Thanks so much for tuning in to Reversing Climate Change. I'm the host Ross Kenyon 2 sponsors right now, Rainbow and Philip Lee LLP. If you give me a couple minutes, I'll tell you about why they are very relevant to your interests. So listen up. If you follow me on Sub Stack or LinkedIn, you've probably seen me write for Rainbow recently. They have a very idiosyncratic approach to how science is commercialized and how engineering works within carbon
removal. And I really like working with them. I've learned a lot from the people there. They're very smart, thoughtful people and they're aiming to be the most developer centric registry out there. What's cool about Rainbow is how seriously they take field engineering experience.
They aren't. They're just to write a bunch of detached rules about how things should work in the abstract and then let project developers figure it out, know they are very serious about field engineering, about how operations actually work in the real world, and they take a rigorous yet philosophical approach. I'll link to those articles in the show notes in the sponsors
section. You should check them out because it will give you a very good idea of why I think Rainbow is a very cool company and one that you should consider doing business with. If you are a project developer and you're thinking about which registry to use for your next project, you should absolutely take a meeting with Rainbow and
see if there's a fit there. One thing to keep in mind that is often very important to the project developers that I've interviewed as a result of my work with Rainbow doing customer discovery work, just trying to wrap my head around the opportunities that they're seeing is how fast their certification process is. They typically quote around 3 months to issue carbon credits, which is very short. It goes by lickety split for registries.
So if you're a project developer, you're looking for a registry to use to certify and issue your carbon credits. Take a look at Rainbow links in the show notes. Thanks so much for listening. I'd also love to tell you about Philip Lee LLP. If you've been working in this space for really any amount of time, you probably have noticed that you do need competent counsel to do business here. The contracts that get signed are, frankly, pretty weird.
You're going to need help from a lawyer with a red pen, I'm sorry to inform you. Your only choice is basically who they should be. And if you are deciding who they should be, you should be considering Philip Lee LLP. They've won Environmental Finances VCM Law Firm of the Year for the last gosh, since 2023 essentially. It hasn't happened yet for 2026. I imagine they're a contender
for it this year as well. They are the largest legal team dedicated to the financing and development of carbon projects globally, and they have offices in the US, Europe, and the UK. One cool new thing I just learned actually is that they have been listed as a firm in Chambers Global as a global market leader in the area of climate change. This listing alliance, Philip Lee LLP, with around 15 to 20 of the leading law firms practicing in this practice area in the
entire world. So Congrats to Philip Lee LLP. Thank you to both Rainbow and Philip Lee LLP for your generous support of the show. You make it possible for me to dedicate so much time to putting out content that I hope is useful to our friends and peers and fellow travelers in the world of carbon removal, climate change, and carbon markets. Thanks so much. Here's the show.
Hey, thank you so much for listening to Reversing Climate Change. This is Ross Kenny, and I am a carbon removal entrepreneur, and I'm so excited to lay out one of the big interesting fights within carbon removal that if you don't already know about this, will be a nice little education and point you in some interesting directions.
It's come up on a number of shows recently and whether in oblique fashion, if you can infer from some of what's being discussed or explicitly, and it's most explicit in the show that I did with Hannah and Barkley from graphite. Graphite is taking waste biomass, drying it, packaging it in a polymer and bearing it, and they have very high carbon
efficiency as a result. Carbon efficiency expresses the rate of success at transforming the feedstock into the carbon removal, and how much of that original carbon actually makes it into a removal in a net sense. So in the case of something like graphite, they have very high carbon efficiency. They're basically just drying out this biomass, packaging it up and putting it in a hole in
the ground. Contrast that there's something like biochar that does burn and release carbon in the process of making it. So because it's using biomass, it's taking this carbon out of the fast carbon cycle and some of it is being re released to the atmosphere during pyrolysis. And so that's back in the fast carbon cycle where trees will reabsorb it again over time. And then we'll enter into the cycling process the biotch has created.
