A Climate Change with Matt Matern Climate Podcast

The lack of clarity and guidance coming out of the nonprofits that have appointed themselves as the arbiters of what’s good enough and what those standards look like is causing a lot of confusion. I was a hippie kid in a logging town.

Alexia Kelly, she’s currently managing director of the high tide foundation. She’s also been a former director at net zero plus nature at Netflix. She’s a specialist in carbon markets, climate finance and policy solutions, worked at the US State Department and helped negotiate Paris agreements in 2015. That’s not going to happen under this administration, by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s going to happen. It’s just a matter of time.

You’re listening to A Climate Change, this is Matt Matern, your host. I’ve got a great guest on the program, Alexia Kelly. Alexia has done a lot of different things. She’s currently managing director of the high tide foundation. She’s also been a former director at net zero plus nature at Netflix. She’s a specialist in carbon markets, climate finance and policy solutions. She worked at the US State Department and helped negotiate the Paris agreements in 2015 so a wide ranging set of responsibilities and career. So welcome to the program, Alexia.

Thanks so much for having me, Matt. Great to be here.

I always like to go back to the origin story of what brought you to this area in the beginning, like childhood or adolescence, whatever.

So I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, actually out in rural Oregon. I was a hippie kid in a logging town, which meant that I lived the tension between natural resource conservation and extraction, the impact that had on ecosystems and livelihoods. And so really always grew up with a strong interest in environmental issues.

It was not until I was in graduate school or undergraduate that I realized that you could actually have a career working to solve some of the challenges that I grew up facing and feeling like were really much bigger than I was and so ended up going into urban planning, spent a summer in Europe learning about everything they were doing there between my first and second year of grad school, and realized both how far behind the United States was and also how urgent the climate crisis was. And so came back and said, This is what I’m dedicating my career and my life to.

So I’ve worked in and around the climate change space for more than almost 20 years now, which is hard to believe, turn around twice, and here we are, but it’s been a fascinating journey, and I think their base has moved a lot. We’ve made a tremendous amount of progress, but we have a lot farther to go as well.

Tell us a little bit about your journey to the State Department and the negotiating tables at the Paris accord, that must have been a pretty heady experience.

Yeah, both really pivotal moments, I think, in our climate change action globally. When I was coming out of undergrad, I was trying to decide whether I went straight to DC and clawed my way up the policy ladder, you know, starting out kind of as an intern, fresh out of grad school, or wanted to work in a smaller market and gain some experience, and was fortunate enough to secure a position at the climate Trust, which was actually the first regulation of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.

So in 1997 the state of Oregon passed a law that required new power plants that were built in the state mitigate a certain portion of their CO two emissions. And one way they could comply with the law was by making a lump sum payment to an independent, qualified nonprofit, who would then go out and invest those funds into emission reduction projects. And so I ended up, not on purpose, but just by accident, sort of getting into this greenhouse gas accounting and carbon market space, because we were literally writing the first methodologies for how you go through and quantify the impacts of mitigation actions broadly.

And I think I just got the bug, because as challenging as carbon markets are, I still don’t see a path to how we mobilize large scale climate action without really making sure that we have the fundamentals of greenhouse gas accounting in place, right? We have to know are the things we’re doing to try and mitigate climate change actually working. What net impact are they having, and how do we verify and make sure that that mitigation outcome and that climate impact persists over a very long period of time? And so that really has been the project of carbon markets since the very beginning.

So I was there for about three years leading our work on policy. And this was, you know, right, when the California cap and trade program was getting stood up and designed the Cal the Global Warming Solutions. Act of 2006 passed AB 32 and that really precipitated kind of a whole move towards what we thought was going to be federal regulation. And so after three years leading the policy program at the climate trust. I was recruited to join the World Resources Institute, and it was right when we were really getting serious about federal legislation, and so I picked up and moved to DC to go work with Congress on how you design a cap and trade system for the US. We never thought that that would be our last bite at the apple, but when wax Matern Murphy ultimately failed in the Senate in 2011 I got very interested in working internationally.

It was always a dream, and I had never had the opportunity to do that. And so the position at the State Department came up, and I was brought on to help design and implement a program called the enhancing capacity for low emissions development strategies under the Obama administration, which was kind of our flagship climate focused international development program. So we really designed that. And then our carbon markets negotiator at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change got recruited to be the climate finance negotiator overall.

