What if microbes could help us mine responsibly? What if astrobiology—the study of life beyond Earth—held clues for how to fix the way we extract resources on Earth? Today’s guest is Liz Dennett, CEO and founder of Endolith, a biotech startup using microbes to boost copper recovery from mining waste. With a PhD in astrobiology, experience at NASA, and a career spanning oil, gas, and data science, Dennett is one of the most fascinating polymaths in climate tech. This episode dives into how microb...
Nov 13, 2025•51 min•Season 1Ep. 374
World War I profoundly changed the world. Nation-states replaced empires. Russia went communist. Fascism arrived. The West's claim to being the most civilized peoples on Earth was supremely undermined. And out of so much suffering, we received a holiday prioritizing grief and mercy. This bonus episode is me speed-running World War I and sharing some reflections on Armistice Day, Remembrance Day, Veterans Day, or however you might call it. If you carry any of this grief with you personally, I hop...
Nov 11, 2025•23 min
Adaptation begins at home. But it doesn't end there. What do you plan on doing with your family as climate change gets worse? Are you already making plans whether to stay or go? How should states respond as people flee disaster? Who should get access to fish stocks as they migrate to new regions? Once one starts asking these questions, they really don't stop... Today's guest is Susannah Fisher, author of the new book, Sink or Swim: How the World Needs to Adapt to a Changing Climate . It's a wo...
Nov 05, 2025•59 min•Season 1Ep. 373
Is climate change a fringe and woke distraction in military planning that inhibits lethality? Or is it invaluable strategic context for this century's power projection? What kinds of missions will soldiers be asked to perform in a world that is getting hotter and more complex? Today's guest is Erin Sikorsky, Director of The Center for Climate and Security and author of the new book, Climate Change on the Battlefield: International Military Responses to the Climate Crisis . Though this show is no...
Oct 27, 2025•58 min•Season 1Ep. 372
Much of legacy media is dying. You know what isn't? Live sports. Where the outcome is uncertain, people want to watch. That means bringing together large numbers of fans and athletes. And what does that all add up to? Emissions. And emissions that could potentially be detached from profitability, leading to budgets large enough to support meaningful carbon removal. But will sports leagues move in this direction? Or is it better that it stay at the level of individual teams jockeying for brand va...
Oct 22, 2025•54 min•Season 1Ep. 371
What happens when you build a list of very nearly every carbon dioxide removal company in existence? You get access to intriguing data and the pride of a very laborious job done well. Presumably you also get to take a nap. Grant Faber is a long-time carbon removal community fixture working on Life Cycle Analysis and Techno-Economic Assessment. Formerly of the Department of Energy, he now works with Absolute Climate (coincidentally, a sponsor of this episode!) Listen is as Grant shares what he ha...
Oct 14, 2025•51 min•Season 1Ep. 370
I came back from New York Climate Week energized. I loved seeing everyone. But many of the conversations I had profoundly scared me. We're staring into the abyss of deep overshoot, and it's staring back into us. What would it mean for us to make peace with a world that doesn't decarbonize fast enough? That doesn't scale carbon removal before tipping points are reached? That is forced into more radical geoengineering approaches that may just be one more layer of intervention that we will likely m...
Oct 07, 2025•42 min•Season 1Ep. 369
We all want to make sure carbon removal works. But who is working to make it beautiful? And could creating beauty be one of the most important jobs in all of climate? Leila Conners is a filmmaker who has been making environmental films for decades, including legendary ones like The 11th Hour with Leonardo DiCaprio. Her latest opus is Legion 44 , which is a wonderful documentary highlighting so many alumni from this podcast and the CDR industry. We also discuss why the antihero is such a popular ...
Sep 30, 2025•49 min•Season 1Ep. 368
Or "project finance", for that matter? Or are these just the current words we say at happy hours? Today, we attempt to nail down some of these definitions so we might have a chance of achieving either of these concepts. Ryan Covington is an attorney and partner in the Climate Projects team of Philip Lee (US) LLP, focused on the development and financing of engineered and nature-based carbon projects. Ryan shares his experience in structuring large financial deals in the carbon removal and climat...
Sep 23, 2025•54 min•Season 1Ep. 367
Are you interested in sailing from Seattle to San Francisco on a sailing vessel older than World War 1?! Well, you can at the end of October 2025. Moreover, you'll be crewing alongside me. I recently joined the team of Maritime Blue as an Executive in Residence, working with ocean tech startups on commercial strategy, storytelling, and go-to-market. They're putting on a fabulous ocean conference in Seattle October 20th-26th. Right after that and until November 3rd is a passage they've chartered ...
