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Listen as Kaitlyn and Mike discuss the complex relationship that small to medium-sized companies have with setting climate or ESG goals. They also dive into adequately capturing impact since many existing carbon accounting systems are designed for larger companies.
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episode [Music] hi everyone welcome back to ESG decoded I'm your host Caitlin Allen today I'm
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welcoming Mike Smith with acclimate to the podcast Mike thank you for being here hi Caitlin it's uh it's great to be
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here thank you for having me yeah absolutely so Mike is the CEO and
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co-founder of acclimate a denver-based climate Tech startup building carbon accounting and offsetting software
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specifically to help small and medium-sized businesses manage and Report their impact on the climate
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previously Mike founded renew West where he developed the largest carbon reforestation project in U.S history the
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2 million tree Collins Modoc project he is a former U.S Navy fa-18 pilot with
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354 carrier arrested Landings across three deployments ultimately attaining
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the rank of Commander Mike Super interesting background we're really excited to dig into this today yeah it's
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been a bit of a journey absolutely and we will get to that Journey but I do want to say for
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transparency's sake that climco has an investment in acclimate and I can speak
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a little bit to that in that you know most of our work is focused on really large companies really large
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corporations but we believe at crimeco that acclimate is doing something important and unique in focusing on that
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small medium Enterprise SME sector and so um yeah that's my my only full
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disclosure point is that we do have an investment but it's really because we believe in the power of acclimate to
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make an impact in that section of the economy um so with that let's talk a little bit
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about your journey Mike how did you come to found a climate startup for small
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businesses yeah it's a it has been a bit of a journey so as you mentioned in my uh my
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bio there so I used to fly f-18s for the US Navy um spent about 12 and a half years active duty doing that and it was just a
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great way to spend my 20s a really exciting lifestyle for some people a real dream career
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but in 2010 I got married um and in 2011 I took my wife to Idaho which is where I grew up to kind of show
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her where I grew you know all the sites that were familiar to me and as we're touring the state we ended up going by
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this fire scar for the Lowman fire the Lowman fire burned in 1989 it was about 44 000 Acres it was kind of the first of
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the mega fires any more 44 000 Acres seems like a you know drop in the bucket
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but at the time it felt like whole state was burning and as a child I was dying when it happened they put up a mushroom
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cloud pyrocumulated In This Cloud that was like super memorable to me uh kind of as a child of the late Cold War and I
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said that doesn't look right and everybody said don't worry about it it'll grow back or you know somebody will replant it and I said okay great
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I'm nine what do I know and so the 22 years later here I am with my my wife
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Lindsay and I see that it's not growing back and that led me to do a little bit
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of think work about what I wanted to do with my life I'd studied about carbon markets a little bit at the Naval Academy when I was a student kind of on
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my own volition I just was convinced I could do something about it so it led me to
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taking a pretty hard turn out of the Navy to start a company about post fire reforestation uh for climate outcomes called renew West renew West has grown
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into kind of a natural and working lands carbon company so not exclusively carbon offsets and it's just kind of the
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intersection of where natural working lands interact with the climate how you can help to bring Market forces to do that
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when I looked at like all the ways that we could do at that reforestation that kind of restoration work I saw that
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there was a lot of great people there were doing a lot of great work within kind of the non-profit sector and because of that background of
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understanding that carbon markets I just became convinced that there were some opportunities around that so founded
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Rooney west have made some great things happen there specifically the Collins Modoc projects
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probably our our biggest claim to fame right now it's the largest project of its type in U.S history two million threes Plus
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and I couldn't be more proud of that but along the way I was also an advisor
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to the U.S climate Alliance also on natural working lands climate policy Etc so the climate Alliance is the 20 plus
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states that stayed in the Paris Accords after the Trump Administration pulled us out before Biden brought us back in and it still continues to operate and so
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there was a lot of smart people that were getting paid to care about carbon markets and climate policy and as I was
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advising them it seemed as if carbon markets were a
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little difficult for them and I got to thinking about like man what are we what are we doing here we created a system
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that we're only like only sustainability Professionals for Fortune 500 companies that have spent years kind of focusing
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on this can can actually properly engage without the help of some intermediary expert and that
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didn't sit right either and so um as part of that
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um and about like wanted to kind of make carbon markets and climate accounting accessible to the layperson
