Kylen McClintock ~ Blockchain Solutions to Climate Change Panel

[Music] all right guys we're gonna get started this is the climate change solutions panel with blockchain okay so I think most people when they think of climate change or energy when related to blockchain they think proof-of-work crypto and that's not really what we're gonna focus on we want to change the narrative around crypto currencies and blockchains contribution to block or contribution to helping draw down climate change rather than adding to it so has that Newton seed has everyone seen the IPCC report at least heard the summary recently the most recent one is the most immediate need yet it was just released and 6,000 scientific references over 90 authors all say that by in the next 12 years by 2030 we will need to reduce our carbon emissions by 45% which is pretty dramatic to reach 1/2 degrees Celsius so that's a pretty it's a there's actually a really big difference between 1 and 1/2 degrees Celsius two degrees Celsius and a little further out so we're gonna mostly talk in more quantifiable metrics which is parts per million of carbon and that's something that you can actually measure and incentivize towards reducing and actually drawing down so just introduce myself I'm Kyle in McClintock and I helped her on blockchain for sustainable development I also run proof of impact which is environmental sensors Oracle's of impacts at a project called flux and I'm gonna just pass this around to you guys say why why you are here today and why blockchain is relevant to climate change tell us what you do thanks Caitlin my name is Paul gamble I'm the CEO and one of the cofounders of a company called nori and Nori's mission is just reversing climate change itself so what we're building and planning to launch later this year is a carbon removal marketplace where we make it as simple as possible to get paid for and to pay for removing co2 from the atmosphere so we're initially working with farmers who are sequestering carbon in their soils this is called regenerative agriculture and I think we'll talk more about this but there are many more ways to remove co2 and just kind of what - what colin was just saying about the one and a half degrees two degrees targets so i got very interested in climate change about four years ago because to me the concerning thing is as the climate warms we will start seeing more mass migrations more refugee crises and Wars and I would really prefer to avoid those so it turns out that there are a lot of different ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and they exist today there are technologies that are available for this their ecological methods for it but they're missing an incentive they're missing the the need and driver to scale them up and that's what nori is building to try to create so well past one thank you I'm Alan Lewis from natural grocers I've been there for 15 years I handle the food an egg policy supply chain integrity and organic compliance best job in the world because I get to run around the United States and some foreign countries talking with farmers and community leaders about all of these issues soils pretty interesting because if you do a soil test you will be on your belly with measurement tools and magnifying glasses and looking for bugs and worms and whatnot but it's really anecdotal for the most part it's descriptive what are you seeing there's 20 indicators of soil health and soil health is directly related to the amount of carbon that stays underground and is captured from the atmosphere related to everything that we're talking about today when it comes to blockchain the critical issue that I'm working on is how do you embed micro sensors in the soil or somewhere on the farm capture that data make it a mutable geo tagged it protect it authenticated and collect such massive amounts that you can actually apply AI machine learning and simple mathematics to that to see whether there are changes taking place and whether those are the changes that you want which leads into exactly what Nori's doing I'll talk a little bit later about just how hard that is but this is the right place to be forget everything else out there this is so critical we don't fix this we'll be block chaining our coffins I second that my name is Jennifer Jericho and I am the CEO of a company called sustainable Pacific consulting it's based in Hawaii I moved recently from Hawaii and I'm also an adjunct professor cu-boulder and the sustainability planning department well it's actually the Masters of the Environment Program and the sustainability planning track so I teach a lot on a lot of different classes on sustainability a sustainability strategy sustainability right now I'm teaching sustainability indicators and metrics and I'm fascinated by blockchain more recently because I think that the potential is huge and is going to change the way that we measure things going forward the way that we monitor our sustainability performance and especially with related to climate change and our carbon impacts it just offers so many so much potential to be able to curb that and to look at ways to make it better and as Paul was saying and sequestering carbon trying to avoid it not avoid it you have to remove it right and within the supply chain alone what Allen does with looking at supply chain of food I mean it's it's just I mean it's limitless the opportunities and blockchain of how it can actually benefit us and benefit the world so I'm excited to be here I've worked on a lot of what did work on a regenerative add project where we looked at soil content tent and measuring the soil over time and seeing how much carbon could be sequestered and changing the health of the soil and even today there's there's a new company that just came out it just read about it yesterday and they're actually able to track from your microbiome all the way back to the farm and the soil where you're the food that you ate that contributed to that came from and