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

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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.

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.

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

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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