Martin Wainstein, OpenEarth Foundation
Today's guest is Martin Wainstein, Founder and Executive Director of OpenEarth Foundation, a California-based nonprofit that creates and supports the deployment of open-source software at the intergovernmental level to further climate understanding and action.
When we think of blockchain, our brains are mostly wired to think of cryptocurrencies and for-profit schemes. OpenEarth Foundation, however, is applying blockchain principles to United Nations-scale carbon accounting efforts to aid in the understanding of and deployment of software that can support an open and accountable data layer for critical carbon accounting. As carbon offsets are retired, as renewable energy credits are traded, and as compliance and voluntary carbon markets grow in prominence, how do we ensure that these systems can understand each other across borders, governments, and methodologies?
After all, a ton of CO2 should be a ton of CO2, and yet orchestrating agreement and dialogue across major stakeholders including governments, markets, and corporations, is never an easy task. Martin and Cody have a great conversation about his journey into the climate space and the origins of OpenEarth Foundation, which was inspired in part by his time at Yale Open Lab and his work on digital currencies at MIT Media Lab. We also cover the state of carbon accounting at the nation-state level today, the innovative ways that OpenEarth Foundation has raised money to date, and some of the big ideas that they're thinking about for the future.
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Cody Simms
Martin Wainstein / OpenEarth Foundation
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Episode recorded on February 2, 2022.
In this episode, we cover:
[3:01] Martin's climate journey
[9:38] An overview of the OpenEarth Foundation
[14:25] Leveraging technology for the common good
[17:32] Carbon accounting and where the data comes from today
[24:10] Openclimate.network and other digital tools
[29:48] Transparency challenges on the national and subnational levels
[34:25] How OpenEarth is helping large global entities with consensus building
[40:44] OpenEarth's initial funding via NFTs and plans moving forward
[49:38] Some of OpenEarth's current projects
[55:07] Where OpenEarth needs help
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Jason Jacobs (00:01):
Hello everyone, this is Jason Jacobs.
Cody Simms (00:04):
And I'm Cody Sims.
Jason Jacobs (00:05):
Welcome to My Climate Journey. This show is a growing body of knowledge focused on climate change and potential solutions.
Cody Simms (00:15):
In this podcast, we traverse disciplines, industries, and opinions to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and all the ways people like you and I can help.
Jason Jacobs (00:26):
We appreciate you tuning in, sharing this episode, and if you feel like it, leaving us a review to help more people find out about us so they can figure out where they fit in addressing the problem of climate change.
Cody Simms (00:40):
Today's guest is Martin Wainstein, founder and executive director of OpenEarth Foundation, which is a California based nonprofit that creates and supports the deployment of open source software at the intergovernmental level to further climate understanding and action. When we think of blockchain, our brains are now tuned to think of cryptocurrencies and for-profit schemes. OpenEarth Foundation, however, is applying blockchain principles to United Nation scale carbon accounting efforts to aid in the understanding of and deployment of software that can support an open and accountable data layer for critical carbon accounting data. As carbon offsets are button retired, as renewable energy credits are traded, and as compliance and voluntary carbon markets grow in prominence, how do we ensure that these systems can understand each other across borders, governments and methodologies?
(01:31):
After all, a ton of CO2 should be a ton of CO2, and yet orchestrating agreement dialogue across major stakeholders including governments, markets, and corporations, is never an easy task. Martin and I have a great conversation about his own journey into the climate space and the origins of OpenEarth Foundation, which was inspired in part by his time at Yale Open Lab and his work on digital currencies at MIT Media Lab. We also cover the state of carbon accounting at the nation state level today, the innovative ways that OpenEarth Foundation has raised money to date, and some of the big ideas that they're thinking about for the future. It's hardening to me that a group like OpenEarth Foundation exists, one that's pushing forward thinking, open technology innovation into the biggest stages of world government in the name of climate action. I hope you enjoy what Martin has to say. Martin, welcome to the show.
Martin Wainstein (02:23):
So good to be here, Cody, finally make it.
Cody Simms (02:26):
I'm so thrilled to have you on here. You and I have gotten to know each other, I guess, virtually now for many years, even though we both live in LA, Los Angeles, we've never met in person, but I had you, back when I was at Techstars, had you come and present to a large audience at Techstars all about carbon accounting, and just had such glowing reviews of your remarks because you think about it from such a different perspective than most people do. You've been someone long on my list to bring on the show, so I'm glad we're finally making it happen.
Martin Wainstein (02:58):
It's an honor to be here. Yeah.
Cody Simms (03:01):
Well, why don't we start. Before we dive into OpenEarth and carbon accounting and all the topics I know we're going to dive into, let's hear about you. How did this become an area that you wanted to focus on? By this, I mean climate and collaboration globally around understanding what's happening to our earth.
Martin Wainstein (03:21):
Yeah. Obviously inspired by the title, what is my climate journey, and how would I resonate with others? For me, it's been a lifelong process. I was born in Buenos Aires in Argentina, and right after high school there was all kinds of things that I wanted to do, but I moved to the US because college allowed a large flexibility of things. I took a class that changed my life, that was astrobiology. Astrobiology helped me see the planet as a four and a half billion year organism, as a living organism. Two things that marked me until this day, that looking at things from these large cycles is so important and it gets you to see such a different perspective. It took three and a half billion years to have the oxygen levels that we have today, and the CO2 levels that we have today.
