Dr. Lauren Gifford is a critical geographer exploring the intersections of global climate policy, conservation, markets, and justice. She is also the host of Carbon Social Club and the author of a recent paper entitled “‘You Can’t Value What You Can’t Measure’: A Critical Look at Forest Carbon Accounting.” On this episode, we dig into avoided deforestation credits, REDD/REDD+, and the dynamics at play when carbon is commoditized in forestry and in general.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hey everyone, welcome to season two of Reversing Climate Change. We are doing that podcast thing now and launching a Patreon. You can find it at patreon. com slash noripodcasts. There are various tiers with different types of goodies available. Do you want to receive a special newsletter digest of what Norinauts are reading that week? Be a part of a Nori book club? Get special access to Nori events? Go take a look at patreon. com slash noripodcasts for what we’re offering. And in that spirit of being lean in that startup kind of way that, you know, we like to do, this list of goodies is subject to change and we’d very much like your feedback.
Is there something that you’d really like to see but it isn’t listed here? Honest feedback does a lot to help us shape what we offer to you. You can send an email to podcast. nori. com or fill out our podcast survey anonymously in our newsletter which you can find at nori. com slash subscribe. And thank you so much for listening to another season of Reversing Climate Change. Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. I am here with Christophe Jospe, my colleague at Nori. Hey, Christophe. Hey.
Hey. Today we have with us Dr. Lauren Gifford, instructor of geography at the University of Colorado, a research affiliate with CU Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, and a podcaster with the new show Carbon Social Club, which you should definitely check out. Is there a reason why you wanted to compete with us as another climate podcast, Lauren?
Dr. Lauren Gifford: I think that my podcast is not, we might have slight overlap in listeners, but I don’t think it’s the same.
Ross Kenyon: No, we’re happy and there’s so much to cover and I’m just happy people are thinking about climate change. But you’re going to encounter something very soon, Lauren, which is the embarrassing process of telling someone that you have a podcast.
Dr. Lauren Gifford: I know it’s very hipster. I feel very Portlandia. There’s something there’s like a stat, though, that the majority of podcasts never make it to 10 episodes. So you guys have like over 100. You’re there already.
Christophe Jospe: Oh, yeah. There’s no stopping us. We’re out of the gate. Come join the club.
Ross Kenyon: And that’s a show about art and environmental justice and climate change and the intersection of these things. That’s broadly how you see it, right?
Dr. Lauren Gifford: Oh, absolutely. Right. I think there’s this question of who speaks for the environment. And I really want to look at artists, writers, other creative folks who are teaching us about environmental injustice and human environment nature interactions in ways that like, quote unquote, experts can’t teach us. And there’s a richness that is really valuable.
Ross Kenyon: That’s cool. I dig that angle. That’s definitely unique. We can talk about that a little bit more as we go. And if you’re interested in that topic, listener, there are links in the show notes so you can follow up. But you tagged us on an article that you wrote in Climatic Change called You Can’t Value What You Can’t Measure, a critical look at forced carbon accounting. You sent us this over Twitter.
Dr. Lauren Gifford: I think somebody else sent it to you. I think a guy that I talk with on Twitter a lot sent it to you. Some entity connected us on Twitter.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, and read this, thought it was really interesting. We’ve been long wanting to do a series of shows about various types of carbon assets. What are their goals? How well do they work? What are some of the criticisms that they face? Because oftentimes these are our zones of contention as you document in this paper. So we want to have you on because you’re really interested in avoided deforestation and forestry accounting. Is that how you see your work or what you’ve been working on lately? Yeah.
Dr. Lauren Gifford: Absolutely. I’m interested in the commodification of carbon broadly, and I’m particularly interested in how that manifests itself with forests. I’m a little interested in soil carbon, which you guys are doing, but I haven’t dug too deep in that. But I’ve spent about the last 10 years exclusively thinking about forest carbon offsets.
Christophe Jospe: Lauren, you’re being kind and using interested in a very diplomatic way, but let’s call a spade a spade. Interested means calling BS where you see it. Is that a better way to say it?
Dr. Lauren Gifford: Yes. So, I mean, well, first of all, one of the funny things is that I met my husband on OkCupid and my OkCupid profile said that my interests were carbon markets and MTV’s Teen Mom 2. So, like, I’m really interested in carbon markets. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Sounds like a catch. Good work. That was quite a trap you laid.
