back burner, perhaps, but I don’t remember paying a huge amount of attention to it. And maybe it just took place before I got into it, because I don’t think I really was thinking about carbon removal before. I think I first started hearing about it — I think Paul started telling me about it in maybe summer of 2016. I think that’s probably when I first got carbon removal pilled and went from there. So it depends on the timeline, but that probably isn’t a very encouraging answer. In any case, you should start from the beginning, because I assume listeners maybe don’t know.
Dave Addison: Yeah, and fair enough. All fair enough. So I was the same, you know, I stumbled into carbon removal, but that’s a story for either later or another time. So the basic story of the Earth Challenge was: back in February 2007, Richard Branson and several other judges with experience and perspective in the climate and sustainability arena laid down a $25 million innovation prize for ways of removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere to help address climate change. It was launched at a press conference in the middle of London. I imagine most of the world’s media agencies would still have footage of the whole thing somewhere. And it’s quite an interesting watch, actually.
I remember seeing footage from it back in the day and just seeing how it was talked about even then in quite just a thoughtful way, in the way that many of the carbon removal leaders today also talk about it in a similar spirit, right? We still need to reduce emissions first. This is stuff that’s complex but necessary to start exploring, and so on and so on. And it was modelled, I believe, after some fairly wellish known innovation prizes throughout history in particular, and I think this was mentioned during the launch, the Longitude Prize, which was launched by the British government quite a long time ago, like hundreds of years ago, I think. I forget the specific date.
There’s quite a good book written about it, and that was a prize at the time for trying to figure out how you would figure out how far around the world you were whilst on a ship. Because back then you didn’t have GPS. And pendulum clocks don’t work on a ship. And one of the ways that you would figure out longitude is to have a clock linked to the time where you left and then synchronize that based on where the sun was to try and work out how far away around the world you were. And it was, at the time, a huge prize. And there’s a whole long, complicated story behind how different people tried to win it.
It was ultimately, I think, just about won by a guy called John Harrison who came up with this very precise clock called the marine chronometer. You can actually see one in the Science Museum in London, which is pretty cool. And there’s another one, I think, over in Greenwich, if memory serves me correctly. And so the Earth Challenge, when it was launched, was really set up as a, hey, no, we need to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. This is a thing, because back then, in my opinion, it was maybe overlooked in a fair amount of the mainstream climate discourse. And here’s a big prize to encourage people to do it.
And yeah, that was — what are we now, 2025? That was like 18 years ago, 18 plus years ago now, that that was announced and launched to the world. You can still find the news articles about it out there, that kind of BBC News article, and many others about it as well.
Ross Kenyon: And were you involved with it from the start? Did you join the project after it launched?
Dave Addison: I started working on the Earth Challenge in 2010. I remember watching the launch during my geography degree, which I loved at the time. It was for me the sort of closest degree you could get to studying like planetology, like how the planet works and how people interact with it. And I remember it being launched. I remember going to the cinema in the first term with all my coursemates and watching An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s climate film, and coming out with a, oh, good gracious. To me, this seems a bit worse than the mainstream media narrative at the time. And I think Richard actually got a personal Inconvenient Truth briefing from former Vice President Gore in 2006 as well. I think that was known and talked about. He talked about that in a few of his books, Richard did.
But yeah, I started in 2010, basically after the geography degree. I went and did the master’s in environmental technology at Imperial up in London, near the museums. And Virgin put out an advert to that course saying, we’re looking for someone to come in and just help with some of the very early sort of staged assessment of the entries, as the prize ultimately got over 10,000 applications and 2,600 entries. And as you can imagine, some were very sincere, some were done by like kids through their schools and that sort of thing. And everyone obviously still needed at least a kind of fundamental robust assessment on whether or not it was actually a potentially viable, scalable, sustainable carbon removal method.
And so, back to the curiosity point, I knew enough about the Earth system and carbon cycle and climatology to know that, oh yeah, we probably do need to do some removal as well in the long run, don’t we? You know, interesting. I was not carbon removal pilled, as you described it, at that time. And frankly, I’m not sure how many people actually applied for the [unclear]. But in that one month in 2010, as they say, I just went down the rabbit hole. And I’ve told you the story before. I had a perfectly good master’s thesis lined up that was then modeling energy and carbon payback for lots of different forms of renewables and that sort of thing. The kind of thing that I think, on paper, you could just walk this into a nice energy consultancy job for.
And I’m not sure whether or not this is ultimately a good idea, but I kind of threw that out the window because I just — I remember going to some of my supervisors and professors and saying like, there’s too much carbon in the air and we need to do lots of mitigation, but we’re probably going to need to take some out as well. And there’s this whole 350 PPM paper that NASA climate scientist Jim Hansen wrote with [unclear] people. And there’s this whole academic conversation around geoengineering and the wider climate movement doesn’t really seem to be engaging with the area, or maybe even treats it like a taboo. And there are all these people just working on it.
