‘Ask Me Anything’ Sessions Launched in Nori’s Discord Community
We kicked off the AMA Series with Nori Co-founder Alexsandra Guerra at the mic.
There is so much to learn when entering the world of Climate, Carbon Removal, and Crypto. Nori is lucky to have a (growing!) team of dedicated, curious, and motivated individuals who all bring an element of expertise to the mission of reversing climate change. We call these folks the Norinauts and are honored to share their knowledge base with you.
If you haven’t met me yet, my name is Cale, or Mycaleum in the digital realm, and I am one of the Community Managers at Nori. I am responsible for supporting and enriching the Nori Community and consider it my privilege to learn from this powerful team on your behalf.
To this goal, I launched a weekly ‘Ask Me Anything,’ Or AMA, Series in Nori’s Discord Server to give the Nori community a chance to chat more openly with our team. The first interview for this series was with Co-Founder and Demand Team Lead, Alexsandra Guerra.
Alexsandra, or Ale, is at the core heartbeat of the Norinaut team and supports Nori’s development in many different regards. You can follow her twitter to stay up to date with her rapid fire mind. This AMA was held live in the Nori Discord Server on July 28th, 2022 and we shared the recording on Youtube afterwards for all to access.
For those who prefer reading over audio, I’ve included a transcript of the AMA Session with Ale below. Without further ado, I am proud to present the first Nori Discord Session with Nori Co-Founder Alexsandra Guerra!
Note: This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Please introduce yourself, your role at Nori, and the broad definition of what Nori does.
My name is Alexsandra Guerra, they call me Ale for short. I’m originally from Miami, Florida. And for those who have not been to Miami, it’s right at sea level. As a teen, I recognized that sea level rise was a threat to my home and I have since made it my career to address this issue. I spent 17 years studying environmental engineering at Columbia University, and at the University of California, and focusing on climate change and decarbonization of the grid and clean energy. I was wanting to start a business around carbon removals specifically for a few years and after three years of trial and error, I found the right team with the right idea and we’ve been working on Nori for the last 5 years. It’s been a wild ride!
Where we are at right now is that we closed our Series A Fundraising a few months ago and hired additional team members bringing us to 25 now and we’re continuing to grow. We just launched our Discord a little over a month ago and it is great to see so much interest in what we are doing at Nori. I would love to learn more about what brought people together in our Discord and what they find interesting about Nori.
What is the scope of your day-to-day operations as Co-Founder and Demand Team Lead?
To be honest, as a Co-Founder I still wear many, many hats so yes I lead the Demand Team, but a lot of what I do is outside of that direct scope. In terms of the Demand Team, I really work with partners and customers who are looking to pay to remove carbon from the atmosphere and engage their customers and communities in that story.
I believe many people have likely heard that we are working with STEPN. As one of our partners, they pay to remove carbon every month. Their whole mission is to get people to be more active and move more with their own feet and offset carbon emissions with Nori. I love STEPN and continue to use their app!
(Read more about the Nori x STEPN partnership here!)
What are your thoughts on the recent bear market environment?
I think bear markets (or declining markets) are almost like a clearing, or forest fire, where some of the brush gets burned out and you’ll see the true use cases make it through. I believe Nori is one of these survivors. We have been working for the last five years to create a carbon removal marketplace and we are very driven. Projects like us will survive with mission-driven momentum.
In general, Nori is helping reverse climate change. More specifically, how is Nori making this happen?
Great question. There are many ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere. I hope people are familiar with some of them. You can plant trees, you can change the way you farm which is what Nori has been focused on. There are also industrial ways to remove carbon front the atmosphere, such as Direct Air Capture with large fans moving air over separating materials. Whether it’s a natural form of removal or a more industrial approach, we are looking to allow anyone who is removing carbon to get paid for that removal.
Right now we are working with farmers who practice regenerative agriculture. These are methods to work the land that help make the soil healthier by improving the soil organic matter which essentially means that carbon comes from the atmosphere into plants via photosynthesis and then into the soil where it is stored. They enter into long term agreements with Nori to continue to adopt practices that would sequester carbon in the soil. We get all this estimated by a third party tool that quantifies how much carbon is being removed from these practices.
What do these practices look like? The biggest impact is tillage, or plowing. By using machines to rip out old roots for new seeds and exposing this soil to the air a lot of carbon is emitted into the atmosphere. But we don’t have to actually do that! We can use alternate methods to plant seeds and leave the organic soil matter undisturbed. We are currently primarily focused on these improved methods and getting farmers paid. We have had over 15 different farmers paid over $1.3M in additional revenue for sequestering carbon in their lands. The more farmers get paid, the more their colleagues and neighbors will see the benefit of adopting these practices. This benefits the farmers, the soil health and the atmosphere! Win-Win-Win!
