Reversing Climate Change

The carbon removal industry and science have evolved greatly since Nori was founded in 2017. In this special Reversing Climate Change episode , Nori's Head of Supply and Methodology Radhika Moolgavkar, joins host Ross Kenyon to talk through what’s changed, what’s still the same, and how Nori is evolving with a new net-zero-friendly ‘blended tonne’ that they just published a new whitepaper on this...

What does a utopian second-generation Direct Air Capture (DAC) system look like, and how does it differ from what we have now? In this engaging episode of Reversing Climate Change , Ross and Siobhan have a very frank and honest discussion with Sampo Tukiainen, a farmer, apiarist, meditator, rifleman and the CEO of C-Fix, a second-generation #directaircapture company that wants to do it all. After...

Making decisions for your garden and yard is often a yearly exercise. But for long-lived perennials, you need to start thinking about how climate change is going to impact your region. But don't start loading up on olive trees just yet... Today on the Reversing Climate Change podcast, Sally Morgan, coauthor of The Climate Change Garden: Down to Earth Advice for Growing a Resilient Garden , teaches...

In this episode, Ross and Siobhan are joined by Ongeleigh Underwood and Nikki Batchelor to delve into the newly released report from the Circular Carbon Network, an initiative of XPRIZE. The report provides valuable insights into the state of the Circular Carbon Market, addressing crucial questions such as who is building Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) projects and who is funding them. The conversat...

Beast and Cleaver, a butcher shop and charcuterie in Seattle, is on a mission to elevate the craft of butchery to true artistry. They want you to eat meat of higher quality, and yes, less of it. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change , the founder of Beast and Cleaver , Kevin Smith, joins Ross to discuss his butcher shop’s unique approach to localized meat production in a carbon heavy industr...

PlantVillage won the Carbon XPRIZE milestone award in 2022, and was awarded one million dollars. It aims to lift 200 million African farming families out of poverty. They are working to capture and sell a billion tonnes of carbon per year using biochar sequestration by integrating trees with crops on farms and using lumber for biochar.  So what exactly is happening on the ground with biochar? And...

What goes into the making of a carbon removal meme? How many pitches does it take before magic comes out? Why do some many captions end up as emojis?!Nori's Memelab: Ross Kenyon, Siobhan Montoya Lavender, and Asa Kamer film their writer's room meeting on a lark to show how we go from a notion to something we think worthy of sharing with our community. Listen in to learn more, and also, respond to...

CarbonCapture is looking to build a large-scale direct air capture facility in Rock Springs, Wyoming, a town with deep roots in the coal industry.  And last fall, the company invited the community to a town hall event to learn more about the initiative, known as Project Bison , and its aim to remove five million tonnes of CO2 annually by 2030. How did the people react to CarbonCapture’s plans? And...

A massive amount of seaweed known as the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt is growing as a response to climate change. To date, it has expanded to a width twice that of the United States. When sargassum reaches the coast, it causes human health problems, destroys ecosystems, and wipes out tourism, usually in communities that don’t have the resources to combat the issue. So, what can we do to prevent t...

A lot of sci-fi writing focused on climate is high literary fiction, which means it’s filled with allusion and often difficult to understand. So, why don’t authors take on climate fiction as a serialized genre like detective novels, zombie books or erotica? Is there a way to make climate fiction more playful without making light of climate change as a global issue? Daniel Backer is the novelist an...

For people living in affluent parts of the world in the 21st century, we are used to preserving food by way of refrigeration. But this technique is quite new when you consider that people have been preserving food through fermentation for at least 10,000 years. Our ancestors experimented with fermenting to make food more delicious, more easily digestible, and more stable for storage. And there are...

In the last five years, an enormous amount of effort has been put into technical and scientific innovation around carbon removal. But what about financial innovation? How can we create more opportunities to finance carbon removal at scale? And what does innovation look like in carbon removal markets? Peter Olivier is Head of New Markets at UNDO , a company that uses enhanced rock weathering to ach...

Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, involves sequestering carbon dioxide emissions from a point source, whereas carbon removal takes existing emissions out of ambient air. And there are a lot of people in the climate community who are for carbon removal and against CCS, arguing that we should shut down these point sources and focus on renewable energy. But is choosing sides the right thing to do?...

You can judge the progress of an industry by its number of sh*tty first drafts. And if we have any hope of getting to gigatonne-scale carbon removal by 2030, we need a greater diversity of ideas in the CDR space. We need entrepreneurs who dare to think differently. We need more sh*tty first drafts. So, what can we do to encourage this kind of radical risk-taking in carbon removal? Where can entrep...

Startups in the CDR space need to succeed quickly if we want to reverse climate change before time runs out. But the current system requires that climatetech founders often devote time to pitching VCs and filling out multiple grant applications. Time that would be better spent developing their solutions. So, what can we do to connect emerging carbon removal companies with the funding they need to...

While large, industrial cheesemakers are known for consistency and scale, small operations like Uplands Cheese make boutique cheeses unique to the land where they’re produced. And these small, pasture-based dairy farms have their own unique concerns when it comes to climate change. So, how is extreme weather already affecting operations like Uplands Cheese? How does climate factor into future plan...

Much has been written about the European Theater in World War II. But the war in the Pacific Theater was the largest naval war ever fought. It covered the entire breadth of the Pacific Ocean, and much of the fighting took place in remote, wild environments. How did the conflict impact those environments heretofore untouched by the outside world? And what about the Indigenous peoples who lived ther...

With a problem as monumental as the climate crisis, we have a tendency toward proportionality bias. We often believe that the issue has a single cause and can only be solved with a few large-scale solutions. But in the case of climate change, a diversity of solutions may be faster and more effective than putting all our eggs in a few big baskets. And that’s why Todd Myers focuses on what individua...

Of all philanthropy globally, only a couple percentage points go to climate in general. And of that couple percentage points, only something like 2% of climate giving is dedicated to carbon removal. The problem is, we need to fund several gigatonnes of carbon removal per year by 2050 to combat climate change. And that’s going to cost hundreds of billions of dollars. So, how do we encourage governm...

Cheese can be both rarified and common. It is also an industry that impacts and is impacted by climate change. Today’s guest is author and cheese expert, Liz Thorpe. Liz is known for working her way up at New York City’s Murray’s Cheese shop, and taking it from a specialty shop to kiosks in Kroger stores across America, making cheese accessible and available to the American general public. Today,...

The first cleantech bubble burst in the oughts, but the industry didn’t go away. And now, we’ve entered a second big wave of "climatetech" investment. So, is this wave more promising than the first? Are we moving into a golden age for climatetech? Or is it too dissimilar to make comparisons? Joel Makower is Cofounder and Chairman of GreenBiz , a leading media and events company at the intersection...

To tackle the climate change problem, we need to move traditional industries closer to net-zero and create new industries from scratch. But how do you build a new carbon removal industry, for example? What is the best way to nurture startups in the climatetech space? Jennifer Wagner is a Breakthrough Energy Business Fellow where she helps early-stage climatetech startups advance the groundbreaking...

Progressives generally support regulations that protect the environment. But the permitting process has become so complex that it can take five years and 500 pages of documentation to get a project off the ground. And that red tape is holding up the clean energy projects we need to reverse climate change. Chris Barnard is Policy Director at the American Conservation Coalition and a regular guest o...

As the number of blockchain-enabled climate solutions multiplies, founders need funding to get their projects off the ground. Ben West is Head of Causes at Gitcoin , a company that helps early-stage crypto projects get funding. In his role, Ben supports Gitcoin’s climate solutions, DE&I, decentralized science, and advocacy rounds. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change , Ben joins Ross an...

To facilitate carbon removal at gigaton scale, we need investors to put their money in climate solutions. But VCs are often used to investing in in bits, not atoms. Climatetech hardware is more expensive and more challenging to replicate than software in many cases. And it’s more challenging to achieve orders of magnitude growth in a physical environment than a digital one. So, what is the best wa...