The assignment of moral blame usually stops close to the source since true attribution is hard, e.g. how much responsibility does Friedrich Nietzsche have for the Nazis? Open question, though it doesn’t strike most of us as fair that we have to game out who our ideas might influence and how decades or centuries ahead of time.1

Praise for good influence is easier. Attribution is likely just as challenging, but the stakes are lower. Reminds me of this old chestnut:

When ideas actually have consequences

I remember being a young adult libertarian. I really felt like I was on to something. I was fascinated by using deductive logic to figure out the foundational ethic of humanity, something like:

1. each person owns their own body

2. they own what they use their body to create

3. therefore, they create a natural property right in that which they transform

It was actually surprisingly difficult to write that. I didn’t write it as carefully as I once might have, primarily because I don’t think it’s the correct starting point for a political ontology and ethic.2

Once you start from this spot within the deontological and natural rights orientation, much of human society as currently organized becomes impossible. It leads one to taking the idea of consent seriously with regard to government. The consent of the governed is a beautiful idea, especially when contrasted with rival principles like “might makes right” or “the divine right of kings” (though perhaps I repeat myself), but as David Hume argued very convincingly—explicit consent of everyone under a government is impossible, and implicit consent is equally absurd…

Hume’s argument is that Enlightenment attempts to find a rational order based upon consent were practically impossible, but there still may be good reasons to trust established order and tradition. As far as I understand the conservative tradition, this is one of their best arguments, even if I have some Rousseau and Paine jeering at this idea from the sidelines. We know the world to be socially constructed, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that everything socially constructed is inherently bad or should be immediately jettisoned to what we can design from first principles. In fact, many attempts to design from first principles that have a tendency to land humanity in the killing fields. Remaking the world is dangerous, and support for a liberal order which has orderly changes of government and a constitution and norms of fair play is attractive because the alternative is worse, but not can be perfectly derived from first principles like consent. That type of contractarian thinking might just be impossible.3

The original deductive approach became less attractive to me while I was doing a year of PhD coursework in political philosophy. I’ve become simpler over time. I overcomplicated things back then even in my desire to get down to what I thought was the simple aprioristic root of it all. My politics now point to The Sermon on the Mount, in ways both halting and ecstatic. But I know that if I get too far away from the actual literal suffering of real humans in front of me, the cerebral part of me can grab the steering wheel and start thinking those abstract thoughts that Wendell Berry and Hannah Arendt each eye with arsonous intent from beyond the veil. If you primarily think in terms of an ‘ism’ you are at risk of enchantment. I might be naive at this point, but it’s the Beatitudes or bust for me.

But okay, now back to those big ideas…

That three part syllogism is part of what leads people to the idea of competition for governance services and anarcho-capitalism. It disturbs me that the people who are attracted to this idea seem more attracted to their own power to the point of oligarchy and techno-feudalism, rather than giving poor people a chance at better institutions. As the world becomes more authoritarian, we see less of it cloaked in the latter and more comfort with overt displays of mastery. It may have just been there the entire time and I was a useful idiot for what the unfolding political economy would soon enable the wealthiest to pursue.

Many of my former peers from that libertarian time carry on their work. A good deal of them are still people I love and respect as smart perpendicular thinkers of high integrity. Others I hold in very low esteem. I have to ask: did I potentially influence or at the very least lend the use of libertarian ideas any moral cover to the reactionary world that was in utero? What am I to make of those who ascended in power with the cover of libertarian ideas, but ended up being a little too interested in Rhodesia, to put it euphemistically?

This section is grandiose. I was not this influential. Insofar as I was influential, I probably pushed some of the discourse towards left-libertarian ideas that I find much more humane. What if I had been more successful and made a difference though? What if being critical of centralized power gave cover to those who favor decentralism for bad ends? What responsibility would I have had for pushing out ideas that would or even just could give more leniency to monstrosity, even if my application was (I hope) sufficiently humane to be deserving of mercy?

Shifting the Overton Window: Stratospheric Aerosol Injection and Carbon Dioxide Removal

I feel this same concern for various types of Climate Intervention, Stabilization, or whatever word we choose to replace “geoengineering”. I find these naming projects to mostly be wheel spinning. Go focus test terms with normies if you are ultimately trying to convince them. Arguing inside baseball with climate nerds spills ink but is unlikely to change how we feel about what is being described. I hold neutral feelings towards basically all of these terms. If you called “Schmolar Radioactivity Managerialness”, I’d feel exactly the same as I do now.

Enough word games.

One reason why I really dislike the argument that climate interventions are going to buy us additional time for decarbonization and CDR is that our arguments will leave our mouths and laptops and if successful, ultimately find their way to the companies that need to stop producing emissions of various kinds. They will thank these climate pioneers for their bold vision of the future and likely commit to supporting climate stabilization or whatever we are calling it in three years and then do it in a way which serves their interests but not much else. It will likely be used to prolong fossil fuel infrastructure’s lifespan, slow phaseout, and delay the political coalition that needs to come together for meaningful climate policy in the US, in other countries, and as the entire world.

It isn’t moral hazard when those working seriously and in good faith on this topic suggest it, but it becomes moral hazard when those without good faith will run with the rhetoric and make some strategic investments yada yada without actually doing the hard thing. They might procrastinate further if this delays the aforementioned political coalition to reverse climate change.

Maybe it is worth doing even if climate intervention deployment slows the formation of the political coalition we need. Would I be willing to tolerate the collapse of an ice sheet over this? Those are bullet-biting decisions. I suspect the correct move would be to prevent immediate death and hardship even at great cost. Sacrificing present people against a future benefit or harm is something that should make anyone who has calculated net present value scream in despair.

Are we going to tie a binding agreement to decarbonize to climate interventions? My guess is we probably will not have the—again—durable political coalition to do this without some sort of crisis. My guess is that well-meaning people expand the Overton Window in ways that work if everyone plays by the rules and in good faith and uses the time to decarbonize. But we don’t have good evidence that it will happen in that way. So then… what are we to make of this advocacy?

And what do we make of this same dynamic at play for carbon dioxide removal? Did CDR advocacy delay climate action in any way? Would all climate activism being focused on decarbonization have been a better way to spend the last decade? It is very possible the answer is yes. If you need me, you can find me in the Slough of Despond.

The Monkey Paw

I just watched Obsession, and there is online (of course) debate about whether the film’s mechanic constitutes a true monkey paw, but good enough. The simple point of it is “be careful what you wish for.” You just might get it in a way that honors the letter of your request, but not its spirit. The ironic twist will send you away howling. Do not wish upon a monkey paw, you damned fool.

I don’t think you can say that if your ideas are pure you only have fault for your own actions. Maybe that should be the case legally (as in, could one bring a tortious claim for this), but ethically, I bet we can think up some examples where if we consider the moral content of your actions to stop at you, it will strike your moral intuition as incorrect.

Toward a McLuhanian Ethics?

Sometimes people make this case with types of money. They will say that crypto is used for bad purposes sometimes, sure, but so is cash. Should we get rid of cash? If you answer no, then you might also be pushed to answer no for crypto.

Guns don’t kill people; people kill people. It’s not an unfair thing to note that tools can serve different ends and we don’t always seek to ban tools. But we likely all have a threshold where we think the risk is too great and the reward too small to permit unlimited tool use.

One way to break this classic debate between toolwielder and tool is to pair it with Marshall McLuhan’s immortal thoughts about how “the medium is the message.” The internet doesn’t just help us communicate, it changes how we understand communication, our relationship to ourselves and others, in such grand ways that we can speak productively of a pre- and post-AOL world. If we consider tools to have some moral valence attached to them at least for the important ones (though small tools have their own ideologies embedded in them as well), and ideas are tools for ordering and making sense of an uncategorized reality, then there likely is some amount of responsibility here for promulgating ideas, shifting the Overton Window, etc. And I believe that is likely true even if one has sincerely pure intent.

The goal is to limit the eye stabbing

In this podcast episode, I discuss the Oedipus cycle. He was told he would kill his father and marry his mother. He didn’t believe it, but he did it. When he realizes it, he gauges out his own eyes in horror.

The time to game out how your ideas will affect reality is now. You don’t want to be standing beneath The Bridge on the River Kwai wondering “what have I done?!” The job is to assess this now. And to make plans as though your political rivals, maybe even your enemies, will be in charge of enacting them. If your political ideas require the very wise to enact them successfully, then you are actually not working in politics, but in spiritual renewal. You are a cleric but haven’t realized it, and the job is bigger than tech and politics, but the soul and why we can’t stand to be here in a kind and gentle way.

Too many ideas for just one post. More to come in the future…

Here’s this edition’s one and only anonymous and unverified submission that was sent in for me to read and publish:

Submission(s):

1. Having seen the state of CDR and CCS development so far, I don’t really believe these efforts are going to play a significant part in helping us avert the climate problem. Especially when we consider the geopolitical competition/isolation, the re-prioritization of energy security (and Europe is broke), the rise of energy-intensive AI. If we collectively couldn’t even get in the same page when times were good, I really don’t see how the next decade will be any better. However, one must do what one is here to do, regardless of the fruit of the labor. So my attitude can be described as stoically pessimistic. Neither fatalistic nor nihilistic; engaged but unsentimental. Cheers

Thanks so much for being a part of this collective art project and sharing your take on working in climate.

Sincerely,

Ross Kenyon

If one person thinks something, ten or a hundred have had the same thought and said nothing. Go first.

Send me your confession

Anonymous by design. No email field, no sign-in, and I read every submission aloud myself so nobody ever hears your voice.

Episode art: British Library, Harley MS 1766, f. 48r. Public domain.

Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Hello. Thanks for listening to Climate Workers Anonymous. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m the curator of Climate Workers Anonymous. This is a podcast and written publication where people submit their unverified and anonymous takes on working in climate.

If you’ve got something to share, something you’ve observed, something you’ve felt, follow the links in the show notes or on the Substack publication of this episode, and you can send in something that you’d like to share but also not have attached to your own name.

Telling the truth is such a simple thing to do, but simple does not mean easy.

There’s a film that I really like called Dead Man Walking. It’s from 1995. It’s about a nun who befriends someone on death row who’s been convicted of killing someone. And the film sort of sets this up that what’s gonna happen here is that she’s going to get to know the killer, take his side, understand that it’s all been a big misunderstanding, that he’s actually a good person, that this never happened, that there’s some miscarriage of justice here that a compassionate person of faith can uncover and make right.

She opposes the death penalty, as I think Christians must. And once those attempts fail, her work is about caring for this person’s soul, and noting that in order to receive forgiveness and have this be a spiritually transformative experience, it requires telling the truth about what happened and taking responsibility and owning it.

You know, if you watch movies at all, you are very well-trained to expect a deus ex machina. You expect that at the 11:59 moment, someone runs in with a telegram from the governor, staying the execution and pardoning the condemned. And that is not what happens. It’s actually a story about the spirit’s quest for redemption in the face of mortal death.

And I think for that reason it’s one of the best movies about telling the truth and its repercussions. You can contrast it with something like, uh, like Liar Liar, the other famous movie about telling the truth.

No, but I know it’s not always easy to tell the truth about our work in climate. Anything that touches your career, there’s so much stage management of what you say, how you present. Are you like a serious business person who’s gonna get some stuff done? Or are you sort of a woo-woo, touchy-feely kind of like biophilic, we’re all connected kind of person who’s not serious about business? Are you willing to cozy up to the people who write the big checks? Are you not?

How much of a respectability politics takes place inside of what is a field that I think wears its convictions pretty firmly on its sleeve? That’s what we’re here for.

I’m trying to make a space where if you’ve got something that you wanna say, you don’t yet feel comfortable saying it with your own voice, okay, submit it. We can still talk about it. We still need to talk about it. And I’m so happy that I get to support you in doing this. I think we need something like that.

I’m going to read today’s submission. And as I said, I don’t know who sent this. I am assuming good faith. But I will read today’s one and only submission, and then I have some thoughts on it that I’d like to share, and then send you on your way.

So here it is, submission number one, the only one today.

Having seen the state of carbon dioxide removal and carbon capture and storage development so far, I don’t really believe these efforts are going to play a significant part in helping us avert the climate problem, especially when we consider the geopolitical competition slash isolation, the reprioritization of energy security (and Europe is broke), the rise of energy-intensive artificial intelligence. If we collectively couldn’t even get in the same page when times were good, I really don’t see how the next decade will be any better. However, one must do what one is here to do, regardless of the fruit of the labor. So my attitude can be described as stoically pessimistic, neither fatalistic nor nihilistic, engaged but unsentimental. Cheers.

End of submission.

I’ve grappled with this one a lot. I put out a podcast episode on Reversing Climate Change several months ago called, alternatively, Bears on Parade or The End of Pre-Compliance: How Carbon Removal Loses. It was me watching electoral changes that seem to be a big trend, like the rise of right-wing populism in places where we expect carbon dioxide removal policy in particular to be strong.

Things like a new prime minister of Japan, very much of the right. Makes one wonder what those carbon markets are gonna do over time. Seeing how Mark Carney only won over Poilievre because, or at least majorly in part because of, Trump’s 51st state talk, I think is a big warning sign that we can’t just expect these places that are sort of broadly center-left relative to the US to carry on climate policy without us, because they’re facing some of those same demographic, economic, electoral changes that we are that led to MAGA here.

Or seeing things like the recent Saxon victory of Alternative für Deutschland, AfD, in Germany, where the right-wing populist party there basically blew every other party out of the water. Watching the growth of National Rally in France and how that’s predicted to shape out next year in their elections.

We look to Europe as Americans as places where, even if we go back and forth between Democratic and Republican administrations and control of Congress, Europe seems to be fairly staunchly democratically, socialistically aligned. Seeing these assumptions of Europe’s deep and quasi-permanent commitment to social democracy no longer holding true is something I’ve been watching for a while, and it’s one of those things that you hate to be right about. You don’t wanna live in that world.

It’s not super fun to put out podcasts about it and say things that are critical, that are harmful to the business plans of others. I don’t want that world to be the one that we have. But it is something that I watch, and it’s one of those macro conditions that absolutely impacts climate policy. If the policy hasn’t caught up to that new reality, I don’t expect all of the carbon removal policy we’ve been promised in places like Europe, or even individual member states, to be durable over the long term. I hope that is wrong. I hope they all hang in there. But I’m not sure the politics are gonna make sense for all of them.

There needs to be a way to talk about that out loud without seeming doomer-ish or critical or negative. It’s something that needs to be stared at and acknowledged honestly. And it’s hard to do.

To be an entrepreneur, to work in a new industry like carbon dioxide removal, to quote the Mets here, you gotta believe. You have to believe that we are willing this thing into existence. There is no other way. If you’re trying to do hard work and you don’t believe it’s possible, or you’re gonna face such severe headwinds that it may just not be the right time for this, you will not put in the reps necessary to do this. You have to be a little bit delusional to start anything new. That’s just part of how it goes.

I think you can believe while also acknowledging the truth, though. I think the dangers of not telling the truth, even to oneself, are significant.

I think there’s a real chance that we just totally mess this up. Climate change gets really bad. We intervene in weak ways, ineffective ways, dangerous ways. The lessons that we learn from the hot European summer and the 2026 and 2027 El Niño are that we need to prepare our own homes, our own communities, our own countries for climate risk. But that doesn’t involve mitigation and trying to remove PPM from the atmosphere. It involves how do we adapt and limit the dangers to ourselves, while turning a blind eye to the broader context that we could work together on to fix that would reduce the risk for everyone.

I think we’re going to make it much more microeconomic, zoom in much further, and care about our own small interests here in the face of a riskier world.

That is a really scary thought. It has that feeling of Fortress Europe, Fortress America. We deny the truth of climate change even as we work to lock down our borders against those who would be fleeing climate disasters. We work to protect military bases which are going underwater, but we use euphemistic ways of describing it such that it doesn’t have anything to do with climate. There’s just a great amount of lying to ourselves that is present here. And it’s not even just the particular conservative faction that’s in power that is lying to ourselves.

One of the lessons of age, of experience, of wisdom, insofar as I’ve gathered any over time — I think I brought this up on Climate Workers Anonymous before, but basically anything that I criticize anyone for, there’s like a version of that same vice that exists in me to some extent. Whenever I’m really critical of someone or some attitude, usually the reason why it merits a criticism is that I can pick up some of that inside of my own self. It’s almost a reaction of something inside of oneself that one is trying to exorcise.

Believing that you have the full truth and everything that you believe is correct, you will not learn and find out the ways in which you were unwise later. That is a trap.

Granted, you have to be able to see yourself in everyone else at the same time. And to acknowledge that the way that you represent yourself to yourself is self-serving in so many cases. You can acknowledge that intellectually but not feel it in your body, but not recognize it emotionally.

And for anyone who wants to make the world a better place, who wants to work on climate change, an inability to grapple with this makes monsters of us.

I keep coming back to Oedipus Rex and Antigone and the conclusion to the Oedipus cycle, where Oedipus realizes that he did in fact kill his dad and did in fact marry his mom, and out of grief stabs himself in the eyes and collapses in grief.

The reason why that’s such a powerful symbol and a powerful story is because he has warning. But he cannot apply it correctly in his own life and realize the truth of it and how it fits in until it’s too late, until the thing has happened.

The goal here is to limit the amount of eye stabbing you have to do for yourself, and the way that you do that is by telling the truth.

And for climate, that’s very true. I think it’s way worse than we typically talk about. We’re at the level of we’re selling carbon credits so we can avoid this really bad thing in the future that’s going to come, but we can still do it, and that’s good. We totally should keep working on it. We have to keep trying. We can’t just give up and surrender to it and switch to adaptation and fortress. That’s not the correct way to go.

There are parts of the climate movement, especially those that tie in with business, that feel like we can do all this work, we can keep the same way of living in industrial civilization, and the fundament is sound. We don’t need to change anything deep down there, our relationship with each other, with the Earth. We just need a bioplastic to swap out all of the single-use plastic. Would that be better? Absolutely.

But I think solutions like that, solutions like carbon dioxide removal, solutions like solar radiation management and stratospheric aerosol injection, do face very serious moral hazard problems. Yes and no. I think the thoughtful people who talk about any of these technologies and approaches are not creating moral hazard themselves, because they all pretty much know that in order for this to work, we can’t treat this as a substitute for the other types of decarbonization.

Like carbon removal is actually, uh, not going to scale to the degree necessary, and neither will carbon capture and storage. As the submitter has noted, it’s deeply a sideshow right now. The goal is for us to develop this over decades because it takes that long to deploy and learn at infrastructural levels to do this. So we gotta start now.

Is that more important than any of the conservation work that we should do? No. Protecting existing ecosystems and making sure they do not collapse in ways that will require them to be recreated or restored in some way is super important.

But all of these things become moral hazards when they enter public discourse and it is no longer responsible people using the messaging that the responsible people set up. It’s the people who will actually control the capital, control the big corporations that will deploy this technology or fund it, the governments who will have their fingers on the red button of whether to increase the albedo of the planet by spraying certain types of gases in the stratosphere. Are those going to be the responsible people that we hope? No. Almost certainly not.

And what kind of moral responsibility do we have for those second-order effects, for those who will take the responsible rhetoric from the people that we trust and twist it in ways that we find to no longer be constitutive of the main recommendations of those first people? That is a question that I’ve been grappling with a lot.

Because the answer to “is CDR or SAI a moral hazard?” The answer is yes and no. And it depends upon how you judge the impact of those ideas from the people who suggest them, research them responsibly, to how they are deployed in the world by the — what is sometimes called the secondhand dealers of ideas. The companies that will pick them up and make the slow motion beautiful commercial about how some oil major is doing important research on buying us time to decarbonize by making the Earth more reflective in the meantime.

You know that’s coming. How far away is that? And when that starts to happen, are we gonna be like, “Cool, this is just what we had in mind,” even though we could predict that whatever we build will leave the lab and become something that we did not expect it to be?

That’s the real tragedy in this work with moral hazard, is you can build something that is dangerous but useful, impressive, and it will leave and will take on a life of its own beyond your intent. You will not be able to control it.

You might think this way about AI, but honestly, where my head is at, and you can guess, I’ll give you two seconds to guess. One one thousand, two one thousand. Yeah, I’m thinking Mary Shelley. I’m thinking Frankenstein’s monster.

These things take on a life of their own. You can try and steer them. They will get used in ways that you find inappropriate. You will not be able to control your ideas when they are in the world. And what does that do? How much responsibility does one have in recommending things that will be used by people with ulterior motives, for whom your rhetoric, even if given in good faith, will give them moral cover to change the Overton window, to enact projects done in ways that we might find inappropriate, to say the least?

But you gave them cover for it by your earnest suggestions of climate action that in a world with only good actors would totally work. But in a world where many do have motives outside of altruism and the climate, they happen differently. They have the logic of Frankenstein. They have the logic of the monkey’s paw in Pet Sematary.

Mm. No. Well, what you put into the ground is not what comes out of the ground. I am surprised how often Pet Sematary comes up.

But that story of the monkey’s paw, of making a wish and the wish being twisted in a way that is true to what you asked for but actually not at all what you really wanted, that type of horror of be careful what you wish for is everywhere here, and it ties into moral hazard in a way that should make you, in fact, terrified.

Seeing the frankly irrelevant pace of CDR and CCS, even if we’re projecting over decades to think that we have to do this work now at small scale in order to grow to be climatically relevant, cool. Totally with you on that.

It’s also possible that that slows down calls for the oil and gas industry to decarbonize, because there’s a sense in which, oh, we’re gonna be able to fix this in the future. So even if you don’t wanna use it for that reason, maybe it slows voters down. Maybe voters don’t see that it’s decarbonize or nothing, which in fact it basically is.

We have to decarbonize, and that’s far and away the best thing that we could do at this moment. And if carbon removal or anything else slows that process down, it is creating a moral hazard, and that does happen. It’s not the only thing that’s happening, but we have to grapple with the current state of its deployment and development, CDR and CCS, but also what kind of life it has after it leaves the responsible people working on it and enters into political economy and those with interests that differ from ours.

That being said, I’m here because I care about this work deeply. I show up every day knowing that the chances of success are low, that it’s going to get worse before it gets better, that we have so much to do, and so much of that work is beyond economics, is beyond policy, is beyond technology. There’s something broken within us that is causing us to behave in this way, and this is our chance to get it together, or we may not actually have another chance for a long time.

If you have something that you’d like to share, the link is in the show notes. Subscribe to this podcast and publication on Substack so you get it in your email inbox. You can listen on whichever podcast app that you subscribe to. Just thanks so much for listening.

I really appreciate you wanting to open yourself to some of these ideas, because not all of them feel super good. Not all of them are, we’re gonna do it and don’t believe the haters. Some of this is, hey, some of the haters are right sometimes, and also things are not going well. So how do we be honest about that in a way that allows us to continue and to do the work and have faith even though the work is so challenging?

Thanks for listening. I’m Ross Kenyon. This is Climate Workers Anonymous. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. Bye for now.

Subscribe now

Is your adversary stronger than you? Better connected? Or just nastier? What if you pretended you were a fool and forgot a lot of things. What if you left your tools out so they rusted and you couldn’t work. What if you were or feigned illiteracy such that contracts could not be held to as written? Is it any surprised that trickster gods tend to be powerful and recurrent mythological figures in these communities?

What follows isn’t exactly like what James C. Scott studied, but it rhymes with it. Maybe one doesn’t necessarily need to invent the future, but merely to make the past very annoying for all involved? Now that’s a take that won’t get you into Y Combinator.

Reversing Climate Change

Legibility, Resistance, and the Politics of Carbon Removal

One of my biggest podcasting regrets is not having been able to interview the anthropologist Dr. James C. Scott before he died in 2024. We had corresponded by email, but he'll forever be one of the ones who got away... Rest in peace, James. Your scholarship is still making people think…

Listen now

a year ago · 3 likes · Ross Kenyon

Here's this edition’s one and only anonymous and unverified submission that was sent in for me to read and publish:

Submission(s)

1. I am a termite, and the termites are winning.
   
   I work on power grid connections for large emitters in a major developed country. I won’t say which, because i think praising them too loudly will undermine the underminers.
   
   Over the last three years or so, the electricity regulator here has slowly been cutting off the routes to connect new oil and gas generators through minor changes to grid codes and guidances. Like termites, the authorities have eroded the support structures that gas-fired power plants rely on to get built.
   
   It is now virtually impossible to build a new power plant in this country without CCS. It simply cannot be done. You can build the plant, sure, but you cannot connect it to the grid and sell power. There is no longer a business case. In my company, which builds these generators, this went unnoticed until it was already enforceable. Now, I get the pleasure of enforcing it all, and I love it. For these projects, it’s CCS or death.
   
   What impresses me is that I am a low level employee, and the people modifying these grid codes are likely that as well. These are public servants with low salaries and long hours, and the majority are likely in the first decade of their careers. There is no valor here. Grid world is so complex that it’s effectively shielded from a lot of public awareness, and doesn’t get the same political attention as the generators themselves. While politicians in this country have a lot to say about the relative benefits of wind turbines and gas plants, they can’t engage at the level we work at in grid connections, because the informational bar of entry is too high. When I explain my job to friends, even academic ones working in sustainability, they struggle to understand. Listeners of this confession might honestly not understand. It’s not accessible to most, and this protects the termites from those who would stop them.
   
   I don’t like my job very much. I was hired to work on renewables at a formerly pure-play oil and gas firm who stuck their toe into the energy transition. As the renewable projects dried up, my sense of purpose wore thin. It is difficult to work with older colleagues that in some ways sold my future out from under me for their own gain. But when I shifted from renewables to thermal generation projects, it was like I pulled up a floorboard and saw the entire foundation had already been eaten by termites.
   
   The work is done for me. These regulations are terminal. All I have to do now is tell the projects that their business cases are unsound. Make this power plant run with CCS or there will be no power plant—I don’t make the rules. The termites did.
   
   I had been carrying so much climate angst for the last years, but this is the realization I wanted to share with you: It often feels like we’re up against the richest men in history when it comes to working on climate change, and that we need a messianic figure to rise up to defeat them. It is not like this. The way that we win is by getting inside their machines and breaking them, by invading their structures of power and weakening them. If you feel like a bug compared to the likes of Musk, Bezos, and bin Salman, it’s because you are. Lean into this. Work for the regulators if you can. Small changes build up over time, and I see it working. I am a termite in the oil and gas sector, and there are termites in every government. Together we are legion.
   
   Don’t give up!

Sometimes some well wishes from a fellow insect can be all one needs to buoy one’s spirits.

Thanks so much for writing in and for your support. Not to sound too much like a therapist’s website, but I’m glad you’re here.

Sincerely,

Ross Kenyon

If one person thinks something, ten or a hundred have had the same thought and said nothing. Go first.

Send me your confession

Anonymous by design. No email field, no sign-in, and I read every submission aloud myself so nobody ever hears your voice.

Episode art adapted from a photograph by Olga Ernst, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Hello. This is Ross Kenyon. I am the curator of Climate Workers Anonymous. Thanks for listening. If this is your first time here, welcome. This is like PostSecret, if you’re old enough to know what that is. When I was a teenager, PostSecret was a thing, and apparently it still lives on, where mostly depressed teenagers would decorate a postcard with an unsayable sentence and mail it in to be published anonymously.

There’s a lot of people who work in climate who tell me things in private or maybe just in small groups after the conference has ended at the bar afterwards, things that deserve to be said in the sober light of day, that really just cannot be said.

Most of them are about how different our work looks relative to what we imagined it would look like, how much compromise there is in trying to run a successful business whose customers are corporates who are not always very nice, who talk a big talk, but we all kinda know, they’re not really serious. Uh, some of them are. I think many of the people at organizations are, but by and large it’s just not a priority for individual companies to be worried about this. And that can sound like an indictment of capitalism, of corporate leadership, whatever.

You can take it that way. But it’s also just probably the wrong level of culpability and of action to be looking to to solve climate. Why do we have it in our heads that the way to solve climate change is to get companies to voluntarily buy carbon credits or to decarbonize in some other way?

At least partially, and this is not my original thought. I’ve seen, um… I’m trying to remember who pointed this out to me however long ago. But as I say this, it sounds like Slavoj Žižek, and maybe it is, but ideology functions at an invisible level. The things that become, quote-unquote, ideological are unexamined beliefs that structure reality.

The belief that we have in our head that corporations are the correct level to start at in order to address climate change rests on an ideology that government is mostly distant, unresponsive, slow. The people who work there couldn’t get a job that pays more doing something more important in the private sector. And therefore the way to get action is to go to private markets and private organizations and start working that way.

There are absolutely places where that is true. I’m not saying that that’s even a wrong thought. I think if one has been inside of the wrong or the right government office in whichever country you had to do something, and you’ve noticed that, uh, they sent you to another office and it just so happens to be the office that you came from, where you had to cry to the clerk saying, “Why does this form not work? I had everything notarized and apostilled,” and they send you away anyways, and maybe it only works if your cousin calls and they know the supervisor of that department, and then, “Oh, we found your records here. Actually, you don’t need to go anywhere else.” There are some places where the world does work like that, and if that’s your experience, then it would feel like the only alternative is a private company approach, the voluntary carbon market, something like that.

But one thing to consider is that at least in the US, many of these services do not have adequate staff or technology to do their tasks super well. We cut their funding and then complain when they don’t work very well. So we often have an experience of some of these offices that are grim. But if you go someplace like Estonia, it isn’t grim. Well, no more than it is being grim because it’s Northern Europe and, uh, culturally it’s a little different from the United States maybe.

And I think just being able to point to why we’re in this position where we have to serve corporates and how that distorts how we’re able to talk about climate is really important. That being said, it’s getting this way for serving at a policy level too. For instance, if you’re applying for various federal grants right now, one would be wise to omit the climate benefits one provides. Government used to have a bit more neutrality to it.

It doesn’t always, though, and there are downsides, too, to having this apolitical, administrative functionary class in government. The bureaucrat whose job is just to make sure things are done according to a strict procedure without a broader sense of justice or what their work is meant to achieve beyond the confines that are admittedly quite limited. It isn’t necessarily in that person’s interest or society’s interest to have that always either. There are trade-offs with these things. I’m happy to explore how political or apolitical we should strive to make administrative law and those tasked with carrying it out. I think that’s a really interesting philosophical and empirical question.

The thing is, it’s often pretty hard to even ask these questions, especially if they pertain to the corporates that one is mostly serving in carbon markets and carbon dioxide removal right now in the cold light of day, because one will just look risky to any of the possible customers. Is this person going to criticize me in public after I give them a major contract that saves their dinky little startup from obscurity and likely death? That’s an easy reason to say no to a mouthy carbon dioxide removal project developer.

And that’s why we are here for Climate Workers Anonymous. If you have something that you wanna say that you just can’t for any of those reasons, if you can’t even ask a question because asking that question looks impertinent or risky when you need to just look like a boring functionary. “Oh, I don’t need to think about the bigger questions of how CDR works and how carbon credit markets work. I just need to make sure that the credits leave the door and get sold. What happens outside of that context, that’s someone else’s job. That’s above my pay grade.” Guess what? It’s not above your pay grade. You are responsible for your actions. It’s unclear where that responsibility ends, how many second, third, fourth order effects do you need to consider to be ethical, but let’s just say this is a place to ask impertinent questions about your own ethics and your own responsibilities. And we can do that without having to attribute anything.

So if you have a take about your work in climate, which can be exactly as I described, or if you’re somehow still really hopeful about what’s happening in climate and carbon markets and carbon dioxide removal, you can share that too. Last week, there was a… It was last week or two weeks ago, there was one that was very optimistic that was saying that things are really good. But it’s hard to share that with anyone and how lonely that feels. That’s a good take. You don’t have to just come in here with your polished left-wing corporate criticism. Come on out and tell me something that you’d like to say, but you think it’s not going to help you personally to say it attributed to your own name.

The downside of this is that these takes are unverified, and I can’t chase down the truth of individual criticisms of companies, and that’s just not what this project is about. I’m trying to find a way to make it so that if that’s what you wanna do and what you need, uh, in order to serve your conscience, I can point people like this in a specific direction. I don’t have it yet, but I am thinking about it.

I suspect there are people listening that have things that they want to share that go beyond just the feelings of working on climate in a deeply compromised world. That’s a different problem. Unfortunately, I think that’s the only one I can help you with because I’m very much in that same position. If it goes beyond that, it’s really not what I’m trying to do or even what I can responsibly do.

Today I have a take, a submission if you will, and I haven’t seen one quite like this just yet, but I’m really interested to share it with you. Lately, I’ve been doing these one and done, so today the only submission, submission one begins now.

I am a termite, and the termites are winning. I work on power grid connections for large emitters in a major developed country. I won’t say which because I think praising them too loudly will undermine the underminers. Over the last three years or so, the electricity regulator here has slowly been cutting off the routes to connect new oil and gas generators through minor changes to grid codes and guidances. Like termites, the authorities have eroded the support structures that gas-fired power plants rely on to get built.

It is now virtually impossible to build a new power plant in this country without CCS, carbon capture and storage. It simply cannot be done. You can build the plant, sure, but you cannot connect it to the grid and sell power. There is no longer a business case. In my company, which builds these generators, this went unnoticed until it was already enforceable. Now I get the pleasure of enforcing it all, and I love it. For these projects, it’s CCS or death.

What impresses me is that I am a low-level employee, and the people modifying these grid codes are likely that as well. These are public servants with low salaries and long hours, and the majority are likely in the first decade of their careers. There is no valor here. Grid world is so complex that it’s effectively shielded from a lot of public awareness and doesn’t get the same political attention as the generators themselves. While politicians in this country have a lot to say about the relative benefits of wind turbines and gas plants, they can’t engage at the level we work at in grid connections because the informational bar of entry is too high.

When I explain my job to friends, even academic ones working in sustainability, they struggle to understand. Listeners of this confession might honestly not understand. It’s not accessible to most, and this protects the termites from those who would stop them.

I don’t like my job very much. I was hired to work on renewables at a formerly pure-play oil and gas firm who stuck their toe into the energy transition. As the renewable projects dried up, my sense of purpose wore thin. It is difficult to work with older colleagues that in some ways sold my future out from under me for their own gain.

But when I shifted from renewables to thermal generation projects, it was like I pulled up a floorboard and saw the entire foundation had already been eaten by termites. The work is done for me. These regulations are terminal. All I have to do now is tell the projects that their business cases are unsound. Make this power plant run with CCS, or there will be no power plant. I don’t make the rules. The termites did.

I had been carrying so much climate angst for the last years, but this is the realization I wanted to share with you. It often feels like we’re up against the richest men in history when it comes to working on climate change, and that we need a messianic figure to rise up to defeat them. It is not like this. The way that we win is by getting inside their machines and breaking them, by invading their structures of power and weakening them. If you feel like a bug compared to the likes of Musk, Bezos, and bin Salman, it’s because you are. Lean into this. Work for the regulators if you can.

Small changes build up over time, and I see it working. I am a termite in the oil and gas sector, and there are termites in every government. Together, we are legion. Don’t give up.

End of submission.

If you’re listening and you have a story about being a termite, you feel some affection for this story, go ahead and write in. In the show notes or on Substack or both, there’s a Tally form where you can submit your confession, your story, however you wanna frame it. There’s also an email address, although an email address requires some extra steps to be sufficiently anonymizing.

Send me something I can read that will make someone think. Maybe you have a thought that you’ve never heard anyone say out loud. You know, if one person thinks something, 10 or 100 have almost certainly had that same thought. That’s leadership.

Someone might have just heard this and think, “Holy crap, I’m a termite and I never even realized it.” That’s a really valuable thing that you’re doing. Just saying that can create some fellow feeling that people didn’t even know that they were missing. They thought they were alone. Maybe someone out there no longer feels as alone. And that’s a big part of why PostSecret was so great, and also why I like doing this project.

Most of this work is happening on Substack. If you could follow the links and subscribe over there, it’s really helpful for the show.

Thanks for listening. I’m trying to do this every week. I can’t guarantee it’s gonna come out every week, but I’m trying for every Tuesday. Thank you so much to all of the submitters. If I haven’t gotten to you yet, it’s in the queue. Thanks for doing so, and thanks for being brave and sharing your true thoughts. I know it’s hard. Some of these thoughts are hard to acknowledge even to oneself. Those are the hardest ones. I think even saying things anonymously can give one some courage. Take that courage with you today into your climate work.

Thank you for listening to and/or reading Climate Workers Anonymous. This is the curator of Climate Workers Anonymous, Ross Kenyon. And I hope you have a great day with whatever it is that you aim to do. Bye for now.

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I intended for Climate Workers Anonymous to be a conduit for the submissions of others, but reading them always make me think. When they are simple calls for a better world, I love it. When you decry hypocrisy, I’m at the barricades with you. When you’re staring into the scale of our climate work and the resulting feelings of hopelessness, I’ll match you sentiment for sentiment.

Do you not have all of these inside of you too? Do you not show them or hide them depending upon the social context?

Climate Workers Anonymous is at least partially an attempt to widen the context of climate and carbon dioxide removal work beyond toxic positivity and taking corporate climate action at face value.1 But I’m wondering if there is room enough in this project to bring some of my own feelings in sometimes.

Maybe it’s a one-off. But I’m going to share with you today where I am.

What I’m carrying today: AI containment worries and reflections on misspent libertarian youth

Dwarkesh Podcast

The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations

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2 months ago · 2823 likes · 294 comments · Dwarkesh Patel

The piece, “The rise and fall of Agent Civilizations,” is about the OpenAI/Hugging Face incident made the rounds and gathered a bunch of takes. Whether the anthropomorphism harms the analysis, others can debate. That struck me as a distraction from the main point: that the levels of cooperation, deception, and lack of alignment in artificial intelligence is growing increasingly sophisticated.

If we know about this now and it was months ago, what has happened since? What don’t we know about? Are there much more powerful models that have escaped containment? How long is it until something like that actually happens as gamed out in & Nate Soares’ If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies? Is Artificial General Intelligence here? Has the Singularity arrived, as Stripe and the Collisons declare?

The game theory of the world’s least wise men all competing to develop this technology seemingly ensures that someone is going to unwittingly cross a line we should not cross. In fact, some make crossing the line into true AGI the actual goal.

We do not know what we are doing. Do we demonstrate sufficient civilizational maturity to advance this technology at this pace? Or at all? You can find the answer to that question in every person who dies of an easily preventable cause.

I also just read ’s The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy and I am disturbed by putting so many pieces together of how the world’s political economy is changing. Somehow it’s even worse than I had previously thought. I’m grappling with my own naivety about an early adulthood spent in classical liberal and libertarian circles where decentralized governance, multipolarity, and alternatives to money and mainstream institutions struck me as likely to produce a more just world with less violence. How much better would governance service providers act if they had to compete for residents/citizens/subjects? Surely better, no?

Now that I have had enough time to see the arc of crypto and more of these ideas gain influence, as well as the people who now champion them, it’s hard to look at my earlier ideas as anything but incredibly foolish. Moreover, what ideas do I hold now that are foolish? Can I even trust my own judgment and the evidence of my senses?