There are all these people just trying to, very early on, just figure out ways of actually doing it, however technological or ecological. I’m kind of thinking maybe I should just try and do a master’s thesis that gives me an excuse to get my head around it all and at least try and vaguely ask the questions around how might you actually sustainably scale this in a way that is aligned with the sustainable development of humankind and responsible collective looking after various planetary systems and so on and so on. Yeah. But that was the spring of 2010, after the Copenhagen climate meeting had kind of not gone the way that people thought it would, and when I think CO2 was already considerably above 350 parts per million.
Ross Kenyon: You see this phase of your career as being one where curiosity was the most important lesson for you, or important principle to keep in mind?
Dave Addison: Yeah. And we might as well start quoting Carl Sagan now, Ross. There’s no point beating around the bush.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, don’t put it off. It’s time.
Dave Addison: You know, Carl Sagan had a line to the effect of — I think I’m paraphrasing — you should always be open minded, but not so open minded all your common sense falls out. And actually, even just sat there helping screen a lot of the entries to the Earth Challenge — obviously there was some in the different categories of carbon removal that we all know and love today. There would be others that were, again, like written by kids somewhere and sent in by their parents. And it wasn’t like a very credible carbon removal venture, but it was still just so awesome to see, and there were quite a lot of those.
And I’m not sure if we ultimately got all of them, but there was a real effort to even give those ones like a nice constructive reply and point them in the right direction. And, you know, wish everyone all the best. And so it was just really cool to have an excuse to look at different early proposals for ways of striving to do sustainable and scalable carbon removal, and being able to bring that curiosity into either assessing them directly or seeing the more detailed, robust assessments of them that would subsequently happen in the process.
Ross Kenyon: Can’t believe it took 20 something minutes to get to Carl Sagan, but I guess that’s fine, David.
Dave Addison: Well, yeah, I think we went to Venus. This was when we spoke previously, maybe there are others. When I had a look around again recently, one of Carl Sagan’s papers about Venus was the earliest thing I could find in the literature talking about, hey, maybe you can actually also remove greenhouse gases from a planetary system to help more consciously intervene with the climate system. So I’ve been very influenced by that way of thinking.
Ross Kenyon: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars books were a big influence on early Nori. Not for me, but that’s part of our intellectual heritage. You turned me on to — I was too young for the original Cosmos, so I missed that when it was actually a thing. But I remember you sent the DVDs over as an advisor, and taking your advice, watched them and found them to be delightful, very charming. And then moving on to David Grinspoon, podcast alumnus several times, Doctor Funkyspoon as he might adorn himself. And I found your nudging me to think about climate change through a planetary science paradigm to be very useful.
And to this day — I’ve said this so many times in the podcast, so maybe it’s been a minute — severely underrepresented. I find it to be such a useful third way of seeing, because the common ways of seeing things are very much wizard and prophet oriented. Charles Mann.
Dave Addison: Yeah. Charles C. Mann.
Ross Kenyon: Charles Mann. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I should go back and listen to that one, because I was so happy that I was able to get him on the podcast, because he’s a legendary person, a legendary non fiction writer. Yeah. Wizard and prophet. So people who think tech’s going to save us and that we can bet on growth and human ingenuity, that’s the wizard; prophets are those who think we need to cut back and, you know, go back to the land, live much simpler lives. And what I love about Charles C. Mann’s work is that he honors both of those perspectives. It isn’t just that one is right and the other one is wrong. It’s like wisdom is knowing when to apply those and when to know that we’re out of balance between wizards and prophets.
But then the Grinspoonian, Saganian perspective, the — it seemingly doesn’t fit into it neatly at all. It’s both about living in balance and harmony with Earth, but also so that we could become a transplanetary civilization that has earned the right, possibly, to grow to become a transplanetary civilization that is permanent, that is not going to boom and bust and wipe ourselves out by accident or by malintent. I find that to be such a humbling but also encouraging way of seeing things. I am indebted to you for nudging me that direction.
Dave Addison: I know. Well, one, it was awesome to be a Nori advisor, and if nothing else, I mean, like long term listeners of Reversing Climate Change, especially in the early days — it was just so awesome to be able to listen to the kind of conversations you were having, admittedly on the others at a very different longitude at the time, obviously in the UK. And I’ll be eternally grateful for that. I found it just a helpful headspace to be in for many practical tasks that you would then have to do, whether it’s briefing people, having stakeholder dialogues and facilitating technical evaluation, putting together blog posts, going and speaking in places.
Just all the different things one would try to do to humbly but sincerely try and nurture the carbon removal innovation ecosystem before it was really the thing today. I often just found trying to come at it from that scientific yet planetary perspective was just a helpful headspace to be in for how to talk about it and think about it and try and build some bridges rather than drive further polarization and that sort of thing. And yeah, there were many heavyish nights where I put on an episode of Cosmos — I’ve told you the story before — and it would sort of say to my soul, it’s OK to sleep now, but also keep going, because people throughout human history, again, in that spirit of curiosity — and a lot of these stories are told beautifully in the Cosmos series in particular — just carried that spirit through into exploring and discovering new things, many of which we now take for granted, you know?
