Hi team,

It’s the first of December. Which means I’m already late on holiday shopping. To make sure you don’t suffer the same scramble that I inevitably may, today’s email has some curated climate-positive gift picks for you. Hope you find something you like or learn something new!

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GIFT GUIDE

Before we dive in, a quick disclaimer. No one paid to make the following suggestions. I don't get paid if you buy anything from this email. Also totally not intended to be an exhaustive list of things I think are ‘cool’. What follows is simply a list of stuff I’ve engaged with in 2022 that spoke to me!

Further, opting out of the materialism cycle entirely is great for the climate, too.

🌱 For the green thumb

I gifted my green thumb Dad Rosy Soil last year for Christmas, and it didn’t disappoint. This is an excellent product for any gardener or plant enthusiast in your life, whether they have a flourishing outdoor garden or deck out their apartment with indoor plants like I do. 

Rosy Soil makes earth-positive soil. Their product is great for two reasons. For one, it integrates biochar, a promising way to sequester carbon for which there isn’t a vibrant end-market yet. Secondly, it has no peat in it. Peat is a surface layer of organic matter that accumulates in wetlands consisting of waterlogged organic material. Peatlands are one of the largest sources of carbon sequestration on land.

Unfortunately, peat lands are often mined for agriculture or for other soils you find on shelves. Rosy Soil doesn’t have any peat in it, however. That peat does its best when left alone wherever it accumulates. 

You can check out Rosy’s products here.

🧼 Stocking stuffers

There’s a whole world of new products leveraging captured carbon as an input in products, including consumer goods. CleanO2 is one example. They’ve commercialized carbon capture tech for commercial-scale natural gas appliances. Their carbon capture system also creates a valuable output, namely pearl ash (potassium carbonate). 

At scale, pearl ash could be sold as a commodity, as it’s used in fertilizer and other household products. CleanO2 is starting with the latter as they scale up; they use their pearl ash to make soaps. I’ve used the soaps, and they’re great. Nor is this just a cheeky way to spread the carbon capture and decarbonization gospel to anyone on your guest list. The proceeds from soap sales help the company get their carbon capture tech in more buildings, reducing emissions. 

For more on CleanO2, you can listen to a podcast I recorded with their CEO here. Or to shop for soap, you can start here! 

⬇️ Removing carbon

Carbon removal is a theme we discussed a lot this year in this newsletter. Whether you’re interested in removing carbon as a gift or want to offset emissions you had a role in creating this year (no pressure, hard to avoid!), here are some options.

First, if you’re thinking ahead to when the tax man cometh in 2023, Terraset is nonprofit climate fund that leverages philanthropy to invest in carbon removal projects. The projects Terraset currently supports are Heirloom and Charm Industrial, both of which we’ve covered (for a podcast episode with Charm, for instance, see here). I know the team at Terraset well and am excited to see how much carbon removal they help facilitate in coming years. Learn more here.

If you’re not sweating the tax-advantage approach, and if you’re a fan of scaling natural solutions to climate change, I buy carbon removals from Nori. Nori brokers transactions between buyers (like me) and carbon removal projects. The carbon removals sold in Nori’s marketplace today come from soil carbon in U.S. croplands; the current projects are from farmers who have transitioned their farms to more regenerative farming practices. 

More regenerative farming has many other benefits beyond the additional carbon stored in soil, which is another reason I like Nori. Nori has lots more info on their website on their practices and recently partnered with Bayer to scale their carbon removal supply. 

In the spirit of 100% transparency, I do some contract writing for Nori, and they’re by no means the only worthwhile carbon removal marketplace out there. 

Finally, if you’re looking for a solution that’s tailor-made for gift-giving or a post-holiday thank you, I’ve also always enjoyed Thanks a Ton’s execution, and they offer a variety of products.

📚 For the bibliophile

I could easily do a whole email on climate book recommendations. In case a bibliophile is on your list for gift buying this year, however, I want to get you some suggestions before the holidays. 

There are many seminal climate and climate tech books out there. Ministry of the Future offers the sci-fi route. Speed and Scale will titillate any venture capitalist. How to Avoid a Climate Disaster commands attention because of its author (Bill Gates). Below are a few more off the beaten path.

(A few books I’m still working my way through (Braiding Sweetgrass and The Grid)

How the World Really Works, Vaclav Smil

OK, still close to the beaten path here. But this book is helpful if you want to get up to speed on hard-to-abate industries and challenges like steel, concrete, fertilizer, and more. It’s not a climate tech book, but it does a solid job of laying out how we got to where we are and why fossil fuels are so entrenched in society. I don’t agree with all of Smil’s views (e.g., he takes a dim view of climate models), but I found a lot of value in the book, no less. 

Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer

Not inherently a climate tech book either, Braiding Sweetgrass offers a wonderful perspective on how to build more gratitude and respect for nature and natural systems into your everyday life. If we all took that perspective, climate technologies would almost certainly scale much faster. 

The Grid, Gretchen Bakke

When people used to say “the grid,” I used to draw a blank. Admittedly, I often pretended to know what they were talking about. After all, we see the grid daily; we’re often surrounded by above-the-ground poles and wires that move electrons around. 

Still, when I needed a primer on the totality of what “the grid” means, I picked up this book. It does a great job weaving in history, current challenges, and the needed evolution of the grid here in the U.S. for the energy transition. Highly recommend it if you’ve ever read an article about the importance of transmission, or electrical upgrades needed for things like EV charging and wanted to go deeper. 

Finally, Coal by Barbara Freese is next on my reading list. Seems strange for a climate tech guy to want to read up on coal, but knowing more about coal’s history will be instructive. For instance, even when coal was first introduced as a power source, people were already concerned about the air pollution it would cause. Coal is still king for electrical power generation globally, despite the amount of attention paid to renewable energy, nuclear. Know thy enemy! 

JOBS

Here are jobs that I'm curating for the climate tech industry. Use this link to submit a role.

Customer Supper Specialist, Swell Energy

Last week we talked about the opportunity Swell Energy has to be a big player in the growing virtual power plant space. As they grow their footprint, they'll need plenty of help with customer service. If you're awesome at guiding customers through challenges, delivering great support, and want to help scale clean energy, then the Customer Supper Specialist role at Swell may be great for you. 

Communications Lead, Brimstone Energy

Brimstone Energy is tackling one of the harder-to-abate industrial sectors, namely cement. As they scale, they'll need communications veterans to help tell the technology's story and underscore the significant opportunity the company has to drive decarbonization. To this end they're hiring a Communications Lead to develop and implement a comprehensive media engagement strategy (among other things). Interested? Learn more here. 

Hope the gift guide was helpful! Got other ideas? Let me know by replying to this email. Also, in case I don’t say it enough, I’m thankful for all of your generous gifts, whether in the form of attention, feedback, evangelism, and more.

Let’s have a great month! 

— Nick

Written by me, Nick Van Osdol.

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