Thanks so much for tuning in to Reversing Climate Change.
I'm the host Ross Kenyon 2 sponsors right now, Rainbow and
Philip Lee LLP. If you give me a couple minutes,
I'll tell you about why they are very relevant to your interests.
So listen up. If you follow me on Sub Stack or
LinkedIn, you've probably seen me write for Rainbow recently.
They have a very idiosyncratic approach to how science is
commercialized and how engineering works within carbon
removal. And I really like working with
them. I've learned a lot from the
people there. They're very smart, thoughtful
people and they're aiming to be the most developer centric
registry out there. What's cool about Rainbow is how
seriously they take field engineering experience.
They aren't. They're just to write a bunch of
detached rules about how things should work in the abstract and
then let project developers figure it out, know they are
very serious about field engineering, about how
operations actually work in the real world, and they take a
rigorous yet philosophical approach.
I'll link to those articles in the show notes in the sponsors
section. You should check them out
because it will give you a very good idea of why I think Rainbow
is a very cool company and one that you should consider doing
business with. If you are a project developer
and you're thinking about which registry to use for your next
project, you should absolutely take a meeting with Rainbow and
see if there's a fit there. One thing to keep in mind that
is often very important to the project developers that I've
interviewed as a result of my work with Rainbow doing customer
discovery work, just trying to wrap my head around the
opportunities that they're seeing is how fast their
certification process is. They typically quote around 3
months to issue carbon credits, which is very short.
It goes by lickety split for registries.
So if you're a project developer, you're looking for a
registry to use to certify and issue your carbon credits.
Take a look at Rainbow links in the show notes.
Thanks so much for listening. I'd also love to tell you about
Philip Lee LLP. If you've been working in this
space for really any amount of time, you probably have noticed
that you do need competent counsel to do business here.
The contracts that get signed are, frankly, pretty weird.
You're going to need help from a lawyer with a red pen, I'm sorry
to inform you. Your only choice is basically
who they should be. And if you are deciding who they
should be, you should be considering Philip Lee LLP.
They've won Environmental Finances VCM Law Firm of the
Year for the last gosh, since 2023 essentially.
It hasn't happened yet for 2026. I imagine they're a contender
for it this year as well. They are the largest legal team
dedicated to the financing and development of carbon projects
globally, and they have offices in the US, Europe, and the UK.
One cool new thing I just learned actually is that they
have been listed as a firm in Chambers Global as a global
market leader in the area of climate change.
This listing alliance, Philip Lee LLP, with around 15 to 20 of
the leading law firms practicing in this practice area in the
entire world. So Congrats to Philip Lee LLP.
Thank you to both Rainbow and Philip Lee LLP for your generous
support of the show. You make it possible for me to
dedicate so much time to putting out content that I hope is
useful to our friends and peers and fellow travelers in the
world of carbon removal, climate change, and carbon markets.
Thanks so much. Here's the show.
Hey, thank you so much for listening to Reversing Climate
Change. This is Ross Kenny, and I am a
carbon removal entrepreneur, and I'm so excited to lay out one of
the big interesting fights within carbon removal that if
you don't already know about this, will be a nice little
education and point you in some interesting directions.
It's come up on a number of shows recently and whether in
oblique fashion, if you can infer from some of what's being
discussed or explicitly, and it's most explicit in the show
that I did with Hannah and Barkley from graphite.
Graphite is taking waste biomass, drying it, packaging it
in a polymer and bearing it, and they have very high carbon
efficiency as a result. Carbon efficiency expresses the
rate of success at transforming the feedstock into the carbon
removal, and how much of that original carbon actually makes
it into a removal in a net sense.
So in the case of something like graphite, they have very high
carbon efficiency. They're basically just drying
out this biomass, packaging it up and putting it in a hole in
the ground. Contrast that there's something
like biochar that does burn and release carbon in the process of
making it. So because it's using biomass,
it's taking this carbon out of the fast carbon cycle and some
of it is being re released to the atmosphere during pyrolysis.
And so that's back in the fast carbon cycle where trees will
reabsorb it again over time. And then we'll enter into the
cycling process the biotch has created.
Some portion of that will remain fixed in the slow carbon cycle,
or somewhere in between those two poles was stored for a much
greater duration of time in the soil or the built environment or
wherever it ends up. But it's not.