Dr. Lauren Gifford: Right, right. Well, then I get this super hot guy that was like, I don’t know about carbon markets, but I know about externalities. And I was like, great, let’s go get a beer. And now we’re married. But I do, I think about carbon markets, who’s included, who’s excluded, why we’re trying to address climate change, which is a crisis of capitalism with essentially more capitalism. And I think about it all the time. I work in multiple facets of, I guess, studying and teaching about carbon commodification.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. And we’re trying to keep this show relatively contained too, because there’s a whole bunch of different assets with cap and trade allocations or avoided emissions offsets. But we’re trying to focus primarily on assets like red plus and avoided We should do other shows on those too. But I guess how might you start us off and give us a baseline? Like what was it like before avoided deforestation credits came about? What exactly led to the paradigm that we have now with carbon credits for forestry?
Dr. Lauren Gifford: Well, we can we can start like a simple starting point is the Bali COP, the UN Conference of Parties on Climate Change in 2007. And at the Bali COP, they introduced this idea of red reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. And that essentially was to pay forest stewards to not cut down trees. Red has always faltered. It’s never met its promises, but it has been adapted. It’s been picked up and evolved and applied. And I find that an interesting thing to track because what used to be called red is now often called different things.
So you can’t just, you know, do a Google search or ask about red projects. You have to follow things called like administrative agreements or conservation agreements. And now we’re seeing, well, I don’t need to ramble too long if you want to bring me back.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, no, this is good because it’s hard to even know what’s an appropriate starting point because this entire field is notoriously opaque to an outsider. It’s confusing.
Dr. Lauren Gifford: Right. It’s notoriously opaque. And then you also find people who claim expertise who will tell you this is exactly what it is when actually it’s incredibly fungible and malleable. So the first iterations of red were countries or polluting entities in the global north were paying for forest conservation in places that have high density tropical forests. So Indonesia, Central Africa, Brazil, Peru, Africa. And now, you know, over a decade of these types of projects, we’re starting to see them actually manifest themselves as like carbon projects in the north because there’s so many problems with these projects in developing countries.
Christophe Jospe: On face value, protecting rainforests is a good thing. So ostensibly, like this is money that is supposed to flow to save the rainforest. Why isn’t that actually happening?
Dr. Lauren Gifford: One project I studied as part of my dissertation is in North Central Peru. And I had asked people how much money was invested, you know, and you can find press releases on this stuff. And corporate investors were investing $4 million in this project. Actually, the band Pearl Jam invested like $300,000 in this project to offset their Latin American tour. Yeah. But when you go down on the ground, I went and did field research just in the community surrounding this forest and within the forest. And you ask the people who are sort of applying conservation work on the ground, how much money did you get?
It’s very little, you know, within like one to $300,000. So where did all this money go? And a lot of that $4 million goes to various bureaucracies and monitoring, reporting, verifying. I’ve heard people call We call this a contractor scape, right? So you’re paying all of these consultants to essentially make forest carbon legible on markets so that it can be something that’s traded financially. Because when we’re trading carbon, we’re never actually physically trading anything. We’re trading an idea, an agreed upon idea of carbon. It takes many, many people to make that legible.
And there’s also all of these instances of fraud, right? So they’re often called carbon cowboys, people selling carbon that they actually had no right to or maybe didn’t technically exist in the first place. So there’s a lot of places that money gets lost along the stream.
Ross Kenyon: I want to talk about this idea of how exactly an offset or a carbon asset is built, given that we’re tracking something like flows of, what do you call it? You’re quoting someone in your paper, ethereal atmospheric gas or something like that.
Dr. Lauren Gifford: Yes, right. I think I’m quoting Jerome Whittington.
Ross Kenyon: That in and of itself is a trip. And the longer that I’ve thought about that, the more it sort of hurts my head. And despite working in this field, it’s fun to call things by different names and we know them. It helps us see it’s like turning a gem over almost. Maybe you can help us even start to understand how that process works.
Dr. Lauren Gifford: Like here’s a question for you. What do you think when you’re talking about trading carbon credits or selling carbon credits? What does that mean to you?
Christophe Jospe: Can I tell a really funny anecdote that happened to me this weekend?
Dr. Lauren Gifford: Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: So we’re in the business of helping farmers in the U. S. get paid for adopting practices that add incremental sorrel organic carbon. And I was in Tennessee meeting with someone and he’s like, so what am I going to do with this carbon credit? Can I go exchange it at the antique store or the antique roadshow? And it was so astute because it is indeed this abstraction. But how do we think about it? You brought up a number of things, and I’ll be the first to admit that whenever you financialize an asset, people start showing up and it might create some new problems that weren’t there before.
