Podcast
Reversing Climate Change
Hosted by Carbon Removal Strategies LLC · EN
Reversing Climate Change is a podcast that bridges science, technology, and policy with the richness of the humanities. From the forefront of carbon removal and climatetech to explorations of literature, history, philosophy, theology, and geopolitics, we dive deep into the people, ideas, and innovations shaping a better future for the planet and its inhabitants.
If you love the show, please become a paid subscriber on Spotify.
11episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
402: Reform vs. Revolution from Microsoft to the Salvage Yard—w/ Drew Wilkinson, Climate Leadership Collective
1w ago01:01:37Tap to summarizeWhat 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 the Melania documentary?Or do you get a job at a salvage yard, start building your own shipping container house, and shift your energy from prevention to adaptation?My friend Drew Wilkinson chose the second thing. Drew grew up in Phoenix, got into punk rock at 13, never stopped playing in bands, and somehow that trajectory carried him from DIY shows in Arizona to corporate sustainability at Microsoft, where he helped organize employees into one of the most effective internal climate movements a Fortune 500 has ever seen. His work there helped pressure Microsoft into its 2020 sustainability commitments. He knows what it feels like to make a real difference inside the belly of the beast.But this episode isn't really about that success. It's about what comes after. Drew left Microsoft three years ago and started consulting independently through the Climate Leadership Collective, and the financial instability of that choice has been brutal. He's honest about it in a way that most people in this space aren't: he doesn't know where his next paycheck is coming from, some days he's crippled on the couch with grief and anger, and he knows that the spicy contrarian stuff he posts on LinkedIn (AKA the stuff that makes him uniquely valuable) also sabotages his ability to get hired by the companies he's criticizing.We got into reform versus revolution, whether the system can be sufficiently reformed or needs to be tossed out entirely, the Austrian Catholic farmer who refused to swear the oath to Hitler (A Hidden Life, go watch it!), and whether Anthropic refusing to work with the Department of Defense matters when Sam Altman is waiting in line behind them. Drew brought up the GreenBiz conference panel that was literally three hours on "how to do sustainability without saying sustainability." I brought up the Amazon CSO posting about minor improvements to delivery van emissions the same week they gave the Melania documentary a platform. We both felt sick about it.But we escaped that grim discourse when Drew started talking about his shift from prevention to adaptation. He's building a shipping container house on five acres in the forest outside Seattle, sourcing materials from the architectural salvage yard where he now works a couple days a week. Yesterday he moved several thousand pounds of doors. He came home covered in dirt. And for the first time in a long time, he could touch the problem and touch the solution. Three thousand pounds of doors didn't go to a landfill. That felt better than any spreadsheet ever did, and even though he may not have predicted this is where he'd be... isn't that life? Can we not be amazed and grateful for every surprise?This Episode's SponsorsEcoEngineers: a carbon dioxide removal and carbon market consultancyPhilip Lee LLP: legal resources for carbon removal buyers and suppliersListen to the RCC episode with Ryan Covington from Philip Lee LLP about project financeListen to the RCC episode with Lev Gantly about the history and current status of CORSIAResourcesBecome a paid subscriber of Reversing Climate ChangeSubscribe to the Reversing Climate Change SubstackBecome a paid subscriber of Reversing Climate ChangeSubscribe to the Reversing Climate Change SubstackClimate Leadership CollectiveEarthwise Architectural Salvage
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401: Emotional startup lessons from Nori cofounders—w/ Alexsandra Guerra of Calming Chaos
