Reversingclimatechange Podcasts

Robert Höglund refers to himself as a "chronicler of CDR" or Carbon Dioxide Removal. He has established himself as an authority in this area, providing enlightening insights through his popular blog, Marginal Carbon. His significant contributions to Milywire, a CDR fund, coupled with his extensive involvement in various roles as a Climate Advisor, …

In this episode, Ross and Siobhan are joined by Ongeleigh Underwood and Nikki Batchelor to delve into the newly released report from the Circular Carbon Network, an initiative of XPRIZE. The report provides valuable insights into the state of the Circular Carbon Market, addressing crucial questions such as who is building Carbon Dioxide Removal (CD…

Beast and Cleaver, a butcher shop and charcuterie in Seattle, is on a mission to elevate the craft of butchery to true artistry. They want you to eat meat of higher quality, and yes, less of it. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, the founder of Beast and Cleaver, Kevin Smith, joins Ross to discuss his butcher shop’s unique approach to loc…

Following 2015’s UN Paris Agreement, each signatory country submitted a strategy indicating how they intend to decarbonize their economy. While much of the work comes from cutting emissions, plans can also include a ‘residual emissions’ category- that’s where carbon removal comes in. But recent research from our panelist Holly Buck and her colleagu…

Last year Planetary Technologies won the Carbon Xprize Milestone award for their ocean-based CDR method. That same year they started testing their ocean alkalinity enhancement process in a small trial in England, partnering with the local water company. The test showed improved alkalinity and reduced CO2 in local waters. Now the company plans to do…

PlantVillage won the Carbon XPRIZE milestone award in 2022, and was awarded one million dollars. It aims to lift 200 million African farming families out of poverty. They are working to capture and sell a billion tonnes of carbon per year using biochar sequestration by integrating trees with crops on farms and using lumber for biochar. So what exac…

In December 2022, the carbon credit platform Puro added a methodology for enhanced rock weathering (ERW) credits. This announcement opens the door for the ERW to be sold into the billion-dollar voluntary carbon marks. ERW is one of the oldest known forms of carbon removal, long studied by geologists. But it is only recently that a growing number of…

What goes into the making of a carbon removal meme? How many pitches does it take before magic comes out? Why do some many captions end up as emojis?!Nori's Memelab: Ross Kenyon, Siobhan Montoya Lavender, and Asa Kamer film their writer's room meeting on a lark to show how we go from a notion to something we think worthy of sharing with our communi…

CarbonCapture is looking to build a large-scale direct air capture facility in Rock Springs, Wyoming, a town with deep roots in the coal industry. And last fall, the company invited the community to a town hall event to learn more about the initiative, known as Project Bison, and its aim to remove five million tonnes of CO2 annually by 2030. How di…

A massive amount of seaweed known as the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt is growing as a response to climate change. To date, it has expanded to a width twice that of the United States. When sargassum reaches the coast, it causes human health problems, destroys ecosystems, and wipes out tourism, usually in communities that don’t have the resources to…

About one year ago we were joined on this show by Toby Bryce, who works with the volunteer-advocacy group the OpenAir Collective on a variety of projects that support the growth of carbon removal. Toby told us about the groups work advocating for state-level legislation called the Carbon Dioxide Removal Leadership Act in New York State. Since then,…

The ramifications of Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse two weeks ago are still rippling across the global economy. SVB was a major lender to VCs, and served silicon valley: two factors that meant its rapid demise will affect the climate tech industry. SVB worked with 1550 climate tech companies, and gave the industry billions in loans. Other banks may…

For people living in affluent parts of the world in the 21st century, we are used to preserving food by way of refrigeration. But this technique is quite new when you consider that people have been preserving food through fermentation for at least 10,000 years. Our ancestors experimented with fermenting to make food more delicious, more easily dige…

The Canadian company Planetary is currently seeking regulatory approval to release Magnesium Hydroxide into the ocean off the coast of Cornwall, England. Another ocean CDR firm, Running Tide, announced last week that they are partnering with global consulting giant Deloitte to evaluate the quality of their carbon credits. Last month, a research tea…

In the last five years, an enormous amount of effort has been put into technical and scientific innovation around carbon removal. But what about financial innovation? How can we create more opportunities to finance carbon removal at scale? And what does innovation look like in carbon removal markets? Peter Olivier is Head of New Markets at UNDO, a …

Blue carbon has emerged as a popular climate solution, with offset marketplaces like Verra and Gold Standard eyeing blue carbon methodologies and Salesforce and the World Economic Forum teaming up to announce their own blue carbon credit framework at COP27 last year. Crediting for blue carbon usually means protecting ecosystems like mangrove forest…

