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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.
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!
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.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.
I'm pretty sure the company I work at is going to fail and that the founder is in denial about it.
I started taking antidepressants in part due to how bad things are in climate. They're working.
Sometimes I feel like I work on climate more for the trees and the bees than for the people who are [abusing] it.
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.
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."
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.There's a CDR company that [has issued many credits to date], this company warrants significant scrutiny
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.
Jon Foley is right
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.
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”:
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…
My read of this is that the submitter meant to write “bake” but probably got autocorrected in a very inconvenient way.
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.