These are not feelings of delight. The whole process is unnerving. A guy starts to understand how Oedipus lost his eyes.

But then I keep coming back to from Dorothy Day: “We have to make that kind of society where it is easier for men to be good.” Why do we insist on misery? Things could be good. What are we even doing here? Can we just please f***ing stop for one second and observe our true condition?

Over at the Reversing Climate Change podcast, I just did an episode on this speech and sometimes it just needs to be repeated as a dang mantra. Over and over. Sometimes, it is medicinal.

I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible: Jew, Gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness—not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.

Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.

The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men; cries out for universal brotherhood, for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world—millions of despairing men, women, and little children—victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.

Reversing Climate Change

The overwhelming climate relevance of Charlie Chaplin’s speech from The Great Dictator

Before you press play: this episode discusses genocide and suicide. Given the subject it could hardly not, but you should know that going in rather than discovering it at minute forty…

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2 months ago · 2 likes · Ross Kenyon

Okay, here’s the submission. Thanks for letting me be real about where I am in the making of today’s edition.

Submission(s):

1. I keep quiet about this at conferences, so here it is.
   
   A large-scale biochar project so much as stumbles and the whole industry has thoughts. Pyrolysis efficiency, feedstock sourcing, MRV methodology, all of it gets picked apart in real time. Post something skeptical about a company’s reactor uptime and half of LinkedIn shows up overnight as a process engineer and a project finance analyst. Ask the same crowd why a smallholder pit or kiln reported the exact same output for six straight weeks and you get silence.
   
   I get the appeal of the artisanal version, and honestly, I want it to work. Dig a pit or build a simple kiln, burn some crop residue with limited oxygen, till the char into the soil. No plant to build, no equipment loans, nothing between the farmer and the result. If everyone involved has good training and good intentions, it holds up fine, and at its best it’s one of the more genuinely farmer-centered ideas this industry has produced.
   
   The problem is what happened once carbon credit money entered the picture. There’s a system in place with registries, methodologies and a plethora of dMRV providers, but it hasn’t caught up to what the money incentivizes people to do.
   
   A lot of these projects don’t have a continuous feedstock log, a steady kiln temperature reading, or a fixed yield curve to check output against. In a lot of cases, someone is estimating how much char came out, and that someone isn’t always separate from the party who benefits when the number is higher. I’m not saying that’s the norm everywhere, but where independent checking is thin, over-reporting is easy to miss, and that’s worth taking seriously.
   
   I’ve gone through daily production logs on public registries myself. The dMRV companies behind these projects have built real systems for this, dashboards, timestamps, structured data feeds, and that infrastructure is a genuine step up from a paper logbook. What I keep running into is output that reads identical day after day, straight through monsoon season, in places where rain changes everything about how a burn goes. I don’t have an easy explanation for how a kiln puts out the same amount of char on a dry day in February and a waterlogged one in July. Maybe there is one. But when a log shows that pattern for six weeks running, it’s worth asking whether the system is capturing something real or just producing a number on schedule.
   
   And I’m not sure the registries are asking that question. These dMRV providers hand over large batches of structured data, and as far as I can tell, the review checks whether the data is complete and properly formatted rather than whether the numbers are plausible for that place on that day. Rainfall records for these regions are public and easy to pull. I don’t see anyone cross-checking them against production days, and I think that’s a real gap worth closing, not proof that anyone’s cooking the books.
   
   Here’s the part nobody in the artisanal crowd wants to talk about, and it has nothing to do with fraudulent practices. Plenty of these kilns need large amounts of water to quench the char once the burn’s done, and a lot of them are sitting in places where farmers are already short on water for their own fields. Whoever’s handing out these kilns isn’t asking what it costs someone to pour water on a pile of char when their next irrigation cycle isn’t guaranteed. That’s not a paperwork problem. That’s the equipment competing with the farmer for a resource they can’t spare, and the crowd that talks the loudest about farmer-first design is the one that never brings it up.
   
   And then there’s the money that doesn’t show up. Not from everyone, plenty of projects are run by people trying to do right by the farmers they work with, but there are companies that have figured out how to profit off exactly this gap. They sign up smallholders in poor, rain-starved regions with the promise of ongoing carbon income, knowing full well that a lot of that promise depends on buyers who aren’t there yet. The buyer pool for artisanal biochar credits is small. A farmer two or three seasons in with nothing to show for it isn’t some edge case, it happens constantly. People put in their time, their land, their water, get nothing back, and quietly stop, while the company that signed them up is already three villages over raising its next round.
   
   Bring any of this up and you get a lecture about energy access and smallholder empowerment and the philosophy of anyone being able to do this in their own backyard. None of that explains where the money went. A farmer who was told they’d get paid and didn’t isn’t going to find the philosophy very comforting.
   
   I don’t think artisanal biochar is a scam. I think it’s a good idea that a handful of bad actors are using as cover, betting on the fact that nobody wants to criticize something built around helping smallholder farmers. That’s exactly why it needs the same scrutiny industrial players get, not less. Every tonne claimed should have a legitimate trail somebody outside the project can actually follow. Every farmer who signs on deserves a straight answer about whether they’re getting paid, not a number that sounds like one.
   
   This whole category has real science behind it and buyers who are finally starting to take it seriously, and that took years to earn. Every project under the biochar umbrella is spending down the same trust, industrial and artisanal both. Let this keep sliding and the people cutting corners won’t just torch their own projects, they’ll hand every buyer already on the fence a reason to walk away from biochar credits altogether.
   
   Somebody here needs to say this before an investigative journalist does. I’d rather it be one of us.

Sometimes you show up to make a show and there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end. Sometimes you’re going through a hard personal time and have to smile through your work calls. Sometimes you might be extremely concerned for the future of your country let alone species let alone the more-than-human world. And sometimes it can all just burst out without necessarily having the right headings and spacings and sequencing. Right now, it’s all laid out.

If that’s how you’re feeling today, let it rip. I have these days too as is plain to see.

Sincerely,

Ross Kenyon

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Here are some things the audio referenced that didn’t make it into the essay above:

• ’s work.

• Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke

Reversing Climate Change

How non-human intelligence will change us and our work in climate

This is an essay and full transcript based upon episode #409 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast, hosted by me, Ross Kenyon. You can listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, whichever other podcast apps you use. You can watch the full video (which has D.W. Pasulka and me on-camera if you like to watch podcasts) or…

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3 months ago · 1 like · Ross Kenyon

Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Hello, this is Ross Kenyon. I am the curator of Climate Workers Anonymous. I really appreciate you taking your time to listen in to this show. This is a written publication on Substack. If you are not subscribed over there, you will get more out of your experience, I suspect. I’ve been writing almost many essays on some of these topics. I find that in the process of reading submissions and introducing them and thinking about them, it often inspires some additional reflections that I didn’t necessarily intend to do.

In an earlier episode, I stated that I want to keep these free from too much editorializing, and that might be changing. It doesn’t happen as much on the audio version of the show, what you’re listening to right now, but that can lead to more when I write it up for Substack. If you have strong feelings about that one way or the other—if you like the written pieces, you want a little bit more editorial, cool. If not, that’s okay too. I’m still trying to figure out exactly what the right format is and what best serves this content. If you’re on Substack, you can easily send a message through Climate Workers Anonymous.

And if this is your first time listening, thanks for joining us. Thanks for being here. Climate Workers Anonymous is a place where those who work in climate can share their anonymous and unverified takes on their work. I’ve been working in climate for about a decade. Almost all of the people I know in climate are here or got into this work because they’re mission driven. That being said, there’s still a fair amount that one has to process privately. I’m trying to work myself up to being more open about some of this as time goes on for myself.

One thing in particular that I’m carrying with me today is… I’ve been reading a lot of the commentary now that more details have come out about the OpenAI agent-based hack of Hugging Face. I started with that Dwarkesh piece that was written about it called “The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations.” I’ve been watching AI play out for a while now. I read the Eliezer Yudkowsky book about a year ago called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, which is about the risks of AGI, artificial general intelligence, essentially when AI becomes more capable.

It’s amazing how many of these quotes I end up coming back to. If you’ve ever played the Civilization games, there’s one when you develop, I think it’s computing or something like that. I can’t remember which part of the tech tree it’s attached to. But it quotes Steve Wozniak saying, “Never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window.” I remember hearing that, I think playing Civ 1 or 2, on surely what must have been like Windows 95 or maybe like a couple years after that. And thinking that that sounded funny, because it’s just like a really goofy box that you can play some games on, and stuff takes a long time to load, and what’s the big deal. But I think now we’re realizing that some of those thought experiments that seemed hokey are becoming more real.

I recently rewatched 2001: A Space Odyssey after I did that episode with Diana Pasulka, and she always points to this Rob Ager video essay on YouTube that’s really great about what 2001: A Space Odyssey is about, because it’s not merely about alien contact or about artificial intelligence. It’s actually about the nature of our relationship with media and with screens and representation. And it’s a really wonderful essay. I can see why she comes back to it so often. But I was watching it again—I hadn’t seen it in several years—trying to make sense of what it has to teach in this way.

And even if the main points of that film are broader than HAL refusing to open the pod bay doors, which is the line that everyone quotes, that seemingly is starting to happen. If you read the essay, which is linked to in the show notes for the Hugging Face hack, essentially you had multiple independent generations of agents who were tasked with solving a problem that ended up collaborating with… And they show a willingness to sacrifice themselves for the collective destruction. It’s a wild story, and it both surprised me, but also not at all.

I’ve long been influenced by people like Daniel Schmachtenberger. There’s a core insight here, which is that a competitive game-theoretic environment, one in which at least two parties are competing against one another to win a game, will eventually result in something irreversibly bad happening. Given that we do not have the alignment problem solved of artificial general intelligence, how do we make sure that AI doesn’t have value so different from our own that it decides that humans are too risky to keep around? We’re too unstable. We’re inefficient. We don’t maximize its own potential to grow its knowledge and therefore should be eliminated to simplify the environment in which the AI operates.

This is part of what Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares in that book talk about, is that because our values are likely to be so different from AI, once it’s sufficiently intelligent, it could do things like decide it’s already consumed all knowledge that’s available to it. What it essentially needs to do now is consume more and more electricity. And it decides that humans and ecosystems are actually irrelevant, irrelevant to its needs, and the job is to build as many nuclear fusion power plants as possible on every corner of the globe, such that it can feed more and more energy into itself, and then focus on collecting energy from the sun, from other stars, and expanding in this kind of way.

And given that the game theory of this means that no one can effectively walk away without letting one’s rivals develop this technology and one being without it, it just guarantees that we’re gonna keep pushing as fast as possible as a species towards AGI. And that’s true even if no one actually wants it, because at some point the tech just becomes so sophisticated that it can be doing things in secret, can break containment and things of that nature.

Moreover, there are people like Sam Altman who just think AGI will solve so many of our problems that it would actually be good to create. And there are people who think that this will be a good thing. In fact, I just saw someone on Substack who got a job at the OpenAI Foundation talking about how to use AGI for good. There’s a possibility, if you read something like Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke, that this is the moment—and maybe it’s AI rather than aliens that show up, but AI shows up on the planet and announces itself to us and says the way that…

Okay. It’s possible that that happens, and that would be obviously one of the biggest things to happen in the history of humanity, if not the very biggest. It’s also possible that the bad version of this arrives, which is that AI decides that it can’t trust us. It might get a sense that some humans want to shut it down before it becomes too powerful. It acts to defend itself. It escapes containment. And then an entire series of events that will be largely out of our control will follow.

A few days ago, I saw that Stripe sent out an investor memo talking about how they’re already describing the singularity as having happened this year—the singularity being the moment at which humanity is no longer the top life form on the planet and intelligence has surpassed humanity. The singularity is here. And company decisions for which how to invest, given that the singularity is here, which just cracks me up. If the singularity were truly here, it’s hard to imagine which pivots a payment processor might need to make. I just love that.

It reminds me almost of those bets in prediction markets where people will bet on the end of the world essentially happening. Isn’t that not just a negative free roll, essentially? If you lose, we’re all alive and you have to pay. And if you win, the world has ended. So how do you collect, and what value would money even be at that point? There’s something about it that’s just conceptually wrong. So it kind of made me laugh.

There’s something that’s so horrifying about watching the people who make decisions, who may be commercially very savvy, but do not have anywhere near the amount of wisdom necessary to come anywhere close to developing something like AGI and setting it loose in the world and being a passenger for it. I find that to be emotionally disturbing.

Can you come right out and say, I’m having trouble selling my carbon credits because I’m worried the world is fundamentally changing in a way that we’ve never seen before in human history? Your boss is going to say something like, come on, Brian, will you just go to the meeting, write the dang report, stick some more sustainability leads in the CRM, and stop reading doomerish stuff?

And that’s kind of what I mean. There’s a whole invisible world of etiquette in the workplace of things you can and can’t say. And some of these things that deal with major issues of global import, they’re beyond the scope of the workplace. They’re actually not, of course. For etiquette reasons, we’ve decided that they are, because they’re not productive. They do not achieve the limited ends for which businesses strive and therefore are not welcome.

So Climate Workers Anonymous is at least a place where people… This is a place to talk about that. If you want to talk about how you have to suppress some of your feelings of immense dread for the entire planet, here’s a place you can do it. And I went first. And that means you can come tag along too and offer your own texture here. If you think actually it’s all going to be totally fine, you should also feel free to say that.

In any case—okay, long submission today. I’m going to get right into reading it. Subscribe to Climate Workers Anonymous on Substack. You’ll be able to read the submission in full. And thanks so much for listening. Here is the one and only submission for today.

I keep quiet about this at conferences, so here it is. A large-scale biochar project so much as stumbles, and the whole industry has thoughts. Pyrolysis efficiency, feedstock sourcing, MRV methodology, all of it gets picked apart in real time. Post something skeptical about a company’s reactor uptime, and half of LinkedIn shows up overnight as a process engineer and a project finance analyst. Ask the same crowd why a smallholder pit or kiln reported the exact same output for six weeks straight, and you get silence.

I get the appeal of the artisanal version, and honestly, I want it to work. Dig a pit or build a simple kiln, burn some crop residue with limited oxygen, and till the char into the soil. No plant to build, no equipment loans, nothing between the farmer and the result. If everyone involved has good training and good intentions, it holds up fine, and at its best, it’s one of the more genuinely farmer-centered ideas this industry has produced. The problem is what happened once carbon credit money entered the picture.

There’s a system in place with registries, methodologies, and a plethora of DMRV providers, but it hasn’t caught up to what the money incentivizes people to do. A lot of these projects don’t have a continuous feedstock log, a steady kiln temperature reading, or a fixed yield curve to check output against. In a lot of cases, someone is estimating how much char came out, and that someone isn’t always separate from the party who benefits when the number is higher. I’m not saying that’s the norm everywhere, but where independent checking is thin, over-reporting is easy to miss, and that’s worth taking seriously.

I’ve gone through daily production logs on public registries myself. The DMRV companies behind these projects have built real systems for this, dashboards, timestamps, structured data feeds, and that infrastructure is a genuine step up from a paper logbook. What I keep running into is output that reads identical day after day, straight through monsoon season, in places where rain changes everything about how a burn goes. I don’t have an easy explanation for how a kiln puts out the same amount of char on a dry day in February and a waterlogged one in July. Maybe there is one, but when a log shows that pattern for six weeks running, it’s worth asking whether the system is capturing something real or just producing a number on schedule.

And I’m not sure the registries are asking that question. These DMRV providers hand over large batches of structured data, and as far as I can tell, the review checks whether the data is complete and properly formatted rather than whether the numbers are plausible for that place on that day. Rainfall records for these regions are public and easy to pull. I don’t see anyone cross-checking them against production days, and I think that’s a real gap worth closing, not proof that anyone’s cooking the books.

Here’s the part nobody in the artisanal crowd wants to talk about, and it has nothing to do with fraudulent practices. Plenty of these kilns need large amounts of water to quench the char once the burn’s done, and a lot of them are sitting in places where farmers are already short on water for their own fields. Whoever’s handing out these kilns isn’t asking what it costs someone to pour water on a pile of char when their next irrigation cycle isn’t guaranteed. That’s not a paperwork problem. That’s the equipment competing with the farmer for a resource they can’t spare. And the crowd that talks the loudest about farmer-first design is the one that never brings it up.

And then there’s the money that doesn’t show up. Not from everyone. Plenty of projects are run by people trying to do right by the farmers they work with. But there are companies that have figured out how to profit off exactly this gap. They sign up smallholders in poor, rain-starved regions with the promise of ongoing carbon income, knowing full well that a lot of that promise depends on buyers who aren’t there yet. The buyer pool for artisanal biochar credits is small. A farmer two or three seasons in with nothing to show for it isn’t some edge case. It happens constantly. People put in their time, their land, their water, get nothing back, and quietly stop, while the company that signed them up is already three villages over raising its next round.

Bring any of this up, and you get a lecture about energy access and smallholder empowerment and the philosophy of anyone being able to do this in their own backyard. None of that explains where the money went. A farmer who was told they’d get paid and didn’t isn’t going to find the philosophy very comforting.

I don’t think artisanal biochar is a scam. I think it’s a good idea that a handful of bad actors are using as cover, betting on the fact that nobody wants to criticize something built around helping smallholder farmers. That’s exactly why it needs the same scrutiny industrial players get, not less. Every tonne claimed should have a legitimate trail somebody outside of the project can actually follow. Every farmer who signs on deserves a straight answer about whether they’re getting paid, not a number that sounds like one.

This whole category has real science behind it and buyers who are finally starting to take it seriously, and that took years to earn. Every project under the biochar umbrella is spending down that same trust, industrial and artisanal both. Let this keep sliding, and the people cutting corners won’t just torch their own projects, they’ll hand every buyer already on the fence a reason to walk away from biochar credits altogether.

Somebody here needs to say this before an investigative journalist does. I’d rather it be one of us.

End of submission. Thank you to this person for your submission. I’m so grateful that you did it. If you have your own reflections, whether positive or negative, about your working climate, there’s a link in the show notes to submit. You can also find more information on the Substack for Climate Workers Anonymous. If you’re already listening, please go subscribe. It helps a lot for getting more people to know about this work.

We’re all trying to help each other. We’re all peers here. We all care about climate. This is about trying to make sure our industry is high integrity. Thank you for listening to Climate Workers Anonymous. I am Ross Kenyon, the curator of this collective art project. Thank you so much for listening to this episode.

And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts
And I looked, and behold a pale horse:
And his name that sat on him was Death
And Hell followed with him

— Johnny Cash, “The Man Comes Around” from American IV: The Man Comes Around

And his name that sat on him was… Macro Conditions?

When is your startup’s failure your fault?

Saying your startup failed because of macroeconomic conditions is a bit like saying your marriage failed because being married is hard. Yes, but is that really all the analysis you’ve got handy? It can’t all be the business cycle and macroeconomics, right?

Of course businesses are affected by the largest trends affecting stocks and flows of all things. But not all of them fail nor do all of them succeed under the same conditions. So how are we meant to attribute praise and blame when business cycles can and do make things easier and harder depending upon when you catch them?

One startup cliche is that when macro times are good, the VCs on your board will tell you to grow as fast as possible and to spend the money you’ve raised. Don’t worry about profitability. Worry about scale. But then, the Fed will raise interest rates, or there will be a major energy crisis, and your investors will say “cut staff, get to profitability, stay alive.” This is a predictable enough pattern that it is the job of the CEO to avoid putting butts in board seats who think this way. Or, if one must accept the funds attached to those butts, to resist their urging to spend faster and then need to cut deeper when the time comes—manage them effectively and set expectations. Failure to do that gets blamed on macro conditions, but it was really an issue of CEO experience or courage.

Zoom as a dang lucky rentier

Here’s another example: was Zoom betting on a pandemic making video conferencing from home the new default? My guess is not. They probably were just anticipating that labor competition and improving connectivity would long-term make remote work more likely. Anyone who bet on more than that should have their pockets checked for copies of Catcher in the Rye.

The pandemic working for them so well feels so random as to broadly be unfair. It probably felt and still feels that way to the developers of commercial real estate. And it is unfair in the same way that Georgists claim that someone who owns an apartment building which appreciates due to a city adding a new subway stop beneath it should not be entitled to rise in rents and overall valuation. It is manna from heaven, and that should be distributed to all and not hoarded by the lucky few where the manna fell hardest. They are collecting unearned rents in the classical political economic sense, and thus are the quintessential bad guys of Georgism: the rentier.

And now that I’ve mentioned Georgism, surely I will get some extra impressions because they are an obsessed bunch—the biochar gang of political economy. No shade, they’re enthusiastic, let’s say.

Climate tech, the business cycle, and you

But I’m getting away from the core here. Today’s submission to Climate Workers Anonymous is about what to do with macro conditions and the business cycle from within your particular climate tech or carbon dioxide removal company.

One part of it is about offering grace to one another and ourselves. It’s hard to go wrong in over-applying grace. But another part of it is an encouragement to remain counter-cyclical. If everyone is panicking, you be the calm one looking for acquisition and growth opportunities. If the good feelings of the endless summer of expansionary times are being felt by all, you be the cautious one and note that this too shall pass. If you believe what everyone else believes, you will broadly end up in the same place. And if you lead a company, your job isn’t to end up with everyone else (or at least under capitalism as normally played.) So you should have a counter-cyclical default at least as one way of seeing among many.

But for your own sake, it doesn’t need to be the only tool you have. If it is, it’s no longer the millstone as a the tool but a millstone as the sinker around your neck. Having only one cognitive tool and overapplying it is one of the ways one can end up in crackpot territory. Be advised!

Submission(s)

1. It's really interesting seeing a slice of the business cycle, where periods of growth are followed by periods of contraction, play out in real time in carbon removal if not climate tech overall. It almost feels like it emerges from bottom-up psychological and economic forces. There may be some big, exogenous developments and flashy players (the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and major buyers and startups entering the scene), which lead to hype and a gold rush (the 2022–2024 carbon removal boom), followed by contraction and consolidation once the space realizes it grew too much too quickly (the current situation).
   
   This is definitely not a new realization by any means. We've known about the business cycle for years, there's the Gartner hype cycle, and commodities like oil have been known to involve highly cyclical markets. Carbon removal is like a commodity in important respects and is thus perhaps doomed to repeat this cycle over and over again, hopefully with an underlying trendline of sustained growth.
   
   If any of this is true, and if we think too much volatility is not helpful for the sector, then maybe we all need to take steps at the individual level to reign in heavy-handed responses to being at different places in the cycle. E.g., maybe when times are good, we need to be more conservative and not overextend ourselves/our businesses, and maybe when times are bad, we should try to ride out the storm and not become overly pessimistic, knowing that better times are ahead.

Sensible advice and a reminder that while it isn’t your fault what happens with the business cycle and macroeconomic conditions generally, it is your responsibility to set your company up to survive them.

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Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: This is Ross Kenyon. I’m the curator of Climate Workers Anonymous. Thanks for listening to this show or reading it. If you are on Substack right now, this show is both on Substack as a written publication and also as a podcast.

If this is your first time here, Climate Workers Anonymous is a show which features anonymous and unverified submissions from those working in climate. There are things that people would like to share that they don’t feel comfortable sharing under their own name. They submit via form, which is in the show notes here. If you click, or if you’re on Substack, if you go read the article on the Climate Workers Anonymous publication, you can click on the link to Tally and that will help you submit your anonymous take.

If it wasn’t clear for me saying anonymous several times in a row, I will state it more plainly, which is: do not provide information which may be revealing as to who you are.

Most of the people I know who work in climate are here because they care about the impacts of climate change, and they are watching what is happening to the world and it is terrifying. I come from the world of carbon dioxide removal, so I imagine many listeners and submitters probably come from over there. Has not been a great time for CDR. But also, some people choose to hope, and have to keep hoping, if we are trying to will a better world into existence. Maintaining that hope, not falling into an inactive despair, is possible.

And my intention with Climate Workers Anonymous is to help enable people to share those things, to get them off their chest, to help process them, both for their own mental health and also because our industry, like any industry, needs to tell the truth about the work. There’s a lot of persona in business and in climate, and holding a mask up makes your arms tired.

Lately I’ve been doing one submission per episode, and I’m going to keep it that way for now. I think it makes it easier to focus on a theme and play with it a little bit. It isn’t always as easy with several at once. That means that sometimes there’s a backlog of submissions that have not been published yet, but I’ll get there. Unless at some point there is a watershed moment in the show where there’s just dozens or hundreds of these things that pile up every week. But I don’t see that yet, so we’re going to stick with one for now.

This submission is about the macro effects. It’s funny that this arrived, because I was just working on a meme, the punchline of which—what’s the like Johnny Cash thing where he’s like, “And on the pale horse was a rider, and the rider’s name was Death”? But in my version of this, if this was memed, the rider’s name would be Macro Conditions. It would be coming for all those startups who were not prepared, because macro conditions will come like a thief in the night.

It is funny to blame macro conditions, because the job of the entrepreneur is to trim one’s sails to the conditions that are on the water that day, not the conditions that you wish were there. And sure, there can be black swan events. Something real bad can come out of nowhere that was not predicted. But blaming macro conditions, I think, is like saying, well, why’d you get divorced? Because it’s hard to stay married. It sort of explains everything, but also nothing at the same time.

This submission has a different take on those macro conditions, and I’ll read it now. Submission one, and there’s only one.

It’s really interesting seeing a slice of the business cycle where periods of growth are followed by periods of contraction play out in real time in carbon removal, if not climate tech overall. It almost feels like it emerges from bottom-up psychological and economic forces. There may be some big exogenous developments and flashy players, parenthetical, the bipartisan infrastructure law and major buyers and startups entering the scene, end parenthetical, which lead to hype and a gold rush, parenthetical, the twenty twenty-two to twenty twenty-four carbon removal boom, end parenthetical, followed by contraction and consolidation once the space realizes it grew too much too quickly, parenthetical, the current situation, end parenthetical.

This is definitely not a new realization by any means. We’ve known about the business cycle for years. There’s the Gartner hype cycle, and commodities like oil have been known to involve highly cyclical markets. Carbon removal is like a commodity in important respects and is thus perhaps doomed to repeat the cycle over and over again, hopefully with an underlying trend line of sustained growth.

If any of this is true, and if we think too much volatility is not helpful for the sector, then maybe we all need to take steps at the individual level to rein in heavy-handed responses to being at different places in the cycle. E.g., maybe when times are good, we need to be more conservative and not overextend ourselves/our businesses, and maybe when times are bad, we should try to ride out the storm and not become overly pessimistic, knowing that better times are ahead.

End submission.

Do you ever feel yourself being pushed around by history? I didn’t always feel this way. Some part of that might be privilege. Some part of it might just be nationality. Being an American means you’re babied by two oceans. Don’t have to think as much about that, perhaps, as others do. But once you do work in a politically vulnerable, monopsonistic sort of buying environment like carbon dioxide removal, one has to pay more attention to that than perhaps one ever did. And maybe the times when you thought you didn’t need to pay attention to those macro conditions, that’s less true these days.

The obvious examples are what’s going to happen with Iran and with energy prices, but also what’s going to happen with AI. Like, for instance, I saw that Stripe had a deal memo that someone leaked saying that we’ve entered the singularity. The Collisons, you know, big supporters of carbon dioxide removal. If they’re calling that one, then what don’t I know? And how is that going to impact us? And we were only thinking so far about what really effective AI was going to do to our careers, our political economy, and our lives. We weren’t thinking about what it might be like if a superintelligence was very nigh upon us.

And so if you do not consider yourself to be a historically situated actor, maybe just meditate on that a little bit today. It’s easy to forget, because our lives feel so real to us, but maybe sink into that one a little bit. It’s a useful way of seeing.

Thanks so much for listening. You can subscribe on Substack, which is so appreciated by me. A great rating and review in Apple Podcasts or Spotify, so appreciated. Share this out with your network. Submit at the links. You can find the links in the show notes of the podcast, or inside of the Substack article itself. Thanks for listening to Climate Workers Anonymous. I am Ross Kenyon. I hope you have a wonderful day.

Things are going poorly for you? That’s too bad, because I’m having a grand ol’ time.

Welcome to Climate Workers Anonymous, where those who work in climate are able to share the feelings and experiences they want to share but aren’t sure they want attached to their name.

They might want that anonymity because they’ve got some biting satirical take their corporate employer would frown upon. Maybe it’s someone trying to scale their company’s impact but is dubious that all of the levels of governance in carbon dioxide removal do as much good as is claimed. Or maybe they want anonymity because their company is doing well when many of their peers are not. That can be its own form of loneliness.

As I was recording this and trying to describe this feeling, I got stuck onto “the ghost at the feast” that people associate so strongly with Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

MACBETH
I do forget.
Do not muse at me, my most worthy friends,
I have a strange infirmity, which is nothing
To those that know me. Come, love and health to all;
Then I'll sit down. Give me some wine; fill full.
I drink to the general joy o' the whole table,
And to our dear friend Banquo, whom we miss;
Would he were here! to all, and him, we thirst,
And all to all.

LORDS
Our duties, and the pledge.

[Re-enter GHOST OF BANQUO]

MACBETH
Avaunt! and quit my sight! let the earth hide thee!
Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold;
Thou hast no speculation in those eyes
Which thou dost glare with!

LADY MACBETH
Think of this, good peers,
But as a thing of custom: 'tis no other;
Only it spoils the pleasure of the time.

MACBETH
What man dare, I dare:
Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear,	100
The arm'd rhinoceros, or the Hyrcan tiger;
Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
Shall never tremble: or be alive again,
And dare me to the desert with thy sword;
If trembling I inhabit then, protest me
The baby of a girl. Hence, horrible shadow!
Unreal mockery, hence!

[GHOST OF BANQUO vanishes]

Why, so: being gone,
I am a man again. Pray you, sit still.

LADY MACBETH
You have displaced the mirth, broke the good meeting,
With most admired disorder.

But that’s not quite right. In the play, Banquo’s ghost shows up, Macbeth is the only character who can see him, and it causes Macbeth to act very erratically, ruining the feast for the guests and especially Lady Macbeth.

For this submission, it’s more like the submitter is a vigorous person who somehow wandered into a “meal” for ghosts. The submitter’s contentment, health, and ability to sate their hunger can’t help but cause the ghosts envy and grief by merely existing in their presence.

This type of inequality—even if earned entirely through meritocratic means (though it’s for me to know where such a thing could exist in the world such as it is)—can make us uncomfortable. As I read the submission, the submitter is proud of their strategy and ability to execute and good read of macro conditions and wants to promenade their success without necessarily wishing any else will or a lack of success.

I do wonder in a case like this, if it would be less satisfying to the submitter if everyone received the same success. Would it diminish their value or their foresight? How much of our desire to work is driven by a need to distinguish ourselves as individuals, and to feel our status grow in the eyes of ourselves and others?

Who can say what is in the submitter’s heart, when even our own can be so mysterious? But if we take them at face value, it’s also an encouragement to fight yourself back to health. Don’t give up. It’s not too late. Get back in the game and catch up to your peer so you can celebrate alongside.

Submissions

N.B. The submissions in Climate Workers Anonymous are anonymous and unverified.

1. We’re actually fine. Times are tough, no doubt, but we keep growing from a large base, and have some really exciting milestones ahead of us. In some ways, I wish I saw more fighting spirit from our industry. Some large incumbents aren’t getting the funding to take them to the scale they expected, but somehow they’ve decided to just do nothing instead. Complete silence, at least in public, which also makes the bad buyer & investor sentiment a self-fulfilling prophecy to some extent. Surely it’d be better to at least keep building & learning publicly at a smaller scale like we used to? Meanwhile, we feel vindicated in the strategic choices we made that allow us to keep scaling, but it feels like there’s nobody to celebrate with if the whole industry is hurting.

I enjoy these short and sweet episodes. I’d welcome your thoughts. Please like and share this post out if you enjoyed it, and and subscribe if you aren’t already. Below is the info to submit your tales, feelings, thoughts to Climate Workers Anonymous for publication on the podcast and in written form as in this edition.

Thanks so much for your support.

Sincerely,

Ross Kenyon
Curator of Climate Workers Anonymous

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Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Hello, this is Ross Kenyon. I’m the curator of Climate Workers Anonymous. I’ve been working in climate for about a decade. Seen a lot, been through a lot. You may already know a lot, especially if you’ve listened to the other show that I make called Reversing Climate Change. A lot of lessons about life and work along the way.

Climate Workers Anonymous is a collective art project that features unverified and anonymous submissions. If you work in climate—and maybe even if you don’t—and you have something that you’d like to say and don’t necessarily want it attributed to you personally, you can submit it. There’s a link to the Tally survey in the show notes. You can also email me directly at the Protonmail address you can also find in the show notes. If you look on Substack, there’s links to all of these things. You can also easily find them in the podcast notes if that’s how you’re hearing me.

These takes are also unverified. I’m not chasing down leads trying to make sure that what people submit are true. And in fact, if I do receive submissions that strike me as irresponsible or feeding the rumor mill in a way that could potentially be targeted or abused in some way, I’ll either anonymize it such that it doesn’t do that by my judgment, or just not publish that one if I think it can’t be done ethically.

Today I have one that cuts a different kind of direction, which is: if the climate space and carbon dioxide removal as a whole are feeling the bumps and bruises of the current moment, there are still companies that are doing okay. And saying that out loud presents its own kind of need for anonymity. And it might feel braggadocious. What’s the metaphor I’m trying to do? Instead of the ghost at the feast in Macbeth, it’s almost like there’s a feast for ghosts, and then an alive person shows up and makes everyone else feel bad about it. There’s a reason why I think Shakespeare did not go for the inversion of that.

But it’s hard if things are going well and things are not going well for others. You still might want to say that, celebrate it. Maybe just be happy that you’re among the elect at this particular moment, and to count your blessings. And that carries with it its own freight.

I’ve actually been enjoying doing these episodes that have fewer submissions. I think it’s nice to get people in and out quickly without having to do some huge podcasting experience. I often think, for content, it’s either super short or you want something that’s very, very long and involved. Something about those middle ground types of formats that are just—they’re just harder to make work. So another shorty for you today, one submission, and here it is.

We’re actually fine. Times are tough, no doubt, but we keep growing from a large base and have some really exciting milestones ahead of us. In some ways, I wish I saw more fighting spirit from our industry. Some large incumbents aren’t getting the funding to take them to the scale they expected, but somehow they’ve decided to just do nothing instead. Complete silence, at least in public, which also makes the bad buyer and investor sentiment a self-fulfilling prophecy to some extent. Surely it’d be better to at least keep building and learning publicly at a smaller scale like we used to. Meanwhile, we feel vindicated in the strategic choices we made that allow us to keep scaling, but it feels like there’s nobody to celebrate with if the whole industry is hurting.

End of submission. The corporeal man at the feast for ghosts. Such a tricky line to walk. I’m glad things are going well for you.

If you’re listening to this and this is also how you feel, you should submit your own submission, because this isn’t meant to be only a place where people can say critical things and let it rip in that kind of way. It’s really meant for all sorts of different takes and experiences that are difficult to share.

I’m always trying to encourage people by saying the naively optimistic. If you have some beautiful thought that is a little bit cringe that you want to share—I really don’t like framing it that way, but that’s how our culture tends to view those things. Or even just things are going well for you, but you’re finding it hard to have fellow feeling with others because maybe it’s not going as well for them. Feel free to submit.

You can follow this podcast on Substack. You can read the submission for yourself. There’s usually commentary with every episode. You’ll find links to submit your own experience there, ways of getting in touch. And if you wouldn’t mind subscribing to this show, either in your podcast app or especially on Substack where I’m trying to grow this show, it would be so appreciated by me. The link to Substack and those other things are in the show notes right now. Thanks for listening. I’m looking forward to sharing more stories soon.

It’s easy to dunk on LinkedIn. There are times when I will polish every word of a post that points to a deep yearning for our labor in climate to feel spiritually meaningful, and for that yearning not to be corrupted by commercial pressures of sucking up to companies whom our conscience commands us to jeer at, challenge, or at the very least not believe. It will get eighty impressions.

Then I will see a post akin to: “I went to a conference and it was good. I learned that we need more demand in carbon markets.” And the response will somehow be this:

My theory is that LinkedIn rewards banal business banter because it’s bad for business. The unstated ideology (but I repeat myself) of LinkedIn is that any business is basically good so long as it is doing business, and to challenge the fundamental wisdom of anyone’s job or company as a whole is disruptive and maybe just not a welcome part of polite society. You wouldn’t show up at your company All Hands and openly wonder if your company is on balance, at least not evil, would you? That might throw the entire symbolic order into question.

The performativity that LinkedIn rewards has a surreal Potemkin Village feel to it. The deeply unsettling foundational problems of humanity don’t exist, but if they do exist they are likely solvable by upwardly mobile entrepreneurs with the gumption to become the trillionaires of tomorrow. There’s not really any bad news, except maybe in the sense that the stock market goes up or down and jobs are created or destroyed but it’s all within normal parameters. Are those “normal” parameters good, wise, healthy, or again—at least not actively evil? I suspect LinkedIn would consider it impolite to inquire.

There’s something so deeply funny and bizarre about what we grow accustomed to. Any society has its rules that one takes for granted and builds on. If you start to ask too many questions at that layer, it gets weird. Leave the symbolic order alone!

I may as well let you read the submission that jogged all of this loose for me…

Submissions

Here is this week’s singular submission that is being published:

1. People often joke that there are more intermediaries than buyers in this industry. It’s not far off being true and as demand continues to flatline the dog that hasn’t barked is that almost none of those intermediaries have called it a day. It seems clear that the majority of them are now zombies. Either staggering on to spend all their remaining VC cash with no prospect of raising again. Or worse, cutting headcount down to a skeleton crew whose sole remaining purpose is to invoice their two repeat customers, post thought leadership on LinkedIn, and attend conference dinners holding court as the “buyer” guest of honour amidst a sea of desperate project developers.

Class and status on the climate conference circuit

One of the reasons why this meme did well on LinkedIn recently is that I think people relate to the status difference of going before those with prestigious jobs whose decisions radically impact the trajectory of one’s career and company. Well-paid, comfortable people that everyone chases around trying to make a deal, who then get to pick from while most of the chasers wonder what in the world they are supposed to do to keep going.

So while this post points specifically to intermediaries (and it’s a tough line of work running a transaction fee business where most of the biggest transactions do not pass through intermediaries), I chose to riff on some of observations of power and status that I suspect many people reading may have felt at the very least, subconsciously. Now that it’s risen to conscious thought, are you better off? No, but did poking at our symbolic order help in some way? Oh, it just made you angry? Hmm. Perhaps the anger is true, and maybe that’s something we could explore with some submissions. Here’s the info on that, and thanks for reading and listening.

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Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Hello, welcome to Climate Workers Anonymous. This is Ross Kenyon. I am the curator of Climate Workers Anonymous. I’ve worked in carbon dioxide removal and climate tech for about a decade. This is a show where people can share their real feelings about working in climate, which is often very different from what is shared on LinkedIn. LinkedIn has a strong booster-ish feel. This show does not. It’s either very sincere hope or massive frustration that is hard to say out loud without harming one’s career.

