Local governments are surprisingly powerful levers for carbon removal.
While large national governments can be slow and unwieldy, cities and counties can sometimes be much more nimble. They can get carbon removal projects off the ground quickly and share what they learn with other local governments.
So, which municipalities are taking the lead in the CDR space? And how do they integrate carbon removal in the local government landscape?
Susie Strife is the Boulder County Director of Sustainability, Climate Action and Resilience; Ramón DC Alatorre is Climate and Energy Coordinator for the City of Flagstaff; and Chris Neidl is Cofounder of OpenAir Collective.
Together, they are collaborators in forming the Four Corners Carbon Removal Coalition, an alliance of local governments that are pooling resources to fund CDR projects in the Four Corners region of the Southwest US.
On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Susie, Ramón, and Chris join Ross and Siobhan to explain why Flagstaff and Boulder are ahead of the curve when it comes to carbon removal.
They share the resistance they face when it comes to endorsing carbon offsets and explain how local governments can educate communities around carbon removal.
Listen in to understand why the Four Corners model focuses on funding carbon removal projects that can be replicated and learn how Susie, Ramón, and Chris support other jurisdictions in finding local applications of CDR.
More from the show
Ad-free episodes and other benefits come with a paid subscription.
Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
Carbon Removal Memes is still going.
Resources
Four Corners Carbon Removal Coalition
Boulder County Office of Sustainability, Climate Action and Resilience
Boulder County Climate on Twitter
Flagstaff Sustainability Office
‘Local Governments Can Drive Carbon Dioxide Removal Innovation’
Flagstaff Climate Emergency Declaration
Carbon Offsets: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
Eli Mitchell-Larson on Reversing Climate Change S2EP62
The Oxford Offsetting Principles
Boulder County Climate Innovation Fund
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m one of the co-founders of Nori and the creative editor there. Today we have a full house, almost a surprising full house. It started off with just one guest and then we just kept getting parlayed into more. And now I’m grateful only three showed up, Susie, frankly. There could have been more. I feel like there’s more people you’re collaborating with. There very well could have been, but it’s going to be a fun, diverse, a lot of good topics that are going to come up today.
And with me here is Siobhan Montoya-Lavendor. God, my words today. Hi, Siobhan. How are you?
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Hey, I’m also very grateful to have this little house with us. We have Susie Streif, the Director of Sustainability, Climate Action and Resilience for the County of Boulder. We also have Ramon D. C. Alatorre, who’s a Climate Analyst for the City of Flagstaff. And joining us, Chris Neidl, the co-founder of the Open Air Collective, a collective you will often hear us referring to on this very podcast. Welcome, everyone.
Susie Strife: Thank you. So fun to be here.
Ross Kenyon: Siobhan, I feel like we passed right by you so quickly, though. We should say, too, that you’re one of the co-founders of Thanks a Ton. You do a lot of meme work with Nori, work on the podcast here. Is there anything else we should even say? Do you feel like that’s an adequate introduction for you?
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: I think that’s efficient.
Ross Kenyon: Let’s hear from our guests here.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: So today’s topic, we’re really wanting to dig into the role of local government. And this is something that you guys have been leading in terms of CDR. For the purpose of our pod, you know, our guests, our listeners typically know about CDR. So if you’re a listener and you have no clue what CDR is, please go watch a previous or listen to a previous podcast. We’re going to assume a baseline of knowledge here and just jump into some questions about how you’re integrating carbon dioxide removal into the local government landscape.
And so I actually watched your Open Air talk. Open Air has terrific This Is CDR podcast. It’s available on YouTube. We’ll link it in the show notes here. Terrific. Always catch them. Always catch the recordings if I miss the live. And Ramon, in your talk, you pointed to the fact that cities and local governments are critical for CDR because local governments are often more nimble than big national governments. As we’ve all seen, national movement on CDR has been less than I think a lot of us have wanted. And so... The ability for you to act quickly is obviously really key when we’re facing a climate crisis that’s upon us.
But we’re not seeing this happen everywhere. We’re not seeing this happen in all local governments and municipalities. So what’s special about Flagstaff in Boulder, you guys? Give us the down low.
Ramón DC Alatorre: I can start with Flagstaff, I suppose. What’s special about Flagstaff? I would say that our community is climate literate. I was not necessarily myself like a CDR expert by any means when our community brought forward the two-page climate emergency declaration in January of 2020. It is a short declaration. It’s pretty prescriptive. The community brought forward the goal of carbon neutrality, the timeline of 2030. And then as you start unpacking that, you start to understand that if the goal is carbon neutrality, that there’s going to have to be a removal sort of Pillar to our portfolio of climate action.
And when we were doing engagement with the community and saying, okay, like if we’re going to pursue this goal and there’s going to be this removal side of that scale, they were like, you better not just do traditional offsets. We’re recording this, I think one month after John Oliver had his sort of somewhat scathing. And I was watching that and I was just like nodding along and being like, this is what my community told me in January of 2020. Right. That paying for somebody to avoid an omission was not going to qualify.