Ross Kenyon: There are so many different avenues into that calming way of seeing that I’ve encountered them recently. The most recent one I heard — there’s a podcast series. I might cut this out, I don’t even know. Did you listen to The Telepathy Tapes?
Dave Addison: No, no.
Ross Kenyon: It’s a pretty well regarded, very popular podcast series right now about how non verbal autistic people have fairly well documented telepathic abilities, and—
Dave Addison: Really.
Ross Kenyon: Well, consciousness exists. I listened to something credible that said it exists probably in the quantum, you know, so Roger Penrose’s whole thing that it’s probably from the quantum realm rather than the Einsteinian realm. So who knows, man? Again, curiosity.
Dave Addison: Yeah, yeah. I’ve gone through a process where, OK, that, or the sort of view from space Grinspoonian way of seeing things, or if you’re feeling spiritual and whatever tradition that you have access to, I’ll have this strong embodied sense of like, why are we spending any time fighting in any way? Or do you know the Great Dictator speech at the end of—
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That also does it to me too, where I’m like, it makes me do the — oh, I sent this to you, the Darmine Doggy Door. But what did they do to us? We’re on this beautiful planet. It’s a magical, mystical experience. And yet we spend our time arguing over bullshit basically, and hurting each other for very little gain, scrapping for the smallest amount of money possible. It’s like a pretty miserable experience for what could otherwise be a free and beautiful one.
I think being able to zoom out in any of those ways, any of those ways that you can get into that snap you out of the like, why am I engaging on this with primate brain, and how do I go galaxy brain on this? I think it’s just like a really useful — OK, say the line. Then be like, now another meme for you, the Bart Simpson: say the line, Bart. [unclear] environment, say the line, man. How do you get to that place where you’re like, oh, there’s oneness and we can access this and it can actually dissolve a lot of these conflicts that we’re wasting our time with that ultimately don’t make us happier or safer.
Dave Addison: Yeah, man, yeah, yeah. And I think I saw it and I felt it a lot interacting with people who were working on carbon removal, meeting the leading entrants to things like the Earth Challenge and spending time with them and listening to their stories and seeing the work they were doing, going to and supporting the early academic conferences even. And you know, this is very hard to do, and I for one certainly didn’t do it perfectly, but just trying to press into having dialogue with stakeholders of any kind, if there’s actually just interest in talking things through.
You know, even if the dialogue starts with a, right, now what you’ve got to understand is here’s why thermodynamics doesn’t actually work — if you’re like, OK, this probably isn’t going to be, but you know, you hear the person out, fine. But you know, just actually, like, just because — especially back then, I think people forget now — like carbon removal was firmly under the umbrella term of geoengineering, which a fellow of the Royal Society at the time, I remember saying, you know, that they said it’s very hard to say anything under that rubric that’s both true and useful, you know.
And, you know, even like, if — would some of the heaviest bits of the 20th century totalitarian regimes, would that be social geoengineering, like a large deliberate intervention in a physical, a human system? It’s just, it’s hard to grapple with. Yeah, there’s lots of very important things underneath it, obviously. And even back then, just really trying to say, hey, yeah, but also like trees are really great and this living Earth system through everything, and this is well covered terrain on Reversing Climate Change, obviously. But you know, through like everything from mountains to the little coccolithophores that make up the chalk cliffs in the UK. Like there’s so many historic examples, even whale fall carbon. You’ve done episodes on like the whale fall carbon, have you? Whales are awesome, you know.
You know, like there’s all this precedent for it. And it really just, again, presses into these questions of, well, like, what does it mean to be a living planet? And what this is — I think David Grinspoon said this on this broadcast. Yeah. What does it mean to try and think about how we interact with this world and each other more gracefully? And then whatever decision you’re making at the time, practically in a carbon removal venture or initiative or program or whatever, like what does it look like to try and express that through whatever strategic or tactical decision you have to make at the time?
And again, I don’t kind of want to maybe perhaps dwell on that too heavily. But again, on that point of curiosity, I just often find it quite a helpful headspace to be in. You know, like Jim Lovelock, the Earth scientist, passed away on his 103rd birthday. He said, you know, science is iterating towards the truth. You know, it’s not just suddenly getting there. And I just often found myself prompted to think about that sort of thing, and not a lot — excuse me — getting to know and being inspired by a lot of the early people working on different elements of the carbon removal landscape, if that makes sense.
Ross Kenyon: It does make sense. It represents the curiosity angle here so strongly. It’s funny that a lot of the things being referenced right now, both by you and I, at least for me, confirm or disconfirm this. From your perspective, the references that I’m making grow out of my college dorm room experience, basically. Like, I’m really close to referencing Bill Hicks. Do you know him, by the way? Philosopher of a comedian?
