Stay ConnectedReversing Climate Change is a podcast about carbon removal and climatetech that keeps wandering off into literature, history, philosophy, theology, and geopolitics on the theory that the technical and scientific questions stop making much sense without them. Hosted by Ross Kenyon, who did not go past a year of political philosophy PhD coursework and has visibly not let it go.
Paid subscriptions live on Substack @ https://rosskenyon.com.
© Carbon Removal Strategies LLC
Copyright: © Nori
It is sometimes claimed that adoption could be a climate solution. After all, if there are kids needing parents and parents wanting kids, adopting might replace the desire to create more children. Is adoption something we should encourage to reduce environmental risk?
Today we have four(!) parents of adopted children on the podcast. Each of them tells their story at the start of the show, including:
Then we all discuss if and how adopting children could or should fit into one's vision of climate activism.
This was a fun and big show to do! I hope you enjoy the change-up in format.
Resources
Here are the verses from the Bible that are referenced:
"...work out your own salvation with fear and trembling."
- Philippians 2:12
"Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven.
Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.
But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth:
That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.
And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.
But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly."
- Matthew 6:1-6
All quotes from the King James Version
Resources
This episode's page on the web: https://www.rosskenyon.com/p/334-is-adopting-children-a-climate-c58
Subscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack: https://www.rosskenyon.com/subscribe
Books from the show, at Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/shop/reversing-climate-change
My other show, Climate Workers Anonymous: https://www.climateworkersanonymous.com
Additionality is typically considered a major marker of quality in carbon removal. But what do we do when carbon removal suppliers are producing other types of products and services that make them less dependent upon voluntary carbon market revenue?
Perhaps even more importantly, how do we have a productive disagreement on this topic? Bringing up some concerns can open one to criticism. But we also depend upon people thinking differently in order to advance our understanding of the world and the types of value we create. How do we make sure we aren't encouraging crackpot analysis while also not hewing so closely to orthodoxy that we might be missing important insights? How can we set the stage to understand the true landscape of disagreement so that we can come to better decisions and not be driven by ideology in improper ways?
Today's podcast features Reversing Climate Change alumnus, Grant Faber, returning to the show. Grant is sui generis in our sector for his deep involvement in life-cycle and techno-economic assessment. He is the Direct Air Capture Hubs Program Manager at the U.S. Department of Energy. Prior to DOE, he ran a consultancy focused on life cycle and techno-economic assessment where he worked with many different startups, accelerators, and investors working on carbon removal and carbon conversion. Before that, he worked with Twelve, Heirloom, and the Global CO2 Initiative.
Importantly, we invite you to engage with this material and come to your own conclusions. Part of what makes carbon removal such an intellectual adventure is just how much room there is for creativity and deep thought!
Resources
Grant's previous RCC appearance
Grant's article, "Carbon removal, co-products, and system boundaries"
Eric Matzner from Metalplant's RCC appearance
"Crediting challenges when carbon removal comes with avoided emissions" by CarbonPlan
A few Robert Höglund pieces on temporary carbon removal: #1, #2, and #3
Here's the quote from Gandalf from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Return of the King:
"It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule."
Resources
This episode's page on the web: https://www.rosskenyon.com/p/333-coproduction-and-additionality-b20
Subscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack: https://www.rosskenyon.com/subscribe
Books from the show, at Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/shop/reversing-climate-change
My other show, Climate Workers Anonymous: https://www.climateworkersanonymous.com
Of all of the world's climate podcasts, here is why you should, with your one wild and precious life, listen to Reversing Climate Change.
The tl;dr is I am a long-time carbon removal and climate tech entrepreneur who comes from the humanities (rather than science) and I am programming shows on climate unlike what you're likely to hear elsewhere. Shows with legendary travel writers to worlds that are disappearing? A Vietnam veteran discussing what Jungian archetypes can teach those thinking of their climate activism as a type of warfare? Survivalism in the age of climate change? What might Dante make of our current predicament?! This show's got it!
If you like the show, would you please become a subscriber here? It makes a huge difference to the show's sustainability. And if you aren't able to do that, would you please give the show a great rating and/or review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whichever podcast app you use that has that ability?
Thank you so much for listening! Please let me know in the comments if you would like anything in particular.
Resources
This episode's page on the web: https://www.rosskenyon.com/p/why-you-should-listen-to-the-reversing-e2f
Subscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack: https://www.rosskenyon.com/subscribe
Books from the show, at Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/shop/reversing-climate-change
My other show, Climate Workers Anonymous: https://www.climateworkersanonymous.com
When we think of climate change, we might think of droughts, floods, wildfires, emigration and climate refugees: but what if the call is coming from inside the house? What if it impacts the way we think and act?
Today's show is with Clayton Aldern, Senior Data Reporter at Grist and author of The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains.
Clayton explains where additional climate risks will be coming from, and much of it is how much even small changes in heat can increase impulsivity and crime, decrease test scores, and generally make things more difficult.
If human bodies are so susceptible to environmental conditions, what does that say for justice? How are we meant to understand agency and determinism? How do we hold one another accountable while also practicing forgiveness for human frailty?