And that, frankly, they understood that the cheapest way was going to be sort of this troublesome offsets approach and that they were not going to be satisfied with that. So they were saying, we want the removal to be meaningful. We want it to be local. We want it to be community based. We want it to be vetted. And so that is what we brought forward in our plan was to put together We had a portfolio of local and regional removal projects. And we were pretty intentional in talking about removal as much as possible rather than offsets.
And so that all just came from the community. I wouldn’t say that there’s anything special about the staff per se, other than the community engagement that we engaged in, in order to understand what was going to be socially acceptable to the people that brought forward that emergency declaration.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: You know, you’re blowing my mind a little bit here because I feel like for a community to come to you and say, we know about CDR and we care about removals and we understand the distinction is really encouraging, first of all. Where did you find these people and how did they contact you and how did this come to fruition? That’s crazy that the community led this. That’s really exciting. Tell me a little bit more about how that happened.
Ramón DC Alatorre: Yeah, so our community got, I guess, swept up, I would say, in September 2019. There was the global climate strikes that were happening. And that is when sort of petitions started to get passed around Flagstaff calling for the climate emergency declaration and putting forward that goal and that timeline of carbon neutrality by 2030. And I would say that when it came to council, they weren’t necessarily talking about removal in January of 2020 and like a really... Sort of sophisticated way. But there was, they were calling for carbon neutrality. And it was in the six months, maybe even longer than that, worth of engagement that we did after that, where we were talking to the community of, you brought forward this goal, you know, how are we going to go about Achieving all of it, you know, carbon neutrality in some ways is a prescriptive recipe.
We have to use less energy, we have to use cleaner energy, and then we have to clean up the rest, right? And it was during those conversations. And so we went on just months worth of what we called kind of the roadshow, presenting to as many community groups as we could, hosting open houses. Many, many surveys and things like that. And that’s where we started to sort of tease some of that out. And we’re really hearing from people in our community that, again, I would say were climate literate. It wasn’t necessarily terribly obvious in January of 2020, but when you spend time with the community, it became very obvious.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Okay. And over at Boulder, how are you guys hearing from your community today?
Susie Strife: Yeah, so actually it was a little different than what Ramon has articulated. We were on this journey with the cannabis sector, actually, and we have a little tiny offset fee for the cannabis. What’s that? So we have revenue and we wanted to spend that in a unique way. And obviously communities like the city of Flagstaff and Boulder County and the city of Boulder, our colleagues there, and about 3,000 communities across the U. S. have really aggressive climate goals. Not all carbon neutrality or net zero goals, but Once you start really unpacking what’s needed, CDR is an absolute must and a complimentary pathway to deep emissions reductions.
Nonetheless, we were on this path with the cannabis industry to say, what would it take to offset your emissions for one year? And we didn’t really want crappy offsets. So we were just kind of going down these rabbit holes. What’s possible? Could we use the fund to nurture a marketplace here for both nature-based or kind of a hybrid approach? We weren’t ready for the sort of tech or engineered approach to CDR. And what was so amazing about that moment was that I was racking my brain. I was going for a hike.
A colleague of mine sent me the Nori podcast with Eli Mitchell Larson on Oxford offsetting principles. I listened to it twice. So my hike was a lot longer than I anticipated. And then I came home, wrote the RFP, basically geared towards, okay, if you can’t do local projects here, we’re going to do as much as we can to nurture the Oxford offsetting principles and really follow those. And then I put the RFP out and open air, Chris Nidel, our carbon angel, which we can have a meme for later, came to fruition and said, hey, this is a really cool RFP.
Did you know the city of Flagstaff was one of the first municipalities in the country to really stand up and say CDR is a huge component of our overarching climate emergency strategy? So at that point, light bulbs were going off. And we were then thinking about and kicking around the idea, okay, so if there are two local governments who have aggressive climate goals, there are way more than that we know, because we’re connected to all the local government players and actors. And that’s when this idea of more connection to kind of a local government coalition around carbon removal came together.
We can get into that later. In our region. And we have both local fund to do that. And now the Four Corners kind of carbon coalition to help foster that too. And I don’t want to jump ahead, but I get really excited about it.
Ross Kenyon: Just for my own edification. I’m very happy to hear that podcast with Eli made an impact. I think he’s very, very smart and it’s a good show and very dense. Yes.
Susie Strife: You want to hear something even better than that, Ross? Is that I called him up right after that. I was just brazen enough to do it. I called him up and he was phenomenal and totally gave me confidence to write this RFP in that way. And then he connected me to Carbon Direct, some players over there. And now we’re contracted with Carbon Direct to help us navigate this kind of interesting world of like reviewing these proposals are coming through because we don’t necessarily have that technical scientific expertise. And so now we have these stacked scientists behind us in terms of reviewing the criteria for all of our proposals.
So, yeah, one podcast can really have a cascading positive impact on someone and what they’re doing, especially at the local level.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Yeah. Any other sustainability, you know, local level professionals are listening to this. That’s a call out to you. So I think it’s really exciting. First of all, using the Oxford principles gives you a lot of credibility, I feel like, in the CDR space. And then I’m still curious about this community-level buy-in because that’s so critical for CDR. And I don’t think we’re seeing an F of it. And so it’s exciting to hear we’re seeing it in Flagstaff and Boulder. When you say you have support and buy-in, what percentage are you talking about?
