Carbon markets are at the forefront of climate action and the mobilization of carbon credits and offsets are critical — where each credit holds the promise of a greener future for the Great White North.

Join us as we unravel the intricate dance of mobilizing these markets — exploring the interplay of trust, transparency, and tradability — while navigating the delicate balance between economic growth and ecological stewardship.

On this episode, we are discussing the hype and reality of carbon markets, the innovation and clean tech that enables carbon removal and the climate action activities that markets need to finance. We’re joined by Michael Berends, the CEO of Clear Blue Markets, Phil DeLuna, the Chief Carbon Officer at Deep Sky, and leadership from Coastal First Nations, whose community is accessing carbon markets to help protect the Great Bear Rainforest — the first offset project in North America to be implemented on traditional territory with unextinguished aboriginal rights and title.

Links:

Learn more about Clear Blue Markets, here.
Learn more about Deep Sky, here.

Speaker 1 [00:00:01] Hi, it’s John here. When you hear the word market, what do you think? We know a farmer’s market is where you can buy farm fresh food. And a stock market is where you can buy stocks. And a flea market is where you can buy. Oh, never mind. You get the point. Markets are where people gather to buy and sell things of value. And those include carbon markets. Carbon markets are, in fact, all the rage in climate circles right now. And yet they’re not very well understood. So let’s start with a basic question. What on earth is a carbon market? They’re not a place to buy or sell carbon. At least not literally. But they are where investors and companies and each of us indirectly can buy a share of emissions reducing activities like tree planting or carbon capture or renewable energy production. Think of it as a place where polluters meet servers to determine the market value of climate action. The value of global carbon markets doubled in 2022 to more than $1 trillion. And when it comes to financing the climate transition, we’re going to need a lot more of these markets to take the baton from governments and move us from a tax and spend and regulate approach to more of a free market approach that truly puts an economic value on climate action. These markets have already helped finance wind farms and protected grazing lands all over the world, but they’ve also led to controversies over the quality of carbon offsets. Are all these projects really removing carbon from the atmosphere or just making us all feel good? And can the markets that are trying to price them with all that power and ingenuity actually take on the biggest challenge we’ve ever faced and mobilize the trillions of dollars that we’re going to need for all the technologies and human initiative to get us to net zero?
Speaker 1 [00:01:54] This is Disruptors, an RBC podcast. I’m John Stackhouse. On today’s episode, we’re delving into the intricate web of carbon markets to explore their legitimacy, the support they offer to some of Canada’s leading innovators, and how they can mobilize those trillions that climate action is going to need, as well as their role in helping communities preserve and enhance our land, forests and water. We’ll be joined by Michael Berends, the CEO of Clear Blue Markets, to talk about the hype and reality of carbon markets. We’ll also hear from Phil DeLuna, the chief carbon officer of Deep Sky. That’s the brainchild of Fred Lalonde, the founder of Hopper. But first, let’s hear from Danni Warren, an indigenous leader who’s working with coastal First Nations in northern British Columbia, where communities are accessing carbon markets to help protect the Great Bear Rainforest. The GBR, as it’s known, is not only one of the most stunning places on the planet, its preservation is essential to Canada’s net zero ambitions. Here’s a clip from our conversation.
Speaker 2 [00:03:01] The Great Bear Rainforest is located on the north and central coast of British Columbia. It’s the second largest temperate rainforest in the world. We are lucky enough to be the only indigenous owned carbon project in Canada. Carbon markets for us have opened up a massive door. It’s allowed us to protect the entirety of the project area and allowed us to bring in revenues that are helping people on the ground in community. In terms of scale, our alliance of nations that I work with is representation of eight different nations. No alliance of First Nations in Canada has been as big as we are and has sat at the table with their government and having real open ended conversations. We’ve created policies together. We’ve created acts together. We co-manage together. In terms of reconciliation, it’s massive. No other nation has been able to sign such a major sharing agreement with their government that allows them to own the assets 100% and then be able to sell them in a marketplace under their own right and their own well. And for our people, for our communities. They have that opportunity. They have the opportunity to actually be heard and to have a say, and input into how their community and their territories is really being managed. It means that we have a chair right there at the table.