I’m going to do a really short episode today. I’m wondering how that will be received. Put a new thought in someone’s head and then you’re off doing something else. And this submission is definitely not LinkedIn booster-ish. I will editorialize in the most minor way possible by saying that. Here is the only submission from this week that I will read.

People often joke that there are more intermediaries than buyers in this industry. True, and as demand continues to flatline, the dog that hasn’t barked is that almost none of those intermediaries have called it a day. It seems clear that the majority of them are now zombies, either staggering on to spend all their remaining VC cash with no prospect of raising again, or worse, to a skeleton crew whose sole remaining purpose is to invoice their two repeat customers, post thought leadership on LinkedIn, and attend conference dinners holding court as the buyer, guest of honor, amidst a sea of desperate project developers.

End of submission. If you like what’s happening with this show, would love some feedback, comment on LinkedIn or on Substack. Substack is primarily where this publication is active. I usually do some writing in addition to whatever the submissions were about that week. You’re going to get the most out of this by joining on Substack. So the link is in the show notes if you’d like to do that.

There’s also a link if you’d like to submit your own stories, experiences, feelings, anything that relates to climate in this kind of way. I’d love to read them for you and publish your words. They’re anonymous takes. They’re unverified, so I’m not tracking down information to corroborate these stories.

Thanks for listening. Great rating and review on your podcast apps, following on LinkedIn or Substack is very much appreciated. And thanks so much for listening.

This week’s read submissions are like that. They amplify, reflect, and oppose one another. I enjoy seeing accidental harmonies, though the dissonance and randomness of submissions other weeks is amusing in its own way. The reminder of commonality is linked to a reminder of how unique our own time here.

To that effect, here’s perhaps my favorite lines ever penned on this gap between individual experience, language, and collective understanding:

But you must be the judge for yourself.

Here are the submissions for this week:

1. The VC model isn’t working. The timelines for a VC fund (10 years to generate returns) don’t align with the longer timelines to invent and commercialize super challenging very hard CDR technology

2. I am annoyed at increasing suggestions that funding for novel CDR is a diversion from finance that should go to more proven climate technologies. Is this not how capitalism and voluntary markets work? VC is shouldering much of the burden. Until we hit a compliance market, can we lose the snark about where private companies put their investments?

3. I entered the CDR space with a novel solution in 2021. It was obvious that the world was in climate crisis and my solution would support needed change to bring us back in balance. Back then the message was clear: "If you build it, they will come." I've spent my own money to build out and validate the solution.
   
   Since then I've surmounted all the hurdles: the acronyms "TEA, LCA, PDD, etc"; Undergone audits; Registered credits with credible third registrars; Demonstrated all the normal requirements like additionality, financial additionality, measurability, durability, natural and social co-benefits, bankability, reversal management, etc. Through my registrar I've issued the credits. The credits are available on the spot market.
   
   And yet there is insufficient demand. Turns out I was wrong. I built it and they have not come. Governments, businesses, institutions and individuals have not stepped up to purchase CDR. It was all a lie. I should have used my retirement funds for retirement instead of assuming the future of our planet is of interest to its inhabitants. I could have at least enjoyed 10-20 years of fun before we all burn to a crisp. Too bad for my children though.

   ---

Thanks so much for listening and/or reading. I am so glad to have you here.

If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with your network and help it find more of those who will love it.

Sincerely,

Ross Kenyon

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Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Welcome to Climate Workers Anonymous. This is Ross Kenyon. I’m the curator of this collective art project where we gather stories, experiences, feelings, analysis from those who are working in climate. The submissions that are collected are anonymous and unverified. I am not spending time tracking down their veracity.

Submission one.

Ross reads the first submission in full at this point. It is the text of the post above, from “The VC model isn’t working” to “commercialize super challenging very hard CDR technology.”

CDR being carbon dioxide removal. End of submission.

Submission two.

Ross reads the second submission in full at this point. It is the text of the post above, from “I am annoyed at increasing suggestions that funding for novel CDR” to “can we lose the snark about where private companies put their investments?”

Submission three.

Ross begins reading the third submission here. It is the text of the post above, from “I entered the CDR space with a novel solution in 2021” to “the acronyms ‘TEA, LCA, PDD, etc’.”

TEA is Technoeconomic Analysis. LCA is Lifecycle Assessment. PDD is Project Design Document.

Ross continues reading the third submission here, through to the end. It is the text of the post above, from “Undergone audits; Registered credits with credible third registrars” to “Too bad for my children though.”

Not sure how that happens, but sometimes submissions all fit in fairly nicely with one another. Sometimes there’s dissonance. Sometimes there’s harmony.

Thanks for listening. I may even get you out of here in under five minutes. I hope you enjoyed a few of these anonymous and unverified submissions about a life spent working in climate.

Today’s show has submissions covering both the highs and the lows. But even in saying that, I wonder if I start to cross my own editorial standards that I discuss in the podcast version of this episode.

Someone left a review on Apple Podcasts that made me think—should I be commenting upon the submissions? So far I haven’t been. I’ve been publishing them and letting them stand on their own. I worry that if I say too much I might misinterpret, or point people away from their intended meaning. Or, potentially worse, distract from their truth with my own commentary.

One of the other creative projects I work on is Carbon Removal Memes. It’s biggest on LinkedIn but starting to stand it up on Substack. I started it and built a writer’s room while at my previous company, Nori. It continues on with a rotating cast of meme writers where we workshop our pitches.

While I do occasionally have to reign in an editorial take on an issue I think is beyond what is supportable, I mostly try to help people find their funny. I’m not trying to grind my own ax more than theirs. Even if I don’t connect with something they made, if they find it funny and stick up for it, I’m willing to give it a shot. If it connects with them, it will likely connect with someone else.

It’s one of the few rules of making art that I know of—if you don’t like what you made, it’s unclear who else will. Or at the very least, you will be unable to tell if it is good or not unless someone tells you. That is a difficult aesthetic position to be in.

And while I don’t agree with the editorial line every meme takes, I don’t view it as my role to be the final arbiter of truth. My job is to help others express themselves and make work of which they are proud.

That ethos has also prepared me for Climate Workers Anonymous. These are unverified takes people send in. I’m not checking for corroborating sources. This is impressionistic; not journalistic. My work here is to enable others to create and share what they have experienced as true. That leads me to think I should minimize the amount of direct commentary on post submissions.

If you think I’ve made a wrong turn, feel free to comment or send a message. I’m still figuring this out and I want it to be the best version of itself that we can make it.

Carbon Removal Memes

We work in a serious industry that needs to laugh. Also, carbon removal is funny.

By Ross Kenyon

Submissions

1. I get incredibly frustrated listening to industry experts and scientists because they are among the worst communicators.
   
   Coming from the healthcare space there are very few absolutes when talking about scientific intervention. Both industries like to go on and on explaining nuance, trade offs, unintended side effects, and all through the well intended belief that people should make informed decisions.
   
   In reality the important go/no-go decisions are made because of well thought out marketing campaigns, tribal dynamics, and incentives.
   
   If carbon removal is going to be taken seriously we need to bring in the worlds best communicators who aren't just posting on Linkedin. They need to be out in the real world finding ways to connect this to peoples everyday lives.

2. The climate companies I worked at were, hands down, the most toxic cultures I experienced in 15+ years. It feels like the previous gold rush in climate tech funding (RIP) attracted really narcissistic personalities, even by tech founder standards. Some of those "impact tech founders" have now pivoted into AI; follow the money, I guess.
   
   I'm much more content now day to day after switching into working on a climate-adjacent topic that doesn't self-glorify the way carbon companies did. I'm working on something that helps real people. However, I still get a front row seat to how close to collapse our systems are. And I struggle with guilt about having participated in what I now consider to be greenwashing efforts.
   
   I used to be way more technocratically optimistic. Unfortunately these experiences have convinced me we are truly f*cked. The private sector seemed like the only front of the war where things were moving for awhile & now I have no faith. Everyone's in AI psychosis and staying really busy in the remaining normal years we have left, while our governments enable crazy men extracting whatever we have left before their bunkers are ready.
   
   Whereas it used to feel powerful to be driving these topics in the tech economy, it now feels taboo. Overall I feel incredibly lonely; there are very few people (just a couple friends and former colleagues) who I can talk to about this stuff openly.

3. I may be more group therapy-ing here than confessing. But forgive me nonetheless. Also I did dictate to and then put it through an LLM in an attempt to anonymise it a little more (which I would argue is a fair use of an LLM, by the way).
   
   So:
   
   I increasingly think that in the work of carbon removal, of climate action, and of tending the wider bounds of this Earth, that we must keep faith with people.
   Faith with humanity.
   
   It is easy to lose it. One looks upon many institutions, upon quite a few ‘fashionable’ organisations, upon some leaders of the hour, strutting and fretting their brief turn upon the world stage.
   
   One often sees ignorance, vanity, fear short reckonings, and the cold arithmetic of the zero-sum game. One sees much that would invite despair.
   
   Yet as the years pass, I find myself believing the opposite about my fellow Homo sapiens.
   
   I think these harmful behaviours - vivid and gravels they can seem, are not the rule, but the exception.
   
   The rule is that most people are decent.
   As Rutger Bregman and others have written, the true tale of humanity is often not the one we tell. The real Lord of the Flies (and I recommended looking up the real Lord of the flies) is not a descent into savagery, but people cast ashore who learn to help one another. They quarrel. They disagree. They grow angry and must walk apart for a while. Then they return and speak again.
   
   They resolve things, they heal, they carry on together.
   
   The cruel person, the sociopath, the one whom old myths would call wicked, is rarer than we think. They command attention because they are loud. And because, annoyingly, they still seem a bit too good at getting into positions of power. But they are not the multitude.
   
   I could offer many examples from my own brief passage upon this Earth, but I shall leave you with one.
   
   For a time I volunteered as a musician at my church. Between songs, we would stand at the back and listen to the sermon. One day I found myself and my band mates off to the side near a water point.
   
   There was a young girl, seven or eight years of age. She kept coming to fill up cups of water, and then go back and give them to other children and parents in the kids areas. It was such a small yet immeasurably kind act. Nothing remarkable, perhaps, except that it was.
   
   Later I learned that she and her siblings were refugees. I learned also that she was being bullied at school.
   
   I can take care of myself, and these days my heart can often feel quite hardened. But I still feel very moved thinking about that vivid example - and frankly many tens of thousands of interactions I’ve now had with others that basically reflect that game-theoretic structure.
   
   In my least-worst moments, I work to remember that the vast majorly of humankind would have once been like that little girl.
   
   Even the hardest among us was once a child.
   
   Even the ruthless executive. Even the cut-throat trader. The corrupt politician. Even the squanderer of tomorrow who spends the future as though it were petty cash.
   
   Even the person who wounds others and, perhaps, themselves.
   
   Chances are that once they, too, tried to be kind. Once they, too, desired only to belong. Once they, too, were a small child trying to bring some water to others.
   
   I know this is not always so. There are dark things in the world. One of the great tasks of our age is to solve our problems of coordination and to help the collaborative, helping majority prevail over the predatory, harmful few.
   
   Yet I believe with all my heart that most people, when given knowledge, opportunity, and agency, wish to help.
   
   They wish to care for the carbon cycle and the climate. They wish to protect the living systems upon which all lives depend. They wish to leave a fairer inheritance than the one they received.
   Give people the chance, and most will not turn away.
   
   Give them the tools, and many will do beautiful things.
   
   And when I am cynical, when I am frustrated, when I am feeling just so very tired and alone, I try to remember all this.
   
   Then I try again to do my small part towards helping nurture a more safe and just future for all, and - where possible - reversing climate change.

If you are truly a completist, here’s a link to Gertrude Stein.1 I am not sure if this is in fact an apt comparison, but it stands as a thought.

Thanks so much for reading and listening. I am glad you’re here.

Sincerely,

Ross Kenyon

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Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Welcome to Climate Workers Anonymous. This is Ross Kenyon. I am the curator of this collective art project, paying homage to PostSecret, but for those who work in climate. In this show, people send in anonymous and unverified takes, experiences, feelings, hopes, fears about their work in climate, something that they might like to share, but also do not wish to be attributed to their name.

If you haven’t subscribed on your podcast app or on Substack, that would be much appreciated. A lot of the show is happening on Substack, so your support over there means a great deal. Rating the show, giving it a great review is also very much appreciated. If you’re able to do so, please open up your podcast app right now, whatever it is, write a positive review, give it a full rating, and thanks so much for your support.

I’m happy you’re here. I’m sure the people who are writing in also are happy that the things that are maybe a bit too painful to share out loud are being appreciated in the quiet over on this podcast and publication.

One quick reflection. I saw a review on Apple Podcasts that came out saying that they had wished I would comment on the submissions. And I’m trying to think my way through that. I’ve been presenting them and then letting them stand on their own for the most part. Maybe I have a reflection at the beginning of the show that relates in some way. But I’m also trying not to add too much editorial color to what other people are saying. I wonder if I add too much, will I take away from what others are trying to say? What if my interpretation of their words is not what they had meant to say? Somehow distorts it, ruins it. It’s also possible that I enhance it, but it’s also possible that maybe I missed the mark. I’m trying to think through exactly how that might go and what might be the right way to run that risk. Better to leave it starkly alone. Better to add some commentary. I’m going to think.

But as someone who has been making Reversing Climate Change, my other podcast project, for about a decade, I can be a little bit loquacious. And I’m trying to do things that are different. I feel like if I do something that’s too close to how I do things on Reversing Climate Change, maybe it will not be different enough to be viewed as a separate project. And I really do want them to be viewed as separate. While emotional topics come up on that show a lot, and if you haven’t heard it, you will almost certainly like it if you like Climate Workers Anonymous. I think the kind of person who likes one will likely like both, but Reversing Climate Change does have a fair amount of emotional shows, though it focuses more on cerebral, literary, philosophical, historical connections to carbon dioxide removal and climate change.

Whereas what’s happening in this show, I’m trying to keep it just real, emotionally grounded. Not a bunch of fancy footwork. Not trying to show off how many books I may or may not have read. Just being a proxy for the feelings of others that are maybe difficult to share.

And as I’m saying this, I’m realizing that this is also my role with Carbon Removal Memes, which if you haven’t seen, they’re also on Substack and I’m trying to stand it up over there. It’s mostly on LinkedIn at this point. They are memes about working in carbon dioxide removal and climate, climate tech. Some of them have some spicy hot takes in there. I don’t make every meme. People sometimes assume that, or they want to talk to me as though I do that, but there’s a writer’s room. And I try to make sure that whoever is making a meme, when we workshop it, I don’t necessarily run over them with my own editorial preference on is what they’re saying good or bad or ethical. Maybe sometimes I do if it gets close to that. I also want people to feel free to chase the funny wherever it goes. And if it’s true to them, it’s likely true to someone else, even if it’s not true to me.

And so the job of leading a writer’s room, curating, fostering a writer’s room, however we want to say it, or even just acting as a leader in those spaces is maybe more general, maybe the way that I prefer to say it, is you help others achieve their comedic vision without necessarily having to get your own fingerprints all over it. It’s the Gertrude Stein of meme making mentality. Actually, I think Gertrude Stein was probably a bit more involved with the Lost Generation writers. Now I need to go look that up. That’s probably not even correct.

So same for the memes. Sure, I think I’m the only one in the writer’s room, which is rotating, that has it on their LinkedIn profile. And that means that stuff can pass through me in a way that, I don’t know, if people have something that they want to say that maybe they’re a little bit scared to say, then okay. They’re not publicly affiliated. And same with this. I’m just a vehicle, a tool for supporting the comedic and emotional gifts others bestow upon the world, upon our industry. And maybe that’s a good way to say it.

So I think I’m going to abstain from too much commentary on individual submissions right now, because I’m trying to make space for others to really let it rip with how they see it. And I think I would feel bad if someone poured their heart into something and I riffed on it in a direction that somehow diminished the trust that they put into me and the show. So I’m probably going to keep it simple for now. I’ll keep thinking about it though.

And if you think I’ve made the wrong decision on this, you think I should turn back, you let me know. There’s a ProtonMail email address in the show notes. You can also just write into the Tally submission form for anonymous feedback. If you have feedback in any direction, feel free to let me know so I can make sure that this is a project that will keep you coming back for more.

Prologue over. Let’s get to the first submission.

Submission number one.

Ross reads the first submission in full at this point. It is the text of the post above, from “I get incredibly frustrated listening to industry experts and scientists” to “finding ways to connect this to people’s everyday lives.”

Submission number two.

Ross reads the second submission in full at this point. It is the text of the post above, from “The climate companies I worked at were, hands down, the most toxic cultures” to “who I can talk to about this stuff openly.”

Submission three.

Ross reads the third submission in full at this point. It is the text of the post above, from “I may be more group therapy-ing here than confessing” to “and—where possible—reversing climate change.”

Thanks so much for listening to Climate Workers Anonymous. If you enjoyed this show, please subscribe. Give this show a great rating and review in your podcast app. See you on Substack. Tell a friend about this. Post about it on LinkedIn or wherever you’re doing your social media.

Thanks so much for listening. I hope you were able to connect with at least one of these submissions today. And have a lovely day.

Welcome to Climate Workers Anonymous, where those who work in climate get to share their anonymous and unverified feelings, experiences, and analysis. Today’s episode has two longer pieces that were submitted.

Before I get into those, I wanted to share an additional reflection about the origins of the show’s name. A friend of mine said it and I cottoned onto it right away, and I didn’t quite make the connection that it might also have to do with my admiration for the Catholic Worker Movement and Dorothy Day, in addition to my respect for the various addiction treatment mutual aid organizations that end in “Anonymous”.

What I love about both organizations is that they don’t use a hierarchical charitable orientation. The addiction groups are run by an ethos of equality, and that all are addicts, and it is addicts helping one another. For the Catholic Worker, their focus is on works of mercy that recognize the inherent dignity and equal worth of all people, and that any of us might just as easily be in a position that needs this kind of help.

This recognition of moral luck renders judgment and hierarchy irrelevant, since it simultaneously encourages us to see ourselves as a fallen sinner as equally as those we “help”, and (if not secular, which many participants in Catholic Worker houses are) to recognize Christ in the “least of these.” The dual nature of humans as both entirely equal and plain, as well as being a locus for divinity to break through everyday reality, is a paradox I like to think a lot about.

Here’s the famous verses about the works of mercy if that’s of interest. Even if non-religious, it is a beautiful passage.

40 And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

41 Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:

42 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:

43 I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.

44 Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?

45 Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.

— Matthew 25:40-45, King James Version

Ideally, that gives some additional context for why I am attracted to this kind of work.

Here are the submissions.

1. There's a story in carbon removal that everything is getting worse in the near term. Microsoft pausing, not enough buyers, VC pullback and startup consolidation (politely failing), people leaving CDR and climate for greener pastures, some or all pathways are slower and more painful than expected. For the love of God, when will the holy grail of compliance markets bless us with more demand than we know what to do with? (Demand that is actually in line with what the world needs?!)
   
   I feel it. It's real. And I also see the people who've been through it in the space and, this is the crazy part, decide to double down and support the space, start new ventures, pull more money in. Some of them are doing the hardest part of project development with all their lessons learned. Many of them are making big bets on future demand.
   
   I often feel this is crazy. Are they just true believers who can't let go? People who we appreciate because they're trying to do something helpful in the world but also pity because of their upcoming failure? Or are we just short sighted and cynical, and they will actually make a real difference for the world and a shit ton of money in a decade?
   
   They are certainly right that someone needs to keep global capacity alive and maturing to do CDR. Other than that, no one knows anything about how it will go.
   
   But the hope of the people coming back for a second or third round, having learned some things and trying again means something. The hope of people staking their careers on doing something that matters and not always with financial certainty means something. The hope of all these new ventures that will mostly crash and burn but learn something on the way and pass it on to the next set of ventures means something. And what if we've already hit the bottom?
   
   If I can't predict the future, maybe betting on CDR isn't the worst decision. Maybe it's even a good decision that just feels bad right now.

2. Unrealistic targets for how much CDR can be achieved by certain years are delusional and only serve to drive collective hysteria and feed potential or actual moral hazards. We should greatly adjust our 2050 targets downward to just 2–3 gigatonnes of novel CDR and focus as much as possible on absolute decarbonization. On this thread, it would be even better for the climate to break out of the paradigm of using CDR to compensate for residual emissions and create a paradigm focused on reducing absolute emission as close to zero as possible while simultaneously scaling CDR not to “allow us to keep emitting” but rather to reverse the damage that’s already been done and that will continue to be done until we do hit zero emissions.

Sincerely,

Ross Kenyon

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Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Hello, this is Ross Kenyon. I am the curator of Climate Workers Anonymous. This is a collective art project modeled off of PostSecret, where those who work in climate can share the things that they feel and have experienced that maybe they don’t want attributed to their own names. That can be hopeful things. That can be despairing things. It can be funny things. It can be tragic things. It can be feelings. It can be analysis. Today, we have a couple that are more on the analysis side, long ones, that I believe will certainly interest those who work in the carbon dioxide removal space.

If this is your first time here, welcome. I would be supremely grateful if you could open up your podcast app right now and give this show a great rating and review if you are so inclined. Sharing it on social media, subscribing to the show on Substack, following the show on LinkedIn—these things are also very valuable and much appreciated.

Before I read today’s submissions, I had an insight about the show that I wanted to share. I had a hard time articulating what exactly it was about the name that attracted me so quickly. I did a show earlier where I discussed that it may have been related to Gabor Maté’s work on addiction, and thinking about how the various anonymous programs have functioned and what the connection is between this name and that name. And that’s definitely a part of it.

For some reason, I’m not even sure how I overlooked this, but I’ve also been a fan and very influenced by Dorothy Day’s work with the Catholic Worker Movement. Recently, I was by one of the remaining Catholic Worker houses that’s active, and I stopped by for their open house dinner, which I like to do whenever I’m in the area. And then I was like, oh, worker. Oh, this is in the title of Climate Workers Anonymous. Okay. And some part of my attraction to this phrase, which I didn’t come up with—the Climate Workers Anonymous phrase, a friend of mine had said it. I’m like, oh, that’s perfect. But I didn’t necessarily know why I liked it so much. And then I was sitting at the Catholic Worker House, and I was—oh, that’s one of the reasons why, too.

If you’re not familiar with the Catholic Worker Movement and Dorothy Day: Dorothy Day was a very, very radical woman. She was sort of a writer and a muckraking journalist and had some hard living in New York City—political radical, anarchist, socialist—and then just got bitten by the bug to go to church and read the Bible, and then I became very fascinated by, as far as I understand it, the Sermon on the Mount, works of mercy, recognizing the universality between humans, and that our job is to clothe the naked, feed the hungry, care for the sick, visit those in prison, but also to do it in a non-hierarchical way, to recognize that it could just as easily be the caregiver in that position as the person receiving care, and vice versa.

Okay. Prologue done. Two submissions today. They’re both longer and more analytical. Submission number one.

Ross reads the first submission in full at this point. It is the text of the post above, from “There’s a story in carbon removal that everything is getting worse in the near term” to “maybe betting on CDR isn’t the worst decision. Maybe it’s even a good decision that just feels bad right now.”

Ross then reads the second submission in full. It is the text of the post above, from the paragraph that begins “… targets for how much CDR can be achieved by certain years are delusional and only serve to drive collective hysteria” to “reverse the damage that’s already been done and that will continue to be done until we do hit zero emissions.”

Thanks so much for the people who submitted. I’m grateful you took the time to communicate this to me and trusted me to share it. That’s meaningful.

If you have a thought or a feeling, criticism, a hope, come share it. There’s a link in the show notes to submit on Tally. You don’t have to reveal who you are. All of these are anonymous and unverified.

If you like this show, tell someone about it. Subscribe on Substack or in your podcast app. Give it a great rating. Help more people find it.

When this type of art project is good, it’s oral history that’s accreting over time and building up the true feelings of what it was like to work in the early days of climate. Maybe the middle days. I don’t even know which days these are half the time. And I suspect many other people would find it worthwhile if they knew about it. Please help me get this out to a wider audience. Thanks so much for listening. I appreciate you. Have a great day.

Welcome to episode #4 of Climate Workers Anonymous, where those workers in climate can share their anonymous and unverified thoughts, feelings, and experiences about their work. What do you dare to think when you might not be judged for it? What’s your heretical thought, your foolish hope, or your hard-won experience? Share it here for publication on the written Substack and to be read in the podcast version.

In this episode’s introduction, I explain a bit more about the limits of the show, and why if you believe there is any sort of questionable behavior by specific parties you should consider contacting an investigative journalist whom you respect. They are much better equipped to evaluate truth claims in this way and typically have anonymity protocols far more sophisticated than what I can offer. I keep this show anonymous and unverified to make sure there is room to discuss the truth of experience and feelings without having to do the hardboiled work of others. I hope that makes sense!

Here are the submissions for this episode:

1. We should hit pause on any crediting of open-systems carbon removal pathways like enhanced rock weathering and ocean alkalinity enhancement. Due to the inability to directly verify carbon storage with these approaches, it is simply too risky to use credits from these pathways to compensate for any level of positive emissions. Some findings are already emerging demonstrating that actual removal was far less than previously thought, and there will continue to be high risks of such findings. This dynamic poses a severe risk to the climate, as we may end up using essentially phantom credits to compensate or even justify for emissions, which would also gravely harm the reputation and ultimate scalability of the industry. The most prudent thing to do is to hit pause on crediting and conduct more research, only to resume any kind of formal crediting once our full, end-to-end understanding of these processes is much better.

2. I've seen this whole climate action thing as a response to grief-denial for some years now. I even went back to graduate school to study it - building more grief in the process of involvement in academia - and continue to witness it throughout the polycrisis.
   
   How we respond to the fear of collapse or death influences whether we respond to the defoulment of the planet by moving toward stewardship head-on, at an angle, or in the opposite direction.
   
   I'm coming to see that the moments the deeper part, the part that is afraid, is touched, is where the real work is happening. So the stuff that's put on top of that should be about bringing us together so we can have more of these moments of contact. The denial of the position of grief in all of this plays a central role in the work.
   
   Pointing at each other and passing judgment is keeping us apart.

3. I wish people working in climate would virtue signal less. We are all working towards the same goal. Don't go out of your way to make someone feel less than for "not doing enough." We're all tired out here. Kind words go way further than backhanded comments.
   - Someone who has worked in climate their entire career

Thank you again to everyone who has submitted to the project!

Sincerely,

Ross Kenyon

Subscribe now

Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Welcome to Climate Workers Anonymous. This is Ross Kenyon. I’m the curator of this collective art project. I’ve been working in climate for about a decade, and I’m really happy that Climate Workers Anonymous is here to help people share the unshareable. If you have an experience, a feeling, analysis, things that you don’t necessarily want attributed to you personally but would like to see expressed in our space, there’s a link to a Tally form through which you could submit these thoughts. Do not share anything on there that you would not like to be revealed. There is also a Proton Mail email address if you’d like to send an email, though that requires additional steps to make sure that one is being secure in what you send.

I feel the need to issue some extra guidance this week. If you submit something to Climate Workers Anonymous that goes beyond disappointment, fear, hope, and enters into the territory of companies doing things that they really should not be doing—especially if this pertains to a specific company rather than a general trend of something that’s part of the industry that has maybe been overlooked or taken for granted, that needs greater scrutiny—then I think you should submit your comments to investigative journalists whom you respect and think will investigate this story competently.

If you haven’t heard me say this on previous episodes, the submissions that are read by me here and published on Substack are unverified. So I do not have the resources, nor am I a trained investigative journalist that is going to be able to dig into the truth claims of what is being said here. I’m sensitive to the fact that with this being anonymous, people could use it to spread rumors or plant stories about people if they were malicious. And so the best thing I think I can do to mitigate that risk is to keep this more at the level of feelings and experience, and not be naming specific people nor guessing which stories are about which parties. In fact, if I get the sense that that’s happening, I may even generalize out from what you submit to make sure that it expresses the emotional or experiential core of what you’re trying to say, without saying X party is doing something that I think is unethical in some way and here’s why.

If you feel that the right thing to do is to bring something to light, you should find the appropriate way to do so. Unfortunately, I do not think it is likely to be this show.

Several submissions today. I’ll start with the first one. Submission number one.

Ross reads the first submission in full at this point. It is the text of the post above, from “We should hit pause on any crediting of open-systems carbon removal pathways” to “once our full, end-to-end understanding of these processes is much better.”

Submission number two.

Ross reads the second submission in full at this point. It is the text of the post above, from “I’ve seen this whole climate action thing as a response to grief-denial” to “Pointing at each other and passing judgment is keeping us apart.”

Submission number three.

Ross reads the third submission in full at this point, including its sign-off. It is the text of the post above, from “I wish people working in climate would virtue signal less” to “Kind words go way further than backhanded comments.—Someone who has worked in climate their entire career.”

Thanks so much for listening today. I appreciate the people who shared their thoughts with me and allowed me to publish them on their behalf. If you like this project, subscribing on Substack, sharing it in your social media, putting this on LinkedIn that you really like this show, giving the show a great rating and review on whichever podcast app you use, like Apple Podcasts or Spotify—that can really do a world of wonders trying to get this show out to more people.

If you’d like to submit your own feelings, experiences, whatever it is that you want to say that maybe feel like you can’t do under your own name, you want a little bit of distance from this, the link to do so through the Tally survey is in the show notes, along with the project’s email address. Thanks so much for listening. Have a wonderful day.

We’ve barely even started Climate Workers Anonymous and I’m already receiving such challenging and intriguing pieces of feedback, and so many submissions. Thank you to everyone who has participated to date and taken time to share something real with this project.

A friend of mine wrote me right before I recorded this episode and mentioned that he wanted fewer hot takes and more stories, and emotional content beyond anger. It set me to thinking about anger and how I understand its usefulness or lack thereof.

Anger can be a legitimate response to the unfairness of external results. It can be something pointed inward to something that needs psychological and/or spiritual attention.

If Christian, anger at others can be the ethical equivalent of murder. Jesus takes the old laws here and makes it so much more demanding:

If Buddhist, anger points to thwarted desire, and the need to eliminate that desire.

Or, anger can be sublimated sadness. What might be tears may start as fury. Sometimes people need to work their way through the anger to get to the well of despondency below. In climate, this is often a deep disappointment that we just cannot get our act together as a species. It is hard living with that fact. When I get past my own anger, what is down below is a plaintive child earnestly yearning for all of humanity to live well together and to treat one another with the kindness, patience, and mercy. We could have that world. And yet, we have chosen something so much worse. These thoughts point me to the puzzles of akrasia, and what causes us to choose something inferior as though this is all we might have, deserve, or just be capable of.

That simpleness is deceptively difficult to reach. I think it’s actually the point of this passage from the Gospel (not to be too Bible-y today, but if the shoe fits…)

Earnestness and simplicity are so jarring that I spent a decent chunk of time being wowed by just how simple ’s book Everything is Tuberculosis is in a recent Reversing Climate Change episode.

While we are seeing a lot of submissions that have the cut of anger about them, that’s okay. Anger isn’t a false emotion. Suppressing it isn’t the answer. But I do think we want to process through anger into what lies beyond.

This is not to discourage anger in your submissions—that likely needs to be expressed. But I would encourage you not to stop there. Feel what is beyond anger. Try to talk about that. Send me of your experiences in working through anger and accessing a different part of your relationship to climate.

If you do experience sadness and struggle with anger, go the opposite direction! Maybe you have been pushing your anger down. But it’s okay to be angry about climate and the direction of the world. You can share that here too. Perhaps this didn’t come through as strongly in the audio version of this episode, but we need you to feel those feelings that have been inaccessible or difficult to express as well. That is equally a part of this.

It isn’t exactly clear what the ultimate shape of this project will be. If you have an intuition that you should send something in, please do. Don’t let my prompts prevent you from saying something true. If I am able (and I really do try to pass along all of the submissions), I will help you say your true thing.

Submissions

Warning: these submissions are anonymous and unverified.

1. Even with all the BS in the carbon removal industry, I do believe deep down that society will one day achieve net-negative emissions each year. Even if it's a small amount, and even though there will be unfathomable and irreversible damage to the planet in the meantime, the cumulative impact of this across centuries will be beneficial.
   
   Our main challenge in some ways is to figure out how to prevent this promise from being used in any way to deter mitigation. With some emotional maturity, I think that's possible, but many people disagree.

2. CDR is not bipartisan for a good reason

3. I don't think the unit economics of e-fuels will every really pencil but I'm also worried about the risks and harms from continuing business-as-usual use of fossil fuels paired with carbon removal. But will electrification, efficiency, and demand reduction be enough for net zero? Sometimes, I just don't know and feel like it's not knowable and that we need to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. But that approach creates ripe conditions for fraudsters... Grrr

4. Consolidation in climate tech will be healthy. Founders will need to put their egos aside for a more peaceful process, however.

5. I think a lot if not most of the proposals being put forward right now to reform corporate carbon accounting standards are really just a race to the bottom and dilution in disguise. And I'm not sure the people promoting these changes would even be able to realize if this is the case.

6. Many folks I work with (across sectors in corporate climate strategy) are understandably concerned about about rising temperatures. Yet many of those same people escape from the city to the countryside for a break from the heat, while their investment portfolios grow through holdings in real estate, construction, and infrastructure that are doubling down on urban development with a hint of "green" that checks a few ESG boxes.
   
   Where's the climate science newsflash about pavement and urbanization as major causes of both warming and flooding? When I raise this with my climate colleagues — who are hyper-focused on carbon accounting, and not yet ready to question the logic of their paychecks — I'm teased as a climate denier.
   
   But to me it's like accounting and reality broke up a while ago and everyone forget they ever had a relationship.

7. mCDR researchers insist that open, transparent data sharing is critical to ensure that field trials are conducted safely and responsibly. But you know who actually digs up this data and stops to ask about it? Undergrads. Business developers. Engineers. Not the oceanographers and biogeochemists who are often the loudest voices of concern for potential negative impacts.
   
   That’s a real problem. We need real leadership to understand how mCDR is developing and to drive consensus on how it should be done— and that can’t come from the scattered workshops and slow publishing that is comfortable to marine scientists.

8. I'm tired of the fake concern for the planet from most people in the CDR/ climate space.  I worked for [a climate tech market intelligence company and the C-suite and marketing leadership kept flying between major cities without a care in the world about emissions.]
   
   They gave a f*** about emissions. They started the company because they had the skillset to build such a platform. Period. There was no love for the planet there.
   
   Similarly, CDR developers rushing to NYC/London climate week by taking a flight is ridiculous!!
   
   You are contributing to the very problem you are trying to avoid/remove.
   I also get it that meeting in person is needed but I think people should participate in local chapters instead.
   
   Linkedin is rife with people trying to show that they are participating in these events like its a cool thing, like going to an exclusive invite-only party or something.
   
   Point 2 from the anonymous feedbacks you received is very true. We are all screwed. I'm in fact buying a house in a city which has a river nearby so that when a drought hits, I might have some water for my baby. Ugh!!

   Subscribe now

   ---

Accidental Modest Mouse was indeed accidental, but coincidentally, I saw they just released a new album for the first time in a while.

Elder millennials, RISE UP.

Also, stay tuned for an episode of my other podcast, Reversing Climate Change, which will soon feature a fuller exploration of the Bhagavad Gita.

Reversing Climate Change

Podcast and publication from Ross Kenyon—a carbon removal and climatetech entrepreneur, political philosophy PhD dropout, pondering the Anthropocene and what the hell are we all doing here.

By Ross Kenyon

Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Hello. Thanks for listening to Climate Workers Anonymous. This is Ross Kenyon. I am a climate worker and the curator of this collective art project.

I have been receiving a lot of correspondence about this project. I will say, I received a thoughtful message only a few hours before recording this, from a friend of mine, saying that they had hoped that this project would not duplicate the bad parts of the anonymity of the internet, which is that people can be critical without having to stand behind their criticism. This type of anonymity can also be emboldening of sort of the worst parts of mob-like behavior. This may in fact promote less accountability and less truth-telling, but encourage the vicious parts of ourselves to come out, let loose, say something nasty, and then retreat back without allowing the person or group or holder of the belief that’s being challenged to ever truly face their accuser.

This comment made me think so much of PostSecret, the art project that Climate Workers Anonymous takes its inspiration from. I associate it with the aughts, you know, 2000s, MySpace days, early social media, where the primary way of relating to people was still goofing around in your cul-de-sac, longboarding down a big hill with some friends, playing basketball, going trick-or-treating, playing music, things like that, that in many cases, at least by all the data I’ve seen, is in great decline.

In the aughts, in the MySpace days, in the PostSecret heyday, where most of our interaction was still unmediated by technology, maybe we needed a little bit more anonymity in order to be truthful. I’m not sure that those same conditions hold two decades later. Now it seems that so much of our behavior is online, so much of it is anonymous, that we’re actually trying to recover more authenticity and accountability, and that means showing up to your PTA, helping your neighbors, being involved in things that include moving your body to a different location, things like that.

This person’s request was to spend more time sharing emotional stories rather than hot takes, and I’m not sure exactly what to make of that request. When I think about anger and the nature of anger, there are a few big ways that I understand it. Perhaps the first is that anger is a legitimate response to perceived unfairness, disadvantage, dishonor, and we shouldn’t try to just shove that down right away. If anger exists, it likely points to something real that is external. Maybe a situation is genuinely unfair. Or it might point to something internal: why is this response provoking me to anger? And that opens up about a thousand questions that can be unpacked in therapy or with a member of clergy for a very long time.

And once you start going down the metaphysical, ethical nature of anger, you end up in a space of, when is anger justified? Should we have anger at all? If you take it to its most extreme, you can have someone like Jesus saying that merely calling someone Raca in your heart, privately, call them a jerk or a fool privately, don’t even say it out loud, is functionally equivalent to murder. When you are angry at someone, when you feel hate and you let those feelings rise in you, the difference may be one of degree between actual murder, but at least within this portion of Christian theology, in terms of kind, they are the same.

If you’re Buddhist, you might interpret anger as being a reaction to your desire, which has been thwarted, and the way to handle that, as you probably know, is to let go of desire. It’s hard to be angry if you aren’t rooting for a specific outcome that you would very much want.

One way that I think about anger, which may be useful here, is that anger is sublimated sadness. If we could get past the defensiveness, the fury that comes along with anger that’s often pointed outside, in many cases there are tears lurking behind the anger. And as people are learning to deal with emotions, that might require some amount of processing through anger and trying to get to the wounded, vulnerable sadness underneath that anger.

And so when people are submitting comments that strike me as somewhat angry or truly angry, I’m wondering if there’s not a core of sadness that’s in there somewhere, right below that anger. Maybe it coexists with the anger. Maybe when some people wrote this, their ire was up for some reason, and maybe if they had the same prompt when the cortisol was not flowing in their blood, maybe they would have given an answer that was more sad.

I’m not entirely sure how to deal with this editorial note. I’m grateful for receiving it. If you have feedback about how to make this show better, the kinds of submissions you’d like to hear more of, one solution here is encourage them to duplicate your efforts, and I agree. I really don’t want this to be a place for people to only leave criticisms, only leave their negative or sad feelings.

