2024-05-13
gemini://gemini.patatas.ca/posts/open-earth-foundation-summary.gmi
In Part 1[1], we looked at the people and organizations involved in funding the OpenEarth Foundation: a ragtag bunch of crypto billionaires, crypto companies, massive philanthropic foundations, and even a former Sotheby's art dealer who, according to OpenEarth's recently-released 2023 IRS filings (form 990)[2], was given a seat on their board of directors.
The next logical question: where's all the money going?
OpenEarth's website has some broad-strokes descriptions of various projects, but to really understand what this organization is all about, it's helpful to get a feel for what drives its founder and executive director, Martin Wainstein.
Hailing from Argentina, Wainstein completed his undergraduate degree at USC, and earned his PhD at the Australian-German Climate & Energy College at the University of Melbourne. And since then he's maintained strong links to academia; MIT's Digital Currency Initiative lists him as a collaborator, and he founded the 'OpenLab' at Yale - a project that eventually became the OpenEarth Foundation.
In early videos on his personal website[3], Wainstein has an air of restlessness, intensity, even a little swagger - useful character traits for a self-described serial entrepreneur. His first commercial venture was an 'environmental consultancy' called Wulcon Energy (the name comes from the words Wake Up, Live Consciously). In one of the Wulcon videos[4], we see Wainstein helping to load metal frames onto a truck; they're parts for 'solar kitchens', reflective satellite-dish-shaped contraptions that concentrate the sun's rays onto a cooking pot. They're being donated to a rural Argentine community, paid for by SASS Global Travel, a company that runs high-end ski and snowboard excursions, as a way to offset the air travel emissions involved in flying people to an Argentinian ski resort where they can "shred pow, eat meat, and drink wine".
The mountain village receiving the solar kitchens, by contrast, isn't on the electrical grid, and residents generally burn firewood as cooking fuel; not only is the firewood a source of carbon emissions, but gathering it is labour-intensive. So it's a double-win: emissions are lowered, and the community spends less time gathering fuel.
This comes with some *minor* caveats.
Namely, the benefits of carbon offsets are often hypothetical, can take decades to accrue, and don't result in permanent reductions to atmospheric carbon. For example, a tree planted today, assuming it survives long enough, can take 20 years to absorb the CO2e it's supposed to offset - and when it ultimately does die and rot, most of the carbon it absorbed gets released back into the atmosphere. Meanwhile, the emissions being 'offset' are pretty much immediate, and very much *not* hypothetical. And as for cookstove projects specifically, a study published in January 2024 looked at the available data and found that the 'carbon accounting' methodologies were over-estimating the benefits by nearly 10 times.[5]
That said, at the very least Wainstein and Wulcon Energy provided some useful kit to an off-grid town's residents. Right?
Or, well... on closer examination, it looks like Wainstein was an effective middle-man in the process, linking up SASS with the Fundación EcoAndina, an organization that had been doing this work for nearly two decades prior to this particular donation.[6]
The second business Wainstein lists, this time as co-founder, is the similarly-named (and similarly defunct) 'Wake Up'.[7] It's described as "a novel franchise system of one-stop-shop wellness centers", and in images of the New Zealand flagship location, we see branded aprons and cups, shelves of "slim & tone protein powder" canisters, a staff yoga session, a massage(?) table, sandwiches overflowing with sprouts, seeds, and cabbage, and large jars of loose-leaf herbal tea with names like Repose and Salvation. You might wonder how this venture - into an industry teeming with almost as many hollow promises and outright scams as cryptocurrency - relates to Wainstein's overall environmental mission. Luckily, he explains his thinking:
"Our major Earth system problems expose a radical disconnection in our human-nature relationship. But I find this only to be a symptom of our disconnection with our very self. To solve our environmental issues, I believe we must start by awakening our own consciousness as holistic beings."
Personally, I'd argue that in wealthy countries, we urgently need to phase out the use of fossil fuels by regulating them out of existence, while dramatically increasing public funding for things like the build-out of renewables, mass transit, and residential heat pumps. Plus we need to cancel the debt of low-income nations, and remove patent protections that restrict the production of technologies necessary for a rapid and just transition. But take all that with a grain of salt, because I don't have a PhD in this stuff or anything.
