This week, Dr. Holly Jean Buck of the University of Buffalo, Chris Barnard of the American Conservation Coalition, and Radhika Moolgavkar of Nori discuss in detail the Growing Climate Solutions Act, the relationship of unions to the The American Jobs Act, how a government-run carbon removal marketplace might work at least for agriculture, and Chris shares some optimistic musings to close us out.
Full Transcript
Announcer: You’re listening to Carbon Removal Newsroom, a weekly show about current events in the world of carbon removal, from technology and innovation to policymaking and job growth. Brought to you by Nori, the carbon removal marketplace.
Radhika Moolgavkar: [music] Welcome to Carbon Removal Newsroom for May 13th, 14th. Thank you to my co-host for joining us. I have Holly Jean Buck, Assistant Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Buffalo in New York. Hi, Holly.
Holly Jean Buck: Hi, Radhika. Hi, everybody.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I am also joined by Chris Barnard, Policy Director for the American Conservation Coalition. Hey, Chris, how are you doing?
Chris Barnard: It’s great to be here as always.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And I am Radhika Moolgavkar. I was reminded last week I forgot to introduce myself. I am Supply and Program Methodology Methodology program manager at Nori. It’s been a bit of a day, so excuse my verbal fumbles. With that, we are going to revisit a topic that we talked about last week, I think mainly because it’s a pretty in the news kind of thing lately, and it’s all about carbon accounting and how do we actually measure carbon? So last week we were talking about the cap and trade issues in California around forestry.
This week, we’re going to look at two different articles. One is kind of wonky, but it’s about the measurements of carbon accounting. And then we’re also going to talk about a brief article written by the same authors that wrote the forest article about a forest in Massachusetts. With that, I will kind of ask Holly what her take was on that first piece about the science of measuring carbon.
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, so this is a paper that came out a few weeks ago in Nature Climate Change by Gracie et al. And here’s the title, Critical Adjustment of Land Mitigation Pathways for Assessing Countries’ Climate Progress. So a mouthful, a ton of authors, but this paper was a big deal in the science world. Basically, they looked at the amount of Carbon that’s removed by land sinks projected in these integrated assessment models that are used to think about the decarbonization pathways. And then they looked at the carbon that different countries were reporting in their inventories as having been removed by these land sinks, i.
e. forests and other ecosystems. And they found a really big gap. They found a gap of 5. 5 gigatonnes or 5. 5 billion tonnes between what these models were saying and what countries were reporting. So for context, greenhouse gas emissions are about 50 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent. So 5. 5 is a big difference in figuring this out, right?
Radhika Moolgavkar: Isn’t that about the amount that the U. S. emits per year, they were saying?
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah. Yeah, basically the same amount. So... So who cares about this accounting mismatch? It’s a big deal because countries are claiming big reductions to their annual emissions because of their forests. But if you don’t, you know, you need these numbers to actually evaluate if a country’s making progress towards its climate goals or not. So the US, for example, in 2019 reported 6. 6 billion tonnes of emissions, but they also subtracted 789 million tonnes because of these land sinks. So it’s important that all of this is accounted accurately to know if, you know, are we doing a good job?
Are we just fudging the numbers with these forests, et cetera?
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, so, you know, it’s such a technical paper, but what I was struggling with, and maybe Holly, you or Chris can explain it to me, is Why the authors were okay with the two different measurements. They said like one was okay in one situation and one was okay in another situation. Why can’t we harmonize around a single measurement to make this less complicated?
Holly Jean Buck: Well, I mean, in a sense, it’s different ways of counting. The physical reality is not changing, right? So what they offer in that paper is a methodology for making this adjustment between these two systems. But yeah, it’s a good question.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Like, why does it have to be so complicated? Yeah, that’s what I struggle with. I mean, Chris, I don’t know if you had a chance, but if you had any thoughts about that or, but as I was reading, I’m like, it feels like we’re making it more complicated than it needs to be. Isn’t there a single system rather than as they call a Rosetta stone to convert the two?
