Carbon removal isn't that old. So for someone who's been involved in it for almost fifteen years... that's an elder. And today he's bringing the wisdom he earned the hard way.
Dave Addison is formerly the Virgin Earth Challenge Manager, an effort he began working on in 2010. That's about six years before I had even heard of CDR, so a long time indeed!
Last year, Dave started Planetary Practitioners, a consultancy founded on a long-run vision of helping much more of humankind access decent work in net-positive industries. You can read his writing and keep up with his work here.
One pattern you might notice in shows is that many of the lessons aren't merely about commercial strategy or TRL or unit economics. Much of the best advice is how to walk upon the Earth in a way that shows you belong here. So today, it's more emotional than average. For those of you who want or need such an experience, it is here for you, and I hope you enjoy this conversation with my good friend, Dave.
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"Keep Going", from Dave's Substack for Planetary Practitioners
Carl Sagan's Cosmos: A Personal Voyage
David Grinspoon's Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future
"It's Just a Ride" by Bill Hicks
"The Darmine Doggy Door" from I Think You Should Leave
Should every dollar spent in carbon removal be maximally catalytic? Or is it okay to try to get a really good deal for your net-zero target? What even is this industry for?!
Joining the show today—somehow for the first time ever—is Robert Höglund, a long-time CDR-watcher and writer; Co-Founder of the carbon removal's data repository-of-record, CDR.fyi, and the Head of CDR at Milkywire.
Robert endures a barrage of questions about how his thinking on carbon removal has changed over the years, and him and host Ross Kenyon try to ferret out what it actually means to be catalytic. Is carbon accounting just for knuckleheads? The truth... may surprise you.
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Robert Höglund's website for his advisory work
Robert Höglund's many articles
Everyone's focused on carbon credit offtakes and Voluntary Carbon Market purchases, but the compliance markets represent the vast majority of carbon assets in circulation. How do these markets work, and how might carbon removal interact with them in the future?
Mike Azlen is the CEO and CIO of Carbon Cap Management LLP, a firm which trades within various compliance markets.
We discuss why private traders like his company can help price discovery in compliance markets, and address some common criticisms of market-based approaches to climate change (both VCM and compliance markets.)
Carbon removal is going to figure into various compliance markets in the future, but how exactly will that work? Might that be the demand boost that carbon removal needs to scale?
There is also bonus content from this episode about some of Mike's observations about VCM failures. It will be released on Saturday, May 24th. Become a paid subscriber to access it when it is published!
This Episode's Sponsor
Listen to the RCC episode with Lisett Luik from Arbonics
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Seemingly everyone in carbon removal says they want more data transparency and the sharing of scientific results. Why isn't open science more present, and how can we get more of it? Could a pre-print server for CDR be part of the solution?
Today is the official launch of CDRXIV ("cee-dee-archive"), a new initiative from CarbonPlan that aims to spur scientific conversations within the carbon removal community.
On this episode, Freya Chay (the CDR Program Lead at CarbonPlan and a Member of the Advisory Board to CDRXIV) and Tyler Kukla (a CDR Research Scientist at CarbonPlan and the Content Manager for CDRXIV) are on the show to explain how pre-print servers drive progress in other scientific fields, why CDR needs one, and how it may change our industry.
If you'd like to submit data and/or a paper for publication to CDRXIV, please email hello@cdrxiv.org, or visit their submission portal here.
This Episode's Sponsor
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Carbon removal only has a few exits. Today’s guest was involved in two of them, and he’s bringing his lessons.
Jim McDermott is the founder and CEO of Rusheen Capital Management, LLC, an investment firm that makes a few early-stage bets and works with companies much more closely than most investors do. He's had a long and storied career in energy and as the founder and CEO of Stamps.com.
Jim shares his lessons from exiting 1PointFive and Carbon Engineering to Occidental Petroleum (who also just bought Holocene, another direct air capture company). He lays out his case for alternatives to the classical venture approach, and proposes a new philanthropic model he believes has a chance of filling in carbon removal’s (in)famous demand gap.
