Jason Assir, EnergyGigs' CEO, sat down with Nathan Truitt, Executive Vice President of Climate Funding at the American Forest Foundation, to discuss the intricacies of voluntary carbon markets, the outcomes of COP 29, and the future outlook for climate funding.
The Role of the American Forest Foundation
The American Forest Foundation plays a crucial role in managing 40% of U.S. forests, which are primarily owned by small family landowners. These landowners face significant challenges, including the need for a sustainable timber supply and ecological services, which require technical and financial assistance. Carbon markets are emerging as a vital source of financing for sustainable forest management and climate mitigation.
COP 29: The Finance COP
Held in Baku, COP 29 was dubbed the Finance COP, focusing on the financial commitments necessary to meet climate goals. The scientific consensus estimates that $1.3 trillion is needed annually to stay on a 1.5-degree pathway, yet COP 29 only committed to $300 billion. This shortfall underscores the importance of engaging the private sector through carbon markets to bridge the funding gap.
The Importance of Voluntary Carbon Markets
Nathan Truitt emphasized the critical role of voluntary carbon markets in mobilizing private sector funds. Efficient carbon markets could potentially reduce the overall cost of climate mitigation by $250 billion. Despite skepticism, participating in these markets can provide substantial value and impact.
Challenges and Improvements in Carbon Markets
The current carbon market faces several issues, including the complexity of carbon accounting and the need for better remote sensing technology, market infrastructure, and regulation. Truitt highlighted the concept of "additionality" as a core difficulty, which involves comparing actual project data to a hypothetical baseline. He suggested improvements such as transparency, reducing conflicts of interest, and dynamic baselining using synthetic controls.
The Future Outlook
Looking ahead, Truitt expressed optimism about the future of carbon markets, driven by the lack of alternatives to market solutions. He also highlighted the importance of nature- and technology-based carbon removal solutions, advocating for well-designed markets that support short-term and long-term storage.
Watch the Webinar:
Transcript:
Jason Assir
Good day, good morning, good afternoon, good evening to everyone. My name is Jason Assir. I'm with Energy Gigs. We're joined by Nathan Truitt, executive Vice president of Climate funding at the American Forest Foundation. We're very excited to speak to you all today about voluntary carbon markets, takeaways from COP 2029 and I guess, looking into 2025. So Nathan is a longtime friend from. You and I used to work together overseas in the US Peace Corps, and now he's with the American Forest Foundation. Nathan. So thank you so much for joining this webinar, being our esteemed guest. Just a little quick sort of housekeeping things around this meeting. Anyone has any questions, please do ask it in the chat. We'll be moderating the chat. It's gonna be an informal discussion. And then for those of you who are maybe this is your first time coming to one of our webinars, real quick about Energy Gigs. We're an talent and workforce platform for the energy industry. So we connect energy companies to just in time talent over hourly fixed fee and temp projects. And we are on a mission to just help educate, you know, our, our members and the community at large about where the energy industry is going, so that when someone wants to find work, they can easily, like, take those new skills and find work. Without further ado, Nathan though, we're really excited to have you. If you don't mind sharing a little bit more about your background and how you came into this role and why, why you're interested in voluntary card markets.
Nathan Truitt
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Jason. Very happy to be here. And just to start. Yeah. My name is Nathan Trude. I'm the executive vice president of climate funding at the American Forest Foundation. So I came into work on carbon Markets because our organization, we work with small family landowners who collectively own about 40% of the forests in the United States in very small parcels. So 70 acres is kind of the average size. And they face a number of challenges in managing their woods in a way that produces sustainable timber supplies, but also all sorts of ecological services that we all depend on, like clean air and clean water. And what we found is that it is very difficult to finance the assistance that they need. And that assistance is technical assistance, like someone to actually go and tell them how they should manage their woods and then financial assistance, how to cover the costs of transitioning from maybe an unsustainable form of forest management to a more sustainable form of forest management. And when we realized those things, we realized that the carbon market was actually a really good fit and an opportunity to provide that finance in a way that would enable landowners to meet their objectives, which are way broader than addressing climate change. Right. While also producing high quality, highly verifiable climate mitigation that could be sold in the form of carbon credits. My own background, actually. Jason and I were in Turkmenistan and the Peace Corps together, if you can believe it. There's like many lifetimes ago. But I came up through international development. And when you do that, when you, when you come up through the international development world, you realize that any kind of environmental problem has at its root social and economic challenges. And if you don't address those, if you, if you're not speaking to the felt needs of people, it doesn't matter how perfect your environmental planning is, it's not going to work. Right. And so that got me into what I would call the pragmatic side of environmentalism. And the American Forest foundation is definitely situated in that. A couple quick words of introduction, then I'm happy to get into some questions. I want to take a second to just talk about what carbon markets are, and I mean at the highest possible level, because a lot of times people talk about the carbon market and there are actually literally thousands of carbon markets that are all slightly different operating around the globe right now. But at its core, carbon markets are a way to drive finance to the most cost effective form of climate mitigation. Right. So in many cases you might have an entity, whether it's an individual or a company or a nation, that is unable to afford mitigating its own emissions in some form or fashion, but could afford to mitigate someone else's emissions. And so if you have a highly efficient operating market, what it in effect does is it drives down the cost of mitigating climate change and adapting to climate change. Why is this important? So this is a good transition to Cop 29 and Baku. Yeah, in Baku, Cop 29 was known as the Finance Cop. That's why a lot of people didn't go to it, because people are bored by finance, which I totally understand, even though that's what I now work in.
