Hey, thanks for listening. This is Ross Kenyon.
I'm the host of Reversing Climate Change, the podcast you
are listening to right at this very moment.
Before we get into the bulk of today's show, I'd love to tell
you about our sponsors, Absolute Climate and Philip Lee LLP.
I've made great radio with both of them.
They should be familiar to you if you listen to this show, but
I want to tell you about why you should learn a little bit more.
The first sponsor is Absolute Climate.
I did a show with their founder Peter Miner few months back and
a lot of people love that show. I was asking a question of can
registries design their own methodologies for carbon markets
without it being a conflict of interest?
An absolute climate's thesis is no, they shouldn't be in the
business of doing that. We actually need to disintegrate
functionality within carbon markets even further.
They are literally the only independent standards body for
carbon removal that exists. Their name is very well chosen.
I think they are some of the most aggressively idealistic
people within carbon removal. It's come up on reversing
climate change so many times about how and why there's
tension between commercial teams and science teams within carbon
markets. There's some fundamental tension
between the rules of running a business, or I should say the
rules of running a profitable business is maybe a better way
to put that and climate impact. And I think Absolute is one of
those companies that, at least from my experience of what I
know of them over there, I think they're going to be some of the
staunchest holdouts just trying to make sure that there can be a
justified true belief that a ton purchase is a ton truly removed.
They're betting big on not compromising.
It's a bold strategy. I respect the absolute hell out
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I think the law is such a fascinating part of our shared
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It's badly understood by most people.
Just structuring deals within carbon removal is hard.
I'm talking grown up deals here, like when you're trying to put
together an enormous package, complicated structuring, a lot
of money, changing hands, The stakes are high.
You really do need a good lawyer.
I'm sorry to tell you that if you are a startup out there in
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money to lawyers. There's just no way around it.
Your choice is basically do you get a bad lawyer or a good
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Thanks so much for what you do. And now here is the show.
Hello, this is Ross Penyon. I'm the host of the Reversing
Climate Change podcast. I just returned from New York
Climate Week. It was a lovely time.
It was genuinely joyful to see so many people who care so much
about climate and carbon removal that they've chosen to do very
nearly impossible things. It's a bizarre space to work in,
especially as a commercial entity.
Why those same people don't go try to do some agentic B to B
sass play instead, I don't know. We're all called to the work of
our lives, I suppose, and while I found that experience to be a
positive, connecting, and fulfilling experience, I'm
harboring more doubt about the future of humanity than I have
previously. Many of the conversations I've
been having, and it's possible the call is coming from inside
the house and I'm having these conversations because I'm
initiating them. There's a fair amount of that in
the mix, but a lot of the conversations tend to be
gravitating away from carbon removal itself and deeper into
concerns about adaptation and resilience, about global
cooling, about which kinds of geoengineering climate
interventions are we going to make or fail to make, and what
that means for us. The reason why we're hearing
more conversations about those things, at least as far as I can
see, is that we've all taken for granted that overshoot is built
in at this point. We're definitely not getting to
1.5. How far up we go, it's unclear.
We can still pull it back, We can still make choices.
But it's concerning. My particular intellectual
advice is that I tend to look for rationality when other
people merely see venality, cruelty, stupidity, wickedness.
And while it's tempting to go to those places and assume for the
worst, and it may even satisfy Occam's razor to assume for some
of those more devilish aspects of the human spirit.
And I've had enough economics training where I am looking for
rationality, people making decisions under constraints,
people trying to maximize output within systems.
And one way to interpret the clean energy rollback that's
happening in the US right now at the federal policy level is that
these people don't believe in climate change.
They're not concerned by it. They think the US might be a
global winner and climate change is is real.
They just don't care. They want to, you know, they're
riding the bomb at the end of Doctor Strangelove.
Like, those are all explanations that I've heard people bandy.
But I think one of the explanations that treats people
as rational agents, and thus maybe more explanatory, is that
of the ducidity trap, which people poke at it.
I did a show with Sarah Godek on geopolitics that we talked about
Kevin Allison, the former PM of Australia's retort book, that
tried to correct some of the ducidity trap logic here.
The argument goes that when there's a rising power, the
established dominant power has a narrow window to cut this rival
ascending power back down to size.