(04:14):
It also highlights how fast in the last 60 years things have changed. To me, that was shocking. The other thing is, the scales from micro to macro. A big part of astrobiology, looking at life in other planets, is about microbiology. Small bacteria that can seed the planet, and microbes in this planet affected the entire chemistry. Without knowing, that was my entry point into systems thinking from a holistic standpoint, and to earth as a living organism. Fr me, the entry into climate was sitting in this class and realizing, doing something, back of the envelope calculations and saying, "Oh my God, it is our generation that is having to face reversing this deep trend towards eroding billions of years of pristine environment in a short time period." I said to myself, "This is a fascinating time to be alive in the history of this planet, and I want to be part of it."
(05:20):
That got me into, "Okay, what are some renewable energy things that I can do from the biology space?" Then, that took me into microbial fuel cells. Then suddenly I was in a lab looking at how microbes could produce electricity, and clean energy, and clean water. But it wasn't scalable, that I got more and more into it. I realized, "Well, the problem here is not technological ,and it doesn't seem to be economical, 'cause the cost of destroying the planet is way more than the mobilizing capital to fix it." Without having any strong vision of political economy, I came up with my own explanation of a social enterprise. So, I decided to go back to Argentina to start my first social enterprise, and discovered myself, in some sense, as an entrepreneur, and for around six years.
(06:10):
That was the first changing point for me, was that astrobiological perspective. The second, in some sense was, "Oh, social enterprises can be a very important way for me to express my interest in the topic." In Argentina, there was all kinds of things that I started doing, from measuring carbon footprint of companies back in 2007, and then using some profits of that to put into deploying solar kitchens in the border between Argentina and Bolivia, or working on forest conservation in the border with Brazil. But at the same time, I realized that I was always thinking about big ideas that were too ambitious for what the reality of consulting for a small startup in Argentina. Then, that was the second, I think, pivotal of a point where I decided to do a PhD and think about how to innovate the business space, and the climate space together.
(07:10):
I moved to Australia, and I focused on the transformation of the global energy business system. We often think about oil and gas companies as the usual suspects. What we're facing, is the fact that they have to cannibalize their core business model, radically change that. I went deep into what that entails, and also about how innovative projects could change the paradigm of the energy business. Then, so I focused on peer-to-peer smart grids, and new business loans for that. The long story short is, that got me into the digital space. As you know, a lot of my work today is on open digital systems, but it really started by thinking about, what is something in the innovation space that could change radically? The peer-to-peer space took me into Web3. Web3, at that time, it was very apparent out of my PhD, and I was a little bit too much of an entrepreneur to be a traditional academic and too much of a big picture thinker to be a mainstream entrepreneur.
(08:11):
So, I moved back to the US and I was fortunate enough to be able to set up the Open Innovation Lab at Yale University and the Solar Energy project at the MIT Media Labs Digital Currency Initiative. That's how I got into carbon accounting, because I had a lot of colleagues throughout my PhD period that were looking at the carbon budget and measuring the carbon budget, so the remaining physical space in our atmosphere where after you put so much greenhouse gases, you crossed the tipping point for 1.5 degrees, and then looking at blockchain as an accounting system. It was like, "Well, the ultimate ledger that we have, is the atmosphere. How are we going to manage this atmospheric accounting in this ticking clock of the budget?" Out of Yale, we presented a lot of these ideas and COP 25 in Madrid, and then I learned that the UN Climate Change had a lot of gaps in, not just emerging tech, but just digitization and managing the Paris Agreement. Then in 2020, is how I decided to launch OpenEarth.
Cody Simms (09:19):
Amazing. Thank you for walking us through how these disparate experiences brought you to where you are today. You went through all of these experiences, and you have now built and are running the OpenEarth Foundation. What is the OpenEarth Foundation?
Martin Wainstein (09:38):
Part of the model that I was in some sense researching while I was at the Yale Open Lab was, how do we use big picture system thinking, particularly earth systems analysis, to programmatically come up with entrepreneurial projects that are designed to hit leverage points? I know that sounds a little bit esoteric, but it's in my own explanation of, what are some critical projects that are not decided by what are market opportunities, but an action that can have a huge impact? I often describe that we look for those in the intersection of emerging technologies, because I feel that they can bring in capabilities that obviously will commend humans capabilities to deal with such a large system like Planet Earth. Then, the other part, is open source and the role of open digital infrastructure, open standards, open protocols, and more than anything, the collaboration needed to create that. Then, all of those two aspects to our system thinking.
Cody Simms (10:47):
Well, even just note there that I think a good example from you that I take away from what you just said, was how you think about blockchain and Web3, which is to say we're obviously living in a time in 2023 when the broader blockchain space, I think, is navigating the corruptive nature of capitalism, in many cases, to take something and encourage actors to exploit it for capitalistic purposes to the end of days as much as possible, sadly. Yet, I feel like from the beginning, every conversation I've had with you about blockchain, is less around, "Oh, there's this great business idea I have," or, "Oh, I know how we're going to make all this money selling tokens." It has nothing to do with that, and it's more thinking about it as the next evolution of open source, and of almost common good collaboration from a technology perspective. Is that the right way for me to think about how you are thinking about leveraging technology generally, regardless of blockchain?
