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 sponsor, Philip Lee.
LLPI really like doing shows about the law.
I think the law is such a fascinating part of our shared
social life. It structures so much of it.
It's badly understood by most people.
And 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
carbon removal, you're going to probably pay a fair amount of
money to lawyers. There's just no way around it.
Your choice is basically, do you get a bad lawyer or a good
lawyer? One really cool thing I can say
on Philip Lee LLP's behalf, Well, one, Ryan Covington and I
did a very fun show about how basically no one except for an
elite few really know what bankability and project finance
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If you'd like to go listen to that show, it's awesome and it's
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One also really cool thing is that they just won Environmental
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They put it three years in a row, 2023-2024 and 2025.
It's the only award for legal teams operating in the DCM, and
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it's something that in a busy life with lots of competing
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reversing climate change. Thanks so much for what you do.
And now here is the show. Hey everyone, thank you so much
for listening to Reversing Climate Change.
This is Ross Kenyon, I am the host, and today I have the
sincere pleasure of having someone on the podcast who I
believe, just in terms of sheer seniority of years, is someone
who tops my involvement in carbon removal.
There's not that many of them since I was involved in carbon
removal pretty early. Noah's one of them.
I'm going to tell you all about Noah Deutsch if you don't
already know him before I do. If you could please open up your
podcast app before you've gotten into whatever task it is you're
going to do. If you could get 5 stars on
Spotify, five stars on Apple Podcast, and write a really
quick positive review, it would mean a lot to me.
It's so helpful and I really appreciate it.
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And please open up your apps or YouTube or whatever you're
using. Find some way to make some
positive mark in favor of this show so that more people see it.
Thank you so much. And now I will get back to
lauding this carbon removal legend.
Noah Dykes was actually one of the first reversing climate
change guests that we ever had. Eight years ago or thereabouts,
did a show in their office before it was even carbon 180.
I believe the original name was Center for the Center for Carbon
Removal, something like that. I can't even quite remember,
it's been so long. Noah was at the Department of
Energy during the Biden administration working on carbon
removal, a recurring theme of many podcast guests of this
show. Noah's background is one of
those things. When you look at it's so
impressive to have a fear that has this many things that
they've done. One of the founders and the
original executive director of Carbon 180, as I mentioned then,
Center for Carbon Removal, various academic and nonprofit
affiliations. What we talked about today
though, is that he was a Stripe Climate Fellow, which was a very
prestigious program. If you look at who was a Climate
Fellow from Stripe in carbon Removal, it's an absolute
killers gallery of people who are doing very impactful work in
carbon removal. My understanding of the
fellowship was this very focus on how to generate additional
demand for carbon removal. There's a long running problem
in debate within carbon removal. What can be done to make sure
that more companies are buying, more governments are buying
carbon removal or finding other ways to just make sure carbon
removal doesn't get all this early stage support from groups
like Stripe and Milky Wire and others.
And these companies get to the ability to produce carbon
removal at scale. But then surprise, there's no
one waiting at the other end of the bridge to buy at that scale.
And thus a lot of money might have been wasted.
Talent may egress from the space, things that are really
not so good for us. So Stripe and making this
climate fellowship program was attempting to solve the bridge
to nowhere problem that carbon removal faces.
And NOAA was doing very interesting work trying to make
advanced market commitments as a structure work for governments.
Really tough time I imagine trying to do that.
I get to ask him a bunch of questions of what that is like.
We both look back and look forward to carbon removal.
What's going to be happening next?
We try to offer some advice to entrepreneurs and others working
in this space that somehow keeps us coming back for more as our
life's work, something that we're so passionate about.
Thank you know for being on. I don't know why this took so
many years since your first visit.
Love and respect so much of what you're able to pull off.
On behalf of Carbon Removal, here is your show.
Thanks for listening. Here it is.
Hey Ross, glad to be back, been too long but excited to to join
you again. I think you were like the 2nd
3rd guest on the show when it was Christophe and I like 8
years ago. Is that how you remember it?
That that is certainly tracks it in my mind.
It was such a quaint little space back then.
It needs. It's less cute now, it's more
muscly, burly. Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know if we're quite at the muscley burly phase.
We're like at the in the gym, trying to get there but not
quite there. I feel like, yeah, we were
there. And then it was like the last
year has been like, you stopped going to the gym and all your
muscles start to like just go away and kind of sag away.
And I think that's kind of. No, here, here's how I see it.