And so that whenever there is a potential upstart coming up,
there's a natural tendency, the argument goes, for the dominant
power to act while they still can't.
And I think what the clean energy rollback signifies is
that the US is showing up its domestic energy production
because it's looking to a future of conflict, of war.
And perhaps there will be war with China or others in the next
few years. And the goal is to be resilient
in the face of that. If that is the case, I think
hope for climate progress during a time of great power conflict
is extremely limited. You know, when there's rivalry,
there may be jockeying for future technological leadership
that might drive climate commitment and progress, but
we're not seeing that. Moreover, if we get to the point
where there is open conflict, emissions will be generated and
money in the famous guns and butter equation, it's going
towards gun and not the butter of climate change, adaptation,
mitigation, anything. And when I am in climate spaces,
there is at least a sense that we're here doing this work
because we're called to do it. Win, lose, or draw, the work
needs to be done, and we are in a particular position to do it.
And independently of the outcome, the work is worth
doing. I think that's a spiritual
understanding of vocation of Labor.
It's good to keep that in mind, but I'd be lying if I said I
wasn't staring into the abyss a fair amount of the time.
I used to feel so optimistic about the future.
I would look towards the rate of technological advance and think
we were headed towards more bounty, more freedom, more
happiness. And often when I look to the
future now feels like we may not have as much privacy.
In the future, AI will know everything about us and be able
to make predictions about us that we'll feel intrusive and
probably just will be intrusive. I've mentioned this on a recent
show I'm watching the war in Ukraine and this is just the
beginning of how AI and drones will be used in warfare.
In fact, I saw Zielinski speak at the UN recently and and say
as much that this is basically the first war were weapons that
were used in this way. And we haven't really seen much
AI powered worker yet as far as I know.
But I think this conflict is very much the historical moment
that after the next war, and there probably will be a next
war, we'll look back on and say, wow, that was just we didn't
even know how drones were going to be used yet.
And that was such a quaint usage of them.
And in the future, there will be autonomous drone swarms that
will be making decisions about who lives and who dies.
And if you're an optimist, you might think AI will have much
better discretion than an individual soldier.
And there's a part of that that's sensible.
I understand why people say that, but do you trust it?
I don't. Especially.
Are we living in a golden age? Is everything about to get so
much better? I don't expect it to.
I've been focusing more on adaptation and resilience, and
I'll explain why in a future episode.
And even though that's important, I think basically
every broad family of climate action is important.
Focusing on adaptation means making peace with the fact that
we're not going to get there, and we need to be making
investments now to make sure people are as comfortable,
happy, alive as possible in a future where warming is baked
in. And that's really weird for me.
Carbon removal has an inherent optimism to it.
So does mitigation. There's a sense that there's a
problem and we can solve it either now or in the future, but
we can do it before it gets really quite bad.
Adaptation is saying that we're probably not going to do that,
or at least there's going to be a period of time where it's
going to be bad before we pull it back.
And depending on who you ask, inside of the broad global
cooling movement of those focusing on ice shelf
stabilization or marine cloud brightening, solar radiation
management, the whole fleet of potential technologies that may
or may not be deployed, There's either a sense that this will
buy us more time for mitigation and carbon removal to take
place, or we're just heading into a future of overshoot and
we're not going to pull back, or we're not going to be able to
pull back. We're going into a future of
global conflict, which may require what now seems like
extreme climate interventions to prevent catastrophe.
In fact, there's even a potential for some of these
technologies to be weapons of war.
There's a future where sulfur dioxide or other appropriate
gases for solar radiation management are deployed in order
to kill the South Asian monsoon system and disrupt that.
Weather modification will potentially be seen not as
something that helps us keep people alive when we can't focus
on more costly climate interventions.
It might actually be a way to punish those who oppose the
world order of the wielder of that technology.
Carbon removal right now doesn't have the possibility to be a
weapon of war. I mean, there is a lot of talk
of dual use and companies are looking to how did they go to
market in an environment for which federal policy is absent
with few exceptions like 45 Q for direct air capture, carbon
capture technology. As far as I know, I can't think
of any way that carbon removal technology can be used
offensively, but that's really not the case elsewhere in
climate action. I hope I'm wrong, by the way.