Ideally, in theory, what we want to do is incentivize new behavior that is additional, that allows new carbon to come out of the atmosphere into the ground or the terrestrial biomass, And that gets into this question of baselining, which you’ve obviously written about, as well as additionality. And for us, we say, well, these consultants who sort of showed up and were carbon cowboys, what if we just had open and transparent ways that anyone who wanted to understand how does this accounting actually work, Could just look at and read and then see for whatever carbon removal approach, this is an open and transparent methodology.
So while we very much realized that we’re playing in a system, you actually can take the best ideas that were built on top of people who in earnest were trying to create credible systems so that we could try to reduce the flow of carbon to the atmosphere or even remove carbon out of the atmosphere and make all that work. So that’s kind of a long winded non answer of how we think about it. Hopefully you’re satisfied.
Dr. Lauren Gifford: No, I’m not judging you.
Ross Kenyon: How close was he? This is hard. I find myself struggling to even have the right language to even ask the right kinds of questions. But I almost feel like the answer that Christoph gave was a bit downstream from what we’re even trying to talk about, which is how do you make a fungible standardize this sort of geophysical process that just happens around us, both naturally and in human made capacities.
Dr. Lauren Gifford: Right. And my driving question for my doctoral dissertation research was simply, what is a forest carbon offset? And I found that it means something very different to every player along the pipeline. So forest carbon offsets or any type of offset often becomes a source of development funding, development capital for people who want projects to be completed. So if you’re a conservation group and you need some money to advance your conservation project, then a carbon offset project is a great thing to tack on to how you’re managing your land, because it’s a great way to get some money.
I’ve also I’ve also seen organizations use carbon offsets to sort of get seed money in big fundraising. So you might get a few million dollars for a carbon project when you have a $20 million capital campaign. Right. It’s like money begets more money. And then there’s a corporate polluter who will turn to an offset for investors. You know, a way to meet their cap goals or as a form of corporate sustainability. So to say we’ve offset our carbon on this cruise line or we’ve offset our carbon on, you know, this supply chain, what an offset is has like a very different meaning to every participant.
Ross Kenyon: That makes our job very easy here, as you can probably guess. Well, I read a book when I started working with Nori. I was trying to wrap my head around what are some of the best cases against the carbon offset markets or carbon markets generally. And I read one by Amy Miller called The Carbon Rush, The Truth Behind the Carbon Market Smokescreen. Have you read that book by chance, Lauren?
Dr. Lauren Gifford: Years ago, but I know that Patrick Bond wrote either the introduction or the conclusion. And he’s someone I always look to for advice and guidance in how to frame understandings of offsets.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, his name sounds familiar. I think that’s correct. Well, the book goes through a bunch of case studies about where projects ostensibly with good intentions had ended up causing a bunch of nasty problems. For instance, if memory serves, there were Dam projects in Central America that would flood certain amounts of land for clean power. And this would become an avoided emissions type credit or some such. But of course, there’s indigenous people who live in those areas, their access to land title and property rights is not established. And so these people were oftentimes pushed around, forced out of their ancestral homes and dispossessed.
And apparently this is not that uncommon of a thing that happens with forestry projects. This has come up on the show a bunch of times. But is this broadly something that happens a lot? Is this what people mean by carbon colonialism?
Dr. Lauren Gifford: Absolutely. It happens a lot. When I hear these stories, I just think this is development as usual. So this isn’t something that’s unique to carbon offset projects. It’s something that is par for the course with a lot of development. But I think it’s also one thing that draws me into thinking about carbon offsets is these unintended consequences from project developers that actually have very severe injustice implications, justice and injustice. I think the term carbon colonialism. Yeah, I mean, I mean, I mean, For whatever the commitment period is, it’s often 100 years.
So people are making decisions now to incorporate forests into carbon schemes. And the people that come after them who are managing that forest are going to have to abide by these carbon rules and regulations, even if they didn’t choose that. That’s sort of a broader way of understanding carbon colonialism.
Ross Kenyon: Does it have to be this way, Lauren? Is there a way to do this in an ethical fashion? Or is this just a consequence of the way that carbon markets now encourage people to think, is this like a new type of hegemony in how we conceptualize what it means to be a force and how to protect it? Does this just naturally flow out of it? Or are we missing something? Or can this process be made better?