Jason Assir
Yeah.
Nathan Truitt
And the job was basically for the delegates there to figure out. Great. We have all these plans, we have all these commitments. How do we pay for it? Who's going to pay for it? Like what, what is the form of the payment, so on and so forth. This was all wrapped into what's called the new collective quantified goal, which is basically a commitment that the members of the UNFCCC process make to provide money. Right now the general scientific consensus was that it would take about $1.3 trillion every year for us to finance the transition from the pathway we're on now to a true 1.5 degree pathway. So that was the goal. And the COP 29 failed to deliver on that goal. They instead came up with a new collective quantified goal which basically was $300 billion a year. So less than a quarter of what is needed, plus this kind of vague commitment to like mobilize other sources of funding. So in other words, governments are going to give a certain amount and then they're going to do stuff to make the private sector give the remainder. So the headline from this is that the private sector for has to figure out why and how they will provide a trillion dollars a year to finance the tradition transition to 1.5 or we're not going to make it. In that context, carbon markets are extremely important because they're a mechanism for the engagement of the private sector, number one. And number two, they're going to reduce that price tag. So maybe it would be a trillion, but if we do it in an efficient way, eta, which is the International Emissions Trading association, estimates you could cut that price tag by about $250 billion with a well functioning carbon market. And in an environment where we don't have enough money and every dollar matters, we cannot afford to leave that tool on the sidelines. So that's why carbon markets are important. Now, many of you listening, probably if I were to ask you to like say what word you would use to describe carbon markets, you might come up with a word like scam. Like, I did this exercise once and someone gave me the word Madoff, right? As in Bernie Madoff. I was like, okay. And I just want to tell you, you do not have to like the current state of carbon markets or even the theory of carbon markets to gain value from participating in them, right? Or, or to have an impact for participating in them. As I said just a second ago, the question of whether or not public dollars will fund the transition has been discussed and decided. We can feel however we want about it. Maybe we think governments should pay for it, but they're not going to. So it's going to be up to voluntary mechanisms to close the gap. And so however you feel about the current carbon market, you should feel like, hey, I got to do what I can to make it work, to improve it. I've spent now seven years working of my life working on the voluntary carbon market and I don't like it. I'm not here to defend it. I don't think it's functioning well. There are, there are more bad things than good things about it and what we got. So we put our shoulders the wheel and we make it better day by day and hopefully eventually we can reform it to where it's really functioning effectively. Last thing I'll say, why should an energy professional care about the carbon market? And there are effectively three reasons. Number one, the carbon market may be a source of funding or finance for certain projects within the energy sector. So obviously renewable energy, large portions of it have been funded by the, by the carbon market. But also some of the new carbon dioxide removal technologies which are closely tied to energy companies and the energy value chain are ultimately like the business case for those is predicated on a highly functioning, scalable, high integrity carbon market. So, you know, if those business models are going to work out, the market needs to be working well. And then the second reason is obviously a lot of energy is produced through fossil fuel. The figure I just saw the other day is still about 80% of the world's energy is ultimately reliant on fossil fuel production of some kind. And so there's the question of during the transition, what do we do to address those emissions, which we can't, despite what everyone would prefer. Like we're not just going to wave a magic wand and poof, they're going to go away, right?
Jason Assir
Yeah.
