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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.
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:
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.
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.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
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.