It's like you, you're on that big hike and you think you get
to the top of the the mountain, but you're actually, you really
have barely started and there's like the giant mountain is ahead
of you. It's just like a little a little
hill and now you can actually see where you got to go and it's
like, oh boy, this is going to be that's a big one it.
Was like the the false peak of carbon removal?
Exactly, Yeah. Cool, that's not necessarily
encouraging, but you probably have the most right to say so of
nearly anyone else. Long time in carbon removal.
You just did a stripe fellowship which was.
I want to hear all about it. Hard to get, Not that many
people got them. Very prestigious.
Fly around the world trying to cut carbon removal deals.
What'd you learn? What'd you see?
How did it work? Yeah.
So my project specifically was how do you get governments
around the world to effectively create a frontier, but not for
private voluntary purchases, but of governments.
So it involved a handful of things.
First, what does that even mean? Governments around the world are
doing a lot of different things to catalyze demand for carbon
removal. It's actually a wildly
heterogeneous set of policies that different countries are
pursuing to make that happen. And so how, how might that all
come together to send a signal to the market that the whole is
greater than the sum of the parts?
And so that that is kind of piece 1.
And then piece 2 is just how do we actually go ask governments
around the world what is it going to take to get them to to
do this, to increase demand, to come together around something
like that? And so the work involves a lot
of that direct engagement with policy makers working on carbon
removal around the world and. What led you to start with North
Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran? Why did you start there?
Well, I mean, there is an election in 2025 or 2024.
Change the course of things. They zigged.
I zagged. You know, it just kind of makes
sense, right? Are there when you were in these
meetings or I'm I'm sensitive to the fact that you probably can't
be totally transparent in public here about how all the meetings
went, but is there a general feeling?
No, no, I can't. Here here's, yeah, here's what I
see is that there's actually way more progress on carbon removal
than there was even two or three years ago in many places around
the world, mostly North America and Northern Europe.
But we're starting to see encouraging signs both in the
kind of Asia Pacific region as well as many emerging economies
like India, Kenya, Brazil, etcetera.
And I'm fairly optimistic about the prospects that these policy
processes are going to create real markets and bankable kind
of policy frameworks for carbon removal by 20-30, which is
great. That's not that far into the
future if you think about it. However, there's how many
hundreds of carbon removal startups that have kind of hit
the go button with their venture capital money, have started
selling projects, have started building tech, and they need to
get to that commercial scale within the next year or two in
order to continue to grow and be viable businesses.
And so that's the real gap. It's kind of what will it take
to accelerate the amount of policy support for those
companies. And that policy support can be
two ways. One is actual direct policy
support. That's obviously great, but also
governments play a really important role in influencing
how private capital spends their money.
If governments signal that they are going to be creating large
scale demand for carbon removal in the near future, it makes it
much easier for investors to give folks cash now before the
money is actually there. And then they can go build the
thing that they need to to be ready for when the policy change
happens. So 2030 is not necessarily a bad
timeline. It's just only works if you have
some combination of additional policy in the near term to
support the field to accelerate as well as a signal to the field
to get it to scale. And I really think that the AI
boom right now that's that's happening is very instrumental
in that. We're seeing tech companies pour
hundreds of billions of dollars into infrastructure projects in
pursuit of winning an industry of the future that doesn't yet
exist. Nobody's really paying for it at
any meaningful scale, but could be trillions of dollars in the
not too distant future and totally transform kind of how
the economy works and how the next century unfolds
economically, right? And that story is honestly
pretty similar to what carbon removal could have been, right?
We need trillions of dollars worth of carbon removal industry
in the not too distant future at that scale.
It actually helps us avoid potentially catastrophic climate
damages. And even if not catastrophic,
definitely very painful both on a human and economic lens.
And so you, you could see a similar arms race happening.
But obviously the AI is happening at massive pace and
scale today, whereas our carbon removal, that industry of the
future is still not yet at that lift off pace where we're really
moving forward. I obviously see a lot of hope
tied around data centers as a natural customer for carbon
removal, but seeing how many very large, very prominent
corporate leaders shifted to the right in the last year, maybe
that's positioning. Maybe that's like you have to
kiss the ring a little bit when you're you have a fiduciary duty
to a Fortune 100 company and that means you play politics in
a way that is palatable or maybe that is genuine.
And maybe the world is moving away from that and participating
in carbon removal to that skill, especially in AI, which the
field that the administration cares quite a lot about.
To the extent that they're willing to preempt state
regulation of AI, it's a major part of their the countries go
to market. You might say the commercial
strategy. Will companies still persist in
creating huge amounts of carbon removal demand given that there
may not be sufficient policies to support them.