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started acclimate internal to Rooney west as kind of a side project I was very
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fortunate to be joined by my co-founder at acclimate a guy named William lupesco who works as our CTO
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we developed it internally as a kind of a part-time project for Rooney west for a bit and then it grew its own legs and
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so we had to make the decision about whether acclimate would be an internal project and whether that would because
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it was a tech company inside of kind of a larger you know Forest you know focused but broadly you know lands
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focused company or to spin it out and so we had to spin it out I left for New West behind in the very capable hands of
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my co-founder guy named John Cleland who's now the CEO there at Radio West and I went and started acclimate
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um and so that's that's how I got here um went through techstar sustainability which is you know a fairly well known accelerator within the uh in the tech
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startup ecosystem and then we've just been out there doing the work since and to go back to you
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know your previous comment which is that we couldn't be prouder of that investment that we got from climco and
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our partnership with them like I've known kleinco for years as back in my renew West days Derek six Martin B check
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are some of the nicest people you'll ever meet um and so it's just nice to be partnered with the right people
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well we certainly feel the same way um thank you for that Mike you mentioned something I want to come back to you
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mentioned that when you are advising the US climate Alliance um you were frustrated that it you know
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it almost like you had to have this Fortune 500 kind of pedigree to really
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understand this stuff and it's perhaps more complicated than it needs to be
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could you talk a little bit more about that I think that's an interesting concept but I can resonate with it because
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that's why we have this podcast she decoded because we're trying to help everybody and kind of understand it and
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we realize that that a lot of this can be very very complex and Technical yeah
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um you know when I first started renew West I spent about six months in the Denver Public Library just trying to teach myself everything I could about
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the material and I checked out this book about climate accounting for forestry and in it there was you know a series of
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authors and um so I reached out to the authors to kind of see like if you know I had some questions that weren't
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covered in the material and one of the authors um when I I spoke with him he was a professor at a at a university and he
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said well you need to go get a masters in order to really understand this and one I thought that was a bit
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patronizing um but also two is like yeah that's not true like the sum total of human knowledge like
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exists in the library it exists in the phone in my pocket right like we don't you know I can you can go learn this
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stuff but he wasn't wrong in the like the larger construct which is that like it takes a lot of effort to kind of go
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and look at this and to learn the material Etc and the people that do that that like
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are kind of the first ones to do that like they tend to work for very large organizations that tend to have Deep Pockets and that have like a big focus
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on certain objectives and their motivations for in supporting those large organizations are going to be different from the laypersons I mean
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that's a natural and appropriate thing right and so as part of that like you start creating things like Scopes right
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and so uh for you know listeners of your podcast who are I'm sure very well familiar with like the definition of
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like scope one two and three that's great uh but for the the rest of the world like when you mention like
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what are your scope to emissions their eyes roll back or there's actually sometimes a little bit of fear like they just like what is this right like and
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that is just entry Stakes for the language uh to approach that that's not a system that's going to work
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um not for the larger system you know the ipcc in their 2018 report you know one of the quotes that came out
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of this was every bit of warming matters every year matters and most importantly for what they said was that every choice
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matters and so like when people start engaging with climate they don't think about it in Scopes Scopes are really
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kind of a way for large organizations to kind of pass the buck a little bit it's a way for you to say well scope one
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is my responsibility okay I'll take responsibility for scope two but scope three is somebody else somebody else is doing those emissions
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now more and more that people aren't accepting that but that's kind of the original uh idea behind scope emissions
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is that like I'll take responsibility for what's most directly under my control which is common sense too right
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like you know you have to start with in your fence line and that makes sense but I totally agree with the the idea that
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it is it's it's Technical and it's all evolving you have science-based targets
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and that sort of thing that are saying no we have to look at scope three as well which is everybody else and that
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everybody else has a lot of small businesses right yeah exactly what's really refreshing
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about talking to these small businesses is that they don't think that way Scopes is like saying it's it's got to be in
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either category one or category two or category three it's got to be categorized you know we have to use our mind to do that but and that's how
