Welcome to the first episode of Climate Workers Anonymous. If you are listening on your usual podcast app, you might notice that the old feed for Carbon Removal Newsroom has been officially repurposed for this new project. It’s hosted by me, Ross Kenyon. I’m a former cofounder of the Nori carbon dioxide removal marketplace and registry. This show is a dedicated space for the hard, often unspoken truths of working in the climate and carbon dioxide removal (CDR) sectors.
Founding a company or working in the climate sector is notoriously difficult. Beyond the business mechanics, climate workers face a unique burden: they are actively trying to capture a dilute gas and stabilize the atmosphere for the survival of humanity, often while relying on an economic system that doesn’t reward this behavior at scale. (We still haven’t quite figured out how to even decarbonize…)
Workers and founders frequently have to project unwavering strength to buyers and investors. They have to suck up to companies that they might actively wish didn’t exist in the first place. Expressing this feeling, or any of the doubts, exhaustion, or frustrations can feel like a massive professional risk. Bottling up these feelings takes a severe emotional toll.
When I was a teenager, I really loved the collaborative art project PostSecret, which encouraged (and actually, still encourages), people to share their true feelings about things without attribution. Climate Workers Anonymous continues in this mold and invites you to share your hidden thoughts, moral dilemmas, artwork, and naive hopes without fear of career repercussions. Whether you are wrestling with the ethics of doing business with billionaires who seemingly don’t care about much of anything but themselves, or of pulling polluting companies into marginally better behavior, or are simply exhausted by the quickening grind towards a world immiserated by the rise of right-wing populism, this is a place to be heard.
Telling the truth about the reality of working in climate is a productive, necessary action. It is anti-authoritarian calisthenics. I hope you will join us in this experiment!
Send us your stories for audio and text publication here or at climateworkersanonymous@protonmail.com.
Thanks for listening!
Sincerely,
Ross Kenyon
Recommended supplemental listening: “When Bad Companies Buy Good Carbon Removal” from my other show, Reversing Climate Change
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: If you’re hearing this through a podcast app right now, this might be a surprise. It’s a different title from the show it replaced. You may not even know which show it replaced of yours. I’ve had this happen to me with podcasts before. Sometimes an old feed gets repurposed for a new show. This is common practice in podcasting, and I wouldn’t do this unless I thought it would be something that would be interesting to many of the subscribers of Carbon Removal Newsroom.
This is Ross Kenyon. I launched Carbon Removal Newsroom, oh, I’m not even sure how long ago it was. 2018, 2019, something like that. It used to be just me. I co-founded a company called Nori, which was a carbon removal marketplace and registry, launched in 2017. The company closed down in 2024, and I ended up acquiring many of the creative assets of Nori, including the memes. So if you, if you follow carbon removal memes, uh, that is a project I am so honored to carry on, and both of Nori’s podcasts, Reversing Climate Change, which I host, and Carbon Removal Newsroom, which at least for this feed, uh, hasn’t had anything on it. I’m sure you’ve noticed.
It’s been a repository of the old episodes of Carbon Removal Newsroom in both the oldest iteration of it and then when it became a panelist show hosted by Radhika Moolgavkar later into the show’s run. I really loved making this show. It’s something that I hope will exist as a record, an oral history of the early days and some of the debates that existed within carbon removal as it started to commercialize in the late 20-teens.
I’ve thought about what our industry needs for a while. Does it need a reboot of Carbon Removal Newsroom? Or does it need something thematically similar but, with some more zhuzh or a different slant on it perhaps. And I never quite came up with anything that I felt comfortable replacing it with. That is no longer true. I am happy now that I think I have found something to place on this feed. It’s called Climate Workers Anonymous.
This concept grew out of these small group off the record conversations that I was facilitating at the last two Carbon Unbounds. The themes of these campfires were all related to how hard it is to work in carbon dioxide removal. I imagine if you’re subscribed to this feed, you know what that is. But it’s various forms of taking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it in some kind of fashion for some amount of time.
Founding a company is already notoriously difficult. The sheer number of things one needs to be good at or at least competent at in order to pull this off successfully is enormous, and a fair amount of it is luck as well. Being in the right place at the right time, not being too early, not being too late. But also, we’re all trying to capture a dilute gas from ambient air and do something with it, and it’s not like selling electrons or it’s not like selling tomatoes. You know, no one strictly needs these things. Maybe in some cases they do, but not to the extent that the atmosphere needs to be balanced so that we can have a healthy, stable, livable climate that is not producing more uncertainty and chaos, which is a world that, uh, I am fearful of.
