.png){kind=logo}
Mike Smith is the CEO of Aclymate, a company with a mission to use intuitive software and friendly Climate Navigators to help your small-to-medium-sized business become a Climate Leader.
Intro
0:00
[Music]
0:07
do [Music]
0:20
mike great to meet you man welcome to the podcast thanks for being here hey ethan it's good to see you man
0:25
thanks for having me you got it and you know we always like to get the show started with a little bit of background on who you are how you
Mikes background
0:31
got to be doing what you're doing the current moment sure yeah so uh i live here in denver colorado i was
0:38
born up the road in casper wyoming my dad used to work in the oil field uh moved up to alaska at the age of two
0:43
lived there until i was about the age of six um my dad lost his job in the bus to 86 and
0:49
we went like full beverly hillbillies moved all our stuff into a school bus and moved to idaho um
0:55
and uh and he became a teacher my mom has been a nurse the whole time and the reason we moved to idaho is because my
1:01
grandfather was a forester who had retired to the area um and so i spent a lot of time in the woods kind of hiking
1:06
around with him uh in 1989 when i was nine years old a big wildfire happened called the loman
1:13
fire and put up a mushroom cloud and that was just really memorable as a child of the cold war to see a mushroom
1:19
cloud and i asked my grandfather what's going on and he said well fire's part of the landscape and don't worry about it it'll regrow or
1:25
somebody will replant it and i said okay what do i know i'm nine you know so great
1:31
i didn't really think about it um i ended up after graduation from high school there
1:37
in boise uh went to the u.s naval academy where i studied uh systems engineering with kind of a
1:43
focus on environmental engineering um that background of kind of living and growing up in like these fairly you know
1:49
rural you know outdoorsy spaces uh you know gave me like a deep appreciation for the environment and so i did it
1:55
there and then i also did i essentially i came close to double majoring in political science um uh
2:02
while i was there and i wrote most of my papers around environmental policy uh weirdly enough including my honors
2:08
thesis around the clean air act amendments of 1990 which were some of the precursors to the carbon markets
2:14
uh fast forward a couple years i after i graduated from the academy i was flying f-18s for the us navy and had like what
2:20
a lot of people kind of consider to be a dream career uh you know fighter pilot flying off aircraft carriers
2:26
and um i got married in 2010 and shortly thereafter i brought my wife to idaho to
2:32
show where i'd grown up and we drove by the loman fire that fire that happened when i was nine it was 22 years after
2:38
the fact it wasn't coming back and that caused me to
2:43
uh to take a really hard turn out of the navy i had a couple more years left on my hitch but i decided i wanted to go
2:48
figure out like what was going on there and how i could be part of the solution
2:54
so that background in understanding about like early carbon markets um i got
2:59
out of the navy spent the first six months in the denver public library taught myself everything i could about climate change carbon markets
3:06
uh business forestry and i started my first company called renew west renew west was about originally was
3:14
about post-fire reforestation leveraging carbon markets in order to achieve that and it's grown into um
3:20
a uh you know more broadly a natural and working lands company that effect that can you how you can leverage land to
3:27
tackle climate change um i was very fortunate to have my very good friend uh john cleland he joined me
3:34
as a co-founder at renew west um and uh you know he was my ride or die we worked really hard together um along the way
3:41
developed an expertise in carbon markets and climate policy was an advisor to the us climate alliance
3:47
and uh our big claim to fame at green us is the largest carbon reforestation project in u.s history uh we planted two
3:53
million trees in northern california uh that finished up on mother's day of this year wow and i just couldn't be more
3:59
proud of that um in the early part of the pandemic i um
4:07
developed a uh i had an opportunity about developing what became is my current company
4:13
acclimate acly mate uh because i wanted to also be part of
4:19
the emissions reduction side and to bring the experience that i had in carbon markets and climate policy to
4:24
make it more approachable for the layperson that was internally a project to renew west and then we came to realize that it
4:31
was actually two separate companies and so uh i left rooney west in the extremely capable hands of john
4:37
he's the ceo he's crushing it over there and i love what they're doing i'm still checking with him a couple of times a
4:42
week but now i'm 100 running acclimate i'm ceo of acclimate and it is climate management
4:49
software for small businesses we help small businesses figure out their footprint uh reduce it
4:54
offset it when it makes sense um and then advertise to uh to their employees and
4:59
to their consumers the the work that they're doing and reporting to you know other stakeholders such as
5:05
supply chains etc and so it's kind of a one-stop climate solution for small businesses and we're
