Seemingly nothing generates hotter passions in carbon credits than forestry. Can credits count against fossil emissions? Is there enough of it to make a difference? What is the appropriate way of funding it?
Today's guest is Lisett Luik, Co-Founder and COO of Arbonics, an innovative forestry company in the Baltic that straddles the line between carbon removal and other services forests can provide.
We discuss if and how forestry can fit into carbon removal, help the planet avoid tipping points, and adequately motivate land managers to employ better practices.
We also play a quick game of bioenergy: friend or foe!
Always more to discuss on forestry, and I doubt this show will be the final word.
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Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to Reversing Climate Change. This is Ross Kenyon. I am a long-time climate tech and carbon removal entrepreneur, and I have a very cool show for you today. It’s with the co-founder of Arbonics, Lisett Luik. We are talking about the role of short-duration carbon removal. What role does it play? Why does it exist? People have strong feelings about what type of biogenic carbon removal should count to negate a fossil emission. Consensus seems to be it shouldn’t. And as we are seeing policy determining the appropriate minimum amount of time to count as carbon removal, we may see certain countries or regions or transnational entities that have large numbers of trees — surprise, surprise — want trees to be considered in policy.
So Lisett and I talk in great detail about how Arbonics does what they do, why they’re focused on trees, why carbon removal, why not just focus on improved forest management or other things like that, and what the process has been like for them. We also talked about a thorny subject, which is bioenergy in Europe. And just in case you’re listening and you don’t know what bioenergy is, it’s literally just burning biomass to generate some kind of electricity. Maybe bioenergy isn’t the best form of renewable energy, and there’s some dispute about to what degree it truly is renewable. But let’s take a somewhat pessimistic case here, that it’s not that renewable.
What do you do in the face of a Europe that is, you know, fairly dependent upon Russian natural gas for its energy mix? It’s changing now. As we talked about in the show, Europe is less dependent now on Russian natural gas than it once was. But even still, the alternative is natural gas or coal, maybe turning Germany’s nuclear plants back on, or something else. But who knows if that’s even going to happen or is politically possible at this point. The question is, is bioenergy better than coal, and to what extent? And is it worth the trade-off in terms of carbon versus biodiversity or other environmental attributes that we might want to maximize beyond just the carbon benefit?
So there’s so much more to say about bioenergy, energy mixes, and the geopolitics of that. But I’ll leave this now for Lisett to explain why Arbonics, why they do what they do, and why are we talking about forestry? And also, just what is up with short-duration carbon removals? How should we be thinking about them? What is the future use case for them? And how might we continue to make sure that biogenic carbon removal is maximized in a time when we really need to be buying ourselves as much time as possible? Have a great day. Here’s your show. Thanks for being here with me.
Lisett Luik: Thanks for having me.
Ross Kenyon: I watched your, your rise recently with Arbonics and was very intrigued to see afforestation making such a dent in carbon removal. I feel like I haven’t heard anything like that in a while, so very excited about the chance to talk about that with you today. And maybe we should start at the beginning with, why Arbonics? There’s probably many things you could be building. How did you decide on building this company, and how’s it going?
Lisett Luik: Yeah. So, why Arbonics? The short answer is, like often with businesses, we started from a problem we ourselves had. So me and my co-founder Kristjan, we were working for an investment fund and we were investing in forest land. But we really wanted to do it in a climate-forward way. And turns out, well, at the time the only way to really financially invest in forest land was to get timber out of it. So that was the only way. You have to cut the trees down. We thought there must be another way. So we set out to find it. And when we didn’t find it, we had to build it ourselves. So that was the beginning of Arbonics.
Ross Kenyon: And you were looking at this and thinking there is a way for land managers to get paid for not monetizing the timber of it, but by keeping trees standing. And that’s what you were trying to build, and that’s what Arbonics does now.
Lisett Luik: Yes. So we have two things we do, actually. One is turn empty, underutilized land into new forests. And I specifically say turn it into forest rather than plant trees, because there’s a lot more to it than just sticking saplings in the soil. And then the other half is precisely to figure out which forests that in the old world you would just want to harvest actually should be kept growing. And maybe instead of clear-cutting, we can do some selective harvesting and keep the majority of the trees up so that we don’t destroy the whole environment.
Ross Kenyon: And that sounds a lot like the distinction between the two Verra methodologies that you work with.