Speaker 1 [00:04:16] The Great Bear Forest Carbon Project is the first offset project in North America to be implemented on traditional territory with an unextinguished Aboriginal rights. Danni’s work is what carbon markets should be all about raising capital from investors and companies, determining a market value and getting that capital to people like her and communities on the front lines of climate action. Our next guest, Michael Berends, is CEO and co-founder of Clear Blue Markets. It’s an award winning carbon markets company that works on carbon product deals, structuring strategies and transactions for offsets in more than 50 countries across all sorts of sectors, including nonprofits and governments. Michael, welcome to Disruptors.
Speaker 3 [00:05:02] Hi, John. Thank you very much. Really excited to talk about carbon pricing today.
Speaker 1 [00:05:05] Let’s start with some basics for those who need a carbon markets 101. There are compliance markets and voluntary markets. Can you give us a quick explanation of the difference?
Speaker 3 [00:05:15] Yeah, I think today a lot of what we hear being discussed is the voluntary market where you have corporate citizens looking to reduce emissions towards net zero. And that’s a lot of the discussion about offsets. However, I think what’s really driving carbon pricing over the years is the compliance markets, which are regulated by the governments and they impose a carbon price on emitters and emitters need to work within those regulations to reduce their emissions and pay a carbon price when they have to pay a carbon price. But a key part of that is that it’s a market and it’s a tradable market, and we’ve had those around for decades. The main one being the ETS, the EU, and we have those down in Canada of course, the carbon price across Canada, which we’ve seen has been very successful in driving emitters towards net-zero targets and reducing their emissions, which we need drastically today.
Speaker 1 [00:05:56] Yeah, as you say, this is nothing new in large parts of Canada. Quebec and British Columbia have both been pioneers in this. Alberta has carbon pricing, industrial carbon pricing and has for a number of years. So emitters, as you say, have to pay a price for what they pollute, but then they can find offsets for that. Can you explain a bit of how that works? If I’m an emitter and polluting, how do I go about getting an offset?
Speaker 3 [00:06:19] Yeah, it’s a challenge for emitters to make the reductions. We know working with emitters, it takes a while for them to make significant impacts into their installations. So offsets are activities that occur outside of a carbon pricing regime. So they their activities don’t have a carbon price such as forestry projects or bio gas projects and landfill projects that achieves the result of emission reductions and allows emitters to also comply with the regulations for a period of time. So the concept of using offsets, even for a voluntary market, is saying, I can’t make those changes today, I will make those changes. In the meantime, I’m going to use this tool called offsets where I’m going to support reductions which otherwise wouldn’t have occurred if I didn’t support that. Again, this not the long term solution. It’s a tool to get towards net zero as we look to make those reductions ourselves.
Speaker 1 [00:07:01] Why would I buy an offset in the voluntary market rather than the compliance market, which sounds more sophisticated?
Speaker 3 [00:07:07] In the compliance market, there’s less options available for those offsets. And the fact that they allow for only certain types of from certain locations because that program’s being able to manage it. These programs want to be have full control over the offsets and what they allow. Now, that’s one issue. I think. The other one is you’ll probably find the price is higher because the price is linked to the compliance price. It doesn’t mean it’s a better or worse. The fact is we take the view that all offset projects that we work with are coming from credible regulations and credible sources. That is, one tonne of CO2 is one tonne of CO2. So if you’re a voluntary offset buyer, there’s no reason to purchase from a compliance regime offset. There’s other offsets out there and probably other assets that are more likely linked to what you’re looking for. For example, maybe if you’re an ad company or if you’re in an oil business, you’re looking for oil sector offsets or other activities that you share, but also locations. Many of our clients have activities across the world, and they’re looking to support offset prices in those locations. So there’s different reasons why you may buy from the voluntary market.