Dr. Lauren Gifford: That’s a really great question. I think that these are reflections that are not specific to... Carbon management, right? They’re reflections of environmental management broadly. So while carbon offsets aren’t relatively new, this type of sort of top-down environmental governance has been around for ages. And we often see people included and excluded by how the dominant community wants that space managed. So I don’t want to get too heady here.
Ross Kenyon: You know we’re going there anyways, Lauren. It’s going to happen. I know.
Dr. Lauren Gifford: One thing I want to touch on is that, you know, you’ll see people, these topics like carbon projects are incredibly polarizing. And you have people say, this is awful and this is wonderful. And I chose to be an academic because I don’t want to see things in that binary. I want to actually like understand the complexity of And I think it’s a really unique space and a really valuable space to say it’s not good or bad. It’s just like, let’s analyze this. And I can hear you laughing at me.
Ross Kenyon: No, I’m laughing because I’m intellectually stimulated by what you’re saying and I’m trying to parse it in my own way.
Dr. Lauren Gifford: Right.
Ross Kenyon: I’m sorry. Does it sound derisive to you?
Dr. Lauren Gifford: No, but I’m on to you, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s just my personality. Take it as you will. Okay, well, I want to follow up on this last question I asked to one of these criticisms. I’ve seen this come up a lot. It comes up in all sorts of places. So Harvard professor Michael Sandel wrote a book called What Money Can’t Buy. And this is broadly called a semiotic objection. So like an objection about the meaning of an action and how it changes. So for instance, you might think that the problem This is a thing that if it doesn’t have rights, then it at least deserves our respect and protection in some sort of integral kind of way.
And that when we start thinking about it in this market context, it changes how we feel. So people argue about this with... I have a friend who actually works on this about whether or not people should be paid to donate blood and plasma in Canada. Or get to feel good about it because that was actually driving a lot of their decision to participate. It changed the way that they thought about giving blood as a social obligation, as an act of volunteerism, some sort of community involvement, as opposed to just being a market transaction, a quid pro quo.
And this changed the way that people thought about donating. Does this same argument apply with forestry? Does it mess up the way that we think about it? Or does it actually help us scale to people who otherwise just wouldn’t give a crap either way about the forest if we didn’t pay them for it?
Dr. Lauren Gifford: Well, there are multiple ways of knowing forests. In fact, like we could say there are as many people. That’s how many multiple ways of knowing forests there are. So I think everyone values a forest differently. And, you know, you like you see a lot of these monoculture plantations going in or like this sort of debunked but still weirdly popular idea of like, let’s plant a million trees. Yeah. And like with a drone. And a lot of these programs are actually really problematic because they overlook biodiversity. They overlook forest livelihoods, right?
And forest dependent communities. So I think just saying like... You know, it’s a scale, right? So if you’re talking about like folks donating plasma in like a specific Canadian city, that’s like a really small scale where you can do that type of analysis. But when we’re talking about global forests, it’s such a vast scale. And there’s like so many ways of knowing. And relating to and using a forest at that scale.
Ross Kenyon: So, yeah, it becomes the dominant way that people understand this space.
Dr. Lauren Gifford: Absolutely. One question that I would ask people when I was doing my dissertation research, a lot of these like carbon offset brokers with forests, I would say, is your job more forestry or finance? And it really opened people up to very interesting responses. And one that I remember off the top of my head was, you can’t decouple forestry from finance. Like forests are finance. And if you start to look, a friend of mine, Kelly Kay, she’s at UCLA. She wrote about this sort of the history of the financialization of forests.
I think she wrote specifically in Maine connected to pulp and paper and logging. And now you see a lot of these timber investment management organizations or the TMOs. One of the largest Maine forest holders is the Yale University Pension Fund that has a shadow LLC called Typhoon LLC. And one of the reasons why you see all these financial entities investing in forests is because forests have a pretty high and pretty constant return on investment. I would say that we need to remember that carbon is just a new type of financial investment.
And you’ll see that these portfolios that have interest in forests use carbon offsets as just like I have like thought of it as like a flaky croissant of financialization. Right. So there’s endangered species credits that they’ll use and there’s, you know, carbon offset credits. It’s just like one more thing to financialize with a forest, with the space.
Ross Kenyon: How bad is it to have an aspect of thinking about force that is financial? Is this damaging to us spiritually or does it have really practical consequences both? Is this beyond the scope of your research? Do you want to just pontificate wildly?