Lisett Luik: Exactly, yes. The official names would be afforestation, which is the planting of new forests, and then improved forest management. And the methodologies themselves are called VM0047 and VM0045.
Ross Kenyon: Great catchy names they’ve got.
Lisett Luik: Well, that’s not really their intent, I, I don’t think.
Ross Kenyon: Well, fair enough. OK. You framed this in terms of carbon removal, which is a design choice that you didn’t need to take. Forestry management has benefits beyond just the carbon removal, and in fact many people know trees as maybe better stewards of other benefits rather than just removing carbon. How did you choose that framing?
Lisett Luik: Yeah, it’s interesting, because we very much started from actually thinking about forest as having layers of value. So timber is one really easy, obvious layer, right? Then you have carbon storage, also kind of obvious. Then you have biodiversity. We’re getting more complex now, harder to measure. And then you have this sort of social and community element. Right here in Estonia, where I’m from, people like to go and pick mushrooms and berries in the forest. And how do you measure that? How do you put a number behind that value?
So we absolutely believe that forests have different layers of value, but that historically, land owners can only really access the very bottom one, which is timber. And they are often facing this decision where sort of society tells them like, look, the good thing to do would be to keep your forest growing, do not cut it. On the flip side, if that’s their primary asset, you know, they have kids to put through school, their house might need a new roof, they have to monetize it, and if they can only monetize it through timber, that will just be what they do. So we really started from a perspective of, how do we give land owners more options so they don’t have to immediately jump to the timber option? And carbon was a good way to do it, because it was the second easiest to quantify after timber.
Ross Kenyon: It seems easier to quantify than how many Baltic forest frolickers can pick mushrooms in the right season. Or maybe, how many pagan groves can you create for neo-pagans to worship around a world tree? Can you do that? That’s, that’s a good metric.
Lisett Luik: I have to think about adding that as a KPI for the team, because I think that would be a pretty cool one to track.
Ross Kenyon: I’m trying to just set myself up for a job here. I’m great at in-jokes for very specific ethnic groups is what I’m trying to tell you.
Lisett Luik: Excellent. Well, it works. We work a lot with local landowners, they would really appreciate it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Is it mostly in, I, I saw that Latvia represented on your website and also Estonia. Is it primarily Baltic?
Lisett Luik: Yeah, it’s the three Baltics, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, then also Finland, and we’re just about to launch Sweden, as in like tomorrow.
Ross Kenyon: Because forestry is so old in carbon markets, I imagine people think of it as being a very crowded space. Is it easy to just spin up a forestry management company with a carbon market orientation at this point?
Lisett Luik: No, I would say, I didn’t think it was easy. So I think there’s a couple of challenges. One is, yes, there’s a lot of players, but I think because of that, land owners, who tend to be quite a perhaps conservative bunch, they don’t trust very easily. So gaining their trust, gaining their buy-in, is quite challenging. So I would say that was a key thing. And what we were doing is, we knew we had to straddle two very different worlds.
So one is the world of carbon markets, you know, where people think about saving the climate and saving the planet. And then they can also think about quantifying carbon, and they get really deep into the science of it. And then you have the world of land. Well, the land owners, where they operate in a very practical, on-the-ground way, and they don’t necessarily, a, they don’t like rules and regulations. They don’t like anyone telling them what they can and cannot do with their land. And secondly, they don’t necessarily have a lot of trust in carbon markets. So you need to build that trust, and you need to really build that kind of knowledge for them that we know what we’re doing.
At the same time, we really have to respect the fact that they know their land better than anyone. They’re there day in, day out. They, like, know the trees basically by name. So yeah, we, we have to really trust them and take their knowledge into account as well.
Ross Kenyon: It reminds me a lot of my work with farmers. They’re very conservative, not trusting the carbon markets, just expect to be bamboozled in some way, because it just sounds made-up, I think, to a lot of people who are tied very closely to like real physical assets and something that is more abstracted than that. I don’t know. I don’t know that I necessarily blame them for assuming the worst in some cases. I imagine a lot of your work is trust building and relationship building. I imagine your best advocates are people who have entered your system and are now advocates for you.
Lisett Luik: Yeah, no, absolutely. I, I think you’re absolutely right. There’s a lot of parallels between forest owners and farmers. And in fact, some of our clients are also farmers, so definitely a lot of, lot of parallels there. I think on the trust piece, yeah, there’s the piece that they don’t necessarily trust these outer, you know, these big complex financial markets. And then there’s another piece, particularly for forest owners, where I think they feel like they’ve been demonized a lot.