Speaker 1 [00:08:11] There course been a number of controversies, a bit of noise out there around offsets, especially over the last year as prices have gone way up. How much of that is hype and how much is reality?
Speaker 3 [00:08:22] I’ll say it’s mostly hype, unfortunately. Lots of interesting stories, of course, that catch people’s attention. The voluntary market is not perfect, but I don’t think anything is perfect and will always be able to find some outliers there. But there’s no reason to blow up the system. I am extremely confident that overall even the voluntary market is doing something very good.
Speaker 1 [00:08:39] So I guess a key behind all of this is what’s called measurement reporting and verification. MRV, which gives people confidence, gives them proof that what paying for actually is happening and relies on third party validation, which has always been the strength of transparent, sustainable markets over the centuries. How is that sort of approach growing when it comes to carbon markets?
Speaker 3 [00:09:01] This approach and the sophistication, the technologies to do those measurements continues to increase. I can’t think of anything else that I could purchase today that I wouldn’t have so much information about that project. I can find out the location, I can find out the technology, I can find out the timing. I can find out who the owner is. The extensive amount of information available if someone wants to look into the offset projects, which I would never find for anything else, I wouldn’t find that when I buy my phone, I wouldn’t find it when I buy my car. Even the food that I buy, I wouldn’t know all the details about that. So there is this sort of contradiction about concerns about transparency, when in fact there’s more information about an offset project than you could imagine out there.
Speaker 1 [00:09:35] There’s been a surge in prices as well as demand really coming out of the pandemic. What’s driving that in your mind?
Speaker 3 [00:09:42] I think the pandemic brought to mind the fact that science is important and climate change is about science and accepting it. And unfortunately for many years, climate change became a political thing and not a scientific thing. And I think that changed when COVID was around and understanding. We need to understand the science behind this. And we realized that the science is telling us we’ve got a problem and this is real, this is important, and let’s do good things with the opportunities we have in front of us. And we really saw the markets, to your point, John, take off during the COVID pandemic.
Speaker 1 [00:10:10] And a lot of companies, of course, are getting more serious about net zero and they’re putting significant amounts of capital into this. You just think of the Apples and Microsofts of the world or Shopify, if you’re in Canada, I think it said it’s going to put $1 billion towards these sorts of offsets. Is there as much demand from communities and that kind of supply side of projects, if I can call it that, as we’re seeing on the demand side from investors and corporates.
Speaker 3 [00:10:37] Indeed, the demand for offsets was driven mainly by the ETS in the EU market. 1520 years ago they changed their rules and a lot of things changed the financial crisis, so it slowed down. Then of course the development of projects slowed down and we saw that direct lack of development as there was no price signal. But as we saw that demand come back, those companies that you mentioned and other, looking for sources that you saw the development side pick up as well. So there is the supply side. But what’s also very important to consider is as demand goes up and need for this and the price of carbon goes up, new technology will be developed and deployed to supply that demand. And that’s exactly what these markets are for. They’re there to create new technologies, new opportunities to capture emissions, for example, and that’s stimulated because of a carbon price. If we don’t have a carbon price, we won’t have those. And taking that back again to the compliance market, if there is no price signal for carbon on emissions, you won’t have these technologies being deployed in these significant industries which they cannot just stop without new technologies and this is what the price is doing.
Speaker 1 [00:11:39] One of the interesting aspects of carbon markets, at least in my mind, is the uncertainty around innovation. So we hear from all sorts of innovators who are developing new technologies. Carbon capture, as you just mentioned, and we’ll hear from Deep Sky shortly about what they’re looking at. Much of it is proven, but some of it is not proven and not proven at scale. How do markets manage that kind of uncertainty?
