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
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 The US has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement and UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).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 environment? And what happens to CORSIA—The Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation from within the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO)—when a key moment of judgment arrives this June?
Lev Gantly is a partner at Philip Lee LLP, a law firm specializing in carbon markets and climate law, and one of Reversing Climate Change's sponsors. He advises a broad range of clients on emissions reduction and carbon dioxide removal projects, both through natural solutions like biochar and engineered technologies.
His deep understanding of international carbon markets, Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, and the evolving regulatory landscape makes him a critical voice on where climate policy is actually heading—and where it can actually survive political pressure.
Listen in to hear more about how CORSIA works and why it matters (or doesn't matter so much?) for carbon removal. You'll also learn about the specific moment this June when the EU must decide whether to keep the scheme or revert to its original plan to impose its own emissions trading system on international aviation.
Plus, where Lev is actually seeing durable policy support for carbon removal right now—and what it takes to make climate policy sticky enough to outlast a change in government.
This Episode's Sponsors
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
European Union Emissions Trading System
"How Carbon Removal Loses: The End of "Pre-Compliance""
Resources
This episode's page on the web: https://www.rosskenyon.com/p/corsia-carbon-removal-and-the-geopolitics
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 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, I walk through why I no longer think that story holds. Right-wing populism is surging across every country the pre-compliance story depends on. Energy prices are climbing. Growth is stalling. And voters facing rising costs and security threats don't prioritize abstract, probabilistic, future-oriented problems no matter how catastrophic those problems actually are.
This isn't a doom episode. It's a planning episode. If you work on anything strategic in carbon removal or climate tech, you need a clear-eyed view of what the world is actually doing—and a plan for what your company looks like if the world doesn't regress to the mean.
"If you want to make an omelette, you've got to break a few eggs."
- Joseph Stalin
"Where's the omelette?"
- George Orwell
This Episode's Sponsors
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 and the Geopolitics of Carbon Removal—w/ Sarah Godek
364: Lowering the Onion into Hell: Strategic Realism vs. Christian Pacifism
Gilets Jaunes (yellow jackets)
Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland) party
Resources
This episode's page on the web: https://www.rosskenyon.com/p/how-carbon-removal-loses
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
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, an ocean alkalinity enhancement company working to remove carbon by adding carefully-sourced alkaline materials to the ocean.
Listen in to hear about the enormous logistical and scientific puzzle of finding the right alkalinity sources, getting them to the right ocean sites without breaking the LCA, and the lessons learned from Planetary's Cornwall and Tufts Cove projects. It's a show about community engagement, the surprising value of relationships in carbon removal sales, humor, and how Omar's background as a mental health nurse shaped his approach to partnership building.
This Episode's Sponsors
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
"Planetary Technologies Cancels Its mCDR Project In Cornwall" in Carbon Herald
Resources
This episode's page on the web: https://www.rosskenyon.com/p/the-endless-pursuit-of-alkalinity
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 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 to more regenerative practices.
Listen in to hear more about how to do business in an extremely creative way that blends customer insights and clever design to reduce friction, correct misaligned incentives, and the bypass the pathologies of the old way of doing things.
This Episode's Sponsors
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
Resources
This episode's page on the web: https://www.rosskenyon.com/p/how-to-grow-regen-ag-without-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
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 Residual and is on the show to discuss the lessons he learned from one year as the carbon partner of numerous projects he has under development, as well as his process of raising funds from family offices.
This Episode's Sponsors
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
Resources
This episode's page on the web: https://www.rosskenyon.com/p/the-quest-to-engineer-the-best-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 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 could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?
Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, soon out of their mothers' laps,
And here you are the mothers' laps.
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.
I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
—From Leaves of Grass (David McKay, Publisher, 1891) by Walt Whitman.
Resources
Subscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack
Song of Myself, 6 [A child said, What is the grass?] from Leaves of Grass
Resources
This episode's page on the web: https://www.rosskenyon.com/p/the-beautiful-uncut-hair-of-graves
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
Are we trying to get parts per million of greenhouse gases down as quickly as possible? Or are also trying to solve the nested problems of fertility, toxicity, and resilience as well as the systems that got us here in the first place?
In this episode, I contrast high carbon-efficiency biomass burial approaches (Biomass Carbon Removal and Storage/BiCRS) with biochar and other methods that sacrifice some carbon efficiency but generate wide-ranging cobenefits.
We explore commodification, fungibility, and the dream of a “tonne is a tonne” carbon market—alongside the discomfort some feel when complex ecological realities get flattened into a single tradeable metric. Is that clarity necessary for scale, or does it repeat the same abstractions that helped create the crisis?
Ultimately, this isn’t a fight between good and bad actors. It’s a productive friction between two worldviews: the PPM-obsessed technocrats and the polycrisis systems thinkers each have their own blindspots and their own superpowers. My hope is not to settle the debate, but to help you notice where your intuitions land—and why.
" we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we use when we created them."
- Albert Einstein
" The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."
