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:
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.I feel like we’re f***ed.
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.1I 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.
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!".
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.
The CDR industry is stuck in a paradox. We want a flashy, well-funded, functioning market filled with high-quality tons, 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
It is possible/likely that #s1-3 were meant to be a single submission.
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.