So, you know, they get a lot of pushback from maybe environmental groups who are like, oh, forest owners, they just want to cut down the trees and burn them and, you know, they don’t care. And I will admit that probably before I got deep into this, I might have been inclined to believe a little bit of that as well, because you see pictures of clear-cut fields and you’re like, the people who do that clearly don’t care. But the reality is, once you meet them, they are so in tune with nature. They really, really care a lot. And I think they don’t get enough credit for that, but they also need pragmatic reasons for it, because it’s often their biggest asset and maybe their only asset. So it’s a very understandable position, really, when you dig into it.
Ross Kenyon: Farmers are the same way too. Even making relatively small changes that we think are obvious and easy can represent major risks for farm management. And for many farms, one bad year can pose enormous difficulties. So I know it sounds obvious, or these people are doing things just to be mean, or they don’t care about the environment or things of that nature. But I often feel like that is missing a greater truth of how on the edge and how in debt a lot of these farmers are. Maybe, maybe some more to timber, or forestry managers, may be different in some ways.
Lisett Luik: No, I think there’s a lot of parallels. Maybe some of the larger ones, yeah, they’re less constantly on the verge, but definitely a lot of small family-owned forest holdings, they face the same issues. And in forestry in particular, your cash flows are really lumpy, right? So you have big good years where you have harvests, and then in the meantime you have nothing, but you have costs. You have forest management costs all the time. You’re having to do clearing up in your forest, you’re having to plant new saplings. And I think that’s also part of the reason why actually carbon credits are attractive to forest owners, because they provide like an additional cash flow in those lean years in between, which helps them keep going.
And a lot of them, again, these are like third, fourth generation forest owners, right? So they feel this huge duty to their father and grandfather who managed it before them, and they, they don’t want to be the generation who lets go. So they hold on even when it’s very, very tough financially.
Ross Kenyon: That’s nice to hear. I’m glad to hear that there’s reasons for doing that beyond just the money. Why frame it in terms of carbon removal? I know there’s a lot of difficulty and debate over whether or not forestry may even qualify as a fossil-fuel-negating type of credit.
Lisett Luik: I have a very strong thesis of like why nature-based carbon actually does matter in the, in the grand scheme, and it kind of comes down to numbers, right? So every year as a planet, we’re emitting over 50 gigatons of CO2 or CO2 equivalent. And we’re currently removing about two gigatons. And of that two gigatons, 99.98%, I believe, is done by nature. So that’s forests, soil, oceans, wetlands, etcetera.
And kind of what that tells me is, so there’s a lot of incredible technologies we’ve, we’ve got coming up that enable us to do technological carbon removal, but they are all still very, very small in their impact. And I’m a huge believer and I hope we are able to scale them. But given where we are, given that we have to take carbon removal as a whole from two gigatons to at least 10 gigatons a year, right? So we have to like 5X what we’re doing now. It’s not going to be like the technological piece, it’s not going to cover what we need, even if we 10,000X it. I think I calculated you have to 86,000X the direct air capture that we’re currently doing in order for it to reach one-gigaton scale. So basically the only thing that can fill the gap is nature.
And is nature going to be as long term as, you know, taking carbon out and then pumping it underground in some slurry? Absolutely not. And a good parallel I have for this is, there’s so much variability. So if you think of different types of trees, you might have an oak. An oak tree can live up to 1,000 years with the right conditions, right? That’s pretty impressive. Or then you have an alder. An alder lives to like 40, 50. And both of those, there’s value in both of them. They just have a very different role to play in the ecosystem.
And so in nature this like natural variability of carbon sequestration, I think, is very normal. And I don’t think it’s fair to say, oh, we can only do nature-based carbon removal if it only stores over 100 years. I think what we need to do is we need to be very clear and transparent. So we need to say, you know, these credits, they come from the oak that’s going to be around for a long time, versus these ones come from the alder. They’re only here for a short time, and you can’t use the short-term credits to sort of offset permanent carbon emissions, right? So if you’re, if you’re burning a bunch of jet fuel, you probably shouldn’t be offsetting that with a short-term forest credit.
But you could use a combination of different types of nature-based credits with a little bit of technology-based. And I think then you can get closer to actually having a realistic offset of like near-term and medium-term and long-term impacts of those emissions. Does that make sense, or did I get too technical there?
