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 sponsors, Absolute Climate and Philip Lee LLP.

I've made great radio with both of them.

They should be familiar to you if you listen to this show, but I want to tell you about why you should learn a little bit more.

The first sponsor is Absolute Climate.

I did a show with their founder Peter Miner few months back and a lot of people love that show.

I was asking a question of can registries design their own methodologies for carbon markets without it being a conflict of interest?

An absolute climate's thesis is no, they shouldn't be in the business of doing that.

We actually need to disintegrate functionality within carbon markets even further.

They are literally the only independent standards body for carbon removal that exists.

Their name is very well chosen.

I think they are some of the most aggressively idealistic people within carbon removal.

It's come up on reversing climate change so many times about how and why there's tension between commercial teams and science teams within carbon markets.

There's some fundamental tension between the rules of running a business, or I should say the rules of running a profitable business is maybe a better way to put that and climate impact.

And I think Absolute is one of those companies that, at least from my experience of what I know of them over there, I think they're going to be some of the staunchest holdouts just trying to make sure that there can be a justified true belief that a ton purchase is a ton truly removed.

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It's a bold strategy.

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Absolute is very much doing things their own way, and they stand out to me and I will never mistake them in a lineup.

Go check them out.

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And that's also true of our other sponsor, Philip Lee LLP.

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I 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.

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 lawyer.

One really cool thing I can say on Philip Lee LL PS behalf.

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And now here is the show.

Hello, this is Ross Penyon.

I'm the host of the Reversing Climate Change podcast.

I just returned from New York Climate Week.

It was a lovely time.

It was genuinely joyful to see so many people who care so much about climate and carbon removal that they've chosen to do very nearly impossible things.

It's a bizarre space to work in, especially as a commercial entity.

Why those same people don't go try to do some agentic B to B sass play instead, I don't know.

We're all called to the work of our lives, I suppose, and while I found that experience to be a positive, connecting, and fulfilling experience, I'm harboring more doubt about the future of humanity than I have previously.

Many of the conversations I've been having, and it's possible the call is coming from inside the house and I'm having these conversations because I'm initiating them.

There's a fair amount of that in the mix, but a lot of the conversations tend to be gravitating away from carbon removal itself and deeper into concerns about adaptation and resilience, about global cooling, about which kinds of geoengineering climate interventions are we going to make or fail to make, and what that means for us.

The reason why we're hearing more conversations about those things, at least as far as I can see, is that we've all taken for granted that overshoot is built in at this point.

We're definitely not getting to 1.5.

How far up we go, it's unclear.

We can still pull it back, We can still make choices.

But it's concerning.

My particular intellectual advice is that I tend to look for rationality when other people merely see venality, cruelty, stupidity, wickedness.

And while it's tempting to go to those places and assume for the worst, and it may even satisfy Occam's razor to assume for some of those more devilish aspects of the human spirit.

And I've had enough economics training where I am looking for rationality, people making decisions under constraints, people trying to maximize output within systems.

And one way to interpret the clean energy rollback that's happening in the US right now at the federal policy level is that these people don't believe in climate change.

They're not concerned by it.

They think the US might be a global winner and climate change is is real.

They just don't care.

They want to, you know, they're riding the bomb at the end of Doctor Strangelove.

Like, those are all explanations that I've heard people bandy.

But I think one of the explanations that treats people as rational agents, and thus maybe more explanatory, is that of the ducidity trap, which people poke at it.

I did a show with Sarah Godek on geopolitics that we talked about Kevin Allison, the former PM of Australia's retort book, that tried to correct some of the ducidity trap logic here.

The argument goes that when there's a rising power, the established dominant power has a narrow window to cut this rival ascending power back down to size.

And so that whenever there is a potential upstart coming up, there's a natural tendency, the argument goes, for the dominant power to act while they still can't.

And I think what the clean energy rollback signifies is that the US is showing up its domestic energy production because it's looking to a future of conflict, of war.

And perhaps there will be war with China or others in the next few years.

And the goal is to be resilient in the face of that.