I'm not sure if it's connected with blotching I know they're using technology to do this but there's just there's so many cool applications for but making it a healthier planet healthier people so thank you for having me here today maybe we should talk about what exactly regenerative agriculture is and how that makes an impact on carbon in the atmosphere yeah so we only have half an hour and there's a lot to cover in climate change and there's a lot of different ways to go about this most carbon credits which we usually think of when we're thinking of blockchain as an obvious way to create immutability stop the double spend problem there they're mostly focusing on emissions reduction which is really not going to be quite enough to pull us out of what is the six extinction this new geological phase the Anthropocene we need carbon drawdown as well and that that will be what creates the most impact and we're gonna focus because we have three amazing luminaries in regenerative agriculture space on this solution that actually has a very large untapped potential to transition the world at least get get a good chunk of that 45% emissions reduction by drawing down so we're gonna focus quite a bit on that did you want me to answer your question so how many of I said I have healthy soil in my garden wouldn't know what that means you know we're talking about soil here and in my little world it's all we talk about in an incredible depth ad nauseam conference after conference after site visit after site visit so I think it's the right place to start and I think I can do this in 45 seconds time so when you think of dirt dirt has nothing in it but some minerals some sand some clay and when you put a seed in dirt it puts a little root down it puts a tiny leaf up and it puts a little dirt down a little root down but in that dirt are various unconnected microbes and fungi that sense that the root is growing and then are attracted to the root bring moisture to the root and and convert the minerals and the other things in in the dirt so that the root can absorb it simultaneous that leave that leaf that goes up is using photosynthesis water atmosphere and sunlight to create sugars that are going down into the root in feeding what they're feeding the fungi and the microbes so it's this symbiotic system the soil biome both need each other in fact I would say that the the the amount of life underneath ground for every little plant that's growing in your garden in our field is about ten times in quantity as what you see above ground if you do something different called industrial agriculture and you take dirt and you pumped nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium into that dirt you can get that root to get the minimum amount of nutrients so it'll grow and will create an ear of corn or a soybean or cotton a cotton ball one of them is taking carbon out of the soil the other one is accumulating carbon in the soil and it's a carbohydrate from photosynthesis in the roots that stay in the soil and remove it from the atmosphere and it can sequester it there indefinitely I'll stop thank you and into the project that I worked on related to regenerative AG in the way that I understood it is you know is the quality of the soil but it's it's this whole process if anyone's read The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan in the room anyone read that so if you remember there's a farm they talked about Polyface farms so we worked with Polyface farms to implement those same strategies and it's the way you work with the animals even and the their impacts on the soil and how that you you rotate the animals in a faster way and then you'll like have the cows come through and then the chickens come through and they actually right afterward and they you rotate them every two days and so then the chickens are eating the maggots off of the cow manure and and so forth and so it creates this it regenerates the soil and it restores water into the soil and so in the project I worked on was in Maui Hawaii and there's been a ton of chemical damage from pesticide and other things from pineapple growing sugar growing and so we've been working to restore the health of the soil for a lot of the reasons that Alan just mentioned to have healthier soil to have healthier food healthier people healthier animals overall and so in summary it's a way to manage agriculture that produces healthier benefits for all and blockchain has a way to be able to measure that so it's kind of that the same quote you can't manage what you can't measure so it provides a great way to be able to measure all of these different components to improve it over time yeah so when it comes to dealing with storing carbon in soils that measurement is a challenge and really what winds up happening is the the grower or the farmer changes their farming practices so instead of like what Alan was talking about the sort of industrial approach where you're just pumping fertilizer into the ground which is over time causing soil erosion it's weirdy creating the qualities of our soils instead farmers can do things like reducing the amount that they till or plow because when when you till the land you're turning over the soil and exposing all that organic matter to the air and it just decomposes and dies you can also plant cover crops and do crop rotations but measuring this is a difficult challenge and this is where it comes back to the blockchain aspect of it because if we're talking about creating an incentive for farmers to be sequestering carbon in their soils the the entities are the companies or individuals who want to pay these farmers want to be absolutely sure that what they're paying for is what happened and there are lots of problems in existing carbon markets today where most carbon credits that are traded are double counted meaning the the people who do the project that does the carbon avoidance they count it as avoiding emissions and then the people who buy the carbon credits