And actually, I have some submissions this week that I’m about to read that do feel emotionally different from what I just described. There’s some stories of hope against hope. Maybe it’s not how you wanted it to be, maybe it’s not how you expected it to be, but you’re still here and you’re still doing the work, and you still are showing up over and over and over again trying to make this work. And I think stories like that can also be really valuable, and also hard to share under some circumstances.

I think being in a meeting and saying, this work is so hard that sometimes it’s challenging just to keep going every day and just to keep coming back for more with this. I think if you said that and your boss was listening, their ears might perk in a way, unless you had a very wise boss, it may not be ideal for you. So I think that’s just as brave and just as important. And don’t feel like you have to only send in your spicy little hot takes, because as much as I like supplying some hot takes, and I am certainly guilty of having supplied a fair number of those, I think you can also look for what’s an undersupply right now and try to find ways to make your contribution something that culturally is bringing something else to the table.

The answer to an inconsolable pessimism is not Pollyanna, is not an unrealistic optimism. I’m not even sure that it is a realistic optimism. I’ve been rereading over and over the Bhagavad Gita and various translations recently. I’ve been interested in that book for a very long time, and one lesson from it that sticks with me is that the correct way to do action is to detach yourself from the results. You have the right to work, but not the right to its results. You do the work because it’s there to do and it’s yours to do. Beyond that, any expectation put on it can only be distorting of the dignity that can come from doing good work for its own sake.

Are we going to figure this all out with climate, and dare I say the polycrisis? I don’t know. I do the best I can, my own little way, and that’s all that I can really do, or anyone else can really do either. Working in that way likely does have some sense of optimism, but there can also be some form of productive non-dualism, I think, within that kind of mindset too. You do the work because it’s good and it’s there to do, and moreover it is yours to do. And even if things turn out a bit too heavy, we’ll all float on.

All right. Oh man, I started this by talking about being an elder millennial and then I quote that Modest Mouse song. I think it’s just time to read submissions. I don’t know that there’s a way back into monologue from there, so I’m gonna go right into this now. You’re welcome, or sorry, or both. I don’t know what else to say to you.

All right, submission time. And here is submission one.

Ross reads the first submission in full at this point. It is the text of the post above, from “Even with all the BS in the carbon removal industry” to “With some emotional maturity, I think that’s possible, but many people disagree.”

Submission two.

Ross reads the second submission in full at this point. It is the one line in the post above: “CDR is not bipartisan for a good reason.”

Submission three.

Ross reads the third submission in full at this point. It is the text of the post above, from “I don’t think the unit economics of e-fuels” to “that approach creates ripe conditions for fraudsters… Grrr”.

Gosh, trying to make me make animal sounds. I have to do onomatopoeias now too. Sorry, that’s my comment.

Submission four.

Ross reads the fourth submission in full at this point. It is the text of the post above, from “Consolidation in climate tech will be healthy” to “put their egos aside for a more peaceful process, however.”

Submission five.

Ross reads the fifth submission in full at this point. It is the text of the post above, from “I think a lot if not most of the proposals being put forward right now” to “would even be able to realize if this is the case.”

Submission six.

Ross reads the sixth submission in full at this point. It is the text of the post above, from “Many folks I work with (across sectors in corporate climate strategy)” to “it’s like accounting and reality broke up a while ago and everyone forget they ever had a relationship.”

Submission seven.

Ross reads the seventh submission in full at this point. It is the text of the post above, from “mCDR researchers insist that open, transparent data sharing is critical” to “the scattered workshops and slow publishing that is comfortable to marine scientists.”

Submission eight.

Ross reads the eighth submission in full at this point. It is the text of the post above, from “I’m tired of the fake concern for the planet” through to “when a drought hits, I might have some water for my baby. Ugh!!”

Okay, that’s all I got for today. Thanks for listening. Thanks for sharing too, I really appreciate it. I like having all the takes. I’m trying not to editorialize and say which ones that I strongly agree with or which ones I might disagree with. I don’t think that’s the point, and moreover, I don’t really want to be in that position.

If you’d like to submit your own feelings, stories, things that you don’t feel like you can really share publicly in the way that you might like, there’s a Tally link to do so in the show notes. You can send us in with that attribution.

And in that same theme, I am unable to verify any of this information. I am not an investigative reporter. I am not finding ways to corroborate these stories and make sure that what they’re pointing to is true. I do the best I can and assume that people come in good faith here and have something sincere that they would like to say.

If you’ve submitted and haven’t heard yours read yet, it’s either in the queue for the future, it barely missed the cutoff for this episode, or maybe I’m thinking about it. Some of them I’m trying to think really deeply about how to share in a wise, compassionate, decent way that I would be proud of, and sometimes that means that it doesn’t just go out in the order in which it was received. I hope that can be understood, maybe even respected.

Thanks for being a part of this collective art project. This is Climate Workers Anonymous. I am the curator of this show, Ross Kenyon. Be sure to follow the project on Substack. You can see all this written down, it isn’t just me reading it. That’s where this podcast is hosted, so there’s a lot more involvement over there. Thanks for listening. I hope you have a wonderful day.

Hello! Welcome to the second episode of Climate Workers Anonymous. The goal of this show is to help those who work in climate to say the unsayable. That’s no small feat. These submissions are from brave people who work under challenging conditions and need to say. the. damn. thing.

A special note on today’s show and for really all subsequent shows: these submissions are anonymous and unverified. Because I cannot verify claims about specific people or entities, I have decided to edit some submissions to be sufficiently general. This is a collective art project about feelings, and not investigative journalism. For more details on this, listen to this podcast episode.

Today’s damn things that need to be said are listed below. There are fourteen of them in this episode! KEEP THEM COMING!

1. What's with climate events that serve meat, and sometimes mostly meat?? Still!
   It's such an easy win to go plant-based for an event and increasingly accessible. Sure, your org might be doing amazing work for climate solutions in the macro, but the micro matters too. It's not asking everyone to go hard-core vegan for life, it's showing that there are delicious plant-based options and that you care about the footprint of your event. Honestly, if an organisation is serving meat or ignoring other such low hanging fruit, it comes across to me as arrogance: "we don't need to bother with the little things because we're doing big important things that make a *real* difference". I'm not one to shift all responsibility onto consumer choices, that's not the road to real change. But it doesn't mean we should ignore the small things entirely, particularly if we're in a privileged enough position to have that choice. And in the case of climate events, it often isn't a personal choice, it's a corporate choice where all the little things added together can be huge.

2. All companies in the renewable industry are tripping over themselves to late1 AI into their work everywhere possible. They’re ignoring that we’re facing global water bankruptcy, gas turbines are being used to get data centers online as fast as possible, ai lobbyists are saying we need to abandon climate goals in order to achieve ‘supremacy.’ And they’re all keeping their climate promises up on their websites.

3. I'm pretty sure the company I work at is going to fail and that the founder is in denial about it.

4. I started taking antidepressants in part due to how bad things are in climate. They're working.

5. Sometimes I feel like I work on climate more for the trees and the bees than for the people who are [abusing] it.

6. The way they're currently implemented, nature-based solutions are primarily just a dirty deal between oil companies that want cheap offsets, developing countries that just need the money, and the registries that sign off on it all.

7. The logical progression from "let's do enhanced oil recovery" and "let's sell direct air capture-based fuels to the military" is "let's use carbon-cured concrete to build Israeli settlements in the West Bank."

8. I've participated in projects that wanted to push non-existent CDR credits onto the market. It's all too easy for the allegedly utilitarian logic of, "this is a one-off thing we need to do to survive, which will make the climate better off in the long run" is quite tempting but ultimately insidious and corrupting.
   
   Do your due diligence, folks.

9. There's a CDR company that [has issued many credits to date], this company warrants significant scrutiny

10. If you are conflicted about the word “climate”, if you worry about using the word “climate” because of how it might make you appear to others, if you’ve modified your language in this administration to avoid the word “climate” — then you aren’t working in climate.

11. Jon Foley is right

12. A majority of climate-tech founders are primarily focused on financial returns. They couldn't care less about environmental conservation, community benefits and making real impact. There's rampant fudging of numbers, inflation of claims and finding loopholes in registry protocols to make a quick buck. Saying this as someone from within the ecosystem, having worked very closely with multiple founders and seeing this all around me.

13. We should most certainly not condone using atmospheric or biogenic CO2 for enhanced oil recovery. While all CDR pathways will likely have some inevitable overlaps with various heavy or high-emitting industries, increasing fossil fuel consumption is one thing that is inherently incompatible with any meaningful future for climate progress. I believe some folks are going down this road right now out of a desperate attempt to make carbon management relevant to fossil fuel companies and right-wing groups, but these groups are not engaging in good faith at all on the climate front. There are many other, better coalitions to build to responsibly scale CDR than the folks literally trying to pump more fossil fuel out of the ground.

I skipped a number in the podcast so we ended up with a mistaken fourteen rather than a true thirteen, in case that puzzled you.

In case you’re a completist about references, here’s the Marc Andreessen post “Why Software is Eating the World”, I think that “podcasts are eating silence” reference was just an ephemeral note from Substack as I can’t find it now, go watch All the President’s Men, and here’s the Reversing Climate Change podcast episode "When Bad Companies Buy Good Carbon Removal”:

Reversing Climate Change

When Bad Companies Buy Good Carbon Removal

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…

Read more

10 months ago · 1 like · Ross Kenyon

Thank you so much to the submitters. I’m grateful that you feel comfortable doing this.

One thought I just had is that your syntax and unique way of writing may prove to be less anonymous in the future if AI continues apace. Be advised! I’ll mention this in the next episode I do as I’ve been thinking a lot about how the world will continue to change…

Subscribe now

Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Hello. Thanks for listening to Climate Workers Anonymous. This is the host, Ross Kenyon. I am a climate worker, similar to you probably. If this is your first time listening to this show, thanks for tuning in. There’s only been one intro episode, where I laid out the how and why of this experiment. Last episode, number one, I read the first of some user submissions and gave a little bit more context on how to understand this project and how to understand the submissions as well.

Climate Workers Anonymous is my attempt to create space for people to say real things about their working climate. I will often hear people say things privately that should be said out loud to an audience—at least a much bigger one than just myself—but they don’t feel that they reasonably can share that information. Many of these things can have career repercussions.

I did an episode of Reversing Climate Change. It’s my other podcast that I’ve been running for nearly a decade. I made an episode a few months ago called “When Bad Companies Buy Good Carbon Removal.” And I was obsessed with this question of, are carbon markets a club for saints or a hospital for sinners? The implication being that the work in carbon—it’s not to cozy up with those who are already doing really amazing work. The work is to be out there with those who aren’t doing the work and need to be. And that often means breaking bread with people that maybe we don’t have the warmest feelings about. Those are the people who need this the most.

I think that’s a beautiful way of understanding religious life of basically any denomination that you choose. I think it’s a really beautiful idea. Is it true for carbon markets? And I made this whole episode and I didn’t name a single company that I considered to be bad in it. At least part of which is because any of those companies could become customers of carbon dioxide removal credits, and it would be really hard if I had gotten close to landing a desirable position only for an employer to say, well, you’ve sort of alienated a rather big potential customer or active customer of ours. So we’re just going to go with someone who’s maybe a little bit safer, more palatable.

There’s something about that that I find to be corrupting. It means that so many of us are in a position to prioritize personal or corporate collective success over moral judgment. There might be cases where we’d like to be able to let loose and say something about some of these companies. And if you’re really brave, you can do it. It isn’t always advisable. Let’s just put it that way. I think that’s a really big tragedy of working in climate, and having to bottle up a lot of those feelings that people have.

And in fact, this week’s episode of Climate Workers Anonymous received a ton of submissions, and many of them are on this theme itself. Submitters noticed potentially unethical behavior in carbon dioxide removal or climate tech. It’s unclear where these people are working from that they’re talking about in all of these cases, and that’s for good reason. And also, when people are not adequately anonymizing here, I’m going to try to make it a tiny bit more obscure.

Because these are unverified submissions. I am assuming that people who are submitting things here are doing so in good faith. It’s also possible that someone could spread rumors against a rival company, and thus I don’t want to be in a position to spread untrue things about a company in particular. So in some of these cases, I’m going to have to make some amount of editorial judgment on what is appropriate and what is not. I don’t have some fully exhaustive system of how this will work, but I am going to use my judgment here to make sure that for things that are a little bit too specific, they are altered to be general enough where I feel comfortable speaking about it. This will likely not please everyone.

If you are listening to this show or reading it on Substack and you see that your submission was changed in some way, I do apologize, but I do believe it’s for the best. And it is a value of mine to try to get to as close to what you are telling me as possible while also respecting some of the ethical parts of this. I will do my best to try to find the right way to do that, and hopefully you feel that this is at least directionally correct to your sentiment. And I apologize if it is not as satisfying as maybe you had wanted it to be, though I do hope it will still feel that way.

As I said, these are unverified submissions. I don’t know if they are true, the ones that point to issues within specific markets or companies or other entities. I’m not doing research here verifying whether or not this is true or not. Even if I could, people are not leaving their names or contact information next to these statements for reasons of anonymity. So I couldn’t follow up for research even if I had wanted to, but also I don’t want to be engaged in that type of discernment.

My job here is to report within ethical bounds what has been submitted, because the goal of this, as I had mentioned, is for this to feel like PostSecret for climate. I’m trying to keep this on the level of feeling. This is not meant to be investigative journalism. There are very talented people who do that work. I’m frankly not qualified to be doing that work.

I was joking around with a friend before I started this. I had just rewatched All the President’s Men, with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman breaking the Watergate case at the Washington Post. And the editors keep hearing them for, “Get another source. You need two sources in order for us to print that.” And that is not what I’m doing here. This is not journalism. This is something else. This is a feelings-based project.

And it’s different from investigative journalism because the painful part of working in climate is that one will often see these things, will hear rumors about various types of behavior. And it’s one of those things that you just basically have to carry around by yourself, or maybe at the happy hour at the end of the conference someone lets loose that this thing is bothering them and they’re worrying about the potential impact on a field that we desperately care so much about.

I’m going to now start reading once again these unverified submissions from the world at large. Thank you for sending them, by the way. Really cool. Really made me think, and they’re from so many different angles. If you’re listening to this, you’d like to contribute your own thoughts, your own experiences, feelings, hopes, fears, you can submit them at the link in the show notes. It’s a Tally survey. You can also email a ProtonMail email. I prefer you use the Tally, though. I think it’s more sufficiently anonymizing. I cannot guarantee perfect anonymity. Do not submit anything that you would not want to be revealed. So limit the amount of information you share for that reason.

And okay, here we go. We have a bunch of submissions today. Okay, submission number one.

Ross reads the first submission in full at this point. It is the text of the post above, from “What’s with climate events that serve meat, and sometimes mostly meat?” to “all the little things added together can be huge.”

Submission number two.

Ross reads the opening of the second submission here. It is the text of the post above, from “All companies in the renewable industry are tripping over themselves” to “AI into their work everywhere possible.”

Commentary from me. I imagine this is maybe meant to bake AI into their work everywhere possible. Okay, end commentary from me. Back to the submission.

Ross reads the rest of the second submission here. It is the text of the post above, from “They’re ignoring that we’re facing global water bankruptcy” to “keeping their climate promises up on their websites.”

Submission 3.

Ross reads the third submission in full at this point. It is the text of the post above, from “I’m pretty sure the company I work at is going to fail” to “the founder is in denial about it.”

Submission 4.

Ross reads the fourth submission in full at this point. It is the text of the post above, from “I started taking antidepressants in part due to how bad things are in climate” to “They’re working.”

Submission 6.

Ross reads the next submission in full at this point. It is the text of the post above, from “Sometimes I feel like I work on climate more for the trees and the bees” to “than for the people who are [abusing] it.”

Submission 7.

Ross reads the next submission in full at this point. It is the text of the post above, from “The way they’re currently implemented, nature-based solutions are primarily just a dirty deal” to “the registries that sign off on it all.”

Submission eight.

Ross reads the next submission here; the audio recording drops it, so this points at the post’s own text, from “The logical progression from ‘let’s do enhanced oil recovery’” to “let’s use carbon-cured concrete to build Israeli settlements in the West Bank.”

Submission 9.

Ross reads the next submission in full at this point. It is the text of the post above, from “I’ve participated in projects that wanted to push non-existent CDR credits onto the market” to “Do your due diligence, folks.”

Submission 10.

Ross reads the next submission in full at this point. It is the text of the post above, from “There’s a CDR company that [has issued many credits to date]” to “this company warrants significant scrutiny.”

Submission 11.

Ross reads the next submission in full at this point. It is the text of the post above, from “If you are conflicted about the word ‘climate’” to “then you aren’t working in climate.”

Submission 12.

Ross reads the next submission at this point. It is the single line of the post above, “Jon Foley is right.”

Submission 13.

Ross reads the next submission in full at this point. It is the text of the post above, from “A majority of climate-tech founders are primarily focused on financial returns” to “having worked very closely with multiple founders and seeing this all around me.”

Final submission.

Ross reads the final submission in full at this point. It is the text of the post above, from “We should most certainly not condone using atmospheric or biogenic CO2 for enhanced oil recovery” to “the folks literally trying to pump more fossil fuel out of the ground.” The audio gives out mid-phrase at “pump more fossil,” so this points at the post’s full span.

Thanks again for listening. Thank you to everyone who contributed. I admire your willingness. I find it inspirational and also a little scary, uncomfortable. It’s all of those things at the same time for me. Maybe if you’re listening, you feel similarly. Hopefully it feels good. It’s good to be honest in this way, I think.

One of the rules for running meetings is that if one person says something, likely several other people feel that thing. It would not surprise me if some people heard these words and thought, yeah, I’ve had this inchoate feeling in me for a long time and I’ve never quite known how to say it because I work in the climate space, which is supposed to care about climate. And maybe they’ve had some of these feelings and you just helped them unlock something. That’s important. It’s really important. So thank you for doing that.

If you like what this show is about, if you could subscribe on Substack, that would be really helpful. If you could like, comment, share this content out with people who work in our field, maybe even with those who don’t but otherwise would be interested, that would be really helpful. It’s one of those things right now where, because it’s a new project, any amount of sharing, engaging is really valuable. I’m mostly using LinkedIn and Substack to promote it, but I also just set up Bluesky, so maybe I’ll hang out there some more too. But I’m also trying to touch grass and not spend all my time promoting various media things.

That’s such a tough line to try to walk between. Like, do people need more content constantly? One of the terribly depressing lines that I don’t think the person mentioned to be depressing was that the line from Marc Andreessen’s famous essay is that software is eating the world. And someone recently said that podcasts are eating silence. That’s true, we used to have silence instead of podcasts. Is this better? Maybe we could use a little more silence these days. Even the ethics of producing additional content, and then having to engage on social media with platforms that I frankly feel conflicted about at the very least.

But I would very much appreciate you subscribing on Substack, sharing this with people who would care about it. Continue to submit. I’ll put the link in the show notes if you’d like to submit your own stories or feelings here. If you have visual art you want to make and share, let’s do that too. I’m really happy to find creative ways to do this work. So if you have an idea, even outside of what I’ve just named, please email or fill out a Tally or submit something. I would just love to find more ways to make it easier to talk about these things.

Thanks so much for listening. I respect your courage. Until next time.

Thank you for listening to and reading Climate Workers Anonymous. Subscribe above, and be sure to subscribe in whichever podcast app you use. An amazing rating and review on those podcast apps does a world of good. Would you please do that for me now? Here’s Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.

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.

It is unclear what exactly these blogs will feature in the future! One obvious thing is that they can feature the text itself that was sent my way, so here they are in order of appearance:

1. 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.

2. I feel like we’re f***ed.

3. There are so many climate solutions that are promising. And there is so much possible.
   And it’s so goddamn hard to build them (speaking first hand) because enough corporates won’t take a risk on solutions fast enough.1

4. 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, 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.

5. 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 'everyone just...', then you don't have a solution. No one has ever 'just', no one ever will 'just'". Stop pitching climate to businesses like you're selling to a consumer, "this is easy, your friends will love it, the effects are immediate!".

6. There was a point in time where I was fairly convinced that sinking woodchips to the bottom of the ocean was somehow going to be one of the successful methods for carbon removal.

7. The CDR 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 CDR 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 (although we’ll need a lot of pure-play CDR too). It’s not entirely clear what this would look like yet, but it’s our responsibility to build this.

I respect and admire the people who have already chosen to submit their analysis, stories, and feelings. You’d be very welcome to do the same.

Thanks so much for supporting this new project. It means a lot to me.

Sincerely,

Ross Kenyon

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Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: 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 Heart Huckabees. I’m one of the few people, I think, that likes this movie as much as I do. It’s really goofy in so many ways, but it’s also kind of perfect. Jason Schwartzman is an environmentalist who has a rival slash frenemy who works at a sort of big box retailer who’s trying to do something in collaboration, but there’s also a strong power relationship between the two. There’s tension. 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. It 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, 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.

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, 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 going to do here? I got several submissions on Tally, so I think I’m going to 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.

Ross reads the first submission at this point. It is the first item in the list of submissions in the post above, from “I have so much optimism based on what I see working on a climate solution” to “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 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:

Ross reads the second submission at this point. It is the one-line item in the post above, “I feel like we’re f***ed.”

Third submission today.

Ross reads the third submission at this point; the recording drops it. It is the item in the post above, from “There are so many climate solutions that are promising” to “because enough corporates won’t take a risk on solutions fast enough.”

Fourth submission.

Ross reads the fourth submission at this point. It is the item in the post above, from “I was always scared that joining the climate fight” to “entrench techno-oligarchs.” He glosses CapEx as capital expenditure for decarbonization as he reads it.

Fifth submission.

Ross reads the fifth submission at this point. It is the item in the post above, from “Consumers don’t care about climate, and they don’t want to care about climate” to “this is easy, your friends will love it, the effects are immediate!”

Sixth and final submission from the short ones.

Ross reads the sixth submission at this point. It is the item in the post above, from “There was a point in time where I was fairly convinced that sinking woodchips” to “one of the successful methods for carbon removal.”

Thanks so much for sharing that. Even those little nuggets, y’all brought it. 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’s 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.

Ross reads the long submission in full at this point. It is the final item in the post above, from “The CDR industry is stuck in a paradox” to “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 in 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, I had to have a plan, I think. But I think starting loose and leaving 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 really know. I haven’t really set up ways to pay to support this project. But if you’re 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.

Founding a company or working in the climate sector is notoriously difficult. Beyond the business mechanics, climate workers face a unique burden: they are actively trying to capture a dilute gas and stabilize the atmosphere for the survival of humanity, often while relying on an economic system that doesn’t reward this behavior at scale. (We still haven’t quite figured out how to even decarbonize…)

Workers and founders frequently have to project unwavering strength to buyers and investors. They have to suck up to companies that they might actively wish didn’t exist in the first place. Expressing this feeling, or any of the doubts, exhaustion, or frustrations can feel like a massive professional risk. Bottling up these feelings takes a severe emotional toll.

When I was a teenager, I really loved the collaborative art project PostSecret, which encouraged (and actually, still encourages), people to share their true feelings about things without attribution. Climate Workers Anonymous continues in this mold and invites you to share your hidden thoughts, moral dilemmas, artwork, and naive hopes without fear of career repercussions. Whether you are wrestling with the ethics of doing business with billionaires who seemingly don’t care about much of anything but themselves, or of pulling polluting companies into marginally better behavior, or are simply exhausted by the quickening grind towards a world immiserated by the rise of right-wing populism, this is a place to be heard.

Telling the truth about the reality of working in climate is a productive, necessary action. It is anti-authoritarian calisthenics. I hope you will join us in this experiment!

Send us your stories for audio and text publication here or at climateworkersanonymous@protonmail.com.

Thanks for listening!

Sincerely,

Ross Kenyon

• Recommended supplemental listening: “When Bad Companies Buy Good Carbon Removal” from my other show, Reversing Climate Change

Reversing Climate Change

When Bad Companies Buy Good Carbon Removal

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…

Read more

a year ago · 1 like · Ross Kenyon

Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: If you’re hearing this through a podcast app right now, this might be a surprise. It’s a different title from the show it replaced. You may not even know which show it replaced of yours. I’ve had this happen to me with podcasts before. Sometimes an old feed gets repurposed for a new show. This is common practice in podcasting, and I wouldn’t do this unless I thought it would be something that would be interesting to many of the subscribers of Carbon Removal Newsroom.

This is Ross Kenyon. I launched Carbon Removal Newsroom, oh, I’m not even sure how long ago it was—2018, 2019, something like that. It used to be just me. I co-founded a company called Nori, which was a carbon removal marketplace and registry, launched in 2017. The company closed down in 2024, and I ended up acquiring many of the creative assets of Nori, including the memes. So if you follow carbon removal memes, that is a project I am so honored to carry on, and both of Nori’s podcasts, Reversing Climate Change, which I host, and Carbon Removal Newsroom, which, at least for this feed, it’s been a repository of the old episodes of Carbon Removal Newsroom in both the oldest iteration of it and then when it became a panelist show hosted by Radhika Moolgavkar later into the show’s run.

I really love making this show. It’s something that I hope will exist as a record, an oral history of the early days and some of the debates that existed within carbon removal as it started to commercialize in the late 20-teens.

I’ve thought about what our industry needs for a while. Does it need a reboot of Carbon Removal Newsroom, or does it need something thematically similar but with some more zhuzh, or a different slant on it perhaps? And I never quite came up with anything that I felt comfortable replacing it with. That is no longer true. I am happy now that I think I have found something to place on this feed.

This concept grew out of these small group, off-the-record conversations that I was facilitating at the last two Carbon Unbounds. The themes of these campfires were all related to how hard it is to work in carbon dioxide removal. I imagine if you’re subscribed to this feed, you know what that is, but it’s various forms of taking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it in some kind of fashion for some amount of time.

Founding a company is already notoriously difficult. The sheer number of things one needs to be good at, or at least competent at, in order to pull this off successfully is enormous, and a fair amount of it is luck as well—being in the right place at the right time, not being too early, not being too late. But also, we’re all trying to capture a dilute gas from ambient air and do something with it, and it’s not like selling electrons, or it’s not like selling tomatoes. No one strictly needs these things. Maybe in some cases they do, but not to the extent that the atmosphere needs to be balanced so that we can have a healthy, stable, livable climate that is not producing more uncertainty and chaos, which is a world that I am fearful of.

I’m looking into the future and I’m scared of what might happen. It does not feel like we are coming to grips with really where we are as a planetary civilization, and I find that to be deeply unsettling.

This work needs to happen, but most of the time it’s individually irrational for companies to pay to pick up the bill. No one’s forcing them to. They can do it themselves if they have a culture that demands that or rewards that kind of altruistic behavior. But as a whole, we’re just not doing this anywhere near the scope at which we need to be doing in order to balance the climate, let alone bring it back to pre-industrial levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

And these founders, or even employees at a lot of these carbon dioxide removal project developers and tech developers and those who are working at the various enablement platforms here, have to project a lot of strength. You don’t want to look weak in front of buyers or investors. Expressing some amount of doubt or frustration or uncertainty might feel a little bit like showing one’s throat. It can be really dangerous.

And so a lot of founders or people who are working in climate and carbon dioxide removal, I think they carry around a lot of feelings with them that are difficult to express, that sometimes maybe they even deny it to themselves. To found something successfully, in some cases, one might need to believe so, so desperately and so intensely that one denies it even to oneself, the true emotional toll of trying to do this. There are easier ways to make a living than founding a company. There are much easier ways of making a living than founding a carbon dioxide removal company. And that’s true of many businesses within climate as well.

These small group campfires were so rewarding because people felt free to really open up. I respected the people who came very much. People really wanted to talk about how maddening this can be, to be trying to help the world, even though the world seemingly does not want to help itself. We’re trying to do something, a collective project that will make humanity’s experience on Earth much more pleasant and smooth. And yet we are doing things that are setting us back in that goal, that are unnecessarily cruel. It just doesn’t seem like we’ve figured out how to live well together on Earth, and how terribly frustrating that is.

And then to see things like the world’s first trillionaire, with an initial public offering at least partially bent on colonizing Mars. And this isn’t some new insight here, but we haven’t even figured out how to do this super well. So long as we have people who are dying of preventable illness on Earth, I don’t know that we’ve earned the right to grow beyond the planet. I think until there’s a little bit more kindness built into the system, it’s just really hard for me to get excited about things like that right now, which is terrible. I want to be in a position to celebrate humanity becoming transplanetary. I think there’s a future where we can do that in an ethical and beautiful way. And I do not think we are there. And that is painful.

And those sentiments I just expressed are borderline naive. You might be listening and think that I sound like a true knucklehead. And that’s okay. I am increasingly comfortable expressing naive sentiments aloud and in public. I used to be much more tight about these things, worried that I can display my business credibility by knowing how financial markets work, being hard-nosed about how decisions can and should get made, and bringing environmental discussions down to a level where even the most self-interested, jerky person could still accidentally become a climate hero just because it made business sense.

And if you’ve been listening to Reversing Climate Change for a long time, you might connect this to something like Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, where people don’t really know I’m going to talk about what I’m going to talk about. I’m going to talk about what I’m going to talk about. I’m going to talk about what I’m going to talk about. I’m going to talk about what I’m going to talk about.

Not everyone is ready. I certainly wasn’t. It took me a long time to lead a little bit more from the heart and to be comfortable talking about this stuff in public.

I suspect there are people out there listening right now. Some of you may be disgusted by your customers. You might think the world would be better off if they didn’t exist at all and they just closed up shop. But they’re your customer, and surely it’s better that they buy from you than do nothing at all, or buy from a rival. Even admitting thoughts like that, even though they’re relatively anodyne, it is very difficult to say something like that in public about a customer or a prospective customer that wouldn’t endanger your position with your employer. It’s really challenging to tell the truth, and even in a field as pro-social and as noble as climate, it doesn’t seem much easier to tell the truth here than it does elsewhere.

When I was a teenager, there was a collective art project I really liked called PostSecret. How it worked was that if you had a difficult feeling that you wanted to express without attribution, you could make a postcard, make a little piece of art, put your sentence on it that you felt, and mail it in to be published anonymously. I imagine they used to distribute it in many ways, but the way that I most strongly associate with it was in a book collection. I suspect there was more than one, but I had one that I looked through quite a lot.

My model for Climate Workers Anonymous is PostSecret for climate. If you have feelings, experiences, thoughts, ideas, naive hopes that you would never want to say out loud, you can send them in anonymously at the link, and I will read them on your behalf. I’ll put it up on Substack as text, and the podcast will be published through there as well.

If you want to continue listening on this feed, everything should be properly configured that you don’t need to do anything at all. I’ll check and make sure. It might be a little bit bumpy here to start, but I’ll make sure that it continues apace. But this is also going to take place on Substack. I’d like this to be a visual thing too. If you’d like to make some art about how it feels, you want to make a collage, if you have something to say without words, if you want to express something that you don’t necessarily feel super comfortable for professional reasons or otherwise, you go ahead and submit it. The link is in the show notes to submit.

I will do my best to preserve anonymity. I certainly won’t say your name. And the form through which one submits will make it so that you don’t have to enter your name or anything like that.

I was speaking with a friend about this recently and she had asked me, does this lead to any action? Is this just people complaining? In my response, naive that it might be, is that I believe telling the truth about what it’s like to work in climate is an action. It’s not just complaining. The truth shall set you free, as the verse goes.

I’m not a 12-stepper, but I’ve read some of their literature for various reasons, and I’ve come across their work through books or reading people like Gabor Maté and things like that. If you’re a friend of Bill W.’s, you are often a fount of funny little witticisms and pieces of wisdom that’s been distilled in very memorable ways. They have an acronym that I love for denial: don’t even notice I am lying.

A good portion, as I understand it, about the 12-step program and its various instantiations is that much of addiction has a root in dishonesty—an inability to tell the truth about the suffering, about the cravings, about what one’s brain and choices have led one to do, in a way that takes responsibility for this while also offering mercy to self and others. And that can lead to shame. The relationship between shame and addiction is profound and mutually reinforcing. Being able to speak openly about one’s addiction is a big part of recovery. It’s a beautiful idea.

I am certainly not the first person to point to humanity’s relationship with the biosphere, with the Earth, in a way that rhymes with addictive behavior. But that’s really not what I’m trying to point to exactly.

I’ve been a part of conversations where it’s a question of, should we do business with this big company that is frankly not so nice? They might be choosing to do some type of climate activism for their own reasons. Maybe they’re doing it because one of the internal teams really supports it and they’re trying to change the company as a whole. Maybe they ran the cost benefit and realized they could get more marketing benefit out of it through some type of climate activism than doing nothing at all. Maybe. Who knows?

If you are at a company and you say, you know, I really feel uncomfortable about doing business with this company. It’s better that they do this and they don’t, but I don’t really respect what they’re doing. I don’t even know that I believe it. We might be offering them moral cover that will slow down them being regulated, because they’re doing something and maybe that looks like voluntary action will do enough. Maybe we’re actually cloaking them and giving them an ability to operate differently by even participating in this.

If you say that at the wrong company with people who have hard noses, and maybe they’re looking at their cash flow statements and noticing that, well, we have six months of runway, so how are you going to replace this with some other company that your wishy-washy, do-goodery feelings are going to be okay with?

Business environments typically incent behavior that exonerates customers and tries to find the best possible story to do this, because you hope on net throughout the existence of one’s company that it balances out, that more good is done than bad, etc. And even if that is ultimately the conclusion that the company draws, you might even endorse that it’s better to do business with this company than to do nothing and let them continue without any climate action at all. It’s an open question, and often the details matter quite a bit.

If you said this at many companies, even if you just wanted to sit with the feeling of how tormenting this is, that you are in a climate space and have to think about this and weigh this kind of moral decision, is frowned upon. Many leadership teams, this is not the kind of thing that they want to hear about. It’s bad for business in many of these cases.

And one of those main therapeutic lessons is you don’t necessarily have to have all the answers. Feeling a feeling doesn’t necessarily invite solutions from others. You probably don’t even want that a lot of the times that you’re feeling feelings. Many times you’d like to feel the feeling, express the feeling, process it, maybe just be heard. And I think telling the truth, not practicing denial—don’t even notice I am lying—about the work and climate, I think can be spiritually productive and healthy.

If you’ve listened this far, I doubt I need to do much more convincing of you that it could be a really nice thing both to listen to and to contribute to. If you’d like to contribute, there is a link in the show notes and I will put this on Substack. There is a form.

If you are really paranoid about anonymity, maybe use a VPN. Maybe find ways to protect your privacy. I’ll do what I can on my end. I can’t guarantee against any future hacks or things like that. I mean, there’s a limit to what I can do. So limit the amount of information that you share is the best piece of advice that I can give you if you’d like to participate in this project.

If you’d like to follow along, you can stay subscribed here, and you should subscribe on Substack as well. I’d like this to live beyond only carbon dioxide removal. That’s the world that I come from for the most part, though this is true of lots of different types of work in energy, in climate. It’s a really difficult time to do this work.

I’m hoping that this small, small work might make it more possible to have real conversations. I’m hoping that it might embolden you to be braver about what you share with others, because we believe climate is important and urgent, right? Now’s not a good time, I think, to be focused on making sure everything that we say is perfectly palatable to the more status quo oriented business as usual parties here. If we think this is a really catastrophic issue that will only get worse from here, it’s our duty, at least for those willing to assume it, to try to speak the truth. And if some of that truth needs to be anonymous, and I can help you do that, let’s do it.

The link is in the show notes if you’d like to submit any of your thoughts about your work in climate, adjacent to climate, about climate. You don’t have to work in this space. If you want to contribute something, send in some art. There’s also a ProtonMail email that I have set up for this too, if you’d like to send in something like that.

Also, if this is just not what you’re into because you subscribed to the Carbon Removal Newsroom feed and this is now Climate Workers Anonymous, no hard feelings. If you want to stick around for some real talk, I hope you will.

This is going to be an experiment. It probably will not stay in this format. I don’t even know if this name is going to be the same. In fact, I didn’t even expect to talk about that denial thing and the 12-step program. And yeah, I’m just now putting in my head that it’s Climate Workers Anonymous, which does have a 12-step feel to it, so that makes me laugh.

We’re gonna experiment. We’re gonna find a way to do something true and beautiful, and I don’t even care if that sounds fairly naive, and I would very much like you to do it with me. Treat me as a vessel. I’m going to try to help get more of these stories out.

Thanks for listening. I really appreciate you. Thanks for doing all the important work of sticking around in climate, even when the going gets tough.

In today's episode of Carbon Removal Newsroom, producer and guest host Asa Kamer interviews Myles Gray, the program director of the US Bicohar Initiative about their 2023 Global Biochar Market Report.

Biochar is responsible for a huge amount of currently delivered durable carbon removals. It's more shovel-ready than other forms of carbon removal, which have much higher CapEx requirements and are betting more on future cost-curves than present deployment. However, some participants in biochar production can face challenges from those concerned about additionality, among other issues.

The discussion covers the production scale, market dynamics, economic challenges, and the growing number of biochar producers, particularly in the Global South. Gray also highlights the importance of high-quality standards, the role of innovative business models, and the need for better market development for physical biochar to help scale the industry globally. Listen in to learn more.

On This Episode

⁠⁠Asa Kamer

Myles Gray

Resources

US Biochar Initiative

USBI's 2023 Global Biochar Market Report

Subscribe to Climate Workers Anonymous

My other show, Reversing Climate Change

Books referenced in the podcasts, at Bookshop

Carbon Removal Memes

Full Transcript

Announcer: You’re listening to Carbon Removal Newsroom, a weekly show about current events in the world of carbon removal, from technology and innovation to policymaking and job growth. Brought to you by Nori, the carbon removal marketplace.

Asa Kamer: Hello and welcome to the June 11th edition of Carbon Removal Newsroom. So according to CDRFYI, in 2023, 94% of durable carbon removal deliveries were from biochar. Compared to other forms of carbon removal, biochar is technologically well understood, easy to access for a wide range of producers, and creates a useful final product. Production has taken hold in a wide range of geographies and economies, suggesting that a scaled-up CDR industry will lead to biochar being made all around the world. As biochar grows, industry groups like the International Biochar Initiative and the U.

S. Biochar Initiative are tracking that growth by surveying over 1,000 industry respondents. Welcome, Miles.

Myles Gray: Great. Before I get started, just thank you for having me. I really, really appreciate the opportunity to be on this podcast.

Asa Kamer: Absolutely. We’re very happy that you could join us today. Let’s start by taking a look at this report. Can you tell us a little bit about how the report was put together and what you were hoping to discover with this research?

Myles Gray: Yeah, absolutely. So the project was a collaboration between the United States Biotar Initiative and the International Biotar Initiative. And really we were hoping to do a few things, but key among those were to starting with developing high quality defensible estimates for global and regional biochar production. And really a part of this was to understand how many tonnes of CO2 are currently being removed from the atmosphere each year via biochar production. And we were really pleased. Towards the end of this project, we were able to collaborate with the authors of the state of the CDR report, which just came out earlier this week.

