When Bad Companies Buy Good Carbon Removal
Carbon markets, moral compromise, bourgeois virtue, and the uneasy line between mercy and self-deception.
This is an episode summary of episode #378 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you enjoy podcasts.
🔹 Quick Takeaways
Carbon markets force moral proximity. They bring climate actors into business relationships with companies they may privately find distasteful or harmful.
“A hospital for sinners, not a club for saints” is a powerful lens for understanding voluntary carbon markets, but not a complete one.
Commerce rewards cooperation, not virtue: bourgeois values enable collaboration across moral disagreement, sometimes at the cost of aristocratic honor.
Public praise can become moral laundering, elevating weak climate action by powerful actors may reduce pressure for deeper change.
Vaclav Havel’s “living within the lie” applies uncomfortably well to climate signaling and performative corporate virtue.
Truth-telling has a cost: speaking honestly about bad actors can damage careers, relationships, and commercial prospects.
Most people operate under constraint, not malice, systems shape behavior more than character alone.
Mercy should be the default, but complicates accountability: the greatest minds, even Vasily Grossman, haven’t fully cracked this one.
The episode refuses easy answers — insisting instead on seriousness, humility, and moral responsibility.
📝 The Uneasy Work of Climate Compromise
Carbon markets were never meant to be comfortable. They exist precisely because the companies that most need to decarbonize are often the ones least inclined to do so voluntarily. The goal isn’t to gather the already virtuous and congratulate ourselves — it’s to engage the reluctant, the compromised, the slow-moving, and the outright harmful. In that sense, carbon markets really are a hospital for sinners.
And yet, something feels off when bad companies are publicly praised for small, inadequate climate actions. When press releases celebrate “leadership” that barely scratches the surface of responsibility. When moral language is used to smooth over deeper harm. Ross names the feeling plainly: humiliation by proxy. A sense that, in trying to make progress, we may be lying to ourselves — and worse, helping others lie more comfortably.
To make sense of this tension, Ross turns to Vaclav Havel’s “The Power of the Powerless”. Havel’s green grocer hangs a slogan in his window not because he believes it, but because it makes life easier. The slogan signals obedience, not conviction. And in that metaphor, Ross sees an unsettling parallel: climate praise as ideology, corporate participation as ritual, truth quietly sacrificed for tranquility.
⚖️ Living Within the Lie—or the Truth
The hardest part isn’t identifying hypocrisy. It’s recognizing how easily we participate in it ourselves. Commerce nudges us toward silence. Careers reward agreeableness. The voluntary carbon market, in particular, requires “making nice”: praising customers, avoiding confrontation, keeping deals alive. And the cost of refusing this ritual can be real: lost opportunities, strained relationships, reputational risk.
Ross doesn’t exempt himself. He admits the fear. The hesitation. The quiet calculation of what honesty might cost. And in doing so, he widens the moral frame. Drawing on Vasily Grossman and Bicycle Thieves, he argues that circumstance matters. That systems shape behavior. That most people, placed under pressure, will choose survival, stability, and belonging over purity.
This doesn’t absolve anyone, but it complicates judgment. It suggests that climate action must be grounded not only in accountability, but in mercy. Not because everyone deserves praise, but because without mercy we become self-righteous, brittle, and blind to our own compromises.
🕯️ No Easy Answers, Only Responsibility
So is the voluntary carbon market a club for saints or a hospital for sinners? Ross refuses to answer cleanly, because clean answers are often a luxury of distance. What he asks instead is harder: Are we telling the truth? Are we confusing marginal progress with moral redemption? Are we serious about climate change, or merely fluent in its symbolism?
The episode ends without resolution, but not without conviction. Truth matters. Integrity matters. And even when mercy is necessary, so is honesty. You can forgive without flattering. You can engage without lying. You can work within flawed systems without fully surrendering to them.
There may be no way to keep your hands clean. But there is still a difference between living within the lie—and choosing, even at cost, to live within the truth.