Martin Wainstein (12:00):
Yeah, absolutely, and a mechanism where we agree on a core source of truth or a state. What's the state of the planet? What's the state of the atmosphere? What's the health of nature? What's the status of that? How do we build systems that are designed to maintain that, to augment that? Records can help, and records that don't require a level of trust, but also again, how sensors, and AI, and models all play a role in trying to attest to that. It's critical, which is, whilst we started looking at the carbon budget, immediately it started into, modern reporting and verification systems in the market spaces, and more just as a common record keeping system. The reality of course is, back in the day was, "Okay, let's address double counting," but blockchain don't address double counting, only if the whole system is within one blockchain, but not when you have 50 blockchains,
Cody Simms (13:03):
What I'm hearing you say is, OpenEarth Foundation essentially exists to leverage technology as a public good to solve large scale collaboration problems, particularly as it relates to the earth and to climate change.
Martin Wainstein (13:20):
Yes, and hopefully also leveraging collaboration so that technology can play a role in scaling broader collaboration, because it does require certain levels of collaboration to create those systems. I'm inspired by the phrase from a [inaudible 00:13:37] on the operating system for Spaceship Earth, or operating manual for Spaceship Earth. For me, one of the missions of OpenEarth is, how do we design the operating system so the digital mesh that helps us manage something that's greater than all of us? But in the process of doing so, and this is maybe a holistic view to that, but it helps us realize that, that, which we're managing is also what we are. A big part of the division that we have as a court issue in our environmental problems, is this illusion that we're separated from nature, that we're separate from earth, and so we have to save earth or help earth, and realize we are earth and we're part of it. How does that also play in how we design the systems from that mindset?
Cody Simms (14:25):
From a theory of change perspective, what incentives are there for people to leverage technology for the common good? A cynical capitalist may say, "People are just going to leverage technologies for their own exploitative practices." How are you seeing that not be true?
Martin Wainstein (14:48):
I mean, I think one key example is, the internet is the best example of a digital public good we have. It's not totally neutral and it's not totally decentralized, and in some sense, been co-opted by a lot of private interest. It's a networking layer that helps transact value and information, and things like that. We need the earth internet, or make the internet help us manage earth in a good way. When we think about a climate accounting system, we think about a climate internet, where just like in the internet, you search for something and it will hit any public website that's using HTML and will retrieve information, and all of that will happen in seconds. If we are to say, "I want to know of all the climate mitigation projects within 100 miles of where I'm at today," we don't have a protocol for that, because obviously you can't pull it from one database, otherwise it would just be a very simple query.
(15:53):
Those are some of the things that we think about, like protocols and standards that could help a lot of the climate information talk to each other and discoverability. Then, the other part, which for me, Web3 was interesting, is power automation. The first thought experiment, and it's interesting 'cause we're a little bit closer to doing that is, a big discussion in the policy space is carbon pricing. But carbon pricing is often derived using the social cost of carbon, and there's some subjective roles around that. None of those models look at the remaining carbon budget At the moment, our remaining carbon budget is around 260 gigatons, and we put out 50 gigatons a year. It doesn't take much to think about within the next six, seven years, we could irreversibly cross our 1.5 degrees.
(16:46):
That equation needs to be part of how we price carbon. Are emissions different? I must always clarify how we price a carbon credit. There's different equations that go into how we price a carbon credit, how we price our emissions, our liability and our impact. For that, you have to have sources of truth to say, "Well, here's a remaining carbon budget, and here's where we're going to price it, and here's how, for example, a government, or in our model, we could perfectly see an earth taxation system where you pay carbon price to earth." So, it goes to a fund, and from there it trickles into projects that have the right quality to do it. Rather than lobbying for your government to roll out carbon price, you can just say, "We'll do that with earth."
Cody Simms (17:32):
Let's dive into that carbon accounting, because obviously in order to understand what our annual gigaton output is as a society today, that presumes some degree of accurate accounting on a carbon level. I don't know where that begins. Does that begin at the nation state level? Does that begin at an individual corporation? From what I know, corporations, who are the ones outputting the bulk of these emissions, most of them have no idea what their carbon footprint is today. They maybe are starting to get their arms around their scope one and scope two emissions, meaning the emissions of their operations and the emissions of their own power use. Though, many of them don't. Feels like almost none of them have their arms around their own scope three emissions, which is the emissions of their supply chain. But, that's just at an individual corporate level, and that spans global geographies. When we talk about the amount of gigaton output happening on earth per year, is that a rollup of nation state level emissions? Is that a rollup of corporate level emissions? Where in the world does that data actually come from today?
Martin Wainstein (18:46):
Great point, and so timely, because we're in 2023 and this is the first year where the Paris Agreement is conducting its first global stock dig that will happen in COP 28 in Dubai this year. That's the exercise where we have to come together and say, "What did you say you were going to do? What did you do? Now, what should you do?" A massive accountability exercise. For me, the way that I describe where this starts, in the high level policy, the Paris Agreement, the UN Climate Change, requires countries to submit their greenhouse gas inventories. They follow a methodology through IPCC, normally happens through sectorial data aggregation. Energy sector, what are your emissions? The agricultural sector, what are your emissions? Residential sector, et cetera, and so forth. Those are put together, and out of those, we calculate, roughly, what are those total emissions? We spend a lot of time trying to think about alternative complimentary ways of doing that. Then, at the same time, how do you cross reference those same numbers by just looking at... What are the traces that we see in the atmosphere? So, using more direct measurement.