Dave Addison: Yeah, philosopher. I’m sure you—
Ross Kenyon: Love being called a philosopher. But he’s sort of like the next generation of George Carlin style anti authoritarian, left of center comedy: vicious, unrepentant smoker long after it was discovered to be bad, unfortunately died of cancer. But all of these things are — or I’ve been reading a lot of Victor Hugo recently and just, you know, capital R Romanticism, this sort of feelings of oneness, of mercy, of this ability to plug into something bigger than yourself, to get away from these empirical pecuniary concerns and be like, what are we? What does it all mean? Like, why do we kill each other and do these terrible things to one another?
And what I’m leading to here is that you need discipline too. And I imagine you counterpoise these, because discipline and curiosity, it’s sort of wiggly brain versus linear brain is kind of how I understood your intent here. Maybe I’m reading too much into it. You can correct me.
Dave Addison: Good segue as well. Yeah, yeah, I was in the same spirit for sure. So that’s the second of the three points, was discipline will also help. And that’s really because just like any journey, some bits will be really hard. Some bits will be really hard. There’ll be misunderstandings, there’ll be things that you get wrong. You know, there will be honest mistakes. There will be times when we fall short. And again, on my own journey, I would see examples where people took ownership of those, stayed humble, even if they were clearly going through something just emotionally or psychologically quite heavy. We’re still able to lead and explain what the immediate objective was in that context and move forward towards it.
You know, choosing the path of peace building rather than just fanning the flames if there’s a highly spirited conversation. You know, not simple, not easy. Again, Carl Sagan: we’ve accumulated dangerous evolutionary baggage. You know, like, and I saw both in my own journey and journeying with others — that we’ve wrote some notes on this — like leadership strategy and tactics are trainable skills. Just how you can train to be a commercial pilot or a surgeon or a medical practitioner or whatever, you can train in leadership. And there are certain, I think, kind of — again, back to the game theoretically, like evolutionarily, socially — ways of just helping others and serving and bearing that responsibility.
And I think often the thing that, if I could have a billboard, not that anyone would care about [unclear], is just like, you have the vision, have the curiosity, but also just have the discipline. You know, like even little things such as just take time — if you can, do whatever you can based on your own physical abilities from an inclusive perspective — but just take time to have it, take exercise, you know, just have time to focus on that side of physical wellness. Because for me, I always found it helped with the mental clarity and patience and that sort of thing.
I think it also applies a lot from an inclusion perspective, you know. And just again, having conversations, having conversations with different stakeholders, being able to stay focused on building bridges and building understanding and really hearing what the person is saying. Even if, naming no names, pointing at myself, they might go on in a couple of different tangents and caveats. Just listen, man, just listen, like write some notes. Like, you know, just — so even on those fronts, I think it’s just really important to focus on cultivating that self-discipline rather than, for example, relying maybe too much on motivation, because that can kind of ebb and flow, especially in heavier moments.
Ross Kenyon: You’ve been a good encouragement for me on that. I’m prone to periods of disillusion where I’m like, I’m feeling depressed and grumpy, and my first instinct is not, well, you know, pull your socks up. I wouldn’t say that anyways because I’m an American, but you—
Dave Addison: Know, we’re not all in Mary Poppins anymore.
Ross Kenyon: Sorry, do not say a mean word about Julie Andrews. It’s a great film.
Dave Addison: It is a great film, but sorry I interrupted.
Ross Kenyon: No, that’s OK. My instinct is less Julie Andrews and more like becoming a minor character in a Tom Waits song who’s just sort of like a barfly at the bottom of society who’s just like rotting in public sight. And I always appreciate that, because we’re talking about different kinds of discipline here too. It’s not just discipline in your thinking to counterpoise against the sort of open-ended view from space. What if consciousness is a field rather than something that emerges from individual brains, blah, blah, blah, stuff that, you know, it’s easy to make wrong turns there and end up like way out to sea in places where you’re like, I don’t know what reality even is.
It’s good to go there. Sometimes you have to. If you don’t, I think you get too linear and you lose out on a lot of what makes this [unclear] world so [unclear]. So it’s like, but discipline of being able to rein that in some too, but also just personal discipline. I think this field is so hard. There are various fields that I’ve interviewed for jobs in recently where I’ve heard it’s like, oh, we have a product customers like and your job would be to help other customers find it and then make them buy it. You’re like, wow, that sounds so remarkably easy relative to carbon removal, where you have to know policy, science, be halfway decent at business, a bunch of other weird skills, translating science into commercial applications. Super hard. I just like to focus though on, you know, as Reddit likes to say, lawyer up and hit the gym. That’s what you got to do.