Speaker 3 [00:12:01] That’s definitely been a challenge in the carbon markets, is the certainty and it’s the regulatory certainty, the stroke of pen risk. Unfortunately, here in Canada, historically, there has been some certainly in regulation. And that has delayed investment and that is the struggle of the long-term certainty in knowing will your emission reductions be valued and can I make this investment say that I’ll get a return on five, ten, twenty years from now? That is changing. We’re seeing a lot of improvement. There’s been a Supreme Court case has show that the federal government can ensure that there’s a carbon price. That’s been great for the signals. We’ve seen a lot of our clients in large emitters make decisions after that result. And the voluntary market is a way of getting around that. That risk of uncertainty when we create our own certainty, as corporates saying we believe in this. We are committed to making investments because we know this technology is important. I’m not going to even worry too much about the compliance side. I will pay for that. But I’m committed and make making my own path. And I believe in the voluntary market and we should get rewarded for that. But we’ll invest in that. And again, also those companies you mentioned earlier on, they’re doing this as well. The Shopifys, the Amazons of Microsofts.
Speaker 1 [00:13:00] Many of those operators are very sophisticated that we heard from Danni Warren earlier, talking about what they’re doing in the Great Bear Rainforest. And it’s fascinating to think of communities in remote parts of Canada and elsewhere in the world doing remarkable things and being rewarded for that through carbon markets. What do communities like that need to think about when they think about global carbon markets and how they can benefit from them?
Speaker 3 [00:13:25] I’m glad you raised this. I’ve been fortunate enough to travel the world and have amazing experiences, but also to be there and talk about carbon pricing. And if there weren’t these markets, we would not be talking about carbon pricing and more importantly, we would not be looking at projects that reduce carbon and those communities throughout the world that are not sophisticated because that’s not their core business, but they’re looking for these opportunities. They need the support to understand that what is the market? They need strong partners to say this is how you can develop and get the most value out of your project to ensure that project is created. But again, that comes all back to the fact that there is a carbon price, a carbon signal, and there’s this incentive for things such as offsets to fight this climate crisis.
Speaker 1 [00:14:07] Michael, you’ve got a great global perch and through Clear Blue you see all sorts of companies and sectors. I wonder when you think about the year ahead or the years ahead, what you think needs to change most? What kind of innovations or developments are going to be most needed in carbon markets for them to continue to grow and succeed?
Speaker 3 [00:14:27] Yeah. As much as we and the co-founders have been doing this for 15 years, I feel like we’re just beginning and what needs to be done is one, I think the first thing is still get that regulatory certainty so these technologies can develop. I’d say the technologies are there today to make significant impacts. They just need to be deployed and needs to be trust in what we’re doing. To do that, we look at developing countries that didn’t cause the problem that the West caused this climate change problem by their economic growth. And we must allow other countries that are still developing to have that same economic growth. And one way to have them do that, but also not cause the same problem, is to help them avoid emissions, to say, look, maybe don’t build a coal plant, build the wind farm and we’ll give you an incentive so technologies will come. But we do have the technologies today that makes it difficult impacts.
Speaker 1 [00:15:09] That’s a great note to wrap up on, Michael. Incentives often drive innovation. Thank you for being on Disruptors.
Speaker 3 [00:15:15] Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure.
Speaker 1 [00:15:19] That was Michael Berends, the CEO and co-founder of Clear Blue Markets. Our next guest is Phil De Luna, chief carbon scientist and head of engineering at Deep Sky. It’s a Canadian clean tech company aiming to remove gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere while building infrastructure to scale carbon dioxide removal systems in a tangible way. Phil, welcome to Disruptors.
Speaker 4 [00:15:47] Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1 [00:15:48] You’ve had a remarkable career and it’s really just getting going. You’ve worked at Toyota and IBM. I think you were Canada’s youngest research director at the National Research Council. Now, you’re chief carbon scientist at Deep Sky. That’s a Montreal startup that just raised $55 million from VC investors. White Cap and Bright Sparks, the venture arm of the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, or Omers, as people may know it better. But Phil, what I love most about your bio is you call yourself a research capitalist. What is that?