Dr. Lauren Gifford: I don’t like to say good or bad, but I will tell you that I was talking to a Native American forest manager in Maine and I said they’ve invested tens of thousands of acres into a forest carbon project. I said something like, how is this reflecting on you or is the commitment period challenge? It’s a hundred year commitment period. What does that mean to you? And this guy says, well, we think seven generations ahead, like 100 years isn’t that much. But you might talk to someone else who views 100 year commitment period as devastating because they were hoping to log in 25 years once there was regrowth.
So like there’s a lot of complexity, right? So I don’t want to say good or bad. It just adds a new dimension.
Ross Kenyon: I think we’ve had people on the show of both types, too. Just lean on people’s spiritual preferences for taking care of force itself. Otherwise, you’re just not going to get there or the game theory doesn’t make sense in the correct kind of way. I think Nori in general is kind of like that too. Even if people at Nori individually think that we should value the earth and its resources, I even called it resources. So that’s a funny way that language works. Even if you value the earth and its inhabitants in this kind of way, you sort of need a little bit more to make sure we can get over the hump and actually...
Dr. Lauren Gifford: Yeah, I mean, I think when we’re talking about solving things, one question I always have is like, why not just make a donation to soil carbon sequestration projects or forest carbon sequestration projects, right? Why did they become tied to these complex markets?
Ross Kenyon: Christoph, you’ve been pretty quiet. Are you just gonna sit there and take that? You have to defend Nori’s honor, I think.
Christophe Jospe: I mean, we got a question the other day coming in by email to say, are NRTs tax deductible? And the answer is no. And there’s a reason for that because we think you’re paying for a consumable commodity. You’re paying for an asset. I understand why you could think, well, it creates less complications if it’s just a donation to something. But we’re trying to build a system that scales and says carbon removal is something that people are going to pay for. And let’s just do our best to make sure that we’re not setting up a system that is creating some other problems or kicking the can down the road somewhere else.
And so we just need to be aware of these things. When I guess if I were thinking, all right, let me just set up a nonprofit that we’re funding for Not tied to the direct impact, but funding upfront costs to start participating with accruing more soil carbon or planting more trees. Like totally, I would love that. That’s a great solution. Like that’s a good solution set. But that’s not what Nori is building, which is trying to essentially standardize an efficient way of saying, here is our best effort at figuring out how to estimate and quantify and verify one ton of carbon getting taken out of the atmosphere from different approaches.
So it’s kind of like, yes, and that’s just not what we’re doing. And it may be that what we’re doing exposes that there are more efficient ways to go about that, but we only can come to that conclusion after having done it and learned how it works.
Ross Kenyon: You buy that, Lauren, or you want to counterattack?
Dr. Lauren Gifford: No, absolutely. So there’s two ways that I look at this. And one is to ask these sort of broad questions as to like, why are we tying conservation to carbon markets, like of any sort, instead of simply Investing in conservation. But the other thing is that life is short. We need to create work that we value and that we’re interested in. And it’s totally fine to have a startup that wants to create. I’m having trouble articulating this, but I actually have organized a session on an upcoming conference about this. And the question I want to ask is, how do we take these theories of political ecology, which is a subfield that says that Ecological and environmental outcomes are the product of sort of multiple contested, varying, uneven power relationships.
And how do we take these theories that we think about, that I’ve been sort of talking about a little bit today, and how do you apply them to real life? Because you sort of come head to head with people who are like, you know, very protective of their work and as we should be. And it’s a disconnect between these academic thoughts and the actual like reality of everyday life. So I think it’s an important conversation that we need to be having. But I don’t know that there’s one simple answer.
Christophe Jospe: Totally. And it’s worth drawing some distinctions here in like, what are we actually talking about? Are we talking about carbon assets that represent removal or avoided deforestation? And what are some of the squishy details that might show up in the difference when the reality is that you might be paying someone to protect the forest, but the neighboring forest gets cut down anyway. And in your article, you kind of say, are we better off If Red Plus didn’t exist and come to the conclusion that, yes, we are, is it for some of those reasons that are tracking the practical realities?
Dr. Lauren Gifford: I think what’s happened with Red is very different than the types of relationships that an organization like Nori is involved in. So Red has, from the beginning, been very colonial, outside Global North money, sort of paying off its Ecological debt and ecological guilt in some ways. So this like two prong of like, those polluters can invest, but it’s another way to pay people to invest in these forests. But the land tenure, and I think Ross touched on this earlier, land tenure in a lot of these places is not... The same as it is in the global north.
