The wildfires in Los Angeles have gripped the country this past week. How could so much valuable real estate in prestigious zip codes populated at least in part by the rich and famous burn without recourse? Today's Reversing Climate Change podcast sees alumna of the show, Allison Wolff, return to discuss Vibrant Planet and the LA wildfires. We were originally scheduled just to catch up because it had been too long, but it turned out to be a serendipitous podcast. Allison has been working on unde...
Jan 14, 2025•46 min•Season 1Ep. 331
Content warning: This episode discusses a scene in a video game that involves sexual assault during war. If you'd like to skip that section, it is from 7:57-8:35. There is a response that discusses the ethical choices in the game beyond that point, but it is more abstract and general about choices. Video games have not historically been amazing at storytelling. Games prioritize mechanics and gameplay while story takes a backseat. But that isn’t the case at 11 bit studios , which have produced so...
Nov 12, 2024•47 min•Season 1Ep. 330
In discussions about technology, and maybe especially within climatetech, the concept of the "Faustian bargain" is common. But what does it actually mean, and is it as simple as concept as it is typically considered? In today's special Halloween episode, Reversing Climate Change host, Ross Kenyon, intros the show by giving the necessary historical context to understand Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust , and to contrast it against Christophe Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus . Get ready for a dose of Ro...
Oct 31, 2024•49 min•Season 1Ep. 329
The Grounded podcast takes over Reversing Climate Change ! Tom Previte of The Carbon Removal Show , founded a new biochar company in the United Kingdom called Restord. And like any good podcaster, he decided to make a show about it! Grounded: A Climate Startup Journey , just wrapped its five-episode first season documenting Tom's attempts to start a new biochar company. He walks listeners through so many of the basic questions of starting a business, and specifically a business in a new category...
Jun 13, 2024•42 min•Season 1Ep. 328
How do we conduct science when there isn't a single isolated variable? What does that mean for carbon removal not taking place in a controlled environment? How does science even work?! Today's show originated from a question of how open-system carbon removal research can be conducted given that in a less-controlled environment, isolating for a single variable with replicability is less obviously possible. Does the scientific method really demand that, or is that some sort of pop culture understa...
Jun 06, 2024•58 min•Season 1Ep. 327
What is it like to go to war? What does the experience have to teach us, and could it in any way be a spiritual endeavor? What does the Temple of Mars have to teach us in a climate-changing world? Karl Marlantes is a Rhodes Scholar who put aside graduate studies at Oxford University to lead a Marine rifle platoon in Vietnam in 1968. He is featured extensively in the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick documentary series, The Vietnam War . His memoir, What It Is Like to Go to War , and novel, Matterhorn , addr...
May 30, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Season 1Ep. 326
If you're going to write about the Oregon Trail or the Mississippi flatboat era, why not go gonzo? Does it make for better history or just better bar stories? What can you really learn about change by recreating epic journeys in contemporary times, and what can that teach us about how we live upon this planet? Today, adventurer and author Rinker Buck is on the show to discuss his odysseys. In particular, his flatboat ride from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, and his mulecart passage of the entire Ore...
May 23, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 325
When the world feels increasingly tame, what does it mean to reclaim our wildness? Can we appreciate the benefits of industrial civilization while connecting with our evolutionary roots? Can we get ourselves back to the garden? In this poignant conversation, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Craig Foster shares insights from his experiences diving in the Great African Sea Forest and the inspiration behind his new book, Amphibious Soul: Finding the Wild in a Tame World . Host and Nori Co-Founder Ro...
May 09, 2024•54 min•Season 1Ep. 324
The world is becoming wealthier. Is that a good thing? Or should we be looking to simpler and less material lives? How does a middle class global population affect climate change, for good or ill? On today's show, Dr. Homi Kharas, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution and author of The Rise of the Global Middle Class: How the Search for the Good Life Can Change the World , elaborates on what it means to be middle class, emphasizing the relevance of choice as a defining characteristic. Peo...
May 02, 2024•48 min•Season 1Ep. 323
You are condemned to be free, and yet how much responsibility do you bear for the structures you inhabit? Do your individual consumer choices matter, or is it some distant political economy? Should we enjoy our time in nature on snowmobiles, or is that just one more bootprint on the road to hypocritical perdition? Do you need to be perfect in order to be an activist? In this episode, Nori cofounder Ross Kenyon, and Thanks-A-Ton cofounder Siobhan Montoya Lavender, discuss the new short film from ...
Apr 23, 2024•58 min•Season 1Ep. 322
Carbon removal is often conceived of as only separating greenhouse gases from ambient air. But what if it also creates other valuable products in the process? Should they still be selling carbon credits? Does this competition make it harder for carbon removal companies that can't produce additional value streams? What are the trade-offs here, and is financial additionality the right place to intervene if intervention is even necessary? In this episode of the Reversing Climate Change podcast, Nor...