If that is the case, I think hope for climate progress during a time of great power conflict is extremely limited.

You know, when there's rivalry, there may be jockeying for future technological leadership that might drive climate commitment and progress, but we're not seeing that.

Moreover, if we get to the point where there is open conflict, emissions will be generated and money in the famous guns and butter equation, it's going towards gun and not the butter of climate change, adaptation, mitigation, anything.

And when I am in climate spaces, there is at least a sense that we're here doing this work because we're called to do it.

Win, lose, or draw, the work needs to be done, and we are in a particular position to do it.

And independently of the outcome, the work is worth doing.

I think that's a spiritual understanding of vocation of Labor.

It's good to keep that in mind, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't staring into the abyss a fair amount of the time.

I used to feel so optimistic about the future.

I would look towards the rate of technological advance and think we were headed towards more bounty, more freedom, more happiness.

And often when I look to the future now feels like we may not have as much privacy.

In the future, AI will know everything about us and be able to make predictions about us that we'll feel intrusive and probably just will be intrusive.

I've mentioned this on a recent show I'm watching the war in Ukraine and this is just the beginning of how AI and drones will be used in warfare.

In fact, I saw Zielinski speak at the UN recently and and say as much that this is basically the first war were weapons that were used in this way.

And we haven't really seen much AI powered worker yet as far as I know.

But I think this conflict is very much the historical moment that after the next war, and there probably will be a next war, we'll look back on and say, wow, that was just we didn't even know how drones were going to be used yet.

And that was such a quaint usage of them.

And in the future, there will be autonomous drone swarms that will be making decisions about who lives and who dies.

And if you're an optimist, you might think AI will have much better discretion than an individual soldier.

And there's a part of that that's sensible.

I understand why people say that, but do you trust it?

I don't.

Especially.

Are we living in a golden age?

Is everything about to get so much better?

I don't expect it to.

I've been focusing more on adaptation and resilience, and I'll explain why in a future episode.

And even though that's important, I think basically every broad family of climate action is important.

Focusing on adaptation means making peace with the fact that we're not going to get there, and we need to be making investments now to make sure people are as comfortable, happy, alive as possible in a future where warming is baked in.

And that's really weird for me.

Carbon removal has an inherent optimism to it.

So does mitigation.

There's a sense that there's a problem and we can solve it either now or in the future, but we can do it before it gets really quite bad.

Adaptation is saying that we're probably not going to do that, or at least there's going to be a period of time where it's going to be bad before we pull it back.

And depending on who you ask, inside of the broad global cooling movement of those focusing on ice shelf stabilization or marine cloud brightening, solar radiation management, the whole fleet of potential technologies that may or may not be deployed, There's either a sense that this will buy us more time for mitigation and carbon removal to take place, or we're just heading into a future of overshoot and we're not going to pull back, or we're not going to be able to pull back.

We're going into a future of global conflict, which may require what now seems like extreme climate interventions to prevent catastrophe.

In fact, there's even a potential for some of these technologies to be weapons of war.

There's a future where sulfur dioxide or other appropriate gases for solar radiation management are deployed in order to kill the South Asian monsoon system and disrupt that.

Weather modification will potentially be seen not as something that helps us keep people alive when we can't focus on more costly climate interventions.

It might actually be a way to punish those who oppose the world order of the wielder of that technology.

Carbon removal right now doesn't have the possibility to be a weapon of war.

I mean, there is a lot of talk of dual use and companies are looking to how did they go to market in an environment for which federal policy is absent with few exceptions like 45 Q for direct air capture, carbon capture technology.

As far as I know, I can't think of any way that carbon removal technology can be used offensively, but that's really not the case elsewhere in climate action.

I hope I'm wrong, by the way.

I'm not always feeling this way.

I describe my relationship to climate doom or climate triumphalism as a sine wave, and sometimes I'm in the through and sometimes I'm not.

And right now, all of those things together are putting me in the through.

And I'm thinking about what predictions do I make for business?

What predictions do I make for my family, given that that may be the future state of affairs?