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humans like to think you know there's all sorts of neurological studies about that but in reality what Scopes really talk about are relationships
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and those relationships are talked about shared responsibility right and it's kind of silly for us to
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think about that like you know that the embodied carbon in fossil fuels are not the responsibility of the fossil fuel
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company but it's also naive of us to think that like it's not also the responsibility of the consumer
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of that fossil fuel right and like so like everybody's kind of you could you know the fossil fuel companies are
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saying that we're only selling this because somebody's buying it right well the flip
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side is is the people are saying well you're we're only buying it because we're in a system where we need to use this in order to power our society and
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the reality is is it's a shared responsibility we all have to be part of that and those decisions and informing
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those decisions are important it really is a interesting way to think about it that that Scopes are about it's an
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accounting framework essentially that's that's what it is what you're talking about is the real impact happens in the
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relationship and so I just wanted to jump in to highlight that because that's
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really really insightful and I think maybe sometimes in the
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world of climate change and accounting we can we can get a little too hung up
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on this number belongs in this category and that number belongs in that category
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and who's responsible for that but your what you're saying is that yes that's fine it's an accounting exercise but the
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the whole point is that the relationship between the parties is what really
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matters here 100 you know I'm not even saying that it's fine I think it's good like I think it's a good thing to have
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like an accounting framework that people should think through if you're an expert but I don't want us to get lost to lose
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the force for the trees yeah which is like the ultimate reason that we have this is is to enact change positive
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change from a climate perspective reducing risk from an ESG perspective and the way that you do that is by
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enabling relationships and those relationships are about shared responsibility associated with these
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behaviors I think that's that's really interesting because um well you notice then you know
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following on to that is that there was a kind of a gap in the market right that the sort of
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average small medium Enterprise or SME wasn't able to access the same level of
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service but the same level of of knowledge because of the complication of
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an accounting system so you guys have designed acclimate as far as I understand it to kind of be the answer
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to that is that fair yeah I think that's a fair characterization when we looked at the space we saw that there were the
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existing solutions for businesses broadly were that they could hire an expert either internally or externally
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through kind of consultancy sort of outfit that was a time time you know intensive process a lot of capital had
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to be kind of dedicated to such a resource and even for your SMB like that was thousands of dollars just to access
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that and then on the back end of that experience they were able to get an accounting you know that that expert
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provided for them and then the expert if they were an external they'd say see you next year and if they were internal then
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you know that you know that was a different thing but for smbs like they couldn't you weren't having an internal
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like that it was just too much time for that some listeners that aren't um
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based in English-speaking countries and I said SME small medium Enterprise Mike
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said SMB small medium business same thing I just wanted to make a clarification if
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anyone's listening that's not a native English speaker yeah so that was one solution is hire an
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expert the other solution was teach yourself and as we did customer interviews we found people that were
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tracking all their airline miles by going to Google Maps and putting in the routes and trying to like putting into a
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spreadsheet and then putting the total number in as their flight miles and that's just not an accurate way of doing it
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Super Time intensive like it wasn't it's a pretty poor user experience at the time we were getting started on
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this there were a few companies that were targeted on uh on the large Fortune 500 type power users that had that have
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defined a lot of like the scope one two emissions you know kind of Frameworks
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um which is great um and those companies have that are supporting that like those numbers have exploded um which is just kind of
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demonstrating like how much demand there is in the market and how much money is kind of pouring Into Climate Tech more broadly there still remains I think a
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fairly sizable Gap though is in supporting the SMB SME you know type customer with what they need they need
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accounting that is approachable but that doesn't require a certain degree of expertise they need something that's affordable
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um that you know is a a cleared and easy to to evaluate price point but they also
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need something with power most of the solutions that are have kind of tailored to them a little bit aren't really
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tailored at all they're just kind of like this very broad spend based accounting where like you put in how much money you spend on on airfare last