Ross Kenyon: No, not too technical. I was reading your Symbiosis RFP blog post on this topic, but I could tell that maybe you’ve been a bit frustrated by the carbon removal community’s focus on durability. Am I, am I reading between the lines too much, or does that exist?
Lisett Luik: No, I think you’re right. Are we right to be frustrated? Maybe not. I absolutely think there is a type, you know, it’s important to be focused on, on. I like to talk about durability rather than permanence. I think permanence is a very binary term. Something either is permanent or not, right? But I think about duration and durability.
And I, I do think there was maybe a little bit of a trend of like everyone saying like, look, if it’s not 1,000 years, it doesn’t matter. Realistically though, the impacts that we’re facing with climate warming is, is on a much shorter time scale than 1,000 years. Like nobody knows what’s happening in 1,000 years, but we know we’re going to be in trouble in 30 years, so I’d rather do a bunch of stuff now, even if it only works for 30 years, which buys us an extra 30 years to figure out how to do more of the long-term stuff. That’s how I’m thinking about it.
Ross Kenyon: I’m very sympathetic to that and I see people write papers talking about how temporary removals are not important. Like I need to just sit down and study in greater detail about how if it’s not 1,000 years at least, it’s just not doing anything that’s climatically relevant. And I like intuitively do not believe that is the case. Because if we will not have solved climate change in the next couple decades or century, like if we don’t solve it this century, we have probably bigger problems. Like we’re now at a much lower complexity civilizationally than we were at this moment that we’re doing this podcasting. Bad things have happened if, if we haven’t figured this out yet. And even just buying us that time.
The best arguments I’ve heard against this way of thinking I just laid out is one, the political economy of it, which is that if you make it easy for corporations to buy something cheaper and less durable, they’re going to do it and yet make the same claims as if they had bought the expensive stuff that can truly negate a fossil emission. That’s possible. And I’ve also heard good arguments about if we put too much money and focus on temporary removals and a lot of the current sinks for carbon become sources, and like the Amazon is now emitting more some years than not, we might have a massive re-release of temporary storage of carbon dioxide. And that would cause us to hit these tipping points much more rapidly and cause a cascading set of feedback loops. That would be terrible.
I, I think both of those things are true, but I think we also still need to be maxing this out now to buy us time if nothing else. What do you think about those arguments? Do they hold any weight for you?
Lisett Luik: I, I think they definitely do hold some weight. So, but this, in the bigger picture, I have this really big belief, which is that it’s too late for any one silver bullet solution, right? We’re way past that point. So we have to do a ton of imperfect things at this point. We have to do anything and everything we can think of, both to mitigate climate change and to adapt humankind to it. So that’s point number one. So I’m, I’m not a big believer in like arguing within the climate community about whose solution is better. I think it’s good to critique things and good to give candid feedback, but at the end of the day, we have to do everything.
And then the second piece about, I was, I did my undergrad in, in philosophy, so I immediately jumped to moral hazard. That’s the term, right, which is this idea that if companies have the opportunity to basically buy their way free for less money, they will do it. And I think the choice we’re facing today is not between, oh, companies will buy the really expensive $500 to $1,000 a tonne technology-based carbon, or they will buy the cheaper nature-based. The real choice is that the vast majority of them don’t do anything at all, right.
I always like the numbers. People critique the sustainability plans of the SBTi-aligned companies, but 99-point-something percent of companies worldwide don’t have any plans. It’s only the small minority who do, and we sort of tear their plans apart. At least they’re doing something. Does that mean we should kind of let them off scot-free and let them claim that, you know, buying a bunch of very cheap, I don’t know, Chinese renewable energy credits, suddenly they’re completely carbon neutral and everything is just fine and dandy? No.
And I think this is where we come to when we talk about carbon removal and offsetting or compensation or whatever term you want to use. The key thing is transparency. So the key thing is to say, look, here’s the things we’re doing. Some of it we’re just supporting the local ecosystem. We know it’s short-term carbon duration storage, but it’s still really important because there’s no other financial mechanism to, for example, protect forests, really.
Some of it we’re doing to encourage new technologies, like maybe investing in biochar and enhanced rock mineralisation. We don’t really 100% know yet how long it’s going to last, but we think it’s pretty good, so we’re going to do it. And then some is this really durable, really guaranteed stuff, and we’re doing it as much as we can. But I think there’s no company in the world who could afford to do only DAC, certainly not in the current economic environment, right? It’s just, it’s very, very expensive still.