Chris Barnard: Right. I mean, it seems like the big problem here when it comes to tackling climate change, because Holly rightly pointed out that It doesn’t change the physical reality of how much carbon is sequestered by these forests or lands or whatever it is, but it does change countries attitudes towards what they can do to reduce emissions further because if a country. Considers a faulty emissions reduction from its forests, then they will say oh we’re already basically at net zero when they might not be, and so they’re not taking additional steps to reduce emissions in other ways through.
Energy and technologies and transportation and things like that. And so I think that’s where the real issue is. And I mean, you raise a valid question as well, Radhika, about the fact that why can’t we just harmonize these? It seems like there’s a discrepancy between independent carbon accounting measures and country specific or national accounting mechanisms. And obviously, it’s not a surprise that the national ones would be more generous than the independent ones. So I’m not sure if that’s something that Would have to be resolved at the at the United Nations level, perhaps in COP later this year, where countries can come together and devise one independent accounting mechanism that would be accepted by all countries.
I think that maybe be the most effective way forward. But I’m I’m really not an expert on this issue and far from an expert on the scientific and like methodological aspects of this. But to me, that seems the most commonsensical way forward.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I could help with just thinking, let’s just take the worst of the two numbers or the one that says we’re reducing the least and using that sort of as our baseline. Because what I took away from that, which probably is way too oversimplistic and anybody out there who’s like, oh, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, you might be right. But from a very layman’s perspective, I was thinking, if we just took the worst case scenario for the amount of emissions or the lack of emissions we are sinking, Then we can only do better than we are now versus trying to create something so perfect that it’s sort of the enemy of the good.
I don’t know. I often feel like we get lost in those details in the carbon accounting space, and it’s just better to put something forward. And in this case, something may be negative or bad, but that will drive greater emission reduction. I was struck by the example in Myanmar that they gave at the end of the article about how they are actually sinking more carbon than they are emitting, but that might change in a few years as they grow. And so we just took the lower of the two numbers. They’d have more incentive to reduce their emissions, I would think.
I don’t know. Holly, are you thinking I’m crazy?
Holly Jean Buck: No, I mean, I think one of the main things behind this discrepancy is this gap in how A managed forest is defined differently by countries and by these models. And you’d think maybe we could just change that rather than have some complicated mathematical formula for reconciling these. I do think your point about taking a risk mitigation type of approach to these questions is warranted. I mean, you know, assume the worst and then you end up doing more and that’s not necessarily bad.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, and you put it so much nicer than I did, risk mitigation. I like that term. Yeah, and then at the same time, again this week, there was another story about a forest. Then, you know, the Massachusetts Audubon Society got a bunch of Credits for essentially protecting a forest that does not seem like anyone believes was ever in danger of being at all disturbed. And so this is where I think, what are we doing in this field? Like that makes no sense to me, but maybe I’m in the minority on that.
I don’t know. I mean, I see the sustainability benefits, the conservation benefits, but I don’t see the carbon benefits. You know, what are you... And I was struck back to back weeks, one in California, one in Alaska, the West Coast, and now one on the East Coast. So it seems kind of pervasive.
Holly Jean Buck: I think it is pervasive. And, you know, this is another story about additionality. And what I appreciate about both of these is there’s an organization called Carbon Plan, which is devoted to kind of open source information and has published some of this work as a preprint. I guess it’s going to go through peer review. And so it’s very cool that we have an organization that’s funded with people on staff to look at the data, perform these types of analyses, because what if we didn’t have them doing that? Like, would we end up knowing about some of these problems?
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah. I don’t know if they’ve come up with any fixes. Do they have any fixes that either one of you have seen them propose?
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, the first article, the one that we talked about last week about the problems with the methodology for these forests in California, I feel like that’s just a, you know, I’m not going to say software fix. It’s probably more complicated than that, but it’s definitely fixable. By CARB and people who are designing these methodologies for counting. So I’m feeling kind of optimistic, actually, now that we know about some of the errors, they seem fixable.