from them counted as avoiding emission so it's getting counted twice and that's a real problem so what Nora is doing is we're we're creating the infrastructure that buyers who want to pay farmers for storing carbon in their soil can be sure that what they're paying for is what happened and then when they purchase we call this a carbon removal certificate which is just a non fungible token when they purchase this crc from the farmer that is immediately retired to use the language from carbon markets meaning it's it's not transferable you can't just go resell it and at Noorie we're working with a group at Colorado State University called comet farm and comet farm is a modeling system that takes in cropping practice data from the farmers so they provide information like what crops they were growing when they planted when they harvested what sort of fertilizer they used where exactly their fields are located and all of that information comes into comet farm and then comet farm is composed of I think 34 different models so they have weather data and imagery data and soil samples that have been taken from different regions around the US and then they can return an estimate on your actual soil carbon levels but we have to get that data verified because how do we know that the farmer is providing true and accurate data so we're working with independent third-party verifiers that verify the data that the farmers provide is accurate and true and that's where the interesting business case is because when we're talking about companies that want to pay for sequestering carbon in soil the big the big buyers right now are food producers food production companies so think of like General Mills and Cargill and Danone McDonald's Ben and Jerry's all of these companies have been putting money into trying to figure out how to pay their farmers to sequester carbon in their soil because for them it's just an investment in their supply chain they're ensuring that they're gonna have high-quality food that they can sell later on down the road so what we're doing at nori is like dramatically simplifying that process so that that data comes in it gets verified and then there for that so there's there's multiple practical business cases for making the transition to regenerative agriculture and actually internalizing the carbon externality that is industrial farming and one of them obviously is showing that through the supply chain that you are being organic and locally sourced carbon negative actually but really what will make this possible on a global scale is when we have the capacity to implement that into a a true carbon market and I think I want to talk about how we get there how what is the process to get in there because that's really how we're going to make this transition at the at the level we're going to have to do it and I think this is a perfect confluence of time where you have I o T sensors dramatically coming down in price that can start to measure the impact of either carbon and air pollution and other chemicals in the soil that can actually then be tracked via the blockchain versus with proof of impact and then go up through the supply chain that's marking like provenance provenance of the goods not just when and where it came from but how it was grown and how many miles it took to get there and we can aggregate the carbon emissions from that and once we can start to prove this out then we can start to go to larger and larger institutions like Denver County then Colorado then potentially the United States and a global level to help implement this as a way for the for governments to finally have a way to internalize the cost the externalities you see wouldn't it wouldn't be fair to have a factory spewing out air pollution like we we modify that because it's we have we put a price on that we limit it because it directly affects someone else but carbon is a little more it's a little more abstract because it goes into the atmosphere and it it is it's it's a global externality global tragedy of the Commons so let's talk about actual practical ways how we're going to get this implemented on a global scale so here's where we are it's kind of comically simple but it actually works we're measuring temperature and moisture at depth so soil and Colorado tends to have less than a half a percent organic matter we also tend to plant one crop and then let that go fallow and uncovered so in those instances you have really hot topsoil that crusts over one hundred and ten hundred twenty degrees sometimes in a hot summer day and you also are losing so much moisture because it's uncovered so if you're talking about a 48 48 inch spread and you are embedding an IOT sensor at 2 inches 2 feet 3 feet 4 feet and you can ping that with low energy over time and aggregate that you're going to be able to see that the way that that crop or that farm is growing their food is has cover crops isn't deep tilled is generating more organic matter and those are the proxies the temperature in the end the moisture are proxies for healthy soil you blockchain all of that in the hardware as it comes out but then the produce whatever that farm is growing whether it's cattle or crops or vegetables you when you lot those harvests you blockchain those harvests with that special tag this is authenticated carbon positive or carbon friendly at least and that is another flag related to organic or regenerative or other processes that we're familiar with but bring up that recognition for the environmental services provided by that farmer so one of the things that I thought of Ben and actually we had this conversation just before this panel that I think is interesting to build on what Alan was saying was we're talking about when you go to the grocery store and you have these different options right so you say you have it the organic local kale or you have kale that's from Mexico or somewhere else right and you choose and it's usually the kale the non-organic or even if it's you know say