For climate startups to find customers, attract talent, and secure funding, they need to communicate their value effectively.
But how do you deliver content that explains complex ideas in an accessible way? How do you synthesize information to appeal to a variety of audiences?
Nick Van Osdol is a writer on the Nori team, the creator of the Keep Cool newsletter, and host of The Keep Cool Show, a podcast that gives promising climate tech startups an opportunity to pitch investors.
On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Nick joins Ross to explain why communications is an undervalued sector within the climate space and discuss his work on the forthcoming updated version of the Nori white paper.
Nick shares his interest in how the Inflation Reduction Act’s $370B for climate action will be deployed and describes the challenge of scaling supply to accommodate Advanced Market Commitments to buy carbon credits.
Listen in for Nick’s take on pragmatism versus idealism in the climate space and learn how a talented content creator thinks about the geopolitical implications of scaling renewable energy.
More from the show
Ad-free episodes and other benefits come with a paid subscription.
Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
Carbon Removal Memes is still going.
Resources
Nori Whitepaper (this is the old version but we will update with the new version when it is published)
The Network State by Balaji Srinivasan
Evan Hynes on Reversing Climate Change
Stanford 100% Renewables Study
The End of the World Is Just the Beginning by Peter Zeihan
Full Transcript
You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m the creative editor and one of the co-founders of Nori. Today I have with me one of my colleagues, Nick Van Osdol, who’s a writer at Nori and also the creator of Keep Cool, the climate tech newsletter, podcast, job board, and probably a few other things I’m forgetting.
Nick Van Osdol: Hey, Ross, great to be on.
Ross Kenyon: Great to have you. You’ve been instrumental in helping us do a lot of writing projects lately. We’ve been working on a new edition of Nori’s white paper, and the original white paper was an early project of mine. I was in charge of editing and wrangling everyone and making sure all the input got in there in the correct way, and it is onerous. It’s an onerous task, a thankless one and an unsexy one, dreary. But we’ve been working on this white paper together and I think it’s a lot smoother this time around, and I think that’s at least partially thanks to your expertise here.
Nick Van Osdol: Yeah, well, I’m glad to hear that you feel like it’s going more smoothly than the first rodeo. I’ve certainly enjoyed sinking my teeth in, and it’s a good challenge to try and wrap your arms around documenting everything that goes into something like Nori’s marketplace and Nori’s products and Nori’s methodology, and making it all work together.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’m hoping even by the time we publish this, maybe the first two sections will be published. We should talk about that, but that would be a nice tie-in for this show. Back when we did it the first time, I don’t think the technology was around to do this in nearly as neat a way, but we’ve been using GitBook this time around. It’s much more like GitHub, where you have repositories that you can update, which makes sense to software people. It’s modular, easier to do things in a modular fashion. Whereas the first white paper we did was essentially a PDF, a hundred-something page PDF that a designer came in on once the text was done, to format everything. And the stakes are so high: if a word was missing, it could mess up an entire block of text and you’d have to start over to fix it. And if you want to change that, you have to go back to the designer.
Nick Van Osdol: You find yourself changing the way that you describe things in order to make the paragraph fit well on the page, as opposed to saying things the way that you want to.
Ross Kenyon: God, I, I don’t think I ever had to do that, but it wouldn’t surprise me if I did have to do that. I think I’ve kind of blocked those memories out. It was a, it was a really hard project, where you have multiple people at Nori and I think some outsiders from Nori too contributing their knowledge, pulling stuff from other sources, trying to make what one hopes is a canonical document of Nori’s thinking at a given moment in time. And now we’re trying to do this again, but in a way that’s easily updatable and modular and less pressure.
Nick Van Osdol: Less design-obsessed. It lends itself well to the idea that everything that Nori, many of the things Nori does at least, will change over time and probably will evolve. And I was talking with another carbon removal company recently and they just put out what they called kind of like a proto-protocol, where it’s an explicit acknowledgement that these things are open for review and comment and discussion, and that’s welcomed. It’s not intended to, it is intended to be, as you said, a one-stop-shop resource to learn everything about Nori and what Nori’s perspective on carbon markets in the world is, but those things are growing and evolving.
Ross Kenyon: At the same time, I wonder how many resources like this even get produced by companies these days, white papers. The Bitcoin white paper was probably the first one in the industry, the standard-setter for everything that came out of crypto afterwards, so there’s definitely a part of that. Okay, I’m going to reveal a lot about Nori’s marketing woes and struggles here, but we have so much good content. I’m not even talking about the stuff that I’m really involved in, even though I like to think it’s included in that category, but we have so many articles and blogs and landing pages.
And if you’re trying to design the information architecture of a website so that the person you want to find a thing will find the thing, without having to wade through too much or be so dedicated to consuming all of the info that you’ve ever produced since the beginning of time, how do you arrange things? And we’re at this point where we’re like, how many pages do we have that are functionally orphaned, that we spent a lot of time on, that are great assets but get seen by seven people? And I guess the hope is that a white paper has the knowledge that you need to have, well organized. And even if there’s other pages that are better for certain things, is this kind of like the kitchen sink where mostly everything lives? I don’t know how you think about it, or is that the wrong way to understand this document?