(19:56):
It's very hard, because you also have to factor in all the natural carbon cycle. We hope that more and more we would be able to advance to actually do a double entry bookkeeping system. This is what the world is saying, and this is what we actually see. That's one way. The way that we've been focusing a lot, and actually got a lot of progress in the last couple years, is where we talk about, nested climate accounting. It's because if you look at those sectors, energy or agriculture, the creation of policies, it drives a lot of insight, but to create policies for the energy sector, you have a ministerial department, but it might not necessarily go directly to the organizations. Nested climate accounting starts by the site and the building, and who owns the building or owns that site. Okay, an organization. That organization sits within the purview of a municipality, which is inside a city, which is inside a subnational government, which is inside, well, different levels of subnational governments, inside a national government, inside earth.
(21:04):
If we're able to do things by spatially aligning and understanding that message jurisdiction, whoever you are, wherever you are, you end up in that sort of stock taking exercise. We've pushed that forward enough, that it's now been incorporated as an architecture to consider for what's called, Article 6.4, which is more around how do you deal with markets as credits move from one place to the other by being able to say, if you are buying voluntary carbon credits in Brazil, well, technically that should roll up to the Brazilian greenhouse gas inventory and the progress towards their nationally determined contribution. If you want to use them where your emissions happen, let's say in California, well, Brazil and United States would have to agree that something is negative here and something's positive there, or the other way around. That requires that level of, let's say, geo timing.
Cody Simms (22:03):
The challenge I'm hearing, is less understanding what the total output is, and it's more about managing at a level below or two levels below that how the horse trading happens. Who's taking responsibility for what in order to create accountability. Is that what I'm hearing?
Martin Wainstein (22:24):
A way to connect, even though you mentioned, a lot of corporations don't know what their carbon footprint is, but there's a lot of movement in that. We've seen in the last couple of years, so many new startups that are working on greenhouse gas accountancy, and they provide the company with a number. Maybe there's not a lot, but we'll allow a audit firm to come in and stamp it, which they used to do that before already, but where does that end up? Well, they could maybe use it for the SG reports, and now we're going to have more regulatory requirements. But how do we trace that into the greenhouse gas inventory that plays under the Paris Agreement? That's one of the big things that we focus on. Then of course, the third method, which is nascent now, but we think very powerful in the future, is through satellite and machine learning models and integrative assessment models, so that you could by what you observe, determine this is what your emissions are.
(23:23):
We work closely with an organization called Climate Trace that works closely on that. These are all complimentary. We need to be able to have a level of redundancy, because the more insight we have on this, the better policy and finance can contract that. A good example, and large banks often pose this problem to us. If I am lending a country a billion dollars for climate action, how do I follow the dollar into the greenhouse gas inventory they get reported to the secretariat? It's not that easy. We think about, what would it take to do that? Of course, all of that needs to be open architecture, run through open standards, and public and neutral, and that's why we're a 501(c)(3).
Cody Simms (24:10):
Let's talk about what that looks like in terms of how you do that. You mentioned earlier on, one of the challenges with, yes, blockchain helps with double counting, but that's only if everybody's on the same blockchain. I would presume then, OpenEarth is not trying to say, "Hey, everyone in the world, use this one tech stack," because that doesn't seem like that would work. But instead, you're having to basically build some big integration layer, like data input and integration layer, or is it like, I don't know, I'm making stuff up now. What is it? What does it look like?
Martin Wainstein (24:48):
Well, that's part of the challenge. Right now, last COP published openclimate.network. It's a nested accounting system, so you can navigate through information that often is disparate, like country information and subnational government, and it's connected with a federated data comments. So, that's just one database and it's connected to other databases, and you can pull information from different sources. I think the next challenge for us, is going more at the protocol level where all these things would combine. Obviously one of the challenges that we have as a nonprofit is, as soon as you go very deep into the technical architecture, it requires mobilizing a lot of bandwidth, a lot of capital, and a lot of talent into these major challenges. You see that a lot of the startups in this space that are well endowed are focusing on their product, but not on some of these underlying protocols.
(25:45):
Some countries don't understand the importance of this. We are always in the challenge of driving little projects as possible to seeing what that would look like, and opportunities where we can advance on that. There's some low hanging fruits that we're currently working on that are very helpful for the process of the global stock deck. For example, the way that countries actually submit their progress reports to their NDCs, their naturally determined contribution, is through PDFs and they just sit in the secretariat in the UN Climate Change Cloud. Now there's 500 documents sitting there, but you don't search, "What are the best practices in terms of climate action or climate adaptation in West Africa," and that it would pool and read from those documents. Those are just some pretty standard digital tools that we can leverage, and that we're working with a secretariat on helping that, so that already the information that's been submitted in PDFs is better accessible to the public, better accessible for insights to policy.
(26:47):
That's one aspect that eventually Open Climate can then pull in, bring insights, and work closely with UN to provide better clarity for better policy, better financial mechanisms, and ultimately a lot of digital infrastructure standard working groups. Were part of W3C, ISOs, and we have a Climate Action Data 2.0 community where we discuss some of these things. There's no way to have one standard to rule them all, or a data model. You have to have resolvers, something that says, "Oh, well you presented in this format that's equivalent to this other format, and here's how you translate it." Those are digital public engines that are running and solving for these things, taxonomies, solving for taxonomy and things like that.
Cody Simms (27:45):
We're going to take a short break right now so our partner, Yin, can share more about the MCJ membership option.
Yin Lu (27:52):
Hey folks, Yin here, our partner at MCJ Collective. I want to take a quick minute to tell you about our MCJ membership community, which was born out of a collective thirst for peer-to-peer learning and doing that goes beyond just listening to the podcast. We started in 2019, and has since then grown to 2,000 members globally. Each week we're inspired by people who join with differing backgrounds and perspectives. While those perspectives are different, what we all share in common, is a deep curiosity to learn and bias to action around ways to accelerate solutions to climate change. Some awesome initiatives have come out of the community.
