Climate Workers Anonymous

What responsibility do we have for our ideas once they leave us?The assignment of moral blame usually stops close to the source since true attribution is hard, e.g. how much responsibility does Friedrich Nietzsche have for the Nazis? Open question, though it doesn’t strike most of us as fair that we have to game out who our ideas might influence and how decades or centuries ahead of time.This is an episode exploring the moral hazard of carbon dioxide removal, solar radiation management, the monkey paw, and Marshall McLuhan.Thanks so much for being a part of this collective art project and sharing your take on working in climate.Sincerely,Ross Kenyon--------------------Thank you for listening to and reading Climate Workers Anonymous. Subscribe to Substack below, and be sure to subscribe in whichever podcast app you use. An amazing rating and review on those podcast apps does a world of good. Would you please do that for me now? Here’s Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.If you’d like submit your anonymous hopes, fears, or experiences to Climate Workers Anonymous, you can use this Tally survey or email climateworkersanonymous[at]protonmail.com, though I believe the Tally survey is more secure. Do not communicate anything you wouldn’t want a hacker to have access to, including an email address that could be linked to you if you email the account on Protonmail. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit climateworkersanonymous.com

A confession from someone who works on power grid connections for large emitters, and who has watched low-level regulators quietly close off the routes that new gas plants need to connect unless they include CCS.No announcement, no press release. Just minor changes to grid codes and guidances until the business case for a plant without carbon capture stopped existing.They call themselves a termite.Before the submission I get into James C. Scott and why we assume corporations rather than governments are the place climate action has to start. Also Estonia, and what it says about us that we cut an agency's funding and then point at how badly it works.Send your own anonymous confession here.Climate Workers Anonymous is curated by Ross Kenyon. Full transcript, additional writing, the archive, and more available on Substack. Can I count on you to subscribe?Episode art adapted from a photograph by Olga Ernst, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit climateworkersanonymous.com

Today's submission is about why perhaps less scrutiny is shown to artisanal biochar than industrial, and how that actually may be harmful to these artisanal biochar project developers. Will dMRV providers notice? But first...Is this a diary?I intended for Climate Workers Anonymous to be a conduit for the submissions of others, but reading them always make me think. When they are simple calls for a better world, I love it. When you decry hypocrisy, I’m at the barricades with you. When you’re staring into the scale of our climate work and the resulting feelings of hopelessness, I’ll match you sentiment for sentiment.Do you not have all of these inside of you too? Do you not show them or hide them depending upon the social context?Climate Workers Anonymous is at least partially an attempt to widen the context of climate and carbon dioxide removal work beyond toxic positivity and taking corporate climate action at face value. But I’m wondering if there is room enough in this project to bring some of my own feelings in sometimes.Maybe it’s a one-off. But I’m going to share with you today where I am.Sometimes you show up to make a show and there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end. Sometimes you’re going through a hard personal time and have to smile through your work calls. Sometimes you might be extremely concerned for the future of your country let alone species let alone the more-than-human world. And sometimes it can all just burst out without necessarily having the right headings and spacings and sequencing. Right now, it’s all laid out.If that’s how you’re feeling today, let it rip. I have these days too as is plain to see.Thanks so much to today's submitter and for being brave in your work in carbon dioxide removal.Sincerely,Ross Kenyon--------------------------Thank you for listening to and reading Climate Workers Anonymous. Subscribe to Substack below, and be sure to subscribe in whichever podcast app you use. An amazing rating and review on those podcast apps does a world of good. Would you please do that for me now? Here’s Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.If you’d like submit your anonymous hopes, fears, or experiences to Climate Workers Anonymous, you can use this Tally survey or email climateworkersanonymous[at]protonmail.com, though I believe the Tally survey is more secure. Do not communicate anything you wouldn’t want a hacker to have access to, including an email address that could be linked to you if you email the account on Protonmail.Did you connect with this edition of Climate Workers Anonymous? Share this out with your network and help it get seen.Here are some things the audio referenced that didn’t make it into the essay above:* Daniel Schmachtenberger’s work.* Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit climateworkersanonymous.com