Chris Barnard: Well, as far as I could tell, isn’t the primary problem here that these credits qualified for the carbon market in California in this case on the basis that they would otherwise be logged? And so they kind of like dangled it over their heads being like almost you’re almost indirectly responsible for having these trees logged if you don’t allow these to be entered into the carbon market. And so it seems less even of a methodology problem than of a kind of what qualifies as a carbon credit should something that is already currently protected if they don’t show a valid case for it is imminently going to be logged because of financial problems or whatever.
But just because they say like, we’ll log it if you don’t help us. Then that seems kind of like something that should disqualify a particular project from the market.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So pivoting away from a carbon accounting, because I think we’ve kind of beaten that to death in the last couple of days, a couple of weeks. I wanted to talk about some of the new policies being put forth out of Washington. So just I think last week or a week or two ago, President Biden put forth an infrastructure bill. But he actually is, you know, he’s being thought of as a fairly environmentally forward, sustainability forward president. But there were quite a few criticisms from the environmental groups about his infrastructure bill.
So Chris, what are your thoughts coming maybe from a different perspective than the average environmentalist?
Chris Barnard: Yeah, of course. And I mean, I’m afraid I’ll have to parrot some of the general conservative critiques of the plan. Because I feel a lot of them are valid. Some aren’t, but a lot of them are. And obviously the first problem is it’s called an infrastructure plan. A lot of stuff is what I and many from the conservative perspective would not consider infrastructure. And I think that risks diluting a policy that is specifically talked about as something that will help tackle climate change. And I think that’s Probably not the best allocation of funds in that case and also just something that’s not going to be very politically possible or palatable and I’d much rather see Republicans and Democrats come together to identify what we really think are the infrastructure priorities in this country and to come up with specific policies that can help those as well as helping from a climate perspective as well.
And there’s this really interesting recent article that you sent me about saying that it will actually not even not help the environment. It might actually be worse for the environment. And some of the arguments there are really interesting because, for example, one of the ways that this would potentially be funded is through tax increases, either income or corporate tax. And the article says that The problem with that is that you essentially make production in America more expensive, which means that a lot of companies might offshore their manufacturing or production or just their business more broadly to other countries with lower environmental standards, with less efficient technologies, and eventually you might actually have more carbon as a result.
And that’s something that we can argue about, but what I find interesting with this is that It doesn’t actually get to the root of the problem, this infrastructure plan, when it comes to, for example, building up clean energy infrastructure in this country. There’s a plethora of regulations right now, such as the National Environmental Policy Act, the New Source Review, the Jones Act. These are regulations essentially that make building infrastructure a lot more expensive. And it delays projects, it has huge regulatory compliance costs. And this is all kind of wonky, I realize that, but the bottom line is that Building a project takes a lot of time and a lot of money and more than it should and longer than it should.
And so we can’t really build out these things without also reforming that and then investing in a targeted way.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, I don’t know if that’s particularly wonky. I think anybody who’s built a house or built anything feels the pain of permitting and regulations. And I certainly don’t disagree with you on that point that it feels like And both sides, I think, agree that some of these regulations are too onerous and actually don’t result in what they would hope for, which is better environmental review and better standards. Holly, I’m wondering if you had any thoughts about it, about the article or about this permitting piece, regulation piece?
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, I think that there’s a lot of things that need to move more quickly. I don’t think we disagree with that. The thing I hear about the most in my corner is the permitting for these class six injection wells for disposing of CO2 and what a headache that’s been for people trying to get these permits or thinking about them. I was pretty happy with the infrastructure plan as it was presented several weeks ago. If the American Jobs Plan of March 31st went forward in anything like its current condition, I’d call that a win, even though I know a lot of colleagues would have preferred it to be much more ambitious.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I don’t know. With the current economic numbers, I’m not sure they’re going to get their wish, right? The recent inflation reports and things make me happy we’ve put forward something as ambitious as we have before some of those numbers came out. I would say, Chris, one thing I was a bit confused about, and maybe you can clarify it for me, is I get the argument that if you have more regulation, therefore it’ll go to other countries. But on the flip side, Arthur was making the argument that free trade will kind of fix that.
