Building High-Integrity Carbon Credits: Digital MRV & The Time Value of Carbon | Yvonne Champagne

But where I think kind of my viewpoint around environmental action really started was probably my my job, my summer job, and how I paid my way through university, which is planning trees in Canada and people don't know Canada, you know, most of the forested land in Canada's crown land, so it's owned by the government. And if you are a company and you're looking to harvest that land, you have an obligation to replant to reforest. And so how that is typically done is every spring and summer, forestry companies will hire, you know, hundreds of students, thousands of students to go replant trees. And it's the ultimate piecework. So you get paid by the tree, but there's a hitch is if you if you plant or a tree improperly, you get dinged. So you get paid by the tree, but if you plant that tree improperly like you have to go replant that that plot of land. And so it's back breaking work, it's the worst conditions possible, it can be snowing and 35 degrees. On the same day, in some cases, the terrain is awful, the bugs are terrible. But if you're willing to work, you figure out that the magic recipe is volume and quality. You want to plant the most highest quality, highest volume of trees in the quickest amount of time possible with the highest quality possible. And it's really framed my entire view on environmental markets and environmental action. To me, environmental action has never been about going to protest or throwing paint on a painting from the masters, right? It's it's doing the work. It's going out. If you care about something, do something about it and doing something about it physically. [Music] All right, welcome back to this week in carbon. My name is René Velasquez. I'm the host for today's episode and I'm delighted to have a friend on the pod, Ivan champagne, who is the co founder and chief carbon officer at carbon AI. Ivan, pleasure to see you again. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Always nice to see you, René and big fan of the podcast. So thanks for having me on. Great. Well, it's pleasure to have you on. I'm really excited about the conversation today, man. We've obviously been chatting across a number of different angles commercially. And every time that we speak, I just walk away from it, just super not only inspired, but also taking away some really pivotal lessons. And I'm hoping that we can do one of those master classes with today with you today, but specifically for our audience as benefit. Why don't we start just at the beginning? Just give the folks some context in terms of your mission at carbon AI, what you're trying to achieve there. And a little bit about your background, if you wouldn't mind indulging me. Yeah, for sure. So at carbon AI, we are, I think just entering our fifth year and our mission from the get go has been to try to help our partners, our customers, project developers in the industry, create the highest quality. And the way that we have attempted to do that is to work with other like-minded players and infrastructure providers in the carbon and in the greater environmental markets ecosystem to really focus on high quality data. And that's really born out of our viewpoint that synthetic commodities, which environmental commodities are right it's not a physical commodity is something like a bushel of corn or a barrel of oil, but where you have products that aren't delivered physically that those commodities more than anything what determines their value is the quality of the data. And if you have poor data, then you have a poor quality instrument or commodity, but if you have high quality data to underpin those commodities, that's how you make something really robust, really sustainable and durable for the longer term. So that's that's really been kind of our key mission what we've been working on. How does that interpret or or correlate to essentially a digital twin. It's a great question. I mean, so digital twin is a concept that's often used in various sectors. So if you have a plant, right, you have a digital twin of your plant, which basically creates a virtual world, if you will, of how your plant operates. And so it is something that in manufacturing, for example, has really emerged as a really powerful tool to help you diagnose problems before they arise, determine where you may have bottlenecks, where you may have issues in your system and your process. But I would say that in environmental commodities, the kind of service that we provide is colloquially known in the industry is DMRV. So digital measurement reporting and verification. I would argue that it's much more than a digital twin because a digital twin of a plant of a manufacturing plant isn't running your process. It's not delivering an outcome. It's not creating the output. It's just giving you a synthetic view of what's happening. Whereas in our technology and our in our software, we are helping create, we are actually helping create that instrument, that commodity. So it's much generally just tracking all of the attributes digitally, but you're generating them absolutely and then tracking exactly because if you think about for an offset credit, for example, how do you create that offset credit? Will you take data inputs, whether that be data that's collected manually or digitally, you put that into a methodology or protocol, which helps you derive an outcome. And so with our software, we're able to ingest various protocols and methodologies, taking in all that data, we're able to actually deliver an outcome, which then gets fed into a registry like a Vera or a GCC or ego registry or something along those lines that delivers a final product. But this is a key input that helps deliver that. So can you walk me through then and our audience through the DMRV component and how you guys are trying to tackle this? Because I really like how the framing around the focus on quality and you call it synthetic commodities. These are digital commodities. Yes. Yes, really the absence of pollution of a colorless and odorless gas like it's a very abstract concept. And so we definitely need to have the trace ability to demonstrate the actual performance of these projects right across the various different technologies. So can you just walk me through a specific example, let's say methane avoidance or coaxos and how your technology sort of works in that