It’s much more complicated. There’s legacies of colonialism. There’s legacies of brutalized indigenous and local communities of governance by resource extraction. And there’s also just weak states. So like a lot of red projects that were in the Democratic Republic of Congo failed right off the bat because you can’t prevent deforestation when there’s like a civil war going on. So I think, you know, investing in farmers or with conservation organizations in the US has been in some ways much simpler and much more straightforward for folks interested in carbon than trying to... So for example, this one project I studied in Peru, there were 5,000 people who lived within the forest, even though it was a nationally recognized conservation area.
And... Some of those people didn’t even recognize the state, you know, like they didn’t even recognize that there was a government of Peru. So when the government comes in and says, well, you need to leave, they were like, you don’t have authority over us. So it’s these incredibly complicated legacies of tumultuous land tenure that creates a really different system and has been one of the reasons why red has failed.
Christophe Jospe: Totally. And your responses make it just so much more obvious why you’re taking the podcast in the direction you are. I keep getting images of the Lorax in my mind. I’m like, is Lorax just trying to create that? Because it’s kind of like, yeah, who’s going to speak for the trees? Who’s going to speak for the people who want to protect the trees? Like what happens when it’s people who might not even think about land ownership, but these carbon credit payments very much are trying to ground themselves in, oh, well, we need to have this ownership.
So whenever there are payments involved, actually it just screws everything up when people aren’t necessarily thinking about these things in those paradigms.
Dr. Lauren Gifford: Right. So I’ve actually and I’ve debated this with certain friends who are more critical of carbon offsets. But if you look at projects in the U. S. , it’s much easier to go in if it’s like state owned land or if you’re taking over land that had been owned by a timber investment management organization. And, you know, it’s been utilized as it’s going to be for a while for pulp and paper. So now it’s going to go to conservation. Like it’s easy to go into these more articulated ownership regimes. There’s not often settlement within there where people are, you know, contesting whether or not they belong there.
Christophe Jospe: So I appreciate the nice things you’ve been saying about Nori. I mean, here we are in earnest trying to create a new carbon market that is Doing our best to adopt some of these learnings from other standards bodies who have tried to follow the International Organization of Standardization or ISO guidance, which has guidance for just about everything, including greenhouse gas accounting. And rulers. And rulers. And let me guess.
Dr. Lauren Gifford: Like measuring cups. Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. And maybe we shouldn’t be taking it as seriously as we do, but unfortunately we live in the day and age where like that’s what the buyers of the assets in our marketplace are expecting us to do. And ISO guidance has really important information around determining baselines and additionality. Can you explain for our audience what those terms mean in carbon markets?
Dr. Lauren Gifford: Sure. So the baseline is your determination of what would happen absent of the carbon project financing coming in. So what’s a business as usual scenario? You know, so like in Nori’s case, like what happens if... Well, and then there’s flexibility, right? So you can say, what happens if this field is fallow? Or what happens if this farmer continues to maintain the farm as they are? And then... The responsibility of the carbon sort of program manager is to absolutely articulate what they mean. So in this, I actually saw a lot of academia, which is like in academia, you can use a word like ontology as long as you define it explicitly how you use it.
That’s the study of ants, right? It’s what?
Christophe Jospe: The study of ants.
Dr. Lauren Gifford: Ontology? No, it’s like, hell you know what you know. I don’t know. I can’t get in there right now. But I think we lean heavily on the ISO, but also it’s how you define your circumstances and then you use other existing sort of similar projects to say like, We’re in line with this project and we’re in line with that project and to define your own parameters. So that’s the baseline. Additionality is the carbon that is sequestered or offset or whatever beyond that baseline. And that’s what people get paid for.
Christophe Jospe: Right. If not but for this carbon project, then you wouldn’t have retained the This carbon in your biomass, or in Nori’s case, removed that carbon. But why isn’t it so straightforward?
Dr. Lauren Gifford: Well, you know, a lot of it is determining your baseline. And there are debates. I’ve spent a lot of time at the UNFCCC, at the United Nations COP meetings, and people will talk about for days, if not years, what is our baseline, right? What is the baseline that the UN is aiming for globally down to like, what is our baseline for each individual project? Right. And, you know, it’s what year do we start at? And it’s actually like a similar debate to like defining the Anthropocene, which is like, did the Anthropocene start when humans came on the scene?