Speaker 4 [00:16:20] Yeah, it’s a little term that I came up from myself. You hear about venture capitalists all the time and what do they do? They identify and find companies to invest in, to create value, to drive disruption. I think of my career as looking at how do we use science and research and innovation to drive disruption. And so when I was at the NRC, I was essentially overseeing a portfolio of programs to disperse public funding to help innovation. When I was at McKinsey, I led carbon tech for the sustainability practice in Toronto. And I was helping investors, incumbents and innovators deploy capital to turn innovation into action. And now I’m at Deep Sky, where I get to essentially find the best technologies in the world to capture CO2 from the air in the ocean. And then I get to bring them to Canada and scale them. So it’s about as good of a term as I could find to describe my career.
Speaker 1 [00:17:14] It’s a beautiful description, and I’m just thinking venture capitalists meet research capitalists. That’s a great intersection. Carbon capture, maybe the hottest tech out there as it allows us to take carbon either out of the air or to capture it at source. Phil, wonder if you can tell us a bit about Deep Sky’s research vision and what you’re hoping to achieve in this great kind of space race of carbon capture that we’re seeing all over the world.
Speaker 4 [00:17:41] Yeah, for sure. I always like to use the analogy and to describe the nuance between point source capture, which is capturing it out of flue stack at a steel mill versus what we’re doing, which is carbon removals. And the difference is imagine that the atmosphere is a bathtub and CO2 is water and it’s overflowing. You have about two that overflow and you can do two things. You either turn off the top or you pull the plug. Point source emissions is turning off the tap, pulling the plug. That’s what we do. That’s carbon removal. And the reason why we need to do this is that there is a very sizable amount of our economy that is impossible or difficult to electrify. Transportation, cement production, steel production. And then on top of that, there is a lag with warming and emissions. I often liken climate change and COVID and the pandemic to be very similar. Both have lagging indicators. In the pandemic, a death was a lagging indicator of infection, a lag time of two weeks. In climate change, temperature rise is a lagging indicator of emissions. But the difference is it’s decades. Just because we stop emitting completely. The world still has this baked in warming, 10 to 50 years worth more warming. Now, that’s why we have to remove CO2 from the air. So I wanted to start with that before I dove into what Deep Sky is doing. We are a technology agnostic, project developer and owner operator of the infrastructure to remove CO2 from our air and from our ocean. We don’t develop the capture tech ourselves. We develop the projects and the plants. We looked around and we said there are no technology agnostic project developers in the market. We are going to service that need. And that’s exactly what we’re doing.
Speaker 1 [00:19:24] This sounds in many ways like a basic matching service, which we see all the time in our lives. Whether it’s for travel or finding hotels, is just matching supply and demand as efficiently as possible. And then no surprise that Deep Sky grew out of Hopper, which is Fred Lalonde, a great Montreal innovator and disruptor who we’ve had on the show in the past. Hopper is the back end of a lot of what we all participate in, which is buying airline tickets. Connect those dots for us. How did the group go from Hopper to Deep Sky?
Speaker 4 [00:19:56] Yeah, it’s a great story. So Fred Lalonde and Joost Ouwerkerk, who are the co-founders of Hopper, a few years ago started offsetting the emissions of their customers by planting trees. They planted, I think, over 30 million trees over three years. And they got criticized by activists saying, oh, this is greenwashing, this isn’t enough. And this was around the pandemic. So they had some a little bit of extra time to dive deeper into climate. And the deeper that they dove, the more scared they got. And they realized two things. Number one is that all of the models that we use to predict how warming will happen, are wrong. They don’t take into account tipping points. These are these one way doors that once you cross them, it’s very difficult to come back. An example being once the Antarctic ice sheet melts, it’s not going to come back tomorrow. If we stop emissions, it takes millions of years for that ice sheet to grow. That’s a one way door. That’s a tipping point. So they realized, one, that climate models are wrong. Two, planting trees is not enough. We actually have to remove carbon dioxide from our atmosphere, mechanically. Trees take 10, 30, 40 years to reach maturity before they really start pulling CO2 out of the air. And so, there are many reasons why we should plant trees and we should continue planting trees for environmental reasons, for habitat restoration, reasons for ecosystems and biodiversity. But emissions reduction probably isn’t the best way to do it.
