interviews
Where Will We Go From Here?
by Lauren Schandevel
April 6, 2020
This interview with Lauren Schandevel, the Macomb County Organizer for We the People - Michigan, a non- profit started in 2017 with the mission to build multiracial working class alliances across the state through community organizing, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
Lauren | I came on last year in June. [Organizing] is an interesting thing to try to grapple with and understand and explain to people. So I think it's taken me some time to figure out what exactly my role is in my community. It is also due to the fact that I went back to the community, I grew up in.
frank | What does your community look like?
Macomb County is an area just North of Detroit.
It's pretty blue collar. It's sort of famous for being an Obama to Trump district. It is where the term Reagan Democrats was coined. It’s very reliant on the auto industry.
I grew up in Warren, which is the biggest city in Macomb county. Warren is in the Southern part of Macomb County, it tends to be a little poorer and a little more diverse than the rest of the County. I try to focus most of my work on that part of the County, because that is where the most people are and also where people are poorer and it's easier to organize people with their material interests in mind.
How would you explain the work of an organizer, and the outcomes you’re after?
The goals vary by region [for We The People - Michigan]. We have organizers in different parts of the state. Our West Michigan organizer is focused on a campaign to allow undocumented immigrants to have driver's licenses. While our Northern Michigan organizers are working on a lot of energy, environmental, and indigenous rights work up there.
The direction I'm moving in is to build a more cohesive sense of community here in Macomb County. It's a suburb, and it has all of the trappings of a suburb, which includes isolation – people are not trusting or talking to their neighbors. But there's that added layer of people also being poor and needing help.
I am focused on community building and political education to create a stronger sense of community and belonging. From there people can advocate for their own needs.
Mechanically that looks like having one on one meetings, determining what people are working on, connecting them to people who are doing similar work, and supporting community groups as they arise. [Also] looking for opportunities to work around issues in the community.
For example, there was a spill a few months back that was like a cocktail of hexavalent chromium, cyanide, and PFAS, it spilled onto one of our nearby highways and ended up in some of the waterways. Identifying opportunities like that to pull people in to advocacy work or organizing.
Right. It's one thing in normal circumstances, but what does it look like now? How do you organize in isolation?
Yeah, I mean that's the question.
Have you figured it out in the last 10 days or what?!
[Laughing] Yeah, I've been at it for a couple of weeks. We started working remotely a little over two weeks ago.
In Macomb County specifically, I've been pulling together contacts that I already have here. We have a call every week with someone in our Congressman’s office, one person from the county health department, and a bunch of community members. People talk about projects they're thinking about launching. There are a couple of folks who want to do a seedlings project where they're planting seeds, growing them, and giving them out to people in the community when the supply chain is disrupted, if people don't have food or can’t afford food. People will talk about what they're thinking about, what they’re working on, and solicit advice. People who are interested in doing that work with them can be connected to them.
In addition to that, We The People - Michigan, is a part of a coalition of organizations called MI COVID Community. They are making policy demands to elected officials and thinking through what advocacy looks like during this. How do we get these demands met? Those are the big things for now. I like to think about the work as separate buckets: an advocacy bucket and a mutual aid bucket.
Can you talk about those two buckets?
Mutual aid is a term that's been thrown around a lot the last couple of weeks, but I think it originated in anarchist circles. It basically is the idea of communities taking care of each other and leveraging resources within the community to help each other – but it started explicitly as an alternative to capitalism. The way that people are using it right now is neighbors helping each other, which is fine and also builds power and alternative structures. If it's something that becomes a little bit more mainstream, I think that's a good thing. But I'm not an anarchist so I wouldn't know.
For me, doing mutual aid here has been figuring out what the needs are, identifying gaps in services, and then figuring out ways to meet those needs. It's really hard to develop a volunteer network where people are going out and doing things, when people can't go out and do things.
For now, that has looked like emulating some of the things that are happening in other parts of the state. For example, people are putting out newsletters to community members, talking about what resources are available in the community, what volunteer opportunities exist, figuring out ways to build community through that first correspondence.
Other communities have set up Google Voice Numbers for people to call if they need help. And so I think more creative digital strategies will emerge and people will start really getting the hang of doing this work remotely. But it's very beginning stages.
I'm working right now to pull together a newsletter with a couple of County residents just to keep everyone informed and aware of what resources are available and volunteer opportunities. That's the mutual aid bucket, which is focused on meeting people's immediate needs.