5:11
just really proud of of what we've built there too um lucky in uh in um and i'd
5:17
obviously be um uh not doing you know service to my
5:23
co-founder there uh william lupesco um who's um who's been working with me now for about two years on the acclimate
5:29
project and he's the cto for the company um known him for about six plus years he
5:34
and i were the same kind of startup circles uh when he was doing his previous company um cobit was that previous
5:41
company's loss but totally my game and i love working with a guy every day
5:46
mike that's got to be one of the best introductory background stories i've heard like just you just put it so so
5:52
well it flows right from the beginning and totally makes sense i just i really enjoyed that
5:57
um before we kind of get into your company i'd love to hear what kind of what you learned from working going to
6:02
the naval academy serving your country working as a naval was your are you an officer or how does that work
6:09
yeah yep uh so uh i actually am just about to retire out of the reserves of the rank of a commander uh so an o5 in
6:15
the navy lieutenant colonel of the army um uh left active duty as a lieutenant
6:22
commander um so an o4 um so yeah uh so uh i've been uh doing that
6:30
you know one of the i think the big things that you learn out of military services about especially within the navy is about just like sometimes you
6:36
don't have all the answers and you just gotta go figure it out uh they have like a whole thing that they call message to garcia uh which is
6:44
this apocryphal story about a guy during the spanish-american war but the general idea is is like
6:50
you're smart you've got authority go figure it out and get the job done and i think that is
6:57
just enormous for an entrepreneur because you never really know what the heck you're doing it's always something
7:02
new and you have to go learn and figure it out and get the resources or the knowledge somewhere and go
7:09
so i think there's a component of that i think that there's a component of
7:14
dealing with people um and about like uh there are some officers that don't
7:20
listen to their junior enlisted uh they don't last uh all that long um because
7:26
there's a lot of people that know a lot of things that you don't and so making sure that you build this this organization where people can uh
7:32
can get information up and down the chain uh appropriately i try to build my organizations a little
7:38
bit flatter than than the military there's a lot of reasons uh why the military is a little more
7:44
hierarchical than than elsewhere but um but still like that empowering like uh like somebody that's junior do you go
7:51
figure out that problem go work on it like i think that's really important um and then the last thing i would say
7:56
is there's a certain degree of risk tolerance um you know uh startups are stressful they're a lot of
8:03
work especially in the climate space when i started like they weren't obvious
8:08
so you just kind of have to believe in the mission and get and know that it's there the nice part about startups is you're
8:14
generally not in physical danger um so so that helps but just knowing that you can get through hard things uh i think
8:21
really helps um and so being a little bit more comfortable with risk being a little bit more comfortable with the exposure and going again
Service brings meaning
8:28
have you ever put any thought into the connection between your desire to serve the country in relation to your desire
8:35
to kind of serve the environment and the global community overall i think service is just it brings a lot
8:41
of meaning um you know when uh
8:47
you know they talk about like at your funeral like people aren't going to talk about like what you did at work they're going to talk about how like you treated
8:53
your family and i think that um i think that's something that needs to be kind of
8:59
uh you know first in your mind as as somebody you know growing is like how do you treat the people around you how
9:05
do they you know do they know that you they love you but i don't think that's entirely true about the work part i think that there
9:11
are people that talk that we remember and most of the time we remember them
9:17
because they gave something of themselves to others you know and i think that brings a lot of meaning to life uh broadly
9:24
um and uh you know put that it's it's a little bit of a maslow's hierarchy of needs right
9:30
which is like you have to you know deal with your own basic needs and then you move up to kind of like your more emotional needs and the folks that are
9:37
like in the emotional needs like you know your family and the people that are closest to you you have to take care of them first
9:43
but then kind of the next step up on that that part there is about like the folks around you um and if you're
9:48
dealing if you're taking care of them too you're it's going to bring you a lot of like satisfaction with you know a life
9:55
well lived yep you match my world view almost exactly i really appreciate that so when
acclimate
10:01
it comes to acclimate you're specifically offering carbon accounting services and then advisory on how to
10:08
decarbonize is that correct yeah so the software is uh it's free to use you
10:15
