Reversing Climate Change

What happens when you ask Dimitry Gershenson how he's doing? He tells you. This confuses people at parties, and by his account it works surprisingly well on investors.Today's guest is Dimitry Gershenson, the co-founder and CEO of Enduring Planet, which provides "founder-friendly working capital and financial advisory services to climate startups and SMBs," often lending against a government grant or contract. They recently closed a second fund more than twice the size of their first.We get into why so much climate content reads like it went through legal, the op-ed on impact investing in an age of autocracy he held back until his fund closed (a major investor bailed anyway), how much (or how little) of his work runs on anger, and what being on the autism spectrum is like while running a company of almost 120 people.And Dimitry tells the story of a field trip with his old Berkeley professor John Harte, who gave the bleakest two-word summary of climate change I've heard in a while, followed by a surprisingly useful second answer.Full disclosure: I have a referral agreement with Enduring Planet, so if you go talk to them, tell them I sent you.Enduring PlanetCourageous Capital: Impact investing in an age of autocracy, Dimitry Gershenson and Jed Emerson, ImpactAlphaTake risk, act swiftly and seven other tips for deploying catalytic capital the right way, Dimitry Gershenson, ImpactAlphaWith $12M second fund, fintech startup aims to pump more cash into climate entrepreneurs, GeekWireEnergy and Resources Group, UC BerkeleyRadical Candor, Kim ScottThis episode's page on the webSubscribe to the Reversing Climate Change SubstackBooks from the show, at BookshopMy other show, Climate Workers Anonymous

I've known Katharine Wilkinson's work for a long time, but only recently got a monkey wrench far enough around my heart to open it up and engage with it seriously. Her new book is Climate Wayfinding: Healing Ourselves and the Planet We Call Home, and she says plainly what most of climate work treats as a fluffy nice-to-have: the core of this work is spiritual, and she probably knew it at 16.Dr. Katharine K. Wilkinson co-founded and leads The All We Can Save Project and co-edited All We Can Save with Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. She was lead writer of Drawdown and co-hosts A Matter of Degrees with Dr. Leah Stokes.Listen in as she reteaches Ross how to listen to the wisdom centers of his body, and why it is that we have grown so practical that we have lost touch with such a basic skill.LinksClimate Wayfinding, at BookshopThe All We Can Save ProjectHuman on Earth, Katharine's SubstackA Matter of DegreesThe Carbon Wave by Leah Stokes, at BookshopPlum VillageThinking Little with Mary Berry (episode 422)ResourcesThis episode's page on the webSubscribe to the Reversing Climate Change SubstackBooks from the show, at BookshopMy other show, Climate Workers Anonymous

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 in Nigeria, where equipment built for plantations met thick-shelled nuts that arrive wet, dusty and full of rocks. BIG is the carbon dioxide removal side, spun out because Releaf's investors understood agriculture and supply chains and did not understand the voluntary carbon market.They bought their pyrolyzer from a Ukrainian manufacturer during a war, installed it without the manufacturer's engineer, and Uzo slept in the factory on a yoga mat for two weeks. Uptime went from around a third to 87 percent. We also get into cassava yields, what Y Combinator told them when they got in, and my own YC story, which ends with Nori getting in and saying no.This Episode's SponsorEcoEngineers: a full-service advisory and consulting firm focused on carbon dioxide removal, decarbonization, and carbon markets.Listen to the RCC episode I made with David LaGreca from EcoEngineers about how to choose, hire, and fire carbon market contractors.And the one with Rudy Krehbiel, also of EcoEngineers, on which story carbon dioxide removal is actually in and what it costs to be inside the wrong one.2026 EcoForums Training Series: Navigating Global Carbon and Fuel Regulations, Market Mechanisms, and Life-Cycle Analysis FundamentalsResourcesFull disclosure: Uzo, Kenna, and I met in the AirMiners Launchpad Accelerator program and I have worked with them in a few programs since.Subscribe to the Reversing Climate Change SubstackBecome a paid subscriber for bonus content and ad-free episodesMy other show, Climate Workers AnonymousReleafBiochar Industrial GroupBIG raises $1.5m to turn African farm waste into carbon removal, TechCabalAirMinersHow Releaf is scaling Nigerian biochar, my piece for RainbowBooks from the show, at BookshopResourcesThis episode's page on the webSubscribe to the Reversing Climate Change SubstackBooks from the show, at BookshopMy other show, Climate Workers Anonymous