Apr 11, 2024•53 min•Season 1Ep. 321
Why does death exist? Does getting older always mean getting wiser? Should we look to experience or youth for breakthroughs? In today's episode of the Reversing Climate Change podcast, Nori Cofounder Ross Kenyon is joined by Dr. Venki Ramakrishnan, a 2009 Nobel Laureate in chemistry and author of the new book, Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality . Despite growing lifespans, it isn't clear that we have become less avaricious or kinder as a species, at least to the e...
Apr 04, 2024•54 min•Season 1Ep. 320
How should a climatetech company think about its brand? What if it's B2B? What if it needs to be both trustworthy and idiosyncratic at the same time?! In today's episode of Reversing Climate Change , Nori Cofounder, Ross Kenyon, is joined by his colleague, Heidi Sloane, Nori's Senior Marketing Manager. Heidi led Nori's recent rebrand, which took it from a more playful B2C feel to something more sturdy and B2B. We used the agency Odi to help us with it. Great job, Odi! Heidi explains how a brand ...
Apr 02, 2024•47 min•Season 1Ep. 319
Seems like a new book on climate-friendly cooking is constantly being released. Do they matter, or do they unfairly place the burden of political economy and social change on the lowly consumer? What type of cooking might actually be impactful, and why? Why do we even bother cooking anyway? In today's Reversing Climate Change podcast, Nori Cofounder and Director of Creative & Marketing, Ross Kenyon, is joined by Tamar Adler, a James Beard awardee and author of several books, including An Eve...
Mar 21, 2024•53 min•Season 1Ep. 318
Off-world settlements are sometimes proposed as an insurance policy for Earthlings. Or as an escape for the super-rich. Is it actually either of those things? How should we be considering humanity's relationship to the cosmos and off-world civilization? And is the Overview Effect worth a damn? On today's episode of the Reversing Climate Change podcast, Nori carbon removal marketplace Cofounder Ross Kenyon is joined by Zach Weinersmith and Dr. Kelly Weinersmith, science educators and authors all....
Mar 07, 2024•54 min•Season 1Ep. 317
Nutrients on Earth are essential for life on Earth. But they aren't evenly distributed. How do they end up in different places, and how does that affect life on Earth? How does life even work?! In this episode of the Reversing Climate Change podcast, Nori Cofounder Ross Kenyon is joined by Dr. Joe Roman, a conservation biologist and author of Eat, Poop, Die: How Animals Make Our World . An established view of how ecosystems emerge and change is through bottom-up processes, e.g. through chemistry...
Feb 22, 2024•56 min•Season 1Ep. 316
What does it mean to farm regeneratively? Or to farm conventionally, for that matter? Is regenerative agriculture size-dependent? What are its benefits and how does it work? Today's Reversing Climate Change podcast episode has Jada Dormaier, Supply Account Manager at the Nori carbon removal marketplace, join Nori Cofounder and Director of Creative & Marketing, Ross Kenyon, to discuss regenerative ag. Like our recent show reintroducing carbon removal generally , we thought it was a good idea ...
Feb 20, 2024•20 min•Season 1Ep. 315
Does liberalism's attempt to let us all pursue different visions of the good life ironically make the good life even harder to achieve? Should there be an established church? Are the people who hold these ideas politically ascendent, or likely to remain part of a small counter-revolutionary fringe? In this episode of Reversing Climate Change , Nori Cofounder Ross Kenyon invites Dr. Kevin Vallier , Associate Professor and Director of the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics program at Bowling Gree...
Feb 15, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 314
When people think about innovation in carbon removal, they're probably thinking about physics or materials science. How do we make CDR faster, cheaper, more durable, or use less energy? What if we told you that a lot of the innovation that is coming is financial and/or contractual? In this episode of the Reversing Climate Change podcast, Nori Cofounder Ross Kenyon and Nori CEO Matt Trudeau are joined by Racheal Notto, Director of Carbon Markets Engagement at Kita , and James Kench, the Head of I...
Feb 08, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Season 3Ep. 313
Everyone right now is talking about regenerative agriculture. What does it look like when major cash crops work to improve their practices? How can the Department of Agriculture and agricultural science programs at universities support the changes so that major commodity operations can derisk their transition? In today's episode of Reversing Climate Change , Nori Cofounder Ross Kenyon is joined by Nori Supply Account Manager, Jada Dormaier, to discuss Nori's partnership with the Texas Climate-Sm...