they're both neither of them are organic but one is from a lot further away but it's cheaper with the externalities he's talking about you're not seeing the carbon footprint of that kale right so this is what blotching has the ability to do eventually is to actually seed so if you're going in you're buying you're like oh with a carbon footprint of this was 10 times higher than this one you know there's the consumer demand you can choose to kind of pay for the car the difference in the carbon but it could also change the way that farmers are doing things right so that creates like a healthy competition to try to lower the carbon footprint of all the different types of fruits and vegetables that you're purchasing if you could actually see you know and through blockchain it could be in an instant right where you could actually measure it the whole supply chain of where somebody's coming from and the whole footprint and think of it's not just growing it it's you know all of the shipping the transportation everything out and and the water content and all of that and a lot of times when it's not organic there's a higher water content because they're using all different kinds of methods to fertilize pesticides and do everything else so so I think that that is a huge potential of blockchain to be able to see you know actually see the externalities right away and make better decisions for our health and the true cost of the good of that cheaper kale is actually much higher than the local kale that you're buying correct there are also other uses for this too where this idea of storing carbon and soil is generally called an ecosystem service and there are lots of other types of ecosystem services that can be monetized and incentives created for things like better water filtration I know a group that's trying to is trying to figure out a way to incentivize people especially wastewater treatment facilities in the Puget Sound the Nori's headquartered in Seattle so in the Puget Sound I also know groups that are interested in trying to figure out ways to deal with the massive forest fire issues out here in the West many in which many cases are that there's a significant amount of slash left on the ground of small diameter timber that isn't really worth it for the logging companies to pick up right now so how do we create an incentive for someone to go do that so we reduce the risk at these massive forest fires one thing that we did in Norway was we created an open source to what we're calling our atomic swap marketplace and you can find this on Nori's github it's a nori - dot do t dash eco and so we've created the ability for you to create a non fungible token for that represents some sort of ecosystem service action that happened that could be anything that could be you removed half a ton of this slash or you stored a ton of carbon and then you can exchange that for a fungible token so for like an ER C 20 token and you can do that atomically so that the market operator it never takes ownership and that's what we're offering to the market where nori never takes ownership of these carbon removals certificates and we never take ownership of the nori tokens that people are using to pay but we did this because we want we wanted to create this as a template we want more people to create other businesses and projects where people can create financial incentives for doing some sort of environmental cleanup some ecosystem service so that's something that's out there and it would be great if other people pick that up so this is actually really really interesting I think this is one of the ways we we put externalities into the cost of goods and I think it's kind of understated how much potential this has we talked carbon when we comes to climate environment because that's something quantifiable something we've been tracking for so long when these other things are more abstract like air pollution or just trash in the ocean or water pollution in general they're harder to measure quantifiably with a verifiable oracle of impacts but once we have these tools and we can start to leverage them on a more local level then we'll start to see this this market evolve or companies coming in to help verify changes in eco system States which is really really cool so that's something that's out there for you guys for blockchain carbon is just one of the many externalities affecting our planet there's methane which is obviously very impactful there's a new company out there that actually is puts up satellites to measure methane can even measure the leaks from natural gas pipes so that opens up the potential to start putting a market around methane and then we can start correlating alright so this holistic grazing opportunity to use large ruminants like bringing back bison to grasslands actually that's great potential to reforest and re gratified desertified regions but we still haven't proven out the science it it puts carbon in the soil but there's also methane in the air so then we could start to see these correlations between alright how much is the methane completely counteracting all the benefits of the carbon we're not completely sure because we don't have enough data so I would certainly urge you to find ways to collect authenticated data and build businesses around that because governments and nonprofits they need ways to internalize these externalities and give incentives to make this transition to do a regenerative future less of an extractive BJ so there's a lot of other drawdown methods out there that haven't been talked about quite as much as carbon so I would love for you guys if you have kind of a favorite one that's more obscure that we can track and is relevant to the blockchain please let let everyone know so at Nouri we we think about carbon removal in sort of three different buckets there are ecological methods industrial met their methods and then hybrid approaches that kind of combine the two on the ecological side soil is the biggest one