Dave Addison: Yes, well, you know, be legally disciplined as far as, you know, being squared away against policy and, you know, rule of law and everything. Like there’s a line in The Ministry for the Future, isn’t there, where I think Kim — Kim Stanley Robinson — says these are the tools we have. You know, like we need to work with those, and fair enough. I also think a kind of subcategory of sustainable development goal should be everyone should have the same access of legal support that you tend to have in like large corporations and stuff. Just because that world — I didn’t get taught any of that at school, but we have a whole lot of conversation about that whole kind of—
Ross Kenyon: I mean, this joke is just like, it’s advice for people getting divorced, basically. Like, relationship not going well? Well, my one contribution to the world maybe is — I don’t mind sharing this story, maybe put this in the bonus episode. I don’t think my better half would mind me saying this. I developed a divorce prevention system modelled after the DEFCON nuclear war prevention thing, called DIVCON. General readiness: you know, do the dishwasher, be kind, don’t be too much of an idiot. And then you can, depending on if you screw up, you can escalate, like, hey man, I can’t come out today, I’m on like a DIVCON 3. Sorry, I need to take some corrective measures to de-escalate. It’s worked for me so far. Love you, dear, if you’re listening.
Dave Addison: Anyway. So basically, so I don’t know, it’s just, again, I’m 15 years into carbon removal now. A lot of the current difficulties that I see people facing and actually leaning into and doing awesome work through, like, echo with some of the ones that we faced in different ways back in the 2010s. And I actually wrote something — again, very cliché, talking about the podcast: yes, I have got a Substack going, look how original I am — but I literally just wrote one which you very kindly commented on, the title of which was just “Keep Going.”
And there would be nights where, you know, with small kids, you’d be up in the middle of the night cleaning vomit off the stairs or something. And it would feel like all these solutions that you were seeing that could really be helpful for the future just weren’t getting the traction that they deserved. And Virgin was quite early in climate and clean tech in general, not just carbon removal, in different ways. And again, back to the discipline point, there would be moments where my thought process would then be, hey man, it’s all good. I’m in a peaceful part of the world. I have running water, I have healthcare. There’s many things to genuinely feel blessed about. Keep going, you know, get a grip and just get up the next day and do the next — to quote the Frozen song which a friend shares with me, a good friend shares with me regularly — to do the next right thing, you know. Just keep going.
And in particular, maybe it’s different today, but if you’re listening to this and you’re working in carbon removal and just sometimes it feels really heavy and like you can’t keep going — like you can, you can. Like, if I can, you can. Like, there are people out there that even if they don’t know you, they appreciate what you’re doing. Don’t underestimate the things that you’re trying to bring into the world. We can get on to the final point of grace a little bit, but just like, just keep going. Like the world is better with you in it. Like, just — and if you need to seek help, seek help. But just don’t be too hard on yourself. You know, you’re doing a good job. Nobody’s perfect, least of all me, but just keep going.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I really like that post. It was straightforward but felt honest to me and was encouraging. I think that advice is really powerful. I met someone randomly recently. It was kind of one of those things where, like, sitting on a bus bench and someone just starts talking to you basically. And this person was telling me about how he had been to prison. He didn’t explain why. I think it was something driving related. I imagine it was maybe a DUI or something, got into an accident and ended up in jail. And sort of out of nowhere, he’s like, don’t kill yourself if you go to prison. It’s not so bad. And I learned a lot and grew from it. And it’s OK.
And it’s good to remember that things are going to just be OK. And I was really taken aback and moved by it, because it was said apropos almost nothing. And it was such a beautiful sentiment where I imagine people just think when bad things happen, their life is over and it’s not worth continuing. And sometimes that simple message of keep going can be deceptively powerful and just a genuinely moving thing to say to someone.
Dave Addison: Yeah. And, you know, again, I can only stick directly to my own journey, of course, but carbon removal in the early 2010s was often a much more hostile space to be in. There were people that got death threats by virtue of it sort of being packaged as this sort of dystopian Ridley Scott Alien film kind of nightmarish, you know, grotesque sort of Black Mirror thing. And any technology — you know, I use this analogy, as Carl Sagan as well, all the time — you can use a rocket motor to launch a space probe or a weapon of mass destruction. And actually, if you go to the Science Museum, you can see the V-2 rocket motor next to some of the stages from the Apollo project, for example, right, to very vividly portray that.
Ross Kenyon: Are they? Are they next to each other? Hoping you will make that connection.
Dave Addison: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think so. And that’s true for most forms of engineered systems and technology, broadly defined, whether social or physical or whatever, hardware, software, and so on and so on. Just like even back then, you had to have a bit of courage, you know. Even if you had to just accept that you might be someone that was on a harder path rather than an easier one. And for me, there would be moments that were quite psychologically painful. No small violins. I had like several years as well where, after some kind of impromptu health scares that turned out to be OK, I just kept getting like different forms of chronic pain that wouldn’t go away and having a bunch of tests, which I’m very grateful for.
