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Ryan Dezember : So an offset is essentially a financial instrument or something that a company can use to negate or sort of compensate for emissions that they're not able to do without. An airline can't stop burning fuel so companies are looking for ways to compensate for those emissions. Ryan Dezember : I've spoken to owners, large and small. Basically the math just works, right? They could make more money selling carbon offsets, managing their woods, that tract of woods by leaving the tree standing and managing them for the carbon market. And it was as simple as that. They might feel good about what they're doing, but that doesn't really get to play into their decision.
Ryan Dezember : When you see a big company say they're going to be carbon neutral by 2050 or whatever, carbon negative by 2030, and they say these goals related to climate change, that's what's driving this market. Those promises to reduce emissions and make up for those that they cannot reduce. An oil company and an airline, they can't get rid of all their emissions and all their pollution. So they look for things that will make a negative number on these carbon balance sheets.
Ryan Dezember : So a lot of landowners are looking at theirs saying, I'm going to get a really low price for my trees. I'll sign up for this program and I'm going to check. You don't sell the trees. You don't sell the actual land. You still own. And you can still log to a degree and do things and sell hunting leases and camping and whatever else do you do with the woods. But you can't cut so many that the carbon stored in those woods declines.