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PODCAST

Reversing Climate Change

Reversing Climate Change is a podcast about carbon removal and climatetech that keeps wandering off into literature, history, philosophy, theology, and geopolitics on the theory that the technical and scientific questions stop making much sense without them. Hosted by Ross Kenyon, who did not go past a year of political philosophy PhD coursework and has visibly not let it go. Paid subscriptions live on Substack @ https://rosskenyon.com. © Carbon Removal Strategies LLC

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All Episodes

01:05:58

The palm nutcracker that became a carbon dioxide...

Reversing Climate Change ·

2026/09/24

What do you do when none of the machinery you imported works? If you're Releaf, you build your own nutcracker, name it Kraken, and get it working with about six weeks of runway left in the middle of COVID. And once you have a huge pile of palm kernel shells sitting around, why not get really into biochar?Today's guest is Uzoma Ayogu, cofounder and CTO of Releaf and cofounder of Biochar Industrial Group (BIG), which just closed a $1.5 million pre-seed. Releaf cracks palm nuts from smallholder farms

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01:20:32

Which story is carbon dioxide removal actually in?—w/...

Reversing Climate Change ·

2026/09/17

Every industry runs on a mythology, and carbon dioxide removal has several of them available at once. There is the hype cycle, where the trough of disillusionment is a phase you survive on the way to mainstream adoption. There is the solar cost curve, where a technology is expensive and clunky for years and then abruptly cheaper than everything else. There is Moore's Law, and also the one where the world returns to normal after the next election. Each of those carries a promise about the ending that

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01:06:32

Thinking Little with Mary Berry, Executive Director...

Reversing Climate Change ·

2026/09/10

Wendell Berry died on August 31st, 2026. A listener once made a Reversing Climate Change bingo card and one of the squares was just "someone mentions Wendell Berry," which turned out to be a rigged square. So rather than write another appreciation, I have pulled the conversation I had with his daughter in 2020 and recorded a new introduction to sit in front of it. The episode I made the week he died is here.Mary Berry runs The Berry Center in New Castle, Kentucky, founded in 2011 after a lifetime of

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00:28:54

Removals, avoidances, and what Wendell Berry thought...

Reversing Climate Change ·

2026/09/03

Rainbow came into carbon dioxide removal from the outside, kept financing avoidances the whole time, and has watched the market arrive at the position it started from. The company I cofounded, Nori, was merciless about avoidance for its entire existence, so some of that is on me.Wendell Berry died on 31 August, at 92. He has more books referenced on this show than any other author. Early in Nori's life I wrote to him twice inviting him onto this very podcast by explaining that we were making

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00:29:24

The scariest current parallel from Hitler's Mein Kampf

Reversing Climate Change ·

2026/08/27

CW: this episode discusses genocidePeople reference the Weimar Republic's transition to Nazi Germany often. But I think they're missing perhaps the most relevant and frightening insight from Adolf Hitler's memoir, Mein Kampf.It isn't just that economic uncertainty produces political radicalism. It's that bad things can happen when a group which has dominated a multiethnic empire for a long time is expected to start sharing more political and cultural power with the groups they once ruled.If you

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01:03:30

The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we...

Reversing Climate Change ·

2026/08/20

CW: this episode discusses genocide and suicide.I swear I didn't mean to make this episode. All I intended to do was to read ⁠the wonderfully moving speech at the end of Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator⁠. But somehow that meant that I had to process so much about World War II, the personality of Adolf Hitler, and why monsters can also be boring and/or extremely goofy.This monologue episode wends its way through the particular moment in history this film was made and why that is significant (as

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01:00:36

412: J. Maarten Troost on Kiribati's atolls, climate...

Reversing Climate Change ·

2026/08/13

This podcast has been running for almost a decade. There are some real gems buried in the catalogue that I am happy to have a chance to rerelease. This is one of those episodes. It has a new intro.I recorded it with J. Maarten Troost in April 2020 and published it as S2E9, "Travel writing a disappearing Oceania". It remains a personal favorite of mine.Maarten wrote four travel memoirs: The Sex Lives of Cannibals (2004), about the two years he spent in Kiribati after his partner got a job

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00:52:10

411: Why I love Poppy Russell of Counteract VC's CDR...

Reversing Climate Change ·

2026/08/07

There are some people whom you know you just have to read whatever they write next. For me, one of those people is Poppy Russell.Poppy is the Research Manager at Counteract VC, a venture capital firm devoted to funding carbon dioxide removal companies. Poppy's research of course helps Counteract diligence potential deals, and sometimes she publishes key insights, models, and other things that make me think.Listen in as Poppy and I discuss the state of carbon removal, what she's bullish and

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00:56:33

410: remove's new Latin American carbon dioxide...

Reversing Climate Change ·

2026/07/30

There are many startup accelerators out there. There are fewer focused on climate tech. Fewer still for carbon dioxide removal. Lucky for us, remove runs the absolute heck out of their programs. And it's been a true joy of mine coaching startups in them this past year. I can't even believe it, but the time has come for another program... In Latin America!If you are a Latin American carbon dioxide removal project and/or technology developer, you should apply to remove's LatAm cohort

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01:04:02

D.W. Pasulka on AI, the religion of UFOs, & the...