And how do you measure and decide how much support you have for different initiatives?
Ramón DC Alatorre: It is not universal. I will say that. We were also fortunate to have, like I said, a climate literate community that brought forward the Oxford offsetting principles to us as well while we were developing the plan. And so our sort of CDR section of our carbon neutrality plan also specifies the Oxford offsetting principles. And I would say that also provided sort of a launching point for conversation with the community. I don’t know that we could absolutely give you sort of like a pulse of Like percentages of the community that are like a hundred percent behind carbon removal.
Like they, they look at it and they’re like, well, by 2030, like that’s only eight years away. You’re like our goal because it’s only eight years and we’re going to reduce as much as possible. And it still leaves about kind of like 50% of our emissions remaining. We just don’t have time to drive down further than that. When they look at it, they’re like, what’s it going to cost? That can cause some heartburn, right? People say, what is it going to cost to offset or to remove the potentially hundreds of thousands of tonnes?
And it’s like, yeah, that could be expensive. We’re trying to work on a process. Access and catalyze some local regional projects that we want to start in 2022 so that they can grow into something by 2030. And that could potentially be a different story. So it will still give people heartburn, even when you’re thinking about the sort of climate literate community that, no, we need to do both things simultaneously. It feels like every time I start the conversation, there’s a little bit of that side eye, like, are you talking about the John Oliver style?
Yeah. Talking about something different. And then when there’s that opportunity to just have the conversation and say, no, we’re talking about something different, you can kind of see almost like the tension or the combative sort of attitude that’s just like in their body language melt away a little bit and be like, well, I’m glad that you’re talking about that, but it still sounds expensive. And so, you know, all of that is true. And I would say, you know, It creates this fertile ground for really good conversations. And when we go through sort of all of those layers, we usually come away with at least like some grudging support, if not full-throated support.
Susie Strife: And I’d be interested in your perspective, Chris Neidl, because you have built a team of activists all across pretty much the nation for this stuff. And I’ve been really inspired by the people that you send to me that are Colorado-based activists. That are having innovative ideas or just citizen support. So love to hear how you’ve concocted what you have through open air.
Chris Neidl: Yeah, I mean, I find that we’re at a phase now where the climate emergency has broken through this sort of environmentalist wall, I guess, in terms of sort of. Assumptions about what solutions must be like and what people are like and how society should be organized. And now it’s been mainstreamed as real climate emergencies are happening as Boulder knows all too well. And those types of folks, the kind of large majority, just look at this like a literal problem that they want to solve. And so if you come up to them and you say, we also have to remove carbon dioxide and this can be done to these ways, we don’t find a lot of resistance.
We find actually a sort of a real sense of relief and enthusiasm and excitement. I think that’s the thing about CDR that people have to acknowledge is that there’s an enormous amount of optimism that I think really defines our movement, which is in stark contrast, I think, to where the climate movement is as a whole. So it doesn’t surprise me when, particularly when conversations can be had, when you can define and provide examples, and particularly when you’re offering what we’re doing here is trying to create what would A form of CDR that is community inspired and draws local resources and really uses place as a sort of a platform for coming up with new ways of thinking about CDR.
People get really excited about it. And so it’s not, it’s really just about spreading the word and having the conversations, but it’s not a massive barrier as we might expect if you were to just sort of look at it through the filter of environmentalism. You know, so I think there is a lot of curiosity and a lot of excitement about it.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Yeah, I think, you know, open air has really always led the way in that kind of both and attitude. And I, you know, I see that coming from Boulder and Flagstaff as well. Now, even with that attitude, have you hit some hurdles with, you know, I know oftentimes environmental groups can even be suspicious. And so have you, have you hit any hurdles with people saying, we just don’t want to focus at all on offsetting? Or have people been pretty open to the idea of quality removal offsets?
Chris Neidl: Well, I think the important part of it is to try to, as you know, this has been, I always look at the beginning of the CDR movement is October 2018 when the UNIPCC report 1. 5C, it was like a Pearl Harbor-like mobilization where you had, I’m sure most of the people that are on this call right now either were right before that or saw that happen. It was a real moment you could kind of put in the history books and So I think that, you know, following that, when the conversation started coming, we’re still now four years later, just dealing with fundamental misunderstandings around what we’re even talking about.
And so at this point in the game, it’s part of me thinks that there’s just the promise of carbon removal gets in the way with some very fundamental sort of operating assumptions of conventional environmentalism in some types of ways. So we do still Have the issues around, you know, separations between, you know, what’s carbon removal versus carbon avoidance, CCS versus CDR. All these things are still there. And I will say, you know, again, I come from the environmental movement. I spent 15 years in renewables and various different places before jumping into CDR.
So I consider myself of that world. But the biggest resistance that we see in the states where we really are trying to advance this is really more from misgivings or apprehensions among You know, various different types of environmental groups. That is a challenge. One that we’re going to have to continue to try to work on. I think we are making a lot of progress there. But at the same time, we have to expand the circle of who our constituency is and go no longer look at that we have to kind of run through the gauntlet of sort of environmental thinking in order to sort of ultimately reach our goals here.