Nick Van Osdol: I do think about it in that way. And I think the job has in many ways been, as you said, myself sinking back into what Nori has published in the past and curating the most relevant pieces of it, or at least making sure that those perspectives are integrated, and then also linking out to documents that can still live on their own and are pretty up to date. So even I’ve still been discovering stuff from Nori that I didn’t know existed, but that is great. So it speaks to your point about these things aren’t always easy to discover. But yeah, now trying to bring it together in a doc that represents it, or at the minimum gives people a jumping-off point to find that. So there is some re-architecting of the pathways as well that goes into it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think one thing that’s cool that definitely comes from the world of software development is you can also have changes tracked. So something that might have been canonical at one point that we have since changed from, because every company certainly must pivot and make changes, you could say, oh, they used to think this way, but the change is tracked here and you can see how Nori’s thought has grown and changed. But I’m describing a very small set of people, like the extreme nerds. How many people are going to want to do that?
Nick Van Osdol: I think people like to know that a company is transparent and does do that, and that it is available. How many people want to track changes through GitHub or GitBook? I have no idea, but that is there.
Ross Kenyon: How many people read all of Charm’s protocol? I don’t know, or are just glad that there is an announcement about it. I think if you read everything you were supposed to read in any sector, I don’t know that you have time for doing anything else. So it’s nice that some things exist, and if you want to, you can check it out, but also you’re making other types of assets too that hopefully are more accessible to the non-elite cadre of people who will consume literally every single document you’ve ever produced and want desperately to be an insider at Nori or Charm or anywhere else.
Nick Van Osdol: But it speaks to the importance of including those levels of depth within the same document, right? Like, a white paper should have a lot of deep granularity, but it should also have an FAQ section that, if people can navigate to it first, they feel like, I only have 15 minutes for this, let me find the section that distills the questions I might have.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve started, and I have no idea when I’m going to finish this because I’ve been too busy to read too much lately, but I started reading Balaji Srinivasan’s The Network State. Have you cracked that one?
Nick Van Osdol: I have a PDF on my computer and I have not yet started it, but I intend to. Intend to.
Ross Kenyon: I intend to read some of it, actually, not all of it, to be honest. I took a picture from, I think, the first page, but he says, I’ve created a one sentence, one page, one essay and one book about why we should be looking at network states, and what these virtual opt-in governance structures might look like for the future with regard to the nation-state, and how things will change. That’s such a, I posted in the marketing channel, normally, this is brilliant, we should do that. Like, what is one sentence, or what is one paragraph, what is one page, and then what is like the entire thing? That’s the white paper, surely, the whole thing. The lite paper is maybe the essay, and then a paragraph and a sentence.
Yeah, we’ve been trying to hire a head of brand marketing and communications, which, if you’re listening and you have a background both at startups but also at large companies where maybe you’ve seen them grow from a smaller company to a larger one, we’re still looking for someone like this as of this recording on August 18th, 2022. This is one of the reasons, well, it is the reason I brought this up. Trying to hire this person is where we all have different stories we tell about Nori, about what we think is most important, what we see as the innovation or the changes we’re trying to bring to carbon removal or anything else. And I’m not always sure that the best story, and a lot of it depends on the audience, but I’m not sure that we have the most coherent story across every audience group.
And it also depends on which Nori you’re talking about, and if you’re one of the more recent hires it’s probably even harder for you to explain all of the things that we touch and why, and why we think the way that we do. So there’s a lot of difficult communications problems that are not just talking to the external world but also just, how do you bring people into a culture where they understand the mission and also not know more than they really need to? I’ve certainly been in meetings where I’m like, yeah, I don’t need to know this. How do you use Asana? I don’t care. Don’t need me on that info, not for me, not for me. So let’s try to find the correct amount of information and when to be useful.
Anyways, I love that strategy, so hiring someone like that. We’re trying to figure out better ways to tell stories. If you’re listening here you probably can tell, it’s really important to us, so much of what we do is communications-oriented. We poached you, or quasi-poached you, because I feel like I’ve said this compliment to your face and behind your back so many times, but you’re one of the most successful synthesizers of large amounts of information, and learning it and then reading it back in a way that repackages it in a way that might actually be useful, especially for someone who is too busy maybe to be reading all that source material oneself. I often, and Paul especially, I think Paul is probably your biggest fan, and I don’t know if you agree with that.
Nick Van Osdol: Yeah, no. I mean, I appreciate you saying that, and there’s other great synthesizers out there, but I won’t try to downplay the, the compliment. I do think that has been, I’ve realized that about myself in reflecting on how I learn about things. One of the ways that I do enjoy learning about things is automatically taking the step of reading or listening to something, but then also regurgitating it in written form for myself and ultimately, ideally, for other people, to see if I understand it well enough to write about it concisely and clearly, and test that with other folks. And that’s kind of how I’ve gotten to the place that I am, writing about Nori and writing about other climate technologies as well.
Ross Kenyon: So seemingly communications is something that you think is pretty important, that is maybe underrated in climate tech. I don’t know if you actually even think that.