Reversing Climate Change ·

2026/07/23

When I have questions about how technology will change human life, our experience of it, and fundamentally what we are as conscious entities... my first port of call is likely someone like Dr. D.W. Pasulka. She's labored on some of the biggest questions of the humanities only to find the world racing to catch up with her later on disclosure, on artificial intelligence, and presumably on whatever comes next in this beautiful tale told by an idiot.I've been reading Diana's books for years

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00:12:21

408: The impossible taxonomy of carbon dioxide removal

Reversing Climate Change ·

2026/07/16

If we created an objectively correct and exhaustive categorization of carbon credits, would it solve everything? Would it solve anything?Listen in as I read an essay I recently wrote about the endless quest to perfectly categorize the world, and while that may be a useful project for some purposes, it isn't anywhere close to the main reasons the world looks the way that it does.Listen in and you'll get surrealist sculpture, Michael Polanyi, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Plato. Who can truly say

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00:58:27

407: Charles C. Mann on the wizards & prophets of...

Reversing Climate Change ·

2026/07/09

I interviewed Charles C. Mann in 2020 about his book, The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World. This episode is a personal favorite of mine.Somehow, I don't believe I've ever rereleased any old episodes. But there are many great ones buried in the archives. I am going to start bringing more of them out that remain relevant.If you aren't familiar with Charles C. Mann, he's written a bunch of great books including

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00:22:21

Climate Workers Anonymous, introducing a new podcast...

Reversing Climate Change ·

2026/07/06

Working in climate is hard. We all have things we wish we could say. What if we could actually say them?If you love the Reversing Climate Change podcast, you should check out the new show I'm working on, Climate Workers Anonymous.It came about as my work has become more emotional in nature. Working with so many founders has led me to see that many business problems are less about GTM motions or product-market fit. They're often about identity, attachment, and shame. Being able to speak openly about

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00:43:44

406: Hyperstition, Dialectic, & Carbon Dioxide Removal

Reversing Climate Change ·

2026/07/02

What happens when you care about climate and also want to explore space? What if you love technology but worry we've deeply misunderstood how to relate to it appropriately? What happens when we take the religious claims of others seriously, even when they aren't seen as legitimate as the major faiths? How can philosophy, literary criticism, film, and media studies help solve some of the biggest questions in climate, and maybe even give us all a little bit of extra solace in a time when we

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00:48:14

405: Does Managed MRV imply the existence of...

Reversing Climate Change ·

2026/06/25

What even is MRV, let alone dMRV?! Or Managed MRV?! Doesn't that imply the existence of Unmanaged MRV? If everything is pretty much digital now, do we still need that pesky 'd' letter?! Are there still dudes with clipboards hanging around?In this episode of Reversing Climate Change, host Ross Kenyon sits down with the cofounder and CEO of Offstream, Varsha Ramesh Walsh, to untangle the complicated web of carbon credit data collection.Offstream has evolved significantly after realizing

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00:06:24

And was Jerusalem builded here, Among these dark...

Reversing Climate Change ·

2026/06/22

In the last Reversing Climate Change podcast episode, Tom Mills and I started talking about "Jerusalem ["And did those feet in ancient time"]" by William Blake (1810), and the 1916 hymn by Sir Hubert Parry that seemingly all Brits know in their souls.I only knew about it due to a childhood obsession with the dvd boxset of Monty Python's Flying Circus, where in the S1E4 episode, "Owl-Stretching Time", Eric Idle sings this song while being seduced. Unfortunately, I

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00:57:22

404: When will insetting work for carbon dioxide...

Reversing Climate Change ·

2026/06/18

Everyone knows about offsetting. But what about insetting? Surely, that's easier. If only we could define it...In this episode of Reversing Climate Change, host Ross Kenyon sits down with Tom Mills to dig into the physical reality of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and its intersection with heavy industry, mining, and global agricultural supply chains.Drawing from his experience working in mining governance across Africa and South Asia, Tom shares how the physical, logistical, and geopolitical

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00:57:58

403: How to get max value from carbon market...

Reversing Climate Change ·

2026/06/11

How do you actually work with a consultant without lighting money on fire? That's the question I've been wanting to tackle for a while, because I've seen both sides of this—companies that get incredible leverage from a good consulting engagement, and companies that spend six figures and walk away with a PDF that's out of date by the time they receive it.David LaGreca is a friend of mine and a managing director at EcoEngineers, which is one of the most active advisory firms in the

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01:01:37

402: Reform vs. Revolution from Microsoft to the...

Reversing Climate Change ·

2026/06/04

What do you do when you spent 20 years fighting climate change from every angle you could find: community organizing, Sea Shepherd, AmeriCorps, corporate sustainability at Microsoft... and you realize the prevention phase might be ending? Do you keep keynoting conferences about employee engagement while the Amazon CSO brags about marginal improvements to delivery vans the same week they platform the Melania documentary?Or do you get a job at a salvage yard, start building your own shipping container

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01:00:13

401: Emotional startup lessons from Nori...

Reversing Climate Change ·

2026/05/29

What happens when you ask a startup founder how a decision made them feel and their eyes start to water? What happens when you realize the person who drove you the craziest at your company was right about all the things you dismissed as too woo? What happens when you look at the wreckage of a seven-year startup and realize the business model failed but the mission didn't?Today I'm talking with Alexsandra Guerra, "Alé", one of my former cofounders at Nori. Her voice used to be the intro to this very

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