It's legs to walk and thoughts to fly Eyes to laugh and lips to cry A restless tongue to classify All born to grow and grown to die —Townes Van Zandt in "Rex's Blues"
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If we created an objectively correct and exhaustive categorization of carbon credits, would it solve everything? Would it solve anything?
Listen in as I read an essay I recently wrote about the endless quest to perfectly categorize the world, and while that may be a useful project for some purposes, it isn't anywhere close to the main reasons the world looks the way that it does.
Listen in and you'll get surrealist sculpture, Michael Polanyi, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Plato. Who can truly say no to an offer like that?
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Here's the essay on Substack if you'd like to read along and check out the endnotes.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hey, thank you so much for listening to Reversing Climate Change. This is the host Ross Kenyon. I’m a longtime carbon dioxide removal and climate tech entrepreneur. I wrote a piece recently on Substack that... I really liked it. It grew out of a different essay I was working on. And the more I worked on this one section, the more I’m like, if I go down this road much further, there’s going to be a second essay nested within a larger essay. And it diverges with the purpose of the original essay enough where I’m like, all right, fine.
I’m just going to break this out. It was originally called The Impossible Taxonomy. By the time this is released, I’m gonna call it The Impossible Taxonomy of Carbon Dioxide Removal. I was inspired to write this piece because so much of the work within carbon markets and carbon dioxide removal, carbon crediting, what have you, is around taxonomy. How do we categorize things? Why do we categorize them this way? So much of this work is predicated on a hope or a belief or a prediction That a better taxonomy, or even a perfect taxonomy, will help us move climate action ahead.
That’s a tough one for me. I came out of loving things like the Cratylus, the Platonic dialogue about the differences between names and the things that are being named and how those are pulling apart and being quite influenced by semiotics and postmodernism and the idea that we should be Questioning categories and noticing that categories aren’t neutral partitions of reality. They are often infused with power. Who gets to categorize things and slice up reality? And these are not neutral actions of stratigraphy. People want to treat the world like Carl Linnaeus, bylaw, classes, kingdoms, families, orders.
If we could just lock everything down, And while I think there is something that’s really important there about clarity and the desire to speak plainly and accurately, and that can unlock some really important truths, it’s one of those things that it’s constantly undermining itself. For so many things, this is especially true if there’s a binary where there’s only two categories, It’s usually stressing at the seams almost immediately. And in order to truly believe in the categorical integrity of a dichotomy, you have to basically enforce it. And you’re going to have edge cases of having to decide...
Decide things that are difficult. But I don’t think the solution here is to retreat into a form of philosophical nominalism, of solipsism, of the impossibility of ever communicating effectively. I don’t think that’s the correct answer here. It is a conclusion you can draw, but I don’t think it’s true. You’ll understand what I mean as I read this essay that I wrote recently on Substack called The Impossible Taxonomy of Carbon Dioxide Removal. The impossible taxonomy. If we created an objectively correct and exhaustive categorization of carbon credits, would it solve everything? Would it solve anything?
It begins with a header quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein, his Philosophical Investigations. Quote, End quotation. One of the most bewildering parts of language is how something can be so obvious and yet elude strict categorization. If you are a carbon dioxide removal professional, and I describe an investor as someone who invests in, quote, legacy carbon credits, end quote, you likely know I mean someone fluent in transacting Red Plus credits on Vera. You’ll probably also infer their comfort with credits originating from Isometrics Improved Forest Management, IFM, and Afforestation and Reforestation, We can say this individual invests in, quote, nature-based solutions, end quote, but the moment we do, we have to carve out an exemption for their support of clean cookstoves or figure out what even is biochar.
We could say that they only support high-quality projects of all kinds, but essentially everyone alleges to be an above-average driver, and there isn’t universal convergence on quality. Some carbon dioxide removal partisans insist that avoidance is universally garbage, and if they went to college for too long, they may chide that, quote, once you have paid the Dane Guild, you never get rid of the Dane, end quote. This is me making fun of myself. It’s from the Rudyard Kipling poem. Avoidance advocates can justifiably retort that nature will be destroyed if not properly financed while we await CDR’s minuscule climate contribution becoming atmospherically relevant.
