#1

Thank you for listening to and reading Climate Workers Anonymous. Subscribe above, and be sure to subscribe in whichever podcast app you use. An amazing rating and review on those podcast apps does a world of good. Would you please do that for me now? Here’s Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.

If you’d like submit your anonymous hopes, fears, or experiences to Climate Workers Anonymous, you can use this Tally survey or email climateworkersanonymous[at]protonmail.com, though I believe the Tally survey is more secure. Do not communicate anything you wouldn’t want a hacker to have access to, including an email address that could be linked to you if you email the account on Protonmail.

It is unclear what exactly these blogs will feature in the future! One obvious thing is that they can feature the text itself that was sent my way, so here they are in order of appearance:

1. I have so much optimism based on what I see working on a climate solution, and from the people I work with in my industry.
   
   But we need more corporate and government actions, fast.

2. I feel like we’re f***ed.

3. There are so many climate solutions that are promising. And there is so much possible.
   And it’s so goddamn hard to build them (speaking first hand) because enough corporates won’t take a risk on solutions fast enough.¹

4. Consumers don't care about climate, and they don't want to care about climate. Paraphrasing from a 2017 Tumblr post, "if your solution to a problem relies on 'everyone just...', then you don't have a solution. No one has ever 'just', no one ever will 'just'". Stop pitching climate to businesses like you're selling to a consumer, "this is easy, your friends will love it, the effects are immediate!".

5. There was a point in time where I was fairly convinced that sinking woodchips to the bottom of the ocean was somehow going to be one of the successful methods for carbon removal.

6. The CDR industry is stuck in a paradox. We want a flashy, well-funded, functioning market filled with high-quality tons, but markets inherently reward provision of cheaper services on the margins. As long as there are cheaper alternatives, whether those are emissions reductions or very low-quality removals, those will always edge out the higher-quality stuff across the entire population of the market. In this context, the venture capital model just won’t work for CDR as it inevitably results in monopolistic and anti-competitive behaviors, a race to the bottom in terms of quality, and attraction of profit-motivated individuals who cynically use science as a shroud for ruthless profiteering. The carbon credit game also feeds much of the moral hazard. No one wants to hear this, but for CDR to be truly successful, it needs to move away from a market-based model. Our adherence to it to date explains so many of the industry’s underlying struggles around buyers, funding, and scale. Building CDR should be a slow-and-steady, no-fail mission that avoids the boom-and-bust dynamics in commodities like oil and gold. It needs to be backed by policy, supported by local communities, rooted in environmentalism, and integrated into our way of life and industries in a way that can yield co-benefits beyond just CDR (although we’ll need a lot of pure-play CDR too). It’s not entirely clear what this would look like yet, but it’s our responsibility to build this.

I respect and admire the people who have already chosen to submit their analysis, stories, and feelings. You’d be very welcome to do the same.

Thanks so much for supporting this new project. It means a lot to me.

Sincerely,

Ross Kenyon

1. It is possible/likely that #s1-3 were meant to be a single submission.