Speaking of which - Wainstein's personal site also shares a video [8] of his 2017 PhD completion seminar, and it's amazing how consistently he's maintained a view that in order to tackle the climate crisis, we should retain capitalist market structures and incentives, and just sprinkle some stuff on top, like, new-fangled blockchain-based financial products that make saving the earth more profitable. Oh, side note, also we all need to radically transform our idea of what the 'self' is, from an individualistic conception, to one encompassing the entire earth system, and thus our 'selfishness' will work out just fine for everybody. Seems straightforward enough!
Wainstein trots out a slew of overly-complicated diagrams over the course of the hour-long presentation, and every single one feels like an attempt to distract himself from a conclusion he's desperate to repress: a system based on the accumulation of private wealth is incompatible with the goal of having a habitable planet.
And if you're worried this might be an unfair characterization, just watch him tap-dance for a couple of minutes in response to his thesis advisor's question at the 51 minute mark: "Is there something about the chasing of the dollar that is fundamentally wrong with society?" [9]
[9] YouTube link (timestamped)
A few years and a couple of NFT auctions later: it's 2022, and Martin Wainstein is in Egypt on behalf of the OpenEarth Foundation, presenting a panel discussion at COP27 called "Nature based digital currencies: incorporating living capital and climate actions as pillars for an advanced monetary system".[10] He introduces the topic with a rapid overview of Nature Based Currencies, or NBCs; essentially the idea is to create blockchain-based assets that, rather than being backed by precious metals, or the state, are backed by the "ecosystem health" of a bio-region. And if you're struggling to understand how that makes sense, you're not alone: one of the panelists also seemed to have difficulty with the concept, and that person was Zoe Knight, Head of Sustainable Finance at HSBC.
For starters, you might be wondering: who determines how healthy an ecosystem is, and how does that get translated into the trade value of an asset? Like, even if it were reasonable to create a one-size-fits-all metric for something as abstract and context-dependent as "biodiversity", you're still left with the classic problem of cryptocurrency 'smart contracts': if you want to make a system that responds automatically to real-world events, then the real-world data has to come from somewhere, and how can you guarantee it's accurate?
Well, here's one approach: lots and lots of surveillance, from multiple sources. OpenEarth's draft whitepaper on NBCs[11] has more details, but at COP27, Wainstein briefly mentions various forms of monitoring - satellite imagery, IoT sensors, drones, cameras, as well as some in-person verification - all feeding into a "decentralized" blockchain system that (presumably?) chews up all those inputs and spits out a real-time token value. Or, maybe it's traders at hedge funds crunching the numbers, before placing bets on the future biodiversity level of a location being surveyed by their old college buddy's mining company.
Sure, I'm letting my imagination run a little bit wild here. But if it sounds like a bad idea to, I dunno, let Oregonian arsonists short-sell the CO2 absorption potential of a forest in the Pacific Northwest, get this: OpenEarth also pitches NBCs as a way to scale up the creation of so-called "debt for nature swaps"[12] between wealthy nations in the Global North and low-income, indebted nations in the Global South. (As I understand it: a nation mints NBCs that are programmatically linked to a set of continuously-monitored environmental metrics, and these financial assets reduce their debt burden - assuming that the assets retain their calculated value, of course.)
This is framed as a way to "empower Global South economies"[13], but I'm skeptical. Again, I'm no expert, but this feels like it's yet another way for wealthy nations to use low-income countries' debt as a method of control, demanding they become the 'unspoiled' carbon sinks of the world, restricted in their ability to develop industries that might increase their standard of living, improve food security, or reduce the reliance on imports from wealthy countries - the very thing which led to the debt in the first place. In a nutshell: it sounds like eco-colonialism, this time with satellites and surveillance drones automating the control.