And also these AI companies are likely global and can shop
around markets where they're not required to do so.
And there might be like C bam might force them if they're
doing business in Europe to like maybe do that at the teeth of
that stay in there. But I'm like curious is we're
going to see venue shopping, policy shopping that may not see
the kinds of carbon removal demand that people are hoping
for. And I think also broadly what
you're saying too is I'm hearing a lot of if we can stay alive
until EUETS integration, like if we can stay alive until the GX
league, if we can just make it a little bit longer and get a
Japanese corporate on our cap table and it's like stay alive
long enough, we'll be OK. I'm wondering how much, how much
of that is opium, and how much of this stuff is actually going
to materialize. Yeah, I don't think staying
alive is the right frame. Staying alive is not what any of
these companies really need to do is they, how do you build a
commercial project? And everyone's being very
creative about where the capital comes from, how you finance
projects like that. But the people who build
commercial scale projects 1st and whose commercial scale
projects work, they will have an enormous leg up going forward
because they'll be able to supply tons at scale and have
credible pathway to say, hey, we actually have data.
Here's what it costs now, but here's what we can sell it for
you in the future. And then we have a real downward
cost trajectory from there. Otherwise, I do think it's a lot
of, we'll see it, we'll believe it when we see it basically sort
of things. But I think that AI data center
Nexus is very much a just coincidence, quite frankly.
The fact that the people who are building out AI data centers
just happened to be the companies that had very high
profit per emission, had already set ambitious net zero goals,
had already begun building teams and leading on carbon removal,
it's just pure coincidence in in my mind.
It's not like a structural feature and it is a true
lifeline for these carpet removal companies without that
policy change. But I think the biggest thing
that I see is that when these companies invest hundreds of
billions of dollars into data center build out, they have a
clear story that there is going to be demand for their AI
products in the future that if they can win, there's this
enormous market. That's the gap right now around
carpet removal is if you build something, will somebody be
there who wants to pay for it? And that goes back to the strike
project. That's the whole point of
frontier in the private sector, right?
That's trying to show that there's an advanced market
commitment there. So if you do invest today in
build private sector projects, then there will be a customer at
the end of the day. That's just that orders of
magnitude too small of a scale to really matter.
So you need the governments to come in and do something of that
nature and signal to the private sector that, yeah, put capital
into the stuff. Now there won't be revenue
immediately, but in the future there will be.
And what's not happening right now is that signal from
governments around the world is not happening with the clarity
and the strength that it needs to.
And so investors are not putting as much money as they want to in
these projects. And it's really interesting
because there's tons of investment interest.
Everybody wants to be an investor in this carbon removal
economy of the future if somebody's willing to buy the
credits. And so who, who is that person
that is going to ultimately pay for this stuff?
Where's that customer going to be?
And I mean, when we first talked, this was a public good.
It still is a public good. We can figure out ways to
subsidized this through integrating it into industries
and doing things around the margin that make it less costly
or potentially even cost saving. But at the end of the day, this
has to be something that society decides that it wants, that we
want to in fact, say, reverse climate change at the end of the
day, and that you're only going to do that with this stuff and
we're going to pay for it. Yeah, that was a hard pill for
me to swallow. I really did not want to come to
that conclusion at the beginning of Nori, which was so VCM
oriented and be like private action can drive and then like
just a harsh reality of like, yeah, what is product market fit
for carbon removal? It really doesn't have a natural
customer. It's really weird space to work
in. Alternatively, we could just
bully the Cullison into getting more of their money.
Noah, have you tried that? I have not.
I don't find that bullying people into giving more money
just out of the goodness of their heart.
Yeah. Much more orders of magnitude
and more. Yeah, I think that's the issue
is that even if you gave all of your wealth away to carbon
removal, which I would advise nobody to do right then what,
what? What do you do?
What, what, how, what impact does that have?
And this ultimately needs to be something that is a teeny, teeny
part of the global economy. But no individual is anywhere
close to being a teeny, teeny part of the global economy,
right? I like this program so much
because it seems to be very focused around demand and just
the bridge to nowhere problem in carbon removal.
Like OK, we got like a bunch of cool pilots Kiloton.
We're like scaling up and then we built a facility that no one
wants and there's no demand for this thing.
And like you've spent a ton of money doing this and we're
nowhere close to to pulling it off and we need governments to
step up that demand. Was there demand that you saw
for building an advanced market commitment at the government
level? Was that a project, an idea of
yours that turned out like there's something here?