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 may not deliver.Rudy Krehbiel thinks some of those stories are misleading us, and this episode is about working out which ones. My introduction runs long because I wanted to talk about Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation first, a film about a man who does not know what genre he is in until the genre changes around him, and which you should watch whether or not you have ever thought about a carbon credit.Rudy works on strategic development at EcoEngineers, who also sponsor this show, and he came into carbon dioxide removal from startups and venture capital, which is why he keeps reaching for diffusion curves. His read is that we are at the innovator stage and mistaking it for a trough. His figures, and they hold up against CDR.fyi's April 2026 snapshot: fewer than 50 million tonnes contracted, barely over a million delivered, Microsoft alone accounting for 78.5% of the disclosed total, and a median purchase outside Microsoft still under 100 tonnes. Diagnose that as failure and you start prescribing medicine for a disease nobody has.The harder argument is the one about public goods. Solar panels and EVs deliver something microeconomic you would still buy if climate change did not exist. A tonne of carbon dioxide removed does not. That makes this, in Rudy's words, arguably the hardest public good anyone has tried to fund, and it is why he will not call the ending inevitable. I asked him to name the story we ought to be inside of. What he answered? You'll have to listen to find out.The Show's SponsorEcoEngineers: a full-service advisory and consulting firm focused on carbon dioxide removal, decarbonization, and carbon markets.Listen to the RCC episode I made with David LaGreca from EcoEngineers about how to choose, hire, and fire carbon market contractors.2026 EcoForums Training Series: Navigating Global Carbon and Fuel Regulations, Market Mechanisms, and Life-Cycle Analysis FundamentalsRudy works at EcoEngineers and EcoEngineers sponsors this show. I would have had him on either way, and you should know the arrangement.ResourcesSubscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack for bonus content and ad-free episodesClimate Workers Anonymous, the other show I makeEcoEngineers"How Carbon Removal Loses", the episode Rudy and I keep circlingBelief that makes itself true: a hyperstition for carbon dioxide removalWhy Don Quixote is so misunderstoodHow non-human intelligence will change us, with D.W. Pasulka, where the Marshall McLuhan scene comes upAdaptation (2002), written by Charlie Kaufman, directed by Spike JonzeThe Orchid Thief by Susan OrleanStory by Robert McKeeDiffusion of Innovations, Everett RogersCrossing the Chasm, Geoffrey MooreGartner hype cycleCDR.fyi's demand structure snapshot, April 2026, the source for the Microsoft and Frontier concentration figuresPublic good, non-rivalrous and non-excludable, used correctly for once (my pet peeve)Whig historiographyAlternative für DeutschlandNational RallyHanging a lampshadeThe Bridge on the River KwaiLiberty ships and Victory gardensResourcesThis episode's page on the webSubscribe to the Reversing Climate Change SubstackBooks from the show, at BookshopMy other show, Climate Workers Anonymous

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 farming. She started it because a forty-year local food movement had produced some very good farmers' markets and almost no change to the culture of farming, and because the best agricultural program her state ever had was being forgotten inside that very state.Listen in to hear more about why the local food movement concentrated on food and skipped land use and the economic lives of farmers, and what you do about any of this if you have no Henry County of your own to go back to.My new introduction is about that last part, and about whether those of who without such roots are like locusts, but somehow worse? What a grim sentence to pen, and there's a lot more coming on this topic soon...This Episode's SponsorEcoEngineers: a full-service advisory and consulting firm focused on carbon dioxide removal, decarbonization, and carbon markets.Listen to the RCC episode I made with David LaGreca from EcoEngineers about how to choose, hire, and fire carbon market contractors.Listen to the RCC episode I made with Rudy Krehbiel, also of EcoEngineers, on which story carbon dioxide removal is actually in and what it costs to be inside the wrong one.2026 EcoForums Training Series: Navigating Global Carbon and Fuel Regulations, Market Mechanisms, and Life-Cycle Analysis FundamentalsResourcesSubscribe to the ⁠⁠Reversing Climate Change Substack⁠⁠⁠⁠Become a paid subscriber⁠⁠ for bonus content and ad-free episodesCheck out my new show, Climate Workers AnonymousThe original 2020 release of this conversationThe Berry Center, and Our Home Place Meat, and the shopThe Berry Center Farm and Forest Institute: the education program Mary describes as the Wendell Berry Farming Program of Sterling College, now run by the Berry Center itselfThe Agrarian Culture Center and the Archive of The Berry Center, which holds her grandfather's and uncle's papers from the Burley Tobacco ProgramThe Land Institute, and Wes Jackson's Becoming Native to This PlaceRemovals, avoidances, and what Wendell Berry thought of making tonnes fungibleWendell Berry, Jayber Crow and the Port William novels, and The World-Ending FireThe 50-Year Farm BillOrganic Valley, founded on what its founder knew about the Burley Tobacco ProgramFour Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry ManderBowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. PutnamGary SnyderThe episode art is Winslow Homer's The Veteran in a New Field, 1865, oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876–1967), 1967, accession number 67.187.131. Public domain, via The Met's Open Access program.Originally released in September 2020 as season 2, episode 30. Re-released September 2026 with a new introduction.ResourcesThis episode's page on the webSubscribe to the Reversing Climate Change SubstackBooks from the show, at BookshopMy other show, Climate Workers Anonymous