And they said, hey, you know something about carbon markets. Here you go. And they dropped us, dropped me off in the chair in Tianjin back in 2010 and we spent six years negotiating the Paris Agreement and really trying to make sure that we got the emissions trading rules, what ultimately became Article Six, right? Well, that’s

a fascinating story and really cool that you got to be, you know, a player in in such an important piece of world history. So I guess maybe tell us a little bit about the negotiations. And from that standpoint, I think that’s a fascinating piece of this whole puzzle, and maybe it gives us some ideas of what we might have to do going forward and in terms of the next round of negotiation, I guess, reading the Paris accord as a lawyer, I looked at it and I was kind of surprised that it was so short, and I was thinking, Oh, this thing is filled with loopholes.

It’s a great kind of statement, like a Declaration of Independence, that, hey, this is what we are aiming for aspirationally, which is valuable. But as a lawyer, just feel like, I don’t know if I could hold anybody’s feet to the fire really effectively with this document.

Yeah, and that was not an accident. You know, while it is a legally binding international treaty, the way in which it was written was necessitated both by the need to get it ratified by the US Congress, and by the fact that, in order to kind of level the playing field and to bring developing countries to the table, and to get all countries kind of making a commitment to contribute to solving the problem, we had to really loosen the aperture on what approaches companies might be taking to do to undertake climate action and to implement what ultimately became nationally determined contribution, contributions.

So they are called nationally determined contributions because they are nationally determined, right? So every country decides for itself how much emission reduction effort, how steep their targets are. Obviously we’re doing kind of calibration and global stock taking to understand how well we’re doing relative to what the science and the IPCC is telling us is necessary in terms of scaled emission reductions between now and mid century. But it was an absolutely fundamental kind of prerequisite that from the us’s perspective, and I think some of the other major emerging economies that we had everybody at the table, right?

So the US was not going to negotiate a deal that did not have India and China and South Africa and some of the other rapidly growing emerging economies that were major emitters as well at the table and contributing as well, largely because that had been one of the big things that had hung us up with Kyoto in terms of getting congressional approval and acceptance of the deal. So the Paris Agreement is really a normative agreement. It is, you know, in essence, guidance for countries around reporting and is the framework we’re using to catalyze action and aligned kind of work globally. But it’s much lighter touch than the previous system under Kyoto, and the the oversight and transparency mechanisms are there, and they are robust, but they do not function the same way that they did under Kyoto by any stretch of the imagination, right?

Well, the irony is, we were concerned about China not to getting to to move the ball fast enough, and. And they are doing it on their own faster than we thought, or they thought, and they’re maybe hitting peak emissions this year, which is earlier than it was expected, and I think it’s due to kind of market forces that they can do. You know, have cheaper electricity with solar and wind, and the market is really going to dictate this more than goodwill and tree hugging sentiments, that either we win the technology war and and make this cheaper and more efficient for everybody, or we don’t.

And I think China is a good example of they are doing it. They’ve got, I think I read today, just they have 100 or 150 electric car companies. I mean, it’s just crazy, like the ton of competition they are really doing. And, you know, kind of putting Tesla, you know, to shame, because of the effectiveness of of just the technology and which will cut China’s demand for fossil fuels dramatically, and have a lot of good benefits down the road, like maybe hurting Russia’s wartime economy.

Absolutely, I think it’s interesting, because one of the things that people talk about less in the context of the negotiations, but is the role of technology. We actually have a whole negotiation stream dedicated to IP around technology. And how do we do technology transfer in a systematic way from developed countries where it’s mostly developed and invented and rolled out to emerging economies where they really need it. And the investment that the US government made for decades in scaling and testing and innovating on renewable energy technologies through the National Renewable Energy labs and the DOE, the full network of DOE labs, really helped, I think, lay that groundwork for solar and wind and now even solar and batteries to be the least cost resource on many grids around the world.

And I think a lot of that early investment by government and by strong policy in building the technology in the United States has had just incredible knock on effects in other markets and other places. And with China’s you know, production and industrial base, they’ve just been able to pick up all that and run with it, right? And that’s why they are so far ahead. I think at this point on deployment, they’ve also been building coal plants right at a rapid pace as well. And so as I think the developing countries grapple with how they grow in the context of climate change, and how they transition a system where we now have a lot of new fossil fueled assets that have been constructed in emerging markets.

You think about China, you think about India, you think about Vietnam, who’ve invested heavily in their coal system because they have coal domestically, and it was the cheapest. It’s not anymore in most instances, that whole transition is going to be a whole other set of things that we’re going to have to solve for as we think about the economic transitions in many of these markets, and so it’s really interesting to see that global interplay. And how do we put those systems together in a way that they work more effectively to enable that virtuous cycle of innovation, technology adoption, scaling and then global deployment?