Or is it going to be much more individually nationed in that
kind of way that I would describe at the beginning of
this? So I think there's definitely
appetite to do something like this at some point in the near
future. I don't think now is the time
where you're seeing any sort of kind of multilateral climate
collaboration rising to the fore of the broader global
geopolitical climate multilateralism.
But it's things that kill the like IMO agreement.
Does that count as multilateralism?
Yeah, exactly right. So you're, you have negative
examples of where diplomacy is kind of crumbling in front of
our eyes, right. But no, I don't think we're
seeing kind of new multilateral collaborations that are coming
forward and are really focused on solutions, let alone just
kind of signalling about the problem.
And so I, I think that to me is the, what really needs to happen
is end of the day, if countries can get these projects built,
that is, as you said, what everyone needs so that they can
be in a place when geopolitical conditions change, right?
And they're going to change. The question is when, in what
direction, kind of what speed and scale, nobody knows.
And so I think figuring out how to both do the 1 foot at a time
in front of another and thinking about what's the ultimate 2030
and beyond frameworks that we need to have in place, doing
those things in parallel is really important.
When you were white boarding this out and had this idea of an
AMC at the the government level, what was your ideal format for?
Did you have like, OK, is it like the African Union is like a
great candidate for this or is it people who have oil and gas
industries across the entire world are like how did you slice
them and say this is potentially the the segment that I think has
the greatest likelihood I. Mean it initially started as
where who has money and that's largely OECD countries
initially. Could the G7 come together and
do that? Could you have some sort of set
of NATO members do that? That that was the idea is how do
you get countries that are have that industry going today?
And so they're not only they have the fiscal capacity to fund
projects, but they also get benefits from it because they've
really catalyzed a lot of that innovation.
They have those research university ecosystems and
venture capital ecosystems that stands to make an enormous
amount of money if you can actually create the industry of
the future out of it. And so I, I think that that to
me is the where I, I see where we saw an initial opportunity,
but I, I think the formulation of it is going to change and it
is unlikely to be that set of countries in the near future for
a handful of reasons. I think the first is that
countries have been very nationalistic about their carbon
removal policies. They want to fund projects in
their own countries, not where the the projects are cheapest.
There are exceptions to that. Very small countries say
Switzerland, Singapore, etcetera, they don't really have
the space to do big carbon removal are are eager to do kind
of Article 6 Paris agreement transactions.
And countries like Japan have thought about it in a really
interesting way about projects don't have to be in Japan, but
they have to be owned by some fraction of Japanese companies.
So there's, there's always some sort of not just this pure
climate motivation, there has to be an, an economic story behind
that. And that coupled with the fact
that every country is doing their own policy framework that
we have certain tax credits here in the US, The Canadians have
different tax credits. The British have a a contract
for difference model on their ETS.
The European Union has its own ETS integration.
Like everyone's doing their own thing.
And so having that all come together under one package is a
little bit challenging for folks to do.
I, I think it's very much within the art of the possible.
And AMC does not have to be a single pool of money where
everyone says here we're going to give you $10 billion a year
and you have to go buy credits. And there's a central vehicle
that's like the most extreme form of an, an AMC, but it can
just, all that matters is that there's a credible and bankable
signal that is sent from policy makers around the world that
says if you build this according to certain specifications,
whether it's cost or permanence or whatever, there will be
demand for it. And that can be through credit
purchases, it can be through tax credits, it can be through ETS
integration and guarantees. It just you need to send that
signal to the private sector in a clear way.
That's what an AMC is at its heart.
So I think you can get something like that, but my guess is it's
going to be either technology specific or industry specific.
There's a lot of sense in my mind about if we're going to
scale up certain marine carbon removal approaches that we would
want governments to be kind of collaborating on that, given all
the sensitivities and complexities about broader
international ocean regulation and who is allowed to
commercialize the ocean for what purposes, right?
There's a lot of reasons why governments would want to come
together and kind of set the terms for what commercialization
looks like. They're also specific
industries. Aviation is a great example
where in many cases today carbon removal is often a cheaper way
to decarbonize aviation then sustainable aviation fuel.
I don't know that's going to be the case forever, but certainly
could be. And so I, I think there's kind
of international aviation coalition's that might want to
jump start carbon removal development.