What does one do if you have those feelings?

I hope I'm wrong, but if I'm not, there's a bit of a Cassandra effect here too.

You know, the curse of Cassandra is to be a prophet that no one listens to.

I don't have a big enough podcast for everyone to to listen to me.

That's fine.

But there's always a risk when you do something this early or make a declaration or prediction this early that you look foolish.

You're ahead of the curve here and people are laughing at it or just think you're overreacting until you're not.

That can be a little bit lonely.

I've had I had a couple conversations at Climate Week where I brought up some of these thoughts and I could tell the people were interested because this is get talked about in this way very often, but it is a downer of a topic.

It's hard to obscure that fact.

And when I am in the through and maybe sometimes you find yourself in the through of climate belief too.

I like to ask myself, put myself in the thought experiment of what would happen if I lost everything.

You're in the position of joke.

If your family's taken away, your wealth is all gone, your body is diseased, you wander the earth as a Wretch, do you imagine that you could be happy under those circumstances?

Could your own mind, your own spirit, keep you enough company to keep you alive in those moments?

And the answer for me is yes.

I think there's enough there to know that even in the face of great calamity, I could continue with only the smallest mustard seed of faith.

There's always an ability to start over, to revisit hope, and to have faith that we can rebuild.

And when you can make peace with having nothing, losing your career, your possessions, maybe even your reputation, but still having your mind and your spirit, you're also preparing yourself for death.

To prepare yourself for death means accepting a return, potentially to nothingness, potentially to pure spirit, where all you have are your tally of actions and perhaps the space to reflect upon them.

Depending on your spiritual tradition, Maybe you're judged for what you did, and punishment or prize is offered to you in proportion to how well you lived life.

And what can you control in all of this turbulence?

Essentially only the status of your own soul.

How lightly you step upon the earth, how kind you were, and what you did when the Abyss stared back into you.

Many traditions come back to this.

You know, I'm freestyling right now, but I can think of several.

There's an amazing Marcus Aurelius meditation on this that I'll put in the show notes if you'd like to read it.

I sometimes feel down on stoicism because I think it allows tech people to avoid their feelings more than they really need to.

People use it in a way that I think is inappropriate.

I like Nietzsche's focus on eternal return, of what would happen if a demon appeared to you and appeared to curse you with having to relive every moment of your life forever, and how would you feel in every moment of that eternal return?

Perhaps the most quoted line from all of reversing climate change is from Dostoyevsky, who said something paraphrased prayer doesn't exist to change the mind of God, it exists to change the person praying, acknowledging the transients of all things of your inability to control moving water.

Our ideas that intersect with several Eastern religious or spiritual traditions.

So at least for me, when I posed that question to myself, how would I feel if I lost everything, but I have the strength to continue on.

Would I keep going if my reputation, possessions, relationships?

We're all obliterated.

I think as long as I had possession of my mind, I would be able to to continue doing that.

I like to think that I would, and I'm thinking that it helps me relax my expectations for the future.

It doesn't make the grief any less, or the theoretical grief of an I'll future.

It does help somehow.

What is it like to live life when you don't expect the future to be better than the past?

What is it like when you expect calamity?

Can you still be joyful under those circumstances?

I'm not sure.

I wonder if I'm being idealistic about myself.

Self knowledge is a deceptively challenging thing to master.

I was recently visiting family in Lithuania and whenever I go to Lithuania I always become re obsessed with Eastern Europe.

The Holocaust, the Yiddish civilization that was obliterated there.

My intellectual attention just spotlights.

It's so hard and it's hard for me to think of anything else.

Eastern Europe is one of those places that people think of as boring.

They think of Stalinist brutalist apartment blocks.

They think of just potatoes and bad food and and mean people.

Eastern Europe has a bad reputation, which is why most of Europe, even the eastern portions of it, called themselves Central Europe.

I'm not sure if you've noticed this, but it's a very clever change because they point to the Ural Mountains and say that's that's the East.

Basically anything in the EU is at least central.

But Eastern Europe wasn't actually always like that.