um you know one of the things that we learned with acclimate is that a lot of the data that we need for carbon accounting already exists
10:21
um and so uh we'll help you on board you know walk you through the process of how to get in
10:27
make you know it can feel a little overwhelming at first and so you know we really value kind of providing you with a little bit of a
10:33
human touch where you can see like okay this stuff feels a little over the top but once you see it like actually it's
10:38
really not that big of a deal um then we connect up to those data sources a big chunk of that is your financial
10:44
accounting if you're a small business and so we have a free integration with quickbooks where we'll pull in your financial information sort through it
10:51
assign a carbon value to most of your transactions that are relevant and you can either accept that
10:57
that carbon calculation or you can reject it or you can give us more information um based upon the quality of the data that
11:04
we have and and all the rest of it um we give we have to make conservative calculations
11:10
you know you give us a little bit more calculation or a little bit more data we'll make a more precise calculation
11:15
and give you that better data um so you know that's pretty valuable um
11:21
there are you know little pieces of that like around the web you could probably go find like a place to calculate your individual flights footprint right but
11:27
this is all consolidated in one central accounting place and that means that we have the ability
11:33
to also provide you a way to look at the data right so you can tag you know what
11:38
employee took this flight or we also have um a survey that we ask you to send out to your employees
11:44
that takes them three minutes and it's things that they know where do they work how do they get there how often do they go that includes you know mass transit
11:52
biking driving whatever the case may be home office emissions and so we can
11:57
build kind of a behavioral profile for how that employee interacts with your company and then we can build a
12:03
profile for your company as a whole and so then we in our analytics page you can actually see
12:08
where your emissions are coming from by the employee by the trip by the office you can see down to individual
12:15
admissions events it's just and all of that is free that's all included in the software because one of the things that
12:21
we care very strongly about the two things we care very strongly about are one is that in order to act on
12:27
the climate you shouldn't have to know anything other than you want to do something about it and two
12:32
is is that this shouldn't take you a lot of time you're a small business you're busy
12:38
and we want this to be something that you get done in about five to ten minutes a month and then all the information is displayed to you in a way
12:44
where you can actually act and reduce your footprint without even having to spend a dime off the top of your head do you know the
impact of large multinational
12:51
difference in input let's focus on the us in particular on the impact of large multinational or i guess multinational i
12:58
think it could still be u.s based large corporations let's say 150 people are over versus the carbon impact of the
13:05
community of small medium businesses 0 to 150 employees you have any idea who's
13:10
creating more missions or anything on that on that front yeah you know so a lot of times you'll
13:16
hear people will um will you know bandy about like the idea that there's a hundred companies that
13:21
have 71 of the world's emissions okay right and so like it almost seem i hate
13:26
that quote like i mean it's true but it's also false and the reason i hate it is because uh one is a certain degree of
13:32
defeatism and two is like the sense of like that we don't have like some shared responsibility ourselves
13:39
right which is like oh well if we just made exxon go away everything would be better but we're their customers
13:45
that's right right and so like what that talks about like when you see that big quote is actually is climate change from
13:52
a policy perspective is just like a super hairy problem because it is a collective action problem where the
13:58
consequences of your behavior aren't seen for years right and so how do you create
14:03
this community of people that are all acting together in order to create this broad-based problem solution
14:09
um and so you know typically when people think of like emissions uh they think of it as like this is my bubble and that's
14:15
somebody else's bubble and that's their responsibility this is mine but that's not true it's relationships
14:22
right when i if i buy a ticket on united airlines to you know go visit you know a
14:27
loved one it was terrible i was on the flight yesterday this is no leg room horrible anyway sorry tangent
United Airlines
14:35
you know we could make a lot of jokes at the airline's expense and specifically you might deserve it whatever but yeah
14:42
well you like it too anyway i say united because i'm in denver and we're a hub for united right um but if i was to fly
14:48
on united um whose emissions are those i don't have the answer
14:54
historically people would say well they're united's emissions they're it's their scope one they're the ones that are burning the jet fuel