But how does free trade fix, and that he doesn’t like the tariffs and things that the Biden administration puts on, and the Trump administration before. But how do you fix that if you don’t have an even playing field in terms of regulations? Even if there’s no tariffs in Mexico and you send everything down there, but they don’t have the same environmental regulations, it seems like the same result would happen. So what am I missing there?
Chris Barnard: Sure. I mean, there’s two main points. The first is what in the article was talked about as comparative advantage. And when there are protectionist tariffs on certain goods and trade in America, that essentially Disincentivizes American companies that have what would be called an unfair advantage over competitors. It disincentivizes them from being more efficient with their resources. They don’t have to compete as much. They’re not going to innovate. They’re not going to use fewer inputs to get better outputs. And the idea of free trade, similar to just a free market, Is that companies would seek to be the most efficient possible.
And that’s why, interestingly, if you look at the countries that have the freest trade around the world and overlay that with the countries that have the highest environmental protection and standards and all those things, there’s a direct correlation between the two. And it’s because in a country like the US, which historically has been a champion of free trade, it’s why we’ve reduced the amount of resources we’ve used for 64 out of 72 raw resources since 1970, which is when they peaked. And so we use fewer and fewer inputs to create greater outputs and protectionist tariffs would stymie that.
The second point is that when a market is opened between two countries, obviously consumers tend to drive markets. And what’s happened in the past is that consumers have kind of rallied to make sure that the goods that they’re getting from the other country that would that would In theory, have lower environmental standards or lower regulations that they actually raise their regulations or raise their standards in order for these companies to attract consumers for that. And so you’ve seen, for example, consumer movements boycotting Nike for environmental standards in Indonesia and places like that.
And obviously that’s not entirely perfect because there’s always kind of a knowledge gap there because consumers aren’t always aware. But in general, again, you do see that consumers tend to push for fair trade. They tend to push for Higher standards. And that’s kind of like the theoretical case in favor of free trade from an environmental perspective.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Thank you. That was actually very helpful. Holly, do you have, I was also struck by the fact that this, one of the articles we read, you know, kind of also called out unions for making things less efficient. And I think that’s, to me, a harder case in some ways, because while I agree unions do tend to slow things down because they are negotiating. I don’t know whether that’s always a bad thing in terms of both the safety of their union members and for the benefits of the overall worker in the US.
It always feels a little bit like a tension to me, like moving quickly in terms of getting things more efficient and getting better, but also safeguarding people and employees. And that’s, I think, one of the purposes of regulation in general. So I don’t know if you have any thoughts about that or critiques.
Holly Jean Buck: I just think working with unions is going to be really key here because these new infrastructures, new projects, they have to be They need tangible benefits in communities, including communities that are dependent on manufacturing, fossil fuels sometimes. So I’m glad that the administration has focused on that.
Radhika Moolgavkar: It feels like every time they talk about the environment, the next word out of their mouth is jobs, jobs, environmental jobs. I mean, it’s called the American Jobs Plan for a reason.
Holly Jean Buck: So I’m really worried about, you know, opposition to new infrastructure to transmission lines to wind and solar installations and the more we can get, you know, these projects as seen as having tangible economic benefits for people, the better.
Chris Barnard: Well, so predictably, again, I’m not a great fan of unions. And the interesting thing when it comes to clean energy workers and clean energy, the clean energy industry has been the fastest growing in America for quite a while. Some of the best paying jobs, et cetera, et cetera. But only 5% of clean energy workers are actually unionized. And the PRO Act, which is a part of this Biden infrastructure plan, would essentially force independent workers to submit to unions. But there’s somewhat of a reason that a lot of these clean energy workers aren’t part of unions because they’d like to be independent and often that can be like your local contractor or whatever that wants or can maintain their independence.