But then I think the biggest thing that I've seen is that
there hasn't been demand from emerging economies that can do
carbon removal at potentially very massive scales at
comparatively lower costs to insist that the rich countries
who have created the most historical emissions actually
pay for it. And we've seen this happen with
forest carbon projects. Red Plus involves enormous flows
from rich countries to places like Brazil, heavily forested
countries. But we haven't seen that same
sort of recognition that places in kind of the tropical and
subtropical regions could be most effective at things like
enhanced rock weathering or certain types of biomass carbon
removal or even have the right conditions to do direct air
capture. And that investment from abroad
into those projects, it is an important thing to do.
So there's just not that demand signal that or or that
international diplomatic call, if you will, for those projects
right now. But I think over time that will
grow increasingly loud. We have seen India, for example,
already say that the global N needs to pay for historical
carbon emissions. I think it's the only kind of
explicit diplomatic call we've seen on that front.
But it hasn't translated into kind of specifics of, hey,
create an advanced market commitment for carbon removal
where the global N is buying Article 6 credits from emerging
economies around the world, right.
But that that to me, is something that I think could
emerge in the the coming decades.
So much there to think about. I want to poke on this
protectionist point that you bring up to where when I think
about carbon removal, I've some amount of economics training.
I'm sympathetic to certain kinds of free trade arguments when I
hear that we can do cost arbitrage and there is carbon
removal that's just as good as what we can produce in the US,
but much cheaper somewhere else. And that might even have a
justice angle to it where it'll, you know, feed money into people
who are providing A valuable service.
And it can address some of the climate justice aspects here at
a bargain relative to what we would pay for the same
atmospheric benefit here in the US.
And that makes very strong intuitive sense to me and has
since I was a teenager like that.
That line of logic is very tight to me.
And then I get frustrated sometimes with policy when I
think about all politics as local politicians obviously want
these projects in their districts so they can have jobs
and something to brag about. And then like the idea of having
an opportunity that could be in your district, but you're
actually just going to give away this opportunity to come home
with what's the LBJ line? It's like, how many how many
Coon skins do you have on the wall kind of thing?
Like you have like, this is not a Coon skin on the wall at this
point because you gave away the raccoon to someone else.
And that's a terrible thing. If you're a politician.
Do the politics of this actually make sense to do, to have like
free trade even before we get to the fact that the world is
increasingly autarkic at this point economically and
protectionism is on the rise? It almost seems like it doesn't
make sense and probably wouldn't have existed even if we did have
a Harris presidency. We probably still would have
been going in a more protectionist direction with
regard to our carbon. And that's not even taking into
into account any of the NDC dynamics and corresponding
adjustments and any of the other like big thorny issues of carbon
removal transacting internationally.
Yeah. I mean, do I think there will be
$100 billion a year industry of foreign direct investment for
carbon removal without any sort of OECD industry?
No way. But I also, I, I don't, I don't
think that's what needs to happen.
I think a very small amount of the relative spending can go
abroad. And I think there are lots of
ways that make that mutually beneficial, figuring out how to
incorporate basically to export technology and and figure out
how to get some of the technology innovation to be
deployed abroad there. There are lots of ways.
And I actually think about how Japan is thinking about this in
terms of, yeah, we'll buy, we'll enable credits from abroad to be
in our Japanese ETS system potentially.
But they need to have some sort of Japanese ownership or
technology content or whatever it is.
I would expect that you'd have a lot more interest in things like
that just because I actually don't think you're going to end
up doing a ton of carbon removal domestically.
And so that the job creation won't be that kind of hard hat
job creation in many places. It will be more of the financial
services and so forth. Like the end of the day, the UK
might be a pretty hard place to say deploy direct air capture at
massive scale given their energy prices, the land constraints,
the storage constraints, right. So it's a great place to finance
large scale director capture projects abroad, potentially to
bring technology out of the UK research and innovation
ecosystem, scale that internationally to provide the
kind of City of London financial services around that in terms of
credit quality, credit registries.
And you see all of those pieces happening in the UK has one of
the most advanced carbon removal of ecosystems today, but like
very structural challenges. California, I think is a similar
situation where you have an enormous amount of innovation
happening in California on carbon removal, but not a ton of
people who say, yeah, California is the future for where I want
to build these projects. They're developing in California
and then going to Texas, Louisiana, wherever else in
order to actually deploy. Because the environment for
doing those projects is just, it's possible in a way that
California is not. Let alone the fact that the
power prices and other just financial cost of doing business
in some of those geographies is way less than in, in California.
So I, I, I think what you'll see is folks figuring out how to, to
specialize and there will be gains from trade, whether that
is politically durable, who knows.