Ross Kenyon: Do you think you might copy Mast Reforestation’s pivot and go into biomass burial in anoxic environments? Is that something that you want to do for Arbonics?
Lisett Luik: I love that question because I was literally thinking about it this week in the context of our temperate forests. So biomass burial more broadly, in burying timber, I’ve always really struggled with the idea, because timber is a really great material and it’s really valuable and has great replacement effects. We use timber rather than concrete or steel. But where biomass burial makes a lot of sense is if you have damaged timber. So Mast is doing it for these wildfire-damaged trees. At our latitudes, wildfires are slightly less of a problem, but we do have pests, and particularly as the winters get warmer, more of them, different types of bark beetles. So you do sometimes have timber that’s really damaged by bark beetles.
And so I’ve actually this week been thinking about, is there a way to make it feasible that we could bury that biomass? So I don’t have an answer for you yet, but it’s, it’s actually top of mind. And I think, I think there’s an interesting challenge in that.
Ross Kenyon: I have lots of questions about it too, and maybe the economics of it keep it in check, because whenever we’re talking about nutrient export, I’d almost rather see those nutrients cycling through the systems that could benefit from them rather than sticking them underground, even for so-called waste wood. I mean, something else is going to grow in its place, and I think if it had access to the nitrogen, carbon, it would use them and uptake them. And if we put them underground where they’re inaccessible, is that a good thing? I think there are cases like with Vaulted Deep where this material is not actually valuable, it’s actually toxic and we’re getting rid of it. That’s a good solution.
But I’m wondering, like, is it actually the best use of even so-called waste wood, or wood from fire in the case of Mast or others I’ve seen, where there’s, you know, non-monetizable wood? For others that I’ve seen, like, OK, the market hasn’t put a price on this, but it still might be valuable to the ecosystem in which it would otherwise be nutrient cycling. I don’t know. How should I feel about nutrient export? Is that, is that, am I like on the right track here, or no?
Lisett Luik: I think so. So I’m, I’m not a biologist, but yeah, I think this is where actually the carbon picture and the biodiversity picture sort of start to clash, which is the things that you might want to do to maximize carbon removal are actually not bad for biodiversity.
So yes, actually in a proper, you know, proper forest, you should be leaving the burnt wood on the ground, because it will enrich the soil and it’s all part of the life cycle of the forest. And same for the, the beetle-eaten trees, you know, they will decompose and be an excellent habitat for a bunch of other types of beetles. So, and, and if you went to do, you know, purely carbon storage forestry, you’ll probably end up planting the most fast-growing trees in the most least biodiverse way possible, right? Just straight rows of it as much as possible. And a big thing for us at Arbonics is that we think nature with carbon removal still has to be biodiversity positive, at the very least neutral. It cannot be negative.
And so that way you get into really thorny questions, and how do you measure it? And how do you measure the benefit of that fallen log staying in the forest versus being turned into biochar or being buried, or all the other ways you can do it? And I honestly think that the only way to solve that is that we, we start somehow putting quantifiable numbers behind biodiversity and the value of nature. And there’s a bunch of different frameworks out there, but I think we failed to like all agree on one way to measure it. So it’s still very early days, but I’m a big believer we’re eventually going to end up being able to quantify it much better than we are today.
Ross Kenyon: It’s a great question, it’s making the gears of my brain turn. One thing I’ve been thinking about that’s parallel to this, and you can let me know if this is applicable or not, but I’ve been following the work of in-situ biochar production with crop stubble. Something like having mobile pyrolyzers on farm fields, then someone, like, doing the same thing, but they’re doing bio-oil that’s being pumped underground, and now it is presumed that the pumped underground solution is more durable than biochar. But you can still, like, I might get a nasty email for even suggesting such a thing. Don’t come at me, biochar people.
Like there’s a lot of, lot of debate I’m sure you’ve seen of, is biochar better suited for the 100 or 1,000 years? Or which portions of the biochar can be counted as 1,000 years of durability? I think if you, if they had presumably a similar amount of durability to be considered properly negating of fossil emissions, you would prefer to have it adding a nutrient-cycling, water-storing, fertility-, efficiency-enhancing source, or value being added to the soil, rather than just pumping that out of the system entirely. And I’m wondering at what point we’re going to be able to have the metrics to make those decisions.