Well, I want to go back to something you said earlier about the accounting piece, my bean counter brother would want to hear more about accounting. And I think that it’s kind of fascinating. I think you framed it well in terms of, at the end of the day, we’ve got to account for this stuff and know what’s the best solution. And kind of take off any kind of biases that we might have and say, Hey, what really works, and what is moving the needle? And tell us more about, hey, how you have done the accounting. How is it getting better? And maybe, what are the things that you see are the most effective?

Yeah, it’s a great question. And one of my favorite topics, because greenhouse gas accounting, I think, used to be one of those things where it was, you know, a small, little backwater of about 40 people globally who would sit and have long, intense discussions for many, many years about how all this was going to work. And has, really, I think, in the last few years, taken center stage, particularly as we’ve pushed more of the accounting into the voluntary space and on to the greenhouse gas inventories. So greenhouse gas inventories, of course, are the estimated emissions of companies and countries and municipalities using a variety of sources to help us understand, okay, this is these are the emissions that I am responsible for based on my business operations, or based on my geographic boundaries, or based on my governance and territorial oversight functions.

And so that piece of the puzzle has become incredibly important, and I think we’re in a real moment now where with the focus on so called direct decarbonization versus market based decarbonization. Maternization or carbon credits. We’ve heard from a lot of folks that there’s this sort of, in my view, misinformed sense, that if it’s a greenhouse gas inventory, it is the infallible ledger of truth and a reflection of real mitigation and a reflection of real reductions. And if it is in the carbon credit market, or if it’s in a market based solution through a different environmental attribute certificate market, then it’s greenwashing garbage. And we really have to get past that conversation, because it’s just not an accurate reflection of where we are with greenhouse gas accounting broadly.

And I think it really hurts our ability to design an interoperable system that does what we need it to do, which is to do a good job of measuring emissions the best we can, and also a good job of measuring the outcomes of the mitigation actions or the things we’re doing to address the climate crisis and reduce emissions overall. And so these two systems have to work better together. And the science based targets initiative, for example, has sort of said, and they’re the first target accounting system in the world to try and do this. Has said, we’re going to try and do all of our greenhouse gas accounting in the inventory, because we think that the inventory is the real ledger of emissions, and we don’t want any of this other stuff out there. Now. Side note, it is very important that companies focus on decarbonizing their supply chains.

So no one is saying that that’s not an important priority, or that they shouldn’t be doing it. But the line gets pretty fuzzy between, you know, is it one supplier removed? Is it two suppliers removed? Is it three suppliers removed? That’s considered in value chain versus out of value chain, and where are we drawing those lines of responsibility and of emissions measurement? And that’s really the conversation we’re having both at the greenhouse gas protocol through the update process there, and at the science based targets initiative as they try and define what robust Net Zero targets look like. And so hopefully we’re turning a corner on that. And I think folks are starting to realize that at the end of the day, these are all emissions estimates and measures.

And I know we want to talk about the role of AI and remote sensing, and I think that’s a really important new development in this space, but right now, we rely on pretty rough estimation tools, kind of across the board, to do greenhouse gas accounting and measurement, and so we have a lot of work to do to continue to build out those systems so that they are the most accurate reflections of both our greenhouse gas emissions sources and sinks and the most accurate reflection of mitigation actions and their impact that we’re undertaking.

So you believe that these mitigation techniques and the carbon credits are a necessary thing going forward? And I guess the related question is given that what which ones do you think are the most effective, if you had to say.

Yeah, I absolutely do. You know, if you think about the way in which commoditized supply chains work, for example, right? There’s no getting away from doing market based accounting, because it’s not going to be possible for me to put a solar panel on every single building that I own where we can and where it makes sense you should do that. But in other instances, you’re going to have to invest in a larger solar facility that’s, you know, either attached to your grid two counties over, or maybe even on a different grid. If what we’re really focusing on is the net emissions impact of our actions, right? If we’re focusing on impact to global atmospheric emissions levels. So carbon credits, and not just carbon credits, but other environmental attribute certificates as well.

So think about sustainable aviation fuels, think about renewable energy certificates, all of the things that we do to measure and move the emissions impact of different interventions in different places. That set of systems has to work better than it does today, and it’s going to be absolutely essential to scaled action and to making sure that we are pricing the externalities of the economy in a way that drives real change. So I’m a I’m a vocal and sort of unapologetic advocate for market based approaches to solving environmental problems.