I don't think the story about, hey, we're going to create a lot
of financial service sector jobs is remotely as compelling as,
hey, we're going to actually give folks manufacturing jobs,
construction jobs, kind of, yeah, jobs that are more in
demand today. And so many regions that are
going to be increasingly stressed by both climate change
and a shift away from dependence on fossil fuels for our energy
mix. And so really thinking hard
about those kind of rural economic development strategies
and how that fits with carbon removal is, is really important.
And I, I think actually fits kind of in a very complementary
way to some of the, the broader global carbon removal ecosystem
changes because it fundamentally it's all about how do you embed
carbon removal into various industrial processes or, or
agricultural processes or, or think about including carbon
removal as part of that broader economic development and local
benefit story. It could be environmental
benefit, it could be job creation benefit, right.
But how do you, how do you actually think about it in part
of a more holistic systems view? And how are we going to support
investment in rural communities, not just here in the US, but
everywhere in the world? How are we going to help fossil
dependent economies transition? And, and like what, what types
of things actually matter there? I think that frame is where the
community of carbon removal developers has really gone.
Not this pure. Hey, we need it for the climate
math, which is where we were eight years ago.
And I think everyone gets that now, more or less.
It's just not translating into money for projects because it's
not directly connected to the salient themes today around
affordability, around how do we get energy abundance and
economic development and all those other themes that are feel
much more urgent and pressing in the next two to three years
compared to 2050 net 0 targets and so forth.
I have a strange question for you and it might be a tad
foolish, so get ready. Yeah, hit me.
When countries are doing things like we're setting up a carbon
removal industry that we're going to support with policy,
you're taxing money from citizens, It's running through
an administration where some of that money is being spent just
on the admin cost of it. And then we're paying for for
something domestically that doesn't seem to be revenue
generating. But the way you're describing
this is a lot of countries who want carbon removal to be a
revenue generating, tax receipt producing industry.
But the first example I gave is very much robbing Peter to pay
Paul in some kind of way. And the second one relies upon a
free trade scheme where like some people are revenue
generating, some people are the customers of the suppliers of
carbon removal. And we're trading these things.
But when it takes place inside of a country, like you spent
money to create an industry, but it was money that people would
have probably spent anyways on something else that would have
just became a different kind of product as a.
Really weird. Question to ask, do you
understand? What?
No, no, I, I think we're, you're getting as there's two things,
right. One is there's this basic
paradigm that polluters should pay for the cost that their
pollution imposes, right? And that, that's an ETS system,
every sort of carbon tax, carbon trading system.
Yeah, of course polluters do not want to pay for it.
But then all of society pays. And So what we're doing is
effectively making the people that are causing the problem pay
for the problem, not just feeling what we talked about as
kind of the social cost of carbon because everyone is
paying for climate change, right?
It's just a how how you feel it in your wallet is different for
for everyone. And so an ETS system is a an
easy way to think about how you would distribute the cost of
dealing with that effectively. So that that's one end and the
other end is at at some point you get to this weird dynamic
where the polluters who made the problem are not here anymore.
That we are going to have emissions that are causing
climate change that were emitted in the 1950s and 20 years ago,
that today in 50 years ago, in 50 years from now are still
there. The companies that made those
emissions are almost certainly going to be logged on.
So who do you pay? Who who do you charge for that?
It's like a a weird problem. And so it very much comes into
this public good about kind of, yes, society created all these
emissions. We didn't charge anybody for it
at the time, but we are ultimately responsible for that.
And there's that's just a public good, right?
We pay for governments to do things like provide a National
Defense for us and we give them money and they create defense
spending. We give government's money to
clean up our trash and they do that, right?
So I, I think it's not necessarily a question of we're
going to take money away from somebody and, and give it to
other. And it's like a, that, that is
what we're doing. But that's the function of many
government actions to kind of solve these social problems,
right? So.
For sure, I sitting it plainly like that is meant for
illustration, but it isn't inherently critical of that
process. I think kind of what I'm
pointing out is that I think some states want it both ways
where carbon removal, is it meant to decarbonize either
one's country or the atmosphere as a whole?
Or is it a revenue generating opportunity?
And can it be both? It is on the micro scale, like
some people will be relatively made better off and some people
will be made relatively worse off in like short term monetary
fiduciary pecuniary ways, even if the climate is made better
off overall. But some of this is like not
everyone can be generating revenue from carbon removal at
the same time. Some people are paying for it,
some people are making money on it and that will net out at 0,
but it's easy. Someone wants to make money at.
The same time. It's weird.
No, I think that's the fundamental crux.