And it’s probably, as you say, we need to put a price on it or have some other way of, how valuable is it to have it out of the carbon, the short carbon cycle entirely? And how valuable is it to have it cycling, even if it’s somewhat less durable potentially? That’s a, how do you even make that decision? I don’t even know what framework is appropriate for deciding that. If you’re a carbon supremacist, then you say like the durability matters, but that isn’t necessarily the right answer. And I can say that because I work in carbon, so.
Lisett Luik: I like the term carbon supremacist. Yeah. I mean, given that you worked on, on soil carbon and farmland, you know this better than anyone. But we have, you know, massive issues with depleted soils and, and poor soils. And, and again, I think on some level actually that can probably be quantified, right? You can actually look at the fertility of a soil and then what it’s like when it’s been depleted of all organic matter, and the difference between the yields of those two, and then calculate whether or not it’s worth putting the biochar into the soil to enrich it.
But yeah, the, the challenge is that nothing in climate is operating in isolation, right? So if we managed to solve the carbon problem, but we have destroyed the natural world, we don’t have clean water, our soils are depleted and we don’t have any forests anymore, we’re still really in big trouble. Like we’re not boiling alive anymore, baking alive anymore, but we’re still in big trouble, right? So we need to, we need to protect the natural world across all of these different dimensions at the same time. And that’s a really hard and thorny problem, and it’s not one that’s necessarily easily solved by technology.
So, and I have the same bias. I come from the technology industry. I want to solve things with technology, right? Like, cool, we just put more brains on it and then we write some code and boom, done, right? And unfortunately in the world of nature, when you’re dealing with atoms and not bits and bytes, it doesn’t tend to be so simple. So I think we need more holistic thinking, but where that’s coming from, and can, can it really be done? I don’t know, but I’m, I’m hopeful. I’m hopeful we will get there.
Ross Kenyon: If it remains a values-driven question, values-driven questions are difficult because one can legitimately come to different conclusions than someone else. And you might say, well, I value this over that. And there’s, there’s no accounting for that. It’s almost just, you can do that. I guess if we had some way of ranking. OK, is the biodiversity crisis more or less urgent than the strictly carbon crisis? And then you could weight it that way, is maybe another way of doing it.
Some people try to do the polycrisis approach, where it’s all of these things at the same time, in the hopes that it helps us solve this more quickly, and it’s possible that generates the right solution and generates the trade-offs that would help us get to the right conclusion. I’m not entirely convinced that it is. It’s whenever I hear systems thinking, I just imagine that I’m going into some fuzzy, hand-wavy kind of discussion, and I don’t want to end there.
Lisett Luik: Yeah. And I, I think the flip side of, if the systems thinking goes into like polycrisis mode, I think a lot of people, when confronted with one crisis, it’s already hard to motivate them. Confronted with like a matrix of five overlapping ones, they just give up. Like, why even bother? That’s way too hard. And I think that’s a real challenge we have, is that fear is not a great motivator. You need to give people positive outcomes to motivate them. And in the climate space, all we’ve got to work with mostly is fear and just threatening people. And I’m, I’m not sure that’s working out super well in so far as getting everyone on board.
Ross Kenyon: It, it doesn’t seem to be working out great, no. There are certain groups that work within afforestation, reforestation that are considered to be a part of carbon removal. And there are some that are, you know, have a foot in and a foot out. I think groups like Pachama, for instance, like they’ll show up at the conference and no one will bat an eye, but they’re not like dyed-in-the-wool carbon removal people. Where does Arbonics fall on the scale here?
Lisett Luik: Yeah, yeah. I don’t know if the like proper core CDR people would allow us to sit at their table. They might not. I think for ourselves, like we, we do think of ourselves as carbon removal, but we are very honest with ourselves. And this is very different from this like really long-duration technology-based carbon removal, because of all the reasons we’ve already discussed. So we think of ourselves as carbon removal, but heavily anchored in nature.
And yeah, I think I’m hoping that the tent can expand, so that it’s not the sort of, so that carbon removal people can be more inclusive of these other solutions that have maybe other co-benefits and slightly less duration. Because again, I think it’s a combination of solutions that we really need. And I think a smart buyer is also buying a portfolio of these approaches, not picking one over the other necessarily.
Ross Kenyon: Were you surprised by Isometric supporting forestry?
