Aug 25, 2022 · 42m · catalyst
The dirt on soil carbon credits
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of Catalyst, host Shayle Kann and CarbonPlan's Freya Chay critically dissect the voluntary soil carbon market, highlighting significant shortcomings in measurement, permanence, and additionality. They argue that while regenerative agriculture is vital, it should be supported through transparent subsidies and philanthropy rather than low-durability corporate offset credits.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Shayle holds 37.1% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Shayle as informed peer 5.0 Guest teaching 3.5 Guest disagreement 1.8 Shayle pushing back 1.5
speaking balance: gold is Shayle, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 37:23 Outright rejection of ton-year accounting validity
The guest directly dismisses ton-year accounting methodologies, declaring that they fundamentally misrepresent the physical reality of temporary carbon storage.
Hardest push from Shayle ▶ 28:15 Host challenges the market viability of non-offset philanthropyThe host pushes back on the idealistic proposal to decouple incentives from offset credits, arguing that without offsetting claims, buyers will largely vanish.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 37:55 Guest explains atmospheric physics versus ton-year equivalenceThe guest details why one hundred tons of one-year storage does not equal two tons of one-hundred-year storage when evaluating peak temperature climate dynamics.
Shayle holds their own ▶ 21:41 Host leverages 2007 carbon market history on additionalityThe host demonstrates deep subject-matter expertise by analyzing additionality loopholes from the 2007 market era and contrasting behavior offsets with direct air capture.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Shayle as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Shayle pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sponsorship Messages: Bloom Energy and ENGIE | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Introductory monologue and sponsor messages from Bloom Energy and ENGIE. As this is a monologue and ad read without guest interaction, all scores are zeroed. | |
| The Science and Economics of Soil Carbon | 5 | 3 | 1 | 1 | The host lays out the foundational mechanism of agricultural soil carbon sequestration and inquires why adoption remains low without incentives. The guest explains farm margin realities and operational barriers to new practice adoption. | |
| Evaluating Carbon Quality: Quantification, Durability, and Additionality | 4 | 5 | 2 | 1 | The guest frankly describes the market as a mess and outlines the three core criteria of credit quality: quantification, durability, and additionality. She details findings from CarbonPlan's review of existing soil carbon protocols. | |
| Challenges in Soil Carbon MRV and Verification | 6 | 4 | 2 | 2 | The host demonstrates domain familiarity by categorizing MRV tiers from non-calibrated models to hyperspectral remote sensing and physical soil core sampling. The guest highlights market race-to-the-bottom dynamics and the current technical limitations of satellite imagery. | |
| Permanence Risks, Reversals, and Buffer Pools | 7 | 3 | 1 | 2 | The host proactively cites CarbonPlan's research on California's forestry buffer pool depletion from wildfires to contextualize soil durability risks. The guest validates the point, noting that buffer pool mechanisms across registries are severely undercapitalized against real-world reversal risks. | |
| Sponsorship Messages: Bloom Energy and ENGIE Solutions | 7 | 3 | 2 | 3 | The host draws on his personal experience in early voluntary carbon markets to critique additionality in behavior-change credits versus engineered removals like direct air capture. Both agree that low credit pricing fails to induce true additionality, discussing separating incentives from offset claims. | |
| Corporate Net-Zero Claims and Standards Bodies | 6 | 4 | 2 | 2 | The conversation shifts to net-zero accounting and standards bodies like SBTi. The host probes whether third-party rating agencies can solve the market's moral hazard, while the guest emphasizes truth-telling about permanent removals versus beyond-value-chain contributions. | |
| Critique of Ton-Year Accounting Frameworks | 5 | 6 | 4 | 1 | The host asks the guest to evaluate ton-year accounting frameworks. The guest delivers an unequivocal rejection, explaining how ton-year models fail to reflect actual atmospheric physics and peak temperature impact. |
Statements from this episode (15)
Kann: Soil carbon removal fails on measurement, permanence, and additionality metrics
“The bad news is that on all the measures that we really care about when we think about quote unquote quality for carbon removal credits, these practices are pretty challenged. Measurement and verification, permanence, additionality, and so on, which doesn't me…”
Kann: Carbon markets failed 15 years ago due to credit quality mistrust
“I worked in the carbon markets 15 years ago, and I watched them never take off, I think in large part because of a lack of trust that a Credit actually meant something, or more specifically, that a credit meant a ton of CO₂, and I think if this market is going…”
Chay: Soil holds more carbon than atmosphere and terrestrial biomass combined
“Soil carbon is a huge carbon reservoir. It holds more carbon than the atmosphere, more carbon than all the terrestrial biomass combined”
Chay: Soil offsets guarantee decades of storage against millennial fossil emissions
“Credits in the current market might represent anywhere from 10 years of carbon storage to, you know, maybe a couple of decades or at the very, very high end. In forests, but on soils, a hundred years. So you're talking about a really different time scale than …”
Chay: Soil carbon protocols broadly lack measurement, permanence, and additionality
“We did a really interesting review of all of the protocols, so all of the crediting rules that are currently used to issue credits to soil carbon in collaboration with Jane Zelikova, and basically, you know, you have these PDF documents that, maybe you have mu…”
Chay: Robust soil carbon offsets require physical soil sampling at project locations
“Consensus is you really need to sample your soil in the place that you're trying to quantify outcomes if you want to have a robust quantification that you can use for an offset.”
Chay: Treating uncalibrated models like sampled soil creates a race to the bottom
“If you're in a market and everything looks like a ton, so I could take any of these approaches and get tons that I can sell, and they look the same in the market you really result in a race to the bottom. It's way easier to not sample anything and get some ton…”
Chay: Satellite verification is not yet capable of measuring soil carbon
“There are a couple of people who are doing really interesting work trying to figure out how, ah, satellite-based verification works. Might contribute to MRV in this space. And I would say we're just kind of not there yet. It's hard to see the soil. You can't a…”
Chay: California depleted its 100-year forest carbon wildfire buffer in 10 years
“Yeah, it's not all the way gone, but we've, we have used up all of the credits that were meant to protect against forest fires for the next 100 years in the first 10 years of the program.”
Chay: Protocols issue carbon credits for farming practices started a decade ago
“A lot of these protocols allow people to get credits for practices they started a while ago, like maybe up to 10 years ago.”
Chay: Soil carbon additionality screens function primarily as box-checking exercises
“Across the board, you see additionality screens that, in my opinion, look a lot more like box checking exercises and a lot less like, kind of, a rigorous questioning around how these dollars enable new practices.”
Chay: Proving additionality for direct air capture is easier than for soil
“Way easier to establish additionality for something like direct air capture than for soils or improved forest management.”
Kann: Decoupling farming subsidies from carbon offsets kills corporate market demand
“On the downside, you probably lose the market. You lose a big, big chunk of the market, right, who is in the carbon market, not in the business of subsidizing practices they like from farmers somewhere else.”
Chay: Stripe exclusively purchases carbon removal with at least 1,000-year durability
“Stripe is an example where they basically said, you know, we want to support permanent stuff because we know it's real and we know we need a lot more of it. So we're only going to buy stuff that represents a thousand plus years of durability.”