We have to appeal to a much broader group of people and what they bring to it. And that’s going to have to be our pathway to success. It has to be much larger than the environmental box.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. Jumping into like, taking off of what Chris is saying about there’s kind of an education gap or an awareness gap. And how can local governments be instruments of spreading knowledge? And how are you guys approaching that?
Susie Strife: Yeah, well, one, we’re on this podcast. No, I mean, I think what we’ve been really trying to do with this concept of a local government coalition is to basically build power in numbers and to have Like to grow our capacity as local government actors in this space. Because at this point, we all have, you know, we have our blinders on, we have our head down in a parochial vision of what climate kind of activism or strategy could look like for a local community. And we’re all in the same boat. We’re not going to reach our climate goals unless we actually look up and outward and band together.
And that’s where our pooled purchasing power comes from. That’s where like sharing assets and sharing best practices, And, you know, sharing kind of that aggregated approach matters so much for impact at scale of what we want to do. And so I think we’re trying to, with the Four Corners Carbon Coalition, at least, we know we have great partnerships right now, and we’re about to launch an RFP to basically dedicate funding for carbon in the built environment. And we can talk more about that in a minute. But The idea is that we want to foster projects first and then tell the success story with the community along the way.
I mean, it’s a both hand, right? You want to nurture the community first and get their support. And we have to act. We cannot just sit on these funds that we have to do great climate work. We have to do it today. And so that’s where I think our coalition of local governments really initiates sort of this pooled Power. And we’ve done that in the past with some policymaking here in Colorado and have had tremendous success. And I think, you know, it goes hand in hand with not only working in this coalition for acting and like, you know, catalytic funding for nurturing that space, but also simultaneously working with our representatives on really solid bills and policies, which has also been very helpful to have Chris Neidl a part of that too.
Because then you’re creating the regulatory space for all of those projects to have success. So we’re doing kind of a multi-pronged approach with four little local governments. And we feel really excited about the potential because a lot of communities have called, whether that’s in California or other areas of the U. S. , saying, how are you all doing this? Can we have a place-based coalition like this? And that replicability is exactly what we’re after.
Chris Neidl: Yeah, I would really add to that too, is just the act itself of local communities proactively embracing carbon dioxide removal is the fundamental thing in a way, because as we know that at this early stages, there’s a lot of assumptions about what CDR is, where it’s coming from, what it’s going to be. And both, it’s always talked about at the gigaton scale, what we have to do in the middle of the century. It comes out of these international reports that And then there’s obviously fears that it’s going to be captured by the very same extraction industries that got us into this in this place.
And that is a version of events that very well could happen. But when you have people with the credibility and the local roots of Susie and Ramon and others, it just categorically changes things. It just it just creates a different frame of reference for people. And it allows other kinds of conversations to happen. So I think it’s just that kind of almost coming out of the closet as a CDR supporter at the local level is sort of half the battle. And so it’s really loosening things up, I think, about the way other local governments think about it.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t think many people listening know much about how cities work. I mean, most of my understanding of how cities work is David Simon derived. I’m not sure how applicable that is here, but very useful resources as far as educationally speaking. But I’m sure people listening have experience knowing about VC deal flow. They know about carbon removal entrepreneurs and how they think. We’ve talked to national level policymakers, but I think a lot of like, what does a county commissioner do? What do some of these offices do that I see on the local ballot?
I find I am baffled by some of this and exactly how it all fits together. What is unique about operating at this scale? And does it make anything new or interesting more possible than other ways of seeing or at different scales?
Chris Neidl: I’d love these two guys to give the majority response to this. But one thing just to set it up from as a solar guy who came to this, what’s often not understood among activists when they’re talking about climate and big picture challenges. You can set a big aspirational goal and pass a law that says by 2050, we’re going to be here or this type of thing. But as a solar guy, I couldn’t tell you how many times the fate of whether or not solar would happen in New York City, where I came from, was really left in the hands of Bob on the third floor of the Department of Buildings.
It’s really these nitty gritty things about getting these technologies into the world. Happen at a very local level. And so there’s a whole other type of advocacy that has to happen in the bowels of regulations and codes. And you have to understand the city manager’s imagination around that. And it’s really about just keeping things going. And so it’s a whole other kind of thing. It’s not poetry. It’s all prose. And so I’ll just leave that. That’s my experience. But Susie and Ramon can really speak to it from an internal perspective.
Susie Strife: Yeah, you’re spot on. And I love this question because I think We’ve had just 10 proposals come through for our Climate Innovation Fund, where we call it for high quality CDR projects with both kind of landscape resilience components to it and the co-benefit component called out and community kind of outcomes. And what’s so interesting is that our land use department, our community planning and permitting department had to review like seven of the proposals and some of them were biochar, some of them were tech. And it’s like, Okay, how do we actually operationalize these here?
Do they have principles of do no harm? Are they having co-benefits for our community? What are the sort of, I guess, biodiversity benefits that we would get out of this? And it was a big team effort. And so it is about kind of the local policies and regulations that would allow for like carbon farming practice or regen practices, et cetera. How we want our community to have those co-benefits of climate stabilization in addition to the benefit of cleaner air and You know, the other CDR benefits that we could kind of materialize.