context to capture that data and then and then be able to provide that information around the quality for sure. Or maybe start by defining what we think a high quality instrument or high quality outcome looks like. And so how we attempt to do this is we have three primary tools in our suite of tools or ecosystem, which is a tool we call proof, which is the first piece, which is our calculation engine. So in proof we're able to ingest methodologies protocols, whatever outcome you're able to drive, we're able to ingest that protocol digitally and we're able to render the calculation in there. But in order to render those calculations, we need good data. And so we rely on a tool that we've designed called field and what field does is it is a data collection tool or first mile data collection tool. We're able to take data, whether that data comes from a manual process and we're able to collect that data digitally to timestamp user authenticate and geolocate every single data. So we know where the data comes from who collected it and when it was collected and we can prove immutably that that data is actually real. We can also connect into sensor networks, IOT, skada, whatever systems there are ingest that data again, combine it, run it through proof and then derive an outcome and outcome. And this is I think the exciting part for us. I think one of the things that we like to pride ourselves on is that we work well with others. We really try to understand who are the major infrastructure players in the space. And we try to figure out how we support them. And so we're really excited. We're working with a number of registries on DMRV pilots and and first missions, if you will. And so what we try to do in that context is, hey, we will deliver this piece. But at the end of the day rendering that outcome, a, you know, delivering a serialized credit, that's typically a registry function. We're not a registry. But what we help do is ensure that that data from source to outcome that it is true, real, fully auditable and fully authentic. And so the third piece of our technology is what we call view. So view as a configurable dashboard that we can provide to various players in the ecosystem to give them a full transparency, if you will, of the functions and the inputs of a project. So an example of a stakeholder could be a verifier. So if we think about carbon 1.0 or 2.0, whatever analogy you want to use and let we think the process should look like going forward carbon 1.0 2.0 very manual, very analog, a lot of reliance on things like paper, spreadsheets, right, which are not an immutable tool, Excel, you know, who doesn't love Excel, but Excel can be manipulated can be changed and you can't prove that no one is altered a cell, for example, right. And so what that process really looks like, I think. from our standpoint is one where again, no one can mess with the data. But with view, what we're able to do, this is really that the paradigm shift is, you know, a verifier, for example, in a historical ver-- or how verifications have been done to date in the industry, is that they will have the chance to look at a sliver of data, a very small sample of an overall project, and they will determine an assertion based on that small sliver of data. With our platform, a verifier now has access to all of the data. It's all available to them, right in front of them. They have full and feathered access. They can trace every single input and output and where it came from. How was calculated? So really creates a much more robust data set to that particular stakeholder. Another stakeholder could be a buyer, right? You know, I think, you know, offset projects, especially biological projects, these are living breathing systems. And if someone, for example, has a contracted offtake on a project, and we're not sure how much of volume they're going to get, you know, we're able to provide them real-time access into how that project is performing. So it's just a different level of information that is available to stakeholders that need them. So that I think that's something that's really exciting from our standpoint. That's really, really interesting. Can I go back to proof? And yeah, just ask. In terms of the-- and obviously, yeah, some of this will be commercially sensitive, and some of the work that you're doing is obviously you won't be able to discuss. But I'm curious about the intersection with the standards and their registry partners and how this tool can provide leverage. And so I'll frame the question in this context. You mentioned really one of the key issues that's afflicting our market, which is that so much of it historically has been based on paper documentation. And then subsequently, the review process is also desktop-based. Reviewing and reading copious reams of data, and then ultimately making a decision around certification. Right? And I think that's just the historical context. I'm wondering whether your tools can actually be leveraged by the standards to create a higher throughput, so more efficient processing times. And so compressing the timeline that a project is invalidation and verification. And whilst without compromising on the integrity piece, because of the immutability and the level of transparency, can you walk me through how that may be occurring in practice? It's an excellent question. And I think it's one that we get asked all the time. And you know that one of the fundamental challenges of the greenhouse gas sector and carbon markets in general, and I'll use an infrastructure or a semiconductor processing analogy. Do you think a lot of the standards upon which we determine and create environmental commodities? They come from about 2006, right? So I saw 14,064, for example, was first published in I think 2006. The first methodologies that came out, you know, shortly thereafter. So if I think about a laptop that you and I use, you know, and what what what chip was powering those laptops back then, I think it was like a Intel Pentium chip back then. If you think of the processing power of that chip, and if you tried to run a modern application with a Pentium chip from back then, like you couldn't even probably run Excel at this point, right? Or outlook, right? The technology is advanced. The processing power, everything has advanced to such a greater degree. The current, you know, the processor chip in our laptops today, I think are at least 15 times more powerful than that