I kept having different types of recurring nightmares about catastrophic climate related things, both planetary level and kind of individual. I won’t share specifics because I don’t want to kind of transmit them, if you like, but I would often like wake up sweating or screaming and stuff. And for me, not just thinking about all the awesome people I got to know who are working on actual just really cool things, you know, however imperfectly, and also thinking about just how many awesome human beings I got to know across so many different places. Like you said, I’ve met people who’ve served time, I’ve met people who’ve been in just desperate poverty, just so many different backgrounds. And I took such inspiration from that.
And at the moment — not to kind of jump ahead a little bit — but for me right now, especially having left Virgin last year, it seems there’s so much potential to press into the areas of like social sustainability, innovation broadly defined, and change that just help feed in. Just as like carbon removal once felt like this sort of impossible, you know, why would you even do it kind of way, that might actually in the long term be able to bring some healing to bits of the climate system that can be healed. Obviously various consequences are irreversible, right? I fully acknowledge that, right. But you know, like there are other bits, in from a wider planetary perspective, where you maybe do want to try and bring some restoration, you know: mitigation, adaptation, restoration.
I kind of feel the same way about — so you put efforts for a safe and just future, broadly defined, into climate, nature and people. The people side: I met so many people. I thought, if you could have a role as like a person working in an awesome — like just imagine, you know, if you wave a magic wand — like awesomely designed and run collectively, like air capture plant or regenerative agricultural system, or work as a tradesperson using carbon negative cement or whatever. Like I could just imagine this person is having the most awesome time doing that and finding a bit more peace and finding a bit more purpose. And that’s something that was quite front of mind with me at the moment, although a very, very early stage.
Yeah, just keep going. Even if it sucks and you’re miserable and it feels like there’s no hope at all in your little storm and corner of the world right now. If nothing else, just keep — just keep going. Just keep going. Even if it sucks, just keep going.
Ross Kenyon: There’s a car that I pass sometimes on my bike, and I actually spoke with the owner of it recently. And this car has a couple stickers on it. And they’re also dictums that are a little bit mockable. They’re very 12 steppy. I imagine this person has a chip on him. And the two bumper stickers say “relax, God’s in charge” and “gratitude is the attitude.” And I saw him messing around with it when I was riding by recently and I stopped. And like, I love your bumper stickers. I find them so encouraging. I love how earnest they are.
If I put on a bumper sticker, I’d be trying to make it witty or perfectly beautiful. I love that these stock phrases, that I imagine come from the 12 step program, are they just, you know, it works, you know. Like there’s no artifice to it. And I find things like that — if you can allow yourself to be earnest and vulnerable in a way where even, you know, unremarkable sayings like this can become remarkable — I find to be an amazing use of poetic language.
Dave Addison: Hey, bud. Yeah. And you know, fair enough. If you’re like grinding through an LCA or MRV or grant application, fair enough, man. Just, you know, just keep on keeping on. But yeah, yeah, for sure. So we may be at this point kind of slightly clumsily segue into the third and final—
Ross Kenyon: Well, I thought we were already here.
Dave Addison: Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. Yes. Are we not? Basically, yeah. So, grace. OK.
Ross Kenyon: Well, carry on then. I thought we were already—
Dave Addison: Talking about grace to others and yourself. Again, for me, some bits noting a huge amount of blessings and privileges. Some bits, especially in the early days, felt incredibly morally heavy. And I think maybe lots of different people working on purpose driven stuff big and small, we’re just trying to help something else and you feel like you wish you could do more but can’t for various reasons, including like one’s own falling short — thinking, oh, could I have said that better? Was that the right decision? And so on and so on. It can just feel very morally heavy. And I still just, again, strongly feel through different frames and rubrics that grace is very important.
As a more practical example — I mean, I’ve told you this, we talked about this before — why, Mr. Ross Kenyon, is flying so safe? You’re in a tin can.
Ross Kenyon: Because it’s so dangerous.
Dave Addison: Well, maybe a little bit. There’s obviously a very long story there, as one of my extended family worked in aviation safety throughout their career. And I remember on a Christmas get together kind of grabbing them almost, and slightly metaphorically kind of shaking them, going, why? Again, like I said, you’re in an aluminium tin can. You’re flying faster than a speeding bullet through the upper atmosphere. Yes. [unclear]. Don’t even get me started on the whole chemtrail conspiracy theory back in the day.
Ross Kenyon: The best line I heard about that, for anyone watching, is they’re not necessarily wrong, they’re just early. If you have a particularly dystopian view of which pathway we’re on, read The Ministry for the Future.
Dave Addison: I saw no evidence of it. Let’s move on. Please don’t reach out to me if you [unclear].
Ross Kenyon: Just go watch Cosmos anyway.
Dave Addison: Anyway, sorry, but like — so, but for the actual flying, it’s one of the safest ways to travel, yet you’re just hurtling through the upper atmosphere. And there’s obviously many different reasons. Obviously when it goes wrong, it goes wrong very tragically and vividly, and OK. But ultimately what my extended relative said to me was, well, there’s obviously a very long story there, but one of the short ones is there was a deliberate effort in the 20th century to nurture what they called a no blame culture when it came to aviation safety.
