Reversing Climate Change

What do you do when none of the machinery you imported works? If you're Releaf, you build your own nutcracker, name it Kraken, and get it working with about six weeks of runway left in the middle of COVID. And once you have a huge pile of palm kernel shells sitting around, why not get really into biochar? Today's guest is Uzoma Ayogu, cofounder and CTO of  Releaf  and cofounder of  Biochar Industr...

Every industry runs on a mythology, and carbon dioxide removal has several of them available at once. There is the hype cycle, where the trough of disillusionment is a phase you survive on the way to mainstream adoption. There is the solar cost curve, where a technology is expensive and clunky for years and then abruptly cheaper than everything else. There is Moore's Law, and also the one where th...

Wendell Berry died on August 31st, 2026. A listener once made a Reversing Climate Change bingo card and one of the squares was just "someone mentions Wendell Berry," which turned out to be a rigged square. So rather than write another appreciation, I have pulled  the conversation I had with his daughter in 2020  and recorded a new introduction to sit in front of it.  The episode I m...

Rainbow came into carbon dioxide removal from the outside, kept financing avoidances the whole time, and has watched the market arrive at the position it started from. The company I cofounded, Nori, was merciless about avoidance for its entire existence, so some of that is on me. Wendell Berry died on 31 August, at 92. He has more books referenced on this show than any other author. Early in Nori'...

CW: this episode discusses genocide People reference the Weimar Republic's transition to Nazi Germany often. But I think they're missing perhaps the most relevant and frightening insight from Adolf Hitler's memoir, Mein Kampf . It isn't just that economic uncertainty produces political radicalism. It's that bad things can happen when a group which has dominated a multiethnic empire for a long time...

CW: this episode discusses genocide and suicide. I swear I didn't mean to make this episode. All I intended to do was to read  ⁠the wonderfully moving speech at the end of Charlie Chaplin's  The Great Dictator ⁠ . But somehow that meant that I had to process so much about World War II, the personality of Adolf Hitler, and why monsters can also be boring and/or extremely goofy. This monol...

This podcast has been running for almost a decade. There are some real gems buried in the catalogue that I am happy to have a chance to rerelease. This is one of those episodes. It has a new intro. I recorded it with J. Maarten Troost in April 2020 and published it as  S2E9, "Travel writing a disappearing Oceania" . It remains a personal favorite of mine. Maarten wrote four travel memoirs:&nb...

There are some people whom you know you just have to read whatever they write next. For me, one of those people is Poppy Russell. Poppy is the Research Manager at Counteract VC, a venture capital firm devoted to funding carbon dioxide removal companies. Poppy's research of course helps Counteract diligence potential deals, and sometimes she publishes key insights, models, and other things that mak...

There are many startup accelerators out there. There are fewer focused on climate tech. Fewer still for carbon dioxide removal. Lucky for us, remove runs the absolute heck out of their programs. And it's been a true joy of mine coaching startups in them this past year. I can't even believe it, but the time has come for another program... In Latin America! If you are a Latin American carbon dioxide...

When I have questions about how technology will change human life, our experience of it, and fundamentally what we are as conscious entities... my first port of call is likely someone like Dr. D.W. Pasulka. She's labored on some of the biggest questions of the humanities only to find the world racing to catch up with her later on disclosure, on artificial intelligence, and presumably on whatever c...

If we created an objectively correct and exhaustive categorization of carbon credits, would it solve everything? Would it solve anything? Listen in as I read an essay I recently wrote about the endless quest to perfectly categorize the world, and while that may be a useful project for some purposes, it isn't anywhere close to the main reasons the world looks the way that it does. Listen in and you...

I interviewed Charles C. Mann in 2020 about his book, The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World . This episode is a personal favorite of mine. Somehow, I don't believe I've ever rereleased any old episodes. But there are many great ones buried in the archives. I am going to start bringing more of them out that remain relev...

Working in climate is hard. We all have things we wish we could say. What if we could actually say them? If you love the Reversing Climate Change podcast, you should check out the new show I'm working on, Climate Workers Anonymous . It came about as my work has become more emotional in nature. Working with so many founders has led me to see that many business problems are less about GTM motions or...