Did the Anthropocene start at the Industrial Revolution? Did it start in the 1950s? So I think, you know, there’s not a right answer. It’s just an ongoing debate. So to move forward and to get things done, you need to define your parameters in your way.
Ross Kenyon: Lauren, since we’re talking about colonialism in this context, I have to quote Rudyard Kipling, if that’s permitted. Yeah. Have you ever heard, it’s from that poem, that once you pay the Dane geld, you never get rid of the Dane, which is about how the Yeah, but there’s like six and seven year commitment periods and then you can after. Yeah. If you wanted to. There’s that. It also just seems weird to pay someone not to destroy a force.
Dr. Lauren Gifford: Isn’t that how the mafia exists?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, nice force you got here. It’d be a shame if someone de-forceded it. That whole thing.
Dr. Lauren Gifford: Right. And, you know, like, I can’t speak to this that well, but there’s a whole other insurance industry that ensures carbon offsets so that if somebody does come and burn your forest or, you know, there’s a pest infestation or something like that, disease infestation, you don’t lose the money for the carbon credits, despite the fact that the carbon was still released into the atmosphere.
Ross Kenyon: There’s an episode there. We got to find those people.
Dr. Lauren Gifford: You got to find. I would love to listen to that episode.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Thanks. Good idea. Well, okay. We’ve gone through so many things and sustained so many criticisms about carbon markets. If we’re trying to do a good job at Nori and I don’t want in five years, 10 years for there to be a whole cottage industry of academics like yourself writing about how terrible Nori is.
Dr. Lauren Gifford: There already is. Well, not Nori specifically, but there already is.
Christophe Jospe: We’re a big moral hazard. We’re just giving people the license to emit until the end of time. Can I deconstruct that argument? Academics out there who are writing about the moral hazard, paying to remove your emissions is a way to motivate you to reduce your emissions as quickly as possible. And I would say it’s a moral hazard not to be removing carbon out of the atmosphere as quickly as possible.
Dr. Lauren Gifford: Kristoff, I feel like this is upsetting to you.
Christophe Jospe: I welcome the debate. Let’s have an open dialogue rather than people writing angry articles about carbon removal and not engaging the industry that’s trying to work on it in earnest.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, let’s cool it a little bit. No, that’s okay. I know this has been from the start of Nori. We’ve been talking about that. But also, skip the moral hazard thing. And we’re just talking about not criticisms about carbon removal generally, but about a Nori carbon removal marketplace. How do we avoid the criticisms that come about from cap and trade or offset markets or Red Plus? What do we do, Lauren, so that you’re not writing screeds against us?
Dr. Lauren Gifford: Well, I think that for some reason this like got personal and none of my critiques are about particular organizations, except for maybe like I haven’t written about them particularly, but like World Wildlife Fund have been involved in some horrific human rights abuses. I think how can Nori, I actually work for a company that sells something I wrote and said, we never want someone to write this about us again, so help us. Wow.
Christophe Jospe: Wow.
Dr. Lauren Gifford: I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know enough about Nori and what you’re doing on the back end to weigh in. But I also think these are theoretical ideas that aren’t about a specific company. They’re not about specific people. Oh, yeah. And one thing I have never understood is why it becomes so personal when really it’s just like people thinking, let’s look at who’s left out. Let’s look at who’s not included. Let’s look at the unintended consequences. And for 15 years while I’ve been looking at this, there’s always people who get very upset.
And I think I just I don’t understand that.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, well, we’re trying. I mean, part of the podcast is an effort at transparency and trying to show that we genuinely care and are intellectually engaged in these discussions. And we’re not trying to be sneaky about it. Like we do care about this. So I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you do see things like this, you should talk to us and hopefully Hopefully, it never comes to that. But I’m sure some people just hate the financialization of carbon assets generally. We’ll probably never appeal to them. That’s okay.
But some of these, like that ProPublica article that Lisa Song wrote, which is very good, and you should read it. It’s in the show notes. I don’t want a nori version of that. I would feel very bad.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, and I think we can avoid it by saying to anyone who’s affected with a carbon removal methodology, be a co-author in this. It’s a marketplace to sell carbon removal and we have to consider not just the sort of commoditization of that, but the broader impact. And the inability to do that, I think, is an Achilles heel for any effort. So it would be in our disinterest not to consider the equity and the justice around the systems we’re setting up. Otherwise, they won’t work.