Do we find that many farmers are used to these methods and it’s just our platform that is unique to them? Or are many new to regenerative agriculture opportunities?
Less than 15% of farmers are adopting at least one type of Regenerative Agriculture practice. We are working with pioneer farmers who are innovating in how we grow food. They experiment with different methods on their lands to find what makes sense for them and how they can keep the soil protected and retain its organic matter. It is definitely not a given at this time.
Angela Knuth, the most recent farmer to submit NRTs to the Nori marketplace, experimented with planting Alfalfa within her corn fields. This is not a common practice but she wanted to continue exploring different ways to increase the soil quality on her land. Her neighbors may roll their eyes at first but in the long run, they notice her increased soil quality, crop yields and additional revenue from Nori!
Does Nori require farmers to adopt specific farming practices, all of them, a few, etc?
The way Nori works is we partner with a third party tool, a data model, that estimates how much carbon is being stored in this soil, on this land, at this time. This means there are inputs that go into this model such as what did I plant, where was it, how did I treat the soil in terms of tillage, types of fertilizers, irrigation methods, liming…there’s a lot of information. Farmers have to enter 20–30 years of operating data. This can take anywhere from 2–6 months to complete. With that in mind, we aren’t practice based. We get all the information and allow the data model to make its estimation on stored soil organic carbon.
The regenerative agriculture farmers Nori is working with currently are all U.S. based but anyone on the planet can purchase Nori Carbon Removal Tonnes (NRTs), correct?
Even though the carbon is being sequestered in the US by farmers here, anyone can pay for Nori’s carbon removals. We actually share purchase general location data to highlight where each of these carbon credits is being retired. If you visit Nori.com/registry, there is a link that says view sales history and this will show a picture of the globe and where credits are being retired. We have removed 86k tonnes of Carbon based on US farmers but only 53k of those tonnes have been retired by individuals or organizations in the US. The rest were exported to Hong Kong, Finland, Australia, there is no limit!
So global problems inspire global communities?
Mmmmhmmm! That’s what we are really aiming for here at Nori. With the Discord and everything, how do we get people involved? We want to share information together. We want to collaborate together. We even have to acknowledge what our limitations are because the state of technology is such that we are limited. There isn’t a perfect way of accounting for how much carbon is being stored in soils… yet. But we use whatever is available now and promise as a thought forward company that we will continuously improve.
In this spirit of collaborative discourse, and particularly from our Discord community, we are hoping this will be the fertile soil that will help to allow lots of seeds to be planted in terms of different methods of carbon being removed, allowing different types of people to be paid for removing carbon across the globe and allowing more folks across the world to pay for that carbon to be removed. We call those the buyers and suppliers. Suppliers do something to remove carbon from the atmosphere and generate NRT supply into the Nori Marketplace where they are sold to buyers such as STEPN.
Can you speak more about the different types of buyers of carbon credits? Who is helping to fund these carbon suppliers?
Yeah, it’s kind of all over the board but to be honest, we have been focusing mainly on the Web3 space because we see so much adoption and very close philosophical alignment. Nori is doing things very differently from legacy carbon markets. As such, our customers need to be comfortable with pushing the envelope and our new approach. When we spoke first with corporate organizations, there wasn’t an initial appetite. Web3 projects like the Sandbox and Rarible and innovative artists like Imogen Heap are the pioneers. The intersection of culture, art, entertainment, Web3, NFTs, crypto, that’s the space we are looking to serve right now! I don’t think we will ever get bored.
What is an NRT?
A Nori Removal Tonne. It represents one tonne of CO2 removed and stored for a minimum of ten years. It is the commodity that we sell. Say STEPN or the Sandbox are responsible for 300 tons of CO2 emissions from their operations, they would need to purchase 300 NRTs to account for this footprint.
(You can check out the Nori FAQs for more in-depth information on NRTs.)
What does it mean to retire an NRT?
This is a common term which comes from the legacy carbon market lingo. It indicates the non-transferable condition of a carbon credit. In legacy markets, you can purchase offsets and maintain the option to resell them later on. When you retire them, that’s when you have told the registry this is counted and you would say this is now “retired”. Nori has immediate retirement, there is no exchange of the NRTs between buyers. We believe every dollar spent on carbon credits, or an NRT, should result in removing additional carbon from the atmosphere and not on simply speculating on the price of carbon. We do not want to see the increase in the circulation price of these assets without contributing to the removal of more carbon from the atmosphere.
Nori’s next steps?