but then there's also just simply planting trees a forestation kelp is fantastic that's why we named our company nori on the industrial side I'm most excited about a couple different opportunities one is called direct air capture so there are a number of different companies out there Clym works carbon engineering global thermostat or to name a few that they pull in air from the atmosphere and they separate the co2 from the rest of the gases and then you can sell that co2 to manufacturers that might make plastics or tennis shoes or construction materials out of it construction material this is the other one so I really think that when it comes to scaling up how do we remove the amount of carbon carbon dioxide that we need to remove it's going to be the industrial approach and I actually believe that it's going to be the oil and gas industry that saves the day because who out there has the engineering talent the financial resources the access to energy and the familiarity with building large-scale industrial projects they're the ones who are going to be able to scale up this direct air capture into another form of ecosystem services that I heard someone the other day coin a term called atmospheric services so direct air capture is the one that I'm really excited about so touch on that real quick that's not going to happen unless we put a price on these externalities right it's not a viable business model just to capture carbon and put it in the ground because it's good for the planet we need to start when you start valuing these things so khylin the what I heard your question was the other options for drawdown or other ways yeah impact climate change so I teach this I do consulting on it collecting data on all of these different areas so we collect data on energy water use waste produced waste reduced weight you know invasive species I mean there the list goes on and on and it is so difficult to collect data and then I teach it and then I have my students try to go out there and get the data and then they get stressed out because they can't get the data so I think one of the best things that blockchain does is it actually makes that data available but even things like you know does anyone well I'm sure you know but if you think of energy just one thing you know which contributes to carbon - but the energy sources in Colorado it's mostly coal right which has a huge air pollution effect right and then there's also natural gas which is connected to fracking and you hear people screaming and town hall meetings over this right and then renewable energy is actually really small but if you were able to actually even track just not the carbon but just the energy from everything and all of the externalities related to that I mean it's it's so huge I mean I don't even know where to start with it but they're everything water waste I mean the oceans polluted you brought up that if you could actually see where each piece of waste came from and plastic companies are a huge part of that so look at the oceans - their major carbon sink and not as many people are focusing on the ocean look at their potential give Alan a chance but also watts here right we're running out of time so I want to make sure we get chance to tell what should we be doing in 2019 in the blockchain space how can we make the most impact okay well I just have to tell you when I checked in today someone looked at my hair and actually asked me if I had a smartphone good way to start today but but we are creatures of our time right and I see a simple couple of old folks in the room 35 years ago spreadsheets were brand new and I ran conferences like this convincing businesses to adopt digital accounting right the reason I'm bringing this up is right now we're in this globalized food system but globalized system in general and there's two broad divergent places one is the multinational Global consolidate centralized standardized supply chain which are run by Oracle and si P big enterprise resource planning systems and I don't even know what energy system uses there's a parallel economy that I think all of us in the room are a lot more comfortable with the parallel economy starts in rural economic communities with farms with farm families with young couples wanting to move to a more wholesome environments and have an agrarian lifestyle the role of blockchain there in terms of protecting their data protecting the identity of their food increasing the value in the broadest term of what they're growing is incredibly important because they're fighting that big globalization and we really need to support that it's a lot of what Nori's doing a lot of what we're all working on but when you think about 35 years ago the opportunities I had for comical but the opportunity here is very deeply democratic and an equitable opportunity to use blockchain to support our communities urban and rural in creating that connection but making sure that 10 or 20 years from now we really have good food choices and good environmental yes it's about a closer connection with the producer and the consumer as well there's countless opportunities to create better co-op structures as well here that just connects connects everyone together more and we that that future of a multinational corporation Monsanto GlaxoSmithKline that's not an inevitable future I would just add one thing to I mean if you're gonna be in blockchain I mean you could you could be in it for so many different there's so many different areas but this is one area where you have the potential to make a huge difference in the world in a positive way and you you know create healthier food healthier products a healthier quality of life for everyone around the world so that's what I would encourage you to look into all of these solutions related to Bakhtin that help do that mmm great thank you guys so much we are going to be up at the impact track table so please if you have any questions come up there and we'd love to help out with some projects