I'm not always feeling this way. I describe my relationship to
climate doom or climate triumphalism as a sine wave, and
sometimes I'm in the through and sometimes I'm not.
And right now, all of those things together are putting me
in the through. And I'm thinking about what
predictions do I make for business?
What predictions do I make for my family, given that that may
be the future state of affairs? What does one do if you have
those feelings? I hope I'm wrong, but if I'm
not, there's a bit of a Cassandra effect here too.
You know, the curse of Cassandra is to be a prophet that no one
listens to. I don't have a big enough
podcast for everyone to to listen to me.
That's fine. But there's always a risk when
you do something this early or make a declaration or prediction
this early that you look foolish.
You're ahead of the curve here and people are laughing at it or
just think you're overreacting until you're not.
That can be a little bit lonely. I've had I had a couple
conversations at Climate Week where I brought up some of these
thoughts and I could tell the people were interested because
this is get talked about in this way very often, but it is a
downer of a topic. It's hard to obscure that fact.
And when I am in the through and maybe sometimes you find
yourself in the through of climate belief too.
I like to ask myself, put myself in the thought experiment of
what would happen if I lost everything.
You're in the position of joke. If your family's taken away,
your wealth is all gone, your body is diseased, you wander the
earth as a Wretch, do you imagine that you could be happy
under those circumstances? Could your own mind, your own
spirit, keep you enough company to keep you alive in those
moments? And the answer for me is yes.
I think there's enough there to know that even in the face of
great calamity, I could continue with only the smallest mustard
seed of faith. There's always an ability to
start over, to revisit hope, and to have faith that we can
rebuild. And when you can make peace with
having nothing, losing your career, your possessions, maybe
even your reputation, but still having your mind and your
spirit, you're also preparing yourself for death.
To prepare yourself for death means accepting a return,
potentially to nothingness, potentially to pure spirit,
where all you have are your tally of actions and perhaps the
space to reflect upon them. Depending on your spiritual
tradition, Maybe you're judged for what you did, and punishment
or prize is offered to you in proportion to how well you lived
life. And what can you control in all
of this turbulence? Essentially only the status of
your own soul. How lightly you step upon the
earth, how kind you were, and what you did when the Abyss
stared back into you. Many traditions come back to
this. You know, I'm freestyling right
now, but I can think of several. There's an amazing Marcus
Aurelius meditation on this that I'll put in the show notes if
you'd like to read it. I sometimes feel down on
stoicism because I think it allows tech people to avoid
their feelings more than they really need to.
People use it in a way that I think is inappropriate.
I like Nietzsche's focus on eternal return, of what would
happen if a demon appeared to you and appeared to curse you
with having to relive every moment of your life forever, and
how would you feel in every moment of that eternal return?
Perhaps the most quoted line from all of reversing climate
change is from Dostoyevsky, who said something paraphrased
prayer doesn't exist to change the mind of God, it exists to
change the person praying, acknowledging the transients of
all things of your inability to control moving water.
Our ideas that intersect with several Eastern religious or
spiritual traditions. So at least for me, when I posed
that question to myself, how would I feel if I lost
everything, but I have the strength to continue on.
Would I keep going if my reputation, possessions,
relationships? We're all obliterated.
I think as long as I had possession of my mind, I would
be able to to continue doing that.
I like to think that I would, and I'm thinking that it helps
me relax my expectations for the future.
It doesn't make the grief any less, or the theoretical grief
of an I'll future. It does help somehow.
What is it like to live life when you don't expect the future
to be better than the past? What is it like when you expect
calamity? Can you still be joyful under
those circumstances? I'm not sure.
I wonder if I'm being idealistic about myself.
Self knowledge is a deceptively challenging thing to master.
I was recently visiting family in Lithuania and whenever I go
to Lithuania I always become re obsessed with Eastern Europe.
The Holocaust, the Yiddish civilization that was
obliterated there. My intellectual attention just
spotlights. It's so hard and it's hard for
me to think of anything else. Eastern Europe is one of those
places that people think of as boring.
They think of Stalinist brutalist apartment blocks.
They think of just potatoes and bad food and and mean people.
