Take on a podcast episode from Carbon Removal Newsroom, originally published Tue, 18 Au. Listen: https://climateworkersanonymous.com/p/9-it-feels-like-theres-nobody-to

TL;DR

  • Anonymous submission from a CDR (carbon dioxide removal) operator saying their company is growing fine while peers struggle — a rare “we’re okay” voice in a bruised market.
  • Submitter’s real complaint: large incumbents going silent instead of continuing to build publicly at smaller scale, making bad sentiment self-fulfilling. Fair critique.
  • Format is anonymous, unverified single-submission — no numbers, no company names, no verifiable claims. Signal is emotional, not analytical.
  • Ross Kenyon’s framing (“corporeal man at the feast for ghosts”) is evocative but this is a ~10-minute mood piece, not reporting.
  • Skip if you want data. Worth 10 minutes if you want a read on morale inside CDR right now.

Episode link. Ross Kenyon (of Reversing Climate Change) runs Climate Workers Anonymous, a Substack/podcast collecting unverified anonymous submissions from people working in climate. Episode #9 is one submission, read aloud with brief commentary: a CDR operator saying their company is doing well, feels awkward saying so, and wishes their struggling peers would keep building in public instead of going dark.

What’s actually worth knowing is the submitter’s substantive claim, buried inside the emotional framing. Paraphrasing: some large CDR incumbents didn’t raise the money they needed to hit their promised scale, and instead of downshifting and continuing to iterate publicly at a smaller footprint, they’ve gone silent. The submitter argues this silence is itself corrosive — it confirms the bearish read that buyers and investors already have, turning it into a self-fulfilling prophecy. As they put it: “Surely it’d be better to at least keep building and learning publicly at a smaller scale like we used to.” That’s a real observation about 2026 CDR communications behavior worth naming, even if the submission gives no names, no sectors (direct air capture? mineralization? bio-oil?), and no numbers to check it against.

The other worth-noting bit is meta: the fact that “we’re growing” now requires anonymity in CDR is itself a data point about where the industry’s morale sits. A year ago the vibe was scarcity of buyers; now it’s apparently scarcity of survivors willing to speak. That maps to what’s visible in public — offtake announcements have thinned, several once-loud companies have gone quiet on LinkedIn, and Frontier’s (frontierclimate.com) purchase cadence remains one of the few consistent public signals. If you want the harder-numbers version of the same underlying story, the CDR.fyi delivery and sales dashboards give you the shape of who’s still shipping tons and who’s not. This episode isn’t that; it’s the emotional residue of that.

The limitation is severe and Ross names it upfront: submissions are unverified, and he actively declines to chase leads. So you can’t act on any specific claim here. What you get is one operator’s structured feeling, filtered through a curator who’s honest about the filter. If you’re a CDR practitioner deciding whether to spend an hour — you won’t, because it’s ~10 minutes, and that’s the right length for what’s on offer.

Useful for founders, comms leads, and buyers trying to read the current mood inside CDR. Skip if you want mechanism, MRV (measurement, reporting, and verification), or pricing.