15:00
but they're my emissions too right because like i bought the ticket they won't they don't fly the airplane without my my
15:07
backside in the sea it's also it's shells emissions shell sold them the fuel
15:12
right and so if you divorce any of those responsibilities you're not really actually addressing the real problem
15:19
and so like a big part of like what we do is actually how do how do you interact with others how do you how does
15:24
your small business interact with its employees how does your small business interact with its partners how does it interact
15:31
with larger those multinationals if you're selling into their supply chains etc because tracking those emissions and
15:38
that responsibility is is kind of a shared effort and the only way that we really get that is if we're all kind of collectively starting to think about
15:44
this and you'll help these companies offset any in intermission interactions they
Offsets
15:50
have their portion of that or is it not that simple i like this way you're thinking about it though
15:57
yeah so right now uh you know we'll sell you offsets to offset everything that you account for right
16:02
and the current line of thinking um at this size is that you know we don't have enough of a network yet for us to be
16:08
able to track emissions all the way through the network right and so if somebody offsets it here and another company offsets it somewhere
16:14
else that's great right and one thing that's been really cool about like small businesses is that they don't
16:21
they take responsibility for everything that they have a shared responsibility for like they don't like create these artificial boundaries that the large
16:26
multinationals do um and so if the if the planet has two people that are double offsetting one
16:33
transaction from both sides that's great you know in the future when we have like a little bit more of these relationships
16:39
and we can kind of track these emissions through we will we should have the ability to assign a little bit more responsibility for offsetting more
16:46
importantly let's help to you know assign responsibility for reduction right well i like that idea and i've
Responsibility for reduction
16:52
talked several times on this show about how i think large corporations in particular should not just be stopping at net zero they
16:59
should be going carbon negative but i like that idea that if everyone's taking responsibility we could essentially be
17:05
at least a little bit negative if all three of these parties me for flying yesterday i offset my
17:10
my uh my seat united offsets their their emissions and then shell offsets or it doesn't even have to be offset
17:16
decarbonized i guess in this case it's offset because the emissions have been consumed already um then we could we
17:22
could actually have a net positive impact and actually act to draw down co2 i had never thought about that that's
17:28
that's very interesting um on the top of my mind is why did you as a business person decide to focus specifically on
17:35
small and medium-sized businesses with your model um
17:42
so a couple of reasons uh the first one was is um so when i was doing my advisory work for the us climate
17:47
alliance there was i was in a room full of super smart people that really cared about climate right
17:53
um and uh a lot of them were having a hard time understanding like the ins and outs of
17:58
carbon markets um and they might understand um you know there was also some some geniuses in the room that
18:04
really like actually some of them who had designed the carbon markets in california for example right
18:10
you know but for some of those folks that were a little bit more new to the table and we're having to like we're kind of feeling like they had to like learn this stuff uh pretty quickly
18:17
it was frustrating because we kind of created a system where uh even smart people that care about it
18:22
like we're having to spend a lot of time learning about it and we weren't creating a system where if it's a collective action problem where a lot of people have to
18:28
act together like we have to create a system for all those people and frankly nobody unless you're getting
18:34
paid to do this you don't have or you're an absolute like you know lover of climate policy like
18:40
people like you and me like the vast majority of the world like they care about climate but they don't have the time to do this right they've got you
18:45
know kids soccer games and things to deal with so i wanted to make that easy um and i
18:50
saw that there was a like a key point like in small business that that was a problem for them if they wanted to deal with it so this is a problem i could
18:57
solve for them that was like really important to me the other part is like small businesses are
19:02
a huge chunk of the us economy they're 44 of the us gdp they're almost half of the u.s workforce
19:09
and so if you want to reach out and touch a lot of people there's a real opportunity in small businesses to go ahead and to build out
19:15
this network to say like you know like even though like you know may only be like five employees at a time like it's such a huge chunk of the
19:22
us economy that like you can actually move a lot of the us economy you can change decisions and behaviors