Nathan Truitt
At the same time, we really can't just, just go like, oh, well, they're there. There's nothing for us to do about that. We have to figure out some way to compensate for them on the transition pathway to net zero. So that's, that's my sort of pitch to anyone, even if you're not interested in carbon markets, about why you should pay attention to this. They can be a tool to help you do the other things in your career that you're most passionate about and interested in. And with that, Jason, unless I missed any thing, I'll just stop and. No, that's great.
Jason Assir
And we're actually getting some questions right now. So one question is, is there a policy to require private companies to spend that trillion dollars that you mentioned? And then I guess the secondary question of that is, why would they comply to spend that money?
Nathan Truitt
What great questions. So the answer to the first is no, there is no such policy. Right now this is going to have to be mainly voluntary corporate action. Now, in different jurisdictions around the world, you're beginning to see a blend of what would be a voluntary carbon market and regulation. So for example, some of the ideas behind a cross border adjustment mechanism like you're seeing in Europe or actually that you're seeing discussed here in the United States, with Republicans actually being the ones who are leading these bills, have mechanisms within them where participants could, in order to sort of reduce their, their burden under cbam, could take advantage of certain carbon crediting schemes for that same reason. Right. It might be super expensive to comply, it might be slightly cheaper to rely on, on a crediting mechanism. And in that way we reduce compliance not only for the companies, but maybe more importantly from a politician's perspective, for the consumers who are otherwise going to bear the cost of those kind of tariff and border adjustment mechanisms. So you're going to see some of that, but even if you do, you're not going to see the sort of global price on carbon with like a highly functioning corporate market that maybe an economist would draw up on a whiteboard in terms of this is how this should work. You'll see this patchwork of stuff and voluntary action above and beyond compliance regimes is I think, actually going to have to take on the lion's share of the responsibility. Which leads to the second question. Why on earth would a company do this? Right? Why would they do this? Companies are not in the business of spending more money than they need to. Right. And so in the voluntary carbon market, we're having to make the case that actually you should spend money that you don't have to because in the long run it will create some sort of competitive advantage. I do believe that actually just today, not to go into it, but there's a, there's a blog that we publish on the American Forest foundation site about this. And the short version is that funding mitigation outside of your company through the voluntary carbon market can serve as an assurance mechanism to your investors and your employees and your B2B customers, these kind of long term partners, that your business is sustainable in a low carbon future, right? That it's not overly reliant on fossil fuels. And the reason it's a powerful assurance mechanism is if, let's imagine your investor asks you that today, like, hey, you're making a ton of money, but what if carbon prices keep going up? What if there's more policies like will you still make money or will we go bankrupt? And you go like, don't worry about it. Hey look, here's this 187 page sustainability report with charts and graphs and look, we have a plan for this, right? Yeah, they're gonna go like, that's great. But like, how do I Know that you're actually gonna implement that plan, that you're gonna hold yourself accountable to it. That's where voluntary carbon markets can maybe play a role. Because you can say, well, look, we're gonna do this. And to the extent that we don't, to the extent that we still have emissions, we're effectively gonna tax ourselves. We're gonna simulate that future where carbon prices have risen. And that will give you, our partners, confidence that our business is sustainable through this, this, you know, time of high and disruptive change. And if you could do that, you'll win more business, you'll acquire and retain better talent and employees, and you'll get a lower cost of capital from investors and debt providers. In theory, there's a, there's a lot of hopium in the answer that I just gave you. But we, we've got to make that case. Otherwise the company's gonna go like, the private sectors are gonna go like, wait, we're not charities, we're not gonna write a trillion dollar check. Cause it's the right thing to do. So hopefully that answered that question.
Jason Assir
No, I mean, that's, that's great. I mean, I think we, what we see on the talent side, especially among sort of the new entrants into the workforce, is a, is a desire, you know, across sort of the spectrum, political spectrum, of wanting to do something that is, is, has a transformative effect and a positive, net positive effect on the environment. And so I think that makes total sense for a company. Right. Because you now have a, almost like an employee value prop that you're saying, hey, we're not just making money, we're also trying to do right by our community, by our city, by our environment. Right. We actually have a follow up question. So do you have any insight into the reliable, rigorous measurement of CO2 reductions to improve on the trust in the carbon credit marketplace?
Nathan Truitt
Yes. So let me start by saying carbon accounting is really, really difficult. Because, because the boundary of your accounting is the atmosphere. And so just think about that for a second. Right. If your accounting boundary, the things within which you're going to try and take account of is literally the planet Earth. Right. That just adds in a tremendous amount of complexity. It's orders of magnitude more complex than kind of the traditional financial accounting which creates these sort of arbitrary boundaries. Right?