Sep 20, 2025•9 min
Raising kids is hard enough. How do we do it now when existential dread is such a major part of youth experience? And how do we keep ourselves mentally healthy enough to be good at both our professional climate work and parenting? Today's show is with Ariella Cook-Shonkoff, psychotherapist and author of the new book, Raising Anti-Doomers: How to Bring Up Resilient Kids Through Climate Change and Tumultuous Times . She answers a bunch of questions I have about how much I should actually be starin...
Sep 16, 2025•56 min•Season 1Ep. 366
Is that a noble man rejecting modernity and embracing tradition? Or is it a lunatic with a lance trying to disembowel a shepherd? The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes (Saavedra) is the much beloved literary classic—and perhaps the world's first true novel—but its reputation goes far beyond the book itself. The character has spawned his own adjective: "quixotic", which gets levied at anyone who dares to dream a bit too big. But is this a word kind of like "epicu...
Sep 09, 2025•22 min•Season 1Ep. 365
In The Brothers Karamazov , the character Grushenka tells a story about an old peasant woman who never did a good deed in her entire life and went to Hell when she died. The woman's guardian angel petitioned God to let him search her life for a single good deed and if he found one, God would let her into Heaven. God agreed. It turns out she had once given a beggar an onion! Her single good deed! So God told the guardian angel to lower the onion into Hell to lift her out of the Lake of Fire... Wh...
Sep 02, 2025•42 min•Season 1Ep. 364
One of my biggest podcasting regrets is not having been able to interview the anthropologist Dr. James C. Scott before he died in 2024. We had corresponded by email, but he'll forever be one of the ones who got away... Rest in peace, James. Your scholarship is still making people think. Today's show serves as an introduction to anthropology, and to some key Scottian concepts like "legibility" that Grant Faber and I apply to the carbon removal and carbon offsetting spaces. Why do states prefer st...
Aug 26, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 363
If there are so many inhabitable planets in the universe, why haven't we made contact with other civilizations? One terrifying answer is that very few civilizations are able to create world-altering technology without also killing themselves off in the process. This monologue episode introduces the concept of Great Filter Events through the work of Dr. David Grinspoon's outstanding book, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future . Go read it, and listen to the shows I've done with David ...
Aug 19, 2025•28 min•Season 1Ep. 362
A $50M Series A?! In this economy? Aircapture recently raised a big round at a time when big raises in climatetech are hard to come by. Their secret? Producing a valuable product better for their customers than what currently exists, and not being dependent upon policy or carbon credits. They're doing modular direct air capture in places that otherwise need to buy merchant carbon dioxide from companies that sell gases. Shipping merchant CO2 to the Canary Islands isn't cheap. If modular DAC can p...
Aug 11, 2025•37 min•Season 1Ep. 361
Writing fiction about climate change is notoriously difficult. Some authors have gone for massive ensemble casts to defeat the hyperobject . But what if one zoomed in to smaller, quieter, interpersonal stories? Jon Raymond is a screenwriter and novelist whose work I very much enjoy. He is a frequent collaborator of Kelly Reichardt 's, on films such as Old Joy , First Cow , Night Moves , and Showing Up . He also adapted James M. Cain's novel, Mildred Pierce , which became an HBO miniseries starri...
Aug 06, 2025•53 min•Season 1Ep. 360
Many hardtech entrepreneurs develop a technology and then figure out how to commercialize it. What happens if you find an industry with potential and then engineer a solution to open an entirely new market to them? Today's show is with two of the cofounders of CO280: Natalie Khtikian, the Chief Commercial Officer, and Jonathan Rhone, the Chief Executive Officer. Natalie and John explain what it's like working with an industry as established as pulp and paper, structuring joint venture deals with...
Jul 29, 2025•42 min•Season 1Ep. 359
When you finish painting the Golden Gate Bridge, it is time to paint the Golden Gate Bridge. With a subject as interdisciplinary as carbon dioxide removal, a beginner's mind can also be a great asset! Marian Krueger is the co-author of Race to Zero: How Companies Can Lead the Way to Climate Neutrality , an intoductory text to CDR that lucidly explains what carbon removal is, why it's necessary, and how to support its continued development. The book will soon be published (August 4th, 2025), and ...
Jul 22, 2025•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 358
We primarily talk about pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and ocean and storing it. But there are some places where we should actually be using it productively. Is graphite for lithium-ion batteries one of those places? Makoto Eyre is the Founder and CEO of Homeostasis, a Tacoma-based company making graphite from carbon dioxide. In the future they aim to colocate their reactors with carbon capture and/or removal to create a modular and distributed system of graphite production. Before...
