In this episode I speak with Will Clayton, CEO of Sky Harvest, a forest carbon project developer that incentivizes small landowners to avoid harvesting their trees for climate impact. We discuss:
How his Christian upbringing shapes his current work in environmental markets.
How growing up in North Carolina's forests through scouting and hiking fostered his deep connection to nature.
His experience at BCG and how it shaped his approach to problem-solving in the environmental space.
Why the carbon market's failure to account for the time value of climate action represents a fundamental flaw that Sky Harvest is working to address.
The challenges of balancing ambition with what truly matters in life.
David Valerio: How would you describe your spirituality and the way it shapes your approach to the natural world?
Will Clayton: That's a good question. It's tough to answer because it's a deeply personal relationship. In some ways it's like your marriage. If someone asks how you'd describe your marriage, how would you describe that?
The most accessible way is to use some typical labels. I'm a Christian. I was raised Presbyterian, and I've been a member of Anglican, Episcopalian, Methodist, and non-denominational Baptist churches. I'm sure there's a lot of that mixed into my journey. I believe that God is good and loving, and at great cost to himself through Jesus' sacrifice, he created a better way for us to live. He showed us how to do that through the Bible, and we spend most of our time doing the opposite. I'm constantly struggling to practice the implications of that belief. It's a battle worth fighting.
Something that I think is intertwined in my spirituality, or at least a product of it: I spent some time a few years back trying to come up with a mission statement for my own life. My mission is to surrender to God and trust his plan. To seek freedom in the love and grace of Jesus. To ask the Holy Spirit for the help I need. To glorify God by living according to my principles. That mission is fairly broad, fairly specific, and highly spiritual. It's something I try to repeat every morning when I wake up and strive to live by, but I seem to be human and really struggle with that.
The second part of your question was how that impacts my view of the natural world. I did not grow up an environmentalist per se, although I certainly can identify where my love for nature comes from. I was at a career juncture in my later 20s and I was thinking about what I wanted to do next. I was fortunate to have some time to explore what my next chapter would be. I felt called toward stewardship of this Earth. It was a spiritual calling and a spiritually anchored belief.
Sometimes it feels like Christians and environmentalists are in different buckets if you read the headlines. But I think in reality, there's deep love for nature and creation across all parts of society. It's hard for me to bifurcate those two ideas. They're inextricably intertwined.
David Valerio: How did you come into the church? Have you always been a Christian?
Will Clayton: I grew up in the church, with a rich inheritance of family that had been involved in churches going back a few generations. There was something anchoring about that for me. But there was also something traditionalist about it that wasn’t personal. It was just what we did. I grew up going to a large church in Raleigh, North Carolina. Great memories, great friends, great lessons came out of that. Core foundations of character came from that, and from scouting and my family.
But it wasn't until my later college years that I started to understand the good news of the Gospel, and to understand why I needed it. I began to understand that this thing I'd been talking about or practicing for a number of years was starting to really click for me. That was a spiritual breakthrough, an epiphany that unlocked further growth, development, and richness in the relationship I was talking about earlier.
David Valerio: Was there anything in particular that unlocked that for you?
Will Clayton: I don't know that there was any one crucible moment. I think ultimately it was probably my own cognitive development. I was maybe for the first time able to get my mind around these things. It was generally seeing some of the brokenness in the world and in my own life. But more than anything, I'm so grateful for the mentors who took time out of their lives to be there to pick up those signals and respond in kindness and love with truth. And when you hear truth, you know it. That's what was happening in college at that time.
All these puzzle pieces that had been spread throughout my life and that I'd been picking up since those early days in the church, they all came together and coalesced into a picture. And suddenly, I was looking at the picture that I understood.
David Valerio: Could you share more about what it was like growing up in Raleigh, and how the nature in that area impacted you?
Will Clayton: I was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and grew up in Raleigh. I have family spread all throughout the state. When you grow up in North Carolina, which is one of the most beautiful states in the country, there's a constant refrain: "Are you a mountains person or a beach person?" Because you can always go west or east. It’s identity-defining question that probably comes with a lot of presumptions based on your answer.
I feel like part of North Carolinian identity is anchored in nature, on both sides of the spectrum. That was the water I was swimming in. I was in scouting. We would go camping monthly. I think we had a camping trip every month where we'd go out in the woods and hike. Later, I got really into backpacking, which is like camping, but you carry everything with you so you can go further from the roads. I did a few week-long trips where I immersed myself in wilderness. You just fall in love with that when you're waking up on those crisp mornings, seeing sunrises in the woods.
I was in North Carolina last week for a work trip with a coworker who had never been there before, and I was trying to give him the lay of the land. After fumbling through a description for a while, I finally just landed on, "Well, I guess it's just one big forest, and then we've cut down some of the trees to build buildings." I think that's probably a pretty apt description of the state.