(28:24):
A number of founding teams have met, nonprofits have been established, a bunch of hiring has been done, many early stage investments have been made, as well as ongoing events and programming, like monthly Women in Climate meetups, idea jam sessions for early stage founders, climate book club, art workshops, and more. Whether you've been in climate for a while or just embarking on your journey, having a community to support you is important. If you want to learn more, head over to mcjcollective.com, and then click on the members tab at the top. Thanks, and enjoy the rest of the show.
Cody Simms (28:53):
All right, back to the show. What I'm hearing is, most of the dialogue around blockchain and climate centers around the carbon markets and centers around actually moving carbon credits on chain to be transacted, to actually manage the offsets themselves in some way, shape, or form through a digital mechanism. I'm hearing from you, that's fine, that can all happen, but the layer that isn't being built or that we are the ones helping to define at OpenEarth Foundation, is really the record keeping layer and a transparent view into what's happening broadly across all of this, regardless of whether the transactions themselves are being managed on the blockchain or not. Is that a correct way to think about it?
Martin Wainstein (29:48):
Yeah, and one way that we also frame it, building from that is, there's three sectors that need to be integrated for better stock taking process. One, is of course the national and subnational level, and we've aggregated a lot of the data for that. The other one, is the corporate sector you mentioned. Very important, as every almost ERP or CLI provider is coming with their own carbon accounting, plus the startups, plus the regulatory environment moving forward. Then, the third is the climate markets. So, national, subnational, corporate, and then markets. Then, most of what we know in the ReFi or DeFi meets Web3, or DeFi meets carbon, is a subsection of that climate market space. But, there's a lot of opportunities. We are launching, we announced [inaudible 00:30:35] and launching, I think in April, a carbon pricing oracle.
(30:39):
We tell you the result of integrative assessment models that calculate the social cost of carbon, and you could determine your discount rate, because there are subjectivities to it. You could take that as an oracle and input into a smart contract. You could say, "Well, one thing I could do is buy my voluntary carbon credits out of Vera or directly from Pachama," or whoever it is, your provider or region. Or you could say, "Tis is the impact of my emissions and my carbon pricing says this," and dynamically it will already execute that contract, for example. We try to do little innovations in those three sectors in the corporate side around bringing the corporate carbon footprint calculators to have a common reporting or common integration layer. Then of course, with the national, subnational is helping in that intersection between countries and the secretariat.
Cody Simms (31:36):
On that last piece, the national and subnational level, how much of it is just purely helping the UN modernize itself to being a digital friendly data organization?
Martin Wainstein (31:50):
Yeah, I mean, I think that's one of our quests. I often describe OpenEarth as a bridge organization between the tech space broadly and the supernational. We collaborate very closely with the World Bank on their climate market infrastructure, and we're a partner of UN Climate Change. From our vantage point, you see amazing gaps where obviously agencies don't have a full team of IT with cutting edge capabilities that are constantly upgrading the systems. The countries that are supporting the UN are often hesitant to find technology. They often partner with tech companies, but they send a lot of marketing people, so not their solution architects. Traditional climate NGOs also happen to not have in-house engineering teams, and philanthropies, also not their strength.
(32:48):
We found that gap and we're like, "Wow, we need to do something different. We need to be a climate NGO that has a full tech team." We've got a full engineering team, and we're just going in and trying to fix bugs, put pipes together, and be a bit of digital plumbers where that happens, by knowing how to collaborate in a very non-threatening and neutral way. Fundamentally explaining, out of COP, we came up with an idea of helping philanthropies increase their capability of digital literacy and how important funding open digital infrastructure is, because they often tend to think, "Well, the big tech firms should fund that."
(33:32):
Well, they often don't because there's also a gap for them, and they don't want to necessarily directly fund an open layer where their competitors also might have a benefit, even though the reality is, they always all benefit from that. Yeah, I think that's been a bit of a role. When we started, it was really hard to try to get this supported, because when we lead with blockchain and AI, you can imagine that a lot of the traditional funders of climate NGOs think we're speaking gibberish, and it's hard for them to take risks on something that's very emerging. Funding digital modernization for the UN is also something that philanthropies would say, "The government should fund that," and the government say, "The philanthropy should fund that." Then the UN is like, "Well, someone's got to fund this."
Cody Simms (34:25):
I'm going to come back to how you got funded, because you have an amazing story there. But before we do that, one other question just on collaborating with big organizations, like the UN. In the smaller corner of the carbon markets, we've seen Vera for example, recently actually issue a request for basically an RFP, a request for proposal of how they should think about digitizing, that I know folks like Tucan and Flowcarbon and others have replied to and are giving them guidance on how to think about that. To me, that feels like a matter of when, not if, it's going to happen. It's just going to take some time to work through the details. For the UN, are they issuing RFPs? How are you in there helping them figure out what they should spend their time on and where, as an example?
Martin Wainstein (35:18):
Yeah, it's a good point. I mean, the Web3 space, it's a really nice community. There's levels of fragmentation, as there is everywhere. I was participating in a lot of these consultation rounds that then led up to a newly launched blockchain Climate Leadership Network, where a lot of these participants in Vera has been open to feedback and where they should go. It's been really nice to see that dynamic dialogue happen. Of course, we know a lot of the issues with the Guardian article, and going back and forth, but it goes to show the importance of what we talk about is, we think about of the importance of integrity in MRV, modern reporting and verification the climate markets. But we have to think about MRV broadly than markets.