"A global land rush is already underway around the globe.[14]
Take, for example, carbon offsets: a form of investment in greenhouse gas emissions reduction that lets the buyer "offset" the effects of their emissions-producing activity.[15]
But much of the available land is in poor countries, and inhabited by people who are those countries' least politically powerful. This can put them in competition for the land that provides their basic needs with powerful private interests from the world's most powerful countries.[16,17]
For instance, a research institute reported in 2014 that Norwegian companies' quest to buy and conserve forest land in East Africa to use as carbon offsets came at the cost of forced evictions and food scarcity for thousands of Ugandans, Mozambicans, and Tanzanians."[18]
- Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, How the Green New Deal Can Avoid Climate Colonialism[19}
Now, I don't think anyone at the OpenEarth Foundation wakes up every day excited to build the next-gen tools of oppression. But I also don't get the sense that they're really listening to the folks directly pointing out the problems with what they're doing.
One of the three panelists invited to the stage to discuss Nature Based Currencies is Dr. Kate Dooley, Lecturer and Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne. In retrospect, it's not surprising that the co-author of a piece titled "No more excuses: restoring nature is not a silver bullet for global warming, we must cut emissions outright"[20] wouldn't be super keen on the idea. But maybe Wainstein figured that someone from his alma mater would be supportive by default?
Not so. Dooley speaks in favour of public approaches, such as the legal protection of bio-regions, and directing funding toward specific, on-the-ground conservation efforts. She supports debt cancellation, and highlights the importance of backing the rights and efforts of Indigenous peoples worldwide when it comes to ecological justice and protection. All good things to implement, she says, "rather than scaling up this enormous nature-backed market."
This felt like a turning point in the discussion. It was all still civil and polite, obviously, but almost immediately the other panelists became more critical of OpenEarth's proposal. Atossa Soltani, representing the Amazon Sacred Headwaters, pointed out the perils of market volatility when it comes to ensuring stable funding of environmental efforts [footnote 1], and voiced philosophical concerns as well, asking, what happens when someone's identity as a forest defender becomes the basis for a transactional financial relationship? [footnote 2]
Even during the Q & A that follows, Wainstein doesn't budge, despite several members of the audience bringing up additional problems with the idea of NBCs. He somehow finds a reason to utter the phrase "nature is non-fungible", and casts doubt on the idea that governments are the appropriate entities to mint NBCs, suggesting "parallel instruments" to national currencies, on the basis that "nature doesn't understand political boundaries". And sure, we get it, borders are like, just arbitrary lines, man. But if it's not governments minting these things, then who? Corporations?
At this point, you might be asking: who cares? Isn't this just some group building an ill-advised blockchain-based carbon market, something that's incredibly unlikely to reach critical mass in terms of adoption? Sure they're at these big UN conferences, but it's not as if they're in the room with real decision-makers, right?
Well, I'm not so sure.
A few days before the Nature Based Currencies presentation, Martin Wainstein had taken part in another panel discussion (to be honest, it felt more like an infomercial for OpenEarth's 'OpenClimate' project) called 'Collectively Building the Open Climate Network' [21]. This panel was moderated by Catherine Atkin, a lawyer and founder of the Climate Data Policy Initiative of CodeX at Stanford, a group that seeks to "inform the development of new climate data policies that can catalyze innovation and action, unlock climate finance and accelerate scale". CodeX, by the way, is so in touch with regular people that there's a post on their blog titled "The Cop in the Backseat", and this is framed as a *good* thing.[22]
At the time, Atkin would have also been hard at work on California's SB-253, a bill she's credited as being the architect and and main legal and technical advisor for. This legislation, named the Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act, was signed into law in October 2023, and requires large corporations that do business in California to publicly disclose their Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions.