And I think forcing, allowing unions to essentially force these workers to submit to them would not be good for either the workers or for clean energy build out. And I’m entirely in favor of people voluntarily being able to join unions, but I don’t think we should allow unions to essentially monopolize an industry and say anyone should submit to what we want them to do.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Holly, you look a little skeptical, so I’d love to hear what you’re thinking.
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, I think that one of the issues we’ve had With transition is that fossil fuel jobs have been traditionally higher wage jobs, unionized jobs. People are looking at these clean energy jobs and saying, you know, those don’t pay as much. Those aren’t necessarily those good jobs that support entire communities. And I think union jobs tend to be higher wage if that’s, you know, how it needs to happen. That’s what we need to do.
Chris Barnard: That only 11% of natural gas jobs are unionized. Only 10% of coal jobs are unionized. I don’t see that there’s a correlation between being a union and having higher wages when it comes to energy industries.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I mean, one thing I think maybe we could all agree on is that the subsidies that are going to these natural gas, you know, non-renewable energy sources could be Transitioned away towards renewable energy sources, potentially. Maybe we won’t all agree on using subsidies, but they exist. And maybe that would drive up wages. I don’t know, but I fall, you know, it’s funny. I fall somewhere in between the two of you because while I am really sympathetic to Holly’s argument, I do believe that unions have played a really important role in driving up wages and protections for workers.
I’ve also had to interact with unions and try to Get them to think in a different way or be creative. And it’s just not part of a union’s DNA. And if you’re looking to be innovative and creative and work faster and be more efficient, I don’t know if going through the unions is the right mechanism. So I don’t know. I come bound right, I think, right in the middle of you two. I don’t know what the right answer is. It’ll be interesting to see. I do agree with you, Chris. I don’t think anyone should ever be forced to join a union or join any organizing body and I actually don’t think it does the unions a lot of any service to force people to join it.
It gives them a bad reputation, I think. But that’s only my personal opinion.
Chris Barnard: I’ll just add one final thing to the union perspective. And I think that gets most difficult and problematic when it involves direct government funds and subsidies, because there’s already a lack of accountability for how that’s spent. And there’s an article in the Wall Street Journal this morning about how coast guards, lifeguards and coast guards in, no, not coast guards, lifeguards. So like people on the beach that protect kids and whatnot. In California, some were getting paid up to $250,000 a year for being a lifeguard. Why? Because they’re unionized. Why? They lobbied the local government to spend whatever $60 million for all the lifeguards there.
And so the problem is that when you spend all this public money, that every dollar that is misspent is $1 or less you can spend on projects that actually are deserving of that dollar. And that’s my big issue with kind of the general infrastructure plan. It’s a lot of money, and I think a lot of it could be spent on things that actually help infrastructure and the climate rather than pet projects. But I won’t open another can of words.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, we definitely can discuss it another day. I was just thinking, now I know how those folks on Baywatch afforded their lifestyle. I mean, I always would watch it and go, how does a lifeguard do what they do? I don’t get it. I’m dating myself just a little bit. Last thing I wanted to talk about, and I think, Chris, I’ll turn it over to you because I think this is particularly something you’re feeling very proud of and happy about is the Growing Climate Solutions Act. So maybe you can explain to folks what that is and what’s going on with that right now.
Chris Barnard: Sure. So I’m particularly excited about this because this is one of those rare bipartisan areas of cooperation on environmental and climate issues and essentially during Earth Week. There are four US senators, Mike Braun, Debbie Stabenow, Lindsey Graham, and Sheldon Whitehouse that introduced the Growing Climate Solutions Act. And what it essentially seeks to do is to break down the barriers preventing American farmers and foresters and landowners from participating in voluntary carbon markets. And so it will essentially establish a program at the US Department of Agriculture to assist both in the certification of carbon credits and also providing technical assistance for farmers and foresters to be able to enter this market and what it looks like to reduce emissions and kind of the technical implications of that.