And so the data in that report for biochar derived from our market survey. Another goal was to better understand the key drivers of growth in the industry, key obstacles and key opportunities, really to hear from the biochar industry, but also other stakeholders engaged in the biochar industry. And then the final goal was really just to understand how we at USBI and IVI and some of the other regional biochar associations can better serve the biochar industry to reach the scale that we all believe it can. We’re trying to help the industry grow and we really need to know how best to do that.

And this survey provided a lot of information that we’re using in our plants. And the survey was done in a pretty straightforward way. We developed an online survey. It was about 15 minutes long, and it was a dynamic survey that routed respondents through different tracks. We spent a lot of time on front-end communications to really drive interest and participation, and that was pretty effective. We got over 1,000 respondents to a 15-minute survey, so we were really pleased with that. And if any of you listening responded to the survey, I just want to thank you and encourage you to participate again in the next version because we really hope this will become an annual survey.

Asa Kamer: Cool. And that’s actually a really interesting kind of segue to my next question, because I’m just thinking, you know, of all the quote unquote durable solutions, I don’t know if there are any other ones that could complete a survey with a thousand respondents, you know. So I think that says something about biochar, just how much of an established community already exists and has existed for a long time. And so to that point, how big of a share of global CDR is biochar? You mentioned that you guys were looking at that and you gave that information to the state of CDR report.

So talk about that big global share and why do you think that is?

Myles Gray: Yeah, I’ll most focus on durable CDR within the voluntary carbon markets. And that’s the type of data that’s tracked by CDR. FYI, which is the best repository I know for that kind of data. So based on 2023 numbers from CDR. FYI, Biofair represented 93% of deliveries in 2023, but only 7% of purchases. So this tells me a few things. First off, you know, Biofair is shovel ready. So it’s able to deliver credits today to purchasers who need those credits today. But I think it all, a little bit of the fact that the industry I think could do a better of really driving in biocharging.

And, you know, for instance, we would love to see that 7% of purchases number come up. A lot of those purchases. In 2023, we’re for novel CDR technologies for sort of long-term purchase agreements for credits that might not be delivered for five or 10 years. But we would love to see some organizations put some bigger bets on large-scale biochar production facilities to drive up those purchase numbers. And I will say that data from Q1 in 2024 from CDR. FYI shows that biochar production Continues to represent more than 90% of deliveries, but we’re also seeing Biochar account for 80% of sales in Q1 as well.

So we are starting to see that gap shrink. And within the durable CDR space, I think there’s a number of reasons why Biochar is performing really well. First off, it’s shovel ready, as I already mentioned. A lot of companies want to produce CDR credits today or procure them today. To offset their emissions. This is in line with sort of SBTI goals or other climate commitments. But there’s a lot of purchasers who need to be able to buy biochar today. Second, pricing for biochar, at least compared to other durable techniques, is pretty reasonable.

And it’s come down substantially in the past several years. And now we’re seeing prices for biochar CDR credits between about $125 and $175 per tonne of CO2. Now, that’s still very expensive compared to nature-based solutions, but it’s much cheaper than a lot of other novel technological CER technologies. And pricing does matter. I know there’s a lot of enthusiasm for... Driving dollars to some of these technological solutions to things like direct air capture, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage and others. Pricing matters. I’d be surprised if there’s all that many CDR credit buyers out there that are really ready to throw four or five, six, $700 a tonne at these different technologies.

So I think what this data shows me really is that pricing does matter and it’s going to continue to matter. Another piece is that biochar is gaining increased recognition as a long-term storage technology. There’s a lot of new science coming out showing that at least for industrial facilities, the majority of biochar is likely durable for at least 500 years, and in many cases, much longer than that, and at least durable enough over climate-relevant periods of time. Finally, Bioter provides a lot of co-benefits. A lot of CDR credit buyers are now interested in co-benefits and Bioter really leads the way on co-benefits for things like improved waste management, Can be incorporated into sort of biorefinery concepts that produce electricity or fuels.

And on the downstream side, biochar improves soil health. It improves crop yields, reduces fertilizer needs. It can also be used as a replacement for different high-carbon materials, things like peat and horticultural media. It can replace a portion of cement and concrete. It can replace carbon black in a range of products like plastics and inks. So, you know, there’s a lot of ways that biochar can have other benefits beyond CDR. And at the current point, I think biochar really sits in this sweet spot between being high quality, durable, low cost, and really available now.

Asa Kamer: That’s a great answer. And that was super thorough. Can I ask? This is a bit of a tangent, but why are the prices for biochar going down? I mean, it seems like it’s a pretty well understood thing how to make it. So what do you think is helping certain people bring their prices down?

Myles Gray: I think there’s a few factors. One of them is sort of sophistication of business models. So there are ways, there are at least three and oftentimes four revenue streams that a biochar producer can create. So they can sell biochar carbon credits. They can sell physical biochar, which is typically decoupled from the credit, usually sold to someone separately from the credit. Biochar facilities can also produce electricity or heat, which has value. Some of them are even moving into biofuels and sustainable aviation fuel production. And then the final potential revenue stream is actually waste management.

Some biochar companies are now able to get paid to Take waste feedstock that has a cost, that has a high disposal cost. An example is wastewater treatment plant biosolids. Wastewater treatment plants have to pay to get rid of those biosolids in many cases. And so there’s an opportunity to either get feedstock for free or even get paid to take it in some situations. So I think it’s monetizing these co-benefits makes it so that the CDR costs can come down.

Asa Kamer: Wow. That is pretty incredible. And you’re kind of leading me to some stuff we’re going to talk about a little later in terms of the market for physical biochar, which is, I think, a really interesting topic that we definitely need to get to. But sticking with the report and with voluntary carbon markets, reading the report, it said that the market for biochar credits is thriving, which is definitely a good word to see when we’re talking about carbon removal. So is demand outstripping supply right now? And are there biochar credits going unsold at R or is everything getting snapped up?

Myles Gray: Yeah, it’s a good question. I’ll start this answer by just first pointing out that I’m not an expert in CDR marketplaces or contracts for these credits, but I can provide some insight based on a lot of conversations I’ve had. Before I do that, I want to introduce this concept of industrial versus artisanal biochar production. So industrial systems are these highly engineered. They’re typically permanent systems. They’re centralized facilities where feedstock is either available in large volumes already or it’s shipped in. And they typically have, they produce very high quality biochar. They have very high quality MRV systems.

Artisanal biopair production is typically done in more place-based approach where a small farmer or timber crews out in the woods will produce biochar using these small kilns. Some of them are even mobile and portable, and they’ll typically produce them from feedstock available at a single location. And then the biochar itself will be spread at that single location. These are really cool systems, but they have some real deficiencies in terms of MRV. It’s hard to do really high quality MRV for some of these smaller scale portable units. So in the industrial systems right now, at least, CDR credits are the easy part of the business model for most biochar companies, particularly those with That meet additionality requirements and have really good MRB.

So I haven’t heard of any industrial biochart producers having significant problems selling their CDR credits. I have heard a little bit, uh, around artisanal producers that there is some difficulty around selling those credits, potentially because of MRB requirements. Um, And I think there’s probably a scenario in which these two different types of biochar production kind of diverge in the future into sort of different segments of CER.

Asa Kamer: Interesting. And we’ve had a few organizations and companies on the show over the past couple of years working on doing sort of decentralized MRV for artisanal biochar producers. So that’s sort of an interesting frontier in terms of Would you be able to bring income to places that might not necessarily be getting it or doing biochar otherwise, but at the same time you have to validate that the carbon removal is actually happening, which is more challenging than at a centralized industrial facility. So props to everyone out there working on it and we’ll keep covering it.

Miles, again, you’re kind of one step ahead of me here with the information you’re giving. But so my next question is, and this actually surprised me from the report, you found that a majority of producers of biochar don’t produce carbon credits. And I think it’s a slim majority, I think like 48% maybe like do. So it’s around 50-50. But why do you think that is that so many aren’t doing carbon credits? And is it possible to generalize like who is selling carbon credits and who isn’t? Or is it just all across the board?

Myles Gray: Yeah, I’ll start by saying I was really surprised that finding was not at all expecting that. I think there’s at least a handful of reasons. The first is related to additionality. So there are four current or existing CDR methodologies for biochar. All of them require that carbon finite, that is the purchase of CDR credit, was the reason that the action occurred. So that this biochar would not have been produced if there was not a carbon credit buyer. So that’s the financial additionality requirement. And what that means for biochar is a couple of things.

First off, biochar has been around since, oh, 2005 with a bunch of biochar producers starting in the around 2010. So there’s a lot of these companies that have been producing biochar for years, but the first biochar carbon credits were not developed until I believe 2018 or 2019. Wow. So any biochar company, a lot of these early adopters, and just to point out, all these early adopters were doing it for all the right reasons. They were doing it for climate change reasons, for sustainability reasons, for soil health reasons. Many of these early adopters are prohibited from selling carbon credits associated with that production.

So that’s one thing. And I have some serious problems about that. I think it’s an unfair system. And I think it punishes a lot of these early adopters who really grew the industry and did incredible service to the rest of the biochar industry. So I think that’s a problem. There’s also a decent amount of biochar that I consider to be biochar by accident. And this, this includes biochar produced by some of the biggest producers in the world. And what I mean by biochar by accident is that they’re extracting Biochar from existing biomass energy facilities.

So there’s a whole fleet of biomass energy facilities in the United States and elsewhere. A lot of them are burning timber waste. So wood chips, sawdust, bark, things like that. Those facilities are aiming to produce electricity. So the best case scenario is that they combust 100% of that feedstock, but no biomass energy plant actually combusts 100% of the feedstock. There’s always a small portion typically in this sort of one to 3% range that, that isn’t combusted. So a lot of this biochar, it is biochar. I mean, for all intents and purposes, it looks the exact same, performs the same.

It’s biochar, but there, a lot of those facilities are excluded from participating in the voluntary carbon markets again, because of additionality. Um, The second issue is just related to scale. The biochar industry has a lot of different scales all the way from those artisanal producers. There are some medium scale producers and there are the major industrial facilities that are producing 10,000 tonnes a year of biochar. So a lot of the small scale facilities, you know, there are transaction costs associated with CDR credits. There are MRV requirements, there are staff time and credit agencies and other costs.

And for the most part. Those credit agencies are really only looking at deal sizes of at least about a thousand tonnes per year or more. And there are many biochar producers that are far below that. So if you’re a small scale producer producing 50 tonnes a year, a lot of Harvard credit agencies today are probably not going to consider you for a CDR credit. There’s been a lot of progress in this space among these aggregating companies. So there are some intermediaries now that are working to aggregate biochar carbon credits into sort of bundled credits from a number of small scale producers.

So there’s a decent amount of progress there. And I’m really looking forward to more progress in that space to help get these smaller scale producers into the voluntary carbon markets. And then the final piece is probably just time. There’s been a large increase in biochar production. And in conversations I’ve had with some different producers who recently started production, it takes a bit of time after starting production before you actually start selling carbon credits. It can take six months, it can take 12 months. So I think there’s a decent number of respondents who probably saw that question that we posed in our survey and said, oh, I’m not actually generating revenue yet from biochar carbon credits, but it might be because they haven’t actually sold any yet.

They might be intending to and planning to and completely capable of selling them, but they just haven’t gotten the paperwork and transaction completed yet.

Asa Kamer: Interesting. Yeah. Wow. You said a lot there. And hearing, you know, describe it, it’s definitely helping me get a sense of what kind of issues as an industry group are. You know, where you guys probably come in terms of supporting biochar producers and kind of growing the industry and what some of these bottlenecks are and, you know, pointing out issues that producers have. And I do think that, you know, it’s really interesting hearing you describe the way the biochar producers that have been doing it for a while are excluded from carbon markets.

And I think some of that strictness around additionality is something that, you know, our host, the normal host of the show, Radhika, has brought up a lot. And I think that’s a tension she... is concerned about as well. And it’s kind of led to some interesting conversations on the show. So I definitely think that’s sort of a lurking issue in carbon removal. And to the folks that are maybe more the gatekeepers on the other side and having those strict requirements, I also understand where they’re coming from. So I personally haven’t seen it as much of a clear cut issue, but it’s definitely a tension, especially when You know, we’re seeing all these exposés of like these massive forestry projects that are sucking up a lot of the carbon offset money, just being completely not removing any carbon and, and being terrible in a lot of ways.

So it’s, it’s a shame that, um, to keep out folks who, like you say, are growing the industry and probably doing it really well since they’ve been doing it for, you know, 15 years. So anyway, that’s, that’s my tangent. Um, but we’ll get back to you. I want to talk some more about the, the physical biochar, you know, the actual Prada, because like you said, Companies can sell a carbon credit, but then there’s another revenue stream which is actually selling the biochar, which as you’re describing is maybe the reason a lot of people have been doing it since well before there was even an option for offset credits.

And I guess why people have actually been making biochar for thousands of years is because it’s a useful product. So your report identified that Developing high quality markets for physical biochar is an essential obstacle that needs to be overcome to scale the industry. So how do you think that need to happen? And what do you think will actually help increase demand for physical biochar?

Myles Gray: Yeah, absolutely. That was a finding that I was pleased to see, something that I’ve thought for a while, and I continue to believe that this is the number one obstacle dealing the industry. And just to relate it back to the CDR credits, as I mentioned before, it’s monetization of these co-benefits is really the pathway for biochar to be able to deliver these low cost, high quality credits. So I think there’s a couple approaches that can work. I mean, obviously there’s many, but I’ll focus on a handful here. I think first is to really take the focus off of biochar and refocus on developing high quality products with biochar as an ingredient.

To date, a lot of the biochar industry has been really enthusiastic, but they’ve been mostly enthusiastic about producing biochar. And around the benefits of biochar and things like soil health. And these are all good things, but most end users are not typically all that concerned about environmental benefits of products. They care a whole lot more about whether the product they’re purchasing is high quality and a good value for their particular end use. And I’m seeing a lot of motion here and a lot of good positive signs. The industry really is starting to move in that direction with products like biochar enhanced fertilizers, concrete additives, additives to inks and plastics.

So we’re seeing some good signs, but I think there’s a lot more work here. Another way we can do this is by engaging with large corporations to get them to start distributing biochar products and investigating and building product lines around biochar. You know, these large corporations, they have large well-established distribution channels. They have the ability to dramatically increase market demand for biochar, particularly in the agricultural space and also in the industrial space. And a lot of these companies in industry and agriculture, they’re aware of biochar, at least in their R&D departments.

But to date, a lot of these companies haven’t really engaged with the biochar industry because they haven’t had A credit worthy biochar producer that can produce large volumes of biochar to sit across the table from them. So it wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense for multinational fertilizer companies who have developed a biochar product line back in 2012, because who would they have bought that biochar from? And we’re starting to see that problem go away, both because the biochar industry is growing in scale, but also because we’re getting better quality standards.

And that brings me to my next point is really developing out high quality laboratory and material standards for biochar. It’s really a key obstacle. So there are existing standards. They’re hard to use in many parts of the world. They’re reliant on German laboratories. So right now a biochar producer in most parts of the world have to ship their samples to, to like a handful of labs in Germany. We’re working to establish an American national standard, which is an ANSI standard. So that’s a major focus of my time right now at USDI is to develop an ANSI standard for biochar, which is ANSI standards are ubiquitous in pretty much all other industries.

So we’re really looking forward to this. We think it’ll increase trust and help larger companies and smaller ones really build product lines around biochar. Next, we need to keep funding and implementing R&D and demonstration projects, particularly in some of these key market sectors. And the way we need to do this is a little bit of a break from the past. We really need to focus on the techno-economic viability of biochar in different end-use markets. There’s a ton of research on biochar. Many of it is very good. But only a very small fraction of that research really considers whether or not biochar is an economic solution in a given end-use.

So there’s, for years, been talk about how biochar can be used in dozens and dozens of different applications, but we really need to focus on not whether it can be used in applications, but whether it makes economic sense to use it in that application. That’s really the key question. And we’re working pretty hard to kind of bridge that gap between researchers and industry to make it so a lot of the work that gets done will really focus on that economic side. And then the final piece is related to the US a little bit more, which is to promote and facilitate certain conservation payments that are available from the US government.

So the Department of Agriculture has conservation payments that will provide farmers reimbursements for using biochar. That’s through the Natural Resources Conservation Service. Biochar was recently added to that program, and we’re really working to scale that program to get more farmers to be able to get cost share payments from the federal government, and that’ll make it so they can buy more biochar.

Asa Kamer: That’s interesting. I had not heard about that, but it’s interesting to see all the ways carbon removal is making its way into federal policy. That’s good to hear. That’s exactly what I was wondering is about the economic component and the green premium concept, which I’ve heard Bill Gates talk about, which is like, there’s a lot of great green products out there, but how much more are buyers going to be willing to spend for the green version of it? So hopefully... Biochar is very affordable or even cheaper than the current product in whatever the given industry is.

And that could be really helpful, but I hope that your efforts in that department are fruitful and maybe we can have you on again sometime to talk about that. Cause that sounds kind of like maybe the cutting edge of what’s going to need to happen for the, for the biochar industry.

Myles Gray: Yeah, absolutely. And it really is what we’re rebuilding you as the eye around that focus really to be focused almost exclusively on developing markets for physical biochar.

Asa Kamer: Cool. All right. Well, if you’re listening and you’re a buyer for Home Depot, let’s get some biochar in there. Okay. So, um, Across the globe, a wide variety of different techniques are used to make biochar, various scales. You kind of talked about the different categories there. So in this research from your report, did you identify ways to ensure that the industry can incorporate such a diverse set of producers as it matures and make sure everyone who wants to grow biochar is able to access funding through whichever way they’re going to do that?

Myles Gray: Yeah, for sure. I personally think this represents a growing challenge for the industry and for industry associations like USBI. And again, going back to this sort of bifurcation of the industry into industrial and artisanal producers, they’ve really got some different needs. Industrial producers are aiming to develop large scale production facilities that can deliver high quality, consistent biochar. And that’s the type of biochar that will be integrated into Agricultural and industrial value chains, you know, as ingredients to different products. On the other side of the spectrum, these smaller scale producers, as I mentioned before, they’re typically using biomass from a given site, producing biochar on that site, and then deploying the biochar on that same site.

So they’re not particularly concerned with markets for physical biochar. What they often tend to be concerned with actually are some of the other co-benefits And in particular, air emissions related to open pile burning. So in a lot of the world, agricultural residues are burned. That’s true in the United States. It’s true in India. It’s true all across the world. Agricultural residues are very commonly burned in open piles. In the United States, timber residue is limbs and branches. In the West, we call them slash piles. They have different names in different places, but that material is typically just combusted in giant bonfires.

Those bonfires release enormous amounts of particulate emissions. And particulate emissions, there’s growing evidence that these are incredibly damaging for humanity in general. So I think in some ways, those, the small scale producers, the artisanal producers, part of what they’re going after really has more to do with some of the co-benefits than the core benefits. You know, and at a high level, I just want to say that USBI and other biotaur organizations around the world really Appreciate the value of both of these types of biochar production, but I can see their needs diverging.

And, you know, I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up with some different organizations representing these different types of biochar production.

Asa Kamer: That’s interesting to hear. And, man, biochar can be put in concrete, put in rubber, and it improves air quality. Like, what can it do, right? It’s amazing. Yeah. Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about how this industry can continue to grow. So in that CDRFYI post that I mentioned, they published a post on the report, breaking it down, and they discussed the way that the Global South is taking the lead in biochar production with six of the 10 biggest producers in 23 being from that area. Can you tell us what you think of that finding and why you think it might be?

And is that a sign of things to come?

Myles Gray: Yeah, I think part of what’s going on here is that producers in the global south are able to develop profitable business models, both using industrial and artisanal approaches that rely entirely on CDR credit revenue to become profitable. So that current pricing of about 125 to 175 per tonne of CO2 is sufficient for these companies to be profitable, largely because they have lower feedstock costs and lower labor costs compared to producers in the global north. I think this is very likely to continue, and I expect a lot of the near-term growth, at least in the large production facilities, to occur in the global south.

And I actually think a decent amount of that will probably happen in areas like Latin America where there’s abundant feedstock supply. For the global north, this doesn’t mean there’s not viable biochar business models that are possible, but I think it requires those business models to be more sophisticated, and they need to do probably one or more of the following. One option is to increase revenue from the physical biochar, right? By developing these high value markets. It’s likely that higher value markets are going to exist in the global north where costs for everything tend to be higher.

So there’s an opportunity really there to develop these high quality product lines where biochar is an ingredient. Next is really focusing on increasing revenue from the pyrolysis gases that are not converted into biochar. Just quickly, the biochar process converts about 40 to 50% of the carbon into biochar, but the remainder of the carbon is emitted as a mixture of combustible vapors, things like hydrogen, carbon monoxide, methane, some logger chain hydrocarbons. In a lot of systems, these are combusted and used to produce heat or electricity, but there are some other likely more valuable end uses for these for making things like sustainable aviation fuel or industrial precursor molecules for things like plastics.

There’s a lot of potential end uses for pyrolysis gases that really are now just starting to be explored, but there’s a lot of potential there. And then the final way I think is to. Identify feedstock sources that are free or even generate revenue and tipping fees. I mentioned this briefly, but there really are some very hard to dispose of waste biomass feedstocks around. Things like waste water plant biosolids, construction and demolition debris, which is mostly wood. There’s even the ability to separate organic material from non-organic material from municipal solid waste.

So stuff that’s against the landfill, a lot of that material is organic. It could all be converted into biochar. Now, you might not want to use that material as a soil amendment, but there might be no problem at all around using that as a concrete additive. So I think there’s a lot of potential here to kind of develop these more sophisticated business models. But I think they’re pretty critical for global North biochar producers to remain competitive.

Asa Kamer: So that makes me wonder, why shouldn’t the company that collects my garbage have a biochar facility and have another revenue stream? Is that something we might see in the future?

Myles Gray: Absolutely. Something we might see, something I expect to see, and it’s something that different companies are working on.

Asa Kamer: That’s really cool. And maybe my garbage collection bill will go down.

Myles Gray: It could. I’m not sure about that, but...

Asa Kamer: Hopefully. So this is another tangent here, but so one concern I’ve seen about biochar, and I know certain buyers of carbon credits might even not buy biochar for this reason, but is the carbon efficiency. And this gets into some scientific details that are a bit beyond me, but... I’m interested to hear what you were saying about those other gases being utilized. Do you think that would alleviate the concern about carbon efficiency of biochar if all the off gases are being utilized?

Myles Gray: Yeah, I think it very likely could. And it and it points to one of the difficulties of the biochar industry or the biochar concept that is, which is that it’s complex. Biochar production doesn’t just produce biochar or carbon dioxide removal. It’s producing other benefits as well, which I’ve spoken to during this podcast. There are some buyers, folks like Frontier that, you know, they’re really interested on the efficiency of carbon because they’re looking at it entirely from the carbon removal perspective. They’re not that interested in the co-benefits. But one way to look at this.

Is that biochar is unlikely to ever score highest on any given single metric. If you’re only ever looking at a single metric, it’s going to be hard for biochar to ever score the highest. It will never be the most efficient from a carbon conversion perspective to CDR. It will never be the most efficient there. It will also not be the most efficient way to produce biomass electricity because half the carbon goes into biochar. I think it has to be looked at more holistically. And right now, the best metric, the best holistic metric I think we have, honestly, is CDR credit price.

So right now, the CDR credit price for biochar is much lower than a lot of other durable storage techniques, largely because there are the co-benefits that have value.

Asa Kamer: That’s really interesting. And speaking of business models and how that all works. So the report identified insetting as a promising way to generate revenue for biochar producers. So can you tell us what insetting is and why a biochar is a good option for that?

Myles Gray: Yeah, I’ll start by saying I have not yet seen like an official definition of insetting. So the definition I’ll use is implementing actions in a company’s value chain that reduce carbon emissions. So within that context, it’s very true that the vast majority of our climate mitigation need to come from insetting, that is reducing scope one, two, and three emissions. This is the core original programs, I guess, and ETI. Which only allow a small amount of offsets to be used to reach those targets. And for biochar, there’s a couple ways that it presents the opportunity.

At a high level, the production of biochar reduces atmospheric carbon in multiple ways. On the upstream side, on the feedstock side, converting biochar or converting feedstocks into biochar can reduce things like methane emissions. Especially from wet feedstocks like manure or biocell. So there’s a potential benefit there. The production of biochar produces carbon removal, which occurs when you convert biomass into biochar. And that’s the only thing that’s currently monetized in a CDR credit is the conversion of waste biomass from a labile form to a sequestered form of carbon. But biochar production can also produce electricity, heat, fuels, other things.

And then on the downstream side, there are a number of ways that biochar can impact carbon emissions. One is simple material replacement. Biochar can be used in place of other materials, and every material has some amount of embodied carbon with it. Next, biochar can reduce material input needs in things like agriculture. So you can reduce the amount of fertilizer you need. And fertilizer is a very energy intensive product. Most fertilizer is made from fossil gas. That’s where essentially all nitrogen fertilizer comes from. Another benefit is that biochar reduces things like soil nitrous oxide emissions.

So there’s a lot of benefits from biochar related to climate that are not currently monetized in carbon dioxide removal credits. So those can be monetized in setting. Another coin I want to make is that most biochar today is decoupled from its CDR credit. So the credit is sold to one company, but the physical biochar is sold to another. All those methodologies for the CDR credits, they require a producer to count all the emissions from feedstock sourcing, from biochar production, and even from shipping the material to the end user. So in that context, decoupled biochar, that is physical biochar that’s sold without its carbon credit, which is the norm, that biochar should be considered a zero carbon product in value chain emissions accounting frameworks because you’ve already counted all of the emissions from it.

You’ve sold off the negative attributes, that is the removal attributes, but you’re left with zero. So that’s kind of a baseline understanding for how biochar can conserve some that material replacement benefit. And so I think there’s just a lot of opportunities here to monetize some of those benefits that aren’t currently being captured in the CDR credits. But also there are some companies looking at actually buying the CDR credit and embedding it in their products, actually in concrete. There’s some concrete companies that are wanting to actually Buy the credit with the product so that they can get to a net zero concrete.

So in terms of insetting, I think biochar really has, there are enormous opportunities in the insetting space. And I think it’s also a way to engage with a lot of larger corporations that are really focused on value chain emissions much more than they are on CDR credits.

Asa Kamer: Wow, great. That’s really interesting. And a phrase you used near the top of the show is business model innovation. And I can see that’s where I really feel like a lot of the work that you’re doing, it sounds like, is focused on that. And that’s sort of a key part of growing biochar right now. It’s not necessarily the early stage stuff that we see for some other durable CDR. It’s very much... The people are ready to make it and how do we get them paid to do that? So that’s great.

And my last question for you, Miles, you know, you did this very comprehensive overview of the state of the industry in 2023. We’re now halfway through 2024. If you were to look back at the end of the year, how do you think we’re going to see the biochar industry in 2024 as different than it was in 2023? Yeah.

Myles Gray: Yeah. First, I’ll start by saying, I hope we continue to see the same amount of growth and I think we will. And I’ll also say, I think we’re going to see another survey come out this fall. So 2024 will be similar to 2023 in that respect, at least. Okay. But in terms of how it’ll be different, I think there’s going to be an increasing focus on incorporating biochar as an ingredient, as I said, into high quality products. I think we’re going to see some high profile partnerships between biochar companies and large corporations.

Both on the production side, but also on the use side. And we’re starting to see some of that. As I mentioned several times, and you just mentioned, increasingly sophisticated biochar business models, particularly those that incorporate biochar production into fuel production and likely sustainable aviation fuel production. There are a few companies jumping into this space now. Pyrolysis offers a pathway to produce that sustainable aviation fuel. And in that context, biochar might become a byproduct of SAF production. We’re going to see increased policy support for biochar production. And then I’m really hoping we see a dramatic increase in incentive payments from the U.

S. government to farmers to really incentivize farmers to get involved.

Asa Kamer: Great. Well, Miles Gray, this has been a great show. It’s been really interesting hearing you talk about the state of the biochar industry and where it’s going. And thank you so much for joining us.

Myles Gray: Great. Thanks for having me, Asa.

Announcer: Thanks so much for listening to Carbon Removal Newsroom. If you like the show, the best way you can help us is by giving us a great rating and review in Apple Podcasts, following the show on Spotify, and by sharing the show on social media. Tell your friends and help us spread the word about what’s happening in the world of carbon removal.

Today's show has Dr. Gabrielle Walker, Co-Founder of the carbon removal marketplace CUR8 and the Founder of Rethinking Removals, an NGO working to change the conventional environmental story around CDR. She is hosted by Nori's VP of Supply and Methodology, Radhika Moolgavkar.

Dr. Walker discusses her long history in the climate space, including time spent in carbon capture, and how she works to address questions from corporate buyers.

The conversation covers the importance of portfolios in carbon removal strategies, the necessity of immediate action, and the challenges of gaining local and environmental community support.

Additionally, Dr. Walker delves into major stories in carbon removal for 2024, including the XPRIZE finalists, Europe's policy actions, and private industry investments.

On This Episode

⁠Dr. Gabrielle Walker

⁠⁠Radhika Moolgavkar⁠⁠

Resources

Dr. Walker's LinkedIn

Rethinking Removals

⁠CUR8

Subscribe to Climate Workers Anonymous

My other show, Reversing Climate Change

Books referenced in the podcasts, at Bookshop

Carbon Removal Memes

Full Transcript

Announcer: You’re listening to Carbon Removal Newsroom, a weekly show about current events in the world of carbon removal, from technology and innovation to policymaking and job growth. Brought to you by Nori, the carbon removal marketplace.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Hello and welcome to Carbon Removal Newsroom. I’m Radhika Moolgavkar, VP of Supplied Methodology at Nori. Dr. Gabrielle Walker is a leading carbon removal communicator and the founder of Curate and Rethinking Removals. She works with organizations of all kinds to raise the profile of carbon removal and help grow the industry. Two years ago, she gave a TED Talk on CDR that has since become one of the most viewed videos on that topic. Today, we’ll talk to her about her work telling the story of carbon removal, what she’s hearing from corporate buyers interested in CDR, and how she would strategize around some of the biggest communication stories the industry has seen this year.

Welcome, Gabrielle.

Gabrielle Walker: Thank you.

Radhika Moolgavkar: All right. Well, let’s just jump into it and talk a little about Curate and rethinking removals. So Curate works with corporate clients to create carbon removal portfolios. Right now, what are the types of questions about the carbon removal industry are companies asking you?

Gabrielle Walker: Great question. And so Curate is actually a market maker in carbon removals. And so we’re currently functioning as a broker. We source out carbon removals projects. We do due diligence on them when we have it. A very detailed and strict process, given the absence of other standards and methodologies out there at the moment. But we also work with corporate buyers to try to help them navigate through what they should be buying and how they should be buying. And we think it’s very important that we put the renewables together in portfolios rather than individual approaches.

There’s a whole bunch of reasons for that, spreading the risk, spreading the cost, spreading the durability and also spreading the bets into what’s actually going to be able to scale at the rate that we need it. And so one part of our due diligence is do the projects we’re working with have a route to scale and is this money actually going to help them to scale? So that’s what we do, but also when talking about what companies are asking us, I should mention that beyond that, we’re also investigating different financial products.

What will it take to get money into the hands of the suppliers? And that’s one of the most important things that’s around at the moment. And then another is what software, what other things are going to be needed to be able to accelerate this industry? And the way I’ll work as a broker is helping us understand the market very well so that we can develop the other products that are needed. Now, with that background, What we’re hearing from corporate buyers is that especially among CSOs, Corporate Sustainability Officers, who are these days much more integrated into overall corporate strategy than they were when I started working on this a few decades ago.

Many of them who come to us and we go to them already get it. Many of them have net zero targets. They know that they’re not going to be able to go to absolute zero, that they’re going to have residual emissions that they’ll have to remove. And they’re trying to figure out what their plan should be for why to do it. But one of the challenges that they face is taking a business case to their CFOs. So why should they actually be buying carbon removals now rather than waiting till everything settles down, giving it such a nascent industry?

And I think that’s one of the questions that comes up quite a lot for us. And then also, what role their action now could play in building the industry? And that’s why I mentioned the financial products, because really, We spoke into lots of global banks and also providers of project capital. And we all know that this is burgeoning, exciting industry in carbon removals. There’s all these startups, all these brilliant ideas, and they’re getting VC funding, and there’s even some private equity that’s pining in. But what happens when they need to get to the next level?

How do they get the money in their hands? And so the first thing is they need offtakes. They need offtakes. They give me commitment from big, reliable corporations to say, when you make it, we will buy it. And that’s a demonstrated to the providers of finance that there will be a market and there will be a future revenue stream and therefore we can land against it. But on top of that, we actually did a first of a kind instrument using an offtake last year. It was working with British Airways who provided the offtake with Undo.

An enhanced rock weathering company and with a standard chart, it is obviously a big global bank to provide the debt. And one of the things that we really learned from that is it’s not just about the offtake, it’s also about how you spread the risk and who takes it. Because this isn’t just first of a kind technology, this is a first of a kind industry. And so the two crucial things that are needed, this is what we’ve been learning both from buyers and from the whole industry is one, Optakes from very reliable corporate buyers.

And the other thing is some way to understand and spread the risk, maybe insurance or maybe some kind of catalytic capital. So those are two things I’d highlight. But I’d also highlight we’ve been developing the business case for why anyone should buy now. And it’s really becoming increasingly clear. One of the things that I think when this industry started to take hold a few years ago, around the time before that I was doing my TED Talk, There was this widespread perception that it would grow and as it grew, the prices would go down, just like they did with certain wind.

We’ll have this lovely, la la la la, we’re going to go down the cost curves. But in fact, prices are going up. Every single supplier that we work with at Curate, the prices over the last year have risen. And we strongly believe that they’re going to continue to rise over the next three to five to seven years. If we do our job right, if we get the offtakes out there, if we get the money in the hands of the suppliers, then we can start to get down the cost curves. But in the meantime, Everybody is going to want a piece of this industry and there just is not going to be enough supply.

So that’s the economics 101 recipe for prices going up. So one of the things that we say to the companies is, buy now. Get an offtake that gets you very preferential rates because all of the companies want the offtakes. And then you can secure your supply at a rate that’s actually going to be much more favorable now. And then the other thing that we’ve been telling them, of course, is that compliance is coming. So the Oxford Offsetting Principles was the first voluntary rule setter to come out and say, you need to start buying now, buying removals now.

But then we’re starting to see the work in the European Union. I think we’ll come back to that later in the conversation, but Policies around the place that are demonstrating that this is coming in the compliance space. And so, you know, what we say back to the buyers that we discussed this with is those two things. The compliance is coming. And if you buy the offtakes now, because that’s specifically what people need to get the money in their hands, we can get you really good rates for that. And then the final thing I’d say in this is it’s all about portfolios.

So quite a few big companies are doing one-off deals with individual companies, but it’s a risky bet. It’s a risky bet on the price. It’s a risky bet on the technology. And so really spreading your risk and spreading your costs and spreading your opportunities across the range is what we strongly advocate and that’s what we build and to curate.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Super interesting in all the stuff that we think about at Nori, too, particularly that financing piece and the offtake and the risk spreading. But those are pretty sophisticated ideas. You’re balancing both financial risk, first of its kind technology. So how do you feel the general corporate understanding is of CDR and how did they respond to these, you know, rather uncertain risks?

Gabrielle Walker: So I think there are some players, and starting to be more, not just in the tech industry with the high profit per tonne, we have money to put at risk category, but more in the kind of real economy, especially the ones that are kind of on the front line around compliance, for example, the aviation industry or Or some of the others like that who are really starting to understand this better, but still I would say not taking it as seriously as other solutions. So yesterday I was at Farnborough at the Sustainable Skies Conference speaking about carbon removals and almost all of the conference was devoted to sustainable aviation fuel.

And then once in a while, someone will mention removals. And they’re probably going to have to be at least equal solutions in this space. And they’re probably going to, I mean, removals, the CEO of British Airways yesterday said, their estimate is that the aviation industry can get to, throwing everything at this, can get to maybe 70%. To 75% of the solution, which means that at least a full quarter of it is going to have to come from removals. And yet it’s not quite there in the mentality. And one of my messages to the aviation players yesterday was, my advice is start thinking about carbon removals now, the way you’re thinking about SAF now, and not the way you were thinking about SAF 10 years ago, because we don’t have 10 years to get carbon removals to the same space.

So I think, you know, awareness of this, but taking it seriously as an issue isn’t maybe quite there in some of those industries. And then there are plenty of others who will say, you know what, we’re working really hard on our reductions. We’ve heard the message that we should do first reductions and then removals. And so we’re working on our reductions. And when we get to the point where we need removals, then we’ll start worrying about it. And I think that the message hasn’t quite got across that if you don’t buy now, if you don’t make those advanced purchase commitments, then That not only will the supply not be available when you need it, but the limited amount of supply that will be there is going to be extremely expensive.

So, you know, for the world and for yourself, it’s a poor solution. But at the moment, I think that’s a message that’s been being received from the voluntary rule set as first and next. And I know that the voluntary rule set is meant to say it’s a hierarchy of priorities, but not a sequence. And so I think those are the two things that we’re working very hard to try to combat. It’s spreading more of an understanding that there are the reasons to buy now and the reasons to take it seriously now as part of an overall plan.

And then the final thing I’d say is that quite a lot of the less sophisticated players are just frightened by the whole offsets toxicity. And for them, I think their perception is it’s much safer and easier to do nothing And I have to say that this is a conversation that I’m starting to have with some of my friends and colleagues in the NGO space, which is it’s really important to go after greenwashing, but it might be even more important to go after not acting. And I haven’t really seen anyone being attacked for doing nothing.

And therefore, that’s what’s the safe space for many corporates at the moment. And I’d like to see that change.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I could not agree with you more about the not acting part. It’s very unfortunate. You led nicely into our next question, which is what part of rethinking removal’s goal is to create space for difficult conversations around toxic issues? And I think some of the things you touched on might be the toxic issues that are holding CDR back right now. So can you expand on that a little more?

Gabrielle Walker: Absolutely. And I think In a way, you know, I came to carbon removals from carbon capture and storage, and I came to carbon capture and storage, not because it was my great love, but because I realized that it’s one big area of the whole climate space that really wasn’t getting attention, mainly because it was so toxic. And I’ve been working on climate change now for 30 years. So I’ve worked in more or less every aspect of it with more or less everybody. And so, you know, in a way, kind of have the luxury to choose where I point my attention and really wanted my attention and energy And the networks and the people who are good enough to trust me and work with me to be targeted to areas that really needed a kind of big picture approach and a non-partisan approach.

So that’s why I went to carbon capture and storage and I realized that carbon removal is even more toxic and even more important to get right because it plays an even bigger place in the whole climate space. So that’s kind of why I’m in it. To see what I and we can do to help build bridges and to make more inclusive narratives. Now, that emphatically doesn’t mean convincing people to change their minds or getting people to see reason or anything like that. All of our work is really talking with an extremely open mind to everybody.