Nick Van Osdol: Yeah, I do think that. It would be hard for me to quantify, but I did see a pretty interesting tweet from, I forget who it was, so I’m not going to be able to credit them live, but they said something to the effect of, they think that climate media, or content, or journalism, or communications is one of the more high-impact but underinvested sectors within climate. And we’re starting to see some more traditional venture-funded raises flow into companies that do communications work. Pique Action is one example. They make really stellar micro-documentaries on climate tech companies. But I think there’s a lot more room for people to be playing the communications role that is so vital to scaling a lot of solutions and convincing folks to invest in it, whether with their money or their time.
Ross Kenyon: Is that why it’s considered undervalued, that there are solutions or companies that need funding, and comms as a way of driving more money into the sector? Is that the primary way it’s measured, or something else?
Nick Van Osdol: I don’t even know that I would say, that would be one way. But also just looking at the sheer number of climate tech startups. Perhaps like, you know, Nori has grown up in the past three years in terms of how it tells its own story and how impactful that is to finding customers or folks to work for you. There’s a lot of companies that need that help, because telling your story as a climate tech startup shouldn’t be, it shouldn’t be hard to convince people why it’s important, but it can be complicated for folks that are coming at it from a more scientific discipline, or not necessarily people that fancy themselves as born communicators. So especially pre-seed and seed-stage companies that don’t have a ton of money yet to hire folks to help them with that type of stuff, and they’re probably focusing on real hardware engineering problems. How do you make time or find the money or hire the right person to tackle some of the same communications challenges that Nori is trying to work through?
Ross Kenyon: We recently hired a new senior marketing manager named Heidi who’s been fantastic. But she says many of the companies that she’s worked with in the past, their problem is that they don’t have any content and they have to find a way to jury-rig something that is halfway useful to anyone. Like, all right, content marketing is a big deal, what can we say that will actually be worth a hundred shares on Facebook? And our problem is the opposite end of the telescope. We’re like, it’s thousands of hours of audio and so many pages and so much content, and now there’s no need to keep track of it. Two options, that’s all anyone wants now.
Nick Van Osdol: Yeah, I’ve got some of that on my show too. I think that people either want, like, really long-form stuff, they want 20 hours a week with Joe Rogan, or they want [unclear], and nothing in between, right? And even the way that some of the platforms where people get their distribution from, like, you can see things like the Twitter algorithm change in real time. Threads were such a big thing for a while and still are in some capacity, but as someone who is also trying to grow his own Twitter audience like myself, and people I talk to about it, it seems like it’s already moving past threads now and wants witty memes and one-liners. And yeah, it evolves with people’s taste and people’s desire.
Ross Kenyon: I love the idea of prioritizing memes. That’s cool, I like that one. Prioritizing snappy one-liners on Twitter sounds terrible. That’s like the thing I hate most about Twitter, the “I don’t know who needs to hear this, but blank, blank, blank.” Not cool. Can we retire this, like, the snarky [unclear] takedown?
Nick Van Osdol: Yeah, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: That’s a whole nother can of worms, this social media friend-or-foe. But we try to use it in good ways to talk about things that are important.
Nick Van Osdol: Yeah. Or, I feel like we try to use it at least for the memes as some sort of relief from doom-scrolling, and also community-building and having a culture.
Ross Kenyon: I feel like there’s a great, what is that movie called? I always forget because it’s so close to Gulliver’s Travels. It’s called Sullivan’s Travels. Have you ever seen this movie from the ’40s?
Nick Van Osdol: I haven’t.
Ross Kenyon: It’s about this film director who very much wants to create a film about poverty. He’s like a sort of popcorn Hollywood director making swords-and-sandals big movies and whatever, and he wants to make something serious about the economy. And he goes on these travels, he goes on a mission to find the common man. And all the common men and women he meets basically say, hey, our lives are not that good. Enjoying your comedies or your adventures were the things that took us away from our hard lives. You’ve shorted us, essentially, by refusing to entertain us, and now you’re trying to direct the spotlight back upon our suffering that we’re trying to avoid a little bit. We had relief for 90 minutes in the theater. Thanks a lot. So I feel like there’s at least part of that operating here, trying to do morale-building, I don’t know, but making it accessible to other folks too. Because otherwise it could be really serious and scientific and economic all the time with respect to something like carbon removal.
Nick Van Osdol: Yeah, I think a big part of it is trying to make some of these things that are kind of in-groupy, trying to attract people to come outside to be like, there’s something funny about this, there’s something interesting, but I need to learn more so I can be in the club, right?
Ross Kenyon: Something is happening here, but I don’t know quite what it is, and that’s a quote from a Bob Dylan song, but I forgot which one. I think it’s, [sings]. Yeah, I don’t think that’s the one. Why did I do that to you? We’re not even in the recording studio, we’re not even wearing pants for our next hour-long session. Yeah, kind of. I actually went into this show not wanting to bring up the memes, because we’ve done so many things lately that are either directly about comedy and meme-making or touch on it. And of course, [unclear] back to me, and it’s all things about me and being self-involved. Here you go, [unclear]. Yeah, I can’t even. The zeitgeist.
