You can listen to this Reversing Climate Change bonus podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or the entire thing in full right below this paragraph.
Working in climate is hard. We all have things we wish we could say. What if we could actually say them?
If you love the Reversing Climate Change podcast, you should check out the new show I’m working on, Climate Workers Anonymous.
It came about as my work has become more emotional in nature. Working with so many founders has led me to see that many business problems are less about GTM motions or product-market fit. They’re often about identity, attachment, and shame. Being able to speak openly about those feelings, even if anonymously, can be an enormous relief.
Moreover, many people in climate have strong feelings about who they do business with, how their companies are structured and make decisions, and maybe think the entire space has deeply lost its way. Can they say that in public? Sure, but that could have career repercussions beyond what many are able and willing to tolerate. It reminds me of the old joke, “all mushrooms are edible. Some are only edible once.”
And yet, are those feelings any less true? No. They are not. And thus, Climate Workers Anonymous was born. People fill out a Tally survey with their unattributed takes and send it to me to publish in written form on Substack and as audio in your podcast feed—it’s the old Carbon Removal Newsroom feed if you’re still subscribed to that.
Please go check out Climate Workers Anonymous, give it a great rating and review in your podcast apps, subscribe on Substack, become a paying supporter of the show if you believe in what it’s doing, and thanks so much for supporting creative media in climate and carbon dioxide removal!
If you’d like submit your anonymous (and unverified) hopes, fears, or experiences to Climate Workers Anonymous, you can use this Tally survey or email climateworkersanonymous[at]protonmail.com, though I believe the Tally survey is more secure. Do not communicate anything you wouldn’t want a hacker to have access to, including an email address that could be linked to you if you email the account on Protonmail.
And thank you to the legendary PostSecret, which I suspect all elder millennials reading this will know, for showing us the way.
Sincerely,
Ross Kenyon
Resources
Check out my new show, Climate Workers Anonymous
Subscribe to the Climate Workers Anonymous Substack
Subscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack
An amazing rating and review on the podcast apps does a world of good. Would you please do that for me now? Here’s Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. Subscribe as well while you're there!
If you’d like submit your anonymous hopes, fears, or experiences to Climate Workers Anonymous, you can use this Tally survey or email climateworkersanonymous[at]protonmail.com, though I believe the Tally survey is more secure. Do not communicate anything you wouldn’t want a hacker to have access to, including an email address that could be linked to you if you email the account on Protonmail.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: From athletic stuff like a full court pickup game, swish, to athletic stuff like a half mile stroll, get those steps in. Head to Sierra or Sierra.com for the brands you want at the prices that let you do it all. From athletic to athletic, Sierra’s got it. Hey, thank you so much for listening to Reversing Climate Change. This is Ross. We’re on a first name basis, right? I guess if you’re listening, we might as well be. Ross Kenyon, if you’re not on a first name basis with me.
I’m a climate tech and carbon dioxide removal person. Dare I say a worker? I wanted to reach out because you’re listening to this show. If you’re still here, presumably it’s because you like the kind of art that I make. You like the way that I deal with ideas. And I want to make sure that you know about another show that I just started called Climate Workers Anonymous. If you’ve listened for the last couple of years, you’ve probably picked up on some of the themes that are perhaps most succinctly explored in the episode of Reversing Climate Change I did called When Bad Companies Buy Good Carbon Removal.
It’s one of those shows that took a long time to make, a lot of processing. How do I feel about this? And it dealt with the fact of what do we do given that the companies that buy carbon offsets, credits, carbon removal credits, sometimes aren’t companies that we’re necessarily proud of. And yet one essentially has to push that down a little bit to get the deals done or to keep your job or to get a job. And how that might feel punitive, compromising, corrupting in some way.
Or maybe we’ve met at Carbon Unbound, where in January and in May, I ran these small group workshops called Campfires that was all about founder grief, about the difficulty of working carbon dioxide removal right now, where it’s pretty bifurcated. If you have a big offtake, you’re focused on executing. If not, it’s unclear if you’re going to be able to gin up enough demand to keep going or to expand or to raise your next round and It’s hard to talk about those things openly because then it makes one look weak and looking weak can create a self-fulfilling cycle where it is thus harder to attract buyers or investors.
