The Wisdom Wall

“because the registries and the feedback loop with the registries is to just keep issuing credits and make each credit look the same as every other credit, everyone's incentivized the other way because the buyers don't want to go back and say, Wow, all this money we've been spending over the last 10 years was a waste.…”

“Avoided deforestation, for example, is like a classically cheap and conceptually compelling credit, um, especially in, you know, say the Amazon, uh, that's I mean, basically impossible to prove the counterfactual, um, because there's often significant amounts of leakage, and leakage means, in this case, as you know,…”

“So there's two things that change. One is that the buyer pays the registry to evaluate deliveries and And two, the credits are issued after they've been delivered, not preemptively before.”

“Like, loudest, most conservative scientist in the room-based governance doesn't work for this. You actually do need to make something off-takeable and contractable, and the way you do that is for these emerging more uncertain approaches, or the approaches that have had less-scale deployment, is you have an actual…”

“One thing that I found a little more useful is to kind of just think about like, what's the actual trapping mechanism for the CO two? Like where does, where does the carbon actually end up? Um, and there you can sort of think like, okay, well, it's leaving the air and another goes into biomass, whether it's algae or…”

“carbon removal is never intended to be a substitute for emissions reduction, and, like, to that point is going to be dramatically more expensive than the vast majority of reductions, right? Like, that's just how this works. Like, not burning something is going to be cheaper than Like, collecting the dilute remnants of…”

“an emission is permanent, basically. Like, an emission of CO₂ stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of thousands of years, not forever, but hundreds of thousands of years. And if you want to somehow net that out with a proportional removal, like, it's not proportional to the emission unless it's similarly permanent.”

“some of the more expensive methods, like direct air capture, are gonna probably be easier to verify. And some of the potentially cheaper methods, especially those using biomass, are probably gonna be harder to verify.”

“what you want is you want the supplier to be able to sell more tons and make more money for the same cogs if they can bring in the error bars around the uncertainty. And innovate on measurement, innovate on modeling, innovate on how they deploy, innovate on their logistics. Because, like, again, if the supplier's…”

“It's not like the plants are just like creating a block of carbon. Like there's nitrogen and phosphorus and iron and other stuff in there. And if you're taking that out of the cycle, you're taking the nutrients out in ratio with the carbon. Right. In contrast, and that's like something you have to think about if you…”

“Like there's going to be a lot of energy use and like no one's life cycle pencils without renewable energy use.”