Jason Assir
Yeah.
Nathan Truitt
So I just want to acknowledge that that's the difficulty. Sometimes people say, like, treat this in the media like, oh, this is easy. And there's just like bad people who aren't doing it correctly. There may be Bad people. But, but more importantly, this is a fundamentally difficult thing to do, number one. Number two, the core difficulty has to do with the question of additionality, which is the question of did this credit and the money paid for it cause this project to happen or would the project have happened anyway? Right. So any negative article you read about carbon markets, that's probably the concept that they're talking about, that this product is non additional, this project, and therefore like the, the climate finance, didn't make a difference. Now, I'm going to answer the question in a second here, I promise. But I just want to again take a moment to realize what's being asked in a carbon project. You have what you measure in the project itself, which is easy. You go on the project, you measure how much carbon is, is either coming from the atmosphere or being admitted to it, and then you measure it against a baseline, which is a counterfactual, which imagines well what would happen if the carbon project was not here. And the difference between those two lines, that's how many carbon credits you can issue.
Jason Assir
Yeah.
Nathan Truitt
Now I just want everyone to realize that exercise requires you to make measurements in this universe that we live in and then to travel to a separate parallel universe in which the project did not exist and make measurements in that universe.
Jason Assir
Yeah.
Nathan Truitt
And I just, I just, like that's metaphysically impossible. We can't do it. Unless you're Doctor who. Right. There's just not something that you can do. And so I just want everyone to realize this is a, this is a very difficult scientific and even philosophical task and people are going to make mistakes and that's okay. Like we're going to get better and better and better. Now, how to improve trust in the carbon markets. Number. I say two main things, actually three. Number one, transparency. Like we got to be clear about our assumptions and be much more public about them. So you have to say, well, we're constructing a guess of what this, this other universe looks like. And here it is, here's all the information you know about our guests right now. There's too much like hiding behind this or that or the other thing, and that erodes trust. Secondly, who does right now, who sets the baseline for most carbon projects? It's the developer. The, the developer is the one who constructs that. And that is really problematic because the developer has a vested interest in that baseline being low. Right. Because why? Because then they get to generate more carbon credits. So, so there's a lot of conflicts of interest in this space that need to be resolved in order for it to function appropriately. This leads me to number three, which is our unique, what we have pursued as a solution to both of those first two, which, which is what's called dynamic baselining, or you may have heard of it, called synthetic controls. And the idea is very simple. It comes from actually the public health and vaccine space. And it goes like this. So, Jason, if I'm doing a vaccine test, what is my research question? I want to know, if I give you this vaccine, will it prevent you from getting a disease? Right. So I give you the vaccine. Now I run into the same problem. Now the universe in which you didn't get the vaccine is forever close to me. So I actually technically can't answer the question. So what do I do? I find a whole bunch of people who look like Jason. Right. Same age, some demographics, they live in the same area, same health history, no hair, all that sort of stuff. And some of them get the vaccine and some of them don't. And we compare the results.
Jason Assir
Yeah.
Nathan Truitt
Use statistics to draw causal inferences from that. Right.
Jason Assir
Yeah.
Nathan Truitt
I want to be really clear. Like this, in some sense is not really scientific because you're not actually observing the thing you want to observe, observing a proxy for it. Right. And you're drawing conclusions from that. We can do the same thing in carbon markets. Right. We can. We can set up that same sort of approach, which has two benefits. Number one, we suspect it's more accurate. Right. And number two, and this is maybe the more powerful one, it removes bias. Right. If you have protocols on how to establish synthetic controls, then actually you've taken the choice away from the developer. The developer no longer builds the baseline. Yeah. Developer implements the instructions of how to assemble a control group, and having assembled it, the project runs. And if their project really has a climate impact, you'll see it, and if it doesn't, you won't. So that's an example of sort of a methodological innovation. There's a lot of other stuff. Better remote sensing technology, better market infrastructure, better regulation, even within the voluntary space. And we've seen some groups begin to step up there. Yeah, I mean, I could go on and on and on. There are a lot of problems. It's not working very well right now. Right. But for any problem you find, there are groups of people who've acknowledged it, who are working on it, who are trying to make it better.
Jason Assir
No, that's. Well, that's fantastic. We have another question from another audience member, participator, participant rather, I believe in the future of carbon markets. What are the skills that makes me fit into it. How do I, how do I get into like, you know, supporting the market? What, what, what, what should I learn and study?