19:28
uh by helping them with their accounting and more importantly helping them with the solutions on how to decarbonize
Ideal client
19:34
who would you say is your your ideal climate and a client and how do you go about finding them
19:40
sure um you know so we typically uh you know we can handle uh
19:46
clients of you know a variety of different sizes we have one right now that actually has like 5 000 employees which is not a
19:52
small business by any stretch right but they have a series of different stores each store with about 40 people right so
19:58
we can handle them right you know so that would be pretty cool um we have uh but you know we have
20:04
solopreneurs we have individuals as well the software is designed to be like really turnkey for those folks like get
20:09
in get it get it done and get out i'm gonna check it out yeah i'd love to have you on the the you
20:15
know on the app man and and you know be happy to kind of show you around there or any of your customers yeah
20:21
um uh or podcast listeners i guess um you know the thing i would also say here
20:26
is um you know as far as the uh kind of like a
20:34
you know the people that we are searching for right now a lot of times they've kind of identified themselves as
20:39
somebody that cares about the environment sustainability climate or even just more broadly like just good
20:44
business practices um and so like right now we've been doing a lot of going out to uh you know
20:50
conveners like you on this podcast or going out to like uh here in denver an outfit called good business colorado
20:56
and talking to them and sharing kind of like what the solution that we have and what's been really cool is is one um
21:03
uh everywhere we go everybody loves us right like they're like wow that's really neat we're interested can we get signed up you're included and then two
21:10
is um we're the first person to ever talk to them about it which again validates the assumption for me which is
21:15
like this is a problem that small businesses had nobody wanted to solve it for them this is what we wanted to do and so i'm
21:22
glad that we you know we found this community of people that really need our help and we're happy to help them when you're speaking to them what do you
Motivation
21:28
find is is motivating these companies to pursue this effort if it's not mandated
21:34
why do they want to decarbonize um there's a variety of things um so some of them i would say are kind of like you
21:40
right uh which is that like they have like a deep personal interest um and one of the things that's really
21:47
cool about like small businesses um and maybe some of your listeners uh appreciate this and some of our have
21:53
maybe not thought of it you have as a small business owner you have an outsized influence on the world
21:59
around you much more than you know other people you could actually change things you have you have you have the power to
22:06
change things you make decisions for your employees that they have to deal with you know whether they come to the office
22:11
how often they come to the office you know where that office is located and can they use mass transit or not
22:16
you have you have the ability to make have a much larger impact on the climate than your average american
22:23
um so we see some folks like that um we see some that uh if you're dealing with the
22:29
climate generation um millennials and gen z are incredibly engaged on this
22:34
uh three out of ten of the climate generation in the last 12 months according to pew research uh attended a
22:41
protest gave money to a charity or their time or wrote a politician about climate
22:46
like that's not casual like i'm posting about it on on social media like this is them showing up and doing the work
22:52
and so if you uh have a lot of employees that are in that demographic um or selling it to a lot of people in that
22:58
demographic you're going to want to be able to tell them the story about how you care about climate too
23:03
and then for some of our customers they're feeling the heat from up from up top if they sell into supply chains
23:10
if they have to acquire you know or borrow money or from psg focused like banks or
23:17
lending institutions or investors those folks now all have like legal
23:22
requirements according to the sec to be reporting their carbon accounting and so knowing what your footprint is
23:27
not a nice to have it's a need to have if you want to do business in that space very good
Process
23:33
so what does your process look like if i were to engage you right now to do my my
23:39
i don't know would you call it my offsetting my carbon accounting what would it look like from kind of start to finish
23:45
sure yeah so you'd go to acclimate.com and there's a place for you to either sign into the software directly
23:52
or you and this is what i would recommend you do is that you actually sign up for a an onboarding session with
23:58
uh with travis who's our dedicated customer success guy
24:03
no pressure on that at all um like i said it's free software if you don't buy offsets okay
24:09
um travis is a little like bearded ray of sunshine like he's the the friendliest
24:15
person you'll ever meet and he loves loves helping people must be in colorado too yeah he's the right guy for this job i
24:21