So I think it is, it really does matter. And Chris has been really helpful in us understanding like if it can happen here and we can kind of replicate that model again to other communities of what is needed on the permitting side to make mobile biochar and a true application in a local community. We have a ton of fire like worry here all the time. And we have a lot of slash to deal with. We have a lot of like You know, tender in our forests. And so these beneficial outcomes of both CDR combined with, you know, fire mitigation, that is real to a community who just experienced a, you know, the Colorado’s worst wildfire, or it’s not even wildfire, it was an urban firestorm, you know, with a billion dollars in damage.
So I think that we are starting to understand these local applications and just We’re the first responders to the climate crisis here in our community. So we are very, very aware of where those co-benefits can actually truly matter in terms of application for this stuff. But Ramon, I’d love to hear your response too.
Ramón DC Alatorre: Gosh, I feel like I just have a big echo to everything that’s already been said. Susie, one term that we’ve started using that you might like, liability biomass is what we’ve been calling it. Not even just like, you know, because there was a time where it was called like no value biomass or something like that. And they’re like, no, it’s like worse than that.
Susie Strife: That’s amazing. I’ll have to start playing around with that one.
Ramón DC Alatorre: Taking care of the liability that’s just kind of laying on the ground. It’s those kinds of things. I like the first responder sort of image that Susie brought up and I think so much of what can be done, there’s a slide in a presentation we give where we talk about one of the roles of local government can just be shifting the narrative by having sort of the courage to talk about it and to just unpack it with people. We have time with people. That’s something that you can have as local government.
And perhaps one of your Most valuable resources is just sort of that time and the ability to give that to the community and to receive that from the community. So just kind of lets you get down, as Chris said, to the nitty gritty. And you can do that interdepartmentally as well. But it goes from being at that 30,000 foot level to the 30 foot level and figuring out how to do it locally.
Chris Neidl: Yeah. And if I could add one of the things that both of you just brought up that I think would both Siobhan and Ross would appreciate is that the way I look at it is a, it’s almost a corollary to what Klaus Lochner and Greg Nemet are always talking about when they’re talking about modularity and distributed technology. It’s not for a love of small things. It’s not, you know, it can easily be confused with the sort of small local fetish of conventional environmentalism. It’s not, it’s about learning rates, innovation and takeoff.
And so Where you can apply that to technology, that’s where local government kind of comes in, is that you have a high learning rate. If you’re trying it out in Flagstaff and it’s spreading to Colorado, you have all these opportunities for it to adjust and get stronger as it spreads horizontally. So that’s one of the really key things. It’s really getting the thing going fast and then evolving it by replication across many different local governments, where the large governments, federal governments, are slow and unwieldy, and there’s not a very high learning rate when you’re talking about operating on that level.
So we talk about that metaphorically, but I think there’s literally something to that, actually, about how local governments innovate around policy and spread them.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Yeah. And so what happens when you take that kind of small, quickly replicable kind of local government model and you bring it into a coalition? Let’s talk about the Four Corners Coalition. First of all, you want to introduce that and then how it came to be. And then how has the Four Corners Coalition enabled you and how has it made it more complicated?
Susie Strife: What a great question. Well, the Four Corners Coalition, Carbon Coalition really launched because we had, this is a partnership. You can tell that we have just a team mentality here. And so when Chris connected us at Boulder County to Flagstaff, We just realized that we really want to invest in catalytic funding. And again, I keep using this kind of word of nurturing the market because when we put out our original RFP, there was no market. There was no response. There’s very little supply, as we all know, of high-quality carbon offsets.
So we said, well, why should we buy offsets? Let’s just build some projects. Let’s actually start this thing. After a year of kicking around this idea and conversations, and we’ve started this thing, and we’re going to be launching our first RFP, again, for just the built environment alone, so that it’s pretty narrow in our scope because we want to also just look at tech-based solutions because what we’re finding here is a lot of nature-based solutions, which are great and support a different kind of market, but we’re really interested in just focusing our first RFP there.
And then also adding some crowdsource funding on top of that for, again, more to this like being able to leverage what we’re putting in from the local government perspective with some private sector and philanthropic funding to actually catalyze something a lot bigger than what we could do and source a loan. So it’s a pooled kind of purchasing mentality and we have a fiscal sponsor to host us. So it’s not just all of us on our own with complex contracts. So it’s very clean and how we’re operating. And I think it’s just really an exciting kind of moment for local governments to, again, build sort of that community capacity building across the whole region of the Southwest.
Ross Kenyon: I think the procurement part of this is super interesting. And Open Air Collective has been a huge part of making that a big part of carbon removal as well. Is there a lot on zoning on this too? I know mass timber sometimes for buildings is not respected in some areas or is seen as still quite dangerous. I’ve seen back and forth, but I don’t know a lot about it. Is that a big part of what you’re thinking about too? Or is that disconnected?
