By Nori
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The podcast currently has 336 episodes available.
Content warning: This episode discusses a scene in a video game that involves sexual assault during war. If you'd like to skip that section, it is from 7:57-8:35. There is a response that discusses the ethical choices in the game beyond that point, but it is more abstract and general about choices.
Video games have not historically been amazing at storytelling. Games prioritize mechanics and gameplay while story takes a backseat. But that isn’t the case at 11 bit studios, which have produced some of the finest video games in recent years, including a series that takes place within a climate-changed world.
Today’s Reversing Climate Change guest is Maciej Sułecki. Maciej worked on three games that RCC host Ross Kenyon is a huge fan of: This War of Mine, and Frostpunk 1 & 2.
The conversation starts with The War of Mine, in which the player plays as a group of civilians trying to survive a fictionalized Siego of Sarajevo. Unlike most war games, the objective is not to win a battle (most characters are ill-suited to fighting) but merely to stay alive and not lose your soul in the process by engaging in unethical or traumatic behavior.
The Frostpunk games each deal with a world that has iced over, and humanity is barely hanging on. Due to the extreme circumstances of survival, the decisions are hard and the political choices tend toward the extreme. It puts players in the role of deciding how to rank liberal values that we take for granted about the consent of the governed and the political process against survival. What’s more: it doesn’t do this in a straightforward way meant to teach you a lesson—a very unusual quality in any media, let alone a video game!
Ross and Maciej discuss other games and series that have prioritized story to varying degrees such as Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, Papers, Please, and Disco Elysium, and also end up discussing the degree to which Polish history influenced what are otherwise games meant to be universal.
In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the democratic body of the Sejm had a principle called the Liberum Veto, by which any member of the body could veto a policy. While this was a beautiful idea, it made it easy for members to be bribed by outsiders to block policy changes and cease the development of the state. By some accounts, it led to the weakening of the Polish state and therefore its ultimate susceptibility to the Polish Partitions. Did that influence the gamemakers thoughts on democracy? Is there such a thing as a universal game, or does all art spring from our experience, cultural or otherwise?
In discussions about technology, and maybe especially within climatetech, the concept of the "Faustian bargain" is common. But what does it actually mean, and is it as simple as concept as it is typically considered?
In today's special Halloween episode, Reversing Climate Change host, Ross Kenyon, intros the show by giving the necessary historical context to understand Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, and to contrast it against Christophe Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Get ready for a dose of Romanticism.
When the Faustian bargain is invoked, it usually means a bad deal—one with no upside except for a short-sighted one. And that may be true for Marlowe’s Faust, but Goethe’s Faust wins his bet with Mephistopheles and his soul is never damned. What does that mean for how we use the term, when persistent survival if not actual upside is reintroduced into the Faustian bargain? What if, at least according to Goethe, making a deal with the devil isn’t always as straightforwardly bad as one might think?
Today’s guest is frequent podcast alumni and multihyphenate, Daniel Backer. Daniel produces virtuosic music, writes insightful novels, and creates video content about literary fiction on both his YouTube and TikTok channels. Be sure to follow his work!
Daniel and Ross spend much of the show exploring what it does to one’s brain to take claims of high strangeness, the paranormal, and the occult seriously, and why horror films (especially those of Ari Aster) deserve a better reputation.
Happy Halloween!
N.B. Reversing Climate Change is no longer a Nori podcast, but its own show. Outdated assets will be updated if and as possible.
The Grounded podcast takes over Reversing Climate Change! Tom Previte of The Carbon Removal Show, founded a new biochar company in the United Kingdom called Restord. And like any good podcaster, he decided to make a show about it!
Grounded: A Climate Startup Journey, just wrapped its five-episode first season documenting Tom's attempts to start a new biochar company. He walks listeners through so many of the basic questions of starting a business, and specifically a business in a new category like carbon removal. What standard should one try to work within? Which parts of the life-cycle assessment matter? Who actually wants this product?!
