The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Carbon is not a Dirty Word, A Guide To Carbon, Markets, Governance & Nature-Based Solutions By Samantha Jewel

Episode Date: November 16, 2024

Carbon is not a Dirty Word A Guide To Carbon, Markets, Governance & Nature-Based Solutions Kmdbooks.com Urth.io "... a game-changer in environmental sustainability. Her insightful and engaging exploration of carbon markets demystifies a complex subject and provides practical solutions for a sustainable future." Ryan Babbage "Carbon is Not a Dirty Word" is a comprehensive guide to understanding one of the most crucial elements on our planet: carbon. Samantha Jewel, with her unique background in both the food industry and environmental advocacy, takes readers on a journey to explore the intricate connections between carbon, climate change, and sustainable markets. Drawing from her rich personal history—from her family's pioneering role in the Australian restaurant industry to her groundbreaking work in soil carbon credits—Jewel provides readers with a clear and accessible roadmap to navigating the complex world of carbon markets and nature-based solutions. This book breaks down the science of carbon, explains the importance of carbon credits, and highlights the urgent need for governments, businesses, and land stewards to collaborate with nature rather than against it. Jewel’s insights into how carbon can be measured, validated, and traded as a commodity offer a pragmatic approach to addressing climate change while ensuring that nature's dynamic processes are respected and preserved. "Carbon is Not a Dirty Word" serves as both a practical guide and a call to action, encouraging readers to understand the pivotal role carbon plays in our ecosystem and the financial mechanisms that can drive positive change. With a focus on the potential of the carbon market to rebalance our climate, this book is essential reading for anyone looking to contribute to a sustainable future.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. I'm Voss Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. Ladies and gentlemen, when the Iron Lady sings it, that makes it official.

Welcome to the show. We certainly appreciate you. Guys, always supporting us for over 16 years and 2,100 episodes. We bring you the Chris Voss Show, and it just keeps getting better and more. There's more. There's always more. Today, we have a young lady on the show. We're going to be talking about her newest book that's out called Carbon is Not a Dirty Word.

A guide to, my mom used to call me that all the time though, a guide to, when she'd get angry, a guide to carbon markets, governance, and nature-based solutions by Samantha Jewell. She joins us on the show with us today. And we're going to be talking about her insights, what we can learn from her, and what's going on in the world, and all that good stuff. Samantha Jewell is a soil carbon expert of some 27 years, giving her the title an OG in the carbon space, whose insights bridge the gap between sustainable agricultural and impactful environmental practices. With a wealth of experience as the CEO of URTH.io. Her company specializes in carbon aggregation and the pivotal

role farmer credits play in the ESG landscape. Welcome to the show. How are you, Samantha? I am great. I'm very excited to be on this show with you, Chris. Well, we're excited to have you. We're so excited I just interrupted you. Gibbouson.com, where can people find you on the interwebs? Look, I'm on a number of places. As an author, I've got my own website, samjewel.com, J-E-W-E-L. And I've actually got the books. I've got children's books as well on the same topic in seven languages for five-year-olds,

10-year-olds, and 13-plus. So different age groups different things all based on the sort of Alice in Wonderland story of down the rabbit hole and very appropriate for the soil and soil microbes so I've been talking about that since 2006 but this is really a business book so this book's been a brand new book and I've got it on both my personal website and on my company website, which is Earth, which you've been saying. Here, I've got it on my thing. And the reason it's.io because it's blockchain based. And I am very excited about this book. I actually was asked to do it by my business partner in the Middle East whose people just don't know this stuff at all.

And because I'm in Australia, we're kind of the world leaders in soil carbon, so you tend to find you're talking in an echo chamber. So it's very exciting to get out and talk into different communities who know nothing about this, the massive relationship between the microbiome in the soil and how we have evolved as humans for everything in our body and our body health, which given that the new Trump election has just occurred, make America healthy again. This should be a very topical piece of discussion.

Yeah, we need it if you've seen the way we eat. You're from Australia, right? I'm from Australia, but I have family in America. I have been many times. I've even gone to school in Topeka, Kansas, but I do struggle to eat everywhere. It's just, I'm amazed what's food. It's a lot of food. Like even like I went to Del Taco the other day, and I normally just order a medium drink because that's about all the Coke I really want to drink.

And I always forget how huge it is. And they'll hand it to me, and I'm like, is this a large? They're like, no, that's medium. I'm like, I don't want to know what large. And I think I've fucked up and I've ordered large sometimes because maybe I'm really hungry. And they hand me their large thing and it's like a bucket. It's like a five gallon bucket. It's actually, as an Australian, and I'm really a fairly english sort of descent and a fairly everything's

kind of polite and modest and you know that's my cultural background i actually find it really gross it's oh this is what's going this is the fence going on on my plate here so it's it's really a cultural shock i think to come into american food systems and the way it's just common to eat over there. It is really difficult. It's really funny. So give us a 30,000 overview of what's inside your book. I always thought carbon was that stuff that makes your fingers black from the Xerox copier. What is carbon?