Some portion of that will remain fixed in the slow carbon cycle, or somewhere in between those two poles was stored for a much greater duration of time in the soil or the built environment or wherever it ends up. But it's not. The 90 ish percentage of carbon efficiency that graphite is getting could be half of that. And what's interesting about this is that depending on how you see the problem of climate change, you will likely have sympathies one way or the other.
I suspect you probably already had feelings in the way that I described this. Those are good to listen to, and you should listen to what your moral intuition is telling you about this characterization of carbon efficiency and how important it is or is not. If all you care about is getting the parts per million in the atmosphere down as quickly as possible, focusing on carbon efficiency makes a lot of sense.
You know that the biomass that is being measured for carbon efficiency, as much of it as possible, is being stored in durable fashion. There's not a lot of extra frills. Maybe there's some Co benefits that are attached to this. Graphite does detail several Co benefits that they believe that their approach to carbon removal offers to communities that host them, but in my opinion, it's not as robust as something like what biochar offers to
communities. Biochar, if you're not aware, is the process of cooking biomass without oxygen, that process called pyrolysis, that leads to highly porous, very high surface area carbon that durably stores carbon. The science is still going back and forth on whether biochar is good for hundreds of years or thousands of years. I don't actually think it's that important of a question. And interestingly, it doesn't seem that Frontier does either.
Frontier, the advanced market commitment for carbon removal doesn't buy biochar not for durability reasons, but because it's not carbon efficient, which is a really interesting market signal that we can talk some more about here. But biochar's ability to have that much surface area and porosity allows it to do really amazing work. It plugs into so many things. I mean, the joke with biochar people, we do a lot of memes of kind of poking up biochar people a lot. It's all in good fun.
I love and respect what y'all are trying to do. And I work with a lot of people who are doing pyrolysis for for various purposes. And it really is crucial work. But there is a funny sense with pyrolysis where it's all things to all people, to quote Paul, or it's simultaneously a dessert topping and a floor Polish and it's got everything in between. And you can make a toothpaste out of it and it goes in the built environment that is great for agronomic uses and blah,
blah, blah. It's kind of everything which becomes a a joke in and of itself. For instance, one thing I'm seeing a lot of that I think is is really fascinating is using pyrolysis in wastewater treatment and for biosolids. So literally, literally you can pyrolyze and a lot of human waste is filled with nasty chemicals at this point, very sorry to say. A lot of the material that makes it into biosolids in general and wastewater treatment have chemicals that are pretty nasty.
And the process of doing pyrolysis on the biosolids can obliterate many of these forever chemicals that would otherwise just permanently be traipsing their way through the hydrological cycle that would have us be re consuming it in various ways. And so being able to to to use pyrolysis in this way is really wonderful. And it's also amazing to see biochar in different grades be a good fit for storing in the built environment.
I've seen studies that have shown that biochar in concrete can make it much harder and longer lasting. Agricultural uses are one of the places where biochar gets talked about the most. And while we haven't seen the the mainstream uptake of biochar yet, very, very smart people are working on it. And it's a great thing to hear because it slows down water working its way out of the land, so it makes land more drought resistant because of its
porosity. And the way that the cations work, fertilizer stays in the soil longer. So you don't get things like eutrophication where there's nutrient runoff that go into the waterways. And then you have all this nitrogen that creates algae blooms. And then when the algae consumes, all of the free nitrogen creates this dead zone that's deoxygenated and is bad for the environment. And it's pretty nasty in places like the Chesapeake Bay and
other places. And because the fertilizer stays there longer, we need to produce fewer synthetics fertilizers. And if you can inoculate biochar with various types of fertility, it can kind of do all of these things at the same time. And, and more power to it. I think it's great. And this is just me freestyling here. And there are so many things for biochar that I don't even think
I know right now. The people who are working on creating products and applications of biochar are some of the most creative people in the space. They're very passionate. Sure, we like to ride them a little bit because they are a quirky bunch, but huge amounts of respect for what they're trying to do.
And you will notice that the amount of time that I had to devote just now to even a small fraction of what biochar is being used for right now is not equivalent to the time that I gave to graphite and bikers, which is biomass carbon removal and storage. BICRS, pronounced bikers, is the category that graphite falls into.