chip. Do you think of the offset industry? We are still using tools that were designed 20 years ago. What we're trying to do something very different, think of the volume of offsets that were created in 2006. Now think of the volume credits that were generated this year. But also think about the next step, Renee. How many reductions? How many millions of tons do we need to create to hit our goals? To hit our targets? We've got gigatons scales is what we need totally. So we're trying to do something much, much bigger with tools that are just not designed for what we're trying to do. They're not built for purpose. It's not to say they're bad tools, but they need to be improved. They need to be modernized. We need to increase effectively the processing power of the entire system. And verification is exactly one of those things. If you think of the major challenges in the voluntary carbon market, when things were super frothy a few years ago, what was the bottleneck? It was issuance and it was verification and even registration as well. And registration rates. So project developers are trying to get their tons to market, not enough to get buys are trying to set up accounts. That was just huge bottlenecks in systems. It just wasn't set up for prime time. So we need systems. And I think that there's a reason we're not within the standards. I think that overall they've been doing such a, I mean, they've been under so much scrutiny. I'd hate to be a CEO at one of the standards, just because of the amount of scrutiny that they've been facing, which ultimately atrophies the system because they are not willing to compromise on the integrity piece because if you look at it from a distribution perspective, that one, two, three, five percent, whatever it might be that is questionable around potentially overcrediting, et cetera. That's what gets picked up in the media and that's what then damages their reputation. So the so risk averse that they're not willing to to compromise on that to and they want to get 100% or 99% confidence with regards to what they're delivering that that results with a significant burden in regards to time and processing. They're double checking, triple checking before they actually approve. Whereas I keep thinking about a future where we harness sort of an industrial type of model ingesting vast reams of data, harnessing, firstly standardizing those processes. Right. I think that this is, we had this chat with Joe Delofano at CTO Advera on the podcast while back and he was talking about the project hub and the digitization of the methodologies is a really important paradigm shift. And then the project hub essentially digitizing the inputs through through that system. And then ultimately you could have a view of a world where the project level data is ingested and like you're talking about around what you guys are building. And then it can all be reviewed through not only machine learning and artificial intelligence tools that we're using to provide leverage and fast higher throughput. But then any deviations then goes to the expert teams to look at it. So it's like a conveyor belt, right? You're building a factory. And then you just have everything if it's within tolerance, then it just keeps going down the conveyor belt and then keeps going to the next bit, next bit, next bit. Anything that's a deviation, either gets taken off and reviewed or you know, chucked out if it doesn't, if it doesn't fit, doesn't work. And I think that that's a much better approach in terms of how to scale rather than than the very bespoke nature that we currently have. So I'm just curious in terms of kind of bringing it back from from my kind of so they've been thinking about it. But to how you're actually implementing it through your tools and ultimately how that immutability through tokenization is helping to usher in that that the cabin 3.0 future. Yeah, I mean, I think our perspective has been to leverage technology as much as possible to digitize and automate where possible so that every person different players across the ecosystem can do more. That's that's the goal. So with our with our platform, you know, it conforms to ISO, right? You still need third party verification. That's a critical part of of the process of creation of an environmental attribute. That's never going to change. But it's the type of work that a verifier can do. They can do a lot more. They have access to so much more data and much higher quality data that I think they can deliver a higher quality assertion. But more importantly, they can be more productive, right? And it changes the nature of a verification mandate from one that has typically been kind of a batch process that is really hard to scale to one that is more of a continuous process where verifiers are continuously engaging with the data and a project. But it's not like you have these peaks and valleys, which you typically have in compliance markets where there's a mad rush to finish compliance reports for the year end or before a compliance period deadline, right? You can really smooth out that work, which means a verification team, verification body can be far more efficient across time, right? And that should be ultimately all our goal. Every player in the ecosystem, we should be trying to do is do more. That's what we need to do. We need to deliver hundreds and millions of tons and do it faster, better, and cheaper. That's our target. Everyone should be doing more. So, you know, our platform doesn't take away any work from verifiers. That's not where we're trying to do. But what we hopefully do is help them do their jobs better. And you talked about registries, right? Like we applaud Vera and others, you know, they're trying really hard. Vera's doing some really cool stuff around DMRB. We're really happy to be working with them on a couple pilots right now. One of the coolest things that they're able to do when they have projects that are using a platform like ours that is higher integrity, higher quality, is that they can move to high frequency issuance, right? I was going to say just about that. That's the kind of dream, right? It's like borrowing a page right out of Rex. As you were talking before around peaks and valleys, I was thinking not only the market cycles around boom and bust, but ultimately like the issuance cycles. Like, okay, so a project, especially like Red+ projects, we'll wait three years for issuance and then