First we wanted to build the Nori Carbon Marketplace, which we have done. Next we are going to launch the $NORI token which is something separate. The $NORI token is a fungible token. If you visit Nori.com/token, there is a really nice image that illustrates the NRT coming into the marketplace on one side and the $NORI token exchanging on the other side. The $NORI token can be purchased and held. It doesn’t represent any actual carbon but is redeemable for one NRT at any time. You could buy the $NORI token, hold on to it, sell it later at a higher price, that’s the $NORI token, it’s fungible. However, once you use one $NORI token to purchase one NRT, that’s it. The $NORI token goes to the supplier, or farmer in this case, and they can choose when and whether they would like to exchange that for fiat in a Balancer pool for example.
(Alpha Alert! Learn more about the $NORI token here!)
What is the reasoning behind the dual asset approach versus the typical single asset we’ve seen so far?
Ok, two part answer here.
Price transparency. If I were to ask you what the price of a barrel of oil is, you would google it and find a clear, transparent price for this. If I were to ask you to do the same for a tonne of carbon, you wouldn’t know. There is no clear answer. We need transparent price discovery on carbon removal so that we can commoditize removing carbon from the atmosphere at the same scale we are emitting it.
The second thing is an added benefit that by separating the NRT from the price discovery asset, $NORI, you allow farmers to sell their NRTs immediately on production, no matter the current price set for the $NORI. This means they won’t hold back their carbon supply, or NRTs, from the market because they won’t have to wait for a higher price for the NRT. They can immediately exchange their NRTs for $NORI and hold the $NORI until the carbon price is more favorable for their desire. If we are only using cash and offer $15/NRT, a farmer may not want to sell at that price and then we experience stuck supply. They continue to hold their supply credits for favorable pricing and this does not incentivize new carbon credits to be produced. So you separate the two things. $NORI and NRTs allow suppliers to immediately provide their carbon credits to the market while allowing them an opportunity to participate in potentially rising carbon credit prices. This helps prevent suppliers holding back credits, which would also age into less desirable vintages for each year held back in a price bottleneck. We are creating a flywheel effect of farmers being paid the day they create supply.
Here’s a question from the audience. Would you anticipate Nori’s long term approach as being purely a marketplace, meaning Nori would allow submission of carbon removal projects not managed or found by us or would Nori want to continue remaining very active on the supply side?
The whole business model is indeed to be a marketplace though we do expect to be very active on the supply side. We are still a young startup with a strong learning culture and we will always have a culture of adaptability and innovation. We will always be a carbon removal marketplace however, with regards to how projects enroll and the involvement of the community in creating new methodologies, we do plan to be a little different from how we’ve done it in the past.
I heard news that we are founding members of the newly launched Carbon Business Council. It seems like we are quite involved in how the tone of this industry develops. What are your thoughts?
The whole idea is to get people involved across different industries and make commitments to either remove or mitigate their carbon. We have a saying at Nori to Emit Less and Remove the Rest. This means to do everything you can to reduce your emissions. This is key. Whatever your remaining carbon emissions are after these strides and efforts, pay for removing this carbon. Anybody, any individual, any organization can remove carbon. Just head to Nori.com and click the yellow button that says Remove Carbon. We are currently taking pre-orders but as soon as supply comes online, we continue to issue credits out to those folks.
(Learn more about Carbon Business Council here!)
Well it seems you have done a great job here today as there are no additional questions pending in chat. Do you have any parting wisdoms, thoughts or alpha on wen $NORI token?
Two things!
I encourage you all to remove your carbon footprint. The average American produces about 16 tonnes of carbon emissions per year so go to Nori.com and you can pay to address that. If you are a business owner, take some portion of your budget to pay for removing carbon. This is a real problem guys, climate change is a thing. We can only move the needle forward when people start taking responsibility for it. So please do that.
Second thing, wen $NORI token? Stay tuned in our Discord. It won’t be for a couple months so don’t get too excited just yet but we will let you folks know here in the Discord first when the $NORI token will be available in the Balancer Liquidity Bootstrapping Pool.
(Follow the latest Nori news by joining the Nori Discord!)
Last question! What does the Nori International timeline look like, just ambitiously in thought?
I would not feel comfortable saying that at this time. My colleague Radhika, our head of Supply and Methodology, would be the one to know. I don’t believe there is any plan or statement for any region that we would expand to just yet. We have spent the last couple of years focusing on Regenerative Agriculture in the U.S. with U.S. based farmers and we are only at the tip of the iceberg in that method and we need to grow the impact there. Once we are able to get that going as well, we can move on to other methods but I promise you all we will let you know. We are always looking to talk to people working on carbon removal projects and explore if there are easy ways to work together and possibly import those credits. This has not happened yet but we are open to those conversations.
Thank you to Alexsandra and our audience for today’s participation. We appreciate everyone’s interest in learning more about Nori and how we can all make a verifiable difference and reverse climate change together. Have a wonderful day and we’ll see you next time!
