Inevitable & Obvious
I spent ten years building the carbon removal industry from scratch. I raised $20M, built Nori into one of the first carbon removal marketplaces, and genuinely believed we could scale our way out of the climate crisis. I was wrong about the timeline.
The math is straightforward: even if we cut emissions aggressively, temperatures will not fall for centuries. Carbon removal won’t meaningfully affect global temperature until the second half of this century, at the earliest. And we’re approaching tipping points that could destabilize Earth systems before the conventional toolkit has time to work.
This realization forced me to confront something most of the climate world isn’t ready to discuss publicly: we need interventions that work faster. Cooling technologies that can lower temperatures within years, not decades. Ice sheet protection. Ecosystem preservation. I call this category stabilization—not a replacement for decarbonization and carbon removal, but what makes them possible by buying time while they scale.
This newsletter tracks the emergence of a new climate framework: Reduce + Remove + Stabilize.
I write about cooling interventions like stratospheric aerosol injection and marine cloud brightening. What the science actually shows, what the risks are, and why almost no one in mainstream climate is willing to talk about them honestly. I write about the strange politics of climate intervention, where researchers can’t advocate, advocacy organizations barely exist, and conspiracy theorists are filling the vacuum. I write about what it takes to build permission space for ideas that sound radical now but will seem obvious in hindsight.
The conversations I’m having privately with climate leaders, researchers, and funders are years ahead of the public discourse. This newsletter brings those conversations into the open.
Why subscribe?
Climate interventions are coming, through careful preparation or crisis-driven panic. Whether we’ll have the governance and public trust to do them well depends on work that happens now. I believe we still have time to prepare. Not much, though.
If you work in climate, clean energy, carbon removal, or adjacent fields, you’ve probably felt the gap between what you know privately and what’s acceptable to say publicly. You’re not alone.
Subscribe and you’ll get new posts in your inbox when I publish. All posts are free.
Start here:
The Stabilization Framework lays out why we need all three tools working together.
Carbon Removal’s Wrong Turn explains where I came from and why the industry I helped build can’t solve this alone.
How to Learn Everything You Need to Know About Cooling is my comprehensive guide to the science, the players, and the debates.
Want to reach me? I’m on LinkedIn and X, or reply to any post.