I’m looking into the future and I’m scared of what might happen. It does not feel like we are coming to grips with really where we are as a planetary civilization. And I find that to be deeply unsettling. This work needs to happen. But most of the time, it’s individually irrational for companies to pay to pick up the bill. No one’s forcing them to. They can do it themselves if they have a culture that demands that or rewards that kind of altruistic behavior. But as a whole, we’re just not doing this anywhere near the scope at which we need to be doing in order to balance the climate, let alone bring it back to pre-industrial levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
And these founders or even employees at a lot of these carbon dioxide removal project developers and tech developers and those who are working at the various enablement platforms here have to project a lot of strength. You don’t wanna look weak in front of buyers or investors. Expressing some amount of doubt or frustration or uncertainty might feel a little bit like showing one’s throat. It can be really dangerous. And so a lot of founders or people who are working in climate and carbon dioxide removal, I think they carry around a lot of feelings with them that are difficult to express. And sometimes maybe they even deny it to themselves. To found something successfully, in some cases, one might need to believe so, so desperately and so intensely that one denies it even to oneself the true emotional toll of trying to do this. There are easier ways to make a living than founding a company. There are much easier ways of making a living than founding a carbon dioxide removal company, and that’s true of many businesses within climate as well.
These small group campfires were so rewarding because people felt free to really open up. I respected the people who came very much. People really wanted to, talk about how maddening this can be to be trying to help the world, even though the world seemingly does not want to help itself. We’re trying to do something, a collective project that will make humanity’s experience on Earth much more pleasant and smooth, and yet we are doing things that are setting us back in that goal, that are unnecessarily cruel. It just doesn’t seem like we’ve figured out how to live well together on Earth, and how terribly frustrating that is. And then to see things like the world’s first trillionaire with an initial public offering at least partially bent on colonizing Mars. And this isn’t some new insight here, but we haven’t even figured out how to do this super well. So long as we have people who are dying of preventable illness on Earth, I don’t know that we’ve earned the right to grow beyond the planet.
I think until there’s a little bit more kindness built into the system, It’s just really hard for me to get excited about things like that right now, which is terrible. I wanna be in a position to celebrate humanity becoming transplanetary. I think there’s a future where we can do that in an ethical and beautiful way, and I do not think we are there, and that is painful. And those sentiments I just expressed are borderline naive. You might be listening and think that I sound like a true knucklehead, and that’s okay. I am increasingly comfortable expressing naive sentiments aloud and in public.
I used to be much more tight about these things, worried that I can display my, uh, business credibility by knowing how financial markets work. Being hard-nosed about how decisions can and should get made and bringing environmental discussions down to a level where even the most self-interested, jerky person could still accidentally become a climate hero just because it made business sense. And if you’ve been listening to Reversing Climate Change for a long time, you might connect this to something like Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees. Where people don’t really know why they’re doing what they’re doing, but somehow it leads to collective wellbeing. Just these individual people all working on their own little project somehow adds up to something much better, not requiring public spiritedness, not requiring altruism, not requiring a large capacity for mercy, for understanding, for humility. We could just do it without that. Wouldn’t it be easier?
Not everyone is ready. I certainly wasn’t. It took me a long time to lead a little bit more from the heart and to be comfortable talking about this stuff in public. I suspect there are people out there listening right now. Some of you may be disgusted by your customers. You might think the world would be better off if they didn’t exist at all and they just closed up shop. But they’re your customer, and surely it’s better that they buy from you than do nothing at all or buy from a rival. Even admitting thoughts like that, even though they’re relatively anodyne, it is very difficult to say something like that in public about a customer or a prospective customer that wouldn’t endanger your position with your employer. It’s really challenging to tell the truth. And even in a field as pro-social and as noble as climate. It doesn’t seem much easier to tell the truth here than it does elsewhere.
When I was a teenager. There was a collective art project I really liked called PostSecret. How it worked was that if you had a difficult feeling that you wanted to express without attribution, you could make a postcard, make a little piece of art, put your sentence on it that you felt, and mail it in to be published anonymously. I imagine they used to distribute it in many ways, but the way that I most strongly associate with it was in a book collection. I suspect there was more than one, but I had one that I looked through quite a lot. My model for Climate Workers Anonymous is PostSecret for climate.
If you have feelings, experiences, thoughts, ideas, naive hopes that you would never want to say out loud, you can send them in anonymously at the link and I will read them on your behalf. I’ll put it up on Substack as text, and the podcast will be published through there as well. If you want to continue listening on this feed everything should be properly configured, that you don’t need to do anything at all. I’ll check and make sure. It might be a little bit bumpy here to start, but I’ll make sure that it continues apace.
But this is also going to take place on Substack. I’d like this to be a visual thing too. If you’d like to make some art about how it feels, you wanna make a collage, you have something to say without words, if you wanna express something that you don’t necessarily feel super comfortable for professional reasons or otherwise, you go ahead and submit it. The link is in the show notes to submit. I will do my best to preserve anonymity. I certainly won’t say your name. And the form through which one submits. We’ll make it so that you don’t have to enter your name or anything like that.
I was speaking with a friend about this recently, and she had asked me, “Does this lead to any action? Is this just people complaining?”. And my response, naive that it might be, is that I believe telling the truth about what it’s like to work in climate is an action. That’s not just complaining. The truth shall set you free, as the verse goes. I’m not a 12-stepper, but I’ve read some of their literature for various reasons, and I’ve come across their work through books or reading people like Gabor Mate and things like that. If you’re a friend of Bill W’s, you are often a, a, uh, a fount of funny little witticisms and, and pieces of, of wisdom that’s been distilled in very memorable ways.