Then there's the advocacy bucket. Focusing on how this moment is, in a way, a window of opportunity to advocate for some of the things that we've wanted for a really long time, including paid sick leave and Medicare For All. Being strategic in how we do that advocacy and tie it to this current moment is really important.
I know there's a group in Michigan called Mothering Justice, which had paid sick leave on the ballot in the last election we had, it passed, and then it was repealed during our lame duck session in the legislature. They're looking to mount that campaign again and bring that back.
Apart from the actual advocating for issues – it’s, what does this political moment mean? I think at any point in history where you have massive economic devastation, there's always a choice made between two visions of the future. Either you're going to choose potential fascism, or a more progressive left-wing vision for what our country could look like.
I think when America emerges from the pandemic, and people are in really dire economic conditions, there's going to be a lot of competing rhetoric. We are going to hear a lot of scapegoating of China and of immigrants and of Asian Americans and of whoever else. People are going to be susceptible to that. Which is why it's so important on the left, to build a proactive counter argument to that, and make the case for inclusive economic justice that points the finger at the real enemies, which are corporations and rich people and shitty politicians.
There will be a rhetorical battle when this is over, which will really determine what direction the nation swings.
It's important to be proactive about what narratives we're putting out. Because if we don't put anything out, people are going to subscribe to the thing that they hear repeatedly, which is this right wing narrative, present before COVID, that says your economic conditions are so dire because of the immigrants taking your job and the people of color who are on welfare and the countries like China who are like stealing our jobs. That sort of stuff. We are going to see a lot more scapegoating, and we have to be really mindful of that and be really aggressive and combative.
Have your goals as an organizer shifted in terms of national electoral politics?
My job has never been organizing around electoral campaigns, so my work really hasn't changed in that way. The approach I like is thinking globally and acting locally.
I do organizing here and try to build community here and build trust and build power for people to fight for the things that they need and want with the knowledge that this strategy can be applied more broadly.
It's really a case study in human behavior doing this sort of work. As I learn more and more about how, particularly working class people, who I grew up with and consider myself a part of, how we think and how we respond to certain strategies organizers use, how we respond to political education and community building activities, is important and applicable for building a larger working class movement that cuts across race and ethnicity and geographic location, and can actually build meaningful power in this country.
How can people get involved?
There's that mutual aid route people have been taking. You're seeing networks arise all over the place. Even in places where mutual aid networks didn't exist before. A lot of these groups are pretty public on social media. There have been Facebook groups that have emerged in Michigan that are specific to a region. And a lot of it is just like resource exchange. If people are thinking through more robust volunteer opportunities, like delivering food and supplies to people and figuring out how to grow food for folks you could also probably find those people through those social media platforms.
Then there's the advocacy side of things. There are a lot of campaigns mounting from this, including campaigns for rent strike, and campaigns that have doubled down on the need for universal healthcare. Because we're all working remotely, those have been pretty accessible. And a lot of folks have switched over to virtual meetings.
I know groups like Sunrise have had a series of webinars that folks can sign up for. Every night they have training online you can attend to get a better sense of how climate activism and COVID fit into each other. I know there are lots of national and local groups that have done similar things where they've been hosting public meetings and webinars and trainings for people virtually.
What is the most urgent advocacy work? Specifically in an area like yours.
The rent strike, in the way that I've heard it used, is basically advocating for a rent freeze. A lot of folks can't afford their rent anymore. I think that's probably necessary work that needs to happen here. In Macomb County, especially because the Southern part has a lot of rental properties, and a lot of evictions, and a lot of foreclosures. A lot of that could be mitigated, hopefully through a rent strike if we're very thoughtful about it, although that's not something that I'm really planning for right now.
In Macomb County in particular, we have an older population. A lot of them live alone. A lot of them aren't on social media. One thing we've been thinking through that's pretty specific to this community is how we get the word out to those people and disseminate information to them, if we can't do it virtually, and we also can’t interact with them in person. Thinking through what flyering could look like, or what safe door to door delivery could look like, and it’s something we're still grappling with. Some of the most vulnerable folks are people who aren't very well connected as it is to their neighbors.
Have any of the tactics you've been deploying right now worked better than others?