Speaker 1 [00:21:21] Phil, as you said earlier, there is a lot of debate about the energy required to take carbon out of the atmosphere. You’re a scientist. Help us laypeople understand the math of using all that energy. And does that really net out in a positive way that’s worth all the investment that’s going to be required?
Speaker 4 [00:21:40] So the first point is that the only way you can do any of this is if we have renewable electricity, low carbon or low carbon electricity. So it’s solar, that’s wind, that’s nuclear. The second piece is that every new technology has iterations. They always start way off, way less efficient than they become. So a lot of folks who say, oh, carbon removals or direct air capture technology is super energy intensive and it will never scale. They’re assuming that it’s going to scale at just this energy intensity. The first generation of carbon removal technologies rely on heat really, really high heat. So what we’re doing at Deep Sky is we’re looking for technologies that don’t need heat or if they do need heat, they only needs low grade or heat that can be produced with electricity. So the number one thing that we’re looking for in technologies that we bring to Canada is can it be electrified? The second thing is, is there a pathway to low energy intensity? To give you a sense. The current technologies that rely on heat are about 4000 kilowatt hours per ton of CO2. So it’s a measure of energy per ton of CO2 captured. We want to find technologies that are a quarter of that 1000 kilowatt hours per ton of CO2. Once you find these technologies and once you scale them, once you start getting down that cost curve by deployment, then not only does it become more economically advantageous, but it also increases energy efficiency.
Speaker 1 [00:23:01] Phil, you’re a materials guy, and I’d like to pick your brain a bit about all the assets that we have in the world to capture and store carbon. But the company is called Deep Sky. So let’s start there. Why is Sky in the name?
Speaker 4 [00:23:15] Really there are a couple of thoughts storing CO2 deep underground, taking the carbon and storing it back to where we found it. So that’s the deep part. And then the sky is removing it from the sky, yes. But also, thinking about the vastness of our atmosphere of what we want to do to protect it. It just felt like a good marriage.
Speaker 1 [00:23:36] That is a good marriage. Tell us about the power of both rocks and sea, because Canada’s got access to a lot of rocks and a lot of sea. So how do we harness those to get carbon out of the sky and deep into the earth where maybe it belongs?
Speaker 4 [00:23:51] So to answer this question, I have to take a step back and talk about our natural carbon cycle. If there were no humans in the world, and if there was no industrial activity, there would still be CO2 that goes from the ground into the air, into the water, into the ground, into the air, into the water. That’s our natural carbon cycle. Rocks play a role. Ocean plays a role. Rocks, for example, deep underground, there are these reactive minerals that when they get exposed, react with the air. I’ll give you an example. Limestone, everything that we use for cement and building everything, the calcium in the ground, which is a metal, when it hits the air, it reacts with CO2 and it forms calcium carbonate limestone. That natural capturing of CO2 by a rock, we can engineer that. We can create reactors that do that faster by playing around with the size of the rock so there’s more surface area so they can touch more CO2, so we can grab it. On the ocean, a lot of people don’t realize, but the ocean is actually the world’s largest carbon sink. And when we put CO2 into the air, when we admit it because of fossil fuels, we also create acid acidification in the ocean. We’re taking CO2. We’re putting into the air that CO2 is going to the water and making it into carbonic acid, making it into Coca-Cola. And so in order for us to reverse that, we also have to remove CO2 out of the ocean.
Speaker 1 [00:25:14] Phil, someone’s got to pay for this at the end of the day. And maybe this is where research capitalist meets the venture capitalists. What’s the economic model that’s going to make this sustainable?
