To better grasp how blockchain can be used in carbon removal, I spoke with one of Nori’s founders, Christophe Jospe. Nori embraces Buckminster Fuller’s words of advice: “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” “We’re trying to say, this whole top-down approach of Paris isn’t working,” Jospe explains. “They continue to change the numbers around so that their voluntary commitments will work. But if anyone actually does the math, you’ll see how much of a scam it is—let alone how much of a scam it is that all these countries are actually lying on their greenhouse gas reporting. So, screw that; let’s start a voluntary marketplace with people who just want to pay to prove that carbon removal works.”
Carbon markets have been set up in ways that destine them for failure. For one, there’s rampant double-counting. Currently, what often happens is that when a carbon polluter in California buys a credit from, say, British Columbia, the emissions reduction is counted both in British Columbia (where it really happened) and in California—an accounting mess that ultimately makes the system dysfunctional. If you sell someone a good, then that good can’t be in two places at once—but right now it’s kind of working that way. Article 6 of the Paris Agreement addresses double-counting, stating that parties should follow UNFCCC accounting methods and “shall apply robust accounting to ensure, inter alia, the avoidance of double counting.” In other words, if you’re a country selling a credit, you can’t simultaneously count that credit on your emissions reductions. However, this only applies to parties in the convention (not corporate buyers, for example), and it still seems a bit shaky and unresolved. On top of this killer flaw, there’s the fact that methodologies for carbon accounting are often proprietary. And then there are all kinds of middlemen that increase the cost of carbon credits, making it harder for smaller actors, including smaller farmers without a lot of initial capital, to participate in these markets. In short, the whole broken carbon market system is in need of a redo.
Nori’s starting marketplace is filled with regenerative approaches, Jospe says, and they’re working with farmers to build a software platform that will make their carbon accounting happen out in the open. One key feature of the blockchain approach is that that the token retires the carbon removal credit immediately, so it can’t be resold. “And that fixes a lot of problems that are happening in today’s environmental markets, right off the bat.”
If you’re not too familiar with blockchain, it’s important to know that it is not only a way of setting up alternative currencies. It’s also, essentially, a distributed ledger, a virtual notebook of transactions that’s not held in one place, but is available all over. As London-based urbanist Adam Greenfield writes in Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life, there aren’t really any handy metaphors for understanding how blockchain works to create and mediate a means for the transmission of value—how does a chain of signatures become a coin?14 Here are the essentials: The blockchain is a digital medium of exchange. Take, for instance, a routine digital transaction with which you’re familiar. You buy a cup of coffee, pay with a debit card, and three dollars is debited from your account. This means that you trust the bank on the other end not to subtract thirty dollars instead, and it also means that you’re not using that same three dollars to pay for a croissant, too. You trust that the bank is handling things—the bank is central to keeping the record, the ledger.
Right now, the carbon markets don’t have that trusty ledger, the bank-like entity that efficiently keeps those three dollars from being spent simultaneously on both the coffee and the croissant. What a cryptocurrency solution implies is: let’s get rid of the central entity keeping the ledger—the record of transactions—and inscribe it instead in the token of carbon removal itself. A blockchain is a shared public record of transactions. The coin has a signature, and each transaction has a unique record, which, with a currency like Bitcoin, is propagated through the network in an encrypted form. These records get stacked into blocks (figuratively), which then appear in a chain. Why is this better than having a master international carbon bank keeping records? One reason is that it cuts out the bureaucracy and the increased costs of administration. A more fundamental appeal is that with blockchain, no single entity holds an oversized amount of power—the distributed system is a more robust, secure system. You don’t have to depend on some external entity to guarantee and take care of your transactions. Greenfield lays out the promise of blockchain beyond Bitcoin: the transparent exchange of any fiduciary token from one party to another, including assets, liabilities, obligations, wagers, votes, and so forth. Greenfield explains:
This prospect opened up extraordinary possibilities for the world of administration, which in large part consists of little more than keeping track of such positions as the information encoding them is moved through, across, and between organizations. More profoundly yet, it presented new ways of thinking about organization itself—about what it means to associate with others, how joint intention might be harnessed, and parties unknown to one another yoked in effective collaboration, across all the usual barriers of space and time.15
For a joint intention that needs harnessing, like carbon removal, blockchain could be a significant innovation. (People who’ve heard about the enormous carbon footprint of Bitcoin ask how this is possible, but again: blockchain is more than just Bitcoin. Bitcoin has become known for the tremendous energy consumed by its “proof-of-work” computing needed to encrypt transactions and mine new bitcoins. Nori uses Ethereum, a cryptocurrency that is switching to a “proof of stake” system that requires less electricity.) A blockchain system could address the double-trading problem, and it provides a way to deal with the trust issues around shady carbon removal schemes. It offers the possibility of smart contracts—contracts that are only executed when certain conditions are met, such as verifiable storage. At its most expansive, blockchain offers an orchestration architecture for getting millions of actors who don’t know or trust each other working toward a global goal.