The 90 ish percentage of carbon efficiency that graphite is
getting could be half of that. And what's interesting about
this is that depending on how you see the problem of climate
change, you will likely have sympathies one way or the other.
I suspect you probably already had feelings in the way that I
described this. Those are good to listen to, and
you should listen to what your moral intuition is telling you
about this characterization of carbon efficiency and how
important it is or is not. If all you care about is getting
the parts per million in the atmosphere down as quickly as
possible, focusing on carbon efficiency makes a lot of sense.
You know that the biomass that is being measured for carbon
efficiency, as much of it as possible, is being stored in
durable fashion. There's not a lot of extra
frills. Maybe there's some Co benefits
that are attached to this. Graphite does detail several Co
benefits that they believe that their approach to carbon removal
offers to communities that host them, but in my opinion, it's
not as robust as something like what biochar offers to
communities. Biochar, if you're not aware, is
the process of cooking biomass without oxygen, that process
called pyrolysis, that leads to highly porous, very high surface
area carbon that durably stores carbon.
The science is still going back and forth on whether biochar is
good for hundreds of years or thousands of years.
I don't actually think it's that important of a question.
And interestingly, it doesn't seem that Frontier does either.
Frontier, the advanced market commitment for carbon removal
doesn't buy biochar not for durability reasons, but because
it's not carbon efficient, which is a really interesting market
signal that we can talk some more about here.
But biochar's ability to have that much surface area and
porosity allows it to do really amazing work.
It plugs into so many things. I mean, the joke with biochar
people, we do a lot of memes of kind of poking up biochar people
a lot. It's all in good fun.
I love and respect what y'all are trying to do.
And I work with a lot of people who are doing pyrolysis for for
various purposes. And it really is crucial work.
But there is a funny sense with pyrolysis where it's all things
to all people, to quote Paul, or it's simultaneously a dessert
topping and a floor Polish and it's got everything in between.
And you can make a toothpaste out of it and it goes in the
built environment that is great for agronomic uses and blah,
blah, blah. It's kind of everything which
becomes a a joke in and of itself.
For instance, one thing I'm seeing a lot of that I think is
is really fascinating is using pyrolysis in wastewater
treatment and for biosolids. So literally, literally you can
pyrolyze and a lot of human waste is filled with nasty
chemicals at this point, very sorry to say.
A lot of the material that makes it into biosolids in general and
wastewater treatment have chemicals that are pretty nasty.
And the process of doing pyrolysis on the biosolids can
obliterate many of these forever chemicals that would otherwise
just permanently be traipsing their way through the
hydrological cycle that would have us be re consuming it in
various ways. And so being able to to to use
pyrolysis in this way is really wonderful.
And it's also amazing to see biochar in different grades be a
good fit for storing in the built environment.
I've seen studies that have shown that biochar in concrete
can make it much harder and longer lasting.
Agricultural uses are one of the places where biochar gets talked
about the most. And while we haven't seen the
the mainstream uptake of biochar yet, very, very smart people are
working on it. And it's a great thing to hear
because it slows down water working its way out of the land,
so it makes land more drought resistant because of its
porosity. And the way that the cations
work, fertilizer stays in the soil longer.
So you don't get things like eutrophication where there's
nutrient runoff that go into the waterways.
And then you have all this nitrogen that creates algae
blooms. And then when the algae
consumes, all of the free nitrogen creates this dead zone
that's deoxygenated and is bad for the environment.
And it's pretty nasty in places like the Chesapeake Bay and
other places. And because the fertilizer stays
there longer, we need to produce fewer synthetics fertilizers.
And if you can inoculate biochar with various types of fertility,
it can kind of do all of these things at the same time.
And, and more power to it. I think it's great.
And this is just me freestyling here.
And there are so many things for biochar that I don't even think
I know right now. The people who are working on
creating products and applications of biochar are some
of the most creative people in the space.
They're very passionate. Sure, we like to ride them a
little bit because they are a quirky bunch, but huge amounts
of respect for what they're trying to do.
And you will notice that the amount of time that I had to
devote just now to even a small fraction of what biochar is
being used for right now is not equivalent to the time that I
gave to graphite and bikers, which is biomass carbon removal
and storage. BICRS, pronounced bikers, is the
category that graphite falls into.