Nick Van Osdol: The zeitgeist.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, well, I want to tell people about Keep Cool, give people a chance to follow your amazing work chronicling climate tech, and also, you have such a great vantage point on everything that’s happening in this space. You cover a lot of carbon removal, even podcasting with people in the carbon removal space recently. I’ll just give you the floor. What’s something that you’re thinking about? What’s an area where you have active thinking happening?
Nick Van Osdol: Yeah, so there’s a few. I mean, one big one that’s a bit more broad. As you know, we’ve just had the Inflation Reduction Act passed in the US, and that’s fantastic and really came out of the blue a few weeks ago. Folks thought that big government legislation was dead in the water for the next two years, but they managed to pull together, and it includes three hundred and seventy billion dollars of funding for climate solutions, energy, even environmental justice. But the big question for me coming out of that is kind of like, what’s next? That was such a big surprise. So where else would we be attuning our attention on the policy front, in other countries, to make sure that this money actually gets deployed in ways, and tracking how that actually happens at the state and community level? So I think for the next five years, how the spending in the US pans out, whether it drives what people expected it to, or what hurdles come up for companies that would want to use this capital or see some sort of tailwind from it, that’s going to be a big story for a long time, and I’m curious what comes next on that front.
So that’s one thing that I’m thinking of, kind of in the big aperture of things that are happening in climate. Within carbon removal, as an example of a specific industry, I think there’s some really healthy tension between all of the demand-side tailwinds that we’ve seen this year, with a lot of people coming out raising money for venture firms to invest in carbon removal startups, coalitions of companies banded together to make Advanced Market Commitments to buy carbon removal credits, but at the same time having a lot of really difficult hardware engineering challenges being taken on by these companies to scale supply, which is still really small, relatively speaking. Or companies like Nori engaging with all the other questions that go along with increasing supply, like methodologies, verifying, reporting on carbon removal, engaging with stakeholders to scale nature-based solutions.
So tracking how that evolves over the next years, and understanding whether investors feel like, ten years from now, this was a good use of their capital, that’s a huge question for me. Because if not, you run into problems of folks saying, let’s not do that again with whatever technology is in its infancy in 10 years, versus a scenario where it all works out really well and carbon removal scales to the point where it needs to.
Ross Kenyon: That’s pretty much what happened with the clean tech bubble, right?
Nick Van Osdol: Right. So yeah, I wouldn’t say there’s shades of that developing here, because we don’t know how it’s going to pan out. We’re optimistic about how it’s going to pan out. But trying to make sure that the way that folks report on this stuff is not overlooking the fact that companies are still producing tens of thousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands of credits, not millions or tens of millions.
Ross Kenyon: I’m curious what will happen with the funding. I hope it obviously all works out great and helps scale an industry that would otherwise scale much more slowly. I do wonder how much potential there is for something like Solyndra to replay, but in carbon removal. Which, I mean, just assume for a second that everything there was all aboveboard and was all fine, I don’t remember all the details of it, but it became such a political flashpoint that I wonder if anything similar. Do any carbon removal companies that we know now over-promise and under-deliver and end up facing a Republican-led campaign against them? Is that the future that we’re looking at for carbon removal? Solyndra.
Nick Van Osdol: Yeah, no, it’s an interesting question, because it does remind me at least that if you’re thinking about your impact as a business, how much CO2 you’re removing out of the atmosphere is obviously one important quantification of that, but what you’re contributing to the health of the industry, in a sometimes less quantifiable way, is also equally important.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Advanced Market Commitments are going to be an interesting one to track too. I’m very curious how that’s going to play out, wondering what it looks like when so many assets are bought so far ahead of time, and what even that looks like and how that affects the shape of the market going forward.
Nick Van Osdol: Yeah. And I think there is one benefit, which is folks also try to kind of mete out the way that the commitments work over time, where it’s not just like an offtake agreement that, you know, we’re buying all these credits in 2022 and paying you for it now. Because if you schedule it over the course of, let’s say, eight years out to 2030, that helps companies that are providing the credits. That’s easier for someone to come in and underwrite it from like a debt financing perspective, to say, oh, there is consistent revenue here, they’re being paid for these credits in 2022 and 2023, 2024 and 2025. So that’s one other mechanism where it can be helpful. But I do hear what you’re saying about, from a supply perspective, there’s already very little supply of high-quality, quote-unquote, carbon removal credits in the market, and a lot of the supply that’s going to be created from now till 2030 is already accounted for from folks that are banded together to make these Advanced Market Commitments. So it could be supply-constrained for a very long time as a result.
Ross Kenyon: Man, in some ways it feels discouraging to me to even look at these numbers, though. They’re like, a billion dollars buys you a rounding error, five minutes of global warming or something like that.
Nick Van Osdol: Yeah, I haven’t done the math, but yeah, 50 gigatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions annually globally versus perhaps a few hundred thousand removal credits, or maybe a million.
Ross Kenyon: I mean, I’m certainly on team order of magnitude per annum. Per annum, let’s just keep going, keep going. But watching this happen, I feel like I can feel it. Not to contribute to the doom-scrolling moments, but that’s the thing that most discourages me within carbon removal, which is weird, because most people I think are most excited about seeing the money flowing in. But whenever I see those numbers in front of me I go, oh, good grief, this is such a, I have to edit this out. Is this going to bum everyone out? Also, this is nothing bad being said about Frontier or anyone a part of something. Nothing, I’m nothing but respect for all of them. But ouch, man. Are we going to be able to do that? Do you think so?