love him um so um anyways so he'll walk you through take
24:27
about 20 minutes you know he'll ask you to like show up with a couple of things you know square footage of your office
24:32
and a couple of you know like stuff that you can find but you may not totally have your fingertips all the time show up with it he'll help you get on
24:38
boarded um you can do it without him but you'll you know he'll it'll take the same amount of time and he'll uh it'll
24:44
be more fun with him um get you onboarded you'll figure out your footprint um and uh you know in about
24:51
five to ten minutes uh you'll know where your footprint is and then you'll be able to go into our offset marketplace
24:57
we have at last count 61 different offset projects that are listed on there all across the united states canada and
25:03
five other continents so a wide variety of selection there and you find the one that matters the most
25:09
to you a couple of clicks you buy the offsets you're done
25:14
footprints uh is taken care of you earn a certification that you can put on your social media
25:22
you can put on your website we have people that can help you with that and there's also a uh
25:29
you know we're starting to explore the ability to actually if you want to put this on your packaging or on some of your your materials like your pamphlets
25:35
we have a qr code uh creator that we can help you with and you can put your acclimate climate leader certification in a qr code
25:42
on uh you know your your your packaged good or your pamphlet and
25:48
people can see like they don't need to trust that that ethan is the one that's doing the offsets they can just like
25:53
take their phone look at it and be like oh yeah cool this is ethan's page over here on acclimate climate leader these
26:00
are the offsets he bought here's the story of it like here's how long he's been doing it ethan's awesome acclimates awesome let's all work together
26:07
i love it man that's the process it shouldn't take you you know very long at all no i really love it i see no reason why everyone
Feedback
26:13
wouldn't couldn't do that i'm wondering if you have any if you've had any feedback about people having to look
26:18
through 61 different projects because i'll tell you this with my own business i have a list of non-profits that
26:24
clients can choose from to make their donation after we close and i closed the property two weeks ago and my clients are still
26:30
like looking through all the stuff trying to figure out or not looking and very busy with their lives trying to figure out what to do so how do you
26:37
provide any guidance for helping people pick projects or does that ever come up as an issue uh so
26:42
low-key in the background one of the things that we know is that people tend to like projects that are closest to them and so we show them the projects
26:48
that are closest to them by geography and so those are displayed right up top that's cool
26:54
um one of the things that we are planning to build out is just that actually which is like uh is more of a
26:59
kind of like a like an onboarding survey of like what matters most to you what matters most to your company you know is
27:05
it you know stories around environmental justice is it the developing world is it around
27:10
you know reforestation or avoided emissions or you know what matters to you and then we can help to kind of
27:16
display the offset projects and help rank them for you cool does your company differ in any
Competitors
27:22
ways from other like carbon accounting services in any way like major way you can think of uh yeah i would say we are
27:28
the only purpose built from the ground up small business solution in the united states we have competitors um
27:35
there are a ton of people throwing a ton of money at the very large companies out there um i mean
27:42
huge amounts of money um there are some that are have talked about like kind of working in the small
27:48
business space but it's um um you know they they aren't building it
27:54
with a small business in mind like they're actually thinking about it from like i was a corporate sustainability person for a fortune 500 so now i'm
28:00
going to try to make and that's not how small businesses work um and so
28:06
uh i happily will put my software up against anybody who's out there um and you know
28:11
it's we're climate accounting for the rest of us we're we're you know we're the ones that make it easy for you i feel like it's easy already i want to
Becoming carbon negative
28:18
be the rest of us i'm i'm checking it out man i got i got to set a reminder as soon as we get off this podcast to check
28:23
it out i love it man let's get you going totally do you have any interest in
28:28
steering clients beyond carbon neutrality to actually become carbon negative and take care of these legacy
28:35
emissions at all is that ever something that had occurred to you um so a lot of our customers kind of are already doing
28:40
that on their own which is like super that'll be me right like you'll see people that'll be like uh you know i'm not just going to buy
28:46
offsets moving forward i'm actually going to buy back um we've had a couple of clients go as for as far back as four years back like they're like nope wipe
28:53
that out um you know and as obviously as a guy that sells offsets like you know that's great
