Reversing Climate Change

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...

Sometimes you read a poem on a carbon removal podcast and it's goofy. Sometimes you read a poem and people start writing you wanting to share their own favorites... Matt Schmitt, CEO and co-founder of Structure Climate (a company I formally advise), was inspired by the recent Emily Swaddle episode where we spoke about poems that mean a lot to us. He wrote me immediately to read a poem of his o...

US federal carbon dioxide removal policy is a fragment of its former self. But are rumors of its death greatly exaggerated? (Sorry, Mark Twain.) Eli Cain, Deputy Director of Policy at the Carbon Removal Alliance, comes on the show to give a reality check on US federal policy for carbon removal. Where is the action still happening, and what do we have to look forward to? Despite a political environ...

If the US pulls out of climate action, is there room for China or another country to fill the leadership void? Or without the US, does climate multilateralism fall apart entirely? This episode is a direct response to my recent monologue episode, "How Carbon Removal Loses: The End of "Pre-Compliance"", which walked through the political risks to climate and carbon removal policy...

I've had a poem stuck in my head, and it isn't one of biophilia and whimsy. It's about liminality, death, and interregna. Let me read for you one of my favorites and one of the all-time classics of Enlighs literature, William Butler Yeats's "The Second Coming". While beautiful for its own sake, I'll also make a case for the defense of useless things, an argument for t...

This is the kind of episode you put on and laugh along with us. This isn't the one where you'll get super quick tech takeaways within 30 minutes that you can drop at your next meeting. It's something else entirely. Emily Swaddle, co-host of The Carbon Removal Show and one of the funniest people in carbon removal, joins Ross for a wide-ranging conversation about life, art, language, climate communi...

Right now, the world's climate policy architecture is under siege. The US has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement and UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Right-wing populism is rising across Europe. And Europe itself is torn between defending against geopolitical threats and sustaining the climate policies it has spent years building. What happens to carbon removal in this envir...

The foundational assumption of carbon removal has been the "pre-compliance" story—that the voluntary carbon market and early corporate offtakes are necessary but not sufficient, and that we're all waiting for compliance to automate demand. That story depends on Japan, Canada, the EU, and the UK carrying the torch while the US sits on the sidelines heckling. In this monologue episode,...

Is all of carbon removal really just about alkalinity? There's a case to be made for quite a lot of it. Weathering, ocean alkalinity enhancement, even parts of direct air capture—they all come back to manipulating pH and moving basic materials to where they can cancel out excess acid in the atmosphere and ocean. Omar Sadoon is the Director of Strategic Partnerships at Planetary Technologies, a...

Sometimes when people think they are coming at an issue from first principles, they're already pretty far downstream. What if rethinking an issue means really blowing past the current framework entirely and figuring out how to get the result in an entirely new way? Emma Fuller is the Cofounder of Fractal Agriculture, a firm which takes minority equity stakes in farmland to help farmers switch...

Carbon removal used to have technology developers who were also project developers. But oh, the times they are a-changin'... What happens when grizzled CDR veterans pluck technology off the shelf and focus on developing projects that produce highly insurable, investable, and offtakeable carbon removal credits? You get something like Residual Carbon. Ted Christie-Miller is the cofounder of Resi...

Sometimes we talk carbon removal. Sometimes we talk poetry. Come let me read you one of my favorite Walt Whitman poems from "Song of Myself" in Leaves of Grass . We'll also explore why it's okay to love only some elements of a work of art, and why Whitman's kaleidoscopic view of grass is so remarkable. A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How cou...