(36:08):
How do you MRV your greenhouse gas inventory, and so many other things? We think about national or international MRV systems. Back to the UN, they don't directly do that, that I'm aware of, unless there's a specific funder involved that's supporting them in the program. The recent activity of that is, in the mid last year, in lead up to what I call the intercessions to the COP, Bloomberg and Macron announced a project towards what France called, The Open Planet Data Hub, and that created the Climate Data Steering Committee. The Climate Data Steering Committee just issued an RFP for building the NetZero Data Public Utility, that would eventually integrate with the Global Climate Action Portal of UNFCC. That's a mouthful, but that just shows also the institutional cascades that need to happen for that.
(37:10):
At OpenEarth, we happen to be very active, as it's taking a lot of my time, but it's really a lot of the role that we have of convening open source community and open source efforts for responding to that RFP, including the for-profit companies that to participate to ensure that we bring a lot of the thought leadership and knowledge that we have around this, on responding to these RFPs that talk about an international data public utility for NetZero, but that could play a role in UN Climate Change. I think that's one example where this happens. I would love to see more. I think they're not probably as used to dealing with also the responses that they might have. One thing is for [inaudible 00:37:55] issue in RFP, but think about UN environment program issuing an RFP in Senate.
(38:00):
They just have a lot of submissions, and they don't have the bandwidth to deal with the responses, let alone what happens afterwards. I think that they have to figure out how to manage that. Unless it's this very specific funded program for a specific thing, we don't see that level of process. What we have seen, and we're part of that, is how UN can modernize their system, not from inside, but by partnering with consortium networks. That's one of the things that, for example, the UN Climate Global Innovation Hub that we're involved with, how do you set up, this is a three-sided marketplace, helping cities meet their core human needs by matching them with innovators and finance?
(38:43):
A very innovative thought for the UN, which the most important thing is that, as long as they have political support for driving these modern platforms, that's all you need. Then partners like us and others can help them think about how to set that up, set up a consortium that has a agreement with the UN, and can bring in funding from outside, and can find a tech team that's working on that so that you don't have to put full stack engineer sitting in Bonn, Germany under the UN to focus on that. There's ways in which the innovation and the partnership of UN systems will help drive the modernization of their digital platforms.
Cody Simms (39:21):
I think the amount of consensus building that you are highlighting is, for many of us, myself included, who tend to come from the entrepreneurial space, it's just a very different and interesting skillset, and so important in terms of that playing that role across so many of those actors helping to steward in what order should things be tackled in, what priorities should things be tackled, in what direction should things be tackled, to ultimately help us all as a society be better at managing these trade-offs that you mentioned are being made. Thanks for sharing all that. It really, at least for me, is very illuminating on the unique role that an organization like OpenEarth plays in the dance of global actors.
Martin Wainstein (40:14):
Well, thanks. Actually, that's one of the things that we're figuring out how to convey better and easier what we do, because it's can be a little bit esoteric and very niche specific. As a 501(c)(3), if you click, donate, what are you donating for? I think ultimately, collaboration requires digital public good support, or public good support. That's obviously what we do, collaboration, but from a subject matter expertise standpoint and the ability to do things.
Cody Simms (40:44):
Well, let's talk about funding. As I understand it, you all were able to secure quite a good deal of funding in sort of the heyday of the NFT and Web3 boom over the last few years. You all took on some incredibly innovative ways of leveraging the interest in NFTs to fund your organization. I'm guessing that is not quite as available to you in 2023 as it was in 2021, but maybe share a bit about what you did in the past, and then how you're thinking about continuing to fund your operations going forward.
Martin Wainstein (41:26):
Yeah, great. That was one of the first challenges setting up OpenEarth, is how to fund it. Having a first chat with philanthropies and seeing that it was a little bit harder to convey our message. Even one technically disruptive family office that we came up with a project and they say, "This is too innovative." I'm like, "Oh my God, I thought you're supposed to be risk capital." We were fortunate enough, one of our early supporters, who founded Social Alpha Foundation, which is a philanthropic crypto organization, the head of that, Jehan, he was a former art dealers at Sotheby's, and he was seeing that the NFT art space was booming. As soon as he mentioned this, it resonated a lot to me. In my free time, I do a lot of art, and so art is a big part of, I think, one ways that I connect.
(42:26):
I never thought about integrating art to our work, but it resonated. We reached out, and also thanks to him and Social Alpha Foundation to some of the top NFT artists. This was back in January 2020. In March 22nd, a month before Earth Day, we launched the Carbon Drop. We reached out to a couple of artists. Definitely the one that made the huge tabloid, is Beeple. Beeple was such a supporter of this idea of, let's use art to fund public infrastructure for climate change that's focused on TLPs, just like distributed ledger technologies can revolution our art to play a role in climate. We suddenly found a great audience.
Cody Simms (43:12):
For people who don't know Beeple, just to put it in context, it was within a month of that timeframe that Beeple sold an NFT for $69 million, one, single NFT. This individual, human artist, was the top of the top when it came to name recognition in the NFT space at the time, and it still is today.