They have an acronym that I love for denial. Don’t even notice I am lying. A good portion as I understand it about the 12-step program and its various instantiations is that much of addiction has a root in dishonesty, an inability to tell the truth about the suffering, about the cravings, about what one’s brain and choices have led one to do in a way that takes responsibility for this while also offering mercy to self and others.
And that can lead to shame. The relationship between shame and addiction is profound and mutually reinforcing. And being able to speak openly about one’s addiction is a big part of recovery.
It’s a beautiful idea. i’m certainly not the first person to point to humanity’s relationship with the biosphere, with the Earth. In a way that rhymes with addictive behavior. But that’s really not what I’m trying to point to exactly.
I’ve been a part of conversations where it’s a question of should we do business with this big company that is frankly, not so nice. they might be choosing to do some type of climate activism for their own reasons. maybe they’re doing it because one of the internal teams really supports it and they’re trying to change the company as a whole. Maybe they ran the cost benefit and realized they could get more marketing benefit out of it through some type of climate activism than doing nothing at all. Maybe. Who knows?
If you are at a company and you say, “You know, I really feel uncomfortable about doing business with this company. It’s better that they do this than they don’t, but I don’t really respect what they’re doing. I don’t even know that I believe it.”. We might be offering them moral cover that will slow down them being regulated because they’re doing something and maybe that looks like voluntary action will do enough. Maybe we’re actually, cloaking them and giving them an ability to operate differently by even participating in this.
If you say that at the wrong company with people who have hard noses and maybe they’re looking at their cash flow statements and noticing that, “Well, we have six months of runway, so how are you going to replace this with some other company that your, uh, wishy-washy do-goodery feelings are going to be okay with?”. Business environments typically incent behavior that exonerates customers and tries to find the best possible story to do this because you hope on net throughout the existence of one’s company that it balances out, that more good is done than bad, et cetera.
And even if that is ultimately the conclusion that the company draws, and you might even endorse that it’s better to do business with this company than to do nothing and let them, uh, continue without any climate action at all. It’s an open question, and often the details matter quite a bit. If you said this at many companies, even if you just wanted to sit with the feeling of how tormenting this is, that you are in a climate space and have to think about this in a way this kind of moral decision is frowned upon. Many leadership teams, this is not the kind of thing that they wanna hear about. It’s bad for business in many of these cases.
And one of those main therapeutic lessons is you don’t necessarily have to have all the answers. Feeling a feeling doesn’t necessarily invite solutions from others. You probably don’t even want that a lot of the times that you’re feeling feelings. Many times you’d like to feel the feeling, express the feeling, process it, maybe just be heard. And I think telling the truth, not practicing denial, don’t even notice I am lying about the work and climate, I think can be spiritually productive and healthy.
If you’ve listened this far, I doubt I need to do much more convincing of you that it could be a really nice thing both to listen to and to contribute to. If you’d like to contribute, there is a link in the show notes, and I will put this on Substack. There is a form. If you are really paranoid about anonymity, maybe use a VPN, maybe find ways to protect your privacy. I’ll do what I can on my end. I can’t guarantee against any future hacks or, or things like that. I, I mean, there’s a limit to what I can do. So limit the amount of information that you share is the best piece of advice that I can give you if you’d like to participate in this project. If you’d like to follow along, you can stay subscribed here, and you should subscribe, on Substack as well.
I’d like this to live beyond only carbon dioxide removal. That’s the world that I come from for the most part. Though this is true of lots of different types of work in energy, in climate. It’s a really difficult time to do this work. I’m hoping that this small, small work might make it more possible to have real conversations. I’m hoping that it might embolden you to be braver about what you share with others. Because we believe climate is important and urgent, right?
Now is not a good time, I think, to be focused on making sure everything that we say is perfectly palatable to, the more status quo-oriented business-as-usual parties here. If we think this is a really catastrophic issue that will only get worse from here. It’s our duty, at least for those willing to assume it, to try to speak the truth. And if some of that truth needs to be anonymous, and I can help you do that, let’s do it. The link is in the show notes if you’d like to submit any of your thoughts about your work in climate, adjacent to climate, about climate. You don’t have to work in this space if you wanna contribute something. Send in some art, there’s also a ProtonMail email that I have set up for this too, if you’d like to send in something like that.
Also, if this is just not what you’re into because you subscribed to the Carbon Removal Newsroom feed and this is now Climate Workers Anonymous, no hard feelings. If you wanna stick around for some real talk. I hope you will. This is gonna be an experiment. It probably will not stay in this format. I don’t even know if this name is gonna be the same. In fact, I didn’t even expect to talk about that denial thing and the 12-step program. Uh, and yet I’m just now putting in my head that, uh, it’s Climate Workers Anonymous, which does have a 12-step feel to it. So that makes me laugh. We’re gonna experiment. We’re gonna find a way to do something true and beautiful, and I don’t even care if that sounds fairly naive, and I would very much like you to do it with me. Treat me as a vessel. I’m going to try to help get more of these stories out. Thanks for listening. I really appreciate you. thanks for doing all the important work of sticking around in climate even when the going gets tough.