What's especially novel about this episode is that Tom and his producer Ben Weaver-Hincks produced it in the style of Grounded, with voiceover segments and various other effects!
Tom and Ross talk about how to make podcasts about carbon removal interesting, how various design decisions impact quality and frequency of publishing, and what we can do to get more people into CDR and climate action through creative media work.
Resources
The Carbon Removal Show
Grounded
Restord
Restord's crowdfunding campaign
Connect with Nori
Purchase Nori Carbon Removals
Nori's website
Nori on Twitter
Check out our other podcast, Carbon Removal Newsroom
Carbon Removal Memes on Twitter
Carbon Removal Memes on Instagram
How do we conduct science when there isn't a single isolated variable? What does that mean for carbon removal not taking place in a controlled environment? How does science even work?!
Today's show originated from a question of how open-system carbon removal research can be conducted given that in a less-controlled environment, isolating for a single variable with replicability is less obviously possible. Does the scientific method really demand that, or is that some sort of pop culture understanding of science that needs to be challegned?
To answer that question, host and co-founder of the Nori carbon removal marketplace, Ross Kenyon, asked Dr. Holly Jean Buck of the University at Buffalo and Anu Khan of Carbon180, to read two books and come on Reversing Climate Change to discuss them.
The two texts are some of the foundational works of modern philosophy of science: Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and Paul Feyerabend's Against Method.
Kuhn argued that paradigms are the collection of foundational beliefs we have about how science and knowledge production is conducted, and that they are quite hard to see outside of since most people work so deeply within them. It can often be a generational effort, as older scientists die and new ones take their places.
Feyerabend goes further, arguing that we shouldn't just look for where one paradigm supersedes another, but be protective of competing systems of knowledge and the valuable ways of seeing that they unlock.
The show applies their learnings to the state of the CDR industry, and attempts to ferret out carbon removal's existing paradigm, whether the world is ready for credits that are not tonne-denominated, and how much time we can afford in retooling and letting "normal science" work within an imperfect paradigm vs. trying to create an entirely new paradigm ex nihilo.
Resources
Anu Khan
Holly Jean Buck
Carbon180
Against Method on Wikipedia
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions on Wikipedia
The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman
Historiography
Connect with Nori
Purchase Nori Carbon Removals
Nori's website
Nori on Twitter
Check out our other podcast, Carbon Removal Newsroom
Carbon Removal Memes on Twitter
Carbon Removal Memes on Instagram
What is it like to go to war? What does the experience have to teach us, and could it in any way be a spiritual endeavor? What does the Temple of Mars have to teach us in a climate-changing world?
Karl Marlantes is a Rhodes Scholar who put aside graduate studies at Oxford University to lead a Marine rifle platoon in Vietnam in 1968. He is featured extensively in the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick documentary series, The Vietnam War. His memoir, What It Is Like to Go to War, and novel, Matterhorn, address what we ask our nation’s young warriors to do from within a cultural environment that denies the multifaceted truth of what it means to be a warrior. His recent novels Deep River and Cold Victory address big questions of agency and what it means to recognize oneself as a historical actor.
Is combat terrifying? Exhilarating? Mystical? Carnal? Is it everything all at once? If we only acknowledge the experience as negative, how might that cause repression and misunderstanding in a world unlikely to leave war behind permanently?
If climate change is not successfully addressed as soon as possible, the geopolitical situation may become more rivalrous and difficult. We need to understand the nature of war, of our relationship to our shadow, in order to chart an honest course to a better future.
Resources
Ken Burns & Lynn Novick's The Vietnam War series
Karl Marlantes' books:
- Matterhorn
- What It Is Like to Go to War
- Deep River
- Cold Victory
Carl Jung
Jungian archetypes
The shadow in psychoanalysis
Leo Tolstoy
Cincinnatus
Connect with Nori
Purchase Nori Carbon Removals
Nori's website
Nori on Twitter
Check out our other podcast, Carbon Removal Newsroom
Carbon Removal Memes on Twitter
Carbon Removal Memes on Instagram
If you're going to write about the Oregon Trail or the Mississippi flatboat era, why not go gonzo? Does it make for better history or just better bar stories? What can you really learn about change by recreating epic journeys in contemporary times, and what can that teach us about how we live upon this planet?
