Emotional startup lessons from Nori cofounders—w/ Alexsandra Guerra of Calming Chaos

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. Links Climate Wayfinding, at Bookshop

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 Sponsor EcoEngineers: 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 Fundamentals Resources Full 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 Substack Become a paid subscriber for bonus content and ad-free episodes My other show, Climate Workers Anonymous Releaf Biochar Industrial Group BIG raises $1.5m to turn African farm waste into carbon removal, TechCabal AirMiners How Releaf is scaling Nigerian biochar, my piece for Rainbow Books from the show, at Bookshop Resources This episode's page on the web: https://www.rosskenyon.com/p/the-palm-nutcracker-that-became-a-86a Subscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack: https://www.rosskenyon.com/subscribe Books from the show, at Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/shop/reversing-climate-change My other show, Climate Workers Anonymous: https://www.climateworkersanonymous.com

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 Sponsor EcoEngineers: 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 Fundamentals Rudy works at EcoEngineers and EcoEngineers sponsors this show. I would have had him on either way, and you should know the arrangement. Resources Subscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack for bonus content and ad-free episodes Climate Workers Anonymous, the other show I make EcoEngineers "How Carbon Removal Loses", the episode Rudy and I keep circling Belief that makes itself true: a hyperstition for carbon dioxide removal Why Don Quixote is so misunderstood How non-human intelligence will change us, with D.W. Pasulka, where the Marshall McLuhan scene comes up Adaptation (2002), written by Charlie Kaufman, directed by Spike Jonze The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean Story by Robert McKee Diffusion of Innovations, Everett Rogers Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore Gartner hype cycle CDR.fyi's demand structure snapshot, April 2026, the source for the Microsoft and Frontier concentration figures Public good, non-rivalrous and non-excludable, used correctly for once (my pet peeve) Whig historiography Alternative für Deutschland National Rally Hanging a lampshade The Bridge on the River Kwai Liberty ships and Victory gardens Resources This episode's page on the web: https://www.rosskenyon.com/p/which-story-is-carbon-dioxide-removal-97e Subscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack: https://www.rosskenyon.com/subscribe Books from the show, at Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/shop/reversing-climate-change My other show, Climate Workers Anonymous: https://www.climateworkersanonymous.com

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 Sponsor EcoEngineers: 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 Fundamentals Resources Subscribe to the ⁠⁠Reversing Climate Change Substack⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Become a paid subscriber⁠⁠ for bonus content and ad-free episodes Check out my new show, Climate Workers Anonymous The original 2020 release of this conversation The Berry Center, and Our Home Place Meat, and the shop The 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 itself The Agrarian Culture Center and the Archive of The Berry Center, which holds her grandfather's and uncle's papers from the Burley Tobacco Program The Land Institute, and Wes Jackson's Becoming Native to This Place Removals, avoidances, and what Wendell Berry thought of making tonnes fungible Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow and the Port William novels, and The World-Ending Fire The 50-Year Farm Bill Organic Valley, founded on what its founder knew about the Burley Tobacco Program Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam Gary Snyder

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 tonnes of soil organic carbon fungible with one another, which may be the worst reading of an audience in my career. He said no both times, kindly. I still have the letters. Listen in to hear more about what it is like to meet someone from Verra and have the first sentence out of your mouth be "I used to think I was better than you", why the hardest parts of carbon market integrity turn out to be structural rather than a failure of anyone's willpower, what the Scouring of the Shire has to do with a methodology list, why I would keep rainforest over carbon removal if someone made me choose, and those ever-present wizards and prophets. This Episode's Sponsor EcoEngineers: 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 Fundamentals Rainbow is a client of mine and I say so in the episode. They are not sponsoring this episode. I was just inspired by the work itself. Resources Subscribe to the ⁠Reversing Climate Change Substack⁠ ⁠Become a paid subscriber⁠ for bonus content and ad-free episodes Removals, avoidances, and the rise of the portfolio mentality, the essay this episode is built on, at Rainbow Rainbow, the standard and registry Sustained Neutralization of the Warming Response to Emissions through a Portfolio of GHG Mitigation Strategies, Ella Hughes, Zeke Hausfather, Randall Spock and Christopher Van Arsdale, CDRXIV, May 2026. This is the Google paper on stacking and bridging The Prodigal Son of Carbon Markets, with Martin Freimüller of Octavia Carbon, on his change of heart about the voluntary carbon market Jason Grillo writes Climagination, and was on the show for The Culture of Carbon Removal Robert Höglund writes Marginal Carbon Rereading The Wizard and the Prophet six years deeper into climate work, with Charles C. Mann, where the wizards and prophets framing comes from The impossible taxonomy of carbon dioxide removal, the previous episode about categories that mislead Wendell Berry, 1934 to 2026, Kentucky Lantern Six Wendell Berry books, and most of what this show has argued about for a decade, are on my Bookshop shelf. Book links go to Bookshop.org. They pay me a commission at no extra cost to you, and the rest goes to independent bookshops.