I think we’ve seen that they can be incredibly efficient and effective, and it’s really hard. So there’s been a lot of noise, and there’s been a lot of criticism, some of it legitimate, some of it less legitimate, and that in the last two to three years has really unleashed a wave of change in the carbon market and a set of reform efforts, largely driven by the integrity council for voluntary carbon markets.

So I don’t know if you’re familiar with the icbcm, but what the icbcm was established to do was to both identify and address some of the quality issues in the market, to create a standardized threshold, benchmark, standard for what quality looks like in the voluntary market, and to help us really chart a path forward on. Where the market needs to go, because the history of the carbon market is that people knew these things were happening. It was highly fragmented.

It was completely unregulated, and it still mostly is unregulated for the voluntary market portions of it, and what that’s resulted in is a bunch of nonprofits sort of standing up, saying, hey, there’s a gap here. Somebody needs to fill it. So we’re going to take a run at actually measuring and issuing certificates that reflect the impact of these actions that are being implemented. That’s what we call the standards and registries in the market. So think of names like Farah and the climate action reserve. Those are all examples of registries that operate in the market.

We have more than 60 different standards operating in the carbon offset space right now globally, which, in my opinion, is a huge problem, but there’s only one standard that represents the vast majority of issuances to date, and that’s Vera which has been significantly beleaguered, but also kind of at the forefront of just figuring out, like, how do we write these methodologies, how do we quantify the impact of these actions, and what does that look like?

So this quality benchmark threshold that we’ve developed, there’s a two tick process under the ICBC. The first is what we call a CCP eligibility check, which means that we go through and look at the governance of the standard to make sure that it conforms with the requirements of both the icbcm rule book and corsia, which is the international rule set for the aviation sector, which is the first and only globally applicable sector specific climate change mitigation policy that’s ever been successfully adopted. And so we check to make sure that your governance systems are in place. And then we go through and we look at the methodologies that the standards have developed to make sure that they conform with our rule book, which we call the assessment framework.

And so that two tick process, if you have a CCP labeled credit, that’s the kind of mark of approval of the icbcm, and that tells you that that credit represents really kind of the best available science and methods for measuring the impact of these emissions, and we’re starting to see the impact of that take hold. So we’re seeing significant increases in pricing benefits for CCP labeled credits out in the market. But we’re only, I think, about a third of the way through right now, so we’re definitely not all the way through the review process, and there’s a lot of work to do still to continue to build those norms and standards across the market. Huge progress.

Well, if any listeners didn’t quite, you know, understand all of that, I feel like I’m on the same page, or that’s a lot to digest. And no wonder why people’s eyes glaze over with, you know, it is a complicated stew, and, you know, you’ve been studying it for years, so obviously you can rattle all this stuff off at a moment’s notice. But like, for normal people, this is like, you know, going way over everybody’s head. So how are you going to put this into plain English, for the love of God. Alex, kick by not, you know, persuading anybody with, you know, the torrent of information and acronyms is, is too much. Give me a simpler, digestible, you know, put, you know, thing we can put up on social media, and people actually get this.

Well, that herein lies the challenge with all greenhouse gas emissions accounting, I think, you know, and even after 20 years, we’re still struggling with, how do we say this in a really short, understandable way? Because it is so complicated. You know, the carbon market covers every sector of the economy. It covers, sort of every emissions mitigation action you might undertake, and it’s incredibly diverse. So what we’re working to do through the work of the integrity Council, is really set that threshold standard, right?

So that everybody agrees that for landfill gas mitigation projects, or for a forestation and reforestation projects where we’re planting new forests to pull down carbon, or for high global warming potential gasses, so methane, hydrofluorocarbonated gasses, like HFC 23 those types of mitigation actions have one rule set that everybody’s using and agrees represents the right answer. Because right now, we have about 40 different rule sets. So really, what we’re doing is pulling them together into one so that we can all say, yep, this represents the best available science and the best available methods and data.

Are you saying this would be globally or nationally?

Globally applicable? And I think one of the things we were going to talk about was just this convergence of the regulatory and the voluntary. And this is a good time to talk about that a little bit too, because, as I noted before, you know, a lot of what happens under the Paris Agreement is largely voluntary, and it leaves a high degree of discretion up to the various countries and how they want to design their programs and whether or not they participate or engage in international emissions trading. And so what that means is that there’s a lot of countries.

