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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.
