I’m Neil; I currently head up partnerships at Isometric a registry for high quality carbon removals. A large part of how I ended up in the role was through writing online, you can find my climate/carbon removal blog here and a few years ago I wrote a piece for Works in Progress called Buyers of First Resort all about advanced market commitments and other demand side innovation policies (it’s true that you can blog your way into a job). I don’t have as much time to write these days but I’m generally interested in ways of funding innovations, frontier climate tech, and how we can solve coordination problems.

Before carbon removal I did some research in implementing zero knowledge proofs to move offchain characteristics onto Ethereum. Generally I think ZKPs are still a massively underrated technology as they could allow for a more textured and malleable internet, my friend has a piece that puts this into much better words.

Writing

• There is no outside anymore
• Joy’s soul lies in the doing
• Coalitions, co-benefits, and lock-in – building durable support for Carbon Removal
• Writing advice for young people
• The past, present, and future of climate investing series:
  • Part 1 – winners of the first wave
  • Part 2 – losers and lessons
  • Part 3 – Changing trends
  • Parts 4+ (coming sometime)
• Could we use AMCs for green steel?
• How solar energy became cheap (Notes)
• How much should you utilise a DAC plant?
• Buying down the cost of carbon removal
• Scaling carbon removal
• Micromotives, macrobehaviours and other notes on group dynamics
• Buyers of first resort (Works in Progress)
• Governing the commons (Notes)
• Conjectures and Refutations (Notes)
• An introduction to mechanism design
• Ergodicity: The gap between typical and average
• Master of the Senate (Notes)

Other

• I made a reading list on market shaping
• Bookshelf
• Some papers I find interesting
• When I was younger I enjoyed coming up with heuristics for mental maths (I know, I know), two that I still use are one for calculating powers of 2 and also how to do compound interest calculations easily.

Coding

• Scaling carbon removal – for my carbon removal blog I wanted to make it in the style of some Bret Victor demos so cobbled together a stack to support interactive posts.
• To rank the books I’ve read I made a noisy comparison sorter that lets you compile a ranked list even if you have non-transitive preferences (which often happens if you do lots of pairwise comparisons)
• On the topic of non-transitive preferences if you want to test out whether you are perfectly rationale I made this little game to surface different kinds of preference cycles.
• During my Masters I made a program to do zero-knowledge ID verification, it used the Stripe ID API and then generates a zero-knowledge proof you send send on-chain for use as a proof of personhood.