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year and it gives you an approximation and that's a problem because it doesn't actually tell people where their
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emissions are coming from or how to make the emissions reductions it doesn't tie that data to you know employees within their company
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or to you know underlying true data you can buy the same plane ticket on
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Frontier six months out or from United tomorrow essentially the same airplane going the
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same route same size seat and you're going to spend potentially 100 times more on the United ticket as
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you would on the frontier that I just gave right so a spend based accounting is also not particularly accurate so how
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do you give them like real power but also make it approachable and affordable so I guess then if we have any small
16:12
medium businesses listening they could go check out acclimate.com of course the
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spelling is in the it will be in the um episode notes and the website of
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course but other kind of pro tips you have for the users so your customers at
16:29
acclimate yeah you know the first thing I would say is that it's a journey just like I had my own kind of personal
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Journey how I came to climate it's it's your journey too and when you think about it as your journey it almost kind of doesn't matter
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what you've done it matters what you're going to do and so you know give yourself a little permission to you know
16:46
I could have done better in the past but let's not worry about it let's focus on what we can do now the very first thing that you can do now
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is get a baseline I'll tell you you probably have a bunch of assumptions about like what you're doing and some of
16:57
them are probably true but some of them are probably not we've had users that have assumed that like it was airfare and travel that was
17:04
going to be like their big emissions related thing and it turns out it was one particular commuter you know cause much higher emissions than like the
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person that flew in from Argentina and so like there's a lot of stuff that's that's kind of buried in there and so
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challenge your assumptions by getting to real data uh we're happy to help you with that at acclimate uh ACL y m-a-t-e
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.com but um however you need to get started get started um the other thing I would say is don't
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feel like you have to do everything all at once it can be overwhelming you can think about like if you're if you have
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manufacturing or you're in sort of some sort of production like that you want to tackle your entire supply chain
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and that's great but going back again to kind of that original scope one two framework here's is like start with what
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you can control most immediately I'll tell you like this the stuff that's happening in the scope 3 space I'm sure
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your listeners are well familiar at this point like it's messy and that's only going to improve with time and so this
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is not to say don't engage or that but just start with what you know what you can engage with there are some meaningful things that you can do right
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now associated with that and then the other thing the last thing I would say here is is it's not an either or again
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kind of in this false categorization of like it's only emissions reductions or it's only offsetting it's kind of both like you like the most responsible
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companies do both and the the net serial framework essentially requires that we do that and
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that we figure out ways that we reduce our emissions that's why we at acclimate we've tried to make our pricing as
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approachable as possible so that way there should be no barrier to for you to do that but on the flip side there uh
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building an internal price of carbon uh through through an offsetting uh commitment I think is is a valuable
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exercise for any company I kind of want to switch gears to this
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perspective you have being a veteran but before we do that is there anything else
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you wanted to add about um acclimate and small small medium businesses taking steps toward in their
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climate Journey the only other thing I would add to that is is that as part of
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that Journey there is an educational component to it um and so listening to podcasts like
19:09
this are a great way to start but again give yourself permission to not know some things and get started and then
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find somebody that you trust or a couple somebody's that you trust and that you can listen to that's part of what we do
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at acclimate is to help people to to learn a little bit more when they're ready and as they can move forward but
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we also have to give ourselves a little bit of permission which is that like the whole small to medium-sized
19:33
businesses don't have full-time sustainability people that you know these are people that are wearing a hat
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in addition to many other hats and so when you can fit it in learn uh when you
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can't fit it in focus on your business the goal here should be to make your business as competitive as possible at
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the same time that you're also dealing with climate so we can displace people that aren't doing that
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um and so don't think about this as as kind of a I've always hated the framework that
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like that being positive for the environment is like a detraction to business outcomes
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I think any listener to the ESG podcast would kind of understand that uh No actually they're reinforcing they're
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mutually beneficial outcomes and so when you do that just recognize that you have to part of that is is carrying your
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business forward as well mm-hmm yeah well said well said Mike well first of all thank you for
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your service it's um it's amazing to see our third veteran
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on this podcast and we've only been around two years or so so not a huge sample size but we've had three veterans