So, and again, I think this is — I’ll give a kind of a rough illustrative example, please go look at people that have actually worked on it — but like, say you find an issue with a bit of a plane that might actually cause a safety risk, and maybe even it’s your fault, right? You’re in an environment ideally and generally, obviously not always, but where you can flag the risk and the reaction isn’t, to the previous point, well, off to jail you go, you sinner. Right, right. It’s cool. Awesome. Let’s internalize that feedback loop and make this whole wider complex system better. Imagine that. Oh look, that’s what your immune system kind of does, right? And there’s many other things in nature that actually gain from disorder and actually do what life does, which is evolve, right?
And I think the reason why things like that — I think, sorry, I’ve said “I think” a lot in that sentence. My better half is an English teacher. I will be tuned up for this later on, listeners, if they ever listen to it. Anyway, like, it matters because, like you said, these are complex systems, right? These are — most carbon removal approaches and pathways to scale are ultimately a series of multi scale and multi vector complex adaptive sociotechnical political systems of systems, as I heard someone, I think actually at a Royal Society conference, described it back in the day.
And you’ve got to work through the complexity, and I think just being graceful and striving for grace, both to yourself and others, can really help. And again, like, I’m not on commission, but I think if you see the examples of the different people in even the Cosmos series who went through different discoveries and breakthroughs, you often see that kind of, again, for want of a better word, grace coming through, you know.
And again, for me — you mentioned the bumper sticker — I don’t mind sharing, actually, I had a journey into faith. I’ve been in carbon removal for a while. Great are the mysteries of faith. Freedom of religion and belief, I fully support. And I know I joined the podcast before where we talked about like black holes, climate and Christianity, I think. And for me, I’m really grateful for the church that I go to. It welcomes everybody. It’s just — I can’t say anything else than that it’s just such a lovely group of human beings from so many different backgrounds and perspectives and journeys. And I was actually there yesterday and that collective grace of different human beings felt just really palpable.
And I think like figures like Christ, for example, like for me, you see as a very strong, vivid cosmic reflection of that grace, you know. And again, not here to convert anybody, and even you, Ross — as we’re different denominations, that could be an ecumenical matter, for any Father Ted fans in the UK. Anyway, basic point is like, I think that grace really matters. And even if you’re the sort of, you know, ardent atheist, consider what people like Ann Druyan write in Cosmos about science being like the pursuit of love and tenderness and just a love for the cosmos and each other. And like she writes, like, the scientific approach to nature and my understanding of love are the same: never stop daring to go deeper and reach higher, and so on and so on, you know. So.
Ross Kenyon: Beautiful thoughts, Dave. Several different things to say about it as we come near the conclusion. One thing I might say on grace as reaction to your sentiments on it is I’ve seen much of my development up to this point in my life as that of acquiring knowledge, trying to read a lot, read very widely. And as I’ve gone on, I’ve changed from a goal of acquiring knowledge to wisdom. I’d like to be someone that others look at and say, that person looks like someone who is at home on Earth. They are happy to be here and they are naturally here. And I don’t think I’m there. I don’t even know that I’m super close to that.
But you know, when you meet someone and they give you that feeling, you’re like, they’ve got it figured out. I can’t exactly tell you why, but they’re not full of struggle or acquisitiveness for knowledge or for status or something else. They’re just contentedly placed here upon the earth. They walk lightly upon it and with grace. And I think that’s a goal to strive for. Unfortunately, seems like life is always nipping at your heels to go and do something, to give more. And it’s hard to maintain grace when we’re also harried. I can’t tell if that’s a result of our political economy and the time in which we live, or if even if you talk to a peasant, they might feel like, oh, I got to plow the fields and my wife’s — I’m trying to go medieval peasant here. I was just — skip that, move off.
Dave Addison: Yeah, just [unclear]. Keep it, I don’t mind if you keep it in. You have the aircraft on that front, sorry I interrupted.
Ross Kenyon: I have the controls, that’s what I’m saying. You should watch, by the way, Season 2 of The Rehearsal.
Dave Addison: Yeah. Oh goodness. Good gracious to me. Yeah. So, so all this sort of these kind of big metaphysical reflections, for me I always tried to carry them into actually doing the work that was in front of me and our team at the time, right. And so for me, again, I think that there are important bridges, for want of a better phrase, between these worlds. And I hope that just if you’re working in carbon removal today, you know, and it feels harder, it feels scary, or it feels uncertain, at least I found the kind of resources and framings that I’ve shared here to be helpful in just navigating through it at that time.
I think basically, you know, hopefully in time — maybe even, I was talking to someone recently, a mutual friend, I won’t name them as I’m not sure how public they are, but hi if they’re listening — who’s thinking about even just like what writing a history of carbon removal would look like. I think there is room to go into a lot of detail. You know how like when you listen to Moby Dick, he just goes into a lot of detail about whales and stuff. You know, like there’s a room, there’s a room for the unabridged version. But for now, the point is, you know, just try.