So I think a lot of people who are working at early stage companies just carry feelings around. They’re either feelings that are conventional to founding a company about, are we going to make it? I have to be the brave parent, the brave leader and put on a good face so that others don’t lose faith and I think that only increases working in a space like climate because I pretty much don’t meet people who are here for the wrong reasons. Pretty much everyone I ever meet who’s in climate At the very least came into this work because they think that it’s really important to reverse climate change, at least make it less bad.
What are we doing here and how do we fix it? So I think this is a line of work with a stronger than average conscience. That only makes these struggles and the mask wearing more painful. To date, I’ve published one introductory episode, which is a lot like what you’re hearing right now, explaining the rationale for Climate Workers Anonymous. And then I’ve also published two episodes that focus on user submissions of their anonymous and unverified takes on working in climate. If you’re a millennial, as I am, at least one from the United States, you might remember Post Secret.
Or people would mail in a decorated postcard that would have a sentiment that they felt unable to express in their regular life, often a morose feeling, something that they were scared to talk about. They would mail it in to be published by PostSecret, a collective art project. And that’s what Climate Workers Anonymous is. It’s a collective art project for those anonymous and unverified feelings You do not feel comfortable sharing with the world at large. Send it in and I will read it on your behalf. It will be published in audio and text form on Substack.
It will go out on the Carbon Removal Newsroom podcast feed if you’re still subscribed to that. If you’d like to submit your stories, experiences, feelings, hopeful, grim, mundane, visual, send me some visual stuff. I’m open to it. If you have something that you want shared, but maybe don’t want it attributed to you personally, send it to me. There’s a link to a tally form. Please don’t submit anything that you’re not comfortable if it was ever revealed. There’s also a ProtonMail email address if you want to send something in that way, but obviously you will have to send it from an email not linked to you personally.
And also be careful as AI gets better. It’s possible that it will be able to deduce who you are from your syntax and words. So I can’t like perfectly guarantee that for all time, your identity will be protected in this way. So please only share what you’re comfortable with knowing what I just told you. I think it’s important to tell the truth about these things. I think it’s important to have a space where people can unburden themselves because this work is genuinely challenging and I don’t know, I’m getting a lot of submissions on difficulties or contrarian opinions that I don’t feel comfortable with.
Or some of them are even pointing to potentially unethical behavior by certain players in climate. And as I mentioned, these are unverified. So I’m not spending time researching these. I can’t speak to their veracity and whether or not these are true. So please keep that in mind as you listen. I try my best to make sure that they are not spreading rumors that I think are harmful in this way. I’m trying to find the right line to do this. And if you’d like to be a part of this collective art project, I would humbly invite you to follow Climate Workers Anonymous on Substack in your podcast app.
And I’m going to attach an episode right now to the tail end of this introduction so that you can hear what that’s like. So here it is, a full episode of Climate Workers Anonymous on the Reversing Climate Change feed. Thank you so much for listening. I hope I will see you over there. Don’t worry, Reversing Climate Change will still persist. How could it not? I don’t know how to quit it even if I could. I think I have to keep making shows here, so don’t worry.
I want to do something different over at Climate Workers Anonymous. Thanks for being a fan. Thanks for listening. I hope this is stimulating your brain, making you feel or think things that otherwise you would not. That’s the additionality of this show. Thanks for listening. I appreciate you a lot. And here it is, an episode from Climate Workers Anonymous. Hello, this is Ross Kenyon. I’m the host of Climate Workers Anonymous. This is the first time I’m attempting to read submissions that have been sent into the show.
I’ve never done this before. I have a lot of questions about the ethics of doing this, about how much to anonymize if people are naming specific people or entities. In general, I think that’s not what we want to be doing today. One of the lessons I seemingly have to relearn continuously as I get older is that whenever I’m judgy towards someone, it usually only takes a little bit of time for me to be in a similar kind of spot to them to understand how they could behave in that way.
As the line from Antiquity goes, I am human. Nothing human is foreign to me. Terrence, the Roman playwright, said that. I’ve always enjoyed that line. I spent way too much time trying to find this. There’s a quote from a film that I love called, I Hurt Huckabees. Jason Schwartzman has hired these Existential detectives, Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin to figure out his life and symbolism and the archetypes and what everything means. And this is not a spoiler and doesn’t give anything away here, but here’s the line.