Chris Neidl: Well, I think for this RFP, it’s even narrower than the built environment. It’s actually specifically around CDR and concrete, which anybody who spends more than five minutes with me knows that is a full-blown obsession of mine of making that happen because it’s key to ramping up a lot of these technologies. And I think that’s a great question. I think that’s a great question. Yeah, but it’s part of the thing with this is starting initiating the struggle, you know, like in order to get you have to build a constituency behind these solutions and proposals like this or what we’re doing on the state sort of force the issue.
So, yeah, it’s a heck of a fight in places like New York City to try to get mass timber buildings sort of, you know, part of the code. But that’s just par for the course. You just you got it. You got to forge the pathway forward and start somewhere. But Yeah, but this RFP is specifically around utilizing concrete production, waste streams, and linking that to CDR and seeing what we come up with.
Ramón DC Alatorre: I was hoping the NAU lumberjack would have more of an opportunity to shine there, but maybe less so given all that. Next time. Yeah. But I think what some of the story, to answer part of your question, the challenges and obstacles and things, was actually that process of narrowing. When we first started banding about this idea, it was like, well, let’s just put out something really broad and see what happens. And that’s actually kind of what Boulder did in the story that Susie already told, where they were somewhat underwhelmed in terms of the responses they got.
And then it was like, do we just come to the built environment specifically, or do we go even more narrow and concrete? And that was a process with all the partners trying to figure out How do we want to approach this? When we think about replicability, we imagine potentially Another group of local governments coming together and coming to a different conclusion. Right. And wanting to maybe do an RFP where they put it out specifically for biochar or they are in the built environment, but not necessarily specifying concrete. Right. That’s going to be a process as well.
And that could be based on factors around like what region are you in? Do you have liability biomass that you need to deal with or are you somewhere else? Right.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Liability biomass. That’s a meme I’m making now.
Ramón DC Alatorre: But it’s kind of that thing where there’s both just like real opportunity there and like being able to kind of like look at each other and be like, concrete? Yeah, concrete. That’s the direction we want to go on this one. It also clarifies. And I think that’s really valuable. But it does mean sort of more conversations. And anytime you’re sort of like just adding those layers and adding more process, it also complicates, right? So it’s that kind of constant tug of clarifying and complicating. I think one of the things that we had to decide upon was how many communities do we want to be a part of kind of like our core communities that are going to be reviewing proposals and how many cooks do we want in the kitchen, if you will.
The more it gets, potentially the more attention it gets and things, but then also the harder it is to oversee and manage and facilitate. Can we bring on more communities during sort of what we’re calling the multiplier phase? Very much borrowing from sort of approaches that the solar industry has used in the past. But those were, again, some decisions that we were all making as we were having conversations with communities and it felt like four is probably about right. We can probably get on a similar page and review proposals, decide who we want to move forward with.
All those types of things became just decision points in the process that we were working on that both had their pros and their cons.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Yeah. Chris, is this the Stripe model, but in local governments? How would you say that this is a pretty exciting initiative as far as I know it’s the first one that’s happening in the US? When I think of a model like this, I certainly think of Stripe and I think of Frontier. Talk to us about like how you helped kind of design this RFP and this model.
Chris Neidl: It’s definitely, you know, we all, like our state policies, we call it Stripe for States is shorthand. You know, I mean, there’s no really understanding how significant their entry into this, you know, space has been and definitely inspired. And we’ve talked to them about it. There’s definitely, I think, some appreciation for the concept. I think what’s a little bit different, although Stripe is kind of like this, you know, there’s not really, and this is really to the credit of Susie, Ramon, and Nicole, the local partners, is that there could be a lot of pressure to really focus on how much carbon are we actually buying from day one, you know, and how does that relate to our sort of big goals?
And instead, it was like, no, we want to be the ones who help first of kind projects, or we are going to do RFPs that we want to sort of Bring CDR investment and innovation into particular spaces that can be locally produced or locally inspired. And so it really is about catalytic gap funding that’s going to help these projects happen. And there’s not really, certainly we’re including in the application, we want to review what the estimates are for carbon removal over a one to five year timeframe, but it’s more about Can this project be replicated by other places?
And can we get, as you guys know, it’s so much about getting these things off of a whiteboard and into the world. And so can we play that role where we have ushered in real projects that people can see and provide just enough funding that’s going to make that happen? If anything, it’s more like a contracts for differences type of model, if you’re familiar with that. So Stripe, again, is very, I think, flexible and certainly oriented towards innovation. Let’s make sure we get as many great options out there. And so they’re not particularly firm on the offtake side of things, but ours even more so.
It’s just this sort of catalytic funding to make a project happen that we think could be replicated more broadly.
Ross Kenyon: I think the obsession with, especially companies or other entities trying to find exactly how much they admitted and then focusing on that rather than how much good they could do with the money. I’m hoping that’s a trend that is starting to change. I see, I catch whiffs of it sometimes. I don’t know if you do too, but... Yeah.
Susie Strife: Well, I mean, I totally agree with you. This is about... It’s so funny to be talking about this from a local government perspective, right? We’re not rolling in... So this is kind of a philanthropic approach for the global commons, I would say. And I’m not saying that we’re the center of it. It’s just one tiny initiative that we want to launch. And I think that’s what’s so neat about we’re not looking for proprietary. We’re here to give the gift of trying to figure out how local governments can play a role in accelerating the This simultaneous to the great work that Stripe, Shopify, others are doing to support that on the private side.