2w ago01:00:13Tap to summarizeWhat 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 Alexsandra Guerra, "Alé", one of my former cofounders at Nori. Her voice used to be the intro to this very podcast. She's now a coach for purpose-driven founders through her business Calming Chaos, and we're doing something I've wanted to do for a while: an honest, no-bs conversation about what went wrong between us, what we've learned since, and why the emotional stuff that I used to dismiss is actually what's holding back so much innovation in climate and beyond.Alé shared her story in a way I wasn't expecting. The perfectionism, the imposter syndrome, the hero complex that made her volunteer for work she couldn't sustain, the sensitivity to feedback that followed, the burnout that was inevitable. She traced all of it back to childhood—a father who didn't show up, a mother who told her to stop crying, and a lifetime of performing for love that was supposed to just be there. And then she connected it to how she showed up at Nori, and I have to admit: it explained a lot of things I didn't understand at the time.I did my version too. The compulsive reading that everyone compliments but that's actually a way of never having a quiet moment. The diminishing returns of knowledge versus the increasing returns of wisdom. The times I should have listened to my gut and didn't because I couldn't articulate it analytically.We got into patriarchy, the spiritual emptiness of power-seeking, why my most common piece of advice to founders is to go to therapy, and why Alé believes entrepreneurship is fundamentally a spiritual process. I didn't want that to be true when we were running Nori together. I'm pretty sure she was right the whole time. It just took me awhile to open up to it. This Episode's SponsorsEcoEngineers: a carbon dioxide removal and carbon market consultancyPhilip Lee LLP: legal resources for carbon removal buyers and suppliersListen to the RCC episode with Ryan Covington from Philip Lee LLP about project financeListen to the RCC episode with Lev Gantly about the history and current status of CORSIAResourcesBecome a paid subscriber of Reversing Climate ChangeSubscribe to the Reversing Climate Change SubstackBecome a paid subscriber of Reversing Climate ChangeSubscribe to the Reversing Climate Change SubstackCalming Chaos: Ale's coaching practiceGabor Maté
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400: What kind of leader does my CDR company need me to be?—w/ Julia Reichelstein, Vaulted Deep
3w ago00:54:03Tap to summarizeWhat 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 lot of tons.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 SponsorsEcoEngineers: a carbon dioxide removal and carbon market consultancyPhilip Lee LLP: legal resources for carbon removal buyers and suppliersListen to the RCC episode with Ryan Covington from Philip Lee LLP about project financeListen to the RCC episode with Lev Gantly about the history and current status of CORSIAResourcesBecome a paid subscriber of Reversing Climate ChangeSubscribe to the Reversing Climate Change SubstackVaulted Deep
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399: How to Pitch Terraset (and other carbon removal buyers)—w/ Taylor Insley, Terraset
4w ago01:07:07Tap to summarizeWhat 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 SponsorsEcoEngineers: a carbon dioxide removal and carbon market consultancyPhilip Lee LLP: legal resources for carbon removal buyers and suppliersListen to the RCC episode with Ryan Covington from Philip Lee LLP about project financeListen to the RCC episode with Lev Gantly about the history and current status of CORSIAResourcesBecome a paid subscriber of Reversing Climate ChangeSubscribe to the Reversing Climate Change SubstackTerrasetCarbon UnboundAirMinersThe opening scene from The Godfather (TW: SA)Chinese Imperial ExamLove on the Spectrum
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398: Scientists vs. Engineers, & the Commercial Pressure on Carbon Dioxide Removal—w/ Erica Dorr & Samara Vantil, Rainbow
May 700:55:51Tap to summarizeI 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. These are the questions that everyone in carbon markets faces and almost no one talks about publicly.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 SponsorsEcoEngineers: a carbon dioxide removal and carbon market consultancyPhilip Lee LLP: legal resources for carbon removal buyers and suppliersListen to the RCC episode with Ryan Covington from Philip Lee LLP about project financeListen to the RCC episode with Lev Gantly about the history and current status of CORSIAResourcesBecome a paid subscriber of Reversing Climate ChangeSubscribe to the Reversing Climate Change SubstackRainbow"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"327: Carbon Removal & the Philosophy of Science: Kuhn's Paradigms & Feyerabend's Anarchism—w/ Anu Khan & Holly Jean Buck""Learnings from the Field: Reducing MRV Costs by 97% Through Ops Consistency" by Charm's Max Levine & Tim Thomson"The Uncomfortable Truth About Carbon Removal Quality" (this is where the line, "the optimal number of traffic deaths is nonzero" comes from.
