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.
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Copyright: © Nori
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 tonne deal with Microsoft. That's... a lot of tonnes.
Today's guest is Julia Reichelstein, the co-founder and CEO of Vaulted Deep. They take contaminated organic waste—the stuff nobody else wants, the sludgy, PFAS-laden, moisture-intensive material that's going to landfills or getting spread on land—and they pump it thousands of feet underground where it stays forever. They don't compete for nice clean biomass. They take the actual waste, and they get paid to take it. That's a business model I can get behind.
I wanted to talk to Julia because her origin story is unusual. She didn't start with a technology and try to commercialize it. She came from venture capital, from international development in Kenya and Ethiopia, from a place of asking "what actually scales?" And when she found deep well disposal through her now co-founder Omar, she recognized immediately that this was both great waste management and great carbon removal—and that the combination was the thing.
But this episode went somewhere I didn't expect. We got into intuition and gut decisions, into what it means to lead a company from a spiritual place without losing business rigor, into "front of brain" versus "back of brain" and why Julia's trail runs keep getting longer the more successful Vaulted gets. I brought up the question of whether CEOs who founded their companies can survive the transition to scaling them, and Julia gave one of the best answers I've heard: "What does the company need me to be?" Not "how do I shape the company around my strengths"—the other direction entirely.
We also talked about the mechanics of spinning a company out of an existing one, why there aren't many venture-backed spinoffs (and why that should have told her something), and what it actually looks like to go from two trucks a week to fifty trucks a day.
This Episode's Sponsors
EcoEngineers: a full-service advisory and consulting firm focused on carbon dioxide removal, decarbonization, and carbon markets.
Listen to the RCC episode with Lev Gantly about the history and current status of CORSIA
Resources
Subscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack
Resources
This episode's page on the web: https://www.rosskenyon.com/p/what-kind-of-leader-does-my-cdr-company
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 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—Taylor Insley, the Director of Strategic Planning for Terraset—was on a panel that made a splash: she was telling developers, basically, that the way many of them approach buyers is counterproductive.
I wanted to talk to Taylor because she sits in an unusual position. She spent most of her career as a fundraiser, soliciting donors for causes she cares about. Now at Terraset, the turntables have turned. She's the recipient of pitches for tax-deductible and highly catalytic CDR and other climate interventions. And that perspective shift has taught her something about what works and what doesn't that I think is genuinely useful for anyone trying to raise money in this space.
But this episode also goes somewhere uncomfortable. We talk about fairness. About whether it should matter that you're charming and diplomatic, or whether the science and economics should be all that counts. About status and in-groups and the fundamental hypocrisy of caring about relationships when you're on one side of the table and resenting them when you're on the other. I brought in the Chinese Imperial Exam, The Godfather, Love on the Spectrum, whether dogs are communists or private property lovers depending upon who has food... It was a lot, but I think we successfully got to the core of this topic.
Taylor's single best piece of advice: "Tell me how to do my job better." If you understand what Terraset is trying to accomplish and can help them get there, you're gold. If you're running up with a video of your kiln in a pyrolysis cycle... maybe don't?
This Episode's Sponsors
EcoEngineers: a full-service advisory and consulting firm focused on carbon dioxide removal, decarbonization, and carbon markets.
Listen to the RCC episode with Lev Gantly about the history and current status of CORSIA
Resources
Subscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack
The opening scene from The Godfather (TW: SA)
Resources
This episode's page on the web: https://www.rosskenyon.com/p/how-to-pitch-terraset-and-other-carbon
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
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 onto the show to hash it out together.
What is science and what is engineering? It sounds like a question from your first week of college, but in carbon removal it maps directly onto how registries set requirements, how projects get certified, how you balance rigor with feasibility, and ultimately whether the whole system holds together or collapses under its own weight. Erica and Samara Vantil, one of Rainbow's environmental engineers on the certification team, walked me through how these two disciplines actually interact on a daily basis at a working carbon registry.