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on this podcast who specifically went into the climate technology space you
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are the third um so I'm noticing a pattern and I wondered if you had any thoughts
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is there a reason that that you see um veterans going into this space from
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your perspective sure uh so yeah obviously can't speak for all veterans when I can speak for
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What attracted me and I think would probably speak to other veterans but you know everybody's journey is different
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What attracted me was I didn't join the the military for a job
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I joined the military for like a for an experience right and part of that experience was that I wanted to
21:24
not totally live like a nine to five life you know with the desk job I wanted to go out and see the world and
21:30
experience it I wanted to I wanted to have a mission uh that was kind of part of like why I got out of bed in the
21:36
morning and that was great you know I uh had those experiences and
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was like I said it's just a phenomenal way to live your 20s um but I also while I was in the service
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grew a little frustrated that um to a certain part like within when you're in the military like you got to
21:54
fit like this pre-assigned role and there's not a there's not a ton of flexibility in careers associated with
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that I was growing like eager to go and do more um and that's what led me to getting out
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of the service and to seeing is there a way that I could like use my talents as I see them best in order to achieve an
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outcome on the world effectively on Mission and that helped me uh to get into climate to stay focused on climate
22:16
and like it really is part of like how identify myself now as somebody that's really committed to our climate
22:22
future and that's that's a that's a priority for me and I think that speaks to other veterans which is is that can
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you have a mission of working on on things Beyond yourself can it be something that's a little atypical
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um a little bit different maybe a little bit more risky uh than something but where the payoffs for the world and for yourself are
22:42
potentially a little bit greater and I think that is um is something that kind of speaks to Veterans uh at least some of them the US
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population is something like seven percent of them are veterans um so it's a pretty sizable chunk of our
22:54
our country I would still Hazard that we're probably underrepresented uh within uh within the climate space uh
23:01
broadly you know when you think about just how many are there most veterans go into you know defense related activities
23:08
after they leave the service or related to a skill that they learned it's a pretty big emotional leap to take this
23:14
like and just completely jump into something totally different um and so uh what I would encourage
23:21
people in climate broadly or sustainability broadly or ESG broadly so
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if you run into a veteran that is transitioning and asking for a couple of questions please make some time for them
23:31
that's not the easiest path for them and they're having to make a big jump um and it's a big change in identity as
23:38
well that's really helpful thank you Mike I think about this National Security
23:44
perspective as well too I know a number of reports from the US military
23:50
um looking at the National Security implications related to the impacts of
23:55
climate change this is something you've worked on too am I right yeah a little bit I've done some writing
24:02
on this you know so in the military they talk about things like cold Force multipliers which is is that having a certain weapon
24:08
system makes a soldier not like having like it's not like having one more soldiers like having 10 more soldiers
24:15
right well there's also threat multipliers um in climate in my opinion and in the
24:21
growing opinion of of people that are within the space is uh potentially
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the not potentially it is the greatest threat multiplier we have out there and it's a slow burn
24:33
uh sort of thing climate's a very difficult policy problem but from a national security standpoint it's it's a
24:40
real mess to give you an example um so you know there's been
24:45
uh like if anybody's ever read the book by Kim Stanley Robinson um called the ministry of the future
24:50
uh that talks about like it's a great non-fiction or great fiction book that's not so fictiony in
24:58
many ways and it talks about like there's this very Grim first like five chapters of the book where she writes
25:03
about like that from a her character's perspective essentially dying of heat in
25:08
India um because there's depending on where we go on which RCP pathway Etc
25:14
uh there are some potential Pathways or big chunks of of the Indian subcontinent India Bangladesh and Pakistan have fetal
25:23
heat uh concept of that like if you don't have air conditioning it doesn't matter the amount of water or shade you have or a fan you die
25:30
um it's because the the dew point is high enough and the temperature is high enough that like perspiration won't cool you down
25:35
may I jump in just to Define RCP was the representative concentration pathway and
25:42
those scenarios can be found in the ipcc reports um for anyone who wants to look them up
25:47
go ahead anyways uh What uh what Ms Robinson did like in her book was is like really make this like a very like
25:55
experiential way of of what it would be like to essentially like see an entire region die because the power Falls and
26:01
like air conditioning goes right that's a it's a pretty gruesome thing that's still on the table that's still a
26:08
potential outcome for us and when you think about that like what happens when
26:13
it's up there's a place in the world where it's too hot to live and that's like a place where like millions and
26:19
millions of people live okay now combining that with Bangladesh is also like the one of the most susceptible the
26:25
ganji's brahmaputra River delta is one of the the most susceptible to sea level rise what happens when you have huge and
26:32
by the way we're already currently experiencing the highest number of displaced people in the history of the
26:38
planet now most of them are internally displaced and that's a number that people don't think about that like they can't live where they were at their home
26:45
they're moving out and so that happens for a little bit people will stay inside of their country because it's the most familiar and they they move from one
26:51
place to the next and sometimes they just settle but as the as the temperature keeps turning up those things are going to
26:57
start cascading um and people are going to start flowing out of out of borders and you start thinking about the National Security
27:03
implications of the political implications of like Syrian refugees in Europe or you know refugees uh you know
27:11
economic refugees generally associated with you know Central America moving into the United States and how that destabilizes our political system and
27:19
then you start combining that in with like an Indian subcontinent area Pakistan and and India are historic