Today, adventurer and author Rinker Buck is on the show to discuss his odysseys. In particular, his flatboat ride from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, and his mulecart passage of the entire Oregon Trail. If you're gasping reading that last sentence, you need to read his books.
Obviously, these landscapes have massively changed over the centuries, and their environmental history reflects human wants and desires, some good and others less so. How are they shadows of their former selves, which could you not tell which century you're currently in, and which are making beautiful comebacks? What does it teach us about the country so many of our listeners call home? How does the American experience prepare or fail to prepare us for a climate-changed world?
Rinker discusses his particular approach to participatory history, why he doesn't like reenactment as a paradigm, and why he bothers with the Heraclean effort for which some might deem him a "conquistador of the useless."
Tune in and learn from Rinker's hard-earned experience and observations!
Resources
Rinker's website
The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey
Life on the Mississippi: An Epic American Adventure
Flight of Passage: A Memoir
1883
Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey by Lillian Schlissel
Frederick Turner's Frontier Thesis
Connect with Nori
Purchase Nori Carbon Removals
Nori's website
Nori on Twitter
Check out our other podcast, Carbon Removal Newsroom
Carbon Removal Memes on Twitter
Carbon Removal Memes on Instagram
When the world feels increasingly tame, what does it mean to reclaim our wildness? Can we appreciate the benefits of industrial civilization while connecting with our evolutionary roots? Can we get ourselves back to the garden?
In this poignant conversation, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Craig Foster shares insights from his experiences diving in the Great African Sea Forest and the inspiration behind his new book, Amphibious Soul: Finding the Wild in a Tame World.
Host and Nori Co-Founder Ross Kenyon asks Craig some unanswered questions he has about My Octopus Teacher, the experience of fame from winning the 2021 Best Documentary Feature Oscar, whether evolution has prepared us for fame, and Craig's adjustment back to civilian life.
Craig discusses the profound lessons learned from marine life, emphasizing the importance of a deep connection with nature and the critical role biodiversity plays in the survival of our planet.
Ross and Craig discuss their various stories of interspecies communication and what it means to build a thread to a species and learn their language. They explore themes of kinship with nature, the significance of tracking as an ancient fundamental language, and the transformative power of cold water immersion. Plunge for the planet!
The discussion also touches on Craig's marine conservation efforts through the Sea Change Project and introduces a unique multimedia aspect of his book that aims to enhance readers' connection to nature.
Connect with Nori
Purchase Nori Carbon Removals
Nori's website
Nori on Twitter
Check out our other podcast, Carbon Removal Newsroom
Carbon Removal Memes on Twitter
Carbon Removal Memes on Instagram
Carbon Removal Memes on LinkedIn
Resources
Sea Change Project
My Octopus Teacher
Amphibious Soul: Finding the Wild in a Tame World
James C. Scott's anthropology
Wim Hof
The world is becoming wealthier. Is that a good thing? Or should we be looking to simpler and less material lives? How does a middle class global population affect climate change, for good or ill?
On today's show, Dr. Homi Kharas, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution and author of The Rise of the Global Middle Class: How the Search for the Good Life Can Change the World, elaborates on what it means to be middle class, emphasizing the relevance of choice as a defining characteristic. People drop the concept all the time, but it isn't really clear what is meant by it. Is it about per capita earnings? Security? The type of labor done? Something else?
He explores how the middle class's values and choices intersect with issues like climate change and government policy. Dr. Kharas sheds light on the evolution of capitalism, arguing that it has always adapted to societal changes, and suggests that this continued evolution is optimism-inspiring.