Martin Wainstein (43:36):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Such an influential in the space. I think it was in February where WhIsBe sold for that, and then we were right up after that. Other amazing artists that were part of that cohort, and they're for us, our primary philanthropists, and every time that we have a win as an organization and the annual report, we reach out to all these artists and say, "You're the most important stakeholder that we've had from an individual standpoint." In one weekend, we auction eight pieces of digital art all around a climate theme using Nifty Gateway as the portal, and raised $6.6 million, of which Beeple was 6 million. Which, all others also broke records. Refik Anadol, amazing artist, truly amazing artists, also had his first NFT art auction there. Fvckrender, [inaudible 00:44:36], so many great artists that are still some of the top NFT artists in the space. That was a great unprecedented way for us to start and to set ourselves up to be able to do our work, which is expensive.
(44:52):
You know this well, full stacks engineers and having that on staff is not easy, but it's also what allows you to build, not just put out White Papers. That really, really helped us a lot, and we were so inspired by it. Then we did another one and Ocean Drop at the end of that year in the context of the Miami Art Basel. That helped us raise, not as much as the previous one, but enough to set up our ocean program. That's how we really got started, and helped us do a big push on our open climate engineering efforts. We set a small endowment. There's exposure to the markets when you do that, so it's not like 2022 was great for us, but it also helps us focus on the fact that for the type of work that we do, we need institutional permanence. So, we have to find a way to maintain the systems that we put out, because it doesn't work if you put out a great digital protocol, but you're bust and then it's 2030, and no one knows how to maintain it.
(46:06):
That's a challenge, so how do we transition from that really one-off capital injection, to going forward? I think because of what we've done so far, we've made a name to some of the philanthropic organizations that are often needing to support climate projects. Of course, we are 501(c)(3), so people can donate to us, but we realize that it's hard to get through the mainstream audience with our mission. That's also why we're trying to think about how to explain what we do from the context of collaboration. But what we also find, is the importance of creating multi-stakeholder consortiums and collaboratives or coalitions that we can lead, so that it's not just us trying to fundraise, that other organizations that can implement things with us, are also contributing to that. Where donors are not alone funding a single risky idea, that they can find peers. So you can create co-funding collaboratives with co-implementation collaboratives. We're in the process of writing a concept node and whole organization, of how to get these supernational organizations, [inaudible 00:47:15] Bank, UN Climate, UNDP, UNEP that need a lot of the digital infrastructure implementation, and the capacity building.
(47:23):
Let's remember that this is great, we're talking about cool tech, but the global South, as we say it in the climate space, doesn't necessarily have the capability to deal with new technology. You need to build tools to get them on board. There's a lot of need for that. Having supernationals in one level, having co-funders come together and support projects, look at a pipeline of saying, "Yeah, this is high leverage point, I can fund this," and then implementation partners. 501(c)(3)s like us, but also tech companies that can implement, and then think about those pre-competitive layers. A common reporting routing protocol for greenhouse gas SaaS companies, they all need to be part of that. We work closely with Linux. They're really good at doing the member-based coalitions. We're not a member-based organization, so that's one of the big things that we're exploring. The other one is, of course, large grants from tech firms or from other groups that are particularly in the space of climate tech that want to look at multi-year projects.
(48:36):
The other tier is, EU commission is really good at putting 20, $30 million grants to consortiums. One of the areas that we want to be able to be better, is to talk to major donors, individuals that have the ability to do powerful exits through their tech firms and care about climate, and care about how tech plays a role in climate from a social issue and from a collaboration issue, how we can get more to them as well. Being a California organization, of course, that's a natural area for us to do better. We're figuring out as we go in the adaptation. We could have come up with a token at some point, and we've looked at augmented bonding curves. One example of, how to fund digital public goods within the Web3 space. They're not quite there yet, or set up our DAO. I've spent a lot of time thinking about these things. I think eventually there's a lot of opportunities for that, but not quite there in a way that we feel super comfortable saying, "This is great." Sometimes we fall back to traditional fundraising for nonprofits, and then open to ideas.
Cody Simms (49:38):
Well, on the notion of wild ideas, beyond the fundraising thing, what are some of the wild ideas that you all are working on right now in general?
Martin Wainstein (49:48):
Yeah. There's certain patterns that we see that keep, after decades, being a deadlock. In the climate space, the big one is the North/South divide. The global South is always seen as poor, they don't have funding, their currencies are indebted, and so they're asking the money from the North. The North says no, but you admitted most of the time. This is the nature of these negotiations and discussions in the climate space. You realize, "Well, if we don't solve this, we have a problem." That's one angle that I've noticed that we really need to innovate there. The second one is, we launch an ocean program to try to think about, how do we help a government fund a marine protected area? When we think about let's say, carbon credits, we think about land ad forest, and those are very open for the private sector. You could buy a piece of forest somewhere, you can engage it in a red project, and sell your [inaudible 00:50:46] price to Microsoft if you want to. When they come alive, you can even do it as a natural asset company.
(50:51):
But oceans are so much more complicated, because this is economic exclusive areas. Through there, we started talking with the Costa Rica Central Bank and they said, "Well, we've got Central Bank environmental accounts, and we don't really know what to do." One thing that we've just published to peers, and we'll be publishing more broadly in April, is the concept of nature-based currencies. The other inspiration of that, has actually been the KlimaDAO. We were part of some of the early discussions of that, because KlimaDAO created a first digital native environmental derivative, something that this token is tied to this digital treasury. I thought that was fascinating, and we are thinking about, how does the global South print the financial capital that they need for climate and conservation that's programmable towards those cost centers, backed by or based on the natural capital that they have? There's a lot of nuances to that. On one side, you've got Central Bank digital currencies, CBDs, and a lot of governments are rolling out ideas for CBDs, some that leverage Web3s, some that don't. But on the other side, you can't directly make nature a collateral that is backing an instrument.