So biochar less carbon efficient, You know it's
emitting some amount of carbon through pyrolysis that is making
it less able to compete on carbon efficiency grounds for
buyers who care a lot about carbon efficiency.
But can't you hear it that there are still so many reasons to be
doing biochar? There are so many problems with
the agricultural system, the food system, toxicity.
There are many other things that biochar can help us with beyond
nearly the climate benefit. So this is where we're going to
zoom back out here and ask the big question.
Do we care only about parts per million in the atmosphere or are
we trying to solve what many people call the Poly crisis?
You can listen to a show that I just did at the time of
publishing. This will be two weeks ago.
I did a show with Eugene Kerbachev from work on climate,
and we talked about the Poly crisis and these embedded crises
around. What's the joke?
This joke only really works in text, but it's an asterisk and
gestures vaguely at everything. Things do not seem to be going
very well right now. The world is feeling very
precarious, unequal. Many of the natural systems that
we've depended upon forever are under extreme amounts of stress.
We're putting chemicals into the environment that are pretty
nasty. There's a return of geopolitics,
as people say, great power conflict is here.
Perhaps Pax Americana is a thing of the past, if it ever was.
And the rules by which we developed our civilization don't
seem to be going serving us very well, which is funny.
I think when people start going to therapy, there's usually a
precipitating cause. So as a kid, you're born into a
family of origin and that also doesn't always go very well.
The various ways that your parents treated you or even just
tried their best and it didn't really give you exactly what you
needed. It's something that I think it's
fair to say that most people, maybe all people, well, let's
just say most people are still processing.
And so some of the ways that you developed as a child to cope
with this difficult circumstance, there comes a
point in life where they no longer are helping you in the
ways that you thought they were. I'll give an example.
I think a lot of people, especially young men, grow up
and video games become a very important part of their lives.
They're very immersive. They're extremely fun.
They only get more fun as time goes on.
For the most part, they just keep getting better and better.
When you're young, you you have more time to goof around and to
play games and it doesn't seem like that big of a deal.
And then for some people, they perhaps find themselves in a
relationship and maybe find themselves even married, having
to work to earn enough of a living to support one's family
and contribute in a meaningful way.
And maybe you used to get 3 hours a day and now you maybe
get half an hour a day, and that's a really different
experience. If you need several hours a day
of video games to regulate your emotional state as you once did,
life will show you that you actually don't have time to do
that and still be the kind of adult you probably want to be.
This isn't true in all cases. I'm sure you could find the
right spouse or right lifestyle that would allow you to pursue
this to your heart's content. But like the more things you
want to do in life, especially if you want to be a parent, you,
you very quickly learn that you only have time for a couple
things and they need to be things that are soul feeding and
important to you. And when they're not, you start
to notice like, wow, that put me in a bad state for the next day.
I do not feel refreshed in the way that I would have hoped.
And now there's even more pressure on me to go about my
life. I imagine if you're listening,
you have had this experience or no People who have, and that's
at that point, they start to realize, wow, the things that
I've been doing for my entire life no longer serve me.
I need help figuring something else out.
I got to change my life. I need to go to therapy.
I need to figure this out. And I think Poly crisis is a
good comparison to that. People who think about these
nested crises in terms of the Poly crisis are also noticing
that the what put us in this position, it's probably not
going to be addressed by the same kinds of thinking that got
us here. People love to quote the Albert
Einstein maxim here. He said we cannot solve our
problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
For a bit spicier of a take, Audra Lords, the master's tools
will never dismantle the master's house.
There's a sense here that we can't just use the same system
as we broadly have now slap some carbon negativity on to it, you
know, slap the top. You have no idea how much carbon
negativity this baby can hold. To go back to that meme, we just
can't do that. In their view, all of these
systems are so entwined that this isn't a technocratic thing
to fix. It's just like, it's not.
It's not a machine that we need to oil and turn a couple screws
on. It's bigger than that.
There's a Dwight Eisenhower quote that comes to mind here,
too. He said if a problem cannot be
solved, enlarge it. I think that's very much part of
the Poly crisis way of thinking here is that we actually need to
be addressing several complexly integrated problems at the same
time. If all these problems are
emerging from some of the same foundational, civilizational
dysfunctions, mistakes, wrong turns, how far upstream do we
need to go in order to figure out what needs to be done to
change it? So those are pretty good cases,
right? I feel like I did both of them
justice, both the Poly crisis folks and the PPM people.