The Emission Trading Systems is the cap-and-trade carbon market that Europe has been using since 2005 to decarbonize its economy. Companies have to pay to pollute, and this week that price hit an all-time high as it traded for over 100 euros/ton. In the first segment of today’s show Na’im Merchant and Asa Kamer discuss the significance of that mile…

Should carbon removal be included in institutional climate plans? It’s a debate that’s taken place across business, government, and science in recent years. The rise of the net-zero framework has sharpened the focus on how and when organizations should decarbonize. And how carbon removal fits in. Last week two influential organizations weighed in o…

Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, involves sequestering carbon dioxide emissions from a point source, whereas carbon removal takes existing emissions out of ambient air. And there are a lot of people in the climate community who are for carbon removal and against CCS, arguing that we should shut down these point sources and focus on renewable ene…

In January, a team of researchers led by the University of Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment released a report titled “The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal.” The authors called it the first global assessment of the field and what gaps need to be closed to scale carbon removal. The 101-page report covered how much CDR currently …

You can judge the progress of an industry by its number of sh*tty first drafts. And if we have any hope of getting to gigatonne-scale carbon removal by 2030, we need a greater diversity of ideas in the CDR space. We need entrepreneurs who dare to think differently. We need more sh*tty first drafts. So, what can we do to encourage this kind of radic…

Startups in the CDR space need to succeed quickly if we want to reverse climate change before time runs out. But the current system requires that climatetech founders often devote time to pitching VCs and filling out multiple grant applications. Time that would be better spent developing their solutions. So, what can we do to connect emerging carbo…

Where are the buyers? That’s the question CDR-observer and climate advisor Robert Höglund asked in a much-discussed recent post. Höglund points out that while significant growth occurred for CDR through voluntary markets in 2022, the number of large buyers is low and growing slowly. He called the market “upside down”: lots of marketplaces, fewer co…

While large, industrial cheesemakers are known for consistency and scale, small operations like Uplands Cheese make boutique cheeses unique to the land where they’re produced. And these small, pasture-based dairy farms have their own unique concerns when it comes to climate change. So, how is extreme weather already affecting operations like Upland…

In 2021 the U.S. congress passed the bipartisan Infrastructure bill, which alongside funding for roads and bridges, included $3.5 billion for 4 DAC demonstration hubs. Each will be a large-scale DAC facility, and they may be the first engineered CDR built at scale in the U.S. Since the bill was passed, DAC-watchers and interested entrepreneurs have…

Last month, the non-profit Carbon Drawdown Initiative published a blog post featuring pictures of 11 projects across the world where researchers were spreading basaltic rock dust onto farm fields. This technique is known as enhanced weathering, and the post shows an upward trend in popularity. According to the post, the projects photographed cumula…

Much has been written about the European Theater in World War II. But the war in the Pacific Theater was the largest naval war ever fought. It covered the entire breadth of the Pacific Ocean, and much of the fighting took place in remote, wild environments. How did the conflict impact those environments heretofore untouched by the outside world? An…

It's our last business episode of 2022. It's been a newsworthy year for startups, corporate commitments, and investing in carbon removal, and December has been no different. This week we'll talk about a grab-bag of headlines: Prince William came to the U.S. to give a promising carbon storage startup $1 million (among other things). A major investor…

With a problem as monumental as the climate crisis, we have a tendency toward proportionality bias. We often believe that the issue has a single cause and can only be solved with a few large-scale solutions. But in the case of climate change, a diversity of solutions may be faster and more effective than putting all our eggs in a few big baskets. A…

In our final policy episode of the year we’re going to look back at some of the biggest news in CDR policymaking in 2022. Some of the topics we took a look back on- COP27 At COP27 this year, each member country of Mission Innovation’s Carbon Removal Launchpad committed to build at least one pilot facility and contribute towards a collective fund of…

Back in April of this year, Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta, and McKinsey announced a joint project to invest $925 million into carbon removal by 2030. Using an Advanced Market Commitment structure, the group aims to provide a source of stable demand and revenue to potential CDR companies to help the industry grow. In November, Frontier offered a n…

Of all philanthropy globally, only a couple percentage points go to climate in general. And of that couple percentage points, only something like 2% of climate giving is dedicated to carbon removal. The problem is, we need to fund several gigatonnes of carbon removal per year by 2050 to combat climate change. And that’s going to cost hundreds of bi…

Cheese can be both rarified and common. It is also an industry that impacts and is impacted by climate change. Today’s guest is author and cheese expert, Liz Thorpe. Liz is known for working her way up at New York City’s Murray’s Cheese shop, and taking it from a specialty shop to kiosks in Kroger stores across America, making cheese accessible and…