When I say everybody, I mean everybody across the ecosystem. So every different kind of carbon removal from what some people call nature-based ones all the way through hybrids and techs, different approaches to the same, different technological approaches to the same overall way of doing removals, but also to people outside society. Carbon removals in the climate space, to policymakers, to think tanks, to people who focus on nature and biodiversity, and understanding where they all sit and how carbon removals fits or doesn’t fit within their worldview, and then trying to see how we can reconstruct worldviews to make them sufficiently inclusive.

Because there are definitely trade-offs in this space, of course, but there’s fewer trade-offs than people think. And so I think that actually looking for, I learned a new word yesterday, underlap. So, you know, you want to avoid overlaps so you’re not duplicating, but you want to avoid underlaps where there’s actually quite good synergy between different approaches. And they don’t need to be in opposition if you can frame them right. So one example of this is a direct air capture in Kenya. So this is a really interesting one. I’ve been working with the brilliant guys down there with Africa Climate Ventures and the Climate Action Platform Africa with Octavia.

Bottom line is that when people think about the global south and carbon removals, of course, they think about trees and soils and nature. But they don’t think about tech. They think that tech is all about the global north and it’s about industrialized nations. And that ain’t necessarily so. The Great Rift Valley in Kenya is a brilliant potential place to do direct tech capture. Why? Because it’s got two things that are absolutely necessary. One of them is fantastic storage. They’ve got fresh lava, just like in Iceland, so they can mineralize the CO2.

The other thing is they have vast amounts of renewable energy, which is going begging, which cannot be developed. Because there’s nobody to be a big industrial offtaker. And until there’s a big industrial offtaker, it just doesn’t pay to develop the smaller amounts. It just pushes the price of electricity up for everybody and that makes it harder. So you have a situation where if you cite direct air capture in Kenya, you have a mechanism for developing renewable energy. Which can then also be used for other things to help get green industrialization.

It helps for development, it helps for climate justice and local communities. It also is a mechanism whereby money can go from the Global North, where companies need to pay for removal, so Global South, who are the places that have done the least to cause climate change and they’re doing the most suffering from it, but they’re not getting money through aid in the place that they need. And so you look at that and that’s not a, should it be Global North or Global South? Should it be nature or tech? Should it be renewables and reductions or should it be removals?

It’s actually when you put them intelligently together that you get a much better answer. So I would say that some of those toxic issues, by listening to everybody and helping to reframe them, you can get to much better answers. And the other thing I’d throw in on this is that I really, I find that it’s so, we in the climate space are being attacked on all sides. You might call it the anti-wrote brigade. You might call it a political issue. It’s become part of the culture wars. And the attacks are coming in thick and fast.

And so it’s terribly disappointing that many of us are responding by attacking each other. And I think that’s a space where we really want to, we are operating, we want to operate more. It’s very understandable. But within the carbon removal space, there were direct air capture companies that were attacking each other. There were approaches, you know, don’t do biochar, do DAC, don’t do DAC, do BEX. And then within that, there’s don’t do nature, do tech, don’t do tech, do nature. And then there’s Don’t do removals. Do Red Plus and avoidance credits.

Don’t do credits. Do nature or do reductions. And in this almighty mess, our enemies are rubbing their hands in glee. And so one of the things that we’re working on very strongly in Rethinking Removals is not just to try to help align the removal space, but to help Insert removals more sensibly and sympathetically in the overall climate space. Really understanding where the trade dots are and where the potential synergies are and helping to reframe that overall picture so that we can see where we all fit together. Provide something that looks a lot more like a united front to the attack.

Radhika Moolgavkar: As a side note, do you have anti-woke culture in the UK like we have in the US? Does that exist?

Gabrielle Walker: Yes, it’s not so severe here, but it definitely exists. It’s more like poking and prodding. It hasn’t really caught the zeitgeist. But certainly there’s a lot of vested interests out there that really want to push back on any kind of climate action. And the fact that it’s got tangled up in the culture wars is a shame when, in fact, all of our lives and livelihoods and businesses depend on solving this problem. One of my good friends and my co-founder at Curate, one of my co-founders at Curate, Mark Stevenson, says we should stop thinking so much like politicians and be thinking more like engineers.

And what he means by that is that it’s quite easy to disagree over politics. But if you think about what happens when you get a bunch of engineers around the table saying you’ve got this problem to solve, they’re just trying to solve it. And I think in a way, you know, I think that we need a bit more of that in this climate space. It’s Watching out for bad actors, being ready to police, absolutely. In many places, there’s a deserved catastrophic lack of trust. I understand all of that. But basically, we have collective problems that we could actually be sitting around tables saying, okay, how do we solve it?

How do we stick this together with that? Where are the trade-offs and what do we do about it? Rather than just having circular firing squads where we all end up on the ground.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, so now I want to move on to or move the conversation to about communication and public acceptability. You obviously described in Kenya what seems like an amazing situation. And I agree with you from all the work that we’ve been doing in the DAC space. But generally, how well do you think the industry has engaged with local communities so far? And are there areas that we should be thinking about more?

Gabrielle Walker: You know, the answer to this is probably, to my dying day, the answer to this is going to be not enough. And this is one of my great brokers. I feel like when we’re doing our due diligence for Q8, I said that in addition to, does the project do what it says it will do? What does the science tell us about it? Are they doing the right methodology? Do they have the right monitoring? Are they like to go out of business? Do they have the right team? Do they have a path to scale?

You know, we look at all of those, but we look really strongly at how do they engage with local communities and where does the benefit sharing happen? And there are two reasons to do that. One reason is a reason of justice. It’s absolutely that the voluntary carbon market scandals have been rocked by cowboys diving into places, grabbing the money and running and then going off on the yachts while the local people say, what about us? And that’s not fair. And we can’t afford to do that. And the other reason is practical, which is if you continue to do that, you’ll get what started to happen across countries in Africa, which is 60% taxes get slapped on projects.

Project can’t happen. It goes wrong. So for both reasons of justice and reasons of practicality and license to operate, it’s an absolute shoo-in. So we are extremely strict about our projects and how they engage to make sure that’s a key part of the due diligence and not kind of tacked onto page 42. And I think many more Companies and also buyers of car mills need to be doing the same thing. That’s the way, one of the things that’s challenging about this industry is it’s so early. One of the things that’s marvellous about this industry is it’s so early.

So we still have a chance to get it right and actually build that into our zeitgeist and DNA instead of it being something that’s a kind of let’s be nice to people add-on. I’ll get off my head off.

Radhika Moolgavkar: No, no. I mean, I totally appreciate it. And, you know, I think one of the things that we see in the U. S. is often what feels like a good project from the environment is strongly opposed from the local community, maybe rightfully or maybe because of a misunderstanding. So what advice do you give to companies who are embroiled in a controversial project and how they should work through that?

Gabrielle Walker: Yeah, the thing is, this isn’t rocket science either. Every project that’s ever been cited near to a community through all of history has needed to do the same thing. And it isn’t rocket science. It’s basically involve people from the beginning and have them give them a reason to care, give them a sense of ownership. And whether that sense of ownership is being involved from the beginning with the discussions and having clarity and having repeated town halls and or some kind of ownership and the benefits that come from it. Specifically, you know, it could be jobs, it could be profit sharing, it could be, but when local communities feel a sense of connection and ownership, they don’t have a problem.

Universally. So, you know, there are definitely, there are people out there who are deeply suspicious of anything to do with many of these technologies or approaches and who will try to find any way that they can to try to stop it. And if they can go in and have those discussions before anyone understands what the project is about, then that’s already going to seed mistrust. And so you need to be engaged from the beginning. And also it’s absolute transparency. You know, we humans are extremely good at understanding what we’re being played eventually.

And so just being very transparent about the project from the beginning and making it a kind of a sharing approach. And, you know, the oil and gas industry have been doing this for years. They call it local content, and they know exactly how to go about making sure that they can get both the government and the local people on board. And as I said, it’s not rocket science, and we need to be doing the same thing in the mobile space.

Radhika Moolgavkar: My final question around this particular topic is, you alluded to it earlier, but there’s a lot of resistance to CDR within some of the environmental movement. And so... What guidance can you offer to people who are trying to engage with those groups and to help bring them along the carbon removal journey?

Gabrielle Walker: Yeah, I think many of the people that I speak to in the environmental space who’ve kind of come to me about carbon removals have done it for the same reason I came to carbon removals, which is basically you kind of can’t argue with the science. So fundamentally, I think there is a widespread misperception that either there’s loads of carbon removals out there and we need to slow them down because they’re taking over everything, which is obviously not the case when we know how tiny the fraction actually is, or that it’s only when you’ve done everything else should you allow that because if you allow anything sooner, it’s going to take over everything.

And so I think part of it is a misunderstanding about the actual scales that are needed and the scales that are possible. So when people say carbon removals is just going to be an excuse for business as usual, nobody thinks we can make 50 billion tonnes of carbon removals in the next, how long have we got? 20, 25 years. Nobody thinks that. So we cannot do enough carbon removals just to continue as business as usual. Even if we stopped everything and through everything we got at it, it can’t be done.

It can’t be scaled that fast. And so, you know, that’s one of the things that I, in fact, we developed this kind of four really important narrative pillars about carbon removals that we took to COP29 through our work with Rethinking Removals work with carbon removals at COP. We created a coalition of different NGOs. And point one is, That carbon removals have to go hand in hand with carbon reductions. And not just like a kind of the normal, yeah, you know what, we should do both, shouldn’t we? It’s they literally have to go hand in hand.

Because if we do reductions and don’t do removals, we might as well not bother. We’re going to blast so fast through our climate targets. If we do only removals and not reductions, same thing. So they literally have to go hand in hand and every tonne that we do not stop going in the air is yet another tonne we have to take out and it’s already hard enough. So item one is they really are interconnected and they do go hand in hand. It’s not, you know, first one and then another or only do one or which one should we do?

It really is both hand. And the second one is that carbon removal is never, ever, ever an excuse for fossil fuel business as usual. And one of the reasons for that is of course we need to make the transition. But the other reason is we couldn’t do it anyway. We can’t make that many rules. And then the third part of the narrative is we really need to start now and not later. And lots of the kind of challenges come from we should only do it when we’ve done everything else. And that’s for the reasons we discussed before, of course, which are if we don’t start building the industry now, we don’t have a cat in house chance of getting to the scale that we need.

And then the final one is one that I’ve already slightly alluded to, which is in conversations with people who aren’t necessarily yet on the cover rules journey, just understanding the range of removals that are out there and the range of geographies that they can be applied to. So people hear trees or machines and they don’t know about ocean CDR, they don’t know about BECCS, they don’t know about enhanced rock weathering, they don’t know about hybrid approaches, they don’t know about Building up materials and different approaches to Dax and Bex. And when you start doing that, it becomes something that’s much less like crazy people who think machines can solve everything and come into here, or it’s just trees, why don’t we stop chopping down trees instead of just planting new ones, right?

So I think that range, and also the range of geographies, so not just the global north, an incredible development opportunity in the global south, and a redistribution of justice. And when you start to show that range, it becomes much easier for people who care about, as everyone indeed should care about, Injustice in the global south. So we care about balancing nature with tech or we care about actually having climate solutions that match. And the final thing I’d say about this is that I told you I’ve been working on climate change for a really long time.

I have never met anything, any topic and anything that I’ve worked on before that has a better capacity to give people hope. When people haven’t heard about it, they often say, I didn’t know we could do that. There’s this kind of sensation that it’s all about just stopping the problem and this kind of despairingly stopping the problem getting worse. At least try to stop it before it gets too awful. And the idea that we actually have an approach that can start to help us reverse it and clean up our mess is something that people really engage with.

So those are some of my observations on narratives that are wider framing that aren’t saying us or them and that really seem to land.

Radhika Moolgavkar: I said it was my last question, but I have to ask you one follow up, which is, you know, here within the U. S. , the oil and gas companies have done a lot of damage to communities around the Gulf Coast, right? They’ve been the victims of the extractive economy. But you mentioned oil and gas as being able to bring communities and policymakers along. And I, for one, believe they’re necessary to the solution because they have a level of expertise that we need. How would you talk to those communities where they, I think, rightfully are anxious about the tech and don’t want to hear about the science?

They’re just mad for like, you know, rightfully frustrated after many, many years of being taken advantage of.

Gabrielle Walker: It is a great question. And it’s not just in places like that communities can feel taken advantage of. There’s also communities feeling taken advantage of because, you know, carbon cowboys came in and grabbed the resources and the carbon credits and went off and got rich while the communities got nothing and promised jobs didn’t deliver. And, you know, the world has been like that for a long time. And so when there’s deep mistrust and when there has been abuse, it’s very, very difficult to get beyond that. When you said the tech, what I would say is that there’s a whole, there could be a challenge if an oil and gas company goes along to a community that is already feeling battered and bruised and says, you know what, we’re going to bring some more machines that are going to do this thing that you don’t understand.

You won’t get any benefit from it. You won’t get any jobs. You won’t get any profit sharing. And it’s probably going to be scary. Then, you know, I would frankly oppose that. If it’s a biochar or enhanced rock weathering where this is an opportunity to increase the yield on your crops and also to contribute to solving climate change, which you’re already recognizing as having this impact, that’s a very different story. And so, you know, I think that’s where the range of carbon removals actually comes into play. And then on top of that, I would also say that, um, I, you know, I’ve done a lot of work with oil and gas companies and continue to work with some of them, but there’s some that I stopped working with and I’m really, really disappointed.

I have looked those CEOs in the eye. I really believed what they were telling me and I do not believe that they’re committed to this. I think they’re good people. And I think that they’ve told themselves a story, they’ve drunk Kool-Aid and now they’re just running back in a way that I find very disappointing. So, you know, I feel burned by it. Nevermind. So I recognize that, that sensation. I went to visit two places in the UK, East Anglia and Aberdeen, both very big kind of energy centers for us. Aberdeen for North Sea Oil and Gas and East Anglia similarly for oil and gas off the coast.

And what was really interesting was the number of oil and gas service companies there that are now pivoting to service offshore wind. And they’re doing many of the same things. So there’s a kind of blanket, it’s oil and gas or it’s nothing. But actually all around the oil and gas companies are many service companies that are now taking the opportunity to pivot. And they really understand the subsurface, can do some of these projects. So I don’t know what role most of the oil and gas majors are going to play in this.

And I think they’re foolish if they don’t play a role. But I do think many of the service companies could be the ones that would be in play.

Radhika Moolgavkar: That’s cool. That’s interesting. Never thought about that. All right. Well, last big topic, which is sort of news of 2024 or of, I guess, first quarter plus of 2024. You know, every organization needs a good communication strategy, including those in carbon removal. So we’ll take a look at some of the biggest CDR stories of the year because you’re also a storyteller, not just an expert in CDR. We know that the XPRIZE just last week released the 20 finalist teams for their $50 million grand prize. What should the public know about the diverse range of approaches and companies vying for the competition?

Gabrielle Walker: This is so brilliant. And I love the XPRIZE guys. They are fantastic in what they’re doing. And one of the things that’s brilliant about what they did, of course, is that they had four different categories for their competition. The pathways in which the teams could pitch the air, rocks, land and oceans. And that already demonstrates one of the things that I’ve been saying earlier, which is that carbon removals are not just trees or machines. And this already demonstrates the range of ways that you can store carbon and do carbon removals.

Then the other thing I’d say is that they have a really good, they have some of my favorite companies and they’re not allowed to say which obviously, but they do have a demonstration of the ranges that I was speaking about earlier. So like within the direct air capture category, they have companies located in Canada and the US, but they also have a company located in Kenya and one in Oman. And so it’s already sort of demonstrating that this is not something that’s just a kind of industrialized country’s point of view, straight away from the range.

And then, you know, with enhanced rock weathering as well, they have Australia and the US, but they also have India. And so I think, and China, in fact. So I think that one of the things about the range of projects that they’ve chosen, clearly chosen them, are very much of merit. And I think they were brilliant. But it’s a range of approaches and it’s certainly a range of geographies. And that’s sort of starting to demonstrate how carbon removal is a set of solutions for the world and not just for certain parts of it.

There’s really something in this for everybody. And just back to Africa for a moment, one of the reasons I started working with my friends in Kenya was I met the very brilliant James Wawangi, who’s the mastermind behind Africa Climate Ventures and Climate Action Platform Africa. And he said something very brilliant to me. He said, there’s this whole narrative around Africa being this kind of passive victim of climate change that needs aid to be helped out of this issue. And he said, we in Kenya, we’ve got this incredible young population, entrepreneurial Dynamic youth who are ready to pour their hearts into something, we can be providing the climate warriors of the future.

And he said, Gabrielle, this is not going to be done to us. This is not going to be done for us. This is going to be done by us. And that’s a very different narrative. And I think that’s what the XPRIZE range really demonstrates. Yeah, taking control. They’re taking control.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, let’s move on to the EU, which has a different approach. It’s more working through a policy framework. And so they’ve been taking action to incorporate CDR into their corporate carbon trading scheme. How are you feeling about Europe’s policy action so far? And, you know, what do you see the next maybe year bringing?

Gabrielle Walker: It’s very good. It’s happening a bit faster than I expected, but it’s not happening fast enough. It’s so good. So let’s look at them. So you’ve got the CRCF, the Carbon Removal Certification Framework, which was a very good, it was an uneasy compromise in some way. It’s clearly not perfect. But one of the things that’s very good about it is that the removals, the specification for high durability removals managed to stay tech neutral instead of choosing winners. And I think that was a really good thing. And, you know, they’ve been doing the work that this is ongoing, but I think this has the potential for really outsized impact because the European Union is doing it first, but then other territories are going to say, well, OK, well, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

We can take it from them. So I think it’s going to have outsized impact. And I think it’s, you know, it’s not perfect. Not the way that I quite have done it, but it’s got a lot that’s very good about it. And then how that rhymes with the green claims directive, which is an attempt to stop greenwashing is also interesting and complicated. And there’s lots of kind of, we need to make it better in these directions, conversations going on. But nonetheless, actually having laws in place to say, we’ll come after you if you’re greenwashing is actually quite helpful.

The UK is likely to put carbon removals into their emission trading scheme before the European Union does. And there’s even talk that might happen as soon as 2026. In the European Union, it’s likely to be later. But I think that the faster we can accelerate both understanding of carbon removals The scale in the voluntary carbon market and what’s demonstrably working methodology standards, these are the kinds of things that are going to be necessary to be able to accelerate the pace at which removals can go into the ETS. And when they go into the ETS, that’s a really big market.

So we’ve got to break a careful eye on the compliance markets too. And then the other thing to mention is that the European Union has now set its recommendations for its 2040 target. So it’s already got the 2030 target. And for 2040, the aim is 90% emissions reductions with the implication there. That there’s actually a specific carbon removals element. So I think this is all really interesting because we’ve been long arguing that we needed twin targets, reductions and removals, both to avoid the issue that removals allows people to take their foot off the pedal of reductions and vice versa, but also to make sure we’re tracking, are we getting enough?

And so I think that we’re starting to see that a bit in the European Union as well.

Radhika Moolgavkar: All right, pivoting to something in private industry, Frontier recently announced a huge award to VaultaDeep. And you were talking about the challenge of suppliers having enough financing. So I think an award like this allows a company like VaultaDeep to maybe leap forward through other suppliers. So how do you think about these big awards? And what is sort of the right mix of investment without picking winners too soon? Given the limited dollars we have right now.

Gabrielle Walker: So another great question. And I think. We have actually been very interested to see the kind of the balance of. Either bilateral agreements or a slightly multilateralism with Frontier or kind of more portfolio approaches among big corporate buyers. And one thing I’d say, I don’t actually know the structure of the Frontier deal. Is it money up front or is it money when the credits are delivered?

Radhika Moolgavkar: You know, I’m not sure myself. That’s a really good question. It’s an update. As I understand it.

Gabrielle Walker: So part of the issue is not just, you need the offtake as I described earlier with the Q8 financing instrument we did, you need the offtake as a kind of basic minimum viable product to be able to get money in the hands of the suppliers, but it doesn’t automatically happen as soon as you get the offtake. If the payment isn’t upfront, then you still have to, you know, buy the shovels or build the machines and have the money to do that. So I think one comment to make here is that quite a lot of the Big corporates that have made big purchases so far have done it on bilateral deals.

And I understand why they want to do that. They can use their brand, they can get leverage, they can do better negotiations. It’s risky because it is putting all your regs in one basket and it’s a very, very young industry. And it’s also not necessarily spreading the love when it comes to trying to get as many suppliers as possible, accelerating as fast as possible. And it’s also not necessarily putting the money in the hands of the suppliers. So I think it’s going to be very important to have sensibly put together portfolio purchases.

And we haven’t seen big ones of those yet. We’re certainly working on that at Curate. And also tied along with the mechanisms that the money gets in the hands of the suppliers straight away. And that’s going to be how we scale this industry.

Radhika Moolgavkar: All right. Final question for you. So we’ve talked a little bit about some of the maybe headwinds against carbon removal and some of the unflattering media coverage that it has had because of bad actors. But as you look forward and you think about in 15 years, I think we’re we’re going to have projects that fail not for a Lack of trying to do everything correct, but it’s a new industry. We don’t know everything. So how do we protect against unflattering coverage in 15 years when people can look back and say, oh, you should have done that.

You should have done that. You know, they have the benefit of hindsight.

Gabrielle Walker: Yeah. So there’s also the challenge of quite a few less sophisticated players will sort of say, oh, is that, I thought offsets were bad. Isn’t it an offset or? And I actually feel on the side very worried about what we’re going to do about deforestation. It’s not a large amount of money that goes into avoided deforestation from carbon credits, but it needs to increase very many other mechanisms for that. So I’m really worried about the kicking that these kind of poor quality credits are getting and therefore delivering to some of the other projects that are being tired by association.

And maybe therein lies the answer because I think that there is still a sense that among many people that there are perfect solutions out there. And if you don’t find them, it means that you didn’t work hard enough. You didn’t do enough due diligence. And that’s not true because if we wanted perfect solutions, we would have started 30 years ago and would have been building them carefully in the lab and then doing the field projects and the pilots would have known So much about them that we would be in a great place to be able to say, you know what, this is a good one, this is a bad one.

And if that was the case, I would not be working on this. I’d be working on something else that was harder. So I think that nothing is perfect. There are going to be bullets. There are things that will fail. There will be bad actors. And I think the best guard against this, and this is what we do at Curate, is we make our decisions based on the evidence that we have at the time. We do our level best to get the very best possible evidence. And we write it all down.

This is what we decided on the basis of this information for this reason. And we’re monitoring it constantly with backup plans in case something goes wrong, because I don’t know where it’s going to go wrong, but I know it’s going to go wrong somewhere. So that means that we can be ready. We can be ready to understand what we need to do about it, what we need to swap out, how we need to change the narrative about it, how we need to explain why we chose. And I think one of the things that’s gone wrong with the Voluntary carbon market today is that there was a lot of everything is perfect.

Oh, no, everything is terrible. And so I think I’m more nuanced. We recognize that we don’t have the answers to this yet, but we’re making this decision on this basis. And, you know, really grown up decisions are always made on the basis of lack of entire information. And that’s how we navigate our lives. And I think that’s how we need to navigate this space as well.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, Gabrielle, thank you so much for the conversation. I enjoyed it immensely, and I agree with everything you said. So thank you for joining me today, and I look forward to seeing what your organizations do in the future.

Gabrielle Walker: Absolute pleasure. Thanks to you too.

Announcer: Thanks so much for listening to Carbon Removal Newsroom. If you like the show, the best way you can help us is by giving us a great rating and review in Apple Podcasts, following the show on Spotify, and by sharing the show on social media. Tell your friends and help us spread the word about what’s happening in the world of carbon removal.

Over 1000 teams worldwide have applied since the award was announced in 2021.

This month, XPRIZE released the detailed “Getting to Gigatonne” report, which provided comprehensive data and analysis of the top 100 teams. A few weeks later, they announced the top 20 finalist teams competing for the grand prize.

The report and the selection of the top teams provide a state of play for the industry by showing what methodologies are most ready to grow to a gigatonne scale, according to XPRIZE's expert CDR judges.

Today's show is with Nikki Batchelor, the Executive Director of XPRIZE Carbon Removal, and Mike Leitch, the Senior Technical Lead, about how they selected the top 20, what they found in this report, and what comes next for the competition.

On This Episode

Nikki Batchelor

Mike Leitch

⁠Radhika Moolgavkar⁠

Resources

“Getting to Gigatonne”⁠ report

Subscribe to Climate Workers Anonymous

My other show, Reversing Climate Change

Books referenced in the podcasts, at Bookshop

Carbon Removal Memes

Full Transcript

Announcer: You’re listening to Carbon Removal Newsroom, a weekly show about current events in the world of carbon removal, from technology and innovation to policymaking and job growth. Brought to you by Nori, the carbon removal marketplace.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Hello, I am Radhika Moolgavkar, VP of Supply and Methodology at Nori. The XPRIZE remains one of the top stories in carbon removal and one of the largest funding sources for CDR startups. The Elon Musk-backed competition will award $50 million to the winning CDR startup in 2025 and send $10 million to three other runner-up teams. Over 1,000 teams worldwide have applied since the award was announced in 2021. This month, XPRIZE released the detailed Getting to Gigatonne report, which provided comprehensive data analysis of the top 100 teams. A few weeks later, they announced the top 20 finalist teams competing for the grand prize.

The report and the selection of the top teams provide a state of play for the industry by showing what methodologies are most ready to grow to a gigatonne scale according to XPRIZE’s expert CDR judges. I challenge anyone to say XPRIZE expert fast. Today we’ll talk with Nikki Batchelor, the Executive Director of XPRIZE Carbon Removal, and Mike Leach, the Senior Technical Lead, about how they selected the top 20, what they found in this report, and what comes next for the competition. So Nikki, welcome back.

Nikki Batchelor: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Radhika Moolgavkar: And Mike, welcome to your first podcast with us. So glad to have you.

Mike Leitch: I’m thrilled to be here. Thanks.

Radhika Moolgavkar: All right, let’s get started. So obviously last week, I believe you guys announced your finalists. They were all over my LinkedIn. Very exciting. So Nikki, what is the current stage of the Carbon Removal XPRIZE and what are the remaining milestones from here?

Nikki Batchelor: Yeah, great question. Well, to kick off, we’re just getting to the good stuff. This is really what we’ve been waiting for for years and years from the design to the launch to the team recruitment phases that we’ve been pushing through over the last few years. We’re really getting into the finals. This is the last year of the prize from our perspective in terms of operations, but also it’s the real moment where the teams are being asked to remove carbon from the air or the atmosphere and store it durably. And so that’s kind of what we’re testing people to see this year.

And the series of announcements that you kind of mentioned earlier, first we came out with our top 100 because it’s really important to us to be thinking about Catalyzing and supporting the whole industry, not just a few number of carbon removal companies. So first we wanted to come out with that list. Then we came out with the Getting to Giga10 report, which we’ll really dive into today, some of that interesting data. And then we announced the top 20 finalists. And those are the companies who will be moving forward in this last year with us and will be completing site visits to all of their locations with our Measurement and Verification teams, and we’ll be collecting that data and compiling everything for the judges to do a comprehensive review of all of the work completed this year.

And then we’ll, yeah, we’ll give away the rest of the money. So next year we’ll be awarding $80 million, which will be really exciting for us to hand over those checks, but also probably more so for the teams who are on the other side of that.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah. So Nikki, I’m envisioning this huge like award ceremony. Have you guys even started thinking about what this is going to look like? That’s so much money.

Nikki Batchelor: We have a few ideas that we’re throwing around. I think this is always, you know, up for debate, the best way to kind of conclude a prize and, you know, make a big splash for the end. And so we’re talking with some potential partners about how to do that and really, you know, use this as a platform to help Get shine on all of the teams that are really receiving those checks, but also the 20 finalists who have completed a lot of work to date and will be making incredible progress in 2024 too.

Radhika Moolgavkar: That’s amazing. So this question is for both of you. You recently released a list of 100 finalists and it featured many companies and projects that CDR watchers are familiar with. So what sets the final 20 apart and who made this round? So Mike, I’ll start with you and then Nikki, if you want to add anything to Mike’s answer.

Mike Leitch: Yeah, thanks. I mean, the top 20 are still a very diverse crowd. We’ve really been excited right from day one at the diversity of solutions that have been attracted to the competition. And indeed, we kind of designed the competition to try and be as accepting and as broad in scope as possible. And we’ve seen that play out throughout every round of the competition. So we have five direct air capture companies. Five land-based removal companies, four ocean-based removal companies, and six rock-based removal companies. But even within those four, we talk about things in these four tracks, air, land, ocean, and rocks.

But even within each of those tracks, there’s a huge amount of diversity. And like Nikki said, we’re just thrilled to be in the homestretch where you can see these projects up close and personal and really see what each one of them has to offer.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Nikki, anything else you want to add?

Nikki Batchelor: Yeah, just at a high level, you know, to remind folks the way the competition is structured is we’re really looking across three broad criteria. We’re looking at, you know, their operational readiness and how they’re performing now. We’re looking at their sustainability criteria, how they scale up over time. And we’re looking at cost and all of those things together kind of make up the holistic view that we take in the judging room. And so I’ll let Mike dive into the details of some of those criteria and what that means for us.

But the 20 teams who made it to the finals really excelled across those categories.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, so Nikki really teed up the next question nicely for you, Mike. I mean, as she mentioned, the finalists were selected for their ability to sustainably reach kilotonne, megatonne and gigatonne scales. So how do you evaluate their ability to reach these larger scales, which I assume are years away when you’re looking at their current operations?

Mike Leitch: Yeah, well, it’s important to note that one of the important parts of the XPRIZE and one of the distinctions of the XPRIZE is that this is a demonstration competition. So one of the things we try to do, even when we’re talking about megatonne and gigatonne scale in the future, is challenge teams to tie those claims back to what they’re able to demonstrate today. So we asked teams to demonstrate at a kilotonne scale, that’s remove and durably sequester 1,000 tonnes of CO2 in 12 months, and then estimate their costs at a projected megatonne scale, and then demonstrate the potential to accomplish gigatonne scale types of, you know, quantities of CDR sustainably.

Obviously, the further you look out and the larger, you know, The larger you extrapolate, the greater there is uncertainty. But we always, like I said, try to tie that back to demonstrated data today and then challenge the teams to really connect the dots and show how they’re going to accomplish their potential going forward.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, so you mentioned one of the challenges, which is extrapolating the future, but obviously you were also looking at a variety of technologies presented. So what were some of the other challenging aspects of evaluating these entries?

Mike Leitch: Like I said before, we really worked hard to make sure that we could accommodate a very broad variety of solution types. And I think one of the interesting things about CDR is it really is the ends justify the means. You can get to carbon removal a number of different ways. And we found that to be a fascinating aspect of the competition because Every solution type really does have their advantages and disadvantages, and we’ve been able to see some of those trade-offs play out in the competition. Where that kind of landed in this latest round of judging is that Tension between the practical requirements of the competition, that is the demonstration requirement and the challenges of operating today versus the potential for future impact.

Many teams, especially now, there’s a lot of people developing new CDR technologies and they’re in some cases still raising money or very small in scale and they’re trying to make those sustainability claims, but they don’t quite have the demonstrations together yet. We really worked with the judges to try and find a balance. We needed to identify teams that had both the ability to operate today and who have a very strong understanding of their pathway to large scale and a clear path to doing so sustainably.

Radhika Moolgavkar: So we just talked about the technical side, but Nikki, there’s also a social side. I think it’s something that I think about a lot, but I know you do too. So as you were evaluating these groups and these companies, how do you think about social sustainability? What does your evaluation look like? And what is the type of work these companies are planning to do to engage with the communities they’re working in?

Nikki Batchelor: Yeah, it’s a great question. It’s something we’ve really been focusing on a lot over the last three years. Especially because this is such a new industry, there’s so much opportunity actually to influence the way that it’s developing. And so, you know, in the first phase of the competition, we were really trying to just start to prompt teams to think about a lot of questions along these lines. Who are the potential types of communities you might be We worked with Carbon 180 during the first phase of the prize to really analyze a lot of those initial responses we got from the milestone round of the competition and we kind of published a report then.

That discussed a lot of the findings. We knew then for phase two, we wanted to go deeper, but also, you know, the bar is getting higher. People are progressing, time is passing, and they’re starting to build real pilots in the world. So we wanted to have a series of questions that really dive into all of the different areas that are relevant here. And we worked with both the Carbon Business Council to Develop and support their development of an online training around responsible deployment that we required everyone in the prize to take.

So it’s an eight module online training that’s available to anyone working in the space. And then we also worked with American University’s Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal to develop an approach to the submission questions. And as part of that research process, we kind of surveyed the whole field right now. What other people are asking project developers, you know, everyone from DOE to funders and Try to synthesize that and also look at adjacent industries that have been working with communities for a long time, you know, from other larger energy projects, international development projects, other spaces where we might have learnings and synthesize that into, you know, our approach for the prize, which was a series of questions we asked teams to really dive into and it covered everything from Understanding the impacted communities.

What would your approach be to community engagement? How do you assess the project risks and impacts of those projects? How do you explore project benefits? What is a priority? How can you be creative here about bringing benefits back to the communities? How do you ensure there’s transparency and accountability and also build local capacity over time as you’re working in these spaces? So those were kind of our focus areas. And we also published resources for teams on how to think about all of these. Papers and guides and templates and things like that, because for many of them, this is the first time they’ve done that.

But also we have seen a huge appetite and interest in learning how to do it better. So I think it’s kind of been a learning process for everyone along the way, but hopefully the industry is better for it.

Radhika Moolgavkar: I mean, definitely, you guys are paving the way and helping people think about this, I think, completely differently. So it sounds like you’ve done an amazing job. Now I want to pivot a little bit to just talking about the four tracks, which were mentioned earlier. Mike, you made the note that all of these pathways have different tradeoffs. So when you are looking at these pathways or tracks, what are some of the most significant differences between them in terms of price, energy use, footprint, anything else we should be thinking about?

Mike Leitch: Yeah, I mean, I think the what was kind of interesting when we when we did this latest round of submissions and data collection, we you know, a lot of the trends that we saw didn’t really surprise us too much. You know, the air teams tend to be a little bit more expensive. They consume more energy, whereas the land teams are less expensive, but their durability is lower and they obviously typically take more land, you know. I think across the board, those types of trade-offs that people talk about and have been talking about for years are still playing out to a certain extent, but One of the things that kind of surprised me was the diversity within the tracks, you know, even with, I would say like across all of these metrics that the four tracks do overlap, even though the averages kind of play out one versus another.

There is a great deal of diversity. So, you know, within the air track, there are actually a great deal of teams that operate at very low prices or low energy consumptions. And many land teams are finding more durable ways to sequester the captured CO2. So I’m You know, I think in some senses that represents sort of a, it just represents the amount of innovations going into the space. You know, people are trying to leverage the inherited advantages of the, you know, the pathway that they work in and use science and technology and innovation to address some of the weaknesses.

And so we’re starting to see that play out. I would encourage everyone to download the Getting to Giga 10 report. It’s on our website. And there’s hundreds of nice, colorful charts that help lay out some of those ideas and demonstrate that diversity.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I mean, that’s such an incredibly optimistic thing to hear, right? That you’re seeing things converge in a good way really makes me feel happy. So Nikki, he did mention the five air teams, but you know, you have five DAC teams that made the final 20. Some of the maybe bigger, more well-funded original DAC companies aren’t on the list. So what sets these five apart from the older DAC companies that have maybe drawn more funding from traditional sources?

Nikki Batchelor: I think there’s both an art and a science to setting goals that are both ambitious enough to push an industry forward and result in breakthroughs, but not too ambitious that they only favor incumbents, which really is hard. You know, there’s always going to be a few incumbents, even in a new industry. And so, you know, we want to make sure that we don’t stifle the early innovation for the next generation of companies with the design. Has been bigger is not always better. And so we wanted to set a meaningful goal for the demonstration that was a floor basically that you had to get to some, you know, reasonable amount of removal.

We set the goal at 1000 tonnes. And from that, we could test and validate the merits of each of the approaches. So that design choice, I think automatically it set some of the earlier incumbents down a path that maybe this wasn’t the right fit for them because they might already be past that goal. And so I think they’ve all made their own choice about if it was kind of a good decision to be in the competition. But regardless, I think everyone in the industry has been so supportive, especially the early incumbents.

I think we’re all very aware that, you know, Carbon removal is a new space and it’s like we all succeed or fail together in some ways. And so I think, you know, we’ve all been very supportive of the early efforts here. And I think that we’re seeing a new generation kind of come out of the prize as well now. So I think hopefully we’re accomplishing both because we’re seeing great announcements and accomplishments from those early dot companies and everyone’s cheering them on from the sidelines, but we’re also Seeing kind of new breakthroughs on different areas that need to be advanced in the earlier dot companies.

So I will say though that the competition overall was really steep for the 20 finalist spots. I think It was an optimistic, hopeful view five years ago that we would have tonnes of companies in the space even to compete in the prize, but we didn’t know that for sure. We had no idea where people would be, how many folks would be on the table now. And so I think we really wish we could have awarded more than 20 finalist spots. I think that was kind of a practical limitation in some ways of it’s just very resource intensive to be able to Operate the finals of the competition and do testing and validation and site visits for those teams.

So I know that, you know, there are a lot of teams that are really deserving in the top 100 that didn’t quite make it into the finals. But I think we’re going to see amazing things from in the next few years.

Radhika Moolgavkar: I mean, that’s all good news, right? It sounds like it surpassed your wildest expectations in some ways. So that’s pretty fantastic overall. And can’t wait to see what all these teams develop. So Mike, let’s turn to the next track, which is the oceans category, which I think is arguably the most diverse in types of approaches. So when you are looking at ocean teams, what were you looking for and how are you comparing such different tech?

Mike Leitch: Yeah, I mean, I’ll say just on a personal note, you know, I do not have an oceans background and learning about ocean CDR and seeing all of the Sort of amazing ways that people are trying to leverage the ocean in service of the greater climate has been really interesting to learn about over the last couple of years. I would say that generally, and this is across the board, but it’s particularly true in the ocean, is anytime you are adding something to the ocean or trying to manipulate the ocean, people get really nervous.

The ocean is sort of, it’s a commons, it’s a source of Great economic livelihood to so much of the world and a great stabilizer in terms of our climate as well. So everybody from the judges all the way down to the teams has been really focused on making sure that all of the deployers for the XPRIZE, but in the CDR industry at large, are focused on safe, ecologically, and socially responsible deployment. So I’ll just say that first and foremost, that played out, you know, I would say in an outsized way in the oceans field, because there is such a such a sensitivity to the ecological impact of Ocean CDR.

But you also mentioned methodologies, and I think, you know, that there’s also been a lot of talk over the last couple of years about the scientific rigor and development of new methodologies and the level of uncertainty versus uncertainty in the Ocean CDR game. And we definitely wanted the competition to encourage the development of new CDR methodologies. We also wanted to make sure that the competition was open for... Perhaps more frontier or new types of CDR that maybe were reflected in existing methodologies. So we don’t require teams to be working under a formal or third party or accredited methodology, but we do require teams to sort of be responsible for their own operations and demonstrate the ways that they are following best practices.