There are no shortage of big questions today! Enjoy.
Resources
The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains
Resources
This episode's page on the web: https://www.rosskenyon.com/p/332-if-climate-change-can-impact-649
Subscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack: https://www.rosskenyon.com/subscribe
Books from the show, at Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/shop/reversing-climate-change
My other show, Climate Workers Anonymous: https://www.climateworkersanonymous.com
The wildfires in Los Angeles have gripped the country this past week. How could so much valuable real estate in prestigious zip codes populated at least in part by the rich and famous burn without recourse?
Today's Reversing Climate Change podcast sees alumna of the show, Allison Wolff, return to discuss Vibrant Planet and the LA wildfires. We were originally scheduled just to catch up because it had been too long, but it turned out to be a serendipitous podcast.
Allison has been working on understanding and managing fire risk for years and has built a data platform at Vibrant Planet that helps various entities like state agencies, utilities, and insurers understand and mitigate fire risk in areas under their responsibility.
Resources
This episode's page on the web: https://www.rosskenyon.com/p/331-the-future-of-wildfire-prevention-ea0
Subscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack: https://www.rosskenyon.com/subscribe
Books from the show, at Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/shop/reversing-climate-change
My other show, Climate Workers Anonymous: https://www.climateworkersanonymous.com
Content warning: This episode discusses a scene in a video game that involves sexual assault during war. If you'd like to skip that section, it is from 7:57-8:35. There is a response that discusses the ethical choices in the game beyond that point, but it is more abstract and general about choices.
Video games have not historically been amazing at storytelling. Games prioritize mechanics and gameplay while story takes a backseat. But that isn’t the case at 11 bit studios, which have produced some of the finest video games in recent years, including a series that takes place within a climate-changed world.
Today’s Reversing Climate Change guest is Maciej Sułecki. Maciej worked on three games that RCC host Ross Kenyon is a huge fan of: This War of Mine, and Frostpunk 1& 2.
The conversation starts with The War of Mine, in which the player plays as a group of civilians trying to survive a fictionalized Siego of Sarajevo. Unlike most war games, the objective is not to win a battle (most characters are ill-suited to fighting) but merely to stay alive and not lose your soul in the process by engaging in unethical or traumatic behavior.
The Frostpunk games each deal with a world that has iced over, and humanity is barely hanging on. Due to the extreme circumstances of survival, the decisions are hard and the political choices tend toward the extreme. It puts players in the role of deciding how to rank liberal values that we take for granted about the consent of the governed and the political process against survival. What’s more: it doesn’t do this in a straightforward way meant to teach you a lesson—a very unusual quality in any media, let alone a video game!
Ross and Maciej discuss other games and series that have prioritized story to varying degrees such as Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, Papers, Please, and Disco Elysium, and also end up discussing the degree to which Polish history influenced what are otherwise games meant to be universal.
In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the democratic body of the Sejm had a principle called the Liberum Veto, by which any member of the body could veto a policy. While this was a beautiful idea, it made it easy for members to be bribed by outsiders to block policy changes and cease the development of the state. By some accounts, it led to the weakening of the Polish state and therefore its ultimate susceptibility to the Polish Partitions. Did that influence the gamemakers thoughts on democracy? Is there such a thing as a universal game, or does all art spring from our experience, cultural or otherwise?
Resources
This episode's page on the web: https://www.rosskenyon.com/p/330-frostpunk-2-climate-video-games-f0b
Subscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack: https://www.rosskenyon.com/subscribe
Books from the show, at Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/shop/reversing-climate-change
My other show, Climate Workers Anonymous: https://www.climateworkersanonymous.com
In discussions about technology, and maybe especially within climatetech, the concept of the "Faustian bargain" is common. But what does it actually mean, and is it as simple as concept as it is typically considered?
In today's special Halloween episode, Reversing Climate Change host, Ross Kenyon, intros the show by giving the necessary historical context to understand Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, and to contrast it against Christophe Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Get ready for a dose of Romanticism.
When the Faustian bargain is invoked, it usually means a bad deal—one with no upside except for a short-sighted one. And that may be true for Marlowe’s Faust, but Goethe’s Faust wins his bet with Mephistopheles and his soul is never damned. What does that mean for how we use the term, when persistent survival if not actual upside is reintroduced into the Faustian bargain? What if, at least according to Goethe, making a deal with the devil isn’t always as straightforwardly bad as one might think?
Today’s guest is frequent podcast alumni and multihyphenate, Daniel Backer. Daniel produces virtuosic music, writes insightful novels, and creates video content about literary fiction on both his YouTube and TikTok channels. Be sure to follow his work!
Daniel and Ross spend much of the show exploring what it does to one’s brain to take claims of high strangeness, the paranormal, and the occult seriously, and why horror films (especially those of Ari Aster) deserve a better reputation.
Happy Halloween!
N.B. Reversing Climate Change is no longer a Nori podcast, but its own show. Outdated assets will be updated if and as possible.