And I'm not trying to come down on one side or the other here.
I've actually gone back and forth on this one a lot.
My former company Nori, which was launched in 2017, the first
or second carbon removal marketplace and registry
depending on how you count it. And we very much took APPM
obsession way of doing things and we wanted to get to
commodified carbon removal. We wanted it to be fungible
against itself. We wanted a ton to be a ton.
We said a ton is a ton is a ton. Many times in those early days
it was more of an aspiration or desire than a true fact of
reality. Because of course a ton is not a
ton. But the goal was to find out how
we can create enough supply here and simplify across the
dimensions upon which these tons were different from one another,
and just focus on the main characteristics that could make
them functionally equivalent, which could be something like
the years of carbon stored. Maybe that was the denominator
that we needed to just focus on and let everything else play
against one another. And then the hope was that once
you had this sort of fungible commodity market trading system,
you could do a lot of cool things with it.
It's how price discovery works. You have a lot of money coming
into this trying to figure out how to trade it, how to make
money on IT. People would probably build
derivatives on top of this. That would bring more financial
play into the space and more actors and more interest and
this would create hopefully a virtuous cycle.
And by the way, this is still a dream that's very latent.
There are several groups in carbon removal either on the
marketplace side or the registry side that have senior staff that
have the right background to operationalize this approach as
soon as it is is ready for it, like as soon as the market is
mature enough for commodities and derivatives for carbon
removal. There are players in the space
that are absolutely going to jump on this and are already
thinking about it, and we're just waiting for the demand to
come rushing in and for decisions to be made about how
to create fungibility across different types of credits.
Assuming that carbon removal, you know, doesn't face such a
bad time in the next couple years that it goes into
cockroach mode, then I think we're going to see this at some
point. So it's possible that some
version of this does come to exist, and I think that will
likely result in a lot more carbon removal being transacted,
show a much more obvious source of demand and price discovery
that will help people make better financial plans.
And when things are easier to plan, it's much easier for
conservative money to enter the space and therefore carbon
removal starts to grow. And that's a really good thing.
Again, though, listen to your heart while I'm telling you
these things. Are you hearing me talk about
the commodification of carbon removal and it is it making you
feel yucky inside? Because if so, then you probably
have some of this Poly crisis way of thinking in you.
Because the goal is not to simplify this beautiful diverse
world into a couple small characteristics.
And then have financial traders who frankly are overpaid and
don't need to have as prominent a space in our society as they
currently do making all the money, while the people who are
actually removing the carbon are basically just watching from the
sidelines as price takers. In a commodity market which
doesn't really serve agricultural producers very
well, why should it serve biochar producers any better?
So whatever. That's sort of a pecuniary,
selfish maybe case for why you might not like it, But also some
parts of it are deeper than that.
They're ideological. Maybe you don't like it because
it's only solving part of the problem, and it's not even
solving it in a particularly thoughtful way.
It's not solving it by acknowledging how complexly
nested all of these problems are.
It's doing it by creating a 2 dimensional world where they've
only pulled out the durability of the carbon removal.
And it's just trading carbon removal durability without
noticing that. OK, even if we got rid of PPM,
the biosphere is undergoing immense stress right now.
Biodiversity loss and toxicity and the livelihoods that depend
upon them are creating political problems, and we can't just look
to this one number to rule them all kind of thing to consider
ourselves successful at reversing climate change.
You can feel that way even while noting that a commodity market
for carbon removal might be the best way to remove the amount of
carbon necessary from the atmosphere to actually bring us
back to a stable and livable climate, both of those things at
the same time. I actually think this is a very
productive friction to have within carbon removal.
I'm not on any particular side of this one.
I'm glad that we have support for each approach going in here,
and it's going to appeal to different funders and buyers and
investors. And that's a good thing, because
I think we need the Poly crisis people here to remind the
commodification people that they're a little abstractions on
the computer that they're trading are cool and all, but
also not to forget how important the rest of this work is and to
recognize how small of a piece of the climate puzzle they're
actually addressing when they're only looking at parts per
million in the atmosphere. And I think it's very useful to
have financial people involved in carbon removal who are
thinking about commodification because they are there to poke
at polycrisis people because sometimes polycrisis people can
be sloppy and holistic in ways that and trying to solve every
problem, you may end up solving no problem at all because it's
really hard to do one thing well.