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397: Should Carbon Dioxide Removal Rejoin the Mainstream Carbon Market?—w/ Martin Freimüller of Octavia Carbon
Apr 3000:52:11Tap to summarizeMartin 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 tons 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 SponsorPhilip Lee LLP: legal resources for carbon removal buyers and suppliersListen to the RCC episode with Ryan Covington from Philip Lee LLP about project financeListen to the RCC episode with Lev Gantly about the history and current status of CORSIAResourcesBecome a paid subscriber of Reversing Climate ChangeSubscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack391: How Carbon Removal Loses: The End of "Pre-Compliance"Octavia CarbonOxford Offsetting Principles
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396: Why We All Keep Going to Carbon Unbound—w/ Oli Katz, Unbound Summits
Apr 2300:59:47Tap to summarizeEvery 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 SponsorPhilip Lee LLP: legal resources for carbon removal buyers and suppliersListen to the RCC episode with Ryan Covington from Philip Lee LLP about project financeListen to the RCC episode with Lev Gantly about the history and current status of CORSIAResourcesBecome a paid subscriber of Reversing Climate ChangeSubscribe to the Reversing Climate Change SubstackCarbon UnboundConnect with Oli on LinkedInListeners can get themselves 10% off of Carbon Unbound East Coast in New York City on May 19th-20th by using the discount count: "ReversingClimateChange".
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Meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same: "If—" by Rudyard Kipling
Apr 2000:07:44Tap to summarizeSometimes 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.ResourcesBecome a paid subscriber of Reversing Climate ChangeSubscribe to the Reversing Climate Change SubstackStructure Climate"If—" by Rudyard KiplingThe Wikipedia article about the poem393: Emily's Language Chat: Storytelling, Silliness, & Surviving the Climate Space—w/ Emily Swaddle, The Carbon Removal ShowVexed 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 DeathThe universal cannibalism of the sea vs. one insular Tahiti—My favorite chapter of Moby-Dick
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395: Bright Spots in US Federal Policy? Carbon removal as essential American infrastructure—w/ Eli Cain, Carbon Removal Alliance
Apr 1400:35:57Tap to summarizeUS 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:$125 million in FY26 appropriationsBipartisan congressional support that tripled year over yearFY26 appropriations: $80 million for DOE R&D and $45 million for the CDR purchase pilot prizeCRA's fly-in day: from 5 Republican congressional meetings last year to 17 this yeara messaging strategy built around industrial integration that is opening doors across the aisle.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 AllianceThis Episode's SponsorPhilip Lee LLP: legal resources for carbon removal buyers and suppliersListen to the RCC episode with Ryan Covington from Philip Lee LLP about project financeListen to the RCC episode with Lev Gantly about the history and current status of CORSIAResourcesBecome a paid subscriber of Reversing Climate ChangeSubscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack391: How Carbon Removal Loses: The End of "Pre-Compliance"Carbon Removal AllianceCarbon180EMRTAI program for mineralization
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394: Will China Stand Up for Climate Policy & Carbon Dioxide Removal?—w/ Sarah Godek
Apr 900:53:12Tap to summarizeIf 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 SponsorsPhilip Lee LLP: legal resources for carbon removal buyers and suppliersListen to the RCC episode with Ryan Covington from Philip Lee LLP about project financeListen to the RCC episode with Lev Gantly about the history and current status of CORSIARainbow: 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.comResourcesBecome a paid subscriber of Reversing Climate ChangeSubscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack338: Carbon Security & the Geopolitics of Carbon Removal—w/ Sarah Godek"Carbon security and the geopolitics of carbon removal" by Sarah Godek & Grant Faber391: How Carbon Removal Loses: The End of "Pre-Compliance"Tencent's CarbonX ProgramChina's 15th Five-Year Plan and carbon—"Carbon Peaking and Carbon Neutrality China's Plans and Solutions"
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