And the unique role that we have is we’re connected to our community. So when we look at proposals, we think about like land use implications or, you know, who is this? Is this shifting the burden onto certain populations that we don’t want to shift the burden to that are already disproportionately impacted by? The climate crisis. So I think it’s just a super exciting kind of unique opportunity for local governments to sort of have a voice that’s definitely not been part of like offsets before or high quality carbon removal discussions before.
And I know that the criteria that firms are using really has those do no harm principles and has a really solid list of the different criteria that they want to use to evaluate proposals. And likely a lot of that is in there. It’s just that we know, literally, I know half the proposers in my RFP who are part of this, who are struggling either to meet kind of the offset criteria or how to verify or how to be Looking at sort of the carbon removal quality and the durability. And we have access now to those scientists who can actually broker those conversations and help them get there.
Because it’s not just going to happen overnight. It’s going to require a lot of partnership and collaboration with local players who want to have that innovative component for the community, but don’t have necessarily the access to that type of Science background or the money that it would take to get, you know, gold standard verification or whatever. So it’s exciting stuff. The other piece that I’ll just launch into is that we’re creating kind of a local government playbook of best practices with Carbon Direct and this team here to ensure that everything that we’re doing is documented in a way that we can hand off to other local jurisdictions to decision makers directly.
So that they can understand, okay, how is this done? And how do we actually get from A to B very quickly? And how do we invest and start thinking about this? So that’s very exciting. I think that local, that sort of playbook, I think we’ll have, it might be a white paper. We don’t know really what it’s going to be. We want it to be interactive, but we just hope that it doesn’t take years and years in the decision-making process. That it’s just so easy for a local government decision-maker to see this and say, okay, yes, we’re in.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Yeah, no, I think that’s terrific. I didn’t know you were working on that, but I think that’s essential is those kind of best practices, playbooks, however you end up formatting it. Again, for those of you in local government listening in, reach out to Susie and see if you can get some pointers from her if you want to start an initiative like this in your community. What do you think, Chris, is like... Obviously, so we’ve talked about having like a climate literate community more or less. Does there have to be like a certain income threshold?
You know, Susie, you mentioned you had some cannabis revenue. Where is the money coming from this? Could it really work in any community or does it have to be communities with funding? Talk to me a little about how we would replicate this elsewhere.
Chris Neidl: Yeah, there’s different ways that this could happen. We should really stress as well is that we’re looking at what we’re about to do at this first catalytic grant round. And this will be an ongoing project that these partners will do. And I think that’s a great question. I think that’s a great question. Even, I won’t, it’d be premature to list it, but there’s already some ideas that have been imposed to us by other local governments in other parts of the country. There are, you know, much lower amount of resources would be required, again, to just get the first kind of project done.
Some biochar remediation projects we’re looking at. So it really will depend on the place and how many partners are brought in. One of the things that we’re really sensitive to is that not every, you know, it’s rare that this kind of amazing fund that Boulder County has at its disposal and the fact that Susie Her leadership has decided to direct it in such an interesting way. It could have gone in many different ways. That’s somewhat exceptional, you know, and rare. And so and we also understand that local governments are, you know, perennially cash strapped.
They have many different things that they have to spend money on. So we think there’s different ways that this can be done. It can be done with some amount of public funding. But that’s also why he brought the crowdfunding part in. And that’s where we think it maps on nicely to open air. We have members all over North America. That if you can get the representative of the local government, it might be just a sort of a show of support and promotional. And then the remainder of it could be local crowdfunding or local philanthropic donating as well.
So we want to blend in as many options as possible, actually, that will allow us to pool enough for coalitions of local governments to achieve their goals, regardless of what they’re deciding to focus on.
Ramón DC Alatorre: I would actually also add from a conversation that I had yesterday, I was presenting to the Sustainable Cities Network here in Arizona. And they were asking a little bit of that. Like I hear this both end messaging, but I’ve only got like a certain amount of money. Like it doesn’t feel both end, but I’m looking at that, right? Like I have to decide how am I going to spend this dollar? And the conversation ended up going to, you know, one of the reasons to be talking about carbon dioxide removal, one of the reasons to be thinking about how it is that you want to move forward.
Is because it suddenly opens up streams of funding that you weren’t necessarily going to be ready for to apply for. Like that happens all the time in local government, right? With the Inflation Reduction Act that’s coming down with the Infrastructure and Jobs Act, there’s like, What’s your like shovel ready project, right? And if you haven’t been putting in the work ahead of time to be able to like respond to grant proposals, you’re just going to like never swing at pitches that are available, right? And so by talking about it and sort of making that plan, then when, you know, Things do happen in sort of the greater world of money moving around.
You’re ready to potentially like jump at a thing, right? A community like Flagstaff that’s been talking about carbon removal is going to see that opportunity coming and another one That hasn’t been putting in sort of that groundwork. We won’t take the swing. That’s one of the reasons as well. We don’t know what funding sources are coming. It seems like more and more like it’s going to potentially be available. And if we are ready, this is how we’re going to leverage it. This is how we’re going to bring it to our community.