Nathan Truitt
Such a good question. You know, one thing I get asked this question a lot, and one thing it's made me realize is that there's not really a good set of resources to help people understand this. You kind of go from zero to 60. Right. It's a very opaque market. Let me answer the first question first, which is like, what are the qualities that someone needs to have? And what I will say is resilience, creativity, curiosity and a sense of humor. And to unpack that a little bit, this is not a market where we know what to do and all we're doing is implementing it and executing it. Right. So you got to be curious about what you don't know about the problems. A colleague of mine has this really great phrase which I'm sure he stole from someone else, I don't know who, which is like, fall in love with a problem, don't fall in love with a solution. So, so that's kind of the attitude you need. And then you just need resilience because one day you'll close a massive carbon contract with the company or get a new methodology approved and the next day, you know, you'll be subject to a withering front page article in the Guardian saying that you're a shill of the fossil fuel industry and fundamentally corrupt and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So it's a, it's an emotional roller coaster, right, to, to be in this space in terms of where to get started. I think probably this is such a good question. Yeah, I'm actually going to punt on this and just say have again planted the seed which other people have planted, which is like, we got to figure out a way to create a better onboard experience for people who want to help. Right. With the voluntary government market. So I'll just acknowledge if you don't go to the AFF blog, I don't know, there's some, there's some good stuff on there that, that you might be interested in. Yeah, and just LinkedIn is also good. Like just start kicking around. The one thing that is good about our community, I think, is that generally people are really interested in explaining and, and talking like openly about these issues and, and friendly. Right. To outsiders, even though we don't really have this good orientation that maybe we.
Jason Assir
Should, well, just to, you know, kind of push the curtain aside a little bit to reveal a little bit of our roadmap, like One of the things we're working on at Energy Gigs is incorporating a learning management tool where organizations can put together high quality educational resources and coursework. So for that, the person that had that question, you know, stay tuned, watch the space. You know, we're working on something there now kind of moving into, you know, 2025 also just sort of cop, you know, other things around COP 29. One question we have is loaded question. Do you have any visibility on the new administration will, whether they will have a CDR funding reductions?
Nathan Truitt
So the, so the short and honest answer is no. But let me give you some tea leaf reading and just you know, take it for what it's worth. I mean one thing that I keep in mind is that the sort of Department of Energy work that that is related to CDR did start under the first Trump administration. Right. I also would would note that a lot of the sectors that the Trump administrative administration is friendly towards, including oil and gas, are big proponents of CDR and frankly in my experience have kind of mostly left behind the notion that their job is to, to fight tooth and nail to preserve their current business models and are actually adapting. Not fast enough but you know, are ad into what this might look like, what opportunities there are, so on and so forth. So I think that they're going to get a lot of feedback about why CDR is incredibly valuable. You're starting to see some of this. You know, Senator Bennett, Senator Murkowski proposed what would be by far the most ambitious CDR policy in the world. You know, now that's just a marker bill. Who knows what happens with that. But to me it's a signal that there are going to be parts of climate policy which we will not call climate policy in under the new administration which may actually benefit. Right. It'll be described differently, we'll use different language, so on and so forth. But they're, they're, they're still going to be there. Yeah. And I then, then I just have to say like the United States is the Saudi Arabia of carbon dioxide removal and geologic storage. I just have to have faith that a business mind administration is going to at some form, at some point see that and do everything they can to ensure that we seize that opportunity. Because it will. If you do the numbers, the CDR industry at scale in a post net zero world is, you know, it's not quite as big as the current oil and gas industry, but it's in the same zip code. Right. It's not like a hundredth of the size. It's maybe 25% of the size. So we're talking a multi trillion dollar industry that really should be developed and cited and led by the United States. So fingers crossed, like that vision will come forward. At the very least, I wouldn't lose hope about CDR under the next administration at all.
Jason Assir
That's awesome. Well, thank you for those answers. I guess the question for your work at the American Forest foundation. When you think about like nature based carbon credit mechanisms versus sort of industry, you know, technology related, you know, like DAC removing carbon from the atmosphere or just, you know, I think, I think you called it, you know, not dumping something, you know, and counting that not in action as a carbon credit. Like, I mean, are there different sort of ways of evaluating those credits based on those sort of three high level variants, if you will?