- Audre Lorde
" If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
This Episode's Sponsors
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
"384: Graphyte's Strategy is a Masterpiece of Simplicity—w/ Barclay Rogers & Hannah Murnen"
Resources
This episode's page on the web: https://www.rosskenyon.com/p/carbon-efficiency-vs-the-polycrisis
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 suicide in literature, specifically Judas Iscariot from the Gospel and Javert from Les Misérables.
Why do this work? You could be doing so many different things. What calls you to it, and what (or who?!) is doing the calling?
In today's monologue show, host Ross Kenyon reflects upon the nature of vocation, aesthetics, and what it means to labor at something as hard as carbon dioxide removal, climate tech, and so many things adjacent.
After a first attempt years ago at J. R. R. Tolkien's short story, "Leaf by Niggle," Ross listened to a podcast about it that had been sitting on his phone for years. After revisiting the short story, he was again reminded that art often finds you when the time is ripe.
"Leaf by Niggle" is a deceptively deep story, which is unsurprising given how strongly Tolkien disliked allegory, and how mythologically dense Lord of the Rings is. In fact, Lord of the Rings has so much symbolic power that many parts of it defy an easy mapping to theology or mythology.
This show dives into some of what Ross has learned now that he's in the middle of my career about what kinds of work to do, how to accept unexpected work with grace, and why creativity might be so much weirder than we usually imagine.
This Episode's Sponsors
Listen to the RCC episode with Ryan Covington from Philip Lee LLP
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
"Leaf by Niggle" by J. R. R. Tolkien
"222: Leaf by Niggle by Tolkien" from the podcast Classical Things You Should Know
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
Resources
This episode's page on the web: https://www.rosskenyon.com/p/why-do-we-labor-in-carbon-removal
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
Are we going to figure out how to get along on a highly stressed planet? Or are we unable to break the patterns that have gotten us here in the first place? Are we too hard-nosed or too woo? A secret third thing?!
Today's show features Eugene Kirpichov, founder of Work on Climate, a very popular climate community built to help people transition into climate work. But the longer Eugene stared at the nested set of problems humanity is facing, it no longer seemed like a simple issue of employment and greenhouse gases. In fact, it's kind of everything.
Daniel Schmachtenberger's work on risk and game theory led Eugene to regenerative economics and an attempt to create a world where economic activity gives more than it takes, and where we aren't constantly lurching from one crisis to the next.
This Episode's Sponsors
Listen to the RCC episode with Ryan Covington from Philip Lee LLP
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
Eugene's LinkedIn post which inspired the show
Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows
"Peter Thiel and the Antichrist" by Ross Douthat at The New York Times
Resources
This episode's page on the web: https://www.rosskenyon.com/p/is-regenerative-economics-inevitable
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
So many people think they need to dream up wild new tech to be successful at carbon removal. But one of CDR's most ascendent companies is relentlessly simple. They're so linear that I scrambled to make sure I wasn't missing something... In fact, if you've ever received coaching from me about simplicity, this is where I'm sending you from now on.
I recently completed Noah Deich and Dr. Jen Wilcox's UPenn continuing education course, CDR Executive Education Program/Purchasing Carbon Removal Credits. It was wonderful and I highly recommend it.
It did require a few homework assignments and a group project based upon a project developer. I chose Graphyte and their work putting waste biomass into bricks, wrapping them in polymer, and burying them underground. This is part of the class of projects called BiCRS (pronounced "bikers"), or Biomass Carbon Removal and Storage.
Today's show has Dr. Hannah Murnen, Graphyte's CTO, and Barclay Rogers, Graphyte's Co-Founder and CEO, on to correct my homework from the course. I've never had a show quite like this.
My sincere respect to each of them for digging into this with me and sharing their numbers. Not everyone in CDR is willing or able to do that, and I'm so happy we got to do that together.
This show also inspired me to make an episode about linearity vs. holistic thinking in CDR. If one focuses on carbon efficiency, Graphyte makes so much sense. But are we optimizing only for solving climate change, or is this a polycrisis that requires a much deeper and interconnected approach? What you choose may say just as much about your values and how you perceive the problem. Stay tuned...
This Episode's Sponsor
Listen to the RCC episode with Ryan Covington from Philip Lee LLP
Resources
Subscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack
"381: Carbon Removal's False Peak as Mapped by Noah Deich"
S2E25: The DAC-up plan for climate change—w/ Dr. Jen Wilcox of Worcester Polytechnic Institute"
Graphyte's page on its registry, Isometric
The 2024 Project Design Document (PDD) for Graphyte's Loblolly project
UPenn's Purchasing Carbon Removal Credits course
CDR Executive Education Program
Carbon efficiency is how much of the carbon remains after the source material has been converted into a form of carbon removal, e.g. Graphyte loses very little carbon back to the atmosphere between waste biomass, processing, and burial. Biochar has a lower carbon efficiency because more carbon is released during pyrolysis. It isn't the only factor that matters, but has major repercussions for calculating net removals and which project types are suitable for which goals.
I had to dig to figure out where I got the Nintendo insight from, but it originates from Richard Rumelt's Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters.
Resources
This episode's page on the web: https://www.rosskenyon.com/p/is-this-the-simplest-company-in-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
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