Jul 15, 2025•44 min•Season 1Ep. 357
When you think of Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, you probably aren't thinking about carbon removal. But should you be? Today's guest is Victoria Harvey, CDR Strategy Lead at ClimeFi. ClimeFi just structured the world's first Article 6.2 international transfer of durable carbon removal credits between Norway and Switzerland, and there's a lot to discuss! What is the relationship between corporate climate action and national obligations? Do NDCs (Nationally Determined Contributions) impact corp...
Jul 09, 2025•45 min•Season 1Ep. 356
Many a business was launched in carbon credits trying to fix a conflict of interest problem. Has Absolute Climate cracked the code? Should registries get out of the methodology development business? Peter Minor, CEO and Co-Founder of Absolute Climate, is on the show today to talk about the many issues of trying to create an ultimate standard in carbon removal (hence the amazing xkcd meme), and how he thinks the current system is set up to fail. Are we doomed to always face conflicts of interest?...
Jul 03, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 355
Salary is touchy. It's tied up with shame on all sides: are we being underpaid? Did we overpay for someone that is unfair? Is it too late to fix it?! Today, host Ross Kenyon monologues about the 2025 Salary Survey from the folks at CDRjobs (which you should go fill out right now!) , and shares some lessons he learned about designing HR policies the hard way and from experienced colleagues. The main lesson is: you're never designing a policy for just one case. That's just the first precedent that...
Jun 26, 2025•22 min•Season 1Ep. 354
The Carbon Removal XPRIZE has been a major focal point of the CDR industry for years. And Mati Carbon just won the $50M Grand Prize. How did they do it, and how did their surprising and counterintuitive approach to enhanced rock weathering win over so many other contestants? Shantanu Agarwal is the Founder and CEO of Mati Carbon, and he's on the show today to discuss how the various novel ways they went to market against the advice of others all added up to being an XPRIZE winner. Sometimes bein...
Jun 18, 2025•44 min•Season 1Ep. 353
Everyone thinks of national and international governments leading or failing on climate change. But what about cities and smaller political entities? How can they lead on climate and carbon removal when larger entities may be focused elsewhere? Since carbon removal infrastructure is likely to end up at least partially within urban or periurban environments, how can we prepare ourselves and our policies for such a near-term future? To answer these and so many more questions, Christiaan Gevers Dey...
Jun 10, 2025•55 min•Season 1Ep. 352
Carbon removal isn't that old. So for someone who's been involved in it for almost fifteen years... that's an elder. And today he's bringing the wisdom he earned the hard way. Dave Addison is formerly the Virgin Earth Challenge Manager, an effort he began working on in 2010. That's about six years before I had even heard of CDR, so a long time indeed! Last year, Dave started Planetary Practitioners, a consultancy founded on a long-run vision of helping much more of humankind access decent work i...
Jun 03, 2025•1 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 351
Should every dollar spent in carbon removal be maximally catalytic? Or is it okay to try to get a really good deal for your net-zero target? What even is this industry for?! Joining the show today—somehow for the first time ever—is Robert Höglund, a long-time CDR-watcher and writer; Co-Founder of the carbon removal's data repository-of-record, CDR.fyi, and the Head of CDR at Milkywire. Robert endures a barrage of questions about how his thinking on carbon removal has changed over the years, and ...
May 27, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 350
Everyone's focused on carbon credit offtakes and Voluntary Carbon Market purchases, but the compliance markets represent the vast majority of carbon assets in circulation. How do these markets work, and how might carbon removal interact with them in the future? Mike Azlen is the CEO and CIO of Carbon Cap Management LLP, a firm which trades within various compliance markets. We discuss why private traders like his company can help price discovery in compliance markets, and address some common cri...
May 21, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 349
Seemingly everyone in carbon removal says they want more data transparency and the sharing of scientific results. Why isn't open science more present, and how can we get more of it? Could a pre-print server for CDR be part of the solution? Today is the official launch of CDRXIV ("cee-dee-archive"), a new initiative from CarbonPlan that aims to spur scientific conversations within the carbon removal community. On this episode, Freya Chay (the CDR Program Lead at CarbonPlan and a Member of the Adv...
May 14, 2025•48 min•Season 1Ep. 348
Carbon removal only has a few exits. Today’s guest was involved in two of them, and he’s bringing his lessons. Jim McDermott is the founder and CEO of Rusheen Capital Management, LLC, an investment firm that makes a few early-stage bets and works with companies much more closely than most investors do. He's had a long and storied career in energy and as the founder and CEO of Stamps.com. Jim shares his lessons from exiting 1PointFive and Carbon Engineering to Occidental Petroleum (who also just ...
May 07, 2025•50 min•Season 1Ep. 347