Right now that are implementing the rule set that just got agreed under Paris for how all this is going to work, all this complexity and acronym filled jargon, this rule set, they’re working now on writing their own rules domestically for how this is going to move forward. And many of them are looking to the icbcm and some of this international best practice to help inform Okay, here’s the rules. So the goal with all of this is to get to a globally coordinated and interoperable market that really enables us to unleash the power of the private sector and to get money flowing into the lowest cost mitigation actions that meet our high integrity standards as quickly as possible.

That makes sense. We meet standards in which everybody agrees, and then then capital will follow the standards, and companies can follow a clear set of directives. Hey, this is what works. That’s right. This is what we’ve agreed upon, and this is what we’re going to follow exactly when it’s too complicated a company is just like, Where the hell do we go? What’s there’s, you know, so then do nothing, or maybe do the wrong thing. Yes, tell us a little bit about your current role as the managing director of the high tide Foundation, and what what that foundation does, and what your role is within it.

So the high tide Foundation was established by it’s a family office philanthropy focused exclusively on the climate crisis. It was established about 15 years ago and focuses on a wide variety of interventions. The primary focus of the foundation is on methane mitigation. So we’re a primary funder of carbon mapper. Helped get the global methane hub stood up. So really looking at what are these big swing issues that we know have a really meaningful impact on slowing climate change and eventually, hopefully halting and reversing it, and then also a focus on carbon markets.

So I lead our carbon markets work. We started the carbon policy and markets initiative about two years ago, coming out of my work in the private sector. So I was the director of net zero plus net plus nature at Netflix, where I really saw firsthand, sort of the collision of the real world implementation that companies were struggling with on their mitigation actions and on their climate strategies and the rule set, right? So all of this accounting stuff that we’re talking about is now becoming the thing that is really slowing down action for companies because they don’t know what counts. They don’t know what they’re allowed to count the things that they can actually do in the real world. There isn’t clear guidance for how they measure it and how they report it.

And so we’re at this real inflection point right now in this space where I think there’s a lot of companies who are more committed than ever, and even under this administration, we’re still seeing them stay the course and remain committed to these really ambitious targets that they set, the net zero goals and other goals out there where they’re looking at making really significant emission reductions and investing hundreds of millions of dollars to decarbonize their operations, and that is a really good thing.

And we really need to make sure they all stay in the boat. But the lack of clarity and guidance coming out of the nonprofits that have appointed themselves as the arbiters of what’s good enough and what those standards look like, is causing a lot of confusion, and it’s causing a lot of companies to sort of say, well, until we know what’s actually going to count and what we’re allowed to report, we’re just going to make small investments, or we’re going to wait and see, or, you know, well, we did a thing and then we got drug through the mud in the media for it, or attacked by an NGO. And so maybe we’re not going to do that thing. We’re just going to stop doing anything and wait until the rules become clear and all of this blows over.

I, you know, have this sort of weird mishmash of skills that includes the jargon filled deep technical, greenhouse gas accounting, walkery and then having also the lived experience of being a sustainability executive trying to do this work in the real world. And so we stood up this epmi program, the carbon policy and markets initiative, to really try and bridge that divide so that we can come up with those really good high integrity rules that make sure that those high integrity rules and standards actually work in the real world.

So I just joke that I’m a professional board member now that’s most of what I spend my time doing is sitting on advisory committees, having deep conversations about, okay, what are the accounting rules, and how do we align them? And how do we get everybody working together? And how are we going to make this whole system hang together so that we can go from cute, artisanal, backwater, that sort of bespoke to like, scaled, fully integrated into the mainstream economy, set of systems and actions.

Now, do you see companies that are that are bigger and more sophisticated, such as Microsoft and Apple and the like, just doing their own thing regarding mitigation, regarding net zero goals, and saying, hey. We, you know, we’d love to comply with your rules, but we kind of, we got this a little bit and and they’re just moving ahead.

I think there’s some of them that are willing to do that, and have been doing that successfully. When you talk to them behind closed doors, you know, they all say we would really like some clear guidance on this from third parties, in part because, as we’re thinking about moving into more formal and structured and regulatory and legally binding reporting requirements, you have to be able to say that you’ve had a third party auditor look at everything you’re saying. So right now, what companies are reporting in their ESG, we call them ESG, their environmental, social and governance reports.

