For commercial and industrial companies that want to help reverse the changing climate, there is now a way to pay for CO2 removal through regenerative farming practices that pull excess carbon dioxide out of the air and lock it into the soil.
Through Nori’s new online “Lightning Sale” pathway, individuals and businesses can pay about $16 to have a metric ton of CO2 verifiably removed from the atmosphere. Nori Lightning Sale participants can estimate their carbon footprints and pick their own cash-for-carbon purchase amounts.
Participants in Nori’s new Lightning Sale will be underwriting the removal of thousands of metric tons of CO2 from the air. The sale is the first stage of Nori’s digital marketplace that will soon facilitate large-scale carbon removal through multiple methods including sustainable farming, forestry, direct air capture and other natural and industrial methods.
Nori is collaborating first with farmers to remove carbon. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently reported that soil carbon sequestration is the lowest-cost way to remove and store excess atmospheric CO2. Nori also is developing a larger-scale digital marketplace to support all forms of carbon removal.
By adopting certain soil management and crop production practices, farmers have the potential to draw CO2 from the atmosphere and retain the recovered carbon in cropland soils. While there are some upfront costs to transition to this type of farming, there are added benefits to the farmer too, including reduced use of chemical fertilizers, and improved soil health. Now farmers have another incentive to apply regenerative practices.
“Commercial and industrial companies are the ones with the largest carbon footprints of all,” according to Paul Gambill, CEO of Nori. “They are facing increased regulatory pressure to deal with those carbon emissions. With carbon removal, they can get involved on both the demand and supply sides, as there are profitable business models waiting to be developed that revolve around sequestering carbon in soils, trees, and rocks."
Companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Lyft, Stripe, Shopify and Intuit are dealing with their carbon footprints in part because they are being pushed by their employees, shareholders and customers to be environmentally responsible. Culture has shifted in a way that more and more people are demanding that companies take responsibility for their emissions.
“In many cases, dealing with climate change makes economic sense for companies. Imagine a manufacturer that has to ship goods on river barges,” added Gambill. “As 100-year floods increase in number, this manufacturer has to deal with the threat of being unable to deliver their goods on time to distributors. The climate is changing and affecting the way that we all do business, and companies are recognizing a need to take action and solve that for themselves.”