Even in saying quote-unquote avoidances, I am omitting that many classical carbon assets and nature-based solutions aren’t strictly avoidances but likely a combination of removals and avoidances. Before I finish speaking what I believe to be a simple term, I’ve already ensnared myself in a language profoundly contested by science, political economy, and power. There are many valid ways to try to categorize asset classes and role archetypes, but I suspect you intuitively understand the kind of projects that would interest this person. I bet if we invented several test cases, we would agree with one another on the suitability of the proposed project to this investor.
That may hold even if we cannot agree on a simple word or phrase to describe this person, let alone what to contrast them against. But are words important? Here’s another quote at the top of this section. Quote, The beginning of knowledge is to call things by their true names. End quote. Attributed to Confucius slash Socrates slash Abraham Lincoln. The pantheon of misattributed quotes on the internet. Do not let this task feel hopeless, because you know what I mean, right? Accept the deficiency of the categories of avoidance, removals, offsets, legacy registries, and so on, because my intention is understood by us both.
Even though you can think of counterexamples where the categories of carbon assets break, they hold well enough to make useful communication possible. There is an oft-unstated belief underlying so much of the taxonomical churn in carbon market discourse that, quote, if only we could categorize and name everything correctly, so much else would fall into place. And I stand here asking, would it? I believe words are incredibly powerful. I spend so much of my time studying them, playing with them, loving them. And yet the problems of climate change are not that we lack the right way of understanding carbon credits or the right carbon accounting scheme.
If man could give names to all of the carbon credits, we’d stay in Eden just a bit longer, if only that were the unlock. I suspect the problem of climate change is word-based, but it isn’t taxonomical. It isn’t about categorization. It’s that there are very powerful and dangerous stories some humans tell other humans about who we are and why we are here on Earth, and those stories are deeply flawed. Hardly are those words out that I realize I’ve committed my own category error. The failure I point to is itself a miscategorization.
It just misfiles a different thing. Not carbon, but us humans. Those flawed stories sort us as sectarian and small. They misunderstand our nestedness in a web of natural systems and beings. When what we most desire is to look into the eyes of our fellow creatures and see both ourselves and God in them. To be forgiven all our shortcomings, to forgive all of theirs, and to celebrate with something like celestial joy, the improbability of this moment and that anything is anything at all. These paradoxically humble and grand sentiments point to divine truth that can only be harmed by the attempt to contain them in words.
But you know what I mean, right? I didn’t say it perfectly. I barely said anything at all. I didn’t create the fully exhaustive system for carbon crediting we might have hoped for. I didn’t rebel against the impossibility of words ever exactly corresponding to the transcendent subjects to which they refer. But I suspect we understand each other better now. I hope you enjoyed. I’ve never actually just read a piece of writing of mine here, but normally when I write something, I like to talk about it. I like to express it, play with it.
I feel like that helps me understand it in new ways. So much of the podcast is improvisatory and what connections are being made and talking is a good way to do that. I appreciate your listening. I hope you enjoyed some of the themes here. There are some cool pictures that I think help explain some of these ideas and maybe open up some new avenues. There’s also end notes if you care about this, including one that I think is important about the work of Michael Polanyi about his famous line, we can know more than we can tell.
His famous example is, you actually can’t really teach someone how to ride a bike The amount of tacit knowledge, things that are inarticulable, innumerable micro acts of balance that take place in your body in order to ride a bike. You could not explain all of those things to someone else using words. They basically just have to start riding a bike and their body will learn it. But you can’t explain every step ex ante. But the thing about riding a bike is you don’t have to state every rule of riding a bike ex ante in order to ride the bike.
I think that’s true of carbon markets and these assets as well. I think the attempts to categorize things better and more accurately over time, it’s useful for some functions and for some types of work, it is really important. But I don’t think that’s the main thing or even one of the most important things that’s blocking climate action. I don’t think that’s having a major impact on that. I think the problems of climate action have much more to do with spiritual illness, with how humans deal with the discount rate, about the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and why we’re here and not having a metaphysical understanding that has prepared us for this moment.
I think those are much better explanations than if only we had categorized this a little bit more tightly and knew what every asset did and could be used for. Again, not disparaging it, valuable work for some purposes, but I’m also careful to note that we understand each other well enough, I think, at this point to check this off of the list of what are the biggest problems bedeviling carbon dioxide removal in carbon markets. I hope you enjoyed this. Link in the show notes to the Substack post. And thanks so much for your time.