And I kind of say this pretty much every time we meet, but over a third of necessary emissions reductions could be provided by nature by 2030. And I think this is a really cool bit of market based policy that would essentially Help the private sector more efficiently be able to create a carbon market and the certification would kind of maybe overcome some of the problems we were talking about earlier is like what what actually qualifies as a credit. What is additional what is not and they don’t promise that they know exactly what that is yet, but part of the act is that they’ll actively through the US Department of Agriculture seek to establish, with the best science and the best data and the best experts in the area, a central certification system that could be functional for everyone.
I’m excited about this personally because my organization, the American Conservation Coalition, was very involved with that, and it’s incredibly bipartisan. We’ve got a bunch of Democrats and a bunch of Republicans on board. So I think if it goes ahead, I think it’ll be a win for the climate movement. But curious to get your guys’ thoughts and also answer any questions if you might have them.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Holly, do you have anything?
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, I think that several will really be in the details here. Obviously, this is something that’s had a huge amount of support, not just from Democrats and Republicans, but from the public as well. When I’ve done polling about support for this, it’s always really high. People want to support farmers generally and see this as a win-win. So it’s really about the same things we’ve talked about a bit with Forestry is getting the methodologies right, having it be scientifically sound. I know that some environmental groups pushed back against an earlier version of this just because it’s an offset system, right?
So ostensibly giving polluters license to continue polluting and having farmers bear the work of cleaning up that pollution. I don’t know how the Recent reintroduction might have changed. I don’t know what the response has been yet. So that’ll be something I’ll be tracking.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, so I was going to agree with Holly a lot, pretty completely. From my law school days, you know, the devil is in the administrative rules that they put together. And so It’s a nice sounding bill, and I agree personally with the intent of it. I just wonder how the execution of it will work. And I hope that in developing these rules and regulations, and I think Christy would agree with me, that they don’t mess up the voluntary carbon markets by becoming too prescriptive in some ways. So how do you define a quality credit without being prescriptive about what it looks like in the similar ways that I feel like the cap and trade System in California failed because they were trying to be, they weren’t just giving broad parameters to meet.
They were trying to be so detailed about things that they ended up actually making it easier, I think, to game the system in a way. So I haven’t yet seen evidence that the government is great at doing that, but here’s to hoping that they can get it right this time. I continue to be optimistic that we can figure something out.
Chris Barnard: Well, you almost sound like the skeptical conservative now, and I’m the one arguing for a government policy, which is an interesting reversal of the roles. But yeah, I mean, I entirely understand those concerns. And part of the idea of the Growing Climate Solutions Act is that there will be a period of public input and comment. And they’ve said they want to work very closely with scientists, but also people already operating within the voluntary private sector sphere of carbon markets. And to kind of develop a methodology. But I think in general, at least theoretically, the idea of having some kind of standardized federal certification mechanism would, again, in theory, help a carbon market simply because it would have a kind of gold standard to measure things against.
And hopefully that will overcome some of the problems. And who knows, it might be so good that other countries and independent operators around the world can Adopted as well, and then we overcome the discrepancy between independent and national governments calculating these things. I think this is a good step in the right direction, but of course the devil is in the details.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I agree that if we could create some standardization, particularly around some of the measurements in science, it would help people hopefully Figure out what’s quality and what’s not quality. You sent another article maybe that had some critiques, but it was more on the forestry side of it, right? How this might be good for regen, but not necessarily good for the forest. You know what I remember? It was an interesting article.
