Reversing Climate Change 378: When Bad Companies Buy Good Carbon Removal
Is the voluntary carbon market a club for saints? Or is it a hospital for sinners? Are we meant to understand all and then to forgive all? How much time are we meant to devote to idealistic abstinence-esque policies for change, and how much of our professional lives should go to harm reduction?
Today's show deals with some of the biggest questions in carbon removal and carbon markets, and does it in just the kind of literary-philosophical ways that make this shows its own... whatever it is that it is.
Trust me and I'll guide you through the history of the Soviet Union and at least one Warsaw Pact country, David Simon, critical theory, German nuclear policy, the Bill Gates piece that ruffled all feathers one way or another, the Enabled Emissions Campaign, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vasily Grossman, I Heart Huckabees, and Bicycle Thieves.
Some days you hit record and you never quite know what you're going to discover...
N.B. The image today is Vaclav Havel's greengrocer from "The Power of the Powerless" as illustrated by his Czech compatriot, Josef Lada, who did the original illustrations for Jaroslav Hašek's incredibly funny,The Good Soldier Švejk, who is a sort of antiwar/pacifistic Amelia Bedelia who messes things up in the Army by being a bit too literal and a bit too eager to follow orders.
This Episode's Sponsors
Absolute Climate: the only standard that’s developed independent of registries
Philip Lee LLP: legal resources for carbon removal buyers and suppliers
Listen to the RCC episode with Peter Minor from Absolute Climate
Listen to the RCC episode with Ryan Covington from Philip Lee LLP
Resources
Become a paid subscriber of Reversing Climate Change
Subscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack
The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek
The Death of Stalin film
"The Power of the Powerless" by Vaclav Havel; it's abridged here but you can click through to the full thing if you'd like
"The Clash of Aristocratic and Bourgeois Virtues in 'The Wire'" by Dr. Bart Wilson
Holodomor (the Ukrainian Famine)
Katyn Massacre (NSFW: death pit image is first thing on Wikipedia)
"The Society of the Spectacle" by Guy Debord
"Three tough truths about climate" by Bill Gates
Germany closing nuclear power plants