Eastern Europe has a bad reputation, which is why most of
Europe, even the eastern portions of it, called
themselves Central Europe. I'm not sure if you've noticed
this, but it's a very clever change because they point to the
Ural Mountains and say that's that's the East.
Basically anything in the EU is at least central.
But Eastern Europe wasn't actually always like that.
Eastern Europe was a place where there was tremendous value on
freedom. The polls valued freedom so much
that they created a a veto system called the Lee Barum veto
that made it basically impossible for meaningful
political action to take place. Anyone member of their
parliamentary body could veto anything, which is a beautiful
notion of freedom and consent and the consent of the governed.
That made it really hard to do anything.
We talked about this in the episode of the show that I did
with the amazing video game makers at 11 Bit Studios.
I'll put a link in the show notes.
The Jews were pushed out of much of Western Europe in the Middle
Ages and came to the Polish, Lithuanian Commonwealth and just
the areas of the East because there was relative tolerance and
freedom for them. Obviously there's intergroup
conflict and not everyone gets along and, and at different
points, the Poles, the Ukrainians, the various
religious factions, the classes, they argue with each other, they
quarrel. There's pogromps.
It's not a perfect life, nothing is, but it mostly gets along and
it develops an immense amount of wealth and diversity and it's
amazing. I read a book, I'll put it in
the show notes too. They're they found right before
the invasion of Poland on September 1st, 1939, there was a
Yiddish contest for youth to submit autobiography as a way of
cataloging the diversity of of experience that happened in this
entire Yiddish civilizational zone.
It's basically western Ukraine, eastern Poland, all the way up
to Lithuania, down to the Black Sea.
Like there's, there's a millions and millions of people that are
part of this Jewish Yiddish civilization and just catalogued
the variety of lifeways of people that were, were living
during those times. You know, and they just recently
found documents that were hidden in Vilnius for a long time and
unearthed them. And then someone did an amazing
job illustrating them and bringing them to life.
I'll put a link. I've heard the name of the book
right now, but it's, it's a wonderful graphic novel, really
cool. And when you look at how much
diversity there was in this Yiddish civilization, it's a
nation without a state, with millions of people living in it.
You know, some of whom are sort of like charismatic religious
figures, like the Hasidic folks. Some of them are like the the
Vilna gone, who are like intensely intellectual rabbinic
figures who are just scholars of the the Mishnah, the Talmud.
They know everything and are making fascinating intellectual
arguments and developing a highly intellectual yeshiva
culture. There's also young socialists
and Zionists and some socialists are Zionists and some Zionists
are socialists, but also there are some who are neither.
There's so much happening here. And of course, if you read a
book like Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder, it documents just what
it's like being between the Germans and the Russians in
World War 2. So I'm I'm skipping ahead from
the partitions of Poland. There's three of them.
It destroyed the Polish state and it got, you know,
incorporated into all of its neighbors essentially.
But once Poland is an independent state again after
World War 1, and especially after the Molotov Ribbentrop
Act, which you know, the Nazis and the the Soviets split Poland
in 39 after Poland was invaded, you just have this push pull
where Poland is being ruled by the Soviets who don't trust
people who have their own political or religious
commitments or basically anyone with any initiative at all.
And of course, the Germans who are trying to create this
racially pure hinterland where they can have their own, like
they were starved during World War One.
So they're trying to essentially create their own independent
food supply so that they can stay alive in a in a land war.
Like, if they have a massive land empire, they don't need to
be worried about the British Empire cutting them off with
shipping. Because I'm gonna start again.
Oh, OK. Those are the big moving parts
of history. And there's so much that will be
out of one's control during those moments.
It's brutal on all sides. The Soviets, terrible Nazis,
terrible. The partisans also put
individual people and communities to hard decisions,
put them in very hard spots. It's it honestly just seems like
hell everywhere you turn. It's bad.
If you collaborate with one group to survive, the next group
is not sure if they can trust you and will likely kill you.
It honestly feels like the closest to hell on earth that
there was the Eastern front in World War 2.
It's it's high up there you don't want to be there.
It's, it's horrible, but there's also so many stories that come
out of reading about that time period where people chose to be
kind, who knew that they were headed into the abyss, but still
acted with integrity that didn't do whatever it took to save
their own lives in a way that would have put their souls, if
you buy that concept into a precarious spot.
