People can now buy Carbon Removal Certificates from the Nori marketplace. This is the first time this has happened and is the first step in Nori launching its full platform. Nori CEO Paul Gambill is on the show to share the news. This episode is posted on Reversing Climate Change and Carbon Removal Newsroom.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon, lead strategist with the Nori Carbon Removal Marketplace. Today I have sitting here with me Paul Gamble, who is a CEO and also a co-founder of Nori. We are so excited that today is the lightning sale of Nori. What that means, I don’t know, maybe you can tell us, Paul.
Paul Gambill: We’re launched.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, we’re launched. Oh, that’s what it means. It’s live.
Unknown speaker: Can you believe that? It’s been two years and we are now facing the customer saying, hello, welcome. Do you agree that’s... Here’s the open door.
Ross Kenyon: There was a gesture that you can’t see, listener. So what exactly does that mean? What are we doing right now? What is the lightning sale?
Paul Gambill: So we have been working, you know, listeners would know that we’ve been working on a methodology for quantifying carbon that’s drawn down into agricultural soils. So this is farmers changing farming practices, adopting things like no-till, So we’ve been working with a farmer named Trey Hill out of Maryland and you have probably heard him on the reversing climate change podcast before. So we’ve been working with Trey to quantify the carbon that he has pulled down into his farm over the last couple of years and we are making those verified carbon removal certificates available for pre-sale to anyone today.
Ross Kenyon: So if you want to actually participate in the Nori marketplace, if you want to buy carbon removal, this is now something that you can do pretty easily. It requires a credit card. We use Stripe.
Paul Gambill: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Pretty simple e-commerce. It’s straightforward, secure.
Paul Gambill: So the thing I wanted to say about this There have been a number of presidential candidates talking about the need for markets for soil carbon, the need to pay farmers for storing carbon in their soils and rebuilding the health of their soils. And that’s great. That’s awesome. I’m glad they’re talking about that in that way. But the programs that they’re talking about are years away. Nori’s live right now.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, they’re proposed. We’ll probably see some action there, but I think it probably will take some years to get all of that stuff going.
Paul Gambill: Yeah, so if you want to take your own personal responsibility for dealing with the carbon emissions that you produce just by living every day, you have that opportunity now. You can go to nori.com slash remove dash carbon.
Ross Kenyon: Yes, that is very, very cool. Take responsibility for your carbon emissions. It’s a nice piece of rhetoric. How much did you pay the publicist for that one?
Paul Gambill: That one I pulled out of a research study.
Ross Kenyon: Yes, that’s very good. Well, great. Maybe it’s good to give listeners a sense of the broad arc of Nori’s development. Is this the first stage of becoming public? What comes next? How are we thinking about various iterations and future releases of the platform?
Paul Gambill: Yeah. So let’s break down our roadmap. So if you’ve read our white paper or just kind of been paying attention to us over the last couple of years, you know that what we’re trying to get to is a fully scaled up global, highly liquid commodities market for carbon removal. That’s what we’re trying to get to. But where we’re starting today is just trying to prove out that we have the ability to quantify and verify soil carbon. So that’s all that we’re doing with this. So when you go on to that nori.
com slash remote. Move-Carbon page, you are participating in the presale for Trey’s CRCs from his farm. And these are going to be recorded on the blockchain. So all the transparency that we’ve been talking about is going to be there. But the payment for these is going to be with cash. Because we don’t want to confuse that message of quantifying and verifying soil carbon.
Ross Kenyon: That’s right. And the way that it’s been working too is as time goes, you’ll introduce more and more features to the marketplace. There’s more functionality when there’s tokens involved that will be appreciated later, but are not necessarily the best way to launch in a lean way.
Paul Gambill: Right. Remember, where we’re trying to get to is incorporating carbon removal payments into every single thing that we do throughout our lives and doing it automatically and invisibly so you don’t ever really think about it in the same way that you don’t ever really think about who pays for the garbage. Like you don’t pay for a garbage removal credit when you dine at a restaurant. It’s just incorporated in the cost of what you’re doing. And that’s how carbon removal should be done. And that’s where we’re trying to go. Like imagine you are shopping for a product on Amazon.
And when you check out, Amazon could calculate the amount of emissions required to deliver that product to your door. And then in real time, use the Nori marketplace to pay for removing that exact same amount of emissions. It’s an exciting vision.
Ross Kenyon: I share this vision. I hope that is the future.
Paul Gambill: I would like to see that.
Ross Kenyon: That sounds scalable. People having to think about it all the time and make a conscious decision to buy seems it faces its own sorts of problems. And it’s a useful step for us to make. But in the long term, we think we can do a lot better than that.
Paul Gambill: Right. It’s like, again, carbon emissions are just like garbage. And so far, we haven’t had the tools to measure, verify and remove that carbon. And Nori is making that available because that’s the infrastructure that we need in order to start dealing with the overall carbon in the atmosphere.
Ross Kenyon: And how much does it cost to buy a carbon removal certificate at nori.com slash remove carbon? Let me finish the URL, man.
Paul Gambill: Okay. Get it in there like seven times head on, apply directly to the forehead. So Trey is selling his carbon removal certificates for $15 per ton. And then Nori charges a 10% transaction fee on top of that. So the carbon price is $15 a ton plus $1. 50 for Nori’s transaction fee.
Ross Kenyon: That’s cool. And there’s also no fees otherwise that are hidden that farmers are picking up. This is the only fee Nori takes. Trey gets paid $15 per ton. It’s all going to him.
Paul Gambill: Yeah. That’s very different and new thing from existing carbon markets where I saw an interesting graphic the other day where it’s sometimes as low as like 20% of the carbon price ends up getting passed on to the project developer. So we wanted to change that around. We really want the farmers to get paid the full carbon price.
Ross Kenyon: That’s terrific. I’m sure Trey is happy about that. And you’ll be hearing from Trey too. We’re doing a series of these little lightning sale RCC bonus episodes. This one will be up on Carbon Removal Newsroom as well. But then moving forward, we have interviews with people who are participating in the lightning sale. So Trey’s coming up. Some of our first buyers will be coming up and we’ll be releasing those to come. Was there anything else that we left out, Paul?
Paul Gambill: No. I think that’s good.
Ross Kenyon: So thanks so much for joining us on this long journey. It’s been a couple of years. We’re so grateful that you’ve spent so much time hanging out with us. It’s weird sometimes when we meet you in person and you can quote us back to ourselves. And we’ve never met you. That’s been a fun new experience. But thank you so much. If you are excited about the lightning sale, if you know someone who will be, go to nori.com slash remove dash carbon and buy some carbon removal certificates. Buy them for your friends, buy them for your family, buy them for yourself.
Share it on social media.
Paul Gambill: We tried to make it really easy to figure out how many you should buy. We just looked at, you know, what is the typical amount that people emit as an average American? Or we also make it easy to remove the emissions from any flights that you recently took. So trying to make it easy.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, there’s a nice little slider up there that you can work with and figure out exactly how much you should be negating. Well, thank you, Paul. This is fun, informative, brief. Thank you.
Paul Gambill: Nori.com slash remove dash carbon.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s many times what you’ve told them. I think they got it now. They’ll be dreaming about it. And then if you like the show, please rate and review us on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, or Stitcher. Tell your friends, help us get the word out about the Lightning Sale, about Nori, about Carbon Removal Newsroom, about reversing climate change. And thanks so much for all of your support.
