Low-quality vs. high-quality credits? The planet can see the difference.
It’s a new day for carbon markets.
Carbon removal is on a roll, with total carbon sales in the last year alone jumping a staggering 600%. But to scale the industry from billions of dollars a year to tens of billions and beyond, someone has to rebuild trust in carbon markets, fixing the reputational damage done by years of low-quality-credit greenwashing.
That’s why the biggest news in carbon removal right now is that Isometric — the carbon removal registry setting a new standard for carbon credits — just launched its Public Registry and issued its first credits.
Before we get into the nuts and bolts of the news, and how Isometric is making carbon credits measure up, let’s take a quick look at how traditional carbon market registries work — or don’t.
Ok, so WTF is a registry?
In the early days of the voluntary carbon market, registries were merely the databases logging carbon credit transactions. Over the years, registries went beyond record keeping to validate the worthiness of carbon credit projects and verify how successful they were at meeting their goals. By certifying credits, registries lent credibility to carbon suppliers and project developers, becoming a sort of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for carbon credit projects.
Trouble is, carbon projects weren’t actually removing much carbon.
What we think of today as carbon removal — durably and demonstrably storing carbon in rocks, plants, soils, oceans, and deep underground — was, until recently, beyond the scope of suppliers’ ambitions or technological know-how. Without any real supply of carbon to underpin credits, the “pay me not to cut down this tree” avoidance credit was born.
But truly offsetting emissions with those cheap credits proved too good to be true, and depressingly few of them did any good for the climate. Possibly as much as 90% of these low-quality credits, according to investigative reporting and academic studies, were worthless.
There’s been a lot of ink spilled over the failures of avoidance credits and the voluntary carbon credit market, so I won’t belabor it. But what hasn’t gotten a lot of press is the role the traditional carbon registries — and how they were incentivized — played in the market’s downward trust spiral.
Bad incentives lead to bad outcomes. Who’da thunk it?
Whether you’re a fan of traditional registries or not, it’s easy to see that the way registries got paid in the old system was a real problem. Like an umpire paid for every strike they call, registries were paid by carbon credit suppliers for every ton of carbon they approved. So of course they approved lots of tons. They were incentivized to keep the credits coming. Now play that feedback loop out over decades and you get the not-at-all-surprising mess of a carbon market that we read about in expose´ after expose´.
Isometric, the registry doing it right.
The good news is that today’s carbon credit market — based on removal not avoidance — doesn’t have to repeat the mistakes of the past. Thanks to carbon removal science accelerating in the last few years, supply is finally catching up to demand. We have exciting new carbon removal approaches — enhanced rock weathering, biomass sequestration, and ocean alkalinity enhancement, to name just a few — that make carbon credits mean something for the planet. And alongside the growth of the carbon removal industry, we finally have a registry making sure the carbon market grows right. Not just up and to the right.
Isometric is laying down the rules of the road for these new carbon removal companies, with strict protocols for every carbon removal pathway to ensure that one credit equals one ton of carbon removed from the atmosphere. Plus, the MRV (measurement, reporting and verification) criteria that govern the protocols are developed by over a dozen Isometric carbon removal scientists and peer reviewed by more than 200 independent climate experts.
Incentives that wipe out carbon, not trust.
In building a new kind of registry from the ground up, Isometric knew they would have to realign registry incentives to eliminate the conflicts of interest that plagued the old market. Here’s how Isometric incentives work. First off, instead of getting paid by the carbon credit supplier, Isometric gets paid by the buyer. Second, Isometric only gets paid to verify the supplier’s claim that “yeah, the credit I’m selling you actually was generated by safely locking away carbon.” Third, Isometric gets paid a flat fee for performing the verification, not for every ton approved.
Why does all that matter? The combination of those three design decisions corrects the fatal flaw of the old system, when registries were incentivized to generate credits and approve tons by obscuring their quality.
Science-first, last, and always.
Isometric further raises the trust level by basing their verifications solely on the Earth science underpinning actual, sucking-carbon-out-of-the-air-and-oceans removal. Shockingly, no other registry can say that.
At the end of the day, carbon removal is about transferring carbon from one part of the carbon cycle to another. And with the deepest science bench of any registry — hell, with more scientists than almost all other registries combined — Isometric is the only registry qualified to determine whether a claimed removal affects the carbon cycle.
This is hard, this is new, and it requires deep scientific and technical expertise. But basing market operations on the carbon cycle is the only way to hold all suppliers to the same standard and generate the kind of trust that scales the industry.
Isometric’s commitment to scientific rigor even goes beyond their own walls. Their first-of-its kind Public Registry — where every credit they issue is open to scrutiny — invites the scientific community to trace the life cycle of every credit, including all the underlying data and calculations. In the words of CEO Eamon Jubbawy, “I don’t want someone to trust Isometric, I want someone to trust the data. Inspect it yourself.”
A credit to carbon credits.
Now, getting back to those historic first credits and what they mean. Isometric issued their first credits to Vaulted Deep, the folks who take carbon-rich biosolids and permanently lock them away underground. Under Isometric’s Biomass Geological Storage protocol, Vaulted removed 2,474 tons of carbon, of which 2,166 have been signed, sealed, and delivered to Stripe and Shopify, two members of the CDR-catalyzing Frontier fund. See for yourself — this is the real deal. The Vaulted delivery is also the fastest and largest pre-purchase delivery to Frontier yet, proving that rigor and speed aren’t mutually exclusive.
The Vaulted credits may seem like a small number compared to the millions that a given carbon project would generate in the avoidance days. But remember, those credits were abstractions with dubious environmental benefit. Many, if not most, were downright worthless. Isometric’s credits are for actual carbon taken out of the game and locked away for 1000+ years — with multiple third-party verifications.
Deliveries with Isometric backing don’t just give buyers confidence, they’re also a big deal for suppliers. With Isometric’s diligence and MRV underpinning every delivery, suppliers get valuable information that helps them improve and optimize future deliveries. For example, Vaulted worked with Isometric to ensure that everything from the transportation emissions to the feedstocks they’re sourcing to the counterfactual uses have the t’s crossed and the i’s dotted. With all that new data, Vaulted now has a better idea of what constraints exist, how to improve their supply chains, iterate their operations, and evolve as the science evolves. This feedback loop is how carbon removal goes from science experiment to global-scale climate infrastructure.
Gigatons of good.
By 2050, we need to be sucking billions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere. Scientists like those at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have been very clear on this. Fortunately, Isometric’s first credits are likely the last nail in the coffin of the old scandal-plagued carbon avoidance market, and a turbocharger for the carbon removal market taking its place. This new market, following standards built on scientific rigor, transparency, and properly aligned incentives, now has the potential for massive scale — and to actually do the gigatons of good the planet needs. We’re excited to see Isometric guide the way.
This could have been a lot longer.
This post is just the beginning of a conversation I believe is absolutely crucial. If you want to dive deeper into the science, technical details, and future of carbon removal, don’t hesitate to hit me up. You can also hear more from me on the “Fixing the messy voluntary carbon market” episode of Shayle Kann’s Catalyst podcast.