What happens when you care about climate and also want to explore space? What if you love technology but worry we've deeply misunderstood how to relate to it appropriately? What happens when we take the religious claims of others seriously, even when they aren't seen as legitimate as the major faiths? How can philosophy, literary criticism, film, and media studies help solve some of the bi...

What even is MRV, let alone dMRV?! Or Managed MRV?! Doesn't that imply the existence of Unmanaged MRV? If everything is pretty much digital now, do we still need that pesky 'd' letter?! Are there still dudes with clipboards hanging around? In this episode of Reversing Climate Change , host Ross Kenyon sits down with the cofounder and CEO of Offstream, Varsha Ramesh Walsh, to untangle t...

In the last Reversing Climate Change podcast episode , Tom Mills and I started talking about "Jerusalem ["And did those feet in ancient time"]" by William Blake (1810) , and the 1916 hymn by Sir Hubert Parry that seemingly all Brits know in their souls. I only knew about it due to a childhood obsession with the dvd boxset of Monty Python's Flying Circus , where in the S1E4...

Everyone knows about offsetting. But what about insetting? Surely, that's easier. If only we could define it... In this episode of Reversing Climate Change , host Ross Kenyon sits down with Tom Mills to dig into the physical reality of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and its intersection with heavy industry, mining, and global agricultural supply chains. Drawing from his experience working in min...

How do you actually work with a consultant without lighting money on fire? That's the question I've been wanting to tackle for a while, because I've seen both sides of this—companies that get incredible leverage from a good consulting engagement, and companies that spend six figures and walk away with a PDF that's out of date by the time they receive it. David LaGreca is a friend o...

What do you do when you spent 20 years fighting climate change from every angle you could find: community organizing, Sea Shepherd, AmeriCorps, corporate sustainability at Microsoft... and you realize the prevention phase might be ending? Do you keep keynoting conferences about employee engagement while the Amazon CSO brags about marginal improvements to delivery vans the same week they platform t...

What happens when you ask a startup founder how a decision made them feel and their eyes start to water? What happens when you realize the person who drove you the craziest at your company was right about all the things you dismissed as too woo? What happens when you look at the wreckage of a seven-year startup and realize the business model failed but the mission didn't? Today I'm talking with Al...

What do you do when you're a venture capitalist who can't stop talking about carbon removal at every meeting? You quit and start a carbon removal company, obviously. Three days later you meet the person who's been quietly running one of the largest carbon removal operations nobody's ever heard of. And then you build a company that just signed a nearly 5 million ton deal with Microsoft. That's... a...

What do you think of a developer who pitches a carbon dioxide removal buyer as they are coming out of the restroom? Or can't even enjoy some friendly scones while we all get caffeinated? Or interrupt conversations with business cards?! Forgetting that buyers are people with names and feelings and limited social energy is a tough look to beat. At a recent Carbon Unbound in Vancouver, today's guest—...

I wrote two pieces for Rainbow earlier this year. The first argued that carbon markets need field engineers, not just scientists. Erica Dorr, Rainbow's head of science, read it and pushed back: the binary was too clean, the caricatures too neat. I wrote a response piece about her work as a scientist applying her knowledge in carbon dioxide removal. Today I brought both subjects of those essays...

Martin Freimüller is the co-founder and CEO of Octavia Carbon, a direct air capture company in Kenya. He's been listening to this show since 2020 and credits it, generously, with pulling him into carbon removal in the first place. He's also someone who thought I'd taken a wrong turn lately with grim prognostications, and he had an idea he wanted to talk through. His pitch: carbon dioxi...

Every industry needs a Schelling point. For carbon dioxide removal, it's Carbon Unbound. Unbound Summits' CEO and Founder Oliver Katz joins host Ross Kenyon to chat about building the CDR industry's flagship in-person events, the economics of conference organizing, why the adaptation event series didn't work, the pay-to-play dynamics of industry speaking slots, and whether carbon r...