You know, there’s no standard for what goes in those reports. Everybody does them differently. They tend to follow the greenhouse gas protocol rules for the inventory piece, but that’s really the only piece that’s standardized in any kind of official way. So you can get your inventory audited right now, and you can have, you know, ey or Deloitte or whoever your financial auditor is, come in and look at all those numbers and say, yep, you followed the rules. And here’s our swamp of approval that you reported this information accurately.

But you can’t do that for the numbers you’re reporting for the actions you’re taking, for example. So that’s a problem, right? Because if I’m going to put things out publicly, and I can’t either substantiate it publicly or point to a third party assurance, I as a CFO at a company, I’m not going to want that to go on my 10k and I’m not going to want to disclose that to regulators, because I can’t be confident that that information meets what would be typically required For financial accounting purposes, right?

And just for the uninitiated, 10k is essentially an SEC report that has to be filed quarterly regarding kind of all kinds of financial things and legal issues and all that and and it seemed as though the SEC was leaning towards putting environmental things as part of disclosures, and now that has evaporated. In the last six months, I haven’t followed Europe as closely, and I thought they may have been requiring this for their publicly traded companies, and I’m not sure if anyone else is.

Yeah. So Europe is, there’s a number of countries that are in the middle of writing disclosure requirements and guidance for large companies. Europe is certainly leading. They have the corporate sustainability directive and reporting requirement that was passed a couple of years ago. It’s now in the middle of substantial revisions based on, you know, big kind of far right political backlash in Europe as well. And so what we’re seeing is kind of, I think we swung way to the left and had big, long, very detailed sets of requirements that we were asking companies to comply with.

And everybody kind of said, Whoa, hang on. This is too much. So now we’re back in really looking at, okay, what are the core things that we really need companies to be reporting on, what’s most important and how is that going to progress? Obviously, the SEC has stopped advancing its greenhouse gas support reporting rule, which we were working very hard on under the Biden administration. So that’s not going to happen under this administration, by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s going to happen. It’s just a it’s just a matter of time. I think climate risk is going to start showing up in much more meaningful and impactful ways as climate change continues to accelerate and increasingly, companies are realizing that they just have to start paying attention to these things as part of their core business operations.

Well, clearly, a number of the oil companies are being sued, one by a former guest on the program, who is suing Exxon regarding their the hurricane and hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, and alleging that the greenhouse gas emissions from all these major oil companies exacerbated the hurricane, causing more death and destruction than otherwise would have occurred. And there’s now attribution science, which can causally link their conduct, the oil company conduct, to the exacerbation. So they’re facing real risk at a trial with jury members slamming them very, very hard, so they better start disclosing these risks to their shareholders, or, you know, they’re going to reap the whirlwind.

Quite frankly, I think ultimately, they’re going to be wiped out legally because of, you know what they’ve caused. I mean, at the end of the day, the fact that Exxon knew this back in 1982 or earlier, that their conduct was causing, or would cause, all the global warming consequences we’re seeing now, I mean, is is going to line them up for a punitive damage case at some point in time? It’s like the smoking cases. It’s going to happen. It’s. Just a matter of time as to when it’s going to happen.

I completely agree, and I think one of the developments that I’ve been particularly excited about is the climate change super fund Act, which passed New York State in took effect in December of 2024 and what that law does is basically calculate damages and requires fossil fuel companies to pay into a fund that then is specifically earmarked for adaptation and resilience measures as a result of the harm that’s been caused by emissions from fossil fuels. California has been trying to pass one of these laws for quite a while. It actually just failed in this legislative session.

But there’s a number of other states that are looking at this as well, and I think man of one of the things that we can do to raise desperately needed funds. You know, I have zero problem returning two or 3% less tax on shareholders and redirecting those funds to repairing some of the damage that fossil fuel pollution is causing. And, you know, really using those resources to help vulnerable communities, rural communities, frontline communities, adapt to what is you know, as we’re seeing in Texas in real time, you know what is an increasingly dire situation with with respect to the impacts of climate change?

Well, tell us a little bit about your role at net at Net Zero and Netflix. And what was it like working at a big company like that, and one that I think is pretty socially conscious, obviously, they hired you to do this, but what were some of the real world problems that you faced, and why did you move on from that position?

Yeah, we actually started working with Netflix because they had come under pretty significant shareholder pressure to stand up a sustainability program. So kind of of the entertainment and technology companies that are headquartered on the West Coast, Netflix was relatively late to the game. They didn’t stand up and start thinking about a formal sustainability program until 2019 and so it was this incredible opportunity to help build a sustainability program at a multinational company. From the ground up, we did the first greenhouse gas inventory, we set the first science based target.