Listen in to lessons for entrepreneurs during tough times and Jim's predictions for direct air capture and the carbon removal sector as a whole.
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In carbon removal, landing a major offtake agreement—like Microsoft’s purchase of 44,000 credits from Carba—is often seen as the holy grail. But what happens next? How does the money flow, and can debt financing bridge the gap between signature and scale?
In this episode of Reversing Climate Change, host Ross Kenyon unpacks the deal between Microsoft and Carba, a waste-to-value biochar company turning landfill-bound biomass in Minnesota into durable carbon removal.
With credits to be delivered over five years, Carba needed capital to ramp up production. Enter Structure Climate, which is financing the deal to help Carba meet its commitments—showcasing a compelling model for how debt finance can unlock climate impact.
Guests Andrew Jones, CEO and Cofounder of Carba, and Matt Schmitt, Founder and CEO of Structure Climate (where Ross serves as an advisor), walk us through the mechanics of the deal, the role of debt vs. equity, and what this means for the future of carbon removal finance.
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"Carba Announces 5-Year Carbon Removal Credit Purchase Agreement with Microsoft" announcement
Fair warning: this episode spoils a lot of (older) media.
Antiheroes make for great television. But why are we obsessed with them? Why are they in nearly all prestige dramas? Is this a result of our cultural beliefs, or is it (re)producing a culture of cynical realism? What impacts might it have for politics and climate change?
This ascendancy of the antihero is a trend I've been watching (and often enjoying) since my teen years. Shows like The Sopranos helped bring television to its lofty artistic status, but it did so by confusing the natural empathy that good storytelling generates. The longer one watches shows like The Sopranos, the more one ends up rooting for bad guys to be successful. In a world that is ever more mediated by media, could a similar trend be happening in politics?
Today's show is an attempt to make sense of the antihero through a number of prestige dramas, and look for some ways of telling stories that don't lead us into the abyss of constant moral ambiguity.
Today we're going to talk about hope, reclaiming moral authority, and why it's cool to believe in things. I hope you'll join me in that ambition.
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"The judge speaks in the name of justice; the priest speaks in the name of pity, which is nothing but a more lofty justice."
- Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
"Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven."
- Matthew 18:21-22, KJV
The Sopranos (here's a clip where Anthony Jr. steals sacramental wine from the church and the shot lingers for a few extra seconds on St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes—perfection)
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band on Wikipedia
Littlefinger Tells Varys That Chaos Is A Ladder | Game of Thrones | HBO
The scene between Michael and Kay in The Godfather
It's a jarring phrase. There's an even more jarring version of it in this episode. You've been warned.
Economists are well-known for gnomic sentences that can sound cruel. For some, that's one of the job's many perks. But that doesn't mean that there isn't some truth in representing decisions as trade-offs.
Today is a bonus monologue episode where I am going to unpack this phrase (and its nastier cousin) and explain what it has to teach the carbon removal industry as it grapples with the tension between scale and quality.
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You should know about my friend Heidi Lim. She's a leading voice of carbon removal on TikTok.
She's been making short-form content for ages but today's show is her first foray into long-form. I have the honor of being her first guest and co-releasing the episode.
It is my sincere honor to help Heidi launch her new content on YouTube!
We get real in this show, talking about the difficult and sometimes unsung work of climate communications, why our world feels so screwed up, and the black hole of tech jobs that suck so much talent into its brain drain.
Best wishes, Heidi! So glad you're now doing this. Count me as a big fan!
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The full video on Heidi's YouTube channel
326: Confronting Our Shadow: Jung, The Vietnam War, & Climate Change—w/ Karl Marlantes, author
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"And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell."
- Matthew 5:30, KJV
If only there were a podcast that broke down all of the ways climate professionals broke into their industry...