Lisett Luik: I’ve been in, in talks with them, so no, not really. But I know that in the beginning they came out very strongly against anything nature-based. I think they have learnt, as have most of us. Once you start adding up the numbers, if they’re purely DAC, just, yeah, the scale isn’t there. The scale is not, even with our best willingness to scale it, we run into some bottlenecks around energy, etcetera. So again, you need nature, you need forests in the mix. I think most people who are in this space for a while, they’ve come to realize it eventually, whether they want to or not.
Ross Kenyon: Many people in carbon removal are concerned about continued buying appetite, especially from the big buyers. Does that same fear exist in forestry?
Lisett Luik: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think I’m, if you were to ask me what’s like the number one thing that’s keeping me awake at night, it’s, I’m worried that like macro stuff that’s actually really short-termist in nature is going to derail our long-term, like global ambitions, because everyone has to focus on geopolitics rather than climate, right? And the US bans talking about climate change, and what does that look like? So I’m definitely worried about that.
I think it’s a little early to tell what’s going to happen with the big purchasers. On the flip side, we have in the EU, I think, increasing support, you know, the EU launching their own carbon removal certification framework. I think that is positive for the industry and gives maybe some of the buyers who have been more conservative and worried about entering the space, that gives them the confidence to enter. But yeah, I, I, yeah, I’m definitely worried about the macro picture. And are we going to get even more behind on our carbon removal goals because for a few years people have to focus on, on other really urgent topics?
Ross Kenyon: OK, so the renaming kind of made me laugh. It was the Carbon Removal Certification Framework and now it’s the carbon removal, carbon farming something or other, but.
Lisett Luik: I haven’t fully, I’m still, I’m still thinking about it as CRCF, so I haven’t fully caught up on that rename.
Ross Kenyon: Carbon Removal Certification Framework, as it was formerly known. Arbonics, does Arbonics qualify for either of those baskets? With, you know, temporary removals, but also it’s not farming. It’s kind of not durable, but also not farming. Is there a place for you?
Lisett Luik: Yeah, afforestation is in the, is in the framework. It was one of the first things that the expert group actually is planning to, or at least like six months ago were planning to, develop a standard for. So they are thinking of afforestation as carbon farming as well, just carbon farming on a longer time scale than your sort of soil-based carbon farming.
Ross Kenyon: Interesting, the, the fights over these things I think are always really interesting, where I always feel very much in a bubble thinking about carbon removal and then just imagining something coming out of Strasbourg or, or Brussels. I imagine the people that are debating topics like this are probably not all, 1,000 years of permanence isn’t good enough, we need 10,000 years or 100,000 years or it’s not even worth bothering. I imagine most of them are being like, well, what about forests? Like we have a lot of trees, especially in the like northern latitudes and in the, the Nordic countries. So are we just gonna ignore them?
But I think if you talk to people who are involved in carbon removal in Europe, I think they are very much people that I, I think of as pushing long, long permanence requirements to qualify for being carbon removal at a policy level. But maybe that just doesn’t play out with giving participation by normies and not just carbon removal accessible.
Lisett Luik: Yeah, I mean, and there’s so many other stakeholders, right? The hard part with the sort of, you know, forests is also part of the LULUCF, the land use and land-use change and forestry goals. But the thing is, you do need to have the right, like you can’t just expect that the forest carbon removal is always going to be there and that people are just going to keep planting their forest and keep doing it, right? Because if it is no longer financially feasible for them, they won’t do it. So this is not something that we can just like, oh, it’s always going to be there in the background. And I’m not sure if the, the sort of durable-only people fully acknowledge that there’s a risk there, that the LULUCF carbon removal will go away if we don’t put some sort of positive incentive in place.
And a good example for this is some of the biggest forestry countries in Europe like Sweden and Finland. In some years they have a net negative balance actually, and Finland is 75% covered in forest. That’s quite hard to achieve. The reason they do it is because they have such intensive harvesting, partially to feed the bioenergy engines of Europe, which is a whole other topic that we don’t, don’t have time to go into today, but.
Ross Kenyon: I was about to ask you about it.
Lisett Luik: Well, we can, we can go into that. But yeah, I guess just to wrap up that point, is that the natural carbon, it’s not that it’s just always there. Like when it comes to forests, which are heavily human-managed, we can’t just rely on like, oh, that stuff is always going to be there, we can always count on it doing its part. No, we have to be prepared for a world in which that decreases significantly from its current roughly two gigatons unless we take action.
Ross Kenyon: Wow, we’re taking forests for granted, essentially.