I put together a Facebook page called Metro Detroit COVID 19 Support which has probably been the most useful and popular tactic I've tried. It’s basically a place for people in Metro Detroit to offer and ask for resources. Leveraging existing relationships, and pulling people into virtual meetings together so they can cross pollinate ideas has also been really useful. The last couple of weeks have been the strategizing phase of things. And I've just now started to try things with people in my community who are also starting to try things. I don't think we'll know what is really effective for a few more weeks, until after we actually try it and evaluate it.
What’s underreported right now?
It's really important, if we're talking about what work looks like in Michigan, to also connect with some of the organizers in Detroit, which was hit really, really hard by Coronavirus, because of all of the health issues and environmental issues that existed before the virus. There are a lot of people who have been doing work around those issues for a really long time who can speak to that. Particularly folks who are doing advocacy around the water shutoffs.
In 2014, 2015 Detroit started shutting off the water of people who couldn't pay their water bills.
That was also happening in Macomb County, but nationally it was talked about in terms of it happening in Detroit because that was where it was most prevalent. At the beginning of the crisis, in early March, our governor announced a moratorium on water shutoff which was great, but it also meant that people who had had their water turned off already still needed to get it back on.
There was quite a backlog because the city had three plumbers on staff who were turning people's water back on and they just weren't moving fast enough. So folks in Detroit, like Monica Lewis Patrick from We The People of Detroit (which is different from my organization and I know it’s confusing), folks from The People's Water Board, Nayyirah Shariff from Flint Rising were basically tirelessly both pestering the governor to mandate that water be turned back on and do a statewide moratorium, and also delivering water to residents who didn't have water through their taps. That is one snapshot of myriad issues that Detroit has faced and has contributed to the influx of COVID cases there. A lot of those are environmental and public health related. I think if I were to point you in a direction of where to get a better sense of what's going on, it would be with some of those organizers and activists.
Have you found yourself asking any new questions – questions you weren’t asking 6 weeks ago?
I also have all of the very nit-pinky questions about the virus itself and how scared I should be of it and how I protect myself. I totally get that.
From the standpoint of an organizer, a couple of questions I've had and haven't really had answered because there is no answer right now is, what does this mean for my community and the nation and the world? How do we use this moment to turn things around and fight for more equitable and just policies and to fight for a better world, a world that's more prepared to deal with something like this, but also can deal with it more equitably? How do we develop a robust social safety net for our most vulnerable? How do we see the humanity in people who are poor or incarcerated or undocumented and instill that in people so that this doesn't happen? Those are all questions that are emerging for me.
Where are we going and how do we ensure it’s better than this?
It's a huge moment for compassion and empathy. But it’s also a blatant example of systemic and institutional failures. Will those two overlap politically?
Oh my God, that's a great and important question. And I hope I can do it justice in my answer. I think that people are starting to make the connection in more subtle ways, right? I am also checking Twitter and seeing people say, “we are housing folks who are homeless now, we could have done that this entire time.” Or you know, “we're providing free public transportation. We could have done that this whole time.” Realizing that a lot of these problems existed because people didn't have the political will to make solutions happen. I do think, though, that we need to be really adamant and proactive and strategic about how we're making those connections for people.
That's why I say that this is an opportunity to really start fighting for the things that we've always wanted and needed because there's clearly a story here about how our institutions failed everyone because they're stacked against poor folks and in favor of wealthy folks. But if we're not telling that story, someone else will tell a different story. Being really intentional about crafting a narrative about what went wrong during this crisis, why it went wrong, who is responsible and then applying it to some of our other fights like universal healthcare and paid sick leave. But I think especially this ties in well to something like climate change where it does impact everyone, but it impacts them unequally. Because people have access to resources that mitigate some of the effects of it.
I read something the other day saying this will be the death of celebrities. Detachment from the real world has never been so apparent.
Yes – most obvious to people is the testing disparities. People are seeing celebrities with no symptoms getting tested and then they're seeing their loved ones dying and not being able to get tests or treatments. That is a very staunch example of what that inequality looks like. And it's really affirming for me, because I was already railing against these things before this happened. And now it feels like more people are sort of flocking to my corner and I welcome it.
That's nice. It's nice to feel welcome. There is sometimes a fear of when something clicks and you're like, shit, somebody has been telling me about this for 10 years and I haven't really realized until now.
It feels less good to be right than you would think, doesn’t it?