Michael Gold is a communications expert and consultant at Word Clouds Consulting and the host of the new podcast, Climate Swings. This show traces guests' stories and explains how they landed a job working on one of humanity's most significant problem sets.
Check out the episode of Climate Swings I did with Michael retelling my odyssey into climate work here! Be sure to subscribe to his show, give it a great rating and review, and send it to a friend trying to come join us.
Also, a special thank you to 9Zero for serendipitously facilitating our connection and to Terra.do for helping Michael do what he does!
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"From PhD Dropout to Carbon Removal Comedian", the episode of Climate Swings I did with Michael
Sometimes, we skip right over the life stories of guests. Othertimes, it's everything. Today, it's everything.
Returning to the show after several years is Carbon180's Executive Director, Erin Burns.
Erin grew up in a coal mining family in West Virginia, got her start in Joe Manchin's Senate office, and has had a long and impactful career in carbon removal.
Today, Erin (re)explains how the budgeting process works in the United States federal government and how the appropriations process intersects with it. What is the difference, and where can voters get involved?
This is truly an improvised masterclass in civics education. Listen up for what you missed in high school, and how it will impact the future of carbon removal.
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"The Appropriations Process: A Brief Overview", a CRS Product
Carbon180's Carbon Removal Funding Tracker
"The Ghost of Tom Joad" by Bruce Springsteen
"Which Side Are You On?" by Pete Seeger
"There is Power in a Union" by Utah Phillips (originally by Joe Hill)
The clean energy transition sure needs a heck of a lot of mining. What do we do when there are environmental or spiritual costs to getting the materials we need for EVs and batteries?
Ernest Scheyder is a Reuters reporter covering critical minerals, and the author of The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives.
His reporting strives to let audiences draw their own conclusions about where the line should be on environmental extraction, which is a rarer approach than maybe meets the eye.
Tune in to also learn where the political battles of the second Trump Administration over critical minerals in Ukraine and clean energy politics at home may lead, and what we should keep our eyes on in the future.
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The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives
Nearly a decade ago, I was introduced to the concept of the Keynesian Beauty Contest. It is one of those concepts that I keep coming back to time and time again.
I recently participated in a two-month Product-Market Fit workshop led by Peter Nocchiero of Alternate Future and Koray Parmaks of Carbon Zero Capital. So I've been living and breathing PMF.
Here is a short monologue bonus video episode where I talk about the Product-Market Fit issues of climatetech and carbon removal, a now-outdated reference to how TSLA bears kept getting crushed, and relate them to my experiences as a founder of the Nori carbon removal marketplace.
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The Keynesian Beauty Contest on Wikipedia
I first heard the idiom "worse things happen at sea" in Monty Python's Life of Brian, and it's true.
Ian Urbina has made a career of telling stories of the ocean. From piracy, illegal fishing, and sea slavery to seasteading and rogue carbon removal experiments, he's covered the gamut.
How does one continuously report on topics of concern to relatively intimidating people? As the old line goes, "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is public relations."
In today's episode, Ian and host Ross Kenyon discuss these topics, but also broader questions of what is happening to journalism in a political environment where retaliation feels very possible.
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The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the World's Last Untamed Frontier by Ian Urbina
For fans ages 21 and up!
It's often hard to know how sustainable or ethical an alcoholic drink is. Very little disclosure is required on most labels, and many of the recipes are proprietary. What is a conscientious drinker to do?
Shanna Farrell wrote A Good Drink: In Search of Sustainable Spirits in order to answer this exact question.
She and host Ross Kenyon discuss the strange world of amaros (or "amari" if you're really going for it!), whiskey, agave, and gin, and try to figure out how to even begin approaching this difficult consumptive choice.
N.B. If you really want to nerd out on amaro taxonomy, Brad Thomas Parsons's books on amaro and bitters are both quite useful; linked below.