He counters the narrative of a trade-off between material prosperity and carbon emissions, asserting that technology can and should allow for both!
Tune in today to get a dose of history and economics!
Resources
Dr. Homi Kharas's website
The Rise of the Middle Class: How the Search for the Good Life Can Change the World
Amartya Sen on Capabilities
Connect with Nori
Purchase Nori Carbon Removals
Nori's website
Nori on Twitter
Check out our other podcast, Carbon Removal Newsroom
Carbon Removal Memes on Twitter
Carbon Removal Memes on Instagram
You are condemned to be free, and yet how much responsibility do you bear for the structures you inhabit? Do your individual consumer choices matter, or is it some distant political economy? Should we enjoy our time in nature on snowmobiles, or is that just one more bootprint on the road to hypocritical perdition? Do you need to be perfect in order to be an activist?
In this episode, Nori cofounder Ross Kenyon, and Thanks-A-Ton cofounder Siobhan Montoya Lavender, discuss the new short film from Protect Our Winters and professional skier Amy Engerbretson, The Hypocrite.
In this wide-ranging discussion, Amy discusses why she made The Hypocrite, which deals with how she went from climate ignorance, through the guilt of her carbon footprint and that of skiing, and became an imperfect climate advocate.
She emphasizes the importance of systemic solutions over individual perfectionism, revealing the often-paralyzing effects of aiming for personal purity in environmental activism. The film aims to inspire action by showcasing the power of collective efforts in outdoor communities, urging listeners to engage civically beyond mere personal adjustments, while also discussing whether duty must be done for its own sakes, regardless of how big of an impact it might have.
The session concludes with Amy's thoughts on political will as the paramount force for climate change mitigation, encouragement for involvement with organizations like Protect Our Winters, and the value of messy, imperfect advocacy.
Resources
Amie Engerbretson's website
Protect Our Winters website
Watch The Hypocrite
Connect with Nori
Purchase Nori Carbon Removals
Nori's website
Nori on Twitter
Check out our other podcast, Carbon Removal Newsroom
Carbon Removal Memes on Twitter
Carbon Removal Memes on Instagram
Carbon removal is often conceived of as only separating greenhouse gases from ambient air. But what if it also creates other valuable products in the process? Should they still be selling carbon credits? Does this competition make it harder for carbon removal companies that can't produce additional value streams? What are the trade-offs here, and is financial additionality the right place to intervene if intervention is even necessary?
In this episode of the Reversing Climate Change podcast, Nori Cofounder Ross Kenyon interviews Eric Matzner, an alumnus of Carbon Removal Newsroom and Cofounder of Project Vesta who has a new venture leaving stealth mode called Metalplant. This is Metalplant's podcast debut!
This innovative project combines hyperaccumulator plants and enhanced rock weathering to extract nickel from soil and crushed rock while removing carbon from the air. Eric discusses the economics of co-producing nickel and carbon offsets, addressing the challenges of carbon removal scale-up, and his views on the importance of vertical integration in ensuring quality and cost control. The episode delves into Metalplant's initial operations in Albania, leveraging the country's rich olivine resources on non-arable land, and generating local employment.
Much of the conversation focuses on a possibly looming intellectual crisis in carbon removal: what does the industry do when it realizes that many of its methodologies are co-producing value besides carbon? Will it try to find a way to square that with conventional applications of financial additionality, or will they abandon or amend additionality to make sure co-producers aren't held down while the world desperately needs them to scale their operations?
So much to talk about, and there will almost certainly be more on this topic in the future!
Resources
Metalplant's website
Eric Matzner's website
Eric Matzner on Carbon Removal Newsroom back in 2019: "Project Vesta for olivine drawdown leaves stealth mode"
Connect with Nori
Purchase Nori Carbon Removals
Nori's website
Nori on Twitter
Check out our other podcast, Carbon Removal Newsroom
Carbon Removal Memes on Twitter
Carbon Removal Memes on Instagram
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