When will insetting work for carbon dioxide removal?
Insetting is the CDR pathway of the future and always will be?
This is a summary of episode #404 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to it literally right below this paragraph, and in full!
Also, there is a little poetry bonus episode coming soon where I read the poem Tom and I discuss, “Jerusalem ["And did those feet in ancient time"]” by William Blake. The episode art is from the same work that William Blake made himself; a man of many talents!
Thanks for listening to this episode! A brief plug before we begin…
I launched a second podcast and collective art project called Climate Workers Anonymous where people will submit their unfiltered takes on working on climate for me to read on their behalf. Please subscribe and check it out!
Tom Mills has had a heck of a career. He’s worked around the world in mining and agriculture. He was a Stripe Climate Fellow trying to figure out how to embed carbon dioxide removal in agricultural supply chains to create a stable demand pathway that is also delivering real agronomic and social benefits. It’s no surprise he ended up at Mati Carbon, doing enhanced rock weathering on farms in the Global South.
Here are some of his biggest takeaways from his Stripe Climate Fellowship:
Context is Everything: The benefits of these climate interventions depend heavily on where they are applied. That’s true whether it’s improving water-holding capacity, pesticide efficiency, or fertilizer reduction.
Awareness is Low: The gatekeepers to international agricultural policy and climate finance have surprisingly limited knowledge about these CDR methods.
Coffee is Leading the Way: Certain commodity value chains are far more interested than others. Due to strict EU deforestation regulations (EUDR) and consumers who are willing to pay a premium, the coffee industry is highly motivated to adopt solutions that prevent farming from moving to higher altitudes as the climate warms.
Carbon Accountancy Standards Can Block or Enable Progress: If the taxonomy isn’t clear for which types of credits can count against which scopes of emissions, CDR might just remain invisible. Various efforts like the Greenhouse Gas Protocol don’t have an easy system for figuring out how CDR can fit into agriculture, and thus Tom has to look for other ways to stick CDR into the value chain. This isn’t a bad thing—it forces Tom to look to non-carbon benefits that deliver good things to farmers who need help. But it take a falsely-simple carbon crediting angle and turn it into a Rube Goldberg machine of stacked assets.
“The coffee industry was just a great place to be operating. It was solving a real problem and there was a lot of energy and movement in that industry.”
—Tom Mills
And what even is “insetting” anyways?
I think I’ve heard it used in every conceivable way. Sometimes it is expansive and is closer to what I call “thematic offsetting”—you sell an e-waste disposal credit to a computer company whose e-waste is not being treated directly in this disposal pathway. All the way to a sugar company literally has a biochar unit on-site processing their bagasse against their own emissions. And a lot in-between.
Right now, it isn’t super cost-effective for industry to decarbonize using carbon removals given that certain pay-for-practices insets are two orders of magnitude cheaper than equivalent removals in enhanced weathering or biochar. Unless that can be externally monetized via carbon crediting (which typically exports a carbon removal credit to a buyer outside of the company that produced the credit—read, offsetting), or by selling a differentiated product that consumers can recognize. Tom points to a coffee company that literally has biochar on their bag, but I need to track it down for myself and presumably drink some…
There’s a lot more detail in this episode. Tom is one of the most knowledgable people in the world on carbon dioxide removal in agricultural supply chains. I hope you enjoy the show.
I’ll add a transcript here soon in case you like to consume episodes that way!