I spent way too much time trying to find this exact line. I can’t find a clip of it or I would just post it in the show notes. They’re explaining the interconnection of Jude Law and Jason Schwartzman’s characters here. And they tell Jason Schwartzman, your energy recycles into every possible relation to everyone else’s energy, even Brad’s. You’ve been predator and prey with him, friends, enemies, brother, sister, mother, child. I think about that line a lot. Many of the things that I would judge when I was younger, now that I’m in a position to experience some of those things that I had only previously observed but now have lived firsthand, I find that I am no better and no worse than many others.
And all the time I had spent putting myself in a position of superiority was not actually that helpful, nor that true. It’s one of the reasons why I think a default to egalitarianism, at the very least in ethical matters like this, is really important. When we expend a lot of energy thinking of ourselves as better than one another, it’s hard to read what I’m about to read to you in a way that is less about how the person sending this message is superior to the person it is about.
But also as a way of maybe having mercy for the individual actor here, because the system pushes people to act this way too. And that’s not to say that we can just blame the system and we don’t have responsibility for our actions. We absolutely do. It’s the only thing that we control. And one of the ways that you can make sense of attention like this is that suboptimal behavior might not be endorseable, but it is understandable. And I think if you can understand something, you can have mercy.
And if you can have mercy, you can go beyond shame. And if you can go beyond shame, you can start to understand why people behave the way that they do in a way that does not present a false hierarchy where the observer is inherently better than the doer. There are times that this may not hold. There are times when this way of understanding action, behavior, consequences May not be appropriate for the situation, but it is something that I’m thinking about a lot as I’m trying to read what people are writing me and to do so in a way that feels true without feeling like an irresponsible gossip column, essentially.
I really want this to feel a bit more like Post Secret and not like a supermarket tabloid. I suspect that will not be the last time that I will have to do a little bit of an intro explaining how this is going to work and why. This process will be evolutionary. We’re all going to learn things about our industry and ourselves. And that’s going to mean that the medium, the art itself will likely have to adapt. To what it is meant to express. Downstream from such lofty thoughts, I received several submissions, some long, some short.
Thank you so much to everyone who already has opened up and sent me your takes. I really appreciate it. In the show notes, you will see a link for an anonymous tally survey. You click on it, you write your little text, you send it off. There’s no spot to put your email or your name. I’m not interested in those parts. Moreover, I think it makes this a whole lot more secure if you just don’t share information that you wouldn’t like it if someone had figured out a way into that tally system and had access to it.
There’s also a ProtonMail email if you prefer to send some info to me over there. Unfortunately, unless you use a new email address or one that you use that is not linked to your name or your profession. There’s a limit to how much can be done for privacy reasons. But if you prefer that, there’s a link as well in the show notes. It’s climateworkersanonymous at protonmail.com. So I don’t know, what am I gonna do here? I got several submissions on tally. So I think I’m gonna do a couple shorties and then I have a longer one that I’m going to read.
So, okay, here we go. First submissions to Climate Workers Anonymous. I have so much optimism based on what I see working on a climate solution and from the people I work with in my industry, but we need more corporate and government actions fast. Here’s one that made me already have to figure out what my bleeping policy is. I think I still got a bleep. So, uh, I don’t know. I guess I’m going to be bleeping. If that’s a wrong decision, you let me know.
Maybe it’s better not to bleep. Maybe it’s better not to believe. I don’t know. I’m gonna have to think about that one. One line. All it says is, I feel like we’re fucked. Third submission today. Fourth Submission. I was always scared that joining the climate fight would mean dying before I got to actually see any modicum of success from years of effort and grind. I just don’t know how people keep their chin up in the space, and now we are faced with outright failure and indifference versus success.
It is dispiriting. As is the reality that the economic systems continue to penny-pinch when it comes to funding CapEx for decarb, capital expenditure for decarbonization, but had no problems ponying up literally $1 trillion to fund AI, which looks likely to destroy labor, further bake the planet, and entrench techno-oligarchs. Fifth submission. Consumers don’t care about climate, and they don’t want to care about climate. Paraphrasing from a 2017 Tumblr post, if your solution to a problem relies on, quote, everyone just, dot, dot, dot, end quote, then you don’t have a solution.
No one has ever, quote, unquote, just. No one ever will, quote, unquote, just. Stop pitching climate to businesses like you’re selling to a consumer. Quote, this is easy. Your friends will love it. The effects are immediate. End quotations. Sixth and final submission from the short ones. There was a point in time where I was fairly convinced that sinking wood chips to the bottom of the ocean was somehow going to be one of the successful methods for carbon removal. Thanks so much for sharing that.