Feb 01, 2024•41 min•Season 1Ep. 312
Reversing Climate Change is many things: a repository of deep dives into carbon removal, a way to intimately understand the thought processes of the folks at Nori working to build a scalable carbon removal marketplace, and a massive catalogue of the infinite number of climate-adjacencies that tickle host Ross Kenyon's brain. And sometimes you've got to get back to basics and reintroduce a topic to catch new listeners up. To that effect, today's show is twenty minutes on the basics of carbon remo...
Jan 30, 2024•21 min•Season 1Ep. 311
What does it mean to work "in Product", let alone at a company working on climate change? What is the difference between Product and Engineering? And what the hell are they building in there anyways?!In this conversation, Nori cofounder Ross Kenyon is joined by Nori's Head of Product, Patrick Tsao, to discuss Patrick's role in scaling climate action. How much of this work is strategy, how much is building tools, and are we meant to be empirical or aprioristic "first principles" thinkers? What ar...
Jan 18, 2024•46 min•Season 1Ep. 310
What does regenerative agriculture mean to you? Whither Big Regen? To Will Harris, author of A Bold Return to Giving a Damn, One Farm, Six Generations, and the Future of Food , it means restarting the cycles of nature—making them healthy again. This week on Reversing Climate Change , Ross Kenyon and Jada Dormaier from Nori are joined by Will Harris to discuss his remarkable journey from industrial to regenerative farming. The conversation is simultaneously a beginners introduction, and a deep di...
Jan 11, 2024•50 min•Season 1Ep. 309
A disaster has arrived. Do you have the right supplies? The right mindset? Are you ready? Last time this topic came up, we spoke with David Pogue on enormous questions of how to choose where to live and to make sure you are relatively prepared for the climate-changed future . This show is downstream from there: what do you do given that you potentially are not moving somewhere else and need to keep yourself and family safe immediately? In this episode of Reversing Climate Change , Ross Kenyon ho...
Jan 04, 2024•58 min•Season 1Ep. 308
Is there a tectonic shift away from corporate offsetting and into corporate insetting? In this episode of Reversing Climate Change , we sat down with Lia Nicholson, Head of Sustainability at Terrascope, to discuss the sexiest topic of all—carbon accounting. Historically, corporations faced justified criticism for opting to buy low-quality carbon offsets instead of making tangible efforts to reduce their own emissions. Lia highlights a significant recent shift from traditional offsetting to inset...
Dec 21, 2023•52 min•Season 1Ep. 307
What's the hallway buzz about carbon removal in Dubai? Is carbon removal a fringe topic or top of mind for attendees? And what's it mean for major climate events to happen in petrostates? Who's ready for Baku, 2024?! It’s COP28, the 28th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the international gathering at which member nations converge to outline their ambitions and responsibilities in regards to climate change. Reversing Climate Change h...
Dec 14, 2023•46 min•Season 1Ep. 306
Forget merely about melting polar ice caps—expansion of deadly diseases is possibly the true Pandora’s Box that climate change is rapidly opening. In this episode of Reversing Climate Change , host Ross Kenyon is rejoined by Zoya Teirstein, staff writer at Grist , to discuss the intricate and chilling intersection of climate change and disease. The way Zoya puts it, climate change is taking the Earth and shaking it like a snowglobe: pathogens are meeting up in new configurations and wreaking hav...
Dec 07, 2023•59 min•Season 3Ep. 64
"I won't be able to live with the realization that I could have done more and I didn't." In this episode of Reversing Climate Change , host Ross Kenyon engages in a candid conversation with Ed Begley, Jr., a seasoned environmental activist and Hollywood actor. Unpacking his Hollywood journey and introducing his memoir, To the Temple of Tranquility and Step on It! , Ed provides a humorous yet insightful look into his life and passion for the environment. Ed's unique perspective on climate change,...
Nov 30, 2023•28 min•Season 3Ep. 63
Can a tiny life be meaningful?For this Thanksgiving Day episode of Reversing Climate Change, join us for stories about food, family, connection, and love.Ross reaches across the pond to speak with Helen Rebanks, farmer, shepherd, and author of The Farmer's Wife: My Life in Days . She is the wife of another farmer, James Rebanks, author of The Shepherd's Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape , and Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey , and each of them are personally prominent in the boo...
Nov 23, 2023•47 min•Season 3Ep. 62
Starbucks is finding new mountains to grow coffee on, agribusiness is developing drought resistant seeds, and the governments are building seawalls. So what can individuals and families do to adapt themselves?! This week Ross is joined by David Pogue, CBS News Sunday Morning correspondent, former New York Times weekly tech columnist, and author of How to Prepare for Climate Change: A Practical Guide to Surviving the Chaos. How do we adapt to the safety risks of major disasters? Should we embrace...
Nov 16, 2023•53 min•Season 3Ep. 61