It reminds me a lot of the 2016 election when folks were like, Oh my God, this is so fucked up. We need to do something. I think a lot of people think that Trump is like the worst thing to ever happen to America, when there were all of these issues that existed before, and precipitated the rise of Trump – he wasn't just an anomaly. I think about this moment like that. Like there are things that people have been talking about for a really long time, like the importance of a universal healthcare system, and how unequally resources are allocated in this country. And this is a very stark example of that. And it's a very dramatic, awful thing that had to happen for people to see that. It's very similar to how I think a lot of people thought about Trump's election.
interviews
Blockchain For Climate
by Joseph Pallant
January 29, 2020
frank | Hi Joseph! Excited to speak with you. Will you start by introducing yourself?
Joseph Pallant | Sure! My name is Joseph Pallant and I am the founder of the Blockchain for Climate Foundation – our goal is to put the Paris Agreement on the Blockchain. I am also the Director of Climate Innovation at Ecotrust Canada and a community scholar in Blockchain for Climate at the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research at York University. This confluence of roles and really is a mashup of my 15 years of work in carbon offset development, and my excitement for using emergent technology like blockchain that can help solve a bunch of the problems we encounter in the climate space.
In layman's terms, what do you mean by your “excitement for using emergent technology like blockchain that can help solve a bunch of the problems we encounter in the climate space?”
Climate has been my day job for 15 years. And about three years ago, in the spring of 2017, I read an article about blockchain and about initial coin offerings that coincided with the start of the ICO boom. It was a really long read, and by the end of it, I had three burning thoughts:
My first thought was, "Oh my gosh, I need to drop everything and get into crypto." And my second thought was, "Heck no. I have a months-old baby, a mortgage and I love my work. I really need to NOT just drop everything." Then my third thought was, "Well, if we could put the Paris Agreement on the Blockchain and operationalize Article 6 (the carbon trading aspects) of this international agreement, THAT would be the killer app for blockchain, vis a vis climate.”
You see, a major issue with achieving the vision of the Paris Agreement rests on the ability to pay for the economic transformation that needs to happen to actually beat climate change. Carbon markets and “Article 6” can help achieve this by connecting countries so that you could have capital flow from one country to another where it was more cost effective to reduce greenhouse gases, and then have environmental assets, these carbon credits called “Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcomes” or ITMOs under Article 6, flow back in the other direction in return. The opportunity that I saw in Blockchain was a tool built for the making and keeping of distributed ledgers, but moreover creating digitally scarce token, digitally scarce units that can be bought, sold or traded and really have that portability and verifiability of value.
So, over the next year I got to explore a lot of different models using Blockchain for selling carbon credits or for verifying and auditing of projects, but I kept coming back to where I started, focusing on this last mile of connectivity between countries to enable this key part of the Paris Agreement. We've subsequently received a lot of good feedback and buy-in on this use case, so we remain hard at work to make it a reality.
Amazing. Can you break down this portion of the Paris Agreement and who the buy-in is from? How do you get people to participate in this? I think my barrier to fully wrapping my head around how this all works is that the Paris Agreement is policy driven – and when I look at Blockchain and how Crypto works, policy seems behind.
Yeah. So. You make a really great point. Basically, the part in the Paris Agreement that we're really trying to address is Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, which lays out the rules for trading of carbon credits from one country to another. So, kind of at that simple level, the Paris Agreement sets rules around doing those trades internationally.
What we're trying to do is build a piece of infrastructure to enable that to happen, transparently and effectively.
Over the last few years, lots of people have tokenized intangible assets on the Ethereum blockchain using the “ERC20” token standard, where they're tokenizing any manner of things. We're basically building a tool allowing governments to tokenize carbon credits that they're approving for transfer out of their country.
Can you define what a carbon credit is?
At its simplest level, a carbon credit is an environmental asset created by implementing a project that reduces or removes one tonne of carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere. In our case, there's a couple of ways it could happen. But theoretically, a project developer could say… Hey - this is probably way too much detail?
No, not at all.
Ok! Thank you. If you were to do a carbon credit project here in Canada where, for example, we could go and work to improve forest management practices in a logging tenure in the province of Ontario and go from releasing a million tons of carbon dioxide per year, down to 500,000 tons per year.
After going through the credit project development and verification process you could be issuing 500,000 tons of carbon credits per year. We have well established processes for doing this domestically, and for that we don’t need the blockchain. But say now Canada wants to trade those carbon credits to Norway?