And when you read stories like that, there's a tendency to
think that you would have that amount of grace under pressure.
That you would be one of the ones who would hide A family
fleeing their own deaths. That you would be the one to
choose to die in someone else's place.
That you would fight for the partisans and be brave, even if
it meant that once it was known that you had joined the
partisans, your entire family might be tortured and killed.
That one's perhaps a bit more ethically charged.
But for every case there is that's inspiring, that shows
people capable of amazing dignity and sacrifice, there are
also cases that you can read of selfishness that did not age
well. You will die at some point.
Do you want to do whatever it takes to not die sooner?
There's stories in that book that are horrifying during the
whole lot of more the Ukrainian famine in the late 20s and early
30s of cannibalism, cannibalistic gangs like in the
Road hunting people, trying to stay alive, killing innocent
people to eat their flesh. Are you willing to do that to
survive a little bit longer? Those questions sound scary.
Weirdly enough, I find them to be clarifying and you should be
asking these questions of yourself right now.
I hear stories sometimes from the world of carbon removal.
Everyone starts off talking a good game about integrity, but
any commercial enterprise puts you in a position to
occasionally make choices between science and commercial.
I've heard many stories of people who felt pressure for
their jobs beside in favor of commercial at the expense of
integrity. You might argue that on net,
being perfect is going to result in a less good outcome than
merely good, and that trying to be perfectionistic and having
super high integrity here is going to set us back and not put
us in a place that we want to be.
And I used to buy that. I did.
And I still see the logic in it. And I can respect if you're
listening and you do, but I don't think that's what I want
to do for myself. Granted, it's easy for me to say
because I do not have a full time position somewhere that is
making these demands of me. I have the luxury of sitting on
my high perch here, you know, laying out life lessons for all
the sinners. My God, I think that's an Always
Sunny line, and I think I have enough self knowledge to know
that some part of this is wishful thinking, some part of
this is vanity. But I think you should have a
line. Many of those moments in
business or elsewhere, it's very easy to move the line.
A good opportunity will come up. Maybe there's some parts of it
you don't like, but you overrule it.
It only takes a few of those until you're somewhere very
different than you thought you might be.
I made a very elliptical Link when I was at Climate Week.
I was having dinner with some friends and I was talking about
this tension between science and commercial and basically any
company. I'm not even, I'm not pointing
at anyone specifically. I think this is just true of
capitalism. I think it's just true of what
it's like to be in the climate business at all.
And I was thinking about the movie The Bridge on the River
Kwai, which if you haven't seen it, that's wonderful.
In fact, even just talking about it, I think it's time for a
rewatch. It always makes those AFI best
films of all time. It's terrific.
And also you get to see Obi Wan Kenobi in a different role.
You have Allied soldiers in Myanmar, then, you know, then it
was called Burma, building a railroad through the jungle.
The commander of the imprisoned Allied troops is Alec Guinness,
Obi Wan Kenobi, and is trying to keep morale high by having the
men focus on a goal, which is building this bridge for the
Japanese so they can better fight the Allies.
And there's a sense of keeping them focus on the goal, but also
trying to undermine the Japanese too.
They don't actually want to build this bridge because it
will allow them to much more effectively fight their comrades
in arms. But also not having a goal, not
having a purpose, just languishing in the jungle is
going to kill these men or it's going to make the Japanese feel
that these people are just to borrow a phrase from the Nazis,
useless eaters and kill them. So there's, there's these
tensions here. Like what are you trying to do
exactly? Are you trying to motivate the
men and, and have a purpose for the Japanese?
Are you trying to sabotage the Japanese war effort?
And the movie concludes. This movie's like 100 years old.
It's almost 100 years old, 80 years old, 90 years.
It's 70 years old or something like that at this point.
So I think I'm allowed to talk about it openly here.
The conclusion of the film is that they build the bridge and
some of the men want to blow it up.
And Alec Guinness stops it because he got so invested in
this smaller goal that he lost sight of what the bigger purpose
of what his collaboration or sabotage or mix of both was
meant to be serving. You make all these little
compromises trying to do things, and then by the end, he has a
moment where he stops the bridge from being destroyed after it
was built. That's my God, what have I done?
