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
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thank you to our sponsors. You really make this so that it's something that in a busy life with lots of competing priorities, I'm able to keep coming back and making more, 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.
Additionally, for $5 a month, you can get access to bonus content and all of the ads I don't read myself are taken out. So the link to become a paid subscriber is in there. 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.