But when it comes to carbon removal, what’s being administered is really quite material—not to mention invisible and hard to measure. Thus, for carbon removal cryptocurrency to work, there needs to be a way to verify that carbon is stored with some degree of permanence: the trust needs to be grounded, so to speak. As Nori’s white paper notes, buyers in the voluntary carbon marketplace value the public relations benefits of the purchase, but they are often daunted by the complexity, opaqueness, and amount of money spent on auditing and compliance: “The most important factor in their evaluation of a carbon removal tool is how well they can trust that the carbon was actually sequestered.”16 The platform for recording and storing trustworthy data is what Jospe and his team are currently in the throes of hashing out.
Measuring carbon storage in soil, for example, could rely on overlapping layers of data: imagery from drones and satellites, combined with a sensor in the soil or a core sample. Then, permanence is assessed using probability of reemission. This data goes into the blockchain, followed by a verification process, which includes auditing all this and making sure the verifier does not collude with the farmer.
“So if one or two verifiers come, would they be like independent contractors who decide to do this for a job?” I ask.
“We want to create a framework so that verifiers can come and participate,” Jospe explains, suggesting there would be white-listed, or trusted, verifiers. Open-source methodologies are another feature that would build trust. “It’s ridiculous that methodologies for the carbon accounting are treated like intellectual property,” Jospe explains. It’s cumbersome to get a new methodology approved; and then once the method is set, it can’t be copied. Jospe and colleagues believe that the methods should be open source, so that they’re not owned by any one person and can improve over time.
Blockchain and the carbon market space have each been described as a Wild West, filled with hype, scams, and dishonest operators. Jospe, too, is concerned about qua
lity and transparency. “Well, why should we trust this tech startup that’s saying they’re going to reverse climate change? Who are they? This cocktail and conference crowd that just spends a lot of money on airline tickets going to climate conferences around the world, saying the same thing over and over, pushes down a lot of groupthink—I think we will run up against that,” he reflects. “There are companies that are writing a white paper, putting a team together, saying they’re going to build all this fancy software, making a hundred million dollars, and then walking away. It’s a total sham. And it’s a problem, it’s a real concern. That’s why people are calling the technology a bubble, and it doesn’t help anyone. But we’re building a platform so that people who buy these gift cards can use them immediately, and it’s ready to go.”
Is this move toward blockchain for carbon removal inevitable? I ask Jospe.
“What’s inevitable is the recording of a physical activity into a digital asset—that’s going to happen, whether Nori gets it right or not. That’s going to happen. And that’s a real game changer,” he tells me. On one hand, some readers who are familiar with the literature on the commodification of ecosystems will see this as another step in the wrong direction, toward further abstraction of value. On the other hand, blockchain for carbon removal involves trading an obligation certificate backed by a real-world action. And in this sense, there’s a radical streak in cryptocurrency. “There’s a lot that the world maybe hasn’t caught onto yet—and this isn’t me being some kind of anarchist that wants to burn down the government—but our entire monetary policy is completely screwed,” Jospe states, citing the absurdity of the US government continually raising the debt ceiling, and how the massive debt accumulates. “I think a lot of the cryptocurrency idealism says, well, there’s a better monetary policy in general. That’s kind of a tangent, but that plays in some ways into what we’re doing.” Another fundamental tenet of Nori’s perspective is that there should be open-source tech for carbon removal. Their Seattle meeting featured a panel on this, drawing together people working on carbon-smart building, household soil-carbon measurement devices, open-source tools to track industrial carbon value chains, and more. It was clear that open-source tech for carbon removal was something that most people in the room were in the early stages of envisioning. It was also clear that the energy in the room was much, much higher than at any other meeting in a windowless hotel ballroom that I’ve ever attended.
What kind of work does Jospe do, exactly? There’s a software engineering component to his team, but also a visionary component. He cohosts the delightfully acronym-free Reversing Climate Change podcast, which aims to render the nuances of carbon removal in plain English. There are aspects of design and visualization in this sector, too, as well as cultural and messaging work—producing the narrative of carbon removal. It’s a knowledge economy job that interfaces with many other types of material, nonhuman, and machine labor.
The easiest descriptor of Jospe, though, is probably that of the entrepreneur. He worked in academia, but became frustrated with its bureaucracy. He worked in consulting, but devoured books on entrepreneurship and realized that he was an entrepreneur. The voluntary carbon marketplace was something he always wanted to work on. He likes the ability to be his own boss and create a positive work culture around him; he also explains that it comes with risk, and that he is in a privileged position to take on that risk, with no debt and no dependents.
Another entrepreneur in the carbon removal space, Tito Jankowski of the aforenamed Impossible Labs, similarly sees value in the entrepreneur’s freedom to try things. In Jankowski’s view, we are closing out an era that focused on scientific monitoring and scientific discovery. “[In] the era that came before, there wasn’t room for mistakes. It was all about perfect spreadsheets, and charts, and models.” Now, we’re in an era of solution building, where entrepreneurs are needed to take a shot, to fail, to try things.