The conversation went somewhere I didn't expect. The real tension isn't between science and engineering at all. Those two are closer to each other than either is to the commercial side. The actual friction lives between the technical teams (science and engineering alike) and the commercial pressures of needing to ship credits, sign projects, and keep the lights on. And every decision about where to set a requirement, how many samples to demand, whether to accept a conservative discount or reject a project outright, sits right in that tension.
We talked about Charm's decision to reduce sampling, about whether quality discourse has become meaningless repetition, about the optimal number of travel deaths being non-zero, and about how you know whether you're cutting scope for the right reasons or because you're about to lose a deal.
My sincere thanks to Samara and Erica for engaging with this so openly. These are, as Erica put it, the ultimate questions.
This Episode's Sponsors
EcoEngineers: a full-service advisory and consulting firm focused on carbon dioxide removal, decarbonization, and carbon markets.
Listen to the RCC episode with Lev Gantly about the history and current status of CORSIA
Resources
Subscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack
"Why carbon markets need field engineers, not just scientists" (Rainbow blog)
"What scientists actually do in carbon removal" (Rainbow blog)
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Resources
This episode's page on the web: https://www.rosskenyon.com/p/engineering-vs-science-vs-commercial
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
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 dioxide removal is the prodigal son, and it's time to come home. We've spent the last few years building CDR as a separate category, defining ourselves against the "legacy" voluntary carbon market, trashing clean cooking credits and REDD+ and Verra and basically everyone who came before us.
Martin thinks that was a mistake, and he includes himself in the indictment. He was on stage a year ago telling investors about DAC's explosive growth. Now he's calling clean cooking founders and asking who their buyers are.
He shared some numbers that caught my attention: there are roughly 200 corporates that have ever bought carbon removal. There are about 35,000 buying carbon credits more broadly, and about 3 million individuals. Article 6.2 bilateral deals and 6.4-based transactions are quietly channeling tens of millions of tonnes of demand per year. The broader VCM is growing. CDR is not, at least not in real revenue recognized terms. Martin's argument is that instead of fighting over the tiny pot of dedicated CDR buyers, we should be figuring out how to sell into the market that actually exists and is expanding.
I found this conversation genuinely moving. Martin is doing something rare in this industry: admitting in public that he was wrong about how he positioned his company and his sector, and sharing an idea that benefits everyone, not just Octavia. That's leadership, and I told him so.
If you're a carbon removal founder who's tired of hearing that bad startups blame their customers, this one's for you.
This Episode's Sponsor
Listen to the RCC episode with Lev Gantly about the history and current status of CORSIA
Resources
Subscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack
391: How Carbon Removal Loses: The End of "Pre-Compliance"
Resources
This episode's page on the web: https://www.rosskenyon.com/p/the-prodigal-son-of-carbon-markets
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
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 removal professionals need to take themselves less seriously.
Listeners can get themselves 10% off of Carbon Unbound East Coast in New York City on May 19th-20th by using the discount count: "ReversingClimateChange".
This Episode's Sponsor
Listen to the RCC episode with Lev Gantly about the history and current status of CORSIA
Resources
Subscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack
Listeners can get themselves 10% off of Carbon Unbound East Coast in New York City on May 19th-20th by using the discount count: "ReversingClimateChange".
Resources
This episode's page on the web: https://www.rosskenyon.com/p/why-we-keep-showing-up-at-carbon
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
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 own and share what it means to him and his labor in carbon dioxide removal.
The poem is "If—" by Rudyard Kipling, from circa 1895.
Matt zooms in on two lines that have stayed with him: the bit about meeting with triumph and disaster and treating those two impostors just the same, and the closing image of filling the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds' worth of distance run.