just dump an entire like three years batch onto the market. It's lumpy and it creates this distortion with regards to pride. We've seen this really interesting backwardation in some instances where the older ventures that are available at spot are trading at a premium to where the forward issuances that are coming up. Interesting. We'll be placed and it's just a factor of time value money and I want to come back to that piece around how we applied time value of carbon later. But it's this interesting concept. But if we had like a Rex model where you had a PPA, you had that forward offtake and the project was constantly monitored any time that there was a deviation or or or or reversal risk, it was easier and early identified. And then you could just output, you know, tons on a regular cadence, whether that's weekly, illim, weekly, motley. And now your smart, you could build smart contracts behind that. And also then accounting, it becomes a lot easier instead of having one big lump sum that's at a procurement event, you structure a bilateral, you do do diligence, you have that. Now you've got that contract and then you automate that contract and then you start taking delivery in in in tons at a time as opposed to hundreds of thousands or millions of tons in the lump sum, which just eases the cash flow burdens as well as the companies, right? Well, it's kind of the dream that I'll hope we get to just a digital faster end of the future. But it helps, you know, I think you had Mark Stewart on one of your previous podcasts and he made a great point, which is like the carbon market's kind of like an art market today. Right. I think that was an analogy use, which I thought was a fantastic analogy because I caught up with him yesterday and he qualified that he said, it's the voluntary carbon market. Yes. Yes. Yes. Compliance markets are much more stringent and his words were, if you don't comply, you go to jail. It's a very simple kind of paradigm. But yeah, for voluntary is an art market, which is kind of interesting. But even more so has a lot behind us to talk to me about the thesis there. I mean, but even more so. So if you're creating instruments for a compliance market, if you're a compliance buyer, why like, and this is, I think Alexi Kelly said something similar about this one again on one of your previous episodes of like people who aren't in carbon, who get exposed to the sector for the first time, they have these moments, which is why are you guys doing this? How does this work? How they like how the heck build a business around this? And so that's the kind of stuff that if you're creating, sure, you can, you can run an art market for the voluntary market because no one goes to jail if they don't meet their compliance period. But when you start meeting or having these very strict obligations and deadlines, this industry, if it's going to hit its potential, needs to operate like a real business, like a real market with the tools and professionalism and infrastructure and efficiency that a market of that size requires. Right. And I think that's what we're trying to, we're trying to do our part to help make that whole, it happened. Hopefully, I like that. It's ultimately comes back to this concept, right? We're trying to deliver a mission reduction, avoidance, like removals at gigatun scale because of the magnitude of the problem. And if we stay in a very bespoke and kind of niche corner, then we failed in our mission. Right. And so now, now we need to harness without compromising the integrity, because that's integrals. But we baked that in as a core tenant, which we have now through carbon principles. And now it's about, it's about achieving scale. And I think systems like yours are really interesting and fascinating. Do you mind if we pivot just slightly? We've spoken before about this concept. And I really want to share it with our audience. And it's essentially the concept of time value of money and time value of carbon, right? Being interlinked. I'll set it up and then I want to get you to sort of expound on it. Right. But essentially the core idea of the time value of carbon at its first principles is essentially a ton of CO2 is not neutral to time. And when it is emitted or avoided, it really changes the impact on the climate system. You know, just as a recap of the context for folks that may be listening who aren't climate scientists. And I'm still in upper porting to be one. Climate change is driven by cumulative effect of that. That's very concentration of greenhouse gases. And it's not just the annual flows. So if we emit a ton today, it contributes to warming immediately. And for decades, depending on how durable that greenhouse gas may be, in the case of methane, it's longer duration than say CO2. But if we emit a ton later, we've effectively delayed that warming impact. Right. So two, with basically, you know, same concept is in terms of removals is later down the line, which suck it out of the atmosphere, which is a little bit more difficult from a physics perspective. But if we avoid a ton today, we prevent that entire cumulative effect. And so the concept around what I've been grappling with and what we've discussed before is avoidance today has got a disproportionately higher climate value because it prevents that cumulative warming. Right. And so I just I want to kind of frame that there. And then I've got a bunch of other points that I want to make around kind of the fashion cycles of the market. And we're in this one where removals are much hotter than avoidance credits. I want to get your thought on this time value of carbon concept. Yeah. Firstly, yeah, for sure. I mean, and listen, like, so my concept and using this frame for me is something that didn't just pop up overnight. I mean, I've been in the industry for over 20 years. And I would say that it's almost like a synthesis of my understanding of what our mission should be. What are we trying to accomplish? Right. And everyone who's in the space and in carbon markets should be focusing really around one goal. It's how do we remove or mitigate gigatons of carbon or other greenhouse gases? How do we mitigate the most of the bit largest quantity in the shortest possible amount of time at the least possible cost? That is what we should be driving to do. And so if I think of how for me this concept really crystallized itself was really starting my career sourcing forestry projects. It's kind of