Nick Van Osdol: It’s a great question. Solar is an example. I think the photovoltaic cells and solar panels have, and I don’t even know exactly how folks measure their efficiency, but those have been improving at 34% compounding rates for 20 years now. And so something comparable is needed in carbon removal to get to some of the scales that a body like the IPCC talks about, and wanting to see the world remove 10 gigatonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere annually by 2050. So it’s possible, and I think this year has been a big step in the right direction, and you need some of those demand signals to encourage people to work on this problem. But at the end of the day, it’s not like building a software business where you can grow your revenue at crazy rates every year. You have to do real hardware to remove CO2 out of the atmosphere and sequester it in the ground, or deal with very complex natural systems to do so.
Ross Kenyon: Or both.
Nick Van Osdol: Or both.
Ross Kenyon: I do think that the software, and I’m combining software and financial infrastructure in one here, but I feel like some of those supportive technologies are actually going to be really key.
Nick Van Osdol: Also super important, for sure.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, yeah. Not to have a chip on my shoulder, on my shoulder, too much on my shoulder, but I do feel like finding ways to trade between these assets in ways where we’re really trying, and we’re going to do an episode on this, I’m sure, but trying to get the tonne-year accounting right and using the right methodologies to make sure that you can compare tonne-years against tonne-years in a relatively credible, ethical way, so that you could have a marketplace that goes beyond a couple dozen brand-name providers of carbon removal.
Now, what happens in the near-term, medium-term future where you do have companies that maybe you don’t know their names but are bringing industrial-scale carbon removal to bear, and they need to move units rather than need to be the critical darling? And how do you support that? That technology is really challenging. But sometimes I feel like, and this is the chip on the shoulder just a tiny bit, some of that technology feels a little bit undervalued relative to, well, we’re building the actual hardware that’s removing the carbon.
Nick Van Osdol: Yeah, that’s a good push.
Ross Kenyon: Am I entitled? Is it a little bit of that, or no?
Nick Van Osdol: You are. Because, I mean, you brought up the whole of aligning incentives and aligning on the methodologies and the standards, all of that. I mean, look at how messed up voluntary carbon markets have been historically. It’s certainly no easy problem to solve either.
Ross Kenyon: So yeah, when I was talking about software companies, I was thinking about, like, your traditional SaaS public equity that performs really well in your retirement portfolio where, I don’t know, they make sales software. I’m not discrediting the hard work the climate software companies do. I mean, I sometimes catch myself with that too, though. We’re so focused on supply being the bottleneck and supply being the problem, and we’ll see companies start up within carbon removal and it seems like the thesis is that the problem is that the buying side of carbon removal is too difficult. I do not think that is the case at all.
One question I have within software, and climate tech too, is like, how many climate SaaS platforms am I expected to know about? I feel like I can’t keep track of them. Do you know anything about that space, who’s competing with, with who and who’s going to win? Is there going to be dozens of these things, or are a couple of them going to win out? What do you think?
Nick Van Osdol: Yeah, I mean, this betrays that I’ve spent more time thinking about companies tackling hardware solutions, so perhaps I should be more mindful about that. But there’s a whole bunch of challenges that software can be applicable to in climate, right? I mean, accounting for emissions is the first that comes to mind, and there’s some players that I think already have a lot of brand recognition in that space and do good work, like Watershed is the one that I have this, the first email you get when you sign up for my Keep Cool email says, hi, thanks for joining, tell me about one company in the space that you’re excited about, or if you don’t know about one then you’ll learn about one soon. I think Watershed is the most common answer that I’ve gotten. So clearly they’re doing something right.
But certainly not the only space where software is relevant to the climate. Of course, there’s a lot being done with kind of like the internet of things and improving data sensing across all kinds of different things. And this is relevant to Nori when it comes to technologies that take up data from farms and soil. And I think that’s the space that I do not know as much about. And then there’s a lot of companies that are trying to tackle logistics problems, whether it’s in something like shipping, where even just improving the efficiency of these giant freighter ships that cross the world with all the stuff we order on Amazon, just increasing their route efficiency could reduce emissions significantly. So people are thinking about all kinds of issues like that, where it’s all interconnected and it all ties back to energy, and that ties to emissions. So sometimes I feel like my aperture is too wide of, like, is this climate, or are they really just trying to save transportation companies money? Which, you know, could be both.
Ross Kenyon: I saw a tweet recently that was arguing that there is an over-representation of software people in climate and that that is a bad thing. My take on it was basically that you have wealthy people with in-demand skills, they want to do something that they believe matters, they moved over, this is the way that they do that, and that we actually don’t need the umpteenth platform. By the way, all these criticisms can be levied at Nori too, I’m not trying to pick on anyone here in particular. Is it like a case of, when all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, for software refugees? Or what is it?
