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Climate Now Episode 134

December 25, 2023

The Voluntary Carbon Offset Market (2/3)

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Featured Experts

Louis Uzor
Climate Policy Manager, Climeworks

Kelly Erhart
President, Vesta

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Kelly Erhart

President, Vesta

Kelly has a multidisciplinary background. She has worked across the climate space for the last decade, with a large focus on carbon dioxide removal approaches. Co-founder of Vesta, Kelly has insight into a diverse range of climate solutions, spanning engineering to the nature based; as well as into market dynamics, business and funding strategies for novel solutions. Her work has focused on the commercialization of sustainable technologies and carbon removal approaches. Alongside her commercial efforts, Kelly has also helped to found multiple non-profit efforts across the climate and sustainability space.

Tom Green
CEO, Vesta

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Tom Green

CEO, Vesta

When Tom graduated with a biology degree before the turn of the millennium, it was already clear that the climate was heading for a crisis. Over a 20 year career in various leadership roles at Capital One, Lending Club, Bain & Company, and Averon, he learned how to manage teams and deliver results. Finally, with an exceptional set of skills gained in this career, he was able to rediscover his true passion, which is bringing a scalable way to meet the challenges of the climate crisis. Tom holds a BA in Biological Sciences from Oxford University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Grant Canary
Founder and CEO, Mast Reforestation

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Grant Canary

Founder and CEO, Mast Reforestation

Grant Canary is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Mast Reforestation which was established by the team as a parent company to DroneSeed. The company is provides no upfront cost reforestation after wildfire and supplies seed and seedlings through its subsidiaries Silvaseed and Cal Forest, manages planting crews, and is able to provide financing by utilizing carbon offsets. Grant has focused his entire career on sustainability—working at Vestas wind energy in China, the US and Denmark, and for the US Green Building Council in its infancy. He founded Biosystems Co., in Bogotá, Colombia that utilized food waste to feed insect larvae for use as industrial fish feed— alleviating overfishing pressure and utilizing food waste. He worked with the acquirer to scale that company to a 60k square feet insect protein factory.

In this Episode

Join us for the second of our three-part series on voluntary carbon offset markets, where we take a look at three companies that have very different strategies for removing carbon from the atmosphere. Vesta aims to increase the amount of atmospheric carbon that the ocean can absorb by infusing coastal systems with sand composed of naturally reactive minerals like olivine. Mast Reforestation generates carbon offsets by maintaining and protecting forests in wildfire-prone areas. And Climeworks uses a mechanical system to filter carbon straight from the atmosphere to sequester it underground.

For each of these companies, we will explore how their company’s carbon removal techniques work, and examine whether (and how) they can provide measurable and verifiable offsets to ensure that the carbon credits they sell are providing a viable benefit to climate mitigation.

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