So biochar less carbon efficient, You know it's emitting some amount of carbon through pyrolysis that is making it less able to compete on carbon efficiency grounds for buyers who care a lot about carbon efficiency. But can't you hear it that there are still so many reasons to be doing biochar? There are so many problems with the agricultural system, the food system, toxicity. There are many other things that biochar can help us with beyond
nearly the climate benefit. So this is where we're going to zoom back out here and ask the big question. Do we care only about parts per million in the atmosphere or are we trying to solve what many people call the Poly crisis? You can listen to a show that I just did at the time of publishing. This will be two weeks ago. I did a show with Eugene Kerbachev from work on climate, and we talked about the Poly crisis and these embedded crises around. What's the joke?
This joke only really works in text, but it's an asterisk and gestures vaguely at everything. Things do not seem to be going very well right now. The world is feeling very precarious, unequal. Many of the natural systems that we've depended upon forever are under extreme amounts of stress. We're putting chemicals into the environment that are pretty nasty. There's a return of geopolitics, as people say, great power conflict is here.
Perhaps Pax Americana is a thing of the past, if it ever was. And the rules by which we developed our civilization don't seem to be going serving us very well, which is funny. I think when people start going to therapy, there's usually a precipitating cause. So as a kid, you're born into a family of origin and that also doesn't always go very well. The various ways that your parents treated you or even just tried their best and it didn't really give you exactly what you
needed. It's something that I think it's fair to say that most people, maybe all people, well, let's just say most people are still processing. And so some of the ways that you developed as a child to cope with this difficult circumstance, there comes a point in life where they no longer are helping you in the ways that you thought they were. I'll give an example. I think a lot of people, especially young men, grow up and video games become a very important part of their lives.
They're very immersive. They're extremely fun. They only get more fun as time goes on. For the most part, they just keep getting better and better. When you're young, you you have more time to goof around and to play games and it doesn't seem like that big of a deal. And then for some people, they perhaps find themselves in a relationship and maybe find themselves even married, having to work to earn enough of a living to support one's family and contribute in a meaningful way.
And maybe you used to get 3 hours a day and now you maybe get half an hour a day, and that's a really different experience. If you need several hours a day of video games to regulate your emotional state as you once did, life will show you that you actually don't have time to do that and still be the kind of adult you probably want to be. This isn't true in all cases. I'm sure you could find the right spouse or right lifestyle that would allow you to pursue
this to your heart's content. But like the more things you want to do in life, especially if you want to be a parent, you, you very quickly learn that you only have time for a couple things and they need to be things that are soul feeding and important to you. And when they're not, you start to notice like, wow, that put me in a bad state for the next day. I do not feel refreshed in the way that I would have hoped. And now there's even more pressure on me to go about my
life. I imagine if you're listening, you have had this experience or no People who have, and that's at that point, they start to realize, wow, the things that I've been doing for my entire life no longer serve me. I need help figuring something else out. I got to change my life. I need to go to therapy. I need to figure this out. And I think Poly crisis is a
good comparison to that. People who think about these nested crises in terms of the Poly crisis are also noticing that the what put us in this position, it's probably not going to be addressed by the same kinds of thinking that got us here. People love to quote the Albert Einstein maxim here. He said we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. For a bit spicier of a take, Audra Lords, the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
There's a sense here that we can't just use the same system as we broadly have now slap some carbon negativity on to it, you know, slap the top. You have no idea how much carbon negativity this baby can hold. To go back to that meme, we just can't do that. In their view, all of these systems are so entwined that this isn't a technocratic thing to fix. It's just like, it's not. It's not a machine that we need to oil and turn a couple screws on. It's bigger than that.