The U.S. elections provided a boost to a President who has overseen climate action, world leaders are gathering in Egypt for COP27 to discuss our climate future, and what could be the next Enron has crashed crypto. What does it all mean for the business of carbon removal?? Join us this week to learn more- Susan thinks this election was a big win fo…

To tackle the climate change problem, we need to move traditional industries closer to net-zero and create new industries from scratch. But how do you build a new carbon removal industry, for example? What is the best way to nurture startups in the climatetech space? Jennifer Wagner is a Breakthrough Energy Business Fellow where she helps early-sta…

The first cleantech bubble burst in the oughts, but the industry didn’t go away. And now, we’ve entered a second big wave of "climatetech" investment. So, is this wave more promising than the first? Are we moving into a golden age for climatetech? Or is it too dissimilar to make comparisons? Joel Makower is Cofounder and Chairman of GreenBiz, a lea…

We planned an episode this week about carbon removal policy in the next Congress. At the time of recording we still don’t know which party will control either chamber. Since it looks most likely that the GOP will win at least the House of Representatives, we focused this episode on the prospect for bipartisan CDR policy opportunities. While Joe Bid…

Progressives generally support regulations that protect the environment. But the permitting process has become so complex that it can take five years and 500 pages of documentation to get a project off the ground. And that red tape is holding up the clean energy projects we need to reverse climate change. Chris Barnard is Policy Director at the Ame…

As the number of blockchain-enabled climate solutions multiplies, founders need funding to get their projects off the ground. Ben West is Head of Causes at Gitcoin, a company that helps early-stage crypto projects get funding. In his role, Ben supports Gitcoin’s climate solutions, DE&I, decentralized science, and advocacy rounds. On this episode of…

If you’ve read about carbon removal online, you’ve seen the refrain, “just plant trees”! It’s true that a living tree draws down co2 as it grows, but can mass forestation slow climate change? That math of forest carbon sequestration is complicated. But a lot of government climate plans, ESG investing rules, and most of the carbon offset markets are…

To facilitate carbon removal at gigaton scale, we need investors to put their money in climate solutions. But VCs are often used to investing in in bits, not atoms. Climatetech hardware is more expensive and more challenging to replicate than software in many cases. And it’s more challenging to achieve orders of magnitude growth in a physical envir…

Darwin and others theorized that evolution was about the survival of the fittest. But when Peter Kropotkin followed up on Darwin’s research, he discovered the competition was only part of the story of evolution in nature. And Kropotkin argued that cooperation and collaboration among organisms also helps them evolve. So, why is Darwin’s narrative th…

Just a few years ago, DAC technology existed exclusively on a lab bench. This year the industry raised over $1 billion in VC funding, with over 50 funded startups in existence. While there are still technological hurdles to overcome to bring CDR to scale, funding also needs to be diversified and innovated, something we’ve discussed before on this s…

When corn is harvested, the remaining corn stover either gets tilled into the soil or left on top. But what if we took a portion of that corn stover, converted it into carbon-rich bio-oil, and pumped it deep underground? Peter Reinhardt is Cofounder and CEO of Charm Industrial, a carbon removal company that is working on a fleet of mobile pyrolyzer…

Lyn Stoler and Sonam Velani have coined the phrase Climate Industrialism to describe the optimistic, action-oriented response to climate change they already see happening in many communities around the world. Lyn and Sonam define Climate Industrialism as ‘a social and economic system built on the creation of climate technologies that yield human an…

Does the carbon removal tech you’re developing have a shot at being cost-competitive in the real world? How might you reduce the cost of a given CDR technology? And how do you convince government funders or investors that your carbon removal idea is viable? A techno-economic assessment or TEA answers these questions. So, what is involved in conduct…

The easier it is to participate in a sustainability program like Nori, the less motivation it requires for farmers to enroll. But the current lack of digitization in the ag space makes it challenging for farmers to get paid for carbon removal. So, is there an easy way to track agricultural data and compensate farmers for regenerative practices? Dan…

A lot of good comes from travel. It gives us a chance to disconnect and recharge. It exposes us to new things and helps us connect with nature and other people. Plus, we contribute to the local economies in the places we visit. But travel is not always good for planet. And the climate-conscious among us often feel guilty about the emissions we crea…

In July, over 40 carbon removal startups announced the launch of a new industry group: The Carbon Business Council. Since then, the list of members has grown past 70 companies. The group’s goal is to serve as a “resource for our members, lawmakers, the energy industry, and the environmental community to advocate for the responsible growth of the ca…