And tell us all about it. Well, carbon's everywhere. It's actually everywhere. You're right. It is that black stuff. But it's also, you know, if you are actually taking carbon out of the atmosphere by a plant, that's what a plant does. We're all made of carbon, so are plants. But carbon actually forms the infrastructure in the soil that makes

it possible for it to absorb water. It actually is the recognition between the plant doing photosynthesis, which everyone learns at school. And you all learn, we breathe out carbon dioxide and the plant, we don't probably know what it does, but we know it breathes out oxygen. So we know the plants are important, but we don't kind of, that's about as far as most people understand. But actually the plant takes that carbon dioxide, splits the carbon uses it to make itself and the black stuff in the soil so when you see a soil that's a red soil like this red soil i've got examples in my i don't know how to put that with this thing i don't i've got

examples in my you know case studies that i've gone through where i've actually done you know studies on i've got photographs and one plant is just covered in red dirt still in the roots and the other plant when you start actually treating it the right way it immediately goes black and that black around the roots is carbon being taken out of the atmosphere that is the plant doing what it should be doing and what we've done globally is destroy this relationship between the fungi in the soil that are part of this sequestration model a particularly a particular fungi called mycorrhizal which is a big word but that is the fungi that wraps itself around the roots and extends the capacity of the plant often kilometers out with this fine sticky network which goes everywhere

and it exchanges the photosynthetic sugars from the plant, you know, photosynthesis, it makes these carbon sugars and it exchanges them with the plant for minerals because the microbes in the soil, when it's healthy, actually break down the rocks and turn them into liquid. They break down rocks, turn them into liquid. What a concept, right? And that exchange between the plant and the soil through the microbes and the fungi is you can see it in the soil.

It goes black as a record. I call it the gold in the soil it goes black as a record i call it the gold in the soil the black gold of the soil and it's also makes these like cathedrals in the soil that enable the microbes and the water to get in so you can have a hard pan on one side of the road from conventional agriculture that's destroyed the soil this this interaction, because of chemicals, fungicides, herbicides, pesticides, all these different things that are being used to pump the food out of the ground to get a crop and without the minerals, which is why you've got all these diseases. So the critical thing in my story really is that this soil carbon thing that I go on about and why the carbon market is so critical to maintain,

I know that Trump's saying climate is a problem, but the real reason I've been on this bandwagon is human health, mental health, children's health, developmental health, disease prevention. Like really the pandemic, if everyone was healthy, they probably wouldn't have even got sick. Like you're a little bit sick and they would have gotten over it because the body would have all the microbial tools that are in the soil that we evolved with would be in our gut and in the story, in this whole discussion. So these up here, these are like experts, and I've got a lot more of them from all over the world

that have given me testimonials on what I've written in the book because I've tried to make it a really simple guidebook so that whether you're a farmer who doesn't know even that you've got carbon in your soil or you don't or you're a sophisticated banker and trader in New York you've got to know well how do I find those carbon credits that I can change that are from all this story that I talk about. And the farmer's going to go, how do I make that stuff? That's really hard. And that's another revenue stream for them. But that is difficult. All that part is difficult for both parties. So, I'm the bridge in the middle. I'm trying to give this relationship for both. So, I recently had

a very, probably the most heart moving thing for me i gave this book to a farmer who all his life and he was on an airplane with me and i gave it to him he said oh i haven't read a book in 30 years i haven't read a book he said oh you'll never get me to read this book and i said give it a go anyway he rang me and he said i he rang me twice once to tell me he was halfway through the book and couldn't believe he'd read this much and another one when he finished the book to say i i have to thank you because i didn't think i could learn anything more about the land in his whole life in the sugar cane industry and he was about to go and give it to the head of the

sugar cane association of australia which is one of the most closed communities like these big commodity like the corn industry in america i'd imagine and he was really i mean that moved me i was like brought to tears but for a farmer to say that they changed from reading my book and understanding how this works how simple this is and and yet how critical works, how simple this is, and yet how critical it is to our survival atmospherically because it's the bit that takes carbon out of the atmosphere, human health-wise, like these critical points that we don't get, how all our weather, all our health issues,

just so many things are all tied into the soil. So I do bang on. I am a bit intense about it. But it's, you know, I just think it's such an excitingly simple thing. People can do something themselves and it makes a difference. Yeah. So is there a way to make money at this? If I'm sitting around right now and I'm like, hey, I want to make a couple bucks trading.