And for me, I found that things that spoke to that curiosity, that discipline and that grace were then helpful to go and do whatever work was needed at that time to either help try and make carbon removal become a sustainable thing in the right direction, and the general work I did in the head office of Virgin, just trying to start new businesses, help existing businesses evolve, generally try and change things sincerely and humbly but sincerely for the better. You know, I just found it a very helpful set of inspiring bits of headspaces to be in. Maybe, you know, just to sort of like — well, yeah, [unclear] — I think it’s just a really interesting time to be thinking about what it means to start and grow and change new things that might occupy other bits of these innovation ecosystems as well.
For example — again, easy for me to say — I’ve had various bits of interaction recently with kind of companies in the services or outsourcing or these sort of more sort of hard industries, you might say. And I think if anyone’s listening is thinking, yeah, what would it look like to try and launch a sort of disruptive net positive competitor there that treats people decently, you know, really presses into nurturing and supporting biodiversity, and is also just going to be a happy, evolving procurer of direct and indirect carbon removal services as appropriate for that industry sector and policy regime, etcetera, etcetera. I think that’s a sort of interesting area with everything going on in the world at the moment. Insert comment on AI here and how that all shakes out.
That’s just quite an emerging area of interest that I hope to write about and not use too much AI augmentation to do so. Maybe a little bit of like, does this make — does this sound completely daft or, you know? So I think that that’s quite an interesting emerging area. And another thing I’d say maybe on that point is, for me, again, any long term listeners or former Nori [unclear] listening — I’m very grateful to have been an advisor and I’m very grateful for this podcast. Like for me, when it started, I was already like seven years in, you know. And it was so awesome listening to you all and your guests just go on all these different adventures and journeys and cover so many different bits of ground. It was just — yeah, I’m really grateful for it. I can’t emphasize that enough.
And I think you’ve always got to have like, you know, the kind of big counter, you know, like Marvel style multiverse sort of counter reality thing — other brands are available — I just wonder, think about how many seeds you will help plant, however directly or indirectly, you know. And I for one am grateful for that. And again, not that it matters or anyone cares, but there was never any other podcast I was going to speak on, you know, first, having not done any podcasts for ages, than this one, man, you know?
But yeah, I’m happy to just chat to people, try and be a good guest and just keep moving forward on those other areas. And I think it’s quite a difficult time for many people at the moment. Like I left Virgin during a restructuring last year. I think certain bits of the job search market at the moment are just plainly absurd. And there’s a lot of innovation needed there as well, man, for people around the world to just help so many folks get decent jobs. And there’s such an interesting area to be pressing into there. And I’ll be trying to write more coherently about that and collaborate and link up with others on that front in time as well. But yeah, any final questions I could answer? I’ve got a few questions I posted on LinkedIn before. If you don’t have any questions, I can give some quick answers to those from a, you know, tidy up perspective.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I have them pulled up here. So they say there’s three of them.
Dave Addison: Yeah, me too. They’re more notes to yourself than — than what? I know. The first one just says “when out.” So, what — that was, what was — sorry, this was someone, someone asked, when will the episode be out? And the answer is now, if you’re listening to it. So there you go. There’s that one. One was on how should people think about scope 4, which is essentially, I believe, a broad term for, you know, how do you document other bits of kind of proactive good that you’re trying to do. From an environmental perspective, I think it should be included, but it depends on the context. You know, if you would include any reporting for some initial good you’re doing, great. I think from a carbon accounting perspective, it gets a bit more complicated.
And the final one was someone working on a sort of innovative approach and how to get support. I think these days, just find some support near you, right? If you’re working on a particular — if you’re actually working on some hardware or even some software, all the different accelerators and support programs and investors and communities and movements, there’s so much awesome stuff out there. If it’s carbon removal — and not on commission, but I’m a long term AirMiners fan. I’ve got my hat and my bracelet and my planter downstairs and my T-shirt. You know, I love AirMiners. Just [unclear] help would be available. Keep looking for it, again, keep moving forward. And yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Dave, thanks for being here. So honored to be your first official post-Virgin podcast experience. Something like that. I don’t know how we want to say it. Thanks for being on.
Dave Addison: Yeah, it was a pleasure. But I was like long term listener, first time actual guest, extremely honoured to be in very good company with a lot of your previous guests and interviewees. And keep on keeping on as well, man. Like, I love this podcast. I’m a happy subscriber and I hope to be for the rest of my days. Until you decide to maybe do something else, because you know, you should never feel you have to do more than you have to. But I think you should keep going for now. But again, low pressure, you know, live your life now.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you. I’ll put a link to your Substack, and if you want to hear Dave’s thoughts, which you absolutely should. Thanks for getting real with me, Dave slash David.
Dave Addison: Thank you, brother. A little, yeah. Yeah, it’s emotional.