If we then take those 500,000 tons of carbon credits and sell them to Norway, their total carbon footprint is reduced by half a million tons. But what we now need to do, and this is really the crux of our work, is to make sure that Canada is adds those 500,000 tons back on to their carbon inventory and basically increase our footprint in Canada by 500,000 tons because we sold those away. Does that make sense?
So you're tokenizing the carbon credits.
Yeah. What we want to do is tokenize the 500,000 tons of carbon credits, so Canada in that issuance and tokenizing event would be taking them off of their national carbon inventory and readying them for transfer to another country.
And then why this is important is because the carbon credits might get sold to Norway, but then Norway might sell it to England might sell it to Germany, might sell to Japan. And so these units are going to be potentially, quite widely traded. And that's good in a lot of ways because it allows for a bigger market, allows for more capital invested and greenhouse gasses reduced.
Countries will be able to see how many tonnes of carbon dioxide they’ve bought and sold, and then they compare that against their actual national carbon footprint that gets calculated and reported to the UN. So, you might see Canada starting off with 730 million tons of emissions this year. And then we might sell off 5 million tons of carbon. So, we'd actually have to increase our footprint to 735 million tonnes. Then we might buy a hundred million tons of carbon credits to get us toward that Paris commitment. So then you'd subtract that off our inventory and so on. We’re excited about the building our platform because it really leverages the nature of Blockchain, natively in tokenizing that environmental outcome and making it into a digital asset. This supports clarity in that bookkeeping and clarity of ownership, all of which we're doing to support getting more capital to reducing greenhouse gases.
How did you start Blockchain for Climate? Again, how did you start getting people to buy into this idea of getting carbon credits onto the Blockchain?
There's so many different things to do in Blockchain and so many different things even to do with climate and Blockchain. I was able to really grasp a moment of clarity and focus and say, "We're just going to work on this one tool to operationalize the Paris Agreement." We had an original team of five folks, including myself, that actually met down at DCTRL, which is literally an underground cryptocurrency members club here in Vancouver, British Columbia. So, we met there, I think, in December, 2017 to just kind of talk about what was going on here.
Basically that initial team came together and then we kept it at five for about another year because we were still just sort of fleshing out exactly what we needed to do. We had an early blockchain developer, a person from the climate space, a person from governance and then also another crypto-native and an awesome individual from the clean energy space. And so the team really started to figure out what type of Crypto tools we need, started to figure out how to really craft the use case.
It was really the launch of CryptoKitties that helped me realize kind of how to make Crypto work for carbon credits. Are you familiar with CryptoKitties?
We did an interview with Blake Finucane about crypto art, and she spoke a lot about CytoKitties.
That's awesome. CryptoKitties was created here in Vancouver, and it's an amazing story for a lot of reasons. But the part cogent for my story was how each CryptoKitty has eight attributes like eye shape and background color and fur color and so on, displayed on the kitty’s token page and coded on the blockchain. And I'm like, "This is exactly what we need to be able to have each individual carbon credit token carry all of the information of its genesis carbon offset."
A quality carbon credit is valuable and credible because of the information that backs it, all of the project information, scientific detail, auditing… Instead of eye color, we could have the name of the credit project. And instead of background color, we could have, which country was this project developed in? And what sector is it? Is it forest carbon, and so on and so forth.
So that was an "Aha" moment, because we know about Bitcoin, Ethereum and Dogecoin and the fact that people are starting to tokenize things on Ethereum. But for our project to really work, you needed to be able to know everything about that credit from that token. It was really CryptoKitties and non fungible tokens that was the first foot to fall and set us on our way.
In March 2018, I sat down and spoke with one of my collaborators, one of the five, Matt Lockyer here in Vancouver. He had just submitted ERC-998, which is an improvement or a tool proposed to the Ethereum blockchain that allows you to create “crypto composables.” This would basically allow your non fungible token, like your CryptoKitty, be able to own other non fungible tokens, like other CryptoKitties. Or you could tokenize bags of CryptoKitty cat food, and have them belong to your CryptoKitty token. Or your CryptoKitty could hold an ether token. That ability to nest other non fungible tokens within other non fungible tokens was the other foot to fall. Because of course the thing that created the huge slowdown in the Ethereum network near the end of 2017, and a lot of ruckus about CryptoKitties was that you can actually only move one of them per transaction on the blockchain. And so that wasn't going to work for our climate system where we're going to have billions of tons moving all the time. But that ability to do that composability where we could say, issue a project token that could then issue and hold 50,000 individual carbon credit tokens? Now we're talking.