Chris Barnard: I think the most interesting thing that I got out of that, which is one of the most salient arguments against broadly the Grown Climate Solutions Act, which is that it would essentially help the bigger kind of more corporatized farmers and industries here that would be able to kind of Take the most money out of this system and it would actually disproportionately benefit them versus smaller foresters and farmers. I’m not entirely sure how accurate that is. And from my perspective, I think the most important thing of a carbon market is that it reduces carbon wherever the carbon is.
And obviously we want to be able to support smaller farmers and forest operations and things like that. But have you guys heard that kind of argument in your spheres as well?
Radhika Moolgavkar: I haven’t. No, I haven’t heard anything. Particularly, I mean, yes, I feared it generally, but not within my localized group. And I would certainly say that Nori’s goal as a company is to serve all farmers at all levels. And so we would never want to do anything that would jeopardize that. But the article that I was thinking about, it was sort of arguing that the forest, the way the forest works, And I was a little bit taken aback that was actually published after all of these conversations we were having about the work that’s been happening by carbon plan.
And so I don’t know if we can comment on that beyond like me saying, I don’t, that article like lost a bit of credibility to me to, you know, after I read her not having any critique of what’s going on in the forestry markets and just making the flat out sentence, it works. I’m not sure it does. So, Holly, sorry, do you have anything to add?
Holly Jean Buck: No, just that line jumped out to me in the same way.
Chris Barnard: Yeah, no, it’s definitely interesting that they say the forest carbon market is working Whereas the agricultural one is not yet. And by lumping them together, you’re maybe halting the momentum of the forest one. And I mean, I think on the most pure level or the most abstract level, the forest carbon market is working, but whether it’s actually reducing carbon is a different matter, but it’s a functional market, right?
Radhika Moolgavkar: Right, fair enough.
Chris Barnard: And so maybe actually to counteract the point of that article, maybe this certification system would actually help the forest carbon market as well because it would make the... Carbon offsets that are being sold or the carbon credits that are being sold, actual carbon credits and offsets rather than what we were just talking about earlier. So it might actually be beneficial.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I mean, in a way, I don’t think lumping them together is the worst thing, because you’re right. Maybe it’ll solve some of the issues in forestry that we’re seeing that they’re going to address from the beginning in regenerative ag. Maybe they can pivot in both. Well, Chris, we’re kind of to the end of our time. So it is your week to kind of tell us what caught your eye in a positive way that’s happening in the environmental space. You know, blow our socks off with something cool happening in the world.
Chris Barnard: Sure. Well, since you did two last week, I’m going to do two as well.
Radhika Moolgavkar: That’s awesome.
Chris Barnard: And I tried to keep them kind of relevant to what we’re talking about here. So the first one is that Obviously forests and soil and all those things do really cool stuff in terms of reducing carbon but also what they call blue carbon in oceans is also incredibly important and especially seagrass. And there’s this project off the coast of Virginia where actually conservation scientists spread more than 70 million seeds in the bays and they restored 9,000 acres of seagrass right off the coast of Virginia. And the Virginia Nature Conservancy is now looking to turn preservation, conservation of these seagrass fields into carbon credits.
And it’s the first ever seagrass project that will be applying for carbon credit certification.
Unknown speaker: That’s all.
Chris Barnard: Not just forest, not just ag, not just soil, but also seagrass.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I mean, I love it. We are definitely interested in some blue carbon methodology, so I’ll be excited to see how this one works out.
Chris Barnard: Awesome. And then the second one was just something I saw on the BBC that apparently since the year 2000, it Area the size of France of natural forest regeneration has happened around the world, which is pretty cool. And of that, an area the size of the Netherlands is tropical forest of that entire 59 million hectares. So it’s pretty cool. That’s kind of like natural regeneration just by allowing the land to be rather than turning it into agriculture or Building or whatever, they just allowed it to be and it naturally did this.
Obviously, the deforestation rate still far outweighs that but I wanted to give a little bit of a silver lining to what’s happening on the positive side as well.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, I appreciate that. With that, thank you everyone for listening. We will hopefully hear you will hear from us next week and you guys have a wonderful weekend and talk soon.
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