Dr. Lauren Gifford: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Is that halfway satisfying to you, Lauren? Or is there more we can and should be doing?
Dr. Lauren Gifford: I think that, I think there’s, I mean, and from what I know about Nori, I think one question I would ask is where are, I think it’s fantastic to sort of have a new funding stream for small farmers, but there’s also a crisis in small farming. So I would be interested in how a company like yourself is also interacting with that problem and trying to like keep small farmers on their land producing.
Christophe Jospe: So the first thing that we say is we don’t have a savior complex that a carbon market is going to quote unquote save The smallholder farmer. We would love to see it play a piece. And I think it’s happening now. I mean, I was at a town hall in Iowa earlier this week. And... There are quite a few small farmers and they said, you know, this system sounds kind of expensive. Verification is a lot. And it’s like, look, farmers know how to get together in cooperatives. I was presenting to a cooperative.
Farmers can create carbon cooperatives so that they are able to access a market like Nori. And it enables them to essentially compete with a broad scale, large commodity farmer who also is farming carbon. And so in as much as we can make this work for everyone, we want to. And in as much as we get the social dynamics, I think we want to certainly make an easier pathway for those who are really hurt by the system. But at the same time, we are... Sort of cutthroat capitalists that say a ton is a ton is a ton and a ton from one farmer is selling the same asset as a ton from another farmer.
But we want to make sure that they own those assets. So if it turns out that a farmer from a small farm could sell his carbon removal to someone who wanted to pay him way more, we’ve actually got a system in the Nori program where you could take it off the market, pay Nori to take it off the market and could sell it to someone for way more. So it enables that sort of transparency as well as the So I guess a question I would have is what does justice and equity mean to Nori?
Ross Kenyon: Well, we had Jane Zelakova from Carbon 180 on right prior to this episode, or it depends on when these air.
Dr. Lauren Gifford: Yeah, I know you talked to her last night.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, people talk. Yeah, we got into this quite a lot. I think we’re trying to, it’s been relatively simple with focusing on US croplands. That’s a sort of an easier nut to crack for how to do that in terms of justice. And it seems like I feel like the main axis for that is this sort of, are only giant farmers able to participate? Or how small can you get where people are able to benefit so it isn’t just giant corporate farmers? That seems to be one of the main axes, I guess you could say.
But obviously, once we start including other methodologies, especially ones that are beyond the United States or the global north, we don’t want to fall into things like I’ve seen those videos of orangutans in Sumatra. Or some of what you detail with Red Plus. And I think that’s very important. And I also think internally, we’re starting to think about hiring. Maybe this is too far afield. But how to build an equitable talent funnel and be bringing in people who aren’t just like white 30-something dudes from Seattle who work in tech.
Dr. Lauren Gifford: Absolutely. Right.
Ross Kenyon: So we’re trying to think about this in a really serious way as we grow up. I don’t know that I have a really finite answer right now. And I hope that isn’t too vulnerable to say in public. Well, thank you for being here, Lauren.
Dr. Lauren Gifford: Yeah. Thank you.
Ross Kenyon: If someone wanted to follow your work, where would you direct them?
Dr. Lauren Gifford: I have a personal academic website, laurengifford. net. And my podcast Carbon Social Club is carbonsocialclub. com.
Ross Kenyon: And I listened to the first episode because I got early access because I, you know, I weaseled my way in there. It is good. I would listen to more of them. I really enjoyed it. Nice work.
Dr. Lauren Gifford: Podcasting is hard. The technical part of podcasting is very hard. I’m impressed that you guys are able to turn out all of these episodes.
Ross Kenyon: There’s a lot of invisible work that happens in the background to make this whole thing run.
Dr. Lauren Gifford: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t know how many episodes you’ve recorded, but you will see if you haven’t already seen it.
Dr. Lauren Gifford: I know I’ve recorded four. And then I was like, what do I do with it? I feel like Derek Zoolander. I’m like, what? It’s in the computer. How do I get it out?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I know that feel. jpg, as they say. Well, thank you again. We’re happy to have had you. And all those links to your works in the show notes, your Twitter account, your personal website, your podcast, etc. , Thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts and or Stitcher. It really helps us a lot to get this content to a wider audience. If you think what we’re doing is useful, interesting, fun, hopefully all three, we’d certainly appreciate your rating and review.
You can keep up We are also now on Patreon at patreon. com slash noripodcasts if you’d like more content, engagement, and community. And thank you so much for your support.