And that's again, everyone wants to be an investor in carbon
removal. Very few people want to be an
off taker for those credits, right.
And so that's the role of of governments is to say, no, we
want to provision this good, it is a public good.
It's not going to be provisioned through a market.
And the fact that it is being provisioned through a voluntary
carbon market today at the scale that it is today to me is a
minor miracle. Like when we first talked about
this, if you would have gone to any of these tech companies and
be like, hey, can you pay 500 bucks a ton for a couple million
tons of Cdr, they would have like, OK, that that's, that's
nice. Like what do you, I don't
understand those words. Like what are you, what are you
talking about? You have no concept of what's
going on. And now they're leading that
charge. And so there's a lot of
illogical things about the market, but to bet on that
voluntary market being the thing that scales, seeing this
incredibly unwise given how few fast followers there are behind
the first movers in the space. And just the fundamental nature
of this as a public good, that we're going to need governments
to either tell polluters that they need to pay for it or that
society recognizes that there are benefits to carbon emissions
and that society is going to clean it up because society as a
whole benefits. And that's just through public
spending, right? But yeah, you're not going to
get just kind of magic money creation.
You're not going to see that happen for sure.
Sometimes I feel like we wanted it that way.
Or when you think back to how Brazil used to credit forestry
or how like various Red Plus project would work, it's like
you're we're both claiming the credits for our own net zero
goals or our own like neutrality goals, but we're also selling
the credits at the same time. And like you would want to count
it for yourself and sell it and yeah.
Yeah. So I, I actually think there's
some nuance there where if you're going to count it for
yourself and then sell it to other countries for them to
count for their national inventories, that that's not
allowed and that's no good. That will result in just
emissions ballooning. But if you want to count things
for your national inventory and then have somebody buy a
voluntary credit, they should be able to count that because
companies are not part of the Paris Agreement, right?
It's almost a dual Ledger, right?
You need to have companies get to net zero.
You need to have countries get to net zero.
You can double count in that instance.
And I, I think that's a totally legitimate way for those
projects to, to actually happen, as long as you're not trying to
somehow get the voluntary thing to mix into compliance markets,
which in many cases you are. So the line gets very blurry
very quickly. But in, in some of these just
bilateral deals, like it makes perfect sense.
And you actually have projects that happen to help your
national inventory that wouldn't happen without these voluntary
deals. Like if these tech companies
couldn't claim their credits, they would absolutely not do the
projects. And then it's not as if the
projects would just somehow magically happen.
It's a choice between does the project happen at all or, or
does the, the company get to, to claim it right.
So I I think there's a very credible case to be made that in
the near term that that voluntary double counting with
the compliance is not not the worst in the world.
Oh yeah, for sure. I think that that's true.
I just like the everyone would like to have their cake and eat
it too. Claim net zero for your native
carbon removal industry and also be generating revenue from other
countries at the same time. But what's next for you Noah?
It seems like you have your pick of the letter.
I'm sure companies approach you and I want to poach you.
I'm sure there's plum policy positions for you too.
What where you going? Are you able to say?
Well, no, I'm just going to be continuing to to help where I
can. I'm so working in in civil
society back at Carbon 180 as a senior advisor, their part time
working with some academic affiliations as well, both with
Jen Wilcox up at Penn and at Columbia as well.
And so it's all the same work. It's how do we continue to build
the policy foundations for this and really a focus on how do we
get projects to scale that. That to me is where we need to
focus right now is getting commercial scale projects built
and then showing the world that carbon removal can work and it
can come down a cost curve. It can be measured and verified
in a really robust way. And that to me really helps get
this flywheel spinning where once you see that happening, you
see the jobs, the investment, you see the climate impact
potential. And that motivates the demand
far more than we have today, where it's a whole bunch of
little startups more or less and the promise of something big.
But actually seeing that big thing is a completely different
ball game and I think will actually help us to make the
progress that we need in 20-30 and beyond to really scale the
industry. Any predictions for 2026?
02026 In what sense for us? Open-ended question.
Is it going to be a year of? I don't know, I've speculated.
I think what's what's your prediction for example?
Similar to yours in some ways where like you're, you make me
think of, do you know the famous Earl Butts line that Wendell
Berry and permaculture people love that like get big or get
out of AG from the 70s? Does carbon removal have get big
or get out? Is that happening right now?
I imagine we're going to see closures, M&A, well capitalized
companies will probably pick up others that are able to for
either attack or physical infrastructure or something like
that. I think we're going to see
probably a fair amount of stuff like that happen.
