Another Side of Sebastian Manhart
Sebastian Manhart on ambition, messiness, and why building climate solutions is harder—and stranger —than it looks from the outside.
This is a recap of episode “379: Another Side of Sebastian Manhart…” from the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your shows.
🔹 Quick Takeaways
Carbon removal looks clean on slides and chaotic in practice. Real progress is uneven, political, and full of trade-offs.
Founders are rarely the caricatures we imagine. Behind confident pitches are doubt, fatigue, and constant recalibration.
The carbon removal ecosystem is still pre-institutional: norms, standards, and business models are forming in real time.
Ambition is necessary but dangerous: without humility it turns into overpromising; without ambition nothing gets built.
Climate tech rewards stamina more than brilliance: surviving regulatory drag, slow customers, and uncertain policy is the real test.
The line between optimism and delusion is thin, and founders walk it daily.
Criticism from the outside is cheap; accountability from the inside is exhausting.
There is no neutral posture—choosing to build is already a moral stance.
Carbon removal is not a single “industry” but a coalition of imperfect experiments.
The work requires emotional resilience, not just technical skill.
📝 The View from Inside the Machine
From the outside, carbon removal can look strangely abstract. Diagrams, pathways, gigaton curves, techno-economic models. From the inside, as Sebastian Manhart makes clear, it feels far more human: improvisational, stressful, occasionally absurd, and deeply personal.
Ross’s conversation with Manhart cuts against the polished narratives that dominate climate conferences and pitch decks. This isn’t a story about inevitable scale or frictionless markets. It’s about navigating uncertainty while being watched by critics who demand perfection and investors who demand speed. Manhart speaks candidly about how difficult it is to build something genuinely new in a policy environment that is inconsistent, capital markets that are impatient, and a public discourse that oscillates between hype and hostility.
Carbon removal, in this telling, is less a clean technological arc and more a prolonged endurance event.
⚙️ Between Vision and Reality
A recurring theme is tension: between what should happen and what can happen. Between moral urgency and institutional inertia. Between ambition and restraint. Manhart argues that many climate debates flatten this complexity, turning builders into villains or saviors, rather than fallible people making constrained choices.
Ross presses on accountability. When do optimism and ambition become self-deception? When does narrative shading cross into dishonesty? Manhart doesn’t dodge the questions. He acknowledges the risk of hype, but also the impossibility of building without belief. If founders waited for perfect conditions or universal consensus, nothing would ever leave the drawing board.
This is the uncomfortable truth of climate work: progress often comes from people who are partially wrong, moving forward anyway.
🧠 Why This Work Changes You
Perhaps the most revealing moments come when the conversation turns inward. What does it do to a person to spend years working on a problem that may not be solvable in time? To live inside climate timelines that stretch beyond careers, companies, even lifetimes?
Manhart describes a kind of psychological adaptation; learning to hold uncertainty without paralysis, criticism without collapse, hope without fantasy. Ross recognizes this as a shared condition among climate builders: a mix of stubbornness, humility, and quiet fear.
The episode doesn’t offer heroes or villains. It offers something rarer: a portrait of what it actually feels like to try. Carbon removal, like all serious climate work, is built by people who know they might fail, and choose to act anyway.