(52:07):
Some like gold. So when gold used to back the US dollar, that means that you could technically exchange, there's enough gold there to back for your dollar. You can't do that. You can't be like, "Give me my tree for my dollar," and you also cannot do, where under any default situation, "I'll take your forest." That doesn't work, and we'll just chop the lumber, sell it, and then we'll get the money back. You have to do it in a way where, what you value is the fact that the ecosystems that are backing the currency, are valued because they're alive. Then the thought process is that, if your natural capital or your living capital is healthy and vibrant, and there's biodiversity, then you have a strong currency and that currency is programmable. We designed to cover the cost of your park rangers, and your surveillance, and your enforcement, and your MRV system, and the restoration projects. But if you chop it down, as we've seen in the last four years with Brazil, then your national currency would go down.
(53:08):
How do we create that mechanism, and how do we do it in a way where the South is not tied to monetary schemes in the North? The example on the North, is the IMF, which is responsible for the SDRs, which are these special drawing rights, printed $980 billion of SDRs in the context of COVID to help. Out of those 980, 250 went to global South countries. You have a printing machine that benefits the rich countries. Well, if you're going to come up with any rules of how to do that, why does the South... I'm from Argentina. Latin America has a great potential to come together around buyer regions, like the Amazon, or the Galapagos, underwater mountain regions and the Andes, and say, "Well, this is wealth, this is value, and we need the currency for that. This is our right. Maybe we can, and not only scale nature for dead swaps, but find a way of setting this." This is out there as an idea. It's wild, but we need to drive some of these thoughts, because there's actually a lot of opportunity for digital infrastructure for that.
(54:13):
If nature's the future gold, the way that you MRV the health of your nature, becomes a very important thing. This is delicate subjects, because it's like, "Ah, your financializing nature fully." We've immediately realized that Indigenous communities need to be part of this discussion, and launched this initiative at COP with a lot of a coalition of Indigenous nations. We had, in the audience, the Bank of International Settlements and former Central Bankers. Having those discussions is important. You'd be surprised, Cody, governments are saying, "This is very exciting. This is an interesting idea." Central Bankers are saying, "This makes sense." From there, to seeing a first nature based CBDC as we put out in a first White Paper, I think will be some time, but we want to be the ones also at least one that stewards some of these thoughts.
Cody Simms (55:07):
I mean, Martin, what I'm loving from this whole conversation is, I'm literally picturing these very formal rooms you're sitting in with central bankers, and this, that, and the other, and it's almost like you're pulling the hoods off the hackers in real time, and helping people come together and collaborate together, leveraging these very cutting edge new technologies to hopefully solve very important global collaboration problems. That visual just sits with me for some reason. Where do you need help? For people who are listening, regardless of which of the various topics we've talked about, help with how to continue to fund your operations, whether it's help with the idea of the accounting layers that you're building, or whether it's some of the future ideas that you're thinking about, such as nature back currencies. Where do you need help today?
Martin Wainstein (56:06):
Thank you. Really, really appreciate that question, and I love your visual as well. I think the first way people can help, is get informed. Go to openearth.org, look at some of the programs. If there's feedback, give feedback. If you are a dean engineer, if you're a coder, if you're a tech person, look at some of our open source projects. Go to our GitHub, Open Climate is fully open. You can do poll requests. You can look at our ocean program. We're publishing python data pipelines for how to create marine ecosystem credits. So, you can collaborate in that way. If you realize that this is an important thing to fund, hopefully there's a donate button you can donate. If you are well endowed and you want to really support projects, I'd love to reach out. I'd love to talk to you more about some of the things that we're doing and how to support that.
(56:57):
You can support that. If you run an organization that works in the space and you've seen that there's opportunities to collaborate around common infrastructure, we'd love to hear from you. If you are great at marketing and communication and press, 501(c)(3)s like us need a lot of help. Get involved. We run a climate action data 2.0 community that meets every month. Join our newsletter, where we constantly put out channels through that channel, ways in which people can engage. We're hiring a tech lead for Open Climate, so if you're a full stack with a lot of experience, and had a lot of experience with larger organizations and now you want to make a difference, you can apply. Last year we did a lot of hiring, so the other way is, get engaged and submit your CV. Right now we have that position. Yeah, I think that that covers where people might come from, and how everyone can collaborate in any way possible.
Cody Simms (58:00):
Martin, I'm so glad we finally got to do this. Thanks for coming on, sharing what you're building with OpenEarth Foundation, sharing more about your background and your motivations for doing it in the first place. I can't wait to see what you all continue to innovate on as time progresses.
Martin Wainstein (58:16):
Thank you so much, Cody. An honor to be here and share this climate journey, and I know that everyone has so many great stories in this podcast, so I look forward to all the future ones, and see more ways in which we can also collaborate with MCJ.
Jason Jacobs (58:30):
Thanks again for joining us on My Climate Journey podcast.
Cody Simms (58:33):
At MCJ Collective, we're all about powering collective innovation for climate solutions by breaking down silos and unleashing problem solving capacity. To do this, we focus on three main pillars, content like this podcast and our weekly newsletter, capital to fund companies that are working to address climate change, and our member community to bring people together as Yin described earlier.
Jason Jacobs (58:56):
If you'd like to learn more about MCJ Collective, visit us at www.mcjcollective.com. If you have guest suggestions, feel free to let us know on Twitter @mcjpod.
Cody Simms (59:10):
Thanks, and see you next episode.