Is this the same sort of thing that I think Tesla and Elon Musk was doing? They were doing something with credits. I don't know if it was electric car or clean air credits. They were doing something. The problem with soil carbon credits is it's been a really hard slog to get the adoption of the understanding because this science is so much more complex. Most people do carbon credit training in the energy space because it's pretty easy. You look on your bill. It's already worked out for you. Most people do carbon credit training in the energy space because it's pretty easy. You look on your bill.

It's already worked out for you. I turn the lights off and I've got, you know, I haven't emitted as much carbon. I get what I call a carbon mitigation credit. You're actually not emitting as much carbon and you get a carbon. You can get a carbon credit for not emitting carbon, particularly in industry. That's what all the tree credits are about they're about i won't cut the trees down so we'll pay you money to not cut the trees down and that's like mitigating the carbon yeah you'll threaten to cut all my trees down so yeah it's it's not really a personal thing it's more on like the rainforest of the amazon or and someone

making money out of the wood it's it's really big business so there's there's been a lot of corruption in the space folks but it will be and that's kind of what i've been trying to do is be able to make it possible for the individual to be part of this like you would be trading in the crypto space to be trading carbon credits it's just not quite there yet we've been really struggling to get that major first sale across the yard. There have been in certain markets, but they're already sold because business needs them so much. They're often sold before they're even measured. Like in Australia, we were the first to develop a carbon credit called the Australian Carbon Credit Unit. But now there's a lot of different carbon credits.

I think America does Vera, but there's been a slowing down you can go on different carbon markets and trade them wait there's carbon markets too yes there's lots of carbon markets so it's like bitcoin i'm just i remember bitcoin first came out and i was like what is what is cryptocurrency coin and now there's 50 trillion different coins, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a little bit different because people are really concerned about corrupting this space because it's nature and nature is very, you know, like we need nature to survive. And so there's lots of activists. People don't really care about Bitcoin, whether it's real or it's not, or the crypto. They just think, oh, that's all the crypto bros.

But when you start talking nature and carbon, even though it's a similar market situation, there is a lot more validation. So we measure carbon a meter into the ground with soil cores, like drilling for something. We drill a meter. It's a bit over a yard in depth. And we send them off to a laboratory and we measure how much carbon, what's called stable carbon, is in there. So it's a really, really different process than satellites with trees.

It's a lot more expensive and it's very slow-growing carbon. You realise you generally only have one rainy season a year in most parts of the world, you know, four seasons, et cetera. So you're generally only having that growth spurt by a plant where it's taking the atmospheric carbon out and putting it into the ground and what are you growing and how far deep is it taking it? So it's a bit more complex. But that's why I'm trying to make the book really simple.

It should take a person from zero to a fairly sophisticated understanding in it. What I'm told is about a four-hour read. Wow. You know, there's a million ways to make money in this world, I guess. I need to get on all of them, evidently. Because you never can have enough. That's for damn sure. So how did you get into this business?

Tell us a little bit about Europe bringing what got you interested in these fields. Yes. It's an interesting story. My family created the first restaurant chain in America in 19, sorry, in Australia in 1965. And I was a baby and my father came from the Midwest, Kansas in Goodland, Kansas. His family is still farming there, the first generation. And they're the first generation and they're the first generation to discover no-till farming which is the not turning of the soil because of

the dust bowl of the 1930s so in 90 in 97 when because his family lived through it and the i don't know if you remember there was a thing called mad cow disease which broke out in england and all i had to kill all the cows because they were feeding a cow cow meat for protein which is i just went what the brains and everything was carnivore or carno why would you give a herb a herb of all meat it was just like this is an insanity and because we were feeding for 50 000 customers a week i went oh my god what are we doing i'm pregnant i better look into what's going into our food because i knew nothing i was not from a farming background i was a sculptor and an artist off in dreamland but also running restaurants with you know it's just it's a whole other world so i i started looking at it and discovered GMOs and what they were doing and the introduction of glyphosate.

And so I got into all this that early. And so I still don't grow anything, but I've become very deep in the research because I was funded by my family's business to go to all the international conferences around the world. So I got really firsthand information by scientists that I found were really talking in a silo they were talking to each other which is why i decided to write the books because i felt i felt this information needs to get out to people there's a lot of big corporations there's a lot

of big corporations that trade this stuff right carbon yes yeah yeah they trade the stuff and they do all the dealio with all of it. The majority of carbon traded right now is still energy. It's still wind, solar, mitigation, pyrolysis, biochar. There's a lot of what I call not putting carbon in the atmosphere or mitigation carbon, but I'm actually into drawdown carbon. I'm actually taking the carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it in the ground at depth. So it's quite a different protocol because I'm actually into drawdown carbon. I'm actually taking the carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it in the ground at depth.