We designed the net zero plus nature commitment, which was the most ambitious sort of climate target that we could imagine, and that was comparable with with our peer group at that point and that whole exercise, it was the first time I’d ever worked with non sustainability professionals. So I’ve been in, you know, deep, long land for most of my career, and it was, I have to say, both humbling and eye opening. So to your point, you know, we live in this jargon filled incredibly complicated sort of landscape that is almost impossible to find your way through unless you have three years of training to understand what in the heck people are talking about.

And so as I was trying to communicate the importance of climate change, it really became clear that a not everyone eats, sleeps and breeds climate change, which was something of a shock to me, embarrassingly, just sort of assumed that that was what everybody does all day long. But also, you know, I think there’s a lot of interest and willingness to act, but a lot of inertia in the system, particularly for people whose core business is not delivering the sustainability objectives of the company, but is getting their job done, and they have ways that they’ve done that job for a long time that present very low risks for them. All of those jobs are built on fossil fuel based inputs, right?

Like the whole global economy runs on fossil fuels, it touches literally everything that any company does just about anywhere. And so explaining and figuring out, okay, where are the interventions that are really going to matter, and how do we do the hearts and minds engagement and strategy for people who maybe honestly, just don’t care that much, or don’t think it’s a real problem, or have been told by their boss that they have to think about this stuff, but they don’t really want to, because they’re busy and They have a job to do, really figuring out how you connect the urgency and importance of this work without sounding like the crazy lady in the corner waving your arms the sky is falling.

You know, was a real education to me, and so I feel incredibly grateful having had the opportunity to work there. And you know, the CSO of Netflix, I’m a Stewart is doing an amazing job shepherding the company through, you know, what is now one of the most ambitious sustainability programs, certainly in the entertainment industry, if not, you know, in the broader fortune 500 but my I’m a policy person by training and by nature, and I really wanted to be able to get back to working kind of in the public interest, and being out there and advocating for the systems and policy change that I saw was really holding us back at Netflix from being able to do the work at the speed and scale that we wanted to do it.

So that was really the impetus for launching cpmi and for digging deep, back into greenhouse gas accounting wonk world, so that we. And try and chart a path forward that gets us moving again and enables companies like Netflix and others to really make the enormous contribution they’re making to the to the economic transition.

Well, tell us a little bit about the goals that you developed at Netflix, plus nature, and what was the plus nature part of it.

So nature is essential. And I think this gets a little bit back to the question around, what are we doing to mitigate climate change? Broadly, right? It’s an atmospheric problem. It’s a dispersed pollutant. So an emission that I make in India is the same as an emission that I make in the United States, and from a mitigation impact perspective, an emission reduction that occurs in India is the same as an emission reduction that occurs in the United States from an atmospheric perspective, from a supply chain decarbonization perspective, it’s a whole different Matern for a lot of companies, you know, Nature doesn’t touch their supply chain super directly in the way that it does, at least not, certainly not in the entertainment industry.

You know, if you think about ag or timber companies, obviously, nature is the basis of their entire business and supply chain, but it’s not something that you go to right away, and it also presents some of the lowest cost, largest scale opportunities we have, not just to address the climate crisis, but also to make sure that We have the food systems and the clean water and the clean air and the cool air, you know that’s required in order for humanity to continue to survive and thrive. So integration of nature into any company strategy is something that that I highly recommend and maintaining that focus both on let’s do the hard things.

Let’s spend the money on the deep decarbonization, as well as identifying the least cost, most available, ready to scale mitigation opportunities. From an atmospheric stabilization perspective, is what that type of target gets a company. It kind of gives you the best of both worlds. You get to do the hard work and decarbonize your supply chain that we need everybody doing, and you get to drive a real impact that has incredible benefits around the globe for communities that otherwise are mostly left behind from this whole process.

Well, tell us just some concrete examples about what what Netflix did in terms of their nature program, and maybe a win or two that they had regarding reducing emissions, directly or indirectly.

I actually can’t talk publicly about the deals we did. They don’t so it’s a little hard to I can’t dig in. I can talk generically about sort of what we’re seeing in terms of deals, but I can’t share specific specifics of deals. So one of the big, I think, interesting trends that we’ve seen emerge recently is around a couple of deals that involve nature. So there was recently a deal that was announced between meta and Microsoft and a timber management company called EFM that was the purchase of 68,000 acres of degraded land in the Olympic Peninsula in the state of Washington that will enable that enabled private sector funds to come in on the back of the long term purchase commitment that meta and Microsoft offered.