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A Good Drink: In Search of Sustainable Spirits by Shanna Farrell
Amaro: The Spirited World of Bittersweet, Herbal Liqueurs by Brad Thomas Parsons
Crushed: How A Changing Climate Is Altering the Way We Drink by Brian Freedman
What is geopolitics, and has it returned? Did it ever really leave? And how will this affect the future prospects of carbon removal?
Today's guest is Sarah Godek, a Washington DC-based international relations researcher. She and Grant Faber co-wrote an article on Carbon-Based Commentary called, "Carbon security and the geopolitics of carbon removal".
We discuss the tension between strategic liberalism and realism, how the world is changing under the second Trump Administration, as well as if and how the Great Game is currently being played and what implications that has for climate change and CDR.
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"Carbon security and the geopolitics of carbon removal"
Graham Allison's Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?
Robert Axelrod's The Evolution of Cooperation
John Pomfret's The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present
Go watch In the Loop, Veep, and The Death of Stalin!
My podcasting editing platform Descript informed me of a new integration with ChatGPT where it would make me a custom video. I complied in perhaps the most annoying and meta way possible.
That video exists at the end of this podcast, but first, I have thoughts I'd like to share on what this process made me feel and think about.
I've heard so many takes on artificial intelligence and art, and I have several of my own that I don't often hear reflected. Mine pertain to the sociological purpose of art, and of developing aesthetic talent on the road to greatness.
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Use my referral link to become a user of Descript for podcast editing, transcription, and now AI-generated video content.
When you take a major pay cut to work in government, you don't expect unceremoniously fired by the Department of Government Efficiency with a change in administration. But it happened to friend of the show, Grant Faber.
Grant Faber was the United States Department of Energy's Direct Air Capture Hubs Program Manager until he was let go as part of the recent firing of probationary federal employees.
In today's episode, Grant explains what he was working on, what it was like being at the DoE during this turbulent time of Trump 2 & DOGE, and what it means for carbon removal, the climate, and the United States moving forward.
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Listen to The CDR Policy Scoop episode with Noah Deich (coming soon!)
Grant's recent RCC episode on coproduction and additionality
Don't make me link to the ASMR deportation video
There are a bunch of episodes I've made with thoughtful conservatives. Poke around the catalog if you'd like. I'll add some more links later if I have the heart to do it.
Russell Vought, Director of the Office of Management and Budget (I mistakenly say OEM in the show):
"We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected... When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so...We want to put them in trauma."
There are a lot of companies that want to buy carbon removal and don't have the budget to participate in Frontier or Symbiosis. What are they to do?
Until now, they either had to pay expensive consultants or vet projects and contracts themselves and stand by their choices alone. No longer!
The new AirMiners Buyers Club could not be arriving at a better time. Federal policy for carbon removal is in an extremely turbulent moment. Buying momentum is not growing to the degree that we need to see. The AirMiners Buyers Club aims to solve for the missing middle of carbon removal buyers.
Do you work at (or know someone who works at) a company that could be passionate about supporting cutting-edge carbon removal companies? Are you a high-net-worth individual? Involved in philanthropy? If so, please reach out to Tito Jankowski directly (tito[at]airminers.com) and see how you can work together to grow CDR during its Dark Night of the Soul.
Additionally, if you personally want to support CDR in non-monetary ways, come join the so-called Rebel Alliance in AirMiners. We'd love to have you.
Thank you so much for your love and support of carbon removal!
Resources
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Join the AirMiners Buyers Club by emailing Tito Jankowski directly: tito[at]airminers.com.
Seemingly nothing generates hotter passions in carbon credits than forestry. Can credits count against fossil emissions? Is there enough of it to make a difference? What is the appropriate way of funding it?
Today's guest is Lisett Luik, Co-Founder and COO of Arbonics, an innovative forestry company in the Baltic that straddles the line between carbon removal and other services forests can provide.
We discuss if and how forestry can fit into carbon removal, help the planet avoid tipping points, and adequately motivate land managers to employ better practices.
We also play a quick game of bioenergy: friend or foe!
Always more to discuss on forestry, and I doubt this show will be the final word.
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