a funny story, but how I ended, if I think of where my journey in carbon started. I've been a geek on climate change since June or I. I think my first science fair project was on the greenhouse effect on acid rain. Sorry. And my second thing, your grade eight was on the greenhouse effect. So I've been, you know, this has been it's been near and dear my heart for a long time. But where I think kind of my viewpoint around environmental action really started was probably my my job, my summer job and how I paid my way through university, which is planning trees in Canada. And for people that don't know Canada, you know, most of the forested land in Canada is Crownland. So it's owned by the government. And so how that is typically done is every spring and summer, force your companies will hire, you know, hundreds of students, thousands of students to go replant trees. So you get paid by the tree. But if you plant that tree improperly, like you have to go replant that that plot of land. And so it's backbreaking work. It's the worst conditions possible. It can be snowing and 35 degrees on the same day. In some cases, the terrain is awful. The bugs are terrible. You want to plant the most the highest quality, the highest volume of trees in the quickest amount of time possible with the highest quality possible. It's going out. And so, you know, to me, like if I think of young people who are really passionate about climate change, to me, like that's the first piece of vice I typically give. Like there are some NGOs doing great work and that can be a path for someone. But if you really care about climate change, go get your engineering degree, go be a forester, go get your business degree, figure out carbon markets, but get involved doing stuff physically. And I think this time value of carbon concept for me and kind of where it kind of emerged was, you know, I spent, you know, summer around 14 years of blue source, large greenhouse gas project developer, generalist firm in North America. And my time there was fantastic. We were a generalist firm. We worked on pretty much every single project type you can think of ozone-depleting substances, outgas, biomass, forestry, methane mitigation, or geoficiency, DCS, you name it. We worked on it. So we got to work on some really cool stuff. But as I got along or went through my career, I think my focus started to sharpen around what am I doing? What impact am I actually delivering? And it kind of framed and where it crystallized for me was, I want to be as efficient as I can with the time I have left to have the biggest impact possible. And this is where the concept kind of just came up and thinking about time value of money and how, you know, an NPV is a calculation of what's the value today? So value is something today and something that is more certain is more valuable. And the longer something goes out, you've got to apply discount fractures. And it started thinking about climate. It's like, man, like if we do stuff today, it is far more powerful for the environment than something we do down the road. And then I started thinking about, okay, well, what is most important? And if you read the IPCC reports, if you understand the science, methane is at the top of the list. And why? Well, methane has, you know, it's a super pollutant, but methane is very interesting, right? It has a GWP value over 100 year lifespan of, you know, some people think it, I think the latest is I think we're up to 28. It could be a little higher. In the last, you see, see report, but over a 20 year period, methane has a GWP value of 84 to 92, I believe, or 86 to 92 times CO2. Why it has a residency period in the atmosphere that is shorter, but when it's there, it has a much bigger impact. So if you think of what we're trying to do today in, in climate, right? We've got these 2050 targets that most people have, where we want to get to Ned Zero by that time frame. So what do we need to do? We need to buy ourselves time, right? Because we are going to overshoot. And if you look at all the data, we're going to overshoot anyway. But why methane becomes so important? And this is an analogy from the electricity sector. But there's a concept called peak shaving, which is, hey, if you have periods of the day where you have higher load, if you peak shave, then you don't need to build more generation, right? Because you don't have to build to meet the peak. So if you shave the peak, then you require less generation. The same concept applies for climate. The next 20 years are absolutely critical. So if we reduce more emissions today, right now, specifically on super pollutants, specifically on molecules that have a greater forcing impact over the near term, like methane, we buy ourselves time. We buy ourselves time to bring along, you know, removals CDR, right? That is going to come down the road. It's going to take longer to build. It's going to take longer to scale to drive down the economics for that to really make sense. But what can we do today? So if we add a dollar, if you're an investor, and you're trying to get the biggest bang for your buck, where would you spend it? Right? So people think about investments that way, right? Where can I generate the highest return? And to me, this is why this concept needs to get more widely understood, not just in compliance markets, but also in the voluntary market, which is if you're serious about climate change, you need to understand the time value of money, and you need to look at your portfolio, what are you buying? And if you're just buying removals that aren't going to get built for 20 years or 10 years, and they're going to generate only a little bit amount of reductions, or you could spend that same money and get high quality methane mitigation today, that is far more powerful to the environment, right? So that's what you're looking to do, if you're trying to generate the biggest best return, right, from a climate standpoint. We need to invest in that near-term mitigation, the stuff that can actually move the needle today. And that's really kind of, you know, it's why, you know, my last few years at Blue Source, you know, we really focused on methane, at least the kind of stuff that I was driving around methane mitigation in the oil and gas sector, because that's where you get the biggest bang for your buck, not just the financial side, but in terms of results and outcomes, an impact, right? That's what losing. So I