Eastern Europe was a place where there was tremendous value on freedom.

The polls valued freedom so much that they created a a veto system called the Lee Barum veto that made it basically impossible for meaningful political action to take place.

Anyone member of their parliamentary body could veto anything, which is a beautiful notion of freedom and consent and the consent of the governed.

That made it really hard to do anything.

We talked about this in the episode of the show that I did with the amazing video game makers at 11 Bit Studios.

I'll put a link in the show notes.

The Jews were pushed out of much of Western Europe in the Middle Ages and came to the Polish, Lithuanian Commonwealth and just the areas of the East because there was relative tolerance and freedom for them.

Obviously there's intergroup conflict and not everyone gets along and, and at different points, the Poles, the Ukrainians, the various religious factions, the classes, they argue with each other, they quarrel.

There's pogromps.

It's not a perfect life, nothing is, but it mostly gets along and it develops an immense amount of wealth and diversity and it's amazing.

I read a book, I'll put it in the show notes too.

They're they found right before the invasion of Poland on September 1st, 1939, there was a Yiddish contest for youth to submit autobiography as a way of cataloging the diversity of of experience that happened in this entire Yiddish civilizational zone.

It's basically western Ukraine, eastern Poland, all the way up to Lithuania, down to the Black Sea.

Like there's, there's a millions and millions of people that are part of this Jewish Yiddish civilization and just catalogued the variety of lifeways of people that were, were living during those times.

You know, and they just recently found documents that were hidden in Vilnius for a long time and unearthed them.

And then someone did an amazing job illustrating them and bringing them to life.

I'll put a link.

I've heard the name of the book right now, but it's, it's a wonderful graphic novel, really cool.

And when you look at how much diversity there was in this Yiddish civilization, it's a nation without a state, with millions of people living in it.

You know, some of whom are sort of like charismatic religious figures, like the Hasidic folks.

Some of them are like the the Vilna gone, who are like intensely intellectual rabbinic figures who are just scholars of the the Mishnah, the Talmud.

They know everything and are making fascinating intellectual arguments and developing a highly intellectual yeshiva culture.

There's also young socialists and Zionists and some socialists are Zionists and some Zionists are socialists, but also there are some who are neither.

There's so much happening here.

And of course, if you read a book like Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder, it documents just what it's like being between the Germans and the Russians in World War 2.

So I'm I'm skipping ahead from the partitions of Poland.

There's three of them.

It destroyed the Polish state and it got, you know, incorporated into all of its neighbors essentially.

But once Poland is an independent state again after World War 1, and especially after the Molotov Ribbentrop Act, which you know, the Nazis and the the Soviets split Poland in 39 after Poland was invaded, you just have this push pull where Poland is being ruled by the Soviets who don't trust people who have their own political or religious commitments or basically anyone with any initiative at all.

And of course, the Germans who are trying to create this racially pure hinterland where they can have their own, like they were starved during World War One.

So they're trying to essentially create their own independent food supply so that they can stay alive in a in a land war.

Like, if they have a massive land empire, they don't need to be worried about the British Empire cutting them off with shipping.

Because I'm gonna start again.

Oh, OK.

Those are the big moving parts of history.

And there's so much that will be out of one's control during those moments.

It's brutal on all sides.

The Soviets, terrible Nazis, terrible.

The partisans also put individual people and communities to hard decisions, put them in very hard spots.

It's it honestly just seems like hell everywhere you turn.

It's bad.

If you collaborate with one group to survive, the next group is not sure if they can trust you and will likely kill you.

It honestly feels like the closest to hell on earth that there was the Eastern front in World War 2.

It's it's high up there you don't want to be there.

It's, it's horrible, but there's also so many stories that come out of reading about that time period where people chose to be kind, who knew that they were headed into the abyss, but still acted with integrity that didn't do whatever it took to save their own lives in a way that would have put their souls, if you buy that concept into a precarious spot.

And when you read stories like that, there's a tendency to think that you would have that amount of grace under pressure.