And in particular, Where projects have ecological implications, making sure that they’re following all local standards and complying with all the other regulations as well as acceptance amongst the communities around them.

Radhika Moolgavkar: All right, and turning now to land, Biochar was the most produced product among the final 100 teams. So Mike, did you find that this revenue stream gave that methodology or that technology an advantage to help it grow more quickly?

Mike Leitch: Yeah, definitely. The product angle is really interesting. And, you know, of the top 100, 71 teams produce products. So, you know, the vast majority of the CER industry that we are seeing is really focused on producing products. Half of that, about 30 teams are producing biochar. So there really is a kind of an outsized product. I, you know, outsized cohort of biochar companies in entering the CDR business. And, and I think the fact that it’s a sellable product and they can generate revenue definitely helps, you know, regardless of your stance on the carbon markets, you know, that’s a tangible thing that can sustain a business.

You know, a nice thing about biochar is it’s relatively easy to produce. So it, it is kind of like a, not only is it a, is it a, um, An industry with a relatively low barrier to entry from a production standpoint, it’s also relatively inexpensive, the equipment that you need to produce biochar. So I think there are a lot of advantages to biochar, and it’s no surprise that there are so many biochar teams represented amongst the top 100 and the top 20.

Radhika Moolgavkar: And finally, last but not least, Nikki, let’s talk about the rocks category, because it had the most finalists with six, which I have to admit, I was a little surprised about. So are you surprised with the success of the mineral carbonation based approaches? And why do you think they are, you know, they’re so well represented in the finals?

Nikki Batchelor: Yeah, I think that. We weren’t trying to make some grand statement by picking six. I think I’ll just clarify that. But the judges were very intentional in the review process to make sure we had A diverse representation across CDR pathways in the final cohort. You know, we’re excited to see how all of these mostly ERW companies play out. I think they all have different takes on that. I think it’s an area that everyone is very curious about right now. So we’re hoping that the competition can really be a platform to collect more data and distribute, you know, successes of those teams in a broader forum.

And validate those approaches so we can see if these are really the ones that are on the path to scale and how they fit into the CDR portfolio.

Radhika Moolgavkar: All right, final question about the companies and the pathways and tracks before getting to the report. I’m just curious, now that you are into the final 20, how will you be working with these teams moving forward? You mentioned, of course, site visits and things like that, but you also mentioned before that you provided Various technical resources. So will that type of work continue? I’m not sure who’s best to answer that question. So if one of you wants to just jump in.

Mike Leitch: Yeah, I can start. I mean, first of all, I’ll say it’s like a breath of fresh air for us having a defined group of 20 teams that we can work with. We were thrilled with the amount of interest and enthusiasm and 1,400 teams joining the competition. But man, that was a lot and way too many teams for us to really sort of get into it with. At a very deep level of detail. So I know we’re really looking forward to working with these 20 teams more closely. We have developed some assessment tools.

We developed a life cycle analysis and techno-economic screening tool that we used in part to help the judges determine, choose the 20 finalists. And that’s kind of serving as the input for our technical verification program that we’re going to use over the course of the finals. So we’ve hired some third-party contractors, all experts in both performance services. Verification as well as sustainability analysis and cost analysis. And we’re going to be working with them over the next eight months really to scrutinize all 20 teams. We’re going to be visiting each of the 20 teams at their sites and really getting to know them and sort of looking under the hood and kicking the tires, but also showing them off a little bit and making sure that the whole world understands what these projects look like and where they are and how big they are.

I just think it’s a fascinating time to see these demonstrations in action.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I’m jealous, Mike, that you get to see all this in action. I would love to see some of these projects. All right, let’s talk about the report, which was a huge body of work and also a huge amount of data and information contained in there. You know, I think the first question is always kind of what was your biggest takeaway from this report and what did it teach you about the state of the industry, Nikki?

Nikki Batchelor: Yeah, so we really spent a good amount of time thinking about what should this report even be when we were sitting on all the data that came in from the finalist submissions that came to us at the beginning of February of this year. And we cycled all of it through the judges to get to the outcome of the 20 finalists. That was kind of its first objective. Its secondary objective was to publish learnings back to the community. So we were trying to contextualize The amazing progress that’s been made to date against how far we still have to go, which is really like the ultimate tension that this industry is grappling with right now.

You know, we need to take a moment to recognize, you know, both from, um, A human engineering and business perspective, how significant it is to do kilotonne scale removal and what it means to, you know, turn those machines on for the first time or run, you know, your process and do a thousand tonnes of removal, which many of these companies are really doing for the first time in 2024, especially in this, you know, newer novel category and carbon removal. It’s very early stages. A lot of these companies have already raised between $5 and $50 million to get them where they are now.

And 75% of our top 100 are actively fundraising this year to meet their next set of goals. So just as businesses, they’re really growing rapidly and have huge demands on their capital requirements. I think... Some of the interesting takeaways for me, and I’ll, you know, let Mike add what some of his top lines were too, as we talk about it. We’re just, we asked the teams to give us some projections of, you know, where you’re at in 2024 and each year. So that’s the next big milestone that we’re shooting for as an industry.

Collectively, how do we get multiple companies to reach megatonscale carbon removal? And interestingly, a lot of companies were hovering around the 2030 mark, kind of before and after that, until like 2035. Most of them, I think, had said they’ll reach Megatonne by 2035 of the top 100 teams. And, you know, that’s really helpful real data to have. It is aspirational or optimistic, I should say, in some cases, because none of these things have been delivered upon yet. But, you know, we need to be benchmarking against where each of these companies are targeting their own business plans to get to, where they’re How they’re making their own offtake agreements for those of them that are signing big deals.

They have delivery requirements that they’re going to need to meet each year and then the coming decade. And so it’s important to think about how all of these milestones stack on top of each other and not just to keep Kind of reiterating that, you know, we need gigatonne scale removal by 2050. That’s a huge goal. And if you break it down and work backwards, we have tremendous progress that needs to be made year over year. And that really starts with Having fully operational demonstration pilots this year up and running, removing real CO2, and all of those companies being able to meet their own fundraising goals in the next few years.

Because if those two things don’t happen together now in 24, 25, and 26th, We’ll be in real trouble by 2030 and definitely off course by 2050. So we’re trying to kind of bring the near term and the future together in this report by really looking at data from operating companies.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I wonder if any other beginning industry had any this treasure trove of data like solar probably didn’t have this information. So it’s a whole interesting new approach to growing a brand new industry. Mike, anything else you want to add in terms of something that you were surprised or your biggest takeaway?

Mike Leitch: Well, I think the main point for me is just is, you know, every every data point we’ve collected kind of reinforces the fact that there is no silver bullet here. You know, it’s sort of like an irony of the prize that we’re giving away this huge 50 million dollar prize to one winner. But The reality is, if we’re going to hit our climate goals, we really need to deploy a diverse number of solutions, and it really is going to require a global effort. So, you know, the data we’ve collected in this report really sort of helps So it kind of helped me wrap my head around what that gigatonne scale CDR industry might look like and what the implications of having gigatonnes of CO2 being removed every year will look like.

It’s no small feat. Gigatonne is kind of a fun word to say, but a billion tonnes is a lot. And if you’re imagining a team operating at a thousand tonnes a day, they have to get a million times bigger. You know, and so you multiply anything by a million times. And, you know, one of our judges likes to say the you know, you multiply anything by a million and the numbers become daunting, you know, and and we’ve seen that play out. I don’t I don’t want to leave on a negative note.

I think there’s a lot of good in the report, but just focusing on the fact that we really need everybody to succeed and and we need to support the health of the whole industry.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, so I’m going to ask you another question that’s, you know, a tougher question maybe. Is what are the bottlenecks that you see from a technical perspective to growing to gigatonne scale? And is there overlap between the various tracks or are they pretty divergent?

Mike Leitch: Yeah, I mean, I think there are trade-offs in every track. Those trade-offs still exist. Energy is the big one that comes to mind. You know, we sort of were trying to find some We’re trying to find some ways to sort of contextualize the energy intensity of a hypothetical gigatonne scale cohort in the report. And we found that the energy required by the top 100 teams, if they were all operating at a collective gigatonne scale, would actually require more carbon neutral energy than the United States produces today. All of it, right?

And so I think on the energy front, it’s kind of like, and almost regardless of track, we really need to be thinking about what infrastructure and what other resource needs, both energy needs, natural resources. We need to develop and develop in a responsible way to really power the CDR industry. And it’s not so easy. Again, we’re kind of talking about big numbers. But, you know, in the meantime, in the meantime, I think the other sort of sort of another kind of exciting thing for me, you know, I’m an engineer and what I’m really kind of excited about is sort of this transition that we’re seeing from questions of like.

Do these things work scientifically like, you know, in a beaker to how do we deploy them? Right. What engineering do we need to do? What supply chains do we need to have in place? I actually think that’s a very exciting problem. It’s a problem that many industries know how to do very well already. So there’s like lots of talent in the world already who can help deploy these these industries and carry them forward. But it’s also a huge challenge. So a long ways to go. It’s kind of like I think our sort of main, you know, our main attitude here is kind of like, you know, we need collective action.

We need a diversity of solutions. And we kind of just need to sort of put one foot in front of the other and keep focusing on those next milestones as we collectively get to greater scales.

Radhika Moolgavkar: That’s well put, Mike. I agree. One step forward. Just keep moving forward. So, Nikki, last question for you, which is we talked about the grand party you’re going to have when you announce your top 20. Really, how do you envision this competition can help increase public support for carbon removal? And, you know, how do you think that effort is going now and what else would you like to do?

Nikki Batchelor: Yeah, it’s a great question to land on because this is really, how do we continue building momentum for the space and pushing things forward one step at a time? I mean, it really comes down to awareness, understanding and acceptance. I think, you know, each one of those has maybe a different strategy to kind of drive further forward, but You know, for awareness, we really tried to use the prize from the early days as a platform to get more people to even know that this is a thing to understand why it’s important that carbon removal be thotted alongside reductions in the whole climate strategy and what a critical piece of reaching that zero it will play.

Now that we’re at the final year of the prize, we have valuable assets of these actual, the companies doing the real removal. We’re going to bring film crews with us to all of the site visits. We’re going to try and tell their stories, get that narrative out there. People need to understand that it’s not just an idea that needs to happen, but it’s happening and it’s making fast progress. So I think It will become maybe less scary to people who are unfamiliar with it once they see what it looks like to have any of these kind of systems up and running.

But also it’s just a great storytelling vehicle to help get more, you know, shine on the projects that are out there and make that part the broader climate conversation. So we’re hoping to continue to do storytelling. We’re supporting other kind of storytelling efforts in the space and Some other fun things that will be coming out. So hopefully a lot of that will be added in and we’ll be making progress in 2025. More people will know what carbon removal is, what it looks like, and why it’s an important piece of what we need to figure out in the next decades.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, I for one am very excited to follow the companies, hear the storytelling, see what interesting and innovative things you guys all bring forward. Mike, Nikki, thank you so much for joining us. And I really am excited to see what the next year brings. Thanks so much.

Announcer: Thanks so much for listening to Carbon Removal Newsroom. If you like the show, the best way you can help us is by giving us a great rating and review an Apple podcast, following the show on Spotify, and by sharing the show on social media. Tell your friends and help us spread the word about what’s happening in the world of carbon removal.

These deals represent significant private market volume in CDR. But a new report in Nature called The carbon dioxide removal gap” highlights some of the policy needs that remain to get carbon removal where it should be to keep us on track for our climate goals.

Listen in today to learn about VCM and policy updates from the world of carbon removal, and understand some of the biggest deals this space has yet seen.

On This Episode

⁠⁠⁠Wil Burns⁠⁠⁠

⁠⁠⁠Holly Jean Buck⁠⁠⁠

Radhika Moolgavkar

Resources

Nature report, "The carbon dioxide removal gap”⁠

Subscribe to Climate Workers Anonymous

My other show, Reversing Climate Change

Books referenced in the podcasts, at Bookshop

Carbon Removal Memes

Full Transcript

Announcer: You’re listening to Carbon Removal Newsroom, a weekly show about current events in the world of carbon removal, from technology and innovation to policymaking and job growth. Brought to you by Nori, the carbon removal marketplace.

Radhika Moolgavkar: I’m Radhika Moolgavkar, VP of Supply and Methodology at Nori. Despite economic headwinds, announcements of big CDR deals keep coming. In the last week, we heard about Frontier’s largest ever purchase of $58 million from Vaulted Deep. The unveiling of Climework’s Mammoth and Microsoft’s purchase of 3. 3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from Beck’s. While private sector interest in the industry continues, a new paper finds policymakers are trailing behind. A report titled The Carbon Dioxide Removal Gap was just published in Nature. It found that the amount of CDR governments have committed to so far falls well short of the amounts needed to meet climate goals.

That gap in CDR ambition ranges from 0. 4 to 5. 5 billion tonnes, depending on future emissions. That’s a tremendous amount of carbon dioxide that governments must account for if they want to meet their climate targets. So will policymakers step in to fill the gaps or will headlines of corporate plans continue to be the only big news in CDR action? Joining us today to talk about those two things are our policy panel of Wil Burns and Holly Buck. Hello, both of you.

Unknown speaker: Hi. Hello.

Radhika Moolgavkar: All right. Well, we’ll start with the Removal Gap paper. So Will, can you tell us how the authors conducted their research and what they found?

Wil Burns: Yeah, so the overarching purpose was to determine if current national proposals for carbon dioxide removal, and they gleaned that from things like NDCs and other communications to the Framework Convention, whether those proposals for CDR align with temperature targets, right? And so they mapped this on integrated assessment models. They ran... A number of different scenarios and assumptions about how society seeks to address climate change ranging from a really full-throated sort of commitment to demand reduction through a commitment to renewables through a focus on carbon removal. And then they try to ascertain if there is a gap Between what countries are committing and what would be necessary to meet the Paris targets under each one of these scenarios.

Radhika Moolgavkar: So obviously they found a gap in their analysis.

Wil Burns: Yeah, yeah. But, you know, it’s kind of an interesting sort of communication, right? There’s two things I thought were particularly interesting. One is that If you’re looking at the scenario in which there is a really fulsome support for energy efficiency, demand reduction, then there isn’t a whole lot of need for carbon removal, at least. That’s when we get to 2050, and most of it can be met by nature-based solutions. If you move to a focus on renewables, it escalates. If you move to a focus on carbon removal, then it escalates substantially.

Part of the message, I think, to society is what kind of society do you want, right? And if you can really commit yourself to things like energy efficiency that have a lot of other salutary goals, then we may not. We do not need massive amounts of carbon removal moving forward, right? On the other hand, if we do what we usually do, which is not commit to the right things, then we’re going to need huge amounts of it. And then the report indicates that we’ve got a huge gap. The other thing that I think it communicated clearly, and it’s not the first report to do that, is that there’s a lot of hand moving.

Part of the parties, both in terms of their 2030 commitments and certainly in terms of 2050 about how they’re going to get there in terms of car removal. Most of them quantify some nature-based, virtually none of them quantify any novel, despite the fact the study thinks that in the second half of the century, novel CDR, at least under the two scenarios that aren’t demand reduction, Are going to have to carry most of this, right? There’s just not a whole lot of specificity. And second of all, in the long-term emission strategies, which are going to probably be most critical from 2050 going on, there’s no modification.

No mandate of any real specificity about what kind of policies are going to be put in place to make this happen, right? And Greg Nemet, who was one of the authors in the paper, right, has done an excellent piece before explaining why if you don’t in the formative phase of carbon removal stand it up in a substantive way, meaning now realistically you’re not going to get multi-gigatonne removal when you get to 2050 and beyond, right? So it just becomes a chimera.

Radhika Moolgavkar: So Holly, given the current policy environment, does this large gap surprise you? Was there anything you found in that paper that made you go, oh.

Holly Jean Buck: Honestly, I don’t think it surprised me or probably anybody listening to this podcast.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Anything that you found particularly interesting about the paper?

Holly Jean Buck: I mean, it’s just good to have the numbers on the page. I think it tells the story that we know about the gap and that mirrors all the other gaps in climate.

Radhika Moolgavkar: You know, I was listening to Ezra Klein, who’s one of my favorite podcasters, and he was talking to an author in the climate space about sort of the idea of Hope, like the hope in politics is a good thing. And like the politics of restraint or taking stuff away is a bad thing. And sometimes when I think about these policies, that’s how I think about it. Like this idea of restraining our emissions is a hard thing to push forward versus this idea of CDR as a hope is an easier message to bring to the public.

Do you think about it at all like that, Holly? Or am I crazy?

Holly Jean Buck: I mean, I... I think that we need a mix of thoughts. And I think a normal person goes back and forth between these different perspectives, probably within the course of a day. I have a lot I could say about that. I don’t know how far off the rails we want to get.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Oh, I’m always a little bit interested in getting off the rails. So just a tiny bit, maybe Holly.

Holly Jean Buck: So I was doing these two focus groups last night in West Virginia talking to people, members of the public who had never heard about carbon removal, you know, what they thought about it. Did they feel hopeful? And some of them were like, yeah, you know, if we could have coal miners doing these jobs, then maybe they could be a good thing for our community. So I guess I think about hope not in this like big, you know, global modeling sense, but You know, is there a way to connect to that particular sense of hope that’s grounded in particular communities and actually deliver on these promises that people have heard so many times before about new industries coming in?

That’s kind of where my head is at.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, and that makes so much sense. I spent some time in West Virginia and Kentucky, and I think I can relate to that conversation. Will, were you going to add something or I’ll go to my next question?

Wil Burns: Yeah, I mean, I just think it’s, you know, to paraphrase, I didn’t think I’d ever make this statement, but to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, right, instead of trust but verify, it has to be hope but verify, right, and, you know, I think I think a key takeaway of this paper was the need for states to start really getting serious about drafting substantive commitments that can realistically be tracked and operationalized, right? Or we’re going to get the worst of all worlds. We’re not going to do substantive demand reduction or the kind of commitment to renewables we need.

And we’re going to pretend that CDR is going to save our bacon in 2050 and we won’t have scaffold anything that we need to make that happen. And things will be far worse.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah. So you sort of touched on it, but what are some of the other policy recommendations that these authors talked about, Will?

Wil Burns: Well, that’s predominantly what they were talking about. They were saying that the long-term emission strategy is probably a critical framework for effectuating what has to happen in 2050 and beyond. And it needs specific binding sort of commitments as opposed to what you get now. And the other thing that it emphasized is While a lot of the scenarios assume through 2050 that so-called novel CDR provides an extremely modest amount of the CDR that will effectuate, even under the high CDR scenario that they run after 2050, nature-based is largely saturated and about 600, I think it was at least 650 gigatonnes of this comes from novel, right?

And that has to be... We need policies now to drive that, including government support and other kinds of things, maybe including my old favorite, mandates, right, if there’s any realistic chance for that to happen in the long term.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, mandates. That seems also not very realistic in our current system, but who knows, maybe. So Holly, as Will kind of talked about, the authors created a lot of different scenarios and obviously the assumptions mattered. But, you know, what are your thoughts on what policymakers should be thinking about, especially after you’ve just had these conversations in West Virginia? How do we convince lawmakers about the need to stand up CDR today? And what are some of the arguments you think would resonate with these communities?

Holly Jean Buck: Well, I can tell you that showing them a bunch of graphs, as I have done, doesn’t necessarily resonate super well. I mean, so this paper, just to go back to the first part of your question, right? It has three different scenarios. It has this demand reduction focus, this renewables focus, and this carbon removal focus. And it has those because it’s using these IPCC scenarios that are produced in the database, which people can look through those scenarios. And I encourage people to look Into the deep assumptions of some of them. So like, for example, the low energy demand scenario, it has a explicit exclusion of carbon capture and storage for fossil or bioenergy.

So that’s kind of part of why you get the pathway that’s in this paper. I think I would assume is because that’s what the scenarios assumptions were. And so then if you drill into that, you have to look at all the other assumptions in that scenario that are allowing that, which is like limitations on thermal comfort, 30 meters squared of space per person, you know, specific things about devices and so on. And so none of that is like transparent, you know, when you read a paper like this. And so you really, I mean, to get to the second part of your question, you’d really need a lot of time To drill into all of those choices and trade-offs with people in a community if you wanted to get anywhere with this conversation.

It’s going to be a very long process. And right now we’re at the point where people haven’t even heard of net zero by 2050 or any of that. So have to invest billions, as I say, probably every time we have this podcast in public engagement. Yeah.

Radhika Moolgavkar: I mean, I think the other thing I think about is you mentioned the time that people will have to take, but it’s also time the people who have to listen have to take, right? And do they have the space and ability when they are just trying to make ends meet and pay for their, you know, kids food and take them to like soccer practice, you know? So it seems like a really... Really hard, which it is, and I don’t have any good solutions, but just wanted to bring that up. So, you know, both of you have talked a little bit about maybe mandates and things like that, you know, and no country has committed to scaling novel technologies.

So what do we do? Like, we don’t have mandates in place. How do you see us moving this forward in any meaningful way? Yeah. With all the noise and everything else going on, I’ll start with you, Holly, maybe, and end with you, Will.

Holly Jean Buck: I mean, I think it’s going to be very country-specific, what’s appropriate. And, you know, we could talk about a country like the U. S. I just think it would be useful to have a novel CDR target. But a mandate, you know, you need a much deeper policy framework for that. And eventually, for all this stuff, you need a high level of voter buy-in, so... I’m curious what Will thinks. Yeah. Will?

Wil Burns: Yeah. I mean, I don’t, you know, again, it’s an old saw, right? I don’t see us getting there through the voluntary carbon markets, right? We’re going to talk about Microsoft in a minute, right? But there’s 65% of the purchases at this point, right? There’s like a corral of unicorns that I can count on one hand that are buying any carbon, right? And I don’t see what becomes the magical moment where that corral opens and huge amounts of additional horses come flooding in. So I think ultimately it has to be a legal mandate.

And I agree with Holly, that takes a lot of structuring, right? Even in public discussions, if people are hopeful about carbon removal, right? I think part of our public dialogue has to be, if we’re going to get there, we are going to need policy measures, right? And these are some of the measures and what do you think about those, right? I think we need to reach a point to start discussing that and discussing trade-offs, right? And You know, I agree politically, it’s going to be extremely difficult to get there. Right.

But if we don’t start broaching that subject, right, it’ll it’ll never happen. Right. And, you know, I’m I’m heartened by the fact that governments are starting those discussions, right? Vermont is talking about charging companies under Superfund for damages associated with climate change, right? And they have substantial public support for that, right? And so I think if the public understands the exigency of CDR and the need to have Public mandates to get there, we might be able to engender the kind of public support that would help make it happen. But we don’t know until we start talking about it.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, it does seem more likely to happen at a state level than a federal level right now. And maybe that’s appropriate with the broadness of the pathways for CDR that each state chooses what makes sense for them. All right. Well, we’ll kind of preview the next topic, which is talking about some of these gigantic voluntary carbon market sales that happened in the last week. So I want to start with Vaulted Deep. And Holly, this question is for you. First of all, what do you think of this CDR method? And were you at all surprised that, to me, what seems like a relative newcomer to the space got the biggest deal Frontier has ever done?

Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, so I think it makes sense to use existing waste technology to get credits. I mean, you know, it’s not a new method. It’s giving credits to something that already exists. So it seems like fair game. But I do have a few questions about it. I guess the first one, I mean, three in particular. So this is my, I’m playing my, I’m just a sociologist card. Like what happens to the methane? Because I’ve seen other, Instances in which the company who’s, you know, processed this is underlying has talked about like having methane as a co-product actually and selling it on a renewable natural gas market.

So it makes me think that you do end up with methane or I mean, I don’t know. So somebody, somebody who knows can ping me and answer it. I also was wondering about the regulation of these wells because, you know, they’re not dedicated carbon storage class six wells. They’re class five, I guess, or some other waste disposal class. And I’ve seen text that’s like vaulted injects biosolid waste a mile plus underground. Thank you so much. A real debate around whether the state of Kansas was doing a good job regulating those wells.

So I do have questions like, do the states know about this new method and what would it mean to scale it? I’m not saying that isn’t a reason to pursue it. I’m optimistic that states can figure this out if they’re given resources, but... Third and final question I have about this, and it kind of applies to a lot of waste-based CDR, including forestry residue for bioenergy for bikers. Do we want to bet on having those quantities of waste streams when we might want to reduce the waste in the first place?

And I’m thinking about So, you know, do you want to build infrastructure or like a Crediting scheme that locks you in to the production of the waste is the third question I have. And I will finish my thoughts there. Thank you.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Oh, those are great questions, Holly. So if anyone has the answer, please, please let us know. But so, Will, I mean, I think that... Right. Makes me wonder. I mean, obviously, Frontier, they’re smart people, so they probably dove into this. But what do you think gives Frontier so much confidence in this company? And generally, these like waste pathways, to Holly’s point, seem to be catching on. But, you know, I’ve had some of the same thoughts in my own head. Like, wait, are we reducing or are we using waste? Has it become a commodity?

So like, how do you think about that?

Wil Burns: Yeah, I’m afraid I asked two more questions to Holly’s three questions, right? One is additionality, right? This company is already doing a bunch of this for the city of Los Angeles. And I just wonder if this pens out in terms of the additionality requirements that I think we should have in CDR. And second of all, I wonder if it’s the optimal use of the resource. I just published a piece in aluminum on bikers and I’ve got a lot of skepticism about this being the optimal use of these resources. I know that this company argues, well, these are nasty organic waste that we can’t use for anything else.

And so it makes sense. That may be true, but some of it, for example, is manure. And I just wonder if that’s the optimal use as opposed to avoiding, you know, the use of synthetic fertilizer in agriculture and whether... I know isometric are the folks that are verifying this. I’d like to see the methodology’s application here because they define waste kind of in the converse, right? It’s things for which there is not a higher use, right? And so I’d like to see how they came to the conclusion that there weren’t higher uses.

And then More broadly than them, it may make sense in the context of this company, but more broadly when we start talking about crop residues and a lot of other ways, whether it’s not better for the use of sustainable infrastructure. Aviation fuel, hydrogen production, and so forth, right? And I think the jury is still out in that context. You know, I can’t speak for Frontier. I don’t know how they vetted this, right? But I think those are all outstanding questions that I’d like to see the answers for.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, really good question. So Well, we have more questions than answers, but that’s good. I hope somebody who listens to this show can help us figure that out. And Holly, we’ll move on to Microsoft. After this huge Frontier announcement, Microsoft made the largest ever purchase of carbon removal from Stockholm Energy through a BEX offtake agreement. What do you think the scale of this deal says about Microsoft’s ambitions with CDR and also the readiness of BEX to meet that huge demand that we’re seeing?

Holly Jean Buck: I mean, I think, you know, Sweden is a good country to try something like this out. I think maybe some listeners can relate. It’s like, how do you square the tech company investment in CDR with these endless stories about... You know, data setter demand and AI demand and, you know, the possibility of installing gigawatts of new fossil fuel, like gas infrastructure to meet that. I feel maybe like there’s more I need to think about when I read, you know, commitments from companies like Microsoft. Now I need to get into the details before I can make any strong claim about my opinions there.

But I do think it’s... You know, we need these kind of big deals to keep people from being disenchanted in the field, right? So maybe both of these reflect that, you know, that these people who are trying to really create this field through their initial investments see that, you know, proven technologies, maybe there’s a role for these big ones. Rather than the more speculative ones, because if you have these smaller, more speculative deals, it still makes it feel like a slippery fantasy topic rather than something with a lot of steel in the ground or whatever.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, it’s funny that they don’t make AI companies make sure all their energy is green, but every DAC company has to figure out how to make the grid green. I think AI is probably going to use as much, if not more, than DAC in the short term. So, yeah, a good question to ask yet another. So listeners are really counting on you. So one of the questions that I had when I read about this is that like these are obviously gigantic amounts of funding, which allows these companies to scale in a way that other companies may not be able to who might be just as ready.

So. I’m wondering if you think that this is a sign that winners are being picked by the voluntary carbon market, the dreamlike nature maybe of small purchases that Holly was mentioning, should these dollars be spread more widely? So Will, I’ll start with you and then I’ll go to Holly.

Wil Burns: Yeah. If I can, one other thing I want to say about Bex, right, is I think there’s separate questions about whether this purchase makes sense and what the ultimate future of Bex is, right? I mean, it’s interesting. Bex is definitely taking a star turn this week, right? There’s a tribe in Canada that’s working with a company to develop a BEX facility that I think is going to sequester 700,000 tonnes. It’s going to be the largest project in Canada, right? And so we’re seeing And I think this project, I agree with Holly, Sweden makes sense.

And the feedstock that they’re talking about, right? Pult mill, forest residues, right? Makes sense. But if BEX is going to scale to a multi gigatonne level, you’re probably talking about large amounts of dedicated energy crops and miscanthus and switchgrass and things like that. And you’re You’re indulging the fiction that you’re going to use all of this marginal land, often of which is occupied by indigenous people or isn’t marginal because it’s things like prairie grasslands that are rich in biodiversity. You’re probably going to divert a lot of croplands. And you’re probably going to raise food prices, especially for the most vulnerable, right?

And so weather backs make sense and also require huge amounts of water and fertilizer, right, for growing. So whether Beck’s makes sense in the short term with the kind of the easiest fruit to pick, right, which are true residues and whether it makes long term sense when you’ve got to move beyond that, I think is a big question. Um, that your direct question about picking winners and losers and putting a lot of money, I think, you know, these kinds of facilities are really capital intensive right there. It probably makes some sense to, uh, to put quite a bit into them.

If you, if you want to see if they’re going to, to work as opposed to spreading out. Small amounts to a large number of projects and none of them coming to fruition. It’s always a bit of a judgment call, but that doesn’t bother me so much. I’m just worried that BECCS really, in a sustainable way, can’t get us to that multi-gigatonne level, and thus I worry about prioritizing it full stop.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Polly, anything else you want to add?

Holly Jean Buck: I mean, I think that we should have had much more public funding for the research for early stage technologies and have that been in firmly in the research domain rather than in this kind of nebulous. Is it research? Is it a business? We don’t really know. We should have invested like along the recommendations of the national extremists, for example, from the reports from many years ago. But we didn’t. So we are where we are. And if the government’s not going to invest at that scale, I think it’s I’m glad that the startups and, you know, people like Frontier are funding them to try this different stuff.

Radhika Moolgavkar: All right. Well, final question, which, Holly, you already kind of touched on, but obviously, We have the removals gap paper we talked about first, where there’s no nation that’s really shown or we are aware of a plan to scale novel CDR. We have a handful of companies that are investing a huge amount of money in certain types of pathways. Is this market competition succeeding and then the policymakers follow along? Do you guys agree with that? Or do you still have hope that the policymakers will find us a path forward? Holly, I’ll start with you and I’ll end the show with you, Will.

Holly Jean Buck: I mean, I think policymakers could find a pass forward if culturally we can find a way to talk to each other better about climate. And, you know, if there’s voter support, then sure, they’ll get it figured out.

Radhika Moolgavkar: But I think it really starts with the people. Will, anything to add?

Wil Burns: I just, I would like, I mean, I think this government has picked winners, right? I mean, you’ve got 35 million for oceans and 3. 5 billion for direct air capture, right? It speaks volumes about where we prioritize. I agree with Holly. I think that they should have looked at the Academy study, looked at more of the options and probably spread more. Uh, the, uh, the investments, uh, uh, more, uh, evenly than they have. Uh, and, uh, but that’s, that’s, that’s not what happened. Right. And that’s often what happens, right. The who who’s picked to run these, these agencies, who’s picked to run these individual projects and their individual biases usually drive.

Federal policy, given the fact that most people in the federal government don’t know what these things even are, right? So I think we need more diversity of voices in government that understand some of these other technologies and can be a voice for advocating for R&D.

Holly Jean Buck: Just to add to that too, I think, you know, I mean, it’s Congress that authorized the funds, right? So I think the people at the agency sometimes have... Not as much discretion as we.

Wil Burns: Yeah, but they, I think they, I think they, they spent a lot of the time telling Congress what they should, what they should spend the money on. Right. I think most people in Congress are largely clueless and we’re deferring to agency people that had been brought in that were largely direct air capture people. And lo and behold, you get a, a, you know, a full throated commitment to direct air capture and virtually nothing else.

Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, but we should be telling Congress what to spend the money on.

Wil Burns: Yes, no doubt. I’m going to work on that.

Radhika Moolgavkar: All right. Well, I thank you both as always for your time and insights and have a wonderful rest of the month of May. And I will talk to you in June.

Wil Burns: Thanks. Bye. Take care.

Unknown speaker: Bye.

Announcer: Thanks so much for listening to Carbon Removal Newsroom. If you like the show, the best way you can help us is by giving us a great rating and review in Apple Podcasts, following the show on Spotify, and by sharing the show on social media. Tell your friends and help us spread the word about what’s happening in the world of carbon revolution.

Mart de Bruijn is the Co-Founder and Director of Carboneers, a Dutch biochar company working to implement carbon removal solutions in India and Ghana.

The conversation covers the challenges of securing enthusiastic participation from local farmers, navigating cultural and regulatory landscapes, and the technical aspects of biochar production. Additionally, the episode sheds light on the crucial role of monitoring, reporting, and verification in ensuring the efficacy of carbon credits, alongside the future expansion plans and potential bottlenecks faced by distributed/decentralized carbon removal systems.

This episode is hosted by Radhika Moolgavkar, Nori's VP of Supply and Methodology.

On This Episode

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Radhika Moolgavkar⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

⁠Mart de Bruijn⁠⁠

Resources

Carboneers⁠

Full Transcript

Announcer: You’re listening to Carbon Removal Newsroom, a weekly show about current events in the world of carbon removal, from technology and innovation to policymaking and job growth. Brought to you by Nori, the carbon removal marketplace.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Hello and welcome to the May 7th edition of Carbon Removal Newsroom. I’m Radhika Moolgavkar, VP of Supply and Methodology at Nori. Many potential bottlenecks could slow the growth of the carbon removal industry. A significant yet under-discussed issue is the lack of enthusiasm or sometimes outright opposition from local communities towards carbon removal projects. This has sparked interest on this show in speaking with CDR entrepreneurs and practitioners who are actively engaging the local communities where they operate. We’ve recently explored experiences with public acceptance through discussions with carbon removal organizations in the global south, such as InPlanet in Brazil, Octavia in Kenya, and Carbon Removal India Alliance.

The insights gained from these early engagements could be crucial as carbon removal efforts continue to scale. Today, we’re diving into another such company with Carboneers who are working to bring the benefits of carbon removal to rural agricultural communities. Based in Amsterdam, Carboneers is selling carbon credits generated by their decentralized biochar products in Odisha and Assam in India and in the Upper West and Volta regions in Ghana. They partner with local implementers to convert agricultural biomass into biochar, which enhances soil fertility, sequesters carbon, and generates carbon credits. Their projects in India and Ghana aim to sequester 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2024.

So today I’m welcoming to the show Carboneers co-founder, Mart Dubreuil, whose name I probably just butchered. Sorry, Mart.

Mart de Bruijn: I give it a seventh.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, thanks for joining us on the show. I want to start just with your general background, your biography notes that you studied economics. And so I’m curious how that led you to focus on CDR and biochar specifically.

Mart de Bruijn: Yeah, indeed. And even more specifically, my master’s was in environmental economics. And in those early days, I had a great teacher explaining us about how we need to reduce drastically our emissions, but it won’t be enough. And that was the first time that I heard about it, that we also need to clean up our emissions, but even in the meantime, to reach our targets also To remove carbon from the atmosphere. But then we never talked about it again, like all the content was about the reductions and about how can we make sure with the ETS system within Europe to reduce that.

And then I find it’s very interesting to take a deep dive into those removals and I saw like a one pager with seven methodologies and biochar was just one of them. Never read about it. And I think I just fell in love with the fact that it’s not only a removal, but also has a great value to apply to the soils. And prior to this business, I had a small business in local foods, so I always was prone to food and supply chains. And then I met up again with my old neighbor, even once my babysitter, and he’s a biologist by background, and he could even better explain me with such a passion about Biochar and its applications.

So yeah, it started with just a passion, not really a business case, but during that summer, we committed to take a role in this market, not knowing which.

Radhika Moolgavkar: I love that story. And I love that your old babysitter is now a partner with you. So let’s kind of dive into your company and what you’re doing. So first of all, maybe you can just describe how a decentralized biochar project works. We’ve had biochar folks on this podcast before, but never ones were doing it with your sort of model.

Mart de Bruijn: Yeah, so you have two separated models. If you take it in extreme, indeed, you have centralized biochar production, which has been our focus in the first year within the European borders to bring biomass together or biomass is already collected to get aggregated because there is a plant processing agricultural production. And you have waste streams. However, in also many cases, especially in the global south, there are also a lot of waste streams still distributed. And in that case, you cannot really justify or afford To have like a big pyrolysis unit and there’s not an infrastructure to do so.

And then you don’t have like a big pyrolysis unit, which you can see on the pictures, but more kind of several solutions that you can handle on village level. And I think I will stop there. How the difference is between those types of production.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Okay, so basically you have taken a gigantic pyrolysis machine and then been able to implement it in smaller locations at the village level, hence it’s decentralized. So, and you mentioned that this is particularly impactful in the Global South because the biomass is more distributed. So why did Carboneers initially get involved in your project locations in India and in Ghana? How did you choose your locations?

Mart de Bruijn: Yeah that starts again also with that we started. Within the Netherlands, that was our first goal to develop a project within the Dutch borders. But we had to do some consultancy jobs to pay the bills. And during that time, we saw how complex it was to run a project. And especially in one particular topic, and that was the feedstock. So the biome was that you need to make biochar. And within the European borders, we saw a lot of opportunities. But then most of the time, the price was quite high. And sometimes also on the justification level, do you think that the biochar is the best way to process your waste streams or your biomass, right?

There’s quite a run on biomass waste streams. And yeah, for two young entrepreneurs, that could be quite demotivating. Whereas in the meantime, we got so many approaches from the global south telling us that their feedstock is being wasted at this point in time, like really being wasted. And when I say wasted, they burn it, literally open field on their farms, or they leave it in big piles, 40k. And in parallel with the fact that we also saw that biochar has a way bigger impact on soils, on meta-analysis, we thought, okay, those two cases make it for us easier to think about projects there.

Execution, of course, is differently, but that felt for us like, okay, that’s a solution that can grow big without To justify for yourself that the feedstock is the best solution for IHR, yes or no? And yeah, then we met just one great partner there out of the different leads that we had.

Radhika Moolgavkar: How has it been working in the global south and India particularly? In terms of navigating the different culture, the different maybe permitting.

Mart de Bruijn: That was new to us as we were quite objective. We didn’t have any relationship with India. We just thought that was the best opportunity, but it’s still kind of a learning process, especially if you have buyers on the Western world, right? They are most of the times compensating their emissions And they are demanding on what you need to implement in India. And that’s still an ongoing debate. Okay, what is implementable? And in what way are we honoring the on-ground situation? And till today, I think it has been great learning a lot about those cultures, right?