So it's quite a different protocol because I'm trying to actually fix the problem, whereas most carbon credits are about trying to slow the process down. Like everyone's trying to say, stop fossil fuels. And I'm saying a big thing you need to understand is if we all went regenerative, actually regenerated the earth at depth, which America has tremendous capacity for because it's got the pathways

deep in the soil anyway, but if we really actually did that, we could double the amount of carbon emissions because we could absorb 70 gigatons per annum through our agricultural practices. Imagine that, double the amount of carbon and we we currently emit 40 gigatons so i'm not suggesting we do double our emissions but i'm just saying it it needs to be considered that this is how important soil carbon is it's more critical than everything else because it also ties into human health and we've got a lot of issues happening around the planet we've got

50 fertility drop globally 50 that's like babies male babies already born sterile so we've got because the gonads are not developing in vitro so we've got huge problems and a lot of this everyone talks about the microbiome but how do you fix the microbiome? The microbiome is actually from the soil, and we've evolved with the soil. So if the soil doesn't have it, we don't have it. It doesn't matter how you're growing. You could be growing organically, but if it doesn't have the nutrients in the exchange

between the atmosphere and the soil, it's not just about no chemicals. It's about what are you doing? Is there an integration of animals in the system are you moving them across are you letting the the planet you know do its thing it's kind of extraordinary the more you study it the more fascinating it is definitely definitely it's it's pretty interesting how this whole thing is going to work so give us a give us a as we go out tell us how people i mean does it require a certain amount of money? Is there a minimal net worth you have to have to play, or how does that work?

In the carbon market? Yeah. Look, I would say at this point it's really only a business B2B kind of thing. I mean, even in the agricultural space, you're not going to bother going to all the auditing costs and stuff without a minimum of, say, 100 hectares, which most people are just small farms. But it's really for ranches with big open pastures doing movement of animals. And there's some extraordinary farmers, America, Australia. We have a lot of case studies. You know, just to give you an example, the viability and fertility of the animals being

born and surviving birth and having, you know, for sheep, let's say twins, that's based on soil health. Wow. I hope. Is it getting late for you over there? No, no. I'm sorry. it is about five o'clock on on the tape but my apologies that's all right it's trying to hide behind the mic that's all right it's it's it's probably a big subject that you may or may not be interested in i know a lot of

people are not interested in i'm always fascinated but it's um it's a subject that has always fascinated me, and I hope that some people in your audience are infused with the enthusiasm that I have for the subject to have a little bit of a research on it because it is really, it's going to be very big and the carbon market will falter down. There are countries in Europe that are already trading it. You can buy a coffee with a carbon credit in Europe but in but you know how it is with rules and regulations it's so onerous to do anything on a retail level from a legal point of view that particularly here in australia that i did start

off as a trading company and doing it with crypto i wanted to do it in that micro dollar thing for people to be involved but it's such a big subject just to get people interested to then get them buying and then get them doing it. It was like, ah, forget it. I'll just deal with B2B. What can you say? Give people your final thoughts as we go out. Tell them where they can find out more about you and your company and where they can order

the book. Okay. So there's two things I'm going to tell you. Again, if you're just interested in the book, go to my website. If you're interested at samjewel.com. If you're interested in knowing more about carbon credits and advisory, whether you're a farmer or you're a, you know, like someone doing your ESG reporting and you have to buy some credits

to offset what your ESG is. And I don't know how that landscape is going to be under Trump saying it doesn't exist anymore in America, but certainly here in Australia and a lot of countries around the world. In January 1 in Australia, we have ESG laws coming in, making it compulsory, which will affect everybody and their supply chains. I know the UAE went ESG compulsory in on the first of july and they're all scrambling to do their footprints i believe it's already in in america at the very big business

have you got 30 000 staff or something i think they have to have esg reporting i'm not up with where the law is over there but certainly i have been reaching out to american cfos and saying you know when you get stuck and you've done all the reduction you can do and you need to do something to show that you're actually trying to offset your emissions, please come and talk to us because we've got very good quality emissions to buy. Buy those quality emissions. They mix great with your coffee. It was that sweet carbon taste. Drink some now. Eat some dirt.

Eat some dirt, which is usually what I'm stating to most of my enemies. So thank you very much for coming on the show. We got your dot com in there, didn't we, Samantha? Yep, samjule.com and my company, earth.io, U-R-T-H dot I-O for the advisory stuff. All right. Yep, love to hear from you. Thank dot I-O for the advisory stuff. All right. Yep, love to hear from you. Thank you very much, Samantha, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it.

Thank you, Chris. Thanks for tuning in as well to our audience. Go to goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, Chris Foss, one of the TikTokity and all those crazy places on the Internet. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time. And that should have.