Interestingly, SB-253 also requires the California Air Resources Board to contract out the work of building and operating a reporting platform, rather than the state board running something in-house. There are some specific stipulations, too: this 'reporting organization' must be a non-profit, must currently operate in the US, and must have experience doing this in California. Seems like that would narrow down the options quite a bit! Whoever gets the contract is going to suddenly have thousands of large corporations using their platform, many of them potentially looking for easy and cheap ways to make their numbers sound better. Golly, it sure would be convenient if there was a ready-built offsets market that integrated seamlessly with this reporting tool.[footnote 3]
(By the way, if it seems like I'm reading way too much into two people crossing paths on just one occasion: Atkin and Wainstein would appear onstage together again a year later at COP28, with Atkin offering effusive praise for Wainstein's work "providing so much leadership when it comes to creating the infrastructure" of these climate data & finance networks.)[23]
Disclosure is obviously necessary for accountability. That's all well and good. But here's the underlying problem with this bill, along with SB-261 (disclosures around climate-related strategy, risk, etc) and AB-1305 (details about the exact nature of carbon offsets used to make carbon-neutrality claims): by including carbon offsets in the accounting and reporting, and making it sound like the only moral hazard is that not all of them are 'high-quality', they're promoting the complete fiction that carbon offsets represent real emissions reductions at all. They don't.[24,25,26]
Anyway, the OpenClimate network just seems to me like another example of this counterproductive market- and tech-solutionism. It's initially described as simply being a way for everyone - from individuals and businesses, all the way up to cities and regional governments - to enter their emissions data. But when OS-Climate [27] representative Vincent Caldeira (former Head of Tech and the Bank of Singapore, and Red Hat's CTO for APAC) has his turn to speak, one of the first things he says is that OS-Climate, essentially the back-end of the OpenClimate project, was designed to "provide data for the climate finance community, with a focus on climate risk assessment".
And to me, that said it all. I believe that these projects are, at their core, about maintaining corporate profitability, and about reducing business and shareholder exposure to risk, and doing so through 1) the expansion of bogus offset markets that will enable greenwashing at the lowest cost available, and 2) by pulling in such a massive amount of data that the entities best positioned to sift through it are well-resourced tech firms and insurance giants.
If you're still skeptical, just take a look at what happened in April 2024 at the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi): the Bezos-backed verifier of corporate climate targets, considered the world leader in the space, suddenly announced that companies would now be allowed to use carbon offsets at scale in order to fulfill their climate pledges.[28] Initially, many SBTi staff thought the announcement was a hoax [29,30] and removed it from the website. Others quit in protest over the change which, coincidentally, came just a month after the Bezos Earth Fund met with SBTi to argue in favour of the expanded use of offsets.
And I think that this concerted push is the reason you'll see breathless reporting about how 'the carbon market is expected to rise to a trillion dollars by the year such-and-such', without an explanation of how that market will halt emissions: speculative finance needs growth to come from somewhere, and this kind of *sounds* like something that's actually good for the world, now that the public has soured on crypto and is headed the same way with AI.
So yeah, I'm angry and frustrated. I think if there's a takeaway on what can be done, it's to continue to make sure that people understand that carbon offsets are completely useless when it comes to emissions reduction, and to make it utterly toxic for corporations to try to pass off their greenwashing as progress. We may not be able to stop them from building these markets, but we might be able to tank those markets' value?
One other sliver of hope I have - and it's probably wishful thinking: I wonder if a lot of these initiatives will turn out to be cryptocurrency-style vaporware? As of this writing, *a full six months after OpenEarth received hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding for the CityCatalyst program*, the CityCatalyst blog page is still entirely lorem ipsum.[31]
Dunks aside though: ultimately, maybe this is a cautionary tale, one that shows just how easy it is for people to fool themselves into thinking they're doing something good, helpful, and productive - even when the reality is that they're building tools that let power and wealth *expand* their ability to control and extract. Self-doubt never feels pleasant; it can make us feel lost. But without it, we really do lose our way.
1. I have no reason to think that Soltani was aware of the significant losses the OpenEarth Foundation had taken over the course of that year, but it was probably painful for Wainstein to hear her talk about how long-term funding stability is best supported using an endowment model.
2. Maybe it was because Wainstein felt the momentum shifting that he moved on to the Q & A portion, but not before invoking the concept of "Mother Nature" as a lead-in to saying how important it is for him to be having this discussion with "three very influential and powerful women".
3. There's also this wrinkle: just three months after the passage of the bill, Atkin became the Chief Sustainability Officer at Redwoods.ai, makers of an "AI Copilot ESG Enterprise Platform" helping organizations track their Scope 1, 2, & 3 emissions, as well as use "AI-powered predictions" to help set business strategy and decarbonization targets. It's not clear, however, if Redwoods currently meets the criteria to be offered the contract. And given Atkin's enthusiasm around what OpenEarth is doing, and Wainstein's existing connections, I'd be surprised if she was trying to sideline them. But I could be wrong!
CC BY-SA 4.0