Nick Van Osdol: I mean, the talent side of things is definitely more constrained when it’s companies looking for chemical engineers or mechanical engineers. But that said, almost all the companies that I talk to and get to know a little bit more deeply also frequently have open roles for software engineers. So I think it’s good that those folks want to work in climate.
Ross Kenyon: I think it’s probably, if you do have an engineering or hard sciences background, I certainly think you can probably in some cases write your own ticket. I’m just speculating, but surely you are in demand. There’s really not that many people who can do what you can do, right?
Nick Van Osdol: Totally, yeah. Huge plug for anyone, you might be listening and working in oil and gas right now, and in a weird twist of fate your skills are super in demand for a lot of these companies.
Ross Kenyon: And coincidentally you have a job board, which is not where I was leading to, but serendipitously, go right ahead.
Nick Van Osdol: We have, and what I would also plug is other folks like the team at Climatebase that has a great website and marketplace for jobs. And frankly, those are the best places to start. My job board is curated by me because it’s teams that I like, that I know kind of well, and where I have a good relationship and I want to try and help find people for them because I think the work they’re doing is great. But if you want a really wide aperture and really want to be able to search and dig into a marketplace, then there’s great places like Climatebase to do that.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I had Evan Hynes on a number of times. It has been a minute. So yeah, Climatebase is great. Hi Evan, if you’re listening, hope you’re doing well. If not, someone send this to Evan and tell him you said hello and talked about him.
Nick Van Osdol: Yeah, you’re welcome for the free plug.
Ross Kenyon: Instead of Nick promoting his own stuff, he downplayed his stuff and talked about yours. Be nice to Nick, okay? He’s a pal.
Nick Van Osdol: Yeah, come to Keep Cool for, you know, your entry point to learning about all kinds of different solutions, whether in written form or podcast form. And then we also, when we think there are really compelling roles out there, we do privilege those at times as well.
Ross Kenyon: You had mentioned earlier you do want to talk something about pragmatism and idealism within the climate space. I think you had some thoughts there. Why don’t we dig into that thorny little thicket?
Nick Van Osdol: Yeah, I mean, that is one of the more interesting kind of dividing lines that I feel like I find. There’s intelligent folks on both sides of the fault. And it’s really just a question of like, how quickly is it possible to actually decarbonize the world? Primary energy generation globally is still above 80 percent reliant on fossil fuels. So what would it take to get that 20 percent? And that informs a lot of the types of discussions that folks have, and if you are really thinking about things in terms of like a highest ROI on your dollar, like what types of solutions to invest in. And I think there’s certain folks that don’t want to see a single new natural-gas-fired peaker plant open anywhere in the world. But then there’s other folks, if I talk to grid operators, their perspective on something like that is that that’s not exactly the most realistic thing in the world. So I think digging into that dichotomy is a very fruitful exercise, can be, when I go out to talk to other folks, because it just sparks a lot of interesting conversation.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve been working on a project, I don’t want to reveal too much about it, but I think it’s going to be a fun one when it gets released, and we were talking about some of the durability and permanence debates within carbon removal. And I feel like there’s a lot of this going on in there, where there’s a lot of, for lack of a better term, like a purist tendency towards wanting, I associate this with maybe the carbon takeback obligation, if you mobilize a tonne of fossil carbon you should return it to the same type of sink from which it arrived. So if it comes out of the ground, comes out of a subterranean reservoir, it should go back in there. So you should be capturing a tonne and returning it to the lithosphere, which would make gas a pretty expensive proposition, right?
I’m pretty favorable towards being a little bit more pragmatic. I think that’s nice, and there’s an equation in there that it feels just right. There’s like an equality between the actions, so I get that and I respect it. I can also see the case, and I lean more this way myself, that over the next century our technology should and must develop at intense speeds to catch up. So merely storing carbon dioxide somewhere out of the atmosphere or ocean for decades or a century is very valuable, because during that period we need to figure out scalable and cheap permanent carbon removal. And so that hundred-year or several-decade time horizon is much more important to me than being able to go for hundreds or thousands of years. I don’t really care that much about that right now, that’s a nice to have. But I feel like my framing of this is favorable towards my own position, I guess, but I’m being pragmatic. There’s also lots of potential for people to use the same line of argument for nefarious purposes that are much more greenwashing and are going to say, oh well, this also applies to avoided emissions in this way.
Nick Van Osdol: Yeah, if you take either side to its logical extreme, you run into some problems. But I do very much align myself with this idea that if there’s a lot of companies trying to make incremental improvements, the amount of learning that comes out of that is one of the more valuable things. So whatever motivation results in people trying a lot of things, within reason, and then making improvements on it and testing and iterating, that’s kind of where I’m putting my chips.
Ross Kenyon: The cumulative effects of many smaller dispersed changes, that’s what you think’s going to get us there?
Nick Van Osdol: Yeah, it’s part of, part of what, and some of these swings have to be big swings. There do have to be companies that are trying to figure out taking it to scale. But for example, if you’re waiting to have 100% scientific certainty about how something is going to play out in a natural ecosystem, that is going to take a long time versus maybe doing small tests. Like, the stuff that you’ll learn from doing it in the field versus hypothesizing about it on paper and in the lab, that’s a very different experience.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I feel this way being very concerned with the forever chemicals, as they’re sometimes called, or these do-not-exist-in-nature chemicals that get released. Pretty spooky. But also I find people often use the precautionary principle to argue against them, and I find that principle to be so favorable to inaction as to make many of the changes necessary impossible, right? Basically no one likes me, essentially.