28:59
but i haven't been pushing it um it's just like it's really cool to see people that want to do that right
29:04
um you know there's a little bit of a mindset shift that we were trying to promote inside of
29:10
the software so historically businesses like and i think a lot of this was driven by how difficult
29:15
the whole process was was like i want to deal with my climate footprint
29:20
uh okay i'll go to this online calculator it'll tell me kind of what happened over the last year i'll buy some offsets um okay
29:28
that's great um now now what i do like and they don't have like so then they have to go like
29:33
write a blog article or something and tell about like what they were doing it was just a real pain you know maybe you didn't have the
29:40
offset project you love but you didn't want to go somewhere else the calculator didn't really give you all that much detail it was just it just didn't work
29:47
what we're trying to do is to change that and to say this is something that you need to actively manage and contin and it's not like a look back over a
29:54
year and like here's you know your the cost of your sin pay it up right like that this is actually
29:59
something that you should you should be budgeting for ahead of time and that this is kind of a monthly thing
30:04
that you should be thinking about and so in order to get our climate leader certification you actually have to be in negative territory you have to
30:12
have bought off enough offsets that you have more off you've offset more than you've emitted
30:18
and the only way that for you to maintain your climate leader certification is to continue to monitor to stay ahead on it that you essentially
30:25
what we're creating is an internal price of carbon for your company and that we you should treat offsets as an account that you draw against
30:31
rather than a debt that you pay back um and so you know we want you to be thinking about like that everything that
30:37
you do has a climate cost both in a in a mission sense but also now potentially
30:43
also in an economic sense um and so uh in order to
30:48
to continue to participate here you're going to have to stay in that negative territory can you tell me a bit more about how you
Climate Leader certification
30:55
developed the certification standard and yeah just a little bit more on that
31:00
yeah um so uh right now um we have two levels of certification the
31:06
first one is just like the most basic calculation kind of like that old-fashioned version of like
31:12
tell me how many employees you are where you work um and how uh what segment of the of industry you're in and you know
31:19
we'll tell you like a rough estimation of what your footprint is you can buy some offsets congratulations here's your your
31:24
climate leader one of the things that we see about people is that there needs to be kind of like a behavior escalation standard how
31:31
can we get people to do a little bit of the harder thing and so we are we offer a higher level of certification called
31:36
climate leader plus which is if you give us that five to ten minutes a month you're doing those calculations uh then
31:42
you then you get that we um we believe that uh for this system to
31:49
scale and to get the number of people that we need in there that it has to be a little bit more trustless and transparent
31:54
um and so uh while we're not explicitly like a web three company and a blockchain and all the rest of that
32:00
which is that we want to display publicly a certain degree that you can can trust
32:06
in and so for every one of our climate leaders we create a website for them
32:12
a company website that they can provide that links to their website links to that qr code
32:17
and where people can go actually see the offset project that they bought from uh they can see what their missions you
32:23
know like they can see that don't trust me trust what you see
Other environmental indicators
32:29
cool do you measure any like other environmental indicators beyond just like carbon or co2 equivalents like
32:35
plastic or paper usage or anything like that not yet unfortunately there's a there's a bit of a focus that we have to stay
32:42
you know there's kind of a boil the ocean problem when you're a startup uh in dealing with this and so we're pretty focused on
32:48
climate we have had customers that have been asking about these broader environmental uh things and so we want
32:53
to include that in the future so just not yet the other thing i would say
32:59
is that all of our offset projects have broader environmental outcomes associated with them uh qualitatively you can read about them
33:06
in the text of that um and one of the things that we're looking to roll out in the near future is actually
33:11
uh kind of a ranking system of those offset projects that helps to tell the story of like uh their additionality how big of
33:19
an impact do they have on on water you know biodiversity uh and in a couple
33:24
other metrics and so you should be able to kind of evaluate uh not just based on the story but on
33:30
you know some independent analyses that are provided by that no i think that's great and that's a very um well thought
The role of small businesses
33:35
out entrepreneurial response i mean if you try juggling too many things it's just not a good strategy for succeeding