Resources
This episode's page on the web: https://www.rosskenyon.com/p/329-the-faustian-bargain-in-climate-bdf
Subscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack: https://www.rosskenyon.com/subscribe
Books from the show, at Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/shop/reversing-climate-change
My other show, Climate Workers Anonymous: https://www.climateworkersanonymous.com
The Grounded podcast takes over Reversing Climate Change! Tom Previte of The Carbon Removal Show, founded a new biochar company in the United Kingdom called Restord. And like any good podcaster, he decided to make a show about it!
Grounded: A Climate Startup Journey, just wrapped its five-episode first season documenting Tom's attempts to start a new biochar company. He walks listeners through so many of the basic questions of starting a business, and specifically a business in a new category like carbon removal. What standard should one try to work within? Which parts of the life-cycle assessment matter? Who actually wants this product?!
What's especially novel about this episode is that Tom and his producer Ben Weaver-Hincks produced it in the style of Grounded, with voiceover segments and various other effects!
Tom and Ross talk about how to make podcasts about carbon removal interesting, how various design decisions impact quality and frequency of publishing, and what we can do to get more people into CDR and climate action through creative media work.
Resources
The Carbon Removal Show
Grounded
Restord
Restord's crowdfunding campaign
Resources
This episode's page on the web: https://www.rosskenyon.com/p/328-building-a-biochar-startup-on-34a
Subscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack: https://www.rosskenyon.com/subscribe
Books from the show, at Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/shop/reversing-climate-change
My other show, Climate Workers Anonymous: https://www.climateworkersanonymous.com
How do we conduct science when there isn't a single isolated variable? What does that mean for carbon removal not taking place in a controlled environment? How does science even work?!
Today's show originated from a question of how open-system carbon removal research can be conducted given that in a less-controlled environment, isolating for a single variable with replicability is less obviously possible. Does the scientific method really demand that, or is that some sort of pop culture understanding of science that needs to be challegned?
To answer that question, host and co-founder of the Nori carbon removal marketplace, Ross Kenyon, asked Dr. Holly Jean Buck of the University at Buffalo and Anu Khan of Carbon180, to read two books and come on Reversing Climate Change to discuss them.
The two texts are some of the foundational works of modern philosophy of science: Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and Paul Feyerabend's Against Method.
Kuhn argued that paradigms are the collection of foundational beliefs we have about how science and knowledge production is conducted, and that they are quite hard to see outside of since most people work so deeply within them. It can often be a generational effort, as older scientists die and new ones take their places.
Feyerabend goes further, arguing that we shouldn't just look for where one paradigm supersedes another, but be protective of competing systems of knowledge and the valuable ways of seeing that they unlock.
The show applies their learnings to the state of the CDR industry, and attempts to ferret out carbon removal's existing paradigm, whether the world is ready for credits that are not tonne-denominated, and how much time we can afford in retooling and letting "normal science" work within an imperfect paradigm vs. trying to create an entirely new paradigm ex nihilo.
N.B. At the 8:55 mark, I contrast Ptolemaic with geocentric and I meant to say heliocentric. Feyerabend said that the quality of predictions between Ptolemaic/geocentric and heliocentric models was similar.
Resources
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions on Wikipedia
The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman
Resources
This episode's page on the web: https://www.rosskenyon.com/p/327-carbon-removal-and-the-philosophy-4cc
Subscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack: https://www.rosskenyon.com/subscribe
Books from the show, at Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/shop/reversing-climate-change
My other show, Climate Workers Anonymous: https://www.climateworkersanonymous.com
What is it like to go to war? What does the experience have to teach us, and could it in any way be a spiritual endeavor? What does the Temple of Mars have to teach us in a climate-changing world?
Karl Marlantes is a Rhodes Scholar who put aside graduate studies at Oxford University to lead a Marine rifle platoon in Vietnam in 1968. He is featured extensively in the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick documentary series, The Vietnam War. His memoir, What It Is Like to Go to War, and novel, Matterhorn, address what we ask our nation’s young warriors to do from within a cultural environment that denies the multifaceted truth of what it means to be a warrior. His recent novels Deep River and Cold Victory address big questions of agency and what it means to recognize oneself as a historical actor.
Is combat terrifying? Exhilarating? Mystical? Carnal? Is it everything all at once? If we only acknowledge the experience as negative, how might that cause repression and misunderstanding in a world unlikely to leave war behind permanently?
If climate change is not successfully addressed as soon as possible, the geopolitical situation may become more rivalrous and difficult. We need to understand the nature of war, of our relationship to our shadow, in order to chart an honest course to a better future.
Resources
Ken Burns & Lynn Novick's The Vietnam War series
Karl Marlantes' books:
- What It Is Like to Go to War
Connect with Nori
Carbon Removal Memes on Instagram
Resources
This episode's page on the web: https://www.rosskenyon.com/p/326-confronting-our-shadow-jung-the-b74
Subscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack: https://www.rosskenyon.com/subscribe
Books from the show, at Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/shop/reversing-climate-change
My other show, Climate Workers Anonymous: https://www.climateworkersanonymous.com
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