There's a Dwight Eisenhower quote that comes to mind here, too. He said if a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it. I think that's very much part of the Poly crisis way of thinking here is that we actually need to be addressing several complexly integrated problems at the same time. If all these problems are emerging from some of the same foundational, civilizational dysfunctions, mistakes, wrong turns, how far upstream do we need to go in order to figure out what needs to be done to
change it? So those are pretty good cases, right? I feel like I did both of them justice, both the Poly crisis folks and the PPM people. And I'm not trying to come down on one side or the other here. I've actually gone back and forth on this one a lot. My former company Nori, which was launched in 2017, the first or second carbon removal marketplace and registry depending on how you count it. And we very much took APPM obsession way of doing things and we wanted to get to
commodified carbon removal. We wanted it to be fungible against itself. We wanted a ton to be a ton. We said a ton is a ton is a ton. Many times in those early days it was more of an aspiration or desire than a true fact of reality. Because of course a ton is not a
ton. But the goal was to find out how we can create enough supply here and simplify across the dimensions upon which these tons were different from one another, and just focus on the main characteristics that could make them functionally equivalent, which could be something like the years of carbon stored. Maybe that was the denominator that we needed to just focus on and let everything else play
against one another. And then the hope was that once you had this sort of fungible commodity market trading system, you could do a lot of cool things with it. It's how price discovery works. You have a lot of money coming into this trying to figure out how to trade it, how to make money on IT. People would probably build derivatives on top of this. That would bring more financial play into the space and more actors and more interest and this would create hopefully a virtuous cycle.
And by the way, this is still a dream that's very latent. There are several groups in carbon removal either on the marketplace side or the registry side that have senior staff that have the right background to operationalize this approach as soon as it is is ready for it, like as soon as the market is mature enough for commodities and derivatives for carbon
removal. There are players in the space that are absolutely going to jump on this and are already thinking about it, and we're just waiting for the demand to come rushing in and for decisions to be made about how to create fungibility across different types of credits. Assuming that carbon removal, you know, doesn't face such a bad time in the next couple years that it goes into cockroach mode, then I think we're going to see this at some
point. So it's possible that some version of this does come to exist, and I think that will likely result in a lot more carbon removal being transacted, show a much more obvious source of demand and price discovery that will help people make better financial plans. And when things are easier to plan, it's much easier for conservative money to enter the space and therefore carbon removal starts to grow. And that's a really good thing.
Again, though, listen to your heart while I'm telling you these things. Are you hearing me talk about the commodification of carbon removal and it is it making you feel yucky inside? Because if so, then you probably have some of this Poly crisis way of thinking in you. Because the goal is not to simplify this beautiful diverse world into a couple small characteristics.
And then have financial traders who frankly are overpaid and don't need to have as prominent a space in our society as they currently do making all the money, while the people who are actually removing the carbon are basically just watching from the sidelines as price takers. In a commodity market which doesn't really serve agricultural producers very well, why should it serve biochar producers any better?
So whatever. That's sort of a pecuniary, selfish maybe case for why you might not like it, But also some parts of it are deeper than that. They're ideological. Maybe you don't like it because it's only solving part of the problem, and it's not even solving it in a particularly thoughtful way. It's not solving it by acknowledging how complexly nested all of these problems are.
It's doing it by creating a 2 dimensional world where they've only pulled out the durability of the carbon removal. And it's just trading carbon removal durability without noticing that. OK, even if we got rid of PPM, the biosphere is undergoing immense stress right now.
Biodiversity loss and toxicity and the livelihoods that depend upon them are creating political problems, and we can't just look to this one number to rule them all kind of thing to consider ourselves successful at reversing climate change. You can feel that way even while noting that a commodity market for carbon removal might be the best way to remove the amount of carbon necessary from the atmosphere to actually bring us back to a stable and livable climate, both of those things at
the same time. I actually think this is a very productive friction to have within carbon removal. I'm not on any particular side of this one. I'm glad that we have support for each approach going in here, and it's going to appeal to different funders and buyers and
investors. And that's a good thing, because I think we need the Poly crisis people here to remind the commodification people that they're a little abstractions on the computer that they're trading are cool and all, but also not to forget how important the rest of this work is and to recognize how small of a piece of the climate puzzle they're actually addressing when they're only looking at parts per
million in the atmosphere. And I think it's very useful to have financial people involved in carbon removal who are thinking about commodification because they are there to poke at polycrisis people because sometimes polycrisis people can be sloppy and holistic in ways that and trying to solve every problem, you may end up solving no problem at all because it's really hard to do one thing well.