Listen in to hear more about why Matt loves that triumph and disaster are both capitalized; why "treat" is the perfect verb—carrying both the everyday sense and the older sense of negotiating a treaty; why the unforgiving minute is unforgiving (it doesn't care whether you think it is sixty seconds or not, the minute is sixty seconds); why the map is always wrong when the map and the ground disagree, and what that has to do with how we navigate physical, social, and spiritual terrain; and why sharing poetry on a carbon removal podcast feels right even when it's hard to articulate exactly how it ties in...
As Matt puts it, we often think what we measure is important not because it's important but because we can measure it. And that doesn't always leave a lot of room for the beauty and spirit we need to do the things we can measure.
If you have a poem you'd like to read on the show, drop me a line.
Resources
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The Wikipedia article about the poem
Vexed to Nightmare by a Rocking Cradle—The 2026 Horror of W.B. Yeats' "The Second Coming"
The beautiful uncut hair of graves—Walt Whitman on the Equality of Death
The universal cannibalism of the sea vs. one insular Tahiti—My favorite chapter of Moby-Dick
Resources
This episode's page on the web: https://www.rosskenyon.com/p/meet-with-triumph-and-disaster-and
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
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 environment that looks grim from the outside, Eli makes the case that real progress is happening:
When enhanced rock weathering can save farmers money, or carbon mineralization can reduce mining waste liabilities, there is a path forward. We also dig into why 45Q survived the reconciliation process, and what it takes to build durable policy in a volatile political moment.
"Every single carbon removal company in our membership is deploying in partnership with industrial players."
- Eli Cain, Carbon Removal Alliance
This Episode's Sponsor
Listen to the RCC episode with Lev Gantly about the history and current status of CORSIA
Resources
Subscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack
391: How Carbon Removal Loses: The End of "Pre-Compliance"
EMRTAI program for mineralization
Resources
This episode's page on the web: https://www.rosskenyon.com/p/carbon-removal-as-essential-american
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
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 in a world where the US pulls back. I looked at Canada, the EU, its various member states, and Japan as possible safe havens. One country I left out was China. So I invited Sarah Godek back on as my "sinologist on call" to help set the record straight.
Sarah Godek is a returning guest and very knowledgeable about China. Our previous episode—a conversation about realism and liberalism in geopolitics, born out of a piece she co-wrote with Grant Faber on carbon security—is linked in the resources section and is a useful first step before diving into this one.
In this episode, Sarah walks me through China's energy security priorities, the difficult role coal plays in Chinese strategy, Tencent's CarbonX Prize, the absence of a clear institutional home for carbon removal inside the Chinese government, and the much harder question of whether climate multilateralism can survive without American leadership.
Listen in to hear more about what the "intangible third thing" of world leadership actually is (Sarah argues it's capability — the ability to make other actors stop) and why the war in Iran is a very different status hit for the US than the war in Iraq was; why a peaceful reunification with Taiwan is still the preferred outcome in Beijing, and what that says about the value of legitimacy; how China's environmentalist movement today more closely resembles the US in the 1960s, and how the principle that "green mountains are gold mountains" shapes Chinese carbon removal policy (heavy on sinks and reforestation, light on engineered CDR); what the 15th Five-Year Plan might or might not change; why China frames historical emissions as a Western problem—"if we didn't break it, why must we buy it?"—and what that means for whether China will ever take the mantle on CDR specifically; and Sarah's closing framing... it isn't that the US leaves a gaping hole the world flounders in. It's that the world will continue on without us, and the risk isn't punishment for not being at the table—it's being on the menu.
This Episode's Sponsors
Listen to the RCC episode with Lev Gantly about the history and current status of CORSIA
Rainbow: a developer-centric carbon removal registry
"Why carbon markets need field engineers, not just scientists" on Rainbow
"What scientists actually do in carbon removal" on rosskenyon.com
Resources
Subscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack
338: Carbon Security & the Geopolitics of Carbon Removal—w/ Sarah Godek
"Carbon security and the geopolitics of carbon removal" by Sarah Godek & Grant Faber
391: How Carbon Removal Loses: The End of "Pre-Compliance"
Resources
This episode's page on the web: https://www.rosskenyon.com/p/can-china-lead-on-climate-without
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
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 English 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 the horror genre as a serious art form, and a close reading of a poem that has become a kind of shared vocabulary for moments when the center will not hold.