Nick Van Osdol: Yeah, we’re probably not making, certainly not making everyone our friend by discussing some of this stuff, but that’s okay too.
Ross Kenyon: Speaking of, I saw you cover nuclear energy recently. What’s been going on there? I saw there’s an interesting thing about fusion that just happened. I haven’t been tracking nuclear much.
Nick Van Osdol: Yeah, I keep my eye on that for sure. That’s another big fault line in climate. There’s some people that are so dogmatic about nuclear that they’re like, we don’t need to develop wind and solar technologies at all, this could just be a hundred percent of the electricity that we need.
Ross Kenyon: Where do you see that? I don’t think I’ve ever seen that.
Nick Van Osdol: There’s some folks I see on Twitter that, it’s hard, I think they mostly take it because they like to hate on renewables. Who’s paying their checks? I’m not sure. But yeah, I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff happening geopolitically around the world where, everything that’s happened in Europe this year with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, that’s obviously put a lot of strain on European grids, and not just European grids, but it has caused countries like Germany and Japan, where there’s traditionally been a lot of hesitation and fear of nuclear energy, to at least keep some of their existing reactors open longer. So that’s an interesting development. My mom’s from Germany and says that this was the first year on social media where she actually saw, it used to all just be kind of more 1970s environmentalist-style folks focusing like, we can’t have nuclear energy in our country, but now she’s like, the sentiment out there has definitely shifted, from her vantage point.
And then on the tech side, a lot of companies getting a lot of funding to try and build smaller reactors that are easier to build and easier to deploy. Yeah, I think my holistic perspective on it is that this plays a role in a diversified mix of energy sources, and it has since 1950, but we probably shouldn’t have taken our foot off the gas as a collective world sometime around the ’90s and 2000s, because the number of operational reactors flatlined around then. But nuclear energy has already displaced a lot of fossil fuel use over the course of the last 70 years and could continue to do so for the next 70.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t think I’ve ever said this on the podcast before, but I said it privately to a friend of mine recently and there was like gasps of, how could you? I drove to Eastern Washington a few months ago. There’s lots of wind out there. It’s so ugly. I find it to be repulsive. And if I think that, and I think it’s important, I can’t imagine what the average person thinks.
So I think a lot of these fights over renewables, there are some places where seemingly it’s politically popular despite being in a conservative area, like I’ve seen solar in Texas is often surprisingly popular. I would like a smaller footprint of a nuclear facility, I think, too, if you look at all the land that would be required and the oceanfront property that would be required to do a lot of the classical renewables. These fights are going to be ugly. So I think in some ways nuclear might end up being the less ugly option, once people see how much of a footprint renewables might actually take. Just a crazy sentence to say. And also, I’m speculating wildly, I have no idea if that’s actually true or not, that’s just me spitballin’. Do you have anything to add to that?
Nick Van Osdol: Well yeah, I mean, this year we’ve seen the shift start, perhaps, and if there’s momentum to it maybe it will get to a point where, I think for the last 10 years nuclear has been on the back foot significantly, public sentiment since Fukushima, and maybe the next 10 years will look different. And then fusion is the wild card, where it’s like, this isn’t going to be producing electricity at scale for 10 or 20 years.
Ross Kenyon: It’s the joke about nuclear fusion that my dad told me about, so it’s definitely been around for a while, which is that nuclear fusion is always 20 years away. It doesn’t matter when you, when you say the joke.
Nick Van Osdol: But there have been some breakthroughs in kind of self-sustaining reactions of late in a lab setting, which is encouraging. But that one’s one that I kind of watch with, with interest as opposed to concrete optimism for now.
Ross Kenyon: You’ve been hurt too many times. Other people have. I’m fresh enough to still have belief. But yeah, people have been talking about that since God knows when. So it’d be cool if it does [unclear].
Nick Van Osdol: Yeah, it certainly would be.
Ross Kenyon: I have a lot of hope for that too. I don’t even know how we are supposed to make the transition without it. Really, people have run the numbers on this. But does it make sense without nuclear?
Nick Van Osdol: Even, you need some type of firm power source, whether that’s nuclear fission, or for a long time it will probably still be a lot of natural gas, which is not as emissions-intensive as coal but certainly still produces carbon emissions, and there’s problems with methane leaks along the whole supply chain. But yeah, it could be a mix of fission and fusion, it could be someone really cracks deep geothermal, that’s one possibility. It’ll all be a mix of a lot of these things. But yeah, there’s in my opinion some people that conversely argue that you can do 100% renewables, and there’s new studies on that out of Stanford recently that I haven’t read yet but intend to. But I, again more pragmatically, definitely think you’ll need a non-renewable, quote-unquote, firm power source in their vision. It’s like, not technically renewable, because there is a finite amount of uranium and plutonium and all that in the world.