think that's how I understand the concept, it's really a frame of reference to have people step back, look at the greater picture, what are we trying to accomplish? And I know it's so easy, and I think for voluntary buyers, and I totally get it, right? Everyone gets deduced by the charismatic. And you know, the CDR community has done a fantastic job marketing what they're trying to do. Why? Because it's a great story, right? Whether it be enhanced rock weathering, or, you know, you name your pathway. It's a great story, right? You're going to be removing CO2 either from the atmosphere or some other means and story. But that's not enough, right? And there's a place for that. A place for that. Yeah. Right? I like your analogy around the investment thesis, because when you look at, when you look at portfolios today, across really large, let's say institutional vices, it's primarily in highly liquid markets. Most of it is in public equities. And then you kind of go up and you look at private equity, etc. But when you compare that to venture capital, right, the early stage, hard to do stuff, the quotients are far, far smaller. So I equate it in that context. Like we need to be allocating the capital today in a very prescient and like a fiduciary, right? To, like you said, to methodologies, technologies that are actually going to move the needle today in order to avoid more and more emissions going into the atmosphere, that should be the hierarchy. And this is a spouse in the Oxford, Oxford principles, right? Where you have this kind of transition effect. I think we've forgotten for the large part in the market over the last couple of years, this, this, this, this, this tenet. But we need to be avoiding those times before they go into the atmosphere. And at the same time, and I think that this is, this is certainly in the case with the sort of the, the large and very sort of prevalent corporate bias, like a Microsoft and Google and the Symbiosis folks. Also underwriting investments in other critical, other critical areas, like nature-based removals. And to a lesser extent, the really technologically difficult stuff that's nascent, like direct air capture, interesting hands-rock weathering, and then kind of coming down that scale around durability to the things like biochar, which are scalable. And there's, there should be a portfolio approach. That allocation is going to be subject to like the portfolio manager, but in this case, the corporate around their, their allocation risk. Obviously, the things that are much more scarce and where it's crowded tend to have a very high price premium. And so when, when you have a strong balance sheet and a really sort of large revenue versus sort of emissions profile, maybe you can go up that, up that kind of curve and start to underwrite some of those early stage opportunities and hard to do things. But if you're a big emitter and relatively lean margins, i.e. airlines, you're not going to be doing that. So the context here is really impressive, which is, yeah, focus on the things that actually deliver results today, focus on the things that you could do at scale with integrity, whilst doing it at lowest possible cost. And then you go up the marginal payment cost curve. It's just, it's a logical progression. Yes. So that makes a lot of sense. But I really like that framing around the financial analogy, right? Of like, you said it today, you know, in time value money, a dollar today is greater than a dollar tomorrow. And in this case, ton of order today is greater than the ton that's removed later. And then I'd say one last thing I'd say is to corporates who may be listening and folks that are influencing those corporates. Think about it purely from a, what does a corporate need when they're looking to structure off-tech deals? They're looking for price certainty and certainty around the supply, right? So like, it's the ten price that they're concerned about. And they do a lot of due diligence on projects in order to then, you know, find those projects that will end up delivering in the time frames that they need. 2030s in particular. What happens if there are issues with that future project? Like you said, the discounting component in finance. Yeah, those projects are not guaranteed to be issued. Maybe delayed because certification issues. And we started talking about that at the beginning of the conversation, right? With sort of the inefficiencies of a paper-based approach. And then there's geographic and geopolitical issues. And we're seeing that and living in a world that's dynamic with the whole raging today in the Middle East. And so, you know, you have to discount for those future values. So if you're a corporate trying to secure that supply for the 20s, why don't you do it from a distributor portfolio? But, but, but, skew it towards things that can actually deliver with a higher degree of certainty. And, and you can probably do it at a lower cost. And so, that's the, that's the broader thesis. And, and it's, it's not framing it in an avoidance versus removals context, but it's an end, but it's also sequencing, right? Avoidance and removals, but sequence the avoidance and prioritize that first. Then absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, you're 100% right. And I think, I think for us, you know, the way I look at this is, you know, and this is, this is, I think, somewhere where the voluntary market is kind of, I would say it's maybe had a negative impact, where it's introduced, you know, elements of charisma, you know, how charismatic is a project type? And, and this is where we move, this is where we go to the art market as opposed to, you know, a real market, which is, you know, what I think of offset quality, you know, the sum of, you know, the goal from my mining, if you will, to, to born expression from Steinbeck is, is really quality, the correlation for quality. High quality means for me is high quality data. How do you get high quality data? Those tend to be metered projects where you know exactly how much methane, for example, has been sequestered or conserved. So I flaring ass conservation, you know, from my standpoint. So one of the highest quality project types, because you know, exactly how much volume of gas you've prevented from being emitted to the atmosphere, right? Super high quality. But is it sexy? Is landfill gas sexy? No, but both those project types are methane. The impact for the environment