It's hard for me to imagine that one could do all of these things at the exact same time and make it all work and hang together in a way that is financially viable and also communicable to the average person, which is no small feat. And the comms part of this is super hard. Some of the most common pieces of advice that I give to startups, they're all story related. And look, I, I told you a complex story here today.
There's two antagonists and I'm trying to create some sort of like dialectical synthesis between them of, OK, they can merge in this way, They provide productive tension in this way. And that's really cool. And that's like a somewhat complex story. So if you're listening to this and you like it, maybe you like engaging with ideas to this extent, but a lot of people don't. Complex stories and climate are really challenging. Have you ever tried to sell someone a product that was a
little bit hard to understand? Many people will want you to stop talking as soon as possible so they can get back to their brain not hurting. And not only that, but also some of these ideas are inherently threatening to the ego. If you go back and listen to the Eugene Kerbischev show, he talks about how he actually really didn't want what he was reading about the Poly crisis to be true. He was reading Daniel Schmuckenberger or listening to
his podcast or whatever. These ideas were freaking him out and he did not want the world to be in as bad of shape as it was presented to him and even him. Eugene strikes me as a compassionate, but as he says, noble kind of person who wants good things to happen for the planet, for the people, for all sentience that exists. He just strikes me as someone who is probably a well wisher of them. And even still, it was hard for his heart to be open enough to take in that.
The crisis, as we're staring into it, is this big and this difficult and is not merely one about pulling greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. That's a really big part of it, a very important part of it. But if that's all you're able to see, then it's only a fraction of the work that he's doing. And already that's such, oh man, it's such an enormous task. Just that one thing alone is already so huge and the life's work of of many, many people to, to do properly.
What I would hope for when you listening is perhaps a better way of understanding the group that you don't feel as much sympathy for. If you're a Poly crisis person, maybe you can feel a little bit of sympathy and respect for the people who are so obsessed with parts per million that they actually have a chance of, I think, bringing that number down
by their focus. And if you are someone who is very obsessed with PPM, I hope this podcast can nudge you in the direction of, hey, like that's a big part of this. But also you found the one true number that should be maximized, but you actually didn't. And you also need to respect that. There's a lot of complexity
outside of this one number. And the people who are are doing this, who are poking at you, maybe saying that these tools and this approach are not going to solve all of the problems that face humanity at this moment. I think it's also worth listening to. And if you have resistance to these ideas in your heart, I would try to make sure that you're not opposed to them for egoic reasons. Make sure that you are opposed to them because you think they are incorrect.
And why are they incorrect? And are there any parts of what they're saying that they aren't incorrect about that It was actually a really good point that you should take back to your own way of thinking. That can make it better, stronger, or just notice the limits to your ideas such that you can become a wiser person. I think the answer to all those things should be yes, and I can conclude it there if you're listening. You work in bikers or biochar.
I hope that you think I was fair to your work. I have a lot of respect for everyone who's doing this, and I really don't take a side here. I'm glad that everyone is bringing their own unique approach to this, and they're appealing to different kinds of people too. The goal is not permanent dominance of one way of thinking over the other. Your way of thinking can change not just because you learn things immature, but because the world has changed around you. Sometimes it's happened to me.
I thought I believed one thing and I didn't even change my mind. But the world has changed so much around me that the application of those ideas radically changed the values, application of those, the values maybe didn't change, but the application of those ideas change. I think being able to listen to that and to be fluid enough to adapt when the circumstances
change is really important. And doing work like this where you're able to sketch out where the disagreements are and also to pay attention to your intuition and what your gut is saying about when you about ideas. Because I think that's a really important thing to listen to you as well, that people who come from a more rational and quantitative background sometimes lose sight of. And I think it's wise not to. Thanks for listening.
Godspeed to everyone doing carbon removal in the most or the least carbon efficient ways possible. Thanks for doing all that you do, Bye for now.