Nathan Truitt
Yeah, so there is this, this is a matter of like intense controversy, debate right now. And basically what has happened is there's the global science on climate change, right? Which is, which is well understood and there's a lot of consensus around. But then there's this question of like how do you downscale it to a nation or to a company? And do the same principles that exist in, on the global level exist on those lower levels? And there's really difficulty here because a company does not have an atmosphere, right? Company shares an atmosphere with every other company. So you begin to get into this question of allocation, right? So on and so forth. In my own view, whether you avoid emitting a ton of carbon dioxide that you would have emitted, or you remove a ton of carbon dioxide that's in the atmosphere, the atmosphere does not feel a difference between those two activities. And so there should not be a distinction between those two Scientifically, pragmatically is where that distinction begins to make a difference. Because if we make the transition by 2050, there shouldn't in theory be additional activities to avoid. Right? They'll just be residual emissions, emissions that we literally cannot get rid of. And then, okay, now we will need removals, right? Because that will really be the only legitimate credit mechanism. The important thing here is just to realize that really is a pragmatic distinction. It's not one is scientifically better than the other in terms of nature and tech. If you look at the ipcc, they describe this very clearly. We need a lot of nature based removals now. We needed them yesterday, we need them four years ago. We keep dithering. We need them in huge volumes. Why nature based? Because tech based solutions aren't ready to operate at scale, right?
Jason Assir
Yeah.
Nathan Truitt
However, nature will Saturate nature is subject to reversal risks. So over time we need tech based removals to sort of take up the burden towards the middle of this century at scale. And so there's a lot of fruitless debates about should we fund nature or should we fund tech. Answer is both. Yeah, and actually well designed markets will, will use nature based credits for short term storage and then seek mechanisms to transfer that to geologic storage as those technologies become available. We're also working on that. That's something that you won't find in the current carbon markets is another great example of like the progress that we need to make.
Jason Assir
Oh, fantastic. Well, I, I know we're really at time and I've got like so many other questions, but before I we let you go, I just wrote one last call. If anyone has any questions for, for Nathan, please do ask them now. I think you know, looking, looking ahead, you know, 2025. Cautiously optimistic sounds like is sort of the, the takeaway, would you say?
Nathan Truitt
Yeah, I would say I'm, I'm optimistic because I have to be right like there, there is no plan B. So whenever, whenever I talk to sort of a true market sell skeptic, I always, I always ask the same question which is like great, let's get rid of markets. What's the alternative? Yeah, yeah, there isn't. So you know, we have to make this work. And so by function of that I, I choose to be optimistic because to be pessimistic doesn't, doesn't make any difference to the atmosphere or any other problems where optimism at least gives us the energy to keep trying and wake up and try harder the next day.
Jason Assir
Yeah, that's perfect. Yeah, well, we'll maybe leave it at there. Nathan, if, if any of the audience members want to reach out to you and learn more about your work, can we share your contact information and yeah, yeah, 100%.
Nathan Truitt
Also, I'm not entirely by choice, very active on LinkedIn and engaged in a lot of these discussions and debates and arguments there. So feel free to reach out to me there as well.
Jason Assir
I love it. I like, I don't quite eat popcorn and read it, but I love all your, your posts man. It's been very educational for me and so I would definitely say like, if you want to learn more about like everything related to the voluntary carbon market, follow Nathan, reach out to him, even have him speak on one of your events or something like that, I guess. And news from the American Forest Foundation, I guess in March you guys are rolling out a certification. Oh, sorry. Well, you Tell me. Sorry, you mentioned, like, I'm butchering it.
Nathan Truitt
But, yeah, I mean, really briefly. Like, one of the problems with the market is it's very hard right now for buyers and sellers to transact. It's very opaque. Every transaction is over the counter, and it takes months and months and months of time on both sides. We are testing a new approach to this. We're having an auction so that all buyers can come, they can all see the same things, they all do the same due diligence, and then they get price discovery through the bidding process itself. So that auction will happen at the end of March. We'll be opening up the. The bidding room in January. So if anyone on this call, if their company is looking to buy carbon credits, you should go. I think it's affauction.org or you just google aff auction and you can sign up there. Not necessarily for the auction that comes later, but just for updates and to learn more and blah, blah, blah, blah, all that kind of stuff.
Jason Assir
Awesome. All right, well, listen, thank you again, Nathan. Really, really appreciate you being our guest today. I'm sure we're gonna have more questions later on down the line. We'd love to have you back. Time. You know, time willing and wish you a great holiday season ahead. And same to everyone on the call. Happy holidays ahead and Happy New Year, and we'll see you all in 2025.
Nathan Truitt
Thank you.
Jason Assir
All right, thanks. Bye.