I don't have super high hopes for 2026.
I think if you're able to, you know, stay lean and but also be
building things that will help you transition to the policy
that you're going to be able to plug into, then cool.
But I don't know if it's going to be as fun as previous years.
No, it's going to be very hard. But I've always thought that
carbon removal was going to be very hard, and I've perpetually
been surprised at how much success it's had in the face of
how hard it's been. I always.
Thought it was going to be easy. I'm just getting punched in the.
Hi, Ross. What about this?
What about the? PCM was going to work and like
that didn't make any. Sense.
Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. Why would that work?
I'm smarter now, but yeah, I learned the hard way.
Yeah, no, it's going to be really hard.
But I think they're the fundamentals are actually really
encouraging. There is really good tech out
there. There are really good teams.
There is enough of an investor and purchaser and policy
ecosystem that recognize that this is critical for not just
that kind of peripheral, how do we make some money in the near
term, but like will we actually deal with climate change?
This is a critical piece and we need to have that option to
scale up and sustain it at real industrial skill soon.
And so folks have risen to the occasion over and over again in
the past 10 years at this point to make that happen.
And yeah, it's going to be incredibly challenging for the
indefinite future. But to me, that's just the water
that carbon removal inhabits. And the folks are, they're
figuring out how to do it. And so I I remain cautiously
optimistic, even if I have no clue exactly where that will
come from, given how hard everything is.
I've done some things within climate, but outside of carbon
removal and I honestly miss it. I'm just like, oh, this is great
confirmation for me that I am a dyed in the wool carbon removal
person and I am actually meant to be over here.
And I'm very effective over here in ways where I'm like
diligencing a battery be like, this is a cool battery.
I'm like, this is not this is not the best reason I should not
be doing analysis of this battery.
Go to market right now or tea. I know.
But that's the thing about carbon removal is if you can
solve admittedly very hard challenges, like the potential
is just enormous, there's so much good that could happen in
so many geographies across so many dimensions, not just
climate, right? That when you get it right, like
how could you not be excited about it?
But that has to live in dialogue with the fact that it's super
hard. And yeah, it's a 11 out of 10°
of difficulty thing to do. But I.
Always say it that way too. How have you like kept your
passion for it? Is it like me where you just you
just like go vocation like call to this actor?
You're like this, I'm meant to be here.
Or do you have days where you doubt that?
Like how do you feel about your work?
Oh. I think this is something we're,
we're still at the very early days of the industry that I
wouldn't be surprised if in 10 years we have a completely
different conception of what carbon removal solutions
actually make sense and can scale and what the business
models and policy frameworks. Only OAF in the future.
Yeah, again, Ross, I think like the early prognostications have
a tendency to be wrong, right. And so I, I hold that that what
we see today is the path to 2030, let alone 2050, almost
certainly going to be radically wrong, but that what we do
figure out is going to work just will be so beneficial and so
impactful. And that, that to me is, is why
I'm excited about this and recognize that again, we're at
the the peak of a tiny little hill that we can now see more of
the giant mountain ahead and just got to keep going forward
figuring out a way out. As someone who's been doing this
work for so long, seen so much from such an early stage and
with so many different organizations, is there any
advice you can give to people working in carbon removal right
now? Things that you are finding
fulfilling, even in times when it might feel darker than you
might like. Yeah.
I think to me, it's just figuring out where you can do
this, like where the opportunities are and to go in
recognizing it will be really hard, but that there's a
surprising amount of opportunity to continue to work forward and
make progress in this space. There are companies hiring,
There are certain geographies that are hiring policy makers
and civil servants, right? There are other places where
people are hiring investors or corporate purchasers and there's
not a lot of that opportunity. Sure.
But I think folks can figure out how to deploy their skill sets,
whether they're scientists and engineers or marketers or policy
experts like there, there's certainly opportunity in a
surprising number of places. And I think all of that
contributes in a significant way today.
And it goes back to the fact that we're still so early that
there's so much that actually matters and can, can push the
field forward. But I, I would definitely keep
that in mind about how do you make sure that you're doing work
that ultimately matters. And to me that's about how do
you go build projects and how do you go build policy foundations
and market foundations that are actually going to scale in the
next kind of three to seven-year time window.
And so I think there's a decent amount of activity, just stay at
it and hopefully those opportunities will present
themselves. Sensible advice.
Thanks for coming back on Noah. I don't know why it took so
long. Ross, it's been a pleasure.
Yeah, fewer than eight years. The next time.
Fewer than eight years.