What inspired you to work on reversing climate change?
In early 2015, I read an article about the depressing situation in which climate scientists were finding themselves, and I started questioning whether there was a way to make the whole problem go away. I used to be a climate skeptic, actually. I didn’t deny that the planet seemed to be warming, but rather that the 3% of CO2 emissions that humans are responsible for were actually enough to make an impact. It wasn’t until after I read a (fantastically entertaining) trilogy of books by Kim Stanley Robinson about colonizing Mars that I began to understand just how serious a small percentage of increased gases in the atmosphere can be. My education is as an engineer, so I think about problems in terms of solving them within an acceptable range. I looked around and saw that most everyone working on anything related to climate change was just trying to mitigate the effects. I asked myself, why not try to reverse it completely? Why not try to undo the emissions that have already been released into the atmosphere?
Why did you start the Carbon Removal Seattle Meetup?
During the summer in 2015, a friend introduced me to a Simon Sinek TED talk about what motivates people to support a business, cause, or organization. “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” I knew that if I was to try to embark on such a large challenge of reversing climate change, I’d need a lot of help from people who know far more about it than I did. So I planted a flag in the ground and formed the meetup as a way to attract people who were interested in figuring something out about removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. I modeled the meetup after the Homebrew Computer Club, the early Silicon Valley group of computing and electronics hackers who spawned companies like Apple. My goal was to build an organization that would foster the growth of new for-profit businesses that were focused on reversing climate change.
Why did you start Nori?
For a couple years, I experimented with different potential business models both as real physical experiments and as thought experiments. Working with others in the meetup group, we tested ideas including CO2 capture in HVAC systems, using passive sorbent materials in consumer goods, and even investing in carbon offset projects like building a dairy digester. Ultimately, these projects were too far removed from my area of expertise. But when blockchain applications exploded in volume in 2017, a new business model suddenly became feasible. Another Norinaut, Jaycen Horton, and I submitted a hackathon entry in February 2017 that was an early precursor to Nori where we created a token to pay farmers for sequestering CO2 in their soil.
I’m also a huge fan of the blog Wait But Why by Tim Urban. He published a piece on Elon Musk’s Neuralink project that illustrated a model that I wanted to replicate. Tesla and SpaceX aren’t trying to single-handedly solve car emissions or building a Mars colony.
What they are doing is making those industries feasible so that more competitors enter the marketplace and give the really huge complex goal a greater chance of being achieved. Nori isn’t going to be responsible for all or even a majority of the carbon dioxide that gets removed from the atmosphere. But we do hope that we create a viable market that inspires entrepreneurs to invest into businesses that take CO2 out and use it in some way that keeps it out of the atmosphere. Nori is the market signal to the rest of the world that it’s high time we start reversing what we’ve done, and it’s possible to get paid to do so.
What is the biggest misconception you think people have about reversing climate change?
People often think climate change is this inevitable thing that we’re all doomed to. It’s incredibly obvious to any observer that governments aren’t going to be responsible for fixing it. And when I tell people about Nori’s mission, they’re shocked to find out that much of the technology we need to remove 1.5 trillion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere already exists. Fixing the damage to the atmosphere and environment from over a hundred years of burning oil and coal is an enormous undertaking, and won’t be solved by Nori alone. But if you boil it down, it’s really just a large infrastructure project, the likes of which humanity has tackled and completed many times before. What we are facing is a problem of coordination and incentive alignment, not a lack of technology. We most certainly can reverse the effects climate change.
What gets you excited about blockchain?
The modern world is built on trust. That means we as consumers often have to pay trusted third-parties to do things like verify identities, hold and transfer money, or provide infrastructure to facilitate transactions between parties. What blockchains offer is an ability to bring economies of scale to trust-based services. Why pay high escrow fees for a home purchase when you can lock money in a smart contract to be released on specific, incorruptible parameters? By building new applications on a blockchain that obviate the old ways of doing things, providers can offer more services to more people at a lower cost.
This is similar to what we are trying to do with Nori. We are removing all of the unnecessarily high middleman costs that go into the many steps of verification of carbon removal, and offering that service at the lowest price possible. The blockchain application helps us streamline the services that prove to our customers that carbon dioxide has been removed and will stay removed.
What previous experiences did you have that will inform your work at Nori?
Other than starting and eventually closing a couple small businesses, I’ve spent most of my career working at software design and development agencies in various roles including quality assurance engineer, developer, product/project manager, and director of operations. The nice thing about working at agencies is that I got lots of exposure to different types and sizes of companies. I worked on mobile and web apps for clients ranging from small startups to big corporations like Nike, Starbucks, Showtime, and Target. I’m a keen observer of how people work, and I’ve seen many different types of organizational structures succeed and fail. I believe in the power of Conway’s Law, which theorizes that software products inevitably reflect the structure of the organization that built them. Large, bureaucratic organizations produce non-intuitive software that feels bloated and difficult. Small, agile organizations produce lightweight tools that adapt quickly to the changing needs of users. Both approaches can have benefits, and building a team of people who are working together on a cause much greater than themselves is more exciting to me than I could possibly put into words.
What kinds of problems do you like to solve?
I daydream about solving social coordination problems. If life were easy (and not so fast), all of our ills could be solved by just engineering the right solutions with technology. Unfortunately, humans are not rational. So in my view, almost every big problem is in fact a problem of incentives. Right now, people are incentivized on an individual level to emit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases at no real cost to themselves. The current accepted policy approach of pricing emissions is using a stick to penalize people for emitting greenhouse gases. Nori’s approach is to use a carrot to pay people to remove carbon dioxide. We’re changing the landscape so that people are incentivized into behavior that will ultimately reverse climate change.
Why do you keep a goopy sourdough starter in your refrigerator?
Have you ever tasted a sourdough waffle or pancake? They are divine.