Even those little nuggets, y’all brought it. You all said something real, whether it was five words, maybe six if you count the contraction as two, or whether it was a full paragraph. Thanks for taking the time to just say something hard. Do you feel unburdened? Does it help to know that thousands of people likely just heard this sentiment? Maybe they hadn’t heard anyone speak so forcefully in the past. Maybe it’s been a while. Thanks for doing that. You have my sincere thanks for your leadership and for going first.
It’s brave. Even if it’s anonymous, it’s brave. Some of these things are just really hard to, I don’t know, to do yourself. I’m realizing now that potentially the first three were meant to be submitted as a single block. So it looks like there was some sort of technical goof in there. Whatever. They all stand separately as well. How funny. Okay, I’m gonna read a longer one now. The carbon dioxide removal industry is stuck in a paradox. We want a flashy, well-funded, functioning market filled with high-quality tonnes, but markets inherently reward provision of cheaper services on the margins.
As long as there are cheaper alternatives, whether those are emissions reductions or very low-quality removals, those will always edge out the higher-quality stuff across the entire population of the market. In this context, the venture capital model just won’t work for carbon dioxide removal, as it inevitably results in monopolistic and anti-competitive behaviors, a race to the bottom in terms of quality, and attraction of profit-motivated individuals who cynically use science as a shroud for ruthless profiteering. The carbon credit game also feeds much of the moral hazard. No one wants to hear this, but for CDR to be truly successful, it needs to move away from a market-based model.
Our adherence to it to date explains so many of the industry’s underlying struggles around buyers, funding, and scale. Building CDR should be a slow and steady, no-fail mission that avoids the boom and bust dynamics in commodities like oil and gold. It needs to be backed by policy, supported by local communities, rooted in environmentalism, and integrated into our way of life and industries in a way that can yield co-benefits beyond just CDR, parenthetical, although we’ll need a lot of pure play CDR too, end parenthetical. It’s not entirely clear what this would look like yet, but it’s our responsibility to build this.
End of that submission. One thing I’m thinking about is how much to react to these responses versus let them stand alone. And I’m leaning towards letting them stand alone. Thank you to everyone for submitting. I like the differences in lengths. I like the differences in earnestness. I like differences in serious critiques of a climate tech field like carbon dioxide removal. I’d like to remind people too That if you have a beautiful sentiment that is awkward to share, you can do that too. I don’t want this to be purely negative.
It shouldn’t be just negative. I think a lot of the things that are scary to say are concepts that maybe need a capital letter at the front because they’re a proper noun, you know, truth and beauty, justice, things like that, that you want to express with regard to your climate work that maybe aren’t super fashionable, maybe make you look like less serious of a business person. Those are very welcome too. I’ll say them on your behalf. You honor me by giving me the opportunity to do so and to pass along some real thoughts here.
Critical, beautiful, mundane. I don’t know. You got something mundane you want to say? I’m really open to however this collective art project plays out. You let me know. The link to submit is in the show notes. You’ll see it on Substack and the publication of this. If you’re listening out there, if you’re already submitting, if you’re thinking of submitting, thank you for your courage. I respect it a lot. And I’m looking forward to doing another one of these soon. I haven’t decided on a cadence.
I haven’t really even decided on a format. I’ve made a lot of art of different kinds of my day, a lot of music, a lot of filmmaking, podcasting, if I may be so bold. Sometimes you can spend a lot of time trying to work out every piece of something before you start, and that’s necessary for certain types of art. If Escher started drawing his stairs without knowing how they were going to connect, it probably wouldn’t work, right? Like that guy had to have a plan, I think.
But I think starting loose and leaving a room for entropy to find you, I think is a good way to make art. Leave some room for randomness. Randomness is often where the best stuff is. We’re going to keep experimenting together. Thanks for being a part of this. I feel really inspired to do this. It feels good. You know, I like being able to connect with people on this kind of level. Maybe feels good for you too. I hope so. If you’re not already subscribed on Substack, that’s where a lot of this is going to happen.
I would recommend you join on Substack to make sure you’re fully up to date and get notified and can participate. And if you want to pay, I don’t know, you know, I haven’t really set up ways to pay to support this project, but if you were willing to do that, that would also be appreciated. I don’t know what you’re going to get for it besides just my thanks and helping to make something that ideally you think should exist, help it to exist. I’m really grateful so many people have already reached out and are listening.
I’m really grateful to you and I hope you have a wonderful day.
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