Stan Alcorn
speaker
46 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Stan Alcorn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Terrazos is a Colombian company that seemed to have found a way to not only pay for conservation, but maybe to even make it profitable. It is a little controversial.
Mauricio understood this basically meant they were conserving ecosystems by taking money from the very same companies that were destroying them. Was there a part of you that was, like, conflicted at all about the model?
Mauricio starts looking into Tarassos' model and quickly realizes it won't immediately solve his problem at El Globo. There aren't any of those big projects destroying that particular part of the Andean cloud forest. But he decides to take a job with Tarassos to learn all about their habitat bank system.
Now, there are two types of carbon credits. There are credits that companies buy because they basically have to by law in places like Europe and California. But then there are also voluntary carbon credits that companies buy because they want to, maybe in order to make some sort of PR claim, like they're carbon neutral or net zero.
Mauricio says their theory was that companies wanted to make these kinds of claims. They wanted to invest in biodiversity. They just needed a way to do that that was easy and trustworthy.
And if they could make it work, Mauricio thought, instead of getting people to pay his family per head of cattle at El Globo, they could instead get companies to pay them per 10 square meters of restored cloud forest. Next, they needed to figure out how much those companies should pay. So how did you set the price?
They added up all these projected costs. Then they looked at the price of things of sort of similar offerings, like an adopt-a-jaguar program. But there was a big range, so they kind of arbitrarily picked a nice round number, $25 a credit. With a total pool of more than 300,000 credits, that would cover their costs and maybe even make them a profit.
For Mauricio, that meant doing a kind of wildlife census to get a baseline. A lot of El Globo is sort of barren from its cattle ranching past, but there was one super dense, biodiverse patch of forest that was never cut down. And that is where the lion's share of El Globo's biodiversity lives.
This is the biodiversity that the Biodiversity Credit is supposed to protect. And it's the kernel that they're building on as they restore the rest of the land here to its former tropical Andean glory.
People. Real ones, no, it's actually marmalade sandwiches. No, so they eat mostly bromeliads.
Which brings us to the existential question hanging over this whole project. Mauricio has sold one credit to Planet Money, but can he sell thousands or tens of thousands of credits to actual companies?
Every two years, diplomats from around the world descend on one city for a week or two in order to try to save the planet's plants and animals and fungus from mass extinction. This year's summit, the COP16, took place in Cali, Colombia.
And like every summit, there was also this sort of shadow conference filled with thousands of people who at least claimed to be trying to tackle the same problem from the private sector.
I think they care because they're here and they're willing to listen. Over the course of the last few years, Mauricio has gone from a biology student to a sort of evangelist for this new kind of financial instrument. One that he hopes might turn his family cattle ranch into a permanent refuge for threatened species like the spectacled bear.
And there are, of course, several biodiversity credit products touting themselves as compatible with the blockchain. Including Mauricio's, in fact. Now, it isn't totally clear whether all of this is just a circus of hot air or maybe the start of a new gold rush. But Mauricio is hoping that all this marketing hype could mean more people will be willing to buy what he is selling.
I have no idea. Mauricio later tells us that Terrasos' goal is to sell 10,000 biodiversity credits by the end of the year. There will eventually be more than 300,000 credits.
ISA is willing to take the risk on this new untested product. But as the conference goes on, it seems like they may actually be the exception.
We think they're a distraction. Mark thinks these credits are a distraction. He's worried that governments might use biodiversity credits as an excuse to not cough up the money they've already promised, to pawn off the biodiversity problem on the private sector. He's also skeptical that these credits will actually be able to deliver on what they promise.
But then in the last couple of years, there's just been a steady drumbeat of damning research and journalism. Reports that consistently show the majority of those carbon credits didn't actually live up to those claims. And a lot of them didn't actually end up reducing carbon emissions at all. The voluntary carbon market has tanked as a result. It's a fraction of what it used to be.
And sure enough, a week or so into the COP conference, Mauricio seems to be learning firsthand some hard lessons about that lack of demand. He's talked to 30 or 40 companies, but there haven't been any big corporate windfalls yet. Terrazos was trying to sell 10,000 credits by the end of the year, and they had sold about 6,000 before the conference.
Showing 21–40 of 46 · page 2 of 3
← Previous
Next →