Speaker 4 [00:25:24] It’s actually very simple. We remove carbon dioxide from the air, the ocean. We generate a carbon credit and then we sell the carbon credit to customers. Because in the short term, it’s the voluntary carbon market, meaning it’s large corporations who have set net zero by 2050 goals. And I’ve realized that it’s going to be very difficult for them to meet them or they have scope three and diffuse emissions that they can’t address alone because they don’t have control over it. Or they’re visionaries like Microsoft who have said that they’re actually going to become a net negative and remove every historical ton of emission that they have emitted as a company since they were founded.
Speaker 1 [00:26:06] One of the concerns that we’re talking about on this episode with respect to carbon markets is how can people be sure of what’s happening? How can we verify that a company or an operator or an innovator is putting carbon back into the earth and that it’s staying there? As a scientist, how are you thinking about that dilemma and what kind of error rate, if I can put it that way, should we be comfortable with? Because if we wait for perfection, we may run out of time.
Speaker 4 [00:26:33] Exactly. No, that’s exactly right. And actually, that’s one of the theses of Deep Sky. We are moving fast and we are purchasing pilots from companies that are barely a year old knowing full well that many of them are going to fail. But that’s okay because we’re going to learn. To us, that’s the cost of discovery. So your question about monitoring comes down to this term monitoring reporting and verification, MRV. And there are different pieces of this, right? We know how to monitor gases and look at fluid flow. Reporting and verification is a little bit more difficult. How do you ensure that the reporting that you do is transparent? How do you track a molecule from start to finish? How do you ensure that you’re audited in a way that is fair, third party and reliable. At the end of the day, in order for this entire industry to succeed, we need carbon removal credits to be extremely liquid. We need them to be tradable. We need them to be transparent and trusted. So from a scientific perspective, it’s actually quite easy to measure this stuff. It’s all of the business and economics and regulatory infrastructure that needs to fall into place.
Speaker 1 [00:27:38] Phil, before I let you go. I want to come back to that word discovery. It’s a very powerful and beautiful word. What do you hope to discover in the next few years in this space?
Speaker 4 [00:27:47] Frankly, I hope to discover all of the failures along the way, because hitting those failures quickly is actually much better than half measures and cautioned approaches, when we have this urgency of climate change, breathing down our back. So to me, a success is we get as many failures as quickly as possible, and maybe we’re going to burn a lot of investment doing that. But when we hit that success, it’s going to make up for everything.
Speaker 1 [00:28:16] What a great message, Phil. Makes me think that disruptors discover. And that’s a good call to action for everyone. Thanks for your discoveries and thank you for being on Disruptors.
Speaker 4 [00:28:25] Thank you.
Speaker 1 [00:28:27] That was Phil DeLuna, chief carbon scientist and head of engineering at Deep Sky. Today we heard from three very different people about the realities and ambitions of carbon markets and how important they are as a tool to fight climate change. Phil told us about the need to accommodate technology risk. When we think about climate action, there’s a lot of technologies out there that are working and we need to finance them at a scale that they’ve never been applied at before. That’s a different kind of risk for many investors. And carbon markets are going to have to figure out how to price that. Michael told us about the need for regulatory certainty. That’s pretty important these days as governments think about what’s working and what’s not, when it comes to climate action. And Danni reminded us what this is really all about, which is people and planet. The work that she and the communities around the Great Bear Rainforest are doing has to be front of mind when we think about carbon pricing and carbon markets and what we need to do collectively over the remaining years of this decade to mobilize the capital. The people all over the country and around the world are waiting to put to work. Until next time. I’m John Stackhouse and this is Disruptors, an RBC podcast. Talk to you soon.
Speaker 2 [00:29:54] Disruptors and RBC podcast is created by the RBC Thought Leadership Group and does not constitute a recommendation for any organization, product or service. For more disruptors content, visit rbc.com/disruptors and leave us a five star rating if you like our show.

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