That you would be one of the ones who would hide A family fleeing their own deaths.

That you would be the one to choose to die in someone else's place.

That you would fight for the partisans and be brave, even if it meant that once it was known that you had joined the partisans, your entire family might be tortured and killed.

That one's perhaps a bit more ethically charged.

But for every case there is that's inspiring, that shows people capable of amazing dignity and sacrifice, there are also cases that you can read of selfishness that did not age well.

You will die at some point.

Do you want to do whatever it takes to not die sooner?

There's stories in that book that are horrifying during the whole lot of more the Ukrainian famine in the late 20s and early 30s of cannibalism, cannibalistic gangs like in the Road hunting people, trying to stay alive, killing innocent people to eat their flesh.

Are you willing to do that to survive a little bit longer?

Those questions sound scary.

Weirdly enough, I find them to be clarifying and you should be asking these questions of yourself right now.

I hear stories sometimes from the world of carbon removal.

Everyone starts off talking a good game about integrity, but any commercial enterprise puts you in a position to occasionally make choices between science and commercial.

I've heard many stories of people who felt pressure for their jobs beside in favor of commercial at the expense of integrity.

You might argue that on net, being perfect is going to result in a less good outcome than merely good, and that trying to be perfectionistic and having super high integrity here is going to set us back and not put us in a place that we want to be.

And I used to buy that.

I did.

And I still see the logic in it.

And I can respect if you're listening and you do, but I don't think that's what I want to do for myself.

Granted, it's easy for me to say because I do not have a full time position somewhere that is making these demands of me.

I have the luxury of sitting on my high perch here, you know, laying out life lessons for all the sinners.

My God, I think that's an Always Sunny line, and I think I have enough self knowledge to know that some part of this is wishful thinking, some part of this is vanity.

But I think you should have a line.

Many of those moments in business or elsewhere, it's very easy to move the line.

A good opportunity will come up.

Maybe there's some parts of it you don't like, but you overrule it.

It only takes a few of those until you're somewhere very different than you thought you might be.

I made a very elliptical Link when I was at Climate Week.

I was having dinner with some friends and I was talking about this tension between science and commercial and basically any company.

I'm not even, I'm not pointing at anyone specifically.

I think this is just true of capitalism.

I think it's just true of what it's like to be in the climate business at all.

And I was thinking about the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai, which if you haven't seen it, that's wonderful.

In fact, even just talking about it, I think it's time for a rewatch.

It always makes those AFI best films of all time.

It's terrific.

And also you get to see Obi Wan Kenobi in a different role.

You have Allied soldiers in Myanmar, then, you know, then it was called Burma, building a railroad through the jungle.

The commander of the imprisoned Allied troops is Alec Guinness, Obi Wan Kenobi, and is trying to keep morale high by having the men focus on a goal, which is building this bridge for the Japanese so they can better fight the Allies.

And there's a sense of keeping them focus on the goal, but also trying to undermine the Japanese too.

They don't actually want to build this bridge because it will allow them to much more effectively fight their comrades in arms.

But also not having a goal, not having a purpose, just languishing in the jungle is going to kill these men or it's going to make the Japanese feel that these people are just to borrow a phrase from the Nazis, useless eaters and kill them.

So there's, there's these tensions here.

Like what are you trying to do exactly?

Are you trying to motivate the men and, and have a purpose for the Japanese?

Are you trying to sabotage the Japanese war effort?

And the movie concludes.

This movie's like 100 years old.

It's almost 100 years old, 80 years old, 90 years.

It's 70 years old or something like that at this point.

So I think I'm allowed to talk about it openly here.

The conclusion of the film is that they build the bridge and some of the men want to blow it up.

And Alec Guinness stops it because he got so invested in this smaller goal that he lost sight of what the bigger purpose of what his collaboration or sabotage or mix of both was meant to be serving.

You make all these little compromises trying to do things, and then by the end, he has a moment where he stops the bridge from being destroyed after it was built.

That's my God, what have I done?