33:40
in this competitive marketplace it's tough out there man um any kind of last thoughts about the role of small
33:47
businesses and medium business when it comes to decarbonization i know we spoke about that a bit but i kind of want to get some some more of your thoughts on
33:53
that like who are as me and you are both small business owners how how do we feel responsible for kind of pioneering this
33:59
better it's better world forward um our tagline for acclimate is to be a climate leader
34:05
right um one of the reasons i hate that quote about like the hundred companies 71 of
34:10
the emissions is is that you can make change right now and you have an outsized influence and
34:17
if you bring enough of your friends to the party you can you can move things you know it's that small determined you know band of people uh like it's the
34:23
only thing that's ever actually changed anything um and so you know banding together bringing you
34:29
know putting you know showing that leadership will actually make much more of a difference than you can ever
34:35
imagine um there's some quotes out there that talk about that like in in a public policy realm if you have
34:42
uh you know two and a half percent of um of a of a group of people that are like
34:48
actively involved in in trying to push for a policy change um it's going to happen right
34:54
you can be part of that you know two and a half percent you know we already there's evidence that there's even more right now as i told you about like the
35:00
climate the generation that's doing that activity show up do the work you're gonna you're
35:05
gonna change a lot and so you can be that leader um and what's awesome is you're gonna get
35:11
rewarded for it people love it like people love good environmental stewards they love
35:16
climate you know people that that are doing their part on climate you're going to make more money as a small business
35:22
you're going to be able to sell to more to the right people and the more people if you do this sort of stuff
35:27
um you know and you know not to threaten you but like get on the bus or get run over
35:33
right like it's coming you know there you can be the laggard you can be the one that does it later
35:40
but you won't be the leader at that point you won't get that advantage of being the first mover into the space and if you don't do it later you're going to
35:46
go out of business because this is something that is coming for the entire economy so you might as well get on early and
35:52
get it done um and then you can be the hero instead of the goat i love i love that man and do you have
Final advice
35:58
any final pieces of advice for like individuals young people like college age or just after who were really
36:03
passionate about improving the world i would say uh don't lose your optimism
36:09
um you know there's a lot of stuff going on right now and uh it's going to get worse before it
36:16
gets better especially from a climate perspective like that we're there
36:21
um i am on the bleeding edge of the millennials
36:26
uh born in 1980 cool um and uh sometimes people call me a zenial
36:32
uh but you know it's a dumb label
36:38
you know i consider myself like an early millennial um and when i uh look at like
36:44
the generation that i'm a part of and the generation that's come behind like me
36:50
those people are awesome they're doing good work they're showing up they talk about like that certain generate like
36:55
generations have behaviors that kind of come in cycles and you know we like to talk a lot about like kind of the greatest generation and
37:01
how they had to come out of like these really incredibly challenging times and like they've remade the world into like
37:07
a safe haven for democracy right and they you know like created the systems that like birth
37:13
the women's movement and like a lot of other civil rights movements you know and
37:19
i see a lot of parallels to where we're at now times are tough there's a rising climate generation that's going to get it done
37:25
and i have all the faith in the world that they can so don't lose that optimism um it's going to be hard
37:31
but the cool part is is like things are moving there's like the climate tech is just exploding there are
37:38
so many jobs that are there showing up and you don't have to have any background and climate
37:43
you just again you just have to care show up there's somebody that needs your talent right now and they're looking for
37:48
you um so if you're looking to to be part of it um either professionally or not like
37:54
somebody needs your help so go do it i'll do it man and i'll never lose the optimism it's it's been a true it's been
38:00
a true pleasure mike thank you so much for your time i really enjoyed it yeah it's been great man i love uh love
38:06
i love talking about this stuff as you can tell so yeah uh thanks for having me ethan and i love everything that you're
38:12
doing as well with uh you know with your business yeah you're welcome man all right everybody and
38:17
we'll see you on the next one take it easy
38:24
[Music]
38:29
[Music]
38:36
so if you or anyone else you know is looking to buy or sell a home anywhere in the usa and would like to create
38:42
thousands of dollars in donations without any cost out of pocket please visit ccrealty.org today