When is your startup’s failure your fault?Saying your startup failed because of macroeconomic conditions is a bit like saying your marriage failed because being married is hard. Yes, but is that really all the analysis you’ve got handy? It can’t all be the business cycle and macroeconomics, right?Today’s submission to Climate Workers Anonymous is about what to do with macro conditions and the business cycle from within your particular climate tech or carbon dioxide removal company.One part of it is about offering grace to one another and ourselves. It’s hard to go wrong in over-applying grace. But another part of it is an encouragement to remain counter-cyclical. If everyone is panicking, you be the calm one looking for acquisition and growth opportunities. If the good feelings of the endless summer of expansionary times are being felt by all, you be the cautious one and note that this too shall pass. If you believe what everyone else believes, you will broadly end up in the same place. And if you lead a company, your job isn’t to end up with everyone else (or at least under capitalism as normally played.) So you should have a counter-cyclical default at least as one way of seeing among many.But for your own sake, it doesn’t need to be the only tool you have. If it is, it’s no longer the millstone as a the tool but a millstone as the sinker around your neck. Having only one cognitive tool and overapplying it is one of the ways one can end up in crackpot territory. Be advised!-------------------------Thank you for listening to and reading Climate Workers Anonymous. Subscribe to Substack here, and be sure to subscribe in whichever podcast app you use. An amazing rating and review on those podcast apps does a world of good. Would you please do that for me now? Here’s Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.If you’d like submit your anonymous hopes, fears, or experiences to Climate Workers Anonymous, you can use this Tally survey or email climateworkersanonymous[at]protonmail.com, though I believe the Tally survey is more secure. Do not communicate anything you wouldn’t want a hacker to have access to, including an email address that could be linked to you if you email the account on Protonmail.Will you please share this Climate Workers Anonymous post out with your network? Help this find more folks out there who will love it! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit climateworkersanonymous.com

Things are going poorly for you? That’s too bad, because I’m having a grand ol’ time.Are you subscribed to Climate Workers Anonymous? Do so now to listen in and read whenever a new edition is released and support this fledgling collective art project.Welcome to Climate Workers Anonymous, where those who work in climate are able to share the feelings and experiences they want to share but aren’t sure they want attached to their name.They might want that anonymity because they’ve got some biting satirical take their corporate employer would frown upon. Maybe it’s someone trying to scale their company’s impact but is dubious that all of the levels of governance in carbon dioxide removal do as much good as is claimed. Or maybe they want anonymity because their company is doing well when many of their peers are not. That can be its own form of loneliness.As I was recording this and trying to describe this feeling, I got stuck onto “the ghost at the feast” that people associate so strongly with Shakespeare’s Macbeth.But that’s not quite right. In the play, Banquo’s ghost shows up, Macbeth is the only character who can see him, and it causes Macbeth to act very erratically, ruining the feast for the guests and especially Lady Macbeth.For this submission, it’s more like the submitter is a vigorous person who somehow wandered into a “meal” for ghosts. The submitter’s contentment, health, and ability to sate their hunger can’t help but cause the ghosts envy and grief by merely existing in their presence.This type of inequality—even if earned entirely through meritocratic means (though it’s for me to know where such a thing could exist in the world such as it is)—can make us uncomfortable. As I read the submission, the submitter is proud of their strategy and ability to execute and good read of macro conditions and wants to promenade their success without necessarily wishing any else will or a lack of success.I do wonder in a case like this, if it would be less satisfying to the submitter if everyone received the same success. Would it diminish their value or their foresight? How much of our desire to work is driven by a need to distinguish ourselves as individuals, and to feel our status grow in the eyes of ourselves and others?Who can say what is in the submitter’s heart, when even our own can be so mysterious? But if we take them at face value, it’s also an encouragement to fight yourself back to health. Don’t give up. It’s not too late. Get back in the game and catch up to your peer so you can celebrate alongside.SubmissionsN.B. The submissions in Climate Workers Anonymous are anonymous and unverified.* We’re actually fine. Times are tough, no doubt, but we keep growing from a large base, and have some really exciting milestones ahead of us. In some ways, I wish I saw more fighting spirit from our industry. Some large incumbents aren’t getting the funding to take them to the scale they expected, but somehow they’ve decided to just do nothing instead. Complete silence, at least in public, which also makes the bad buyer & investor sentiment a self-fulfilling prophecy to some extent. Surely it’d be better to at least keep building & learning publicly at a smaller scale like we used to? Meanwhile, we feel vindicated in the strategic choices we made that allow us to keep scaling, but it feels like there’s nobody to celebrate with if the whole industry is hurting.I enjoy these short and sweet episodes. I’d welcome your thoughts. Please like and share this post out if you enjoyed it, and and subscribe if you aren’t already. Below is the info to submit your tales, feelings, thoughts to Climate Workers Anonymous for publication on the podcast and in written form as in this edition.Thanks so much for your support.Sincerely,Ross KenyonCurator of Climate Workers AnonymousThank you for listening to and reading Climate Workers Anonymous. Subscribe to Substack below, and be sure to subscribe in whichever podcast app you use. An amazing rating and review on those podcast apps does a world of good. Would you please do that for me now? Here’s Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.If you’d like submit your anonymous hopes, fears, or experiences to Climate Workers Anonymous, you can use this Tally survey or email climateworkersanonymous[at]protonmail.com, though I believe the Tally survey is more secure. Do not communicate anything you wouldn’t want a hacker to have access to, including an email address that could be linked to you if you email the account on Protonmail.Did you enjoy this post from Climate Workers Anonymous? Please share it out so it can find the people who will love it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit climateworkersanonymous.com