And just this moment of, of terror of, of like the wrong
decision being made, the wrong thing being prioritized, and I
just don't want to be in a position of, of my God, what
have I done? I don't think this is uniquely
true about carbon removal. I don't think it's uniquely true
about climate. I think it's just part of what
it's like trying to believe in anything.
And the rule makes it very hard to believe in things.
And we have phrases that we we use to comfort ourselves that
the world is inherently disappointing and difficult.
Don't make the perfect the enemy of the good.
It's a fancy way of saying you should lower your expectations.
Just be happy for what you've got, which is fine.
There's some wisdom in there. I can respect that.
But if we are pointed at the abyss, if the future is as bleak
as I sometimes feel it is, how does that affect your decision
making? Do you want to be like Alec
Guinness and the bridge on the River Kwai?
Do you want to be someone who maintained their dignity and
humanity while being marched to a mass grave in Ukraine or
Lithuania? Is that even something that you
can decide ahead of time? This is after all a thought
experiment and not even asking you to draw any specific
conclusion here, but to ask yourself how it makes you feel
and what kind of person you would like to be when this is
asked of you. Because it very well might be.
They can be small things like are you expected to make
compromises at your business to get a deal done even though the
climate action is less than is typically supposed?
It could be a big thing. And how do you even ask this
question without glorifying yourself or expecting that you
would always choose the most noble of things to do?
And I think the only way to do that is to be OK with the fact
that you will lose everything and you will ultimately die,
because otherwise one will make decisions that will try to
preserve your expectations. But if your expectations are
that low, or maybe I should say that realistic, maybe it will
help you make better decisions for the future.
By way of a postscript, I find the literary value of ghosts to
be instructive here. The most common phrase that
everyone associates with ghosts, and you can say it with me, is
unfinished business. Ghosts are often those who don't
even realize that they're ghosts.
They're so caught in their own selfishness and their own self
absorption and their own pain and their own greed, they've
forgotten that they've even died.
They walk the halls of a building that used to live in or
work in or angry about the people.
They're moving their stuff, not realizing that they're not alive
to do anything anymore. I think that's such a beautiful
literary device. There's also a Contra Passo in
Dante's Divine Comedy that I've talked about in the podcast, but
it's been several years. I love it, though.
There are these figures that Dante encounters that are so
caught up in Florentine politics that all they want to talk to
Dante about is which family is he from which side of the great
rivalry of the families of Florence did he take sides in?
And it's a funny scene because these men are literally being
held in hell to great suffering and they can't even focus on
that or find a way to make peace with the fact of where they are
because of their failure of self knowledge.
They're so wrapped up in Florentine politics that even
though they have a living man in front of them, they still are
obsessed with what bothered them in life.
They could not let go of it. They're stuck there.
They're unfinished business is their torment.
I think much of this unfinished business is an expectation that
you might have, an expectation of the way things can be, should
be. And releasing that expectation
is something that could in fact liberate you, allow you to make
better decisions. Allow you to increase the amount
of humanity in your life. If you've been listening to
these shows too, by the way, and you connect with them in any
way, you should know that I am not some spiritual genius or
anything. Me talking about any of this
stuff is because I think I'm like among the crappiest people
to be enacting any of this out there.
I think about it, but it mostly stands to make me aware of my
own hypocrisy. Being graceful, loving, and
forgiving in this way is, I think, the greatest challenge
that presents itself to a human on earth.
And my being interested in these ideas does not mean that I'm
even halfway decent at it. But it helps me.
It helps me to Orient my expectations, to release them.
I tried to point myself in a direction that I can be proud
of, that if ghosts are real, I don't die with unfinished
business of expectations unfulfilled, and I'm able to
gracefully pass into the great beyond in a way that I can be
welcomed to as someone who learned how to live.
It's more of an aspiration than a reality, but maybe.
But maybe I'll get there, and maybe you will too.
Good luck. How's that for a New York
Climate Week's reflections post? Not nearly as chummy as many of
the other ones. Thanks for listening.
I hope you have a wonderful day. Hopefully you can take some of
these ideas with you and use it to change your relationship to
life, to death and the decisions you have to make every day in a
life which is extremely fraught. Bye for now.