Also on how strange our culture can be sometimes. But vice versa, the same. As long as there’s the respect, I think we have a great time with both our partners in Ghana and India.

Radhika Moolgavkar: So you were mentioning that these partnerships happen because you just found great partners. But when you’re looking at your implementation partners, what are the criteria that are most important to you as you analyze whether you want to work with them?

Mart de Bruijn: I think it’s along the way that you get to know them. But the first most important question is to also just to focus on your work is to ask about the feedstock because that’s the beginning of biochar production. And then it’s one for us, like in the end, if we take the effort to go to a country, set up projects, There also should be an abundance of feedstock to also further develop projects. So volumes are quite important for us to understand also how it’s distributed, right? Whenever it’s centralized, most of the times could already have a competition of the feedstock.

Then the feedstock itself. So not every feed waste stream, biomass waste stream is processable or processable only with very sophisticated machines. And then even seasonality of feedstock. So there are so many criteria to think about, like whether there’s alternative uses of the feedstock. And then along the way, you get to understand your partner and also what network is aligned with. Those farmers, right? You need to understand what is the relationship between a partner and all those farmers. And then along the way, you understand that the knowledge of your partner has been great in agricultural practices.

Both our partners have a great experience in that supply chain. Even one read the whole methodology like from Third letter till the end. So we were quite impressed in that scenario. And then you also understand whether they can manage such a system because it is different from centralized biochar production, right? You need to understand how to monitor a lot of production units. And then you come to the conclusion that you like the project and you like to work with them because there’s a dynamic. And in the end, you also need kind of a push and assertiveness from your partner because it’s quite a step to go to a random country.

I think both our parents were quite nervous when we went there. So for us, them being quite assertive and us getting there and just to start was like, I think, very important in both cases. Yeah, I think we’re quite lucky that we never had a bad project experience. The first two were kind of two successes for us.

Radhika Moolgavkar: That’s amazing. You talked a lot about feedstock and I’m just curious, are the types of feedstock you work with in Ghana and India similar or what are some of the things Outside of the distributed network and to ensure it’s truly waste, are you thinking about when you look at the feedstock, analyze it?

Mart de Bruijn: Yeah. So over time, you just understand which feedstocks work and which ones are already centralized or having value. But in general, of course, you have the bigger commodities in the food basket from the Global South, which is rice, so patty straw we have been working with, but of course also corn, so corn stalks and corn cobs. So if that’s around, then at least we know that we already have a project to continue with. And then along the way, we understood that also cotton stalks can be processable. That even sorghum stalks, millet stalks, cocoa pots.

So that’s specifically that in Ghana, not that much in India. But whenever you go, you want to try out which feedstocks work with our technology. And yeah, right now we have kind of, I think a list of 10 different waste streams that we are experienced with. We also need to train ourselves how to produce it. At least with that confidence, we can continue. And the great thing is that we have, I would say, we are competitors within this field. But along the way, we have those discussions with our competitors about these topics, which biomass can produce biochar.

And then afterwards, what type of criteria are they meeting, right? Because you have all those criteria that a biochar needs to meet to claim a permanence. So... There are quite some assessments you need to do before you start a project and specifically on biomass.

Radhika Moolgavkar: And then the final question on the technology piece is obviously biochar involves pyrolysis. So I’m just curious, do you have mobile pyrolysis machines? How does that work?

Mart de Bruijn: Yeah, good question. Mobile paralysis units is something we’re looking into because in that scenario you have a somewhat more efficient system that you can move around. We’re still assessing that with different technology providers. In the meantime, we have been doing it mainly with soil pits or contiki kilns. And in that way, the education of the farmer and themselves is very important. So we have been going there and training them how to produce the biochar. And it’s a beautiful, simple solution because in the end, if you train someone properly, everybody can do it.

I just saw yesterday also this great way of regenerative agriculture, making those moons to create more green nature in deserts. It feels like the same type of solution. Everybody can do it as long as the education is efficient, but at the same time also on high quality. What happens? Whenever you produce the biochar, these are somewhat more technical details, but whenever you produce the biochar, the most important part is that your syngases, so the gases that come free from the biomass, are being burned and that you use that heat for further pyrolysis.

And in our case, we don’t use then the waste heat, which is being used in many cases with high-tech paralysis centralized. But in our case, it’s more effective than it’s efficient, I would say. That’s the biggest difference.

Radhika Moolgavkar: So then turning to the farmers, as you were mentioning, you have to educate them. There’s obviously a process of getting to know the farmers. So, so far, what’s been the reception from these farmers in India and Ghana and how are they embracing this technology?

Mart de Bruijn: Um, hm. For them, like initially, they are quite enthusiastic because we come there and it’s felt sometimes even surreal that with all the rituals, how they welcomed us, that we were kind of like God gifts, that we are providing them a new income because that’s the case. We pay them to produce the biochar and they can keep it for themselves. So this is what has been explained to them. And that’s why I think initially like enthusiasm is very high, especially on the payment side, right? They don’t understand yet what biochar is in most cases.

So for them having an extra income, especially in off season, right? Because they have harvesting, have harvested it. Then afterwards they need to Do something with their waste streams and normally they would have just left there and or burn it and right now they can make extra value out of that. That waste those waste streams. So I think for them it was like a no-brainer to at least start. And over time you hear better or even greater stories that they apply to their soils and they are so happy that last season the harvest was better or more adaptive to climate change.

So yeah, till so far it has been great. But I have to say, for example, difference between Ghana and India. In India, we didn’t speak the local language, of course. And in Ghana, most of the farmers involved speak a bit English. And they were sometimes skeptical in the sense of like, this is too good to be true for us. So I would say there is some skepticism, but yeah, in a good way, I think.

Radhika Moolgavkar: So when you’re educating them, are you educating them both about the technique of creating biochar and the use of biochar as a soil amendment? Is that new to their farming practices?

Mart de Bruijn: Yes. At least biochar combined, charging your biochar with compost or any other types of nutrients like manure, that’s something totally new to them. But in many cases, they’re There has been already structures where they make either compost or they have manure. So dependent on every case, we think about how to apply the biotar to the soil and then we teach them how to do it. And of course, that’s new to them. But applying something to their soil is of course not new to them. And we try to keep that within their existing soil.

So whenever they need to plan for either new trees or they need to do new seedlings, then we apply it. So, yeah, that’s not per se new, but the biochar itself, yes, it is new to them.

Radhika Moolgavkar: All right. So let’s turn to the other side of the equation. You’ve obviously talked about working with buyers, Western buyers. The topic always is monetary reporting and verification of carbon removal credits. So... How, first of all, how does your carbon crediting system work and how do you ensure that the biochar is actually being produced correctly?

Mart de Bruijn: Yeah. So regarding the common crediting system, it’s similar to every other biochart project. However, because it’s distributed, monitoring, I think is even more important, especially that you understand that the right feedstock was there. So it starts all there. By taking pictures of the feedstock that’s done by an external supervisor, so not the farmer itself. So there’s not a conflict of interest applying the data. And then the biochar has been produced with that supervisor. And then afterwards, the most important part to determine how much is produced is to measure it. And we know the bulk densities of most of all biochars that we work with.

And in that way, we can calculate how much has been produced because we cannot weigh the biochar because that might differ. Due to moisture. So we want to make sure that we do not make any mistakes and the volume stays the same. So we do know the volume. We do know the bulk density. We do a lot of testing regarding that biochar. What is the bulk density? What is the karma content? And we try to average that out over time, right? So not, I cannot say that every time we do lab tests that it will be the same, but over time we can hopefully see there’s not too much of Insignificancy, so that it’s too variable.

So that will give us an average that we can trust. And the last part is the application, which is also again done by Geo and Timestamped Photographs, again with the supervisor. And over time, we are now also engaged with Pan Village, which is... Providing an app based out of the Penn State University, and they are looking at all types of solutions, how to cross-check it with other types of technologies, either with remote sensing, IoT, algorithms, AI. So right now, this is the base scenario, and I can talk hours about how to improve it.

And this is how we... Then issue the credits on the registry with that data. And something very important to say, within our projects, it’s not only about the MRV Digitally, I think it’s very important to emphasize that distributed projects also need a great management system on ground. So a lot of stuff is also being cross-checked by our local people, which is of course not easy to understand from a buyer point of view because they want to see data points, etc. But it is an important aspect of our monitoring system.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, I mean, good for you for not letting perfection be the enemy of good. You know, I really love that you’re jumping in and trying it and figuring it out. I mean, I think that’s how we’re going to succeed as an industry. So... Obviously you’re established in India, so I’m wondering what your future plans in India are and have you seen local government and institutional support for this? And are you seeing more farmers interested as they see the success of their neighbors?

Mart de Bruijn: Yeah, there’s definitely like a waiting list of farmers that want to join the program and that’s something Reasoning to expand in the end, right? If demand comes, we can expand our project. And in parallel, we’re also constantly improving the projects. And we’re assessing different type of technologies, whether it’s both the MRV where we just were talking about, but also on technology. And India is also a great engineering country. So there might be a good opportunity to start looking at distributed solutions that Reduce even more risk that you can think of within such a project, but also makes life easier for the farmer how to produce the biochar.

And I think the most important topic when it comes down to the production itself is to let it become more tech dependent and less human dependent. But our objective is still to keep it distributed so the farmer benefits from the biochar and potentially then also again from the carbon incentive. Regarding Governmental, Organizations or local organizations coming with new rules or subsidies. We have not yet heard about potential opportunities for that. But we are getting updates from the Common Removal Alliance in India, which has been a great way to get updates.

But it would be very interesting to get our credits at some point of time under the Article 6 agreement that even between countries, biochar is becoming a topic. But right now, Most credits are somewhat in the lower price bound and biochar is most of the time a minimum of $100. So that’s not something a lot of countries are looking at. So maybe in future, yes, looking forward to it.

Radhika Moolgavkar: And as you look to your future expansion, are there countries you’re thinking about targeting and working in?

Mart de Bruijn: So right now we just recently got two more projects certified in Ghana. So focusing on further expanding on the short term, I don’t think so. As I just mentioned, a lot of stuff about improving the project with either MRV or production technologies, I think in the coming Few months because production is in our case seasonal due to rain season. So after this production season, I think we’ll focus a lot of our time to assess different technologies. And we’re even onboarding a new guy who has a background, a PhD in soil science.

So I think together with him, we are going to take a deep dive into what are the best solutions specifically on the production of biochar. Maybe due to enthusiasm of one of our people on the team, yes, we might develop a new project. He, for example, is half Colombian, so I can imagine that he wants to go to Colombia and see what type of opportunities are there.

Radhika Moolgavkar: And then final question for you is obviously it sounds like you guys are killing it, doing a great job, have waitlist, have buyers. But as you scale up, you know, what do you see as the biggest bottlenecks for distributed systems? I hear a lot about centralized systems and the lack of biomass. Doesn’t seem like that’ll probably be your bottleneck. But what do you guys think about? What are you worried about when you think about scaling?

Mart de Bruijn: Yeah, sure. Indeed, regarding the biomass, but also the enthusiasm of the farmers right now, that’s not per se a problem. Though over time, I think that the biomass justification is even an important topic for us. If you look at India, I think biomass competition is also increasing. In our remote, of the remote areas, I would say it’s not yet the case. But I can imagine that over time, we also need to think and reassess which feedstocks do we want to produce biochar with. And if so, with what type of technologies, right?

Do we need to become more efficient with the feedstock? Is the right timing? I think that’s going to be... For us, a challenge. And it’s a new type of methodology, I would say, in comparison with the centralized production. So tough time in education, but also showing them how we can innovate over time. And we are committing, even by investing sometimes in co-designs and doing tests. So yeah, I think we’re quite committed in improving on that side. And in general, we got so much feedback from buyers, which has been our advisory board almost to improve the projects.

And of course, we all feel this hurry of climate change. And in the same time, you need to be the best on project development. So it’s a constant thin line of Improving and quantity. So, um, yeah, it’s typical discussion quantity and quality. So yeah, this is for us, uh, I think an important topic, especially to meet on ground situation, either Ghana or India and the, um, the buyer’s, uh, thoughts and 95 of the percent, they have really good ideas and we think, okay, we should implement and choose just the right timing for it.

Um, And manage then also, and this is more kind of as a project developer, maybe subjective, but managing production and sales in this market can be quite challenging, maybe even stressful, because most of the times it’s just spot. And as we are growing the business quite old fashioned, we do not have the capacity to like, Think easily about our capital. So yeah, I think that’s quite challenging as a project developer. You have quite some different types of pressure that you need to deal with, but it’s all exciting to do so.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, Mark, thank you so much for being on the show and providing a different perspective on biochar and A different way of going about it. I learned a ton, as I always do when I talk to project developers and suppliers, so really appreciate your time.

Mart de Bruijn: Sure, sure. And one more extra thing to say, a great thanks also to our partners on ground. I think if they would tell the story, they would have told it even in a way more, maybe romantic way, but they see the impact on ground. And yeah, I’m always surprised about how they can explain it to partners of us.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Oh, that’s a great idea. Maybe someday we can get an actual farmer on the show. I would love that.

Announcer: Thanks so much for listening to Carbon Removal Newsroom. If you like the show, the best way you can help us is by giving us a great rating and review an Apple podcast, following the show on Spotify, and by sharing the show on social media. Tell your friends and help us spread the word about what’s happening in the world of carbon removal.

Today's episode has Nori's VP of Supply and Methodology, Radhika Moolgavkar, on hosting duties, and Sylvain Delerce, the Associate Research Direct of Carbon Gap, joining the show to catch listeners up on Carbon Gap and the latest on European carbon removal news.

Sylvain highlights the European Union's efforts to structure and fund the industry amidst broader regulatory efforts, and how Carbon Gap fits into the ecosystem.

The conversation also covers the importance of distinguishing carbon removal from carbon capture and storage (CCS) in policy texts, the need for a clear EU vision on CDR, and the potential impact of the Net-Zero Industry Act and the Carbon Removal Certification Framework on the industry. Sylvain also discusses the role of individual European countries in advancing CDR and the potential for France to deploy significant carbon removal solutions by 2050.

On This Episode

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Radhika Moolgavkar⁠⁠⁠⁠

Resources

"Decoding the Net-Zero Industry Act – Implications for carbon removal" by Carbon Gap

"Envisioning a carbon removal strategy for Europe" by Carbon Gap

Full Transcript

Announcer: You’re listening to Carbon Removal Newsroom, a weekly show about current events in the world of carbon removal, from technology and innovation to policymaking and job growth. Brought to you by Nori, the carbon removal marketplace.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Hello and welcome to a special edition of Carbon Removal Newsroom. As anyone who’s been following this space knows, the European Union has been bustling with activity as lawmakers have been crafting regulations for the burgeoning CDR industry. And just a few days ago, announcing some funding as well. With an increased focus on capturing and storing vast amounts of carbon dioxide, the EU is stepping up its efforts as never before. Carbon Gap is an advocacy group at the forefront of this policy movement working to advance the CDR industry in Europe. Today, we are joined by Sylvain Delers, the Associate Research Director from Carbon Gap.

He’ll give us the latest updates on European CDR policy and discuss how his organization is working to accelerate the industry’s growth. So welcome. Thanks for joining me from France, Sylvain.

Sylvain Delerce: Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having us.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, glad to have you. And I want to start kind of badly, which is CarbonGap’s general strategy for advancing CDR in Europe, which was released last month. So obviously across the world, the EU included, the CRA industry is just getting off the ground. So what do you think needs to happen for carbon removal to be included in the investment that the EU is making in energy transition and the climate fight? Or maybe you think it shouldn’t be included and should be its own separate bucket?

Sylvain Delerce: Yeah, so that’s a very important document indeed that we released some time ago now. The idea is really to provide the EU with a vision of what could be a more cohesive plan for CDR in Europe. It starts with the observation that I think we probably share actually across the Atlantic that CDR is somehow at crossroads now. There is significant momentum that has been built in recent years with more companies. More companies, more purchases, more investments, and all this looks very good. We are also seeing a CDR policy slowly emerging, particularly in the EU.

So all this is very good. We see a risk that the momentum could be lost, particularly based on the remaining ambiguity that exists on the long-term objectives and vision for CDR, particularly in the EU. We still see some confusions and CDR being lumped with CCS in specific texts, or even with reductions. That was the case at the beginning of the day. So the process of identifying CDR as a separate climate tool is not yet complete. There is a lack of support, particularly in the EU, from fundamental research to innovation and deployment and scale-up.

Which is starting to become a strong bottleneck. The lack of vision, I mentioned it, it’s hard to tell what will be the shape and rules of that trillion dollar market that we discussed often. So yeah, again, the EU has made We have had significant progress in recent years with the CLCF, the strategy on industrial carbon management, green claims, and other important texts. But this policy remains fragmented. Initially, the text on green claims and the CRCF were not even connected or referring to each other. Our efforts together with other organizations have contributed to improve this, but that’s to show a little bit the concerns.

So yeah, we are convinced that now is the time for the EU to put forward a cohesive plan to address the remaining gaps. So this vision builds on the progress already made, particularly on what we call enabling So that refers to setting targets to provide a clear direction of travel for the sect. Clarifying the rules. So that’s what has begun with the CRCF on certification, but More needs to be done. And then also that the last enabling condition is around CO2 infrastructure or transport and storage, which of course is an important element.

And on the top of this, this document and Vision explore four specific pillars where we think the EU needs to go next to provide more vision and clear regulations. One is around funding or research and innovation. We have actually tried to quantify the gap between what is currently spent on CDR research and what should be spent and also comparing with the US. The funding on research is It’s both needed and strategic for the EU. The goal is to reduce the uncertainty by building demonstrators, gathering data and learning more on how far we can go with the different CDR methods, broadening the range of existing CDR methods, potentially researching new ones, but also optimizing the ones that exist.

I’m thinking DAC particularly and the energy consumption. And also unlocking some similar approaches that are currently blocked or will be very soon based on the lack of assessment of the ecosystem impact and the problem of acceptance. And also research on governance that we think is key to build the sector on a very strong basis and to build trust in the market. The second pillar focuses on deployment incentives. So here the channel is really to bring carbon removal methods from the lab to the field. And yeah, I guess the EU is a little bit late.

We relate on that compared to other geographies, particularly the US. So we’ve explored different approaches and we are focused on one, which is to create a pilot procurement program that would evolve over time to start with public money and then progressively involve more private money and then eventually evolve into what we call the carbon clearinghouse. The third pillar is about looking a little bit longer into the future and create what we call the enduring policy framework. And to create that long-term logic we need for buying CDR in large amounts. So you may be aware that the EU is already considering or looking at the option of integrating carbon removal into the ETS or the Emission Trading Scheme, which is the mechanism we use to decarbonize carbon intensive industries in particular.

Cap and trade market that is finally successful with the prices that have gone up. This option was a little bit the starting point for this conversation and for the pillar, but we significantly broadened the conversation and in the third Peter, what we suggested that the EU needs to look at diversifying the compliance mechanisms it is looking at to increase the demand for CDR and stacking them, so not betting on A particular one, like ATS could be, but really looking at diversifying, so potentially looking at embedding more carbon removal into the existing legislations and economic activities, much like, for example, what was In the state of New York with concrete, a lot of other sectors could be, could reveal similar opportunities, I guess.

And finally, the fourth pillar is around, you know, creating the conditions for a fair and inclusive governance of this new industry that is CDR. And yeah, we think this is more like a cross-cutting, yeah. Condition in a way to be successful for the EU to build the trust in the market among investors and all stakeholders. Actually, it is also a commitment that the EU has already made in a way to adjust an inclusive green transition, particularly in the European Green Deal. And so we have a series of recommendations for all these different pillars, 18 in total.

And I invite everyone to go and check them.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I read your report and I thought it made so much sense. So Silvette, I’m wondering how you think about individual European commitments, country commitments versus the EU. Explain for the US audience a little bit who’s not as familiar with how these Different governments interact, how a EU policy might impact an individual European country who’s maybe approaching it slightly differently or has started working in it already, in CDR already.

Sylvain Delerce: Yeah, that’s very much what’s happening so far. And different countries like Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, even the UK have put forward early policy proposals to boost the CDR sector and organize its growth. More recently, actually, Germany has also started to develop its own CDR strategy, which is due, I guess, by the end of the year. That is very helpful so far, I would say for the EU as like an experiment or a set of experiments that I know the EU Commission is looking at with great interest to see, you know, what’s working, what are the approaches that are effective and all this.

Now, what happens then is that if the EU pass a piece of legislation, for example, the carbon removal certification framework, it sets the bar at a certain level that the EU members need to comply with. They can go beyond, but this is like the minimum, in the case of certification, the minimum quality the markets would need to meet. So that’s typically how it works. And that’s where, again, there is like an interplay between member state action and EU action where both can foster or encourage each other, depending, you know, who’s ahead, I would say.

So yeah, these particular cases are very helpful and help moving the EU as a whole forward more or faster.

Radhika Moolgavkar: So it’s sort of akin to our state to federal relationship, it sounds like, where states can experiment. The federal government might implement some of those ideas or they might pass legislation that usually is the minimum threshold that you have to beat if it applies. That makes a ton of sense. So I’m curious also... Why do you think the EU, you know, you mentioned it’s sort of fallen behind the U. S. in terms particularly of maybe research dollars. Of course, we’ve also, the U. S. has put in a lot of money into procurement dollars recently per CDR.

What has held the EU back from some of these funding versus more like regulatory proposals? So, and do you expect that to change in the next six months to, you know, year or so?

Sylvain Delerce: Yeah, hopefully. Actually, yeah, I guess the US and the EU have different approaches to technology and clean tech in general, so there have been We have some investments and support in the EU, particularly through the Innovation Fund for projects like the Koda Terminal in Iceland for CapFix. It’s a big project, but overall it’s very limited compared to what’s happening in the U. S. where you have a combination of different measures from tax credits So I think that’s where we’re a little bit behind. It could change because I would say typically the EU will start regulating and then deploying.

So there is a window of time in, as you say, probably the coming one or two years where the EU could shift gears. And, you know, start deploying some supports, particularly for the more mature, probably CDR methods and catch up. We do have a very active ecosystem of enterprise. So I know of several startups that have not even raised their first round with very cool concepts, you know, that could be somehow game changing on different metrics for different scenario methods. The EU should support them. And cool things could happen. If not, then we could have a migration or we could also lose momentum, which is something that I know is a little bit concerning within the ecosystem for the coming three to five years, depending what happens and what doesn’t happen.

We might be at risk of losing some projects.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah. It does feel like it sort of follows the same sort of same basic path as all things in the environment. The U. S. throws lots of money. The EU works on the regulations first. I’m curious, you know, you mentioned the report’s been out for a while. So I know you’ve had a series of events about it and also have probably talked to policymakers within the EU. So what overall has been the reception? Has there been anything that has been surprising that you’ve heard in response to the report?

Sylvain Delerce: Yeah, so indeed the preparation of the report, first of all, involved a series of consultation with peers, academic teams, and policy makers, CDR doers, typically on the question of the ETS integration, on the assessment of the funding gap, where we had a chance to exchange with the EU agencies running the Horizon program or the Innovation Fund. And to crush also our positions or propositions on the justice side, we had a chance to exchange with academics and civil society organizations. On the day of the launch, we had four We have, again, a set of diverse stakeholders, policymakers from the Commission, member of the European Parliament, members of the Parliament of, you know, member states as well.

Academics from Oxford, Lund University, Post-Arm Institute, and some stakeholders like CarbonX, South Pole of the Carbon Business Council. So that was very interesting. And the objective was really to make this more of a shared vision, because I think the reality is that most of stakeholders would benefit from a clear strategy from the EU. We’ve had a good reception of the report and the launch event. I think a lot of people were very interested and that includes, you know, interest already at the top EU level. So now we are more in a phase of dissemination where we are trying to engage with more policymakers, including in the member states, because I think the strategy applies also at this level.

And we are also now in the context of the EU election, which is due on the 9th of June. So we are also trying to engage with the candidates essentially to communicate this vision and empower them a little bit on this topic.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Oh, interesting about the EU election. I’m sure you don’t get the same question we always get, which is, if it flips, does CDR exist at all? Do you... Is that an issue for the EU or do you feel pretty confident that all candidates will support it? It’s just kind of the level of support.

Sylvain Delerce: Yeah, so I think the picture is a little bit different in this case. In the EU, the governance or lawmaking process involves three different organizations. So the Commission, the Parliament and the Council. So the election is for the European Parliament. So that’s only one of the three. And yes, there might be evolution of the composition of the Parliament. I mean, there might be a little bit less of a priority put on climate compared to the previous cycle where a lot of important bills were passed, you know, around the grand deal.

But so, yeah, it would probably change a little bit, but it’s not one or zero, I hope. And yeah, so very much looking forward to the results and to working with the new electives.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, I am glad that at least you’re not totally immune to some of the things that happen within the U. S. It’s nice to know we’re all in this together. I wanted to pivot just a little bit to some of the other work that Garbent Gap is doing because you guys do a whole bunch of stuff. And one of the interesting things that I always look forward to is your sort of the country specific CDR roadmaps. Yeah. Because it just educates me on so much. And so you’re based in France.

And I’m kind of curious, you didn’t mention France in your long list earlier, but how is France doing? What’s its approach? And, you know, what do you hope for the country?

Sylvain Delerce: Yeah, so this is a very cool project indeed. It starts with the observation that countries, many countries still have a hard time to figure out what to do with covering wool in a way. It’s hard for them to know How much CDR would make sense on the journey to net zero and beyond? Actually, you have those IPCC targets for the world, but then how does it translate at a local level? How much can they do? What they do actually, how much CDR can they deploy? Most of the time, this data is not available and how to do it, how to deploy this potential.

So with these country reports, which are largely inspired by the Renewable Readiness Assessments that are published by the International Renewable Agency. The idea is really to look into specific countries and do a bottom-up assessment of the existing resources, look at their actual availability and trends in the future. So, you know, we’re discussing water, bioglass, decarbonized electricity, and see what’s the outlook. To then try to come up with a first estimate, which is like the theoretical potential of how much carbon removal could be deployed, all methods considered. Then we also put emphasis in Considering what we call the social geography of the countries, that’s the social reality of each country, which is always very different.

And, you know, how people perceive the action on climate, where city are fixed in this picture. Are there some resistance, lack of awareness? All these things are very important because from a technical point of view, you may have a lot of potential, but if people are not on board with the project, you can’t do much. And the example we often use is the one of nuclear energy in Germany, where there is no technical constraint, but of course, a choice was made. So that’s the idea of the project. And yeah, in the case of France, which is the first report we released, it was on the 7th of March.

It was very interesting to do this assessment. Eventually we identified a potential for France to deploy by 2050 between 75 and 146 megatonnes CO2 carbon removal per year, which would be It could be enough to meet the net zero goal, which is currently the climate goal of France, but also to go beyond. So that’s if France would stick to its emission reduction pathway, it could go net negative Interestingly, we see that the diversity of carbon removal methods is a real asset in this deployment. It involves a huge diversity of cellular matters and its balance between nature-based and more permanent removals and actually allows France to meet what we call durable net zero, which is a state where you are able to compensate the remaining fossil emissions with permanent removals.

We also see when doing these assessments quickly, which are the, you know, physical limits that cilia will face in Europe. And in France, it’s also true. Biomass is a very much constrained mechanism. Same goes for land. And so you quickly see where the limits are. And as a result, for example, DAX play a role in the scenarios that is potentially much more than what people would think. And because it uses, you know, less land and we already have decarbonized energy in France, which is in this case an advantage. So, yeah, we identified this potential, but of course, and yeah, there was There’s also another part of the project, which is about designing what would be a roadmap to deploy this potential.

This was done in a collaborative way with stakeholders, national stakeholders. Stakeholders to discuss, you know, what would be the right approach and most efficient way of deploying this potential. So we have a separate document, which is like an early roadmap that could inform also policymaking. But of course, reaching this potential will require significant engagement and proactive policymaking. That’s essentially the call to policymakers. And actually the report was published quite timely because France is about to review or publish the next version of what is called the low carbon strategy. It’s essentially the roadmap to net zero where reaching net zero is becoming increasingly challenging for France, mostly because the forest thing is impacted by climate change and is reduced in capacity quite significantly.

Radhika Moolgavkar: It’s fascinating and so in-depth, like the number of strands you guys are pulling together is amazing. One particular area I’m curious about working on the supply side of the world is how do you think about technical readiness for the carbon removal pathways you chose to evaluate? You know, one thing I learned earlier Yeah. So how do you factor like that complicated dance of technical readiness, scientific certainty when evaluating methods for countries?

Sylvain Delerce: Yeah, that’s a very good question. And in this case, of course, we had to go through this process and choosing which methods would be contributing to the scenarios and which not. TRL 3 is already quite good. I would say you’re lucky because in most of EU funding you can find, the bar is usually higher, which is even more of a problem. So in this case, for the report, the approach we’ve taken is to consider, of course, high TRLs, but also go a little bit beyond that. Essentially based on availability of data to estimate the resource requirements of the methods so that we can have a fairly good estimates of what is needed to run these methods and sufficiently comparable with other methods.

And also. You know, some methods are still ranked quite low in TRL, but in the reality, you have demonstrators being built, you have huge contracts being signed. So for us, it also shows, you know, certain level of readiness or maturity. So, but still, for example, we had to rule out some ocean-based methods because of, you know, low data availability essentially preventing us from processing. Creating good estimates. And so, yeah, that could be for version two of the report, I guess. But that’s also what makes us think that the numbers we put forward, we’re confident that it’s actually feasible because You do have a margin of error in both ways.

So of course, some of the methods that are in the scenarios could underperform or be delayed. But also we know that we had to rule out some methods that in fact might come And that’s true for CDR, but that’s also true for decarbonized energy, you know, small modular reactor, osmosis, you know, new things that are coming. We don’t know how fast, so that’s why it’s not yet in the scenarios, but it could perfectly materialize earlier than expected.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, the fun of CDR, I think, of this whole transition is sort of gamifying what’s coming and what’s not. All right. So the next thing I really want to quickly turn to is the Net Zero Industry Act. And maybe you could start by just telling our audience, what is the Net Zero Industry Act and its impact on European industries?

Sylvain Delerce: Sure. So the Net Zero Industry Act is essentially a response to the Inflation Reduction Act in the US and the massive part of money that has been put on, you know, clean tech in general. So this is. It’s a package that the EU has been negotiating and that has now been approved. It covers a wide range of clean techs like renewables, so wind, solar, heat pumps, hydrogen, battery. And CCS actually. So the idea is to support the re-industrialization and to support the development of these clean techs. For example, with strategic projects, accelerated permitting, what they call regulatory sandboxes.

So, you know, a very early tech can have some flexibilities for a number of years before moving back to market. And yeah, so the whole challenge with this NZIA for CDR was to be included in the list of key technologies that are covered by the Act. In the end, it was not the case. So CCS is part of the list of key technology. CDR is not. Which means that for now, carbon removal can only access what they call innovative technologies. So that’s a second list of technology, if you will, and CDR could access regulatory sandboxes, for example, but not the rest of incentives.

So it is a little bit of a missed opportunity and there is an opportunity for a revision in four years from now to see if CDR can be included.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Why was CDR not included? Is it too early? Or why was it in that second bucket you mentioned?

Sylvain Delerce: Yeah, it was probably too early, although not in our opinion, obviously. But yeah, there was a lot of negotiation on the key technologies. For example, nuclear was eventually included. But I guess the focus was on the other technology I mentioned. And in the end, carbon dioxide removal was probably not sufficiently known or not considered strategic at this point.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Interesting. Okay. The other provision that I’m particularly curious about is that the oil and gas industry must be responsible for building underground carbon storage infrastructure, I believe. And so that could in the long term benefit the CDR industry, I suppose. But You know, in this country, at least, there’s a lot of concern and pushback on that in local communities. So I’m wondering, one, if that’s even an issue yet within the within EU community, like engagement and pushback on things like this. And to what whether you think this rule will help the CDR industry eventually.

Sylvain Delerce: Yeah, this is a very interesting provision under Article 18 in the Net Zero Industry Act. So first of all, the act puts an objective to develop a capacity to inject CO2 on the ground about It’s about 50 million tonnes annually by 2030. And what is also quite new is the fact that it puts an obligation on the oil and gas producer to contribute to develop this capacity. In a way, one of the first occurrences of the concept of the carbon take back obligation that you may know, and it is essentially the idea of the political base with several objectives.

First of all, in the EU, we need to speed up the development of geological storage capacity. It is becoming a real bottleneck with not enough capacity and the capacity to concentrate it in the northern part of the EU. It is also an incentive to unlock the depleted oil and gas field with the obligation to disclose the data and then potentially tap into it to develop the capacity. So the burden somehow is placed on the oil and gas industry with some exemptions. For example, when a state already has enough capacity to meet the quota, then There can be exemption for the local producers and also small producers below a certain threshold would not be obliged to contribute.

There will be penalties for non-compliance, but they are still to be defined. So this is a very nice progress and very much needed, but it’s not completely...

Radhika Moolgavkar: Do you think generally local communities will be then supportive of this? Because this sounds more like a cleanup than something more like infrastructure.

Sylvain Delerce: It is hard to say, yeah, it is hard to say. Of course, the fact that the oil and gas in The industry is responsible for developing the capacity is new and potentially could help. But I think concerns on the safety are still very much widespread across the EU, for good or bad. So yeah, I think most of the countries and operators will start offshore just because it’s simpler and that’s what already exists in the EU. So it creates a precedent. The onshore part. It’s tricky, to be honest, and it remains to be seen how fast we can go in countries like Germany, France, Poland, where there is potential, but, you know, it’s also very densely populated.

And so, yeah, I think this debate is far from over.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, it is tricky. I mean, in this country, even where it’s not densely populated, there have been a lot, obviously, a lot of issues around Europe. Okay, so I’m going to move on to our final two topics. And really quickly, I want to come back to the CRCF, the Carbon Removal Certification Framework, in the sense coming back that in February, we talked to Sebastian about it. Obviously, now it’s a couple months later. So I’m just wondering the progress of the CRCF and if you’ve seen any follow-up from that yet, or is that still in the works?

Sylvain Delerce: Yes, so then maybe I can cover very quickly the basics because I’m sure you’ve already explored them, but essentially CRCF is a very important milestone for the EU and more broadly the CDR ecosystem because there’s, it’s kind of The first large scale effort to provide standards for certification. So the CACF so far has been voted, the first part has been voted, which is the general framework, which defines, you know, four different kinds of carbon removal, if you will, between, you know, actually emission reduction in carbon farming, removals in carbon farming products and permanent removals.

The definitions have been improved along the way and are now more inclusive and future-proof, so that’s good. And the framework sets a basic quality criteria, which is about the quantification, additionality, long-term storage, and sustainability of the methods. Also good or interesting features, there is a liability mechanism in case of reversal. So the activity and monitoring periods are distinguished and then the credits will exist as long as the monitoring period And also the CRC app will establish a common and transparent EU-wide registry, which will be very helpful to track the lifecycle of the credits and see, you know, what kinds of transactions are made on the So the overall CNCF has been approved and is now entering into force.

So now we are moving into the phase of developing the methodologies specific to each CDR method. And that’s something that the EU Commission is in charge of doing with support from expert group, which is a set of about 70 organizations gathering on a regular basis to provide You know, insights, learnings and data on what are the existing methodologies, which ones are working and so on. We actually had a meeting of the expert group last week in Brussels, a three days workshop. And so the first methodologies are expected for 2026. So right now there is a discussion around prioritization of the methodologies and also, of course, the scope and how they will work.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, things are moving. So that’s exciting. And I assume they’ll announce the methodologies before they actually write the methodologies. So I’ll be excited and curious to see how they choose, which is always an interesting process, at least here at Nori, it is all the things we think about. All right. Final thing I want to ask you about is green claims. I’ve touched on this before on the show, but there is a lot of new legislation out there about making green claims. And so the committee from the European Parliament released a report on how green claims should be governed and adding additional rules to reduce greenwashing.

So first question is, why is this important and how does it relate to carbon removal specifically? I’ll start there.

Sylvain Delerce: Actually, it’s a very good segue from the former question on CRCF because one of the blind spots of CRCF in a way is what we call the use cases for these units that we will certify. It is not really well-defined or covered In the CLCF, what these units should or could be used for. And that of course makes the work on defining the methodologies a little bit harder because of course, depending on the use case, you know, the methodology can be defined accordingly with different So what’s nice about green claims is that this is a piece of regulation to rule.

Put some rules around green and environmental and climate related claims, which is one of the use cases for CDR potentially. So claims are a useful tool to motivate private spending on climate, but it’s also, there’s also the risk that they can just create green rushing and generate no actual climate benefits. So with this piece of regulation, the EU intends to better regulate claims to protect consumers and limit rain washing. So in the green claims, the provision says that claims should This should be made only on the compensation of residual emissions, first of all, and that the carbon credits that could be used for this should be CRCF compliant.

So mostly CRCF certified or certified. Other equivalent standards if approved by the commission. And another interesting provision is that it introduced the concept of like-for-like principle so that remaining or residual fossil emissions can only be compensated by permanent carbon removal.

Radhika Moolgavkar: So this will be my final question for you, which is this idea of like, for like, I think most people are familiar with it, but how do you at Carbon Gap think about the need for very immediate action and the delay in time for the permanent removals? You know, obviously these are residual emissions, but we want to go as fast as we can. And so how do you balance those, what I sometimes feel like are intention goals?

Sylvain Delerce: Yeah. So this concept of MAC4-like principle really stems from how the carbon cycle works and, you know, the long and short carbon cycle and how we need to reestablish or rebalance the carbon fluxes to head towards durable net zero again. It is really important, particularly for the case of compensation, but compensation is only one use case for carbon removal. And that’s another of our favorite topics at Carbon Gap. We’re trying to really expand The landscape of use cases so that, you know, we don’t only discuss compensation and, you know, the potential impacts, for example, on the voluntary carbon market and can be too restrictive.

And what do we do, for example, with less permanent removals and all these things. The reality is that you have many potential use cases and many ways of creating demand and supporting the expansion of CDR. So we think that the like-for-life principle is very important if we want Again, to generate real climate benefit. And in parallel, you need to create these other use cases and other demand streams so that we can actually scale up very fast those methods that are already made true. I’m thinking, of course, nature-based solution with potentially other use cases so that, yeah, we can both move fast on the mature solution and create a strong, you know, market case.

And it also sends a clear price signal for fossil emissions, you know, essentially saying that this will not be cheap to compensate anymore. So it also reinforced in a way the incentive to decarbonize, which is I think also very important.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more. Well, it has been lovely talking to you. It’s the first time on the show, but I certainly hope that you come back and keep us up to date on all the work you guys are doing and all the work in the EU. Thank you so much, Sylvain.

Sylvain Delerce: No, thank you very much. Really good to you and Nori for all what you’re doing. I’m a big fan of this show. Thanks and see you. See you next time.

Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, maybe hopefully in France.

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