And it’s going to have these co-benefits, et cetera, et cetera. Hopefully we’re positioning ourselves to be just in a position of strength to bring that type of resources to our community. And now suddenly we do have both and, right? Because a lot of times funding comes with Like this is what you have to spend it on. So yes, perhaps my colleague that’s looking at their limited pot of funds that’s supposed to go to energy efficiency, they’re going to spend that on energy efficiency. And they’re not necessarily trying to break up that pot, but now they have two pots, right?
And that’s how you can kind of pull the end.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: I like it. I like it. You guys, this is really interesting. How can people follow along? How can people get involved? If there’s people from Boulder, people from Flagstaff listening, how should people reach out to you?
Chris Neidl: I can’t remember the name of our URL, Susie.
Susie Strife: People were so scrappy. I bought it so long ago. Obviously, you’ll edit that part out, but I actually don’t have that.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Go look it up and we’ll cut it in. It’s a funny moment.
Ross Kenyon: Leave it in, but it’s in the show notes now.
Chris Neidl: We’ll make sure it’s in the notes. We’ll put it in the show notes, yeah. People can check out our website. And certainly, you know, I think one of the things that’s really important to stress here is that while it’s unique for the moment that Boulder and Flagstaff and a handful of other communities are wading into this to kind of change the course of CDR, it’s Not at all unique that local governments are taking a lead on climate action. And that’s not just making declarations. There’s a whole history that’s often not told.
Once things get full blown, we sort of forget about that scrappy early phase where local governments Local activists or local governments originate models for demand support that prove really, really critical. And again, solar, you have Solarize, you have Community Solar, you have Community Choice Aggregation. You have these things that were these really important building blocks to gaining acceptance, bringing down cost, and spreading a technology. So we’re just applying those dynamics that already exist. And to link it to the point, like the networks that both Ramon and Susie have with their peers in other local governments in the region.
And they’re always swapping notes because they’re trying to solve the same problem. It’s really a word of mouth thing that is really, I think, going to enable this more than any kind of broadcasting that we have to do. It’s just working through the relationships that people on the front lines and local communities already have with each other and the trust that they already have. And I think that’s going to be the really fundamental thing to growth and success less than having to go out and advertise it in some sort of mass marketed way.
Ross Kenyon: Are you going to let him have the final word? Please don’t. Anything you want to plug? Where can people find your work too? Or is it your specific office? Is it something else?
Susie Strife: We’re online at the Office of Sustainability, Climate Action, Resilience. And I know that’s a mouthful, but our jobs just keep getting bigger and bigger as we start to, again, deal with the climate impacts in addition to the climate strategies and solutions to help reduce and mitigate and now remove and restore our atmosphere. So yeah, we’re on Twitter, we’re on social. Yeah, I think the bottom line is that it’s nice to be in this together. And it’s so, when this occurred, it’s a public-private, public-private partnership. So you look at open air, you look at the communities involved, you look at the scientists who are working with us from Carbon Direct.
And that’s when I think the magic happens for a local community too, when you have sort of the seasoned experts coming together. To you with these great ideas, and then you’re able to bring them to life in your own community. I think that’s extremely powerful. And that’s sort of the secret sauce that Boulder County, at least, has been using for quite some time with some of our replicable programs and services and the first of, first of kind sort of mentality that we have always had here. So it’s just great to be in partnership.
That’s the bottom line. And that’s why we have so many people on this podcast today. Yeah.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: It is. It’s a happy hour record. Well, thank you guys so much for joining us today.
Ramón DC Alatorre: Flagstaff Sustainability Office is how you find us on the internet. And one of the things that’s exciting about this collaborative coalition type thing is that I think you just also get more attention than if you were trying to do this by yourself, right? Like us trying to do something without Boulder County. Attention is currency, right? And so I’ve been getting so many more of those kind of like cold emails ever since we’ve been working together. And it’s great. And I love talking to people about it and would be happy to do so.
One thing I’d add, too, is that if you are a listener of this show and you haven’t found exactly where to plug into carbon removal yet, Open Air Collective is also a really fascinating community. I’m sure you would welcome them with open arms, hopefully, Chris, unless I just open the floodgates of people like you. You’re going to gatekeep on them. Okay, it’s good.
Chris Neidl: Come on in, folks. That’s the name of the game.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: You have to be willing to be on Discord, though. I think that’s my biggest why I’m not more participatory.
Chris Neidl: I’ve tried to get Javon on there twice, and there’s some kind of weird gremlin that is just following her around. She just doesn’t like Discord, I think.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: My life’s on Slack. But I’m a supporter, and there’s just a lot of people doing great work. So please do check it out, everyone. Thank you guys so much for joining us.
Unknown speaker: Thank you so much. That was really fun.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s our pleasure. And also, if you’re listening, you can help the show by giving us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Send this to a friend who might enjoy it. And thanks so much for listening. Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify, that’d be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people. You can sign up for our newsletter at nori.com. Follow us on social media.
We will catch you next time.
