Well, sort of. A Portland company says it can help tree owners get a toehold in the carbon-offset economy
Can you believe it? A promise to turn photosynthesis into virtual money. Photo: Tom Donald/CC
By Chris McGinness, KGW News. August 15, 2022. Portland start-up Cascadia Carbon says it can help people connect the trees in their yards to the lucrative carbon-offset market while fighting climate change.
In short, you could get paid for the good care you take of your trees.
“Eighty percent of Fortune 500 companies have committed to either go net zero or net negative,” says Alex Wick, the founder of Cascadia Carbon.
Because most of these companies cannot remove all of the carbon from their process, they buy carbon offsets. A carbon offset negates the greenhouse gas emissions by producing an emission reduction elsewhere.
Here’s a simple analogy: Company “XYZ” creates 1,000 tons of CO2 each year, so they pay company “ABC” to plant a million trees. Trees are some of nature’s best carbon captures.
“The voluntary carbon offset market has been around probably since the late ’70s, but historically, individuals, homeowners [and] small landowners have been unable to participate because it costs too much to verify and list your offsets for sale,” says Wick. “We’re the Airbnb for offsets. We allow individual homeowners to take that carbon stored in their trees and sell it to corporations.”
Oh, yeah, NFTs are involved
To participate, people must document their tree, including the species, size, health and location.
Then Cascadia Carbon creates a digital certificate of authenticity.
Cascadia Carbon founder Alex Wick. Photo: Cascadia Carbon
The non-fungible token, or NFT, becomes an NF-Tree. Then any growth of the tree—which is mostly carbon—goes onto the carbon-offset market. As the tree grows, so does the vestment.
According to its website, Cascadia Carbon’s nature-based cryptocurrency is called $CODEX.
Because the trees are individually validated every year for their carbon-capturing ability, it’s possible these offsets are of higher value than what’s currently on the marketplace. But of course, it’s not just about the money.
“The idea behind tokenization is that it allows you to verify and validate that you and your family are doing something to stop climate change,” says Wick. “There are so few things an individual can do just in their daily life that are carbon negative. There’s actually one thing you can do that’s carbon negative and that’s photosynthesize.”