It's hard for me to imagine that one could do all of these things
at the exact same time and make it all work and hang together in
a way that is financially viable and also communicable to the
average person, which is no small feat.
And the comms part of this is super hard.
Some of the most common pieces of advice that I give to
startups, they're all story related.
And look, I, I told you a complex story here today.
There's two antagonists and I'm trying to create some sort of
like dialectical synthesis between them of, OK, they can
merge in this way, They provide productive tension in this way.
And that's really cool. And that's like a somewhat
complex story. So if you're listening to this
and you like it, maybe you like engaging with ideas to this
extent, but a lot of people don't.
Complex stories and climate are really challenging.
Have you ever tried to sell someone a product that was a
little bit hard to understand? Many people will want you to
stop talking as soon as possible so they can get back to their
brain not hurting. And not only that, but also some
of these ideas are inherently threatening to the ego.
If you go back and listen to the Eugene Kerbischev show, he talks
about how he actually really didn't want what he was reading
about the Poly crisis to be true.
He was reading Daniel Schmuckenberger or listening to
his podcast or whatever. These ideas were freaking him
out and he did not want the world to be in as bad of shape
as it was presented to him and even him.
Eugene strikes me as a compassionate, but as he says,
noble kind of person who wants good things to happen for the
planet, for the people, for all sentience that exists.
He just strikes me as someone who is probably a well wisher of
them. And even still, it was hard for
his heart to be open enough to take in that.
The crisis, as we're staring into it, is this big and this
difficult and is not merely one about pulling greenhouse gases
out of the atmosphere. That's a really big part of it,
a very important part of it. But if that's all you're able to
see, then it's only a fraction of the work that he's doing.
And already that's such, oh man, it's such an enormous task.
Just that one thing alone is already so huge and the life's
work of of many, many people to, to do properly.
What I would hope for when you listening is perhaps a better
way of understanding the group that you don't feel as much
sympathy for. If you're a Poly crisis person,
maybe you can feel a little bit of sympathy and respect for the
people who are so obsessed with parts per million that they
actually have a chance of, I think, bringing that number down
by their focus. And if you are someone who is
very obsessed with PPM, I hope this podcast can nudge you in
the direction of, hey, like that's a big part of this.
But also you found the one true number that should be maximized,
but you actually didn't. And you also need to respect
that. There's a lot of complexity
outside of this one number. And the people who are are doing
this, who are poking at you, maybe saying that these tools
and this approach are not going to solve all of the problems
that face humanity at this moment.
I think it's also worth listening to.
And if you have resistance to these ideas in your heart, I
would try to make sure that you're not opposed to them for
egoic reasons. Make sure that you are opposed
to them because you think they are incorrect.
And why are they incorrect? And are there any parts of what
they're saying that they aren't incorrect about that It was
actually a really good point that you should take back to
your own way of thinking. That can make it better,
stronger, or just notice the limits to your ideas such that
you can become a wiser person. I think the answer to all those
things should be yes, and I can conclude it there if you're
listening. You work in bikers or biochar.
I hope that you think I was fair to your work.
I have a lot of respect for everyone who's doing this, and I
really don't take a side here. I'm glad that everyone is
bringing their own unique approach to this, and they're
appealing to different kinds of people too.
The goal is not permanent dominance of one way of thinking
over the other. Your way of thinking can change
not just because you learn things immature, but because the
world has changed around you. Sometimes it's happened to me.
I thought I believed one thing and I didn't even change my
mind. But the world has changed so
much around me that the application of those ideas
radically changed the values, application of those, the values
maybe didn't change, but the application of those ideas
change. I think being able to listen to
that and to be fluid enough to adapt when the circumstances
change is really important. And doing work like this where
you're able to sketch out where the disagreements are and also
to pay attention to your intuition and what your gut is
saying about when you about ideas.
Because I think that's a really important thing to listen to you
as well, that people who come from a more rational and
quantitative background sometimes lose sight of.
And I think it's wise not to. Thanks for listening.
Godspeed to everyone doing carbon removal in the most or
the least carbon efficient ways possible.
Thanks for doing all that you do, Bye for now.