And just this moment of, of terror of, of like the wrong decision being made, the wrong thing being prioritized, and I just don't want to be in a position of, of my God, what have I done?

I don't think this is uniquely true about carbon removal.

I don't think it's uniquely true about climate.

I think it's just part of what it's like trying to believe in anything.

And the rule makes it very hard to believe in things.

And we have phrases that we we use to comfort ourselves that the world is inherently disappointing and difficult.

Don't make the perfect the enemy of the good.

It's a fancy way of saying you should lower your expectations.

Just be happy for what you've got, which is fine.

There's some wisdom in there.

I can respect that.

But if we are pointed at the abyss, if the future is as bleak as I sometimes feel it is, how does that affect your decision making?

Do you want to be like Alec Guinness and the bridge on the River Kwai?

Do you want to be someone who maintained their dignity and humanity while being marched to a mass grave in Ukraine or Lithuania?

Is that even something that you can decide ahead of time?

This is after all a thought experiment and not even asking you to draw any specific conclusion here, but to ask yourself how it makes you feel and what kind of person you would like to be when this is asked of you.

Because it very well might be.

They can be small things like are you expected to make compromises at your business to get a deal done even though the climate action is less than is typically supposed?

It could be a big thing.

And how do you even ask this question without glorifying yourself or expecting that you would always choose the most noble of things to do?

And I think the only way to do that is to be OK with the fact that you will lose everything and you will ultimately die, because otherwise one will make decisions that will try to preserve your expectations.

But if your expectations are that low, or maybe I should say that realistic, maybe it will help you make better decisions for the future.

By way of a postscript, I find the literary value of ghosts to be instructive here.

The most common phrase that everyone associates with ghosts, and you can say it with me, is unfinished business.

Ghosts are often those who don't even realize that they're ghosts.

They're so caught in their own selfishness and their own self absorption and their own pain and their own greed, they've forgotten that they've even died.

They walk the halls of a building that used to live in or work in or angry about the people.

They're moving their stuff, not realizing that they're not alive to do anything anymore.

I think that's such a beautiful literary device.

There's also a Contra Passo in Dante's Divine Comedy that I've talked about in the podcast, but it's been several years.

I love it, though.

There are these figures that Dante encounters that are so caught up in Florentine politics that all they want to talk to Dante about is which family is he from which side of the great rivalry of the families of Florence did he take sides in?

And it's a funny scene because these men are literally being held in hell to great suffering and they can't even focus on that or find a way to make peace with the fact of where they are because of their failure of self knowledge.

They're so wrapped up in Florentine politics that even though they have a living man in front of them, they still are obsessed with what bothered them in life.

They could not let go of it.

They're stuck there.

They're unfinished business is their torment.

I think much of this unfinished business is an expectation that you might have, an expectation of the way things can be, should be.

And releasing that expectation is something that could in fact liberate you, allow you to make better decisions.

Allow you to increase the amount of humanity in your life.

If you've been listening to these shows too, by the way, and you connect with them in any way, you should know that I am not some spiritual genius or anything.

Me talking about any of this stuff is because I think I'm like among the crappiest people to be enacting any of this out there.

I think about it, but it mostly stands to make me aware of my own hypocrisy.

Being graceful, loving, and forgiving in this way is, I think, the greatest challenge that presents itself to a human on earth.

And my being interested in these ideas does not mean that I'm even halfway decent at it.

But it helps me.

It helps me to Orient my expectations, to release them.

I tried to point myself in a direction that I can be proud of, that if ghosts are real, I don't die with unfinished business of expectations unfulfilled, and I'm able to gracefully pass into the great beyond in a way that I can be welcomed to as someone who learned how to live.

It's more of an aspiration than a reality, but maybe.

But maybe I'll get there, and maybe you will too.

Good luck.

How's that for a New York Climate Week's reflections post?

Not nearly as chummy as many of the other ones.

Thanks for listening.

I hope you have a wonderful day.

Hopefully you can take some of these ideas with you and use it to change your relationship to life, to death and the decisions you have to make every day in a life which is extremely fraught.

Bye for now.