is so huge. And I think that's one of the things I love to see happen in the voluntary space is getting that bigger, maybe reflection from players to understand, wait a minute. If I'm building a diversified portfolio, if I understand the time value of carbon and impact today is more important than impact tomorrow, then yes, everyone should have methane mitigation as part of their portfolio. To me, it's an absolute no brainer. And guess what? You're absolutely right. Brenne, it tends to be cheaper because it's not sexy. It's not seen to be as sexy. But some of those projects are the highest quality tons in the market. Have the potential. Sorry, they have the potential to be higher. Duncan, in fact, I had to hear him and Donna Lee on the on the podcast a few months back from K-Licks, a global. Yes. Duncan calls it the sort of methane projects like the ugly ducklings of carbon markets. But it's the The avoidance component is unimpeachable, right? The counterfactuals in nature-based projects are getting much better in terms of dynamic baselines and that sort of stuff, but they're difficult because they're dynamic systems in nature and highly variable. But in these infrastructure type of systems, you can, you can meet or you can overlay that with drone and other inputs that can actually show you the plumes of the methane and you can actually see that materially through that satellites as well. And so there is that correlation that, yeah, it's actually much more measurable. And like you said, the quality of the data then begins that higher quality of those credits. To your point, I just think, I think maybe we've round the corner after this, but it is, these types of projects have an important position within a portfolio. And it's again, bringing the financial narrative or the investment narrative. Like you'd be crazy not to have the S&P 500 represented in your portfolio. That's what this stuff is, right? You can invest in the next, you know, but when publicity lists, you know, you want to invest in that. It's like early stage opportunities, right? And everyone thinks that they'll pick that stock. But ultimately, you want to have diversification through an index in finance and in this context, you want to have diversification through portfolio management, but these types of credits have a real place in the world. Agreed. Conscious of your time, yeah, you send me a message earlier around some of the thoughts around what you want to discuss. I'm just, I want to get to the last point that you had sent to me, which was wanted to talk about sort of innovation coming from emerging markets, IE, the global south. I want to, I'd like to learn more about what you're seeing, because obviously from your side, you're working with number of project developers across the global south. So give us, give us some context and then, and then try to bring back the conversation around the rallies we're seeing on the ground. For sure. So, you know, I think it's been one of my biggest joys, you know, of being a carbonAIs that we we work globally. A lot of our work, a lot of our clients are in Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia. And when I was a blue source, you know, most of my focus was in North America. So I didn't get a chance to really get outside the country. And it was always interesting in IEA events. You get to meet, you know, the folks work down your own markets or, you know, back in the day, CDM, and it would always be very interesting with people in Madrid. That's what he meant. That's it. So one of my favorite nights. So that's been fun. But I think one of the most interesting things for me, most exciting things and why I'm excited, I think, about a greater role for the global south in carbon markets is around innovation. And the analogy I've used is if you think of the telecom sector, North America, Europe, you know, we, we had to build landline infrastructure, right? We put a lot of wire up, a lot of poles to basically deliver telephones or telecoms. And in parts of Africa, right, they've been able to skip landlines. They've been able to go straight to wireless or, you know, as, as my partner and our CEO at, at CarbonAi, Ryan Arson will talk about sometimes is we're able to go straight to satellite, right? And this is the great thing about carbon is that you have these countries, whether it be Nigeria or Kenya or Ghana, who are embracing technology, they're not beholden to this 20-year-old infrastructure, right? Yeah. It exists elsewhere that is almost sclerotic. They are looking at how do we achieve our targets? How do we attract investment? How do we ensure that we will win this race for capital to decarbonize our economies? How do we do this? And they're really embracing technology. And this is, I think, what makes me so excited about working with some of these great, great players in some of these countries, you know, I think a Papua New Guinea is another great example. The Philippines were just embracing, they're embracing, they're leaning into technology, they're not scared or they're not beholden to, well, this is the way we've always done things. So we're going to keep doing it this way. It's like, how do we do this? How do we scale? How do we do this quickly? How do we attract capital now? And so I think they're seizing this moment of, hey, we need to do this. We need to do it now. And so I think that to me is super exciting. And I think it's bringing different voices, different perspectives into the carbon market, which is always great for any industry. So I think that's one piece I'm super pumped up. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, I've actually seen that live and on the ground. And it's really interesting. There's lots of different analogies, but yeah, for context for folks that may not have traveled to sort of remote parts of the African continent, for example, your point is salient and not only did it occur with telephony, but it also occurred within financial systems like microfinance and ultimately like actual payment systems. But effectively, these economies did not, like you said, invest in the early technologies and then have to amortize those investments in infrastructure over time. They just basically skipped generations. And then they went from instead of having poles with wires across long distances where you didn't have a market and just couldn't stand up. And then they went straight to mobile telephony. They could have a tower every 10 kilometers or whatever it might be. And then it could pin various different cell phones. People didn't have landlines. They just went straight to cell phones. And then so you look at a country like Kenya, they've got 90-something percent adoption around mobile telephones in the country. It's been this incredibly democratic wave and process. And then you overlay the opportunities around financing, not every bank could actually set up a brick and mortar bank in these townships and these more towns and villages across the country. But instead then you had payment systems like an empec- -Yeah. -Mobile banking and you could pay somebody like you do in the U.S. Venmo, but they have it in Kenya and Pesah. And so they just skipped generations. They skipped the generation. It went from any of wires and copper wiring. And then with straight to mobile technology. And now many of them are actually taking advantage of satellites, like you said. We had a star link when we were in some very remote locations, just most recently in South Africa. And the hour takes away the disadvantage of distance. You could literally be anywhere in the world and still have communications anywhere in the world. So it's just this incredibly democratic process. I hope that we see that moment for carbon markets where the lessons of the past are still you know, you know, I think what we're trying to do this week in carbon is try to provide that platform, which is kind of like historical documentation. What we document and we just must say. And then folks don't repeat the mistakes of the past, but also that we can just bypass some of those technological infrastructures and not have to replicate those same mistakes. And just bypass the next generation, next generation. And I think we're seeing that. I think there's evolution of different standards and registry ecosystems like you're talking about how on your platform you guys are using the digital and my V tools. These are paradigm shifts in markets history. And I think we'll ultimately you had great results to the point around countries being welcoming for these technologies. Ultimately, the capital that comes along with them. That's the critical piece. I think for your country and countries can often times create perverse outcomes where they dissuade investment. Just case in point, one of my teams at carbon exposure needs to get to a project in India and the visa process took an in order out of time. It should be an easy piece to try to get folks there to be able to tell stories. For sure. Cool. So that was a great conversation. I really enjoyed it. Do you have any final comments, any final thoughts to share with the audience? Yeah, I mean, if I think like again, I've been in this industry a long time. As have you, Renee, and you know, I'm calling on the reason I'm still in it is it's kind of it's kind of a vocation, right? Like there's a mission here. Yeah, you know, we need some great people on that and purpose that exists in the market. People that are really smarter attracted to this space and they're full going. Yeah. But it's the big, the big checks that they could get in in some other industry with an tech or investment banking, but they're doing it because they feel that this is a passion. Yes. I can please subscribe. If we want people, if we want to attract people to the centers, which is really, really important. It has to be an industry that is sustainable that doesn't go through a crazy peak and then a crazy down cycle where you shed 80, 70% of the people, the companies in the space. And we believe the way you get there is by ensuring, you know, if you think of, you know, where the big drop off came in voluntary markets, I can think of of two really big scandals that happened. And it was probably the South Pole project in Zimbabwe, the second, you know, the sequest a scandal around cookstores. And you know, both of those things happened because of, I think, lack of transparency, lack of modern ability, not enough role-based governance around data. You know, sequester, very sophisticated company as was South Pole, but things happened. And why? I think they have the right checks and balances to ensure that the outcomes that they were generating were actually real. And so I think that's the thing that we're most excited about and how we're trying to contribute is to provide the tools to ensure that these emission reductions that we're creating are important, are in fact real. You know, I'm really excited about the work we're doing on clean cooking. You know, we're even in a low technology environment, which is, you know, rural Africa, that we can track cooking cycles on stoves. We can collect that data in a way that is super efficient and get very high quality data. And you can make a cook stove project from a quality of data standpoint equivalent to a meter project. That's that's really kind of what we're striving to do, right? And then that helps ensure the sustainability of that project type and allows it to achieve the potential that it has. But we can't keep having these scandals that rock the industry, the kill consumer and corporate trust in the outcomes that are being generated. So this is why we think this is existential. And the industry needs to adopt. We need to change. We need to get better. We need to ensure that we can scale. We can professionalize this industry so that what we're delivering is not going to be something that drops off every five years, but something that can continue to scale. People can stay in this in the long term. And we can help deliver the outcomes that we all need to generate. I think that's the exciting part. The global south, obviously, huge players. It's going to be a huge player in this. So we're really excited about that. Great. That's our, that's our outro. Thanks very much, Ryan. That was a, that was a, that was a must've last. I really enjoyed it as always. Enjoy our conversations and, and incredible insights. Thank you very much for making the time. I hope you enjoy your time in Green Bay. And look forward to having you back on the show at some point in time. For the audience, please, yeah, please give us some feedback in terms of what you heard today. I'd love to hear and have that dialogue with folks in the audience. But otherwise, click like and subscribe. Look forward to having the show come back next week. Cheers. Thanks again, Renee. Have a great evening. Thanks, man.