Lisett Luik: Yeah, a little bit, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: I was going to ask you, it’s funny that you went there, but before you even started going into bioenergy, I was going to ask you just very matter-of-factly how you felt about Drax. But I am curious about the very, I mean, yeah, Denmark, Sweden, very famous right now for, for BECCS and bioenergy plans for carbon removal. Is that something that you see as something that is a nice complement to your work, or does it compete with it for feedstock, or somewhere in between? How are you thinking about it?
Lisett Luik: Like my very honest personal view is I’m quite worried about it. I think the scale at which we are at in Europe for bioenergy, I think it’d be very hard for anyone to argue that we’re purely feeding that off of like low-quality or, you know, damaged wood or just waste products that wouldn’t otherwise have been used. So I’m, I think at the scale we’re currently at, we have to be feeding in some proper timber that could have other uses.
The challenge is the forest lobby is huge in Europe. And every time the European Commission wants to remove BECCS as a sort of renewable energy source, remove it from a renewable energy source classification, they get a lot of pushback. But to me, it’s very hard to stand here and, you know, with a straight face claim that something is renewable if I can cut it down and burn it in a day and then it takes 80 years to recover. Like, yes, it’s renewable, but on what time scale? So, yeah, personally, I think it is a very challenging area and it probably needs more regulation. But the lobby has been very strong around it.
Ross Kenyon: That’s fascinating. And energy security is obviously of great import to Europe. I saw that there’s like a Baltic grid that just got disconnected from Russia, I think, this last week or something like that.
Lisett Luik: Exactly. Last weekend, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Which is fascinating too. And I think it’s hard to be too oppositional to BECCS and bioenergy when your alternative is maybe natural gas coming out of Kaliningrad or something like that. That probably changes the calculus a little bit.
Lisett Luik: Yeah, exactly. That’s why it’s very hard for me to, you know, give a very direct answer on that, because again, like comparatively, would I rather have BECCS or coal? I’d obviously rather have biomass-based energy. But then the bigger picture, can we be thinking bigger? Can we, you know, have even cleaner sources? Yes. And there’s maybe a very high proportion of biomass energy is kind of standing in the way of us developing those cleaner sources also, yes.
But in the short term, you know, it’s a cold winter out here in Estonia and, like, we need to stay warm. So these are, again, very, very challenging, nuanced topics. And I kind of get frustrated when they get boiled down in media into like, one thing bad, other thing good. Let’s just switch over from A to B. It’s almost never that easy when it comes to energy, unfortunately.
Ross Kenyon: Might just be one of those values disagreements things too. Or I guess what you project for the future of the EU and relations with Russia. I even saw this week that Trump is meeting with Putin and trying to wind down the war in Ukraine. And who knows if he pulls a rabbit out of his hat and maybe that ends. But I think ongoing conflicts that have an energy-as-a-weapon component to it will really influence us, maybe potentially more than the carbon benefit or lack thereof for energy choices in the future.
Lisett Luik: Yeah, no, absolutely. And again, you’ll get a very different answer asking this question to an Estonian than if you ask, I don’t know, someone in France, maybe, when they have, they’re well covered in nuclear power stations and have got good energy security. So.
Ross Kenyon: Well, I think you gave a pretty, a pretty nuanced and fair answer while also having your criticism allowed as well. It can be all of those things at the same time, Lisett. Where can people follow your work if they want to keep up with either you personally or with Arbonics?
Lisett Luik: With Arbonics, the best way is to look up our website, www.arbonics.com. We also have a Substack where we publish some interesting forest carbon world news. And as for me personally, you can find me on Bluesky, which is, you know, the cool new place for the climate people to hang out. And my handle is just Lisett Luik, I think.
Ross Kenyon: OK, cool. Is it worth going over there? I haven’t done it yet. I don’t necessarily need another social media platform to try. Has it been worth your time?
Lisett Luik: Yeah, I’m enjoying it. I feel like there’s a lot of academics there, so I’m often finding like really interesting threads about their papers and things that I wouldn’t necessarily otherwise get exposed to. So I’m enjoying it.
Ross Kenyon: OK. Well, Lisett, thanks for being here with me. Thanks for answering the questions in a real way. I felt like I got some good answers there. Made you think a little bit.
Lisett Luik: Well, thank you for having me. And yeah, I like it when the questions are challenging enough that I can’t just recite off some rote answers. So always a good discussion then.