And that deal is a great example of how corporate leadership in carbon credit purchase and retirement and support for nature is actually transforming the way in which we think about timber management, for example, which is a huge issue where I live in the Pacific Northwest. So over time, as the market Matern, what we’re going to see is much, I think, many more deals like that, and an opportunity to really scale and grow investment in nature as an integrated part of a portfolio of actions that companies are taking to help make progress towards Net Zero targets, both for their supply chains and for the globe more broadly, and just for the uninitiated, I think 68,000 acres would be over 100 square miles.

So that’s a pretty good, pretty significant, yeah, there is one of the deals I was actually just in Kenya a few months ago visiting one of the projects that I had purchased when I was at Netflix. We had a fairly large carbon offset portfolio that I helped construct. You can check it out in our ESG report. But one of the projects was the Chula Hills project in the Maasai region in Kenya, and we got the opportunity to go out and see that project. It’s a million acre project.

Wow, yeah. I mean, it was just we were up at the top of the hill, and the guides said, Look, do you see that mountain on that horizon and that mountain on that horizon? Like, that’s the scale of this project. It has no fences, and it’s one of these projects that’s totally community driven. Depends entirely on carbon credit revenue. Provides clean food, clean meals for you know, 100 schools a day, protects the freshwater drinking source of the city of Mombasa, which is a city of amazing. Million people, they perceive 40% of the fresh water for that community, and that was just like a byline in the description of the project when I was diligencing it right.

And so I think people forget that really, what carbon markets are is a mechanism to get money from where it’s sitting in the global north to where it’s going to have the most impact, both from a climate perspective and adaptation resilience and community benefit perspective all over the world. And that, to me, is why this market is worth investing in and getting right, and why, you know, we keep fighting for it despite all the noise and the drama, you know, and the chaos in the in the media. Because I’ve just never seen anything else that works as well, from getting money where it is now to where it needs to be in a verified and efficient fashion.

That’s a very impressive byline you should put in your resume. My God, that’s over 1000 square miles, I think, absolutely enormous, insane amount of land and what impact in a extraordinarily beneficial way for the world. You know, you must be doing great work at your new job to put that work that you were doing in Netflix if, if putting 1,000 square miles away wasn’t good enough for you, we’ve got like plans, and we’re actually in the process of putting together what we’re calling the verified carbon market roadmap, which is a real vision for the future of the market. So how do we move it from where it is today to where it needs to be? And our goal is to deliver five gigatons of abatement globally by 2035 so we want to be out there. Tell us what that means in…

Yeah, so 5 billion tons is about 10% of the annual emissions of the globe on an annual basis. So it’s a significant increase from where the market is now. Last year, the market was valued at about $750 million so it was much, much smaller than that. And we, you know, Vera just hit a billion tons a couple of years ago of issuances in total over its entire 10 year life. So we’re really pushing hard to advance, accelerate and scale, but to do so in a way that is based on systems and methods that we know is going to deliver us the atmospheric impact and integrity that is so critical to designing these markets and getting them off the ground.

Well, Alexia, I appreciate your time that you’ve given us and the education. It’s going to take a little bit further education to really follow all these things down the rabbit hole. But you know, just appreciate your great work and in moving so many important initiatives, both at your work at Netflix and the State Department and the Paris Accords and now your new gigs, it’s tremendous. And so love to keep in touch and tell everybody where they can find you and follow what you’re doing and contribute to it.

Absolutely you can find me on LinkedIn. I’m there and quite vocal. And really appreciate the opportunity to chat with you, Matt. And thanks so much for the work you guys do on this important podcast. And looking forward to continued conversations.

Okay, fantastic. Well, thank you, Alexia, and we’ll, we’ll keep in touch, and everybody go out and follow Alexia and and I guess engage with this on a company level. I know our company has has done that recently, just to measure our missions, and that’s a challenging process. And I think just kind of looking under the hood versus kind of ignoring what’s under the hood, which was our prior position, and then the next step is to actually go out and try to mitigate it directly. Some of it is maybe more easily mitigated, and some of it a bit harder. So then we’ve been looking at carbon markets, and where do you buy carbon credits, and what are the best ones? And it’s a challenging process, not super easy.

No doubt, but it is definitely an incredibly important part of a balanced climate action strategy. So thanks for doing that, and happy to help folks figure out how to engage.

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