So as that got clear and we moved forward, then we opened up the gates for more team members. Since then we've grown to a team of around 20 kind, generous folks, contributing from a wide variety of life experiences and professional expertise. Because you know, we have a subject matter focus on blockchain and climate, but building this into fruition takes a lot of other skillsets. We’re really lucky because these folks are all profoundly skilled, and leaders in their respective fields. It brings home the fact that we’re working on a critical task, and bringing compelling tools to the job of getting it done.
Conceptually, I understand. So there's what, 196 countries in the Paris Agreement?
Yeah.
When you say that you have people buying in to the project who are you talking about exactly? If country is the answer, how many of the 196 are currently operating on the blockchain?
Right. So that's our next frontier. It’s been neat just getting people in the space to understand and get on board with this idea. Those are kind of the precursors to the other types of buy in which we'll need ultimately to get some or all of the 196 countries on board. I think a stretch goal is to create like the tool for everybody to use the tool for Paris Agreement-compliant issuance and exchange of carbon credits . But what's more likely is that we'll have a smaller number as few as two, two's our minimum, one buyer, one seller, to trial this. And so right now we've come back from the UN COP25 in Madrid, and we're working on building a national party working group of countries to co-create, utilize and champion our system. We have a notional goal of six varied countries interested in working with us over the next year and a half to try to refine and support the building of this tool so that by this time next year we are actually able to allow countries to trade carbon credits through our system. We're hoping to get countries that are keen to use the tool and will say, if you build it and it works, we'd like to use it. We also want them as users to really provide their feedback. What do they want to see? What are they allergic to?
Why is this a blockchain manifestation of the Paris Agreement a better option than what's happening right now?
With the slight caveat that I'm still learning, and there's always a risk that I'm smack talking a little bit, which is really not the goal. But basically, Article 6 in the Paris Agreement, which is the one around international carbon trading, started out as only one page. Before work could start to build a tool like we’re building to enable really clear transparency around these international trades, countries have to do a bunch of work around hammering out the Article 6 rule book. By 2018, all the other Articles that have solidified their rules and might be like 40, 50, 100 pages. But active opposition to critical parts of a rulebook for Article 6 has meant that, even though the rules are looking a lot better now after COP25, they’re still not complete and universally agreed upon. This has a number of impacts, including that further building of a transparency tool like ours by official channels has paused until some future date.
Under the earlier Kyoto protocol, there was a system of carbon credits called the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). International trade of these credits was registered on the International Transaction Log or the ITL. Every two years the ITL recorded the sum total of all the pluses and minuses, all of the trades that each country would do of carbon credits. An interesting nuance under the CDM, was that the “developing world” could create carbon credits and sell them to the “developed world.” And that would lower the footprint of the purchasing country, usually in Europe or Japan, but they didn't actually add the corresponding emissions back onto the carbon footprint of the selling country. It was really a one way flow.
Now that all countries of the world have committed to reducing emissions, if you are going to sell a carbon credit and somebody else is going to remove it from their footprint, YOU have to put it back on your footprint as the seller. And so this International Transaction Log, my understanding is they're not going to even start building it or its replacement until Article 6 has been finalized, which will hopefully be this November in COP26 in Scotland, but we don't really know. The fact that they can't start building that till all the rules are made and the fact that we hear it will take around three years just to build that once all the rules are made, really slows down the ability to roll out to a carbon market and mobilize capital to fight climate change. Those are some of the reasons why we decided we needed to do this.
The other main reason that's kind of intangible, or emotional, or maybe I’m just being overtaken by crypto geekery, is that if the world goes with the old way, they're locking in this old technology and it’s not really sufficient for the task at hand. If we’re going to mobilize the billions of dollars of capital and deploy it in every corner of the world to fight climate change, we’re going to need the technological advancement of tools like blockchain. So really we're building our platform to enable corresponding adjustments between carbon accounts to happen in real time rather than every two years.
It’s a mis-fit. It just doesn’t feel right. Also, this use case really jives with the nature of crypto and of blockchain, which tokenizes values or tokenizes an outcome. This is exactly what was needed to solve this problem of how to issue, exchange and reconcile carbon credits under the Paris Agreement. When you have a tool that fits the task so well, it just kind of calls use it. So that's a cluster of the reasons why we are.