Ross Kenyon: I read a book recently, it might interest you. The title is so clickbaity, but it’s a pretty good book. The End of the World Is Just the Beginning is the name of it, Peter Zeihan. Do you know him? Have you come across that geopolitical consultant? He’s pretty skeptical of renewables for a number of reasons, but one of which is this claim recently, especially with Russia and Germany, that renewables would have avoided this problem. But renewables really make us extremely reliant on places like central Africa and getting rare earths from there. And also China is where many rare earth minerals come from, and almost all of the aluminum that we need comes from China as well. So you can already see movement about Taiwan and semiconductors and the CHIPS Act, worried about losing access to that. Can you imagine being entirely dependent upon renewables from China? That would not be any better than being dependent upon Russia for natural gas.
Nick Van Osdol: Yeah. The onshoring of a lot of these supply chains, at least to an extent, whether it’s solar panels or, you’re right, kind of production of batteries, that’s definitely going to be an interesting open question in years to come. I don’t fancy myself as the world’s greatest geopolitical analyst, but I find those things interesting, for sure.
I think the metals required for batteries and a lot of these technologies is an interesting question, because you do also get that refrain from folks that kind of like, naysayers of renewable energy a lot. That’s a pretty common refrain, sure. I think there’s good examples of being able to engineer your way out of constraints. Like, cobalt is a common example of something that folks focus on. It’s mined, you know, 70% or something like that comes from the Congo, and there’s often a lot of horrific human rights abuses at some of these mines. So there’s a lot of justification behind concerns about, like, do EVs need a lot of cobalt? But I think this year, vehicle manufacturers aren’t stupid, they recognized this stuff, and I think half of Tesla’s cars that they’ve sold this year are produced with batteries that no longer require cobalt. So folks find solutions to these things, if not right away. And I’m thinking about Germany’s natural gas problem at present, but I think in some ways it can be a good catalyst for innovation.
Ross Kenyon: I think you’re right. I hope you’re right too. I think people maybe oversold that story of renewables having gotten us into this problem, and it’s, we got into this particular problem. But it introduces, although, this having dependencies upon other countries, like the fact that we bought Russian oil and gas, the West bought, wasn’t that the right way to say it? They probably wouldn’t like that. Is the fact that Europe, they probably don’t like that either, they consider themselves part of Europe, is the fact that the EU bought oil and gas, did that prevent war from happening sooner? Potentially, like the fact that our economies were intertwined and it caused such hardship for them. I think they rebounded in some sense. But do you think the fact that we were such serious trading partners prevented more overt types of conflict? Like, if we were less reliant upon Chinese exports now, for the United States, would conflict be [unclear] greater?
Nick Van Osdol: Yeah, it’s a really interesting question, the Russian gas one in particular. Like, I can see your perspective, but I also feel like the decision to invade Ukraine at a time when natural gas prices were already very high, and Europe’s dependency, or the cost of action against Russia, inflicting, perhaps in Putin’s calculation he was like, these folks don’t have another option right now. There’s already energy shortages and we just went through a winter where electricity got really expensive. That might have also been part of the calculus, like, this is the moment to pursue some action, because we’ve just had a display of what happens if you try and go without available gas. I don’t know.
Ross Kenyon: Interesting. Yeah, that’s a good kind of dependency. You know, if these economies were more independent from an energy production perspective, maybe Russia would be like, all right, we got nothing to lose, and that’s one option. Or they would feel like they don’t have as much leverage, or they just don’t care, because the thing that they want is so valuable that they will trade basically anything for it.
So I’m going to have you come back on this podcast, because we get to talk about all kinds of fun stuff. Yeah, I have to sign off here. Hey, normally we end it one question after I ask the worst question of the show, and then you know for certain it’s time to go, and today we can put a pin in it ahead of that moment. So how about that, Nick?
Nick Van Osdol: Sure, sounds good.
Ross Kenyon: Anything you want to plug? You have your Twitter, Keep Cool the newsletter, the podcast. Why don’t you tell people where to find you?
Nick Van Osdol: Yeah, the best place to find the Keep Cool letter is on workweek.com. That is my parent company that I work for, and you’ll find the climate tech vertical on their website. Or you can just Google Keep Cool and Workweek in the same search and you’ll find it, and Workweek is one word. And then, yeah, find me on Twitter, Nick Van Osdol, no spaces obviously in my handle, and I like to tweet memes but also serious takes about climate tech on there. And yeah, I look forward to connecting with folks.
Ross Kenyon: Great, links to all those things are in the show notes. Thanks for being here, Nick.
Nick Van Osdol: Thank you. It’s been fun.
Ross Kenyon: Hey, thanks so much for listening. Send this to a friend. Go subscribe to Nick’s newsletter, Keep Cool. Thanks for being a fan of the show. Give us a great rating and review, as you probably already know to do if you’ve heard the sign-off more than once, which surely you’ll have unless you’ve fallen asleep. At this point it’s pretty late in the show to be telling people what to do, but that’s how calls to action work. Anyways, thanks for listening. Have a lovely day, and goodbye for now.
Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts, or a rating on Spotify, that’d be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people. You can sign up for our newsletter at nori.com. Follow us on social media. We will catch you next time.