27:25
Rivals both are nuclear and States they border a third nuclear armed State China which has its own host of problems and
27:31
you start getting these tipping points that you just don't come back from and that gets really scary really fast this
27:36
is kind of one of those Stitch and time scenarios which is like we need to take RCP 8.5 which is like the really high
27:42
concentration lots and lots of heat sort of stuff we need to take that off the table because when you start having like
27:50
big resource constraints and a lot of people moving around you're going to have like massive destabilization
27:55
they're only starting to see just the first little samples of that so I try not to think about that too much because
28:02
it's a pretty dark and scary place to go and I try to be a little bit more about like what can I do in the present for
28:09
that and for me that was helping to uh to empower others to make those decisions to to help avoid those those
28:16
worst outcomes I think it's important you brought all that up Mike because I think it might
28:22
not be to the layperson and obviously for to National Security but that's in
28:28
fact um you know been top of mind at the world economic forums wrist reports for
28:34
years now I mean years I can't remember the first time I read one it's been a long time and there was always that
28:40
linkage between climate change and or natural disasters whether or not they
28:45
can be proved to be linked to climate change the relationship between those and displacement of people
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um poverty War you know it kind of it's like a very scary domino effect and
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um so but but it's not necessarily common knowledge right and so it's it's
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fascinating to think about it from a national security perspective and perhaps more veterans will will be
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motivated to to work in this space I think it's um certainly not the note we want to end on
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can we think of something else to wrap up on
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internal to my company I have like a an onboarding process for like new employees new hires interns and uh I'm
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I've become somewhat famous for like telling them like why we all care about climate change right and they all come
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out with kind of their eyes wide open right and it's they're a little intimidated and like they even jokingly
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refer to it as like my Doom and Gloom speech right when you look at like all the different concentration path rcps
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there are no great Solutions at this point we're now at a point where we have
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only a you know a bad outcome it's a it's a question between bad worse
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disaster or like cataclysm right but it means that like we still have choices we
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still have we can still steer this to a certain direction um and that we have opportunities to be
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part of that solution and when you look at what I like to refer to the climate generation Millennials and gen Z the oldest Millennials by the way are like
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in their 40s now so entering the peak of their political and economic power and they're overwhelmingly motivated by
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climate politically this is where like you see a breakdown Pew research shows this even in Republicans versus Democrats
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here domestically where conservative like Republican Millennials care about
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climate and that's a break from kind of their their Boomer and Gen X elders
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they the climate generation cares about climate they're acting and they're buying according to climate uh within the SMB context uh something
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like uh three quarters 75 percent of all Millennials will take a pay cut to work at a company that has like good ESG
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metrics to them two-thirds of them won't work for at all for a company that doesn't right like this is something
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that they're they're engaging with in like real big and meaningful ways and I'm pretty excited about that
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the other part that I would say here is kind of within kind of the choices part there's a professor at MIT a guy named
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John Stearman who talks about that uh there are no silver bullets in climate
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there are silver there's silver buckshot unfortunately we're past the point of where we can kind of do like one thing
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and it'll that'll be the thing that solves the climate change problem we now have to kind of do all the things and so
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again in this this mindset of false categorization about like where we only have to choose we have to choose the
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perfect path you know it's either like a small modular reactors or bust no that's not it right like the answer is we have
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to do all the things and so pretty much like wherever you want to get in on the on the fight you're needed and you're you're valued
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and it will make a difference you know I don't want to give like a false hope like there are like there's some real challenges and some stuff
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coming to us but like we have real opportunities too to really to be part of that that change
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and uh I I get excited about that it's why I love the
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this concept of using markets and that's really what conco is all about is how do we use markets use novel Finance create
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new Commodities that incentivize the behaviors that have the impact that we
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want on the world and it's it's really cool there's a lot that's not yet written I mean our we have a team that
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all they do is look at potential new projects potential new Commodities and could that have an impact so
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um so it's really exciting time for sure so thank you much much better note to end on
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well Mike thank you so much for being on we appreciate you and
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um super interesting show I think folks will find it um really insightful thank
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you for joining yeah thank you for having me Kayla I enjoy being here
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thanks again to this month's sponsor big pivot Partners learn more by visiting
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www.bigpivot.net foreign
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