I work through the imagery line by line, and connect it to everything from Frankenstein and Genesis's exile from Eden, to Tig Notaro's stage presence, to theriantropic madness from The Office's Michael Scott, to H.P. Lovecraft, to Slavoj Žižek on Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, and more.
The trigger wasn't climate policy rollback or the war in Iran, as you might guess—it was actually thinking about artificial general intelligence, and that the falcon that can no longer hear the falconer.
Listen in to hear more about why "The Second Coming" reads as present-progressive horror rather than past-tense lament, why "troubles my sight" is a master class in economy of language, what monsters are actually for (the etymology connects to the Spanish mostrar—to show; which I minorly mispronounce in my freestyling—forgive me!), how Hereditary, The Babadook, and Jordan Peele's films use horror to talk about grief, depression, and race, and why this liminal moment between world orders feels so monstrous: not because the new world has arrived, but because the rough beast is only now slouching toward Bethlehem.
"The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters."
- Antonio Gramsci
Resources
Subscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack
"The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats
Paul Muldoon's reading of "The Second Coming"
In Praise of the Useless Life: A Monk's Memoir by Paul Quenon (referenced via Thomas Merton)
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World by Margaret MacMillan
Paris 1919 (album) by John Cale
Pervert's Guide to Cinema — Slavoj Žižek on Hitchcock's The Birds
Treaty of Trianon (I didn't mention this by name, but I've been thinking a lot about how it shaped/shapes Central Europe.)
Id, ego, superego in Freudian psychoanalysis
Michael Scott's theriantrope fantasy/nightmare/prophecy from The Office
Resources
This episode's page on the web: https://www.rosskenyon.com/p/the-second-coming-reading-yeats-in
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
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 communications, and the absurdity of having a career in all of the above. A good chunk of the reason The Carbon Removal Show is so fun is because Emily is so fun, and this episode is basically an extended version of her (in)famous segment on TCRS, "Emily's Language Chat".
Emily Swaddle is a storyteller, communicator, and co-host of The Carbon Removal Show alongside Ben Weaver-Hincks and Tom Previte. She's been making the show since 2020, producing deeply researched, highly produced seasons that have become a go-to educational resource for the carbon removal community. Emily brings a unique perspective shaped by her background in the arts, her love of language, and her instinct that the climate conversation needs more humanity, more humor, and far less jargon.
Listen in to hear more about why Emily thinks silliness and vulnerability are underrated tools in climate communication, and why we even bother doing this climate work when it isn't the glamorous, high-paying energy executive type work.
You'll also hear about the Carbon Removal Show Coalition funding model, the tension between monetizing the natural world and actually caring about it, how British class dynamics show up in language and accent, why being a generalist in a specialist world is both a gift and a curse, and what happens when two podcast hosts stop talking about carbon removal policy and start talking about Disney villain queer coding, Mary Poppins, and whether "rabbit tube" should be a phrase.
Special thanks to the team at The Carbon Removal Show for loaning us the perfection that is the "Emily's Language Chat" reggae jingle.
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
This Episode's Sponsor
Resources
Subscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack
The Carbon Removal Show podcast
The Carbon Removal Show Coalition
Why Would You Say Something So Controversial Yet So Brave?
Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England's Kings and Queens by David Mitchell
What Makes Disney Villains so Gay?
Money can be exchanged for goods and services from The Simpsons
"The Darmine Doggy Door" from I Think You Should Leave
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein
Resources
This episode's page on the web: https://www.rosskenyon.com/p/storytelling-silliness-and-the-soul
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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