Jankowski seems to see direct air capture as an idea that is lofted on this kind of freedom: taking carbon dioxide molecules out of the air is one simple thing. “It’s not, okay, let’s go to the smoke stack and make a deal with them so we can take their stuff, and then we can make a deal with the government so we can get a carbon credit.” Rather than getting entangled with the political world and having your efforts ground to a halt, with direct air capture, you’re able to take the first step (and Jankowski’s literally produced a step made from carbon captured from the air, as an artifact). The struggle is, of course, that there’s no market for captured carbon. But Jankowski sees it all as an opportunity: “The technologies of carbon removal, of pulling carbon from the atmosphere itself, and learning to build a market and a use for it, to me … this is like our ultimate opportunity to take everything that we’ve learned as a society … everything from our arts, and our music, to our science and our entrepreneurs, and just saying, this isn’t a bad, doomsday, everything-sucks thing.” Rather, climate change is, he says, “the biggest opportunity I could have ever, ever dreamed of.”
Transforming a trillion-ton existential disaster into an opportunity takes audacious thinking, but that’s what entrepreneurs are encouraged to do. Of course, this also coincides with the retreat of the state under several decades of neoliberalism. Entrepreneurship has become a model of how to be and behave, as cultural theorist Imre Szeman reflects (and perhaps this is the new era that Jankowski was musing on, articulated from a different perspective). Szeman writes: “We are all entrepreneurs now, or, at a minimum, we all live in a world in which the unquestioned social value and legitimacy of entrepreneurship shapes public policy, social development, economic futures, and cultural beliefs and expectations.”17 Entrepreneurship is held up as a way to gain income and give one’s life meaning, especially when many workers in the global North have “bullshit jobs,” Szeman notes (following David Graeber). Generalized risk is at the heart of this: “Everyone has to be an entrepreneur because in the absence of society—of the guarantees of formal and informal security and welfare once provided by community and state policies and programs—risk is a universal condition of existence.” In Szeman’s analysis, “Instead of chafing and complaining about the retreat of the state and the disappearance of society, or about their abandonment to the hostile environs of the contemporary labor market, entrepreneurs embrace the openings left behind by the retreat of the state as spaces wherein they can shape their own subjectivity with the greatest freedom imaginable.” While this aligns with Jankowski’s comments about freedom, it’s also a little bit of a caricature: an entrepreneur like Jospe can very well critique the ways states have mishandled carbon markets, while still embracing the opening left behind by the failure of the state to deal with climate change. It’s not even so much an embrace of that opening, in Jospe’s case, but a sense, tinged with responsibility, that someone needs to step up and do something already. The state and the international regime should have set a price on carbon, but they haven’t. Entrepreneurial projects like Nori can thus be seen as a response to abject failure by states. And while a mistrust of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial logic is understandable in the wake of characters like Russ George, the entrepreneurs themselves might be the wrong focus of critique. Indeed, the figure of the socially conscious entrepreneur will play a vital role in the near term.
What is Jospe’s long-term vision for Nori? “Our hope is to be a middleman that gets rid of the middlemen, and then gets rid of ourselves … we can set up the framework and then walk away,” Jospe explains. There’s an interesting tension here between simplifying and democratizing the accounting of carbon removal, on one hand, and creating green collar jobs, on the other. This is just one instance of a deeper twenty-first century challenge: locating good jobs in an era of increasingly cheap machine labor.
Machine labor: Carbon removal in a world of advancing automation
When will artificial intelligence outperform humans? According to a survey of hundreds of machine learning experts, this could be sooner
rather than later for many tasks: “translating languages (by 2024), writing high-school essays (by 2026), driving a truck (by 2027), working in retail (by 2031), writing a bestselling book (by 2049), and working as a surgeon (by 2053).”18 These experts also believed that there was “a 50 percent chance of AI outperforming humans in all tasks in 45 years and of automating all human jobs in 120 years, with Asian respondents expecting these dates much sooner than North Americans.”
Whether or not you agree with the assessment of machine learning researchers—a sample that is both knowledgeable and biased—there’s a fair case to be made that machines will be doing various parts of this carbon removal work over the next century. This is both fantastic and unfortunate.
Automation could be key to the cheap scale-up of carbon removal. Robotic labor could help to build the parts of carbon dioxide removal infrastructure that would be mass-produced, like direct air capture machines, making it a cheaper and more doable rapid transition than past energy or technology transitions would predict. There is actually a confluence of fields—robotics, the “Internet of things,” and artificial intelligence—that could hold the potential to make a carbon removal scale-up cheaper—that is, if it were applied to this problem. Currently, Silicon Valley is busy with other things besides the critical plight of our planet. However, robotics is being applied, for example, to forestry (via drones), and it could be used in underwater cultivation as well as monitoring. Smart sensors could help with monitoring carbon flows and stocks. Microsoft’s AI for Earth initiative, for example, has all kinds of environmental informatics applications for precision conservation, such as monitoring runoff or species tracking, which would help people understand the impacts of various carbon removal strategies.
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