I grew up in the woods—hiking, camping, backpacking. Those were my favorite activities. Later it became running, any trail running that I could do. Getting out in Umstead Park or, during a period when I was commuting between Raleigh and Durham, seven of my favorite trails that were on the commute home. I'd pick a different one each day and get out there to get my shoes dirty. I just love that, there's something beautiful about it. I said earlier I didn't grow up an environmentalist, but that certainly fostered my love of nature and the importance of it, and the connection with it that's ultimately driving the importance of a lot of what I do now.
David Valerio: Are you a mountain North Carolinian or a beach North Carolinian? It sounds like you're a mountain North Carolinian, but I wanted to confirm.
Will Clayton: That's a good question. I probably am. I love both. I'm a variety guy. I like to switch what's on the menu at dinner and, you know, and vacations as well.
David Valerio: “I reject the premise.” That's a good one.
Will Clayton: That'll be a theme too.
David Valerio: Do you consider yourself an environmentalist now? How has your philosophy on these topics changed over time?
Will Clayton: I guess I'll have to reject the premise again. Words like that come loaded with connotations, and it depends what those connotations mean. I certainly think this Earth that we've been given is a great gift, and it's humbling to think about. I certainly think it's worth preserving and stewarding. So if that makes me an environmentalist, sure. But there are certainly trade-offs with other parts of human development and economic flourishing that sometimes come into conflict with environmentalism. That certainly plays out often in the political realm. I guess you have to take those on a case-by-case basis, with a lot of listening and discernment.
David Valerio: What made you end up studying economics at UNC?
Will Clayton: I didn't conduct as broad a search in high school as many people did. I applied to four schools and quickly narrowed it down to two. I had a really cool scholarship at UNC that made the decision for me. That scholarship, the Morehead-Cain Program, changed the trajectory of my life. I'm super grateful for that.
When I got to Carolina, it was after taking a gap year. This particular scholarship foundation had received a significant grant the year I was going through the application process. They were launching some new programs, including a gap year. They got a bunch of 17-18 year-olds on the phone and said, "We're willing to fund a portion of your budget at this prime time in your life to do whatever you want." When they asked who was interested, both my hands went up. I was shocked there were only six of us out of about 50 who elected to do that. I loved it. It was a great growth experience for me—growth in independence, learning about the world, travel, wisdom, and many other things. After that year, I came back to UNC and enrolled as a freshman.
I was probably, unbeknownst to me, a little burnt out after high school. I was one of those kids who was involved in a lot, leading a lot, and going all the time. During my gap year, I had a wide array of jobs working manual labor with folks who had been spent decades in manual labor. I worked for non-profits in South America, volunteered at churches, taught English and computer science in schools there. Across all these experiences, I came to see a much broader spectrum of wealth than in the world I grew up in. I spent limited time with some very wealthy, upper-class South Americans. Then I spent a fair amount of time with folks who were receiving Habitat houses in impoverished neighborhoods of Lima and other areas. I saw this really wide disparity of wealth, yet it seemed uncorrelated with happiness. That was maybe one of the things that struck me most from that whole year abroad.
When I came to UNC, I was really curious about this question: what's the relationship between wealth and happiness? I'll never forget the first day of my Economics 101 class. Professor Michael Salemi was talking to about 30 of us, and he said, "Economics is the study of why people behave the way they do." I was fascinated by that. Immediately, I saw that an economy is just billions of small behaviors. I don't think an economy is typically seen that way—as this aggregation of lots of tiny little things—but it is. Understanding how those individual behaviors are made and the decisions behind them is fascinating.
I always liked microeconomics and how it plays into macroeconomics. From that first class on, I was an economics major. My dad was an economics major, and I have two older brothers who were economics majors. There's something in the blood, or in the water, that had me predestined for that path. But when I chose it for myself, it was on the very first day of college in that 8:00 AM Economics 101 class.
David Valerio: Have you come to an answer on this question of the relationship between economic growth and happiness?
Will Clayton: I don't know that there is one. I haven't found one. One school of thought points at Maslow's hierarchy and says, "It's hard to achieve happiness when you don't have some of your basic needs met." That makes sense to me. But after a certain minimum threshold, there doesn't seem to be a correlation.
I've always been struck by the verse where Paul, who's in jail, says, "I've learned to be content in any and every circumstance. No matter what the circumstance."1 That was certainly in my mind when I was living in those different environments week to week. There were sharp juxtapositions between going out in somebody's speedboat at their beach house in Venezuela, to a few weeks later sleeping in the hallway of somebody's newly-built Habitat house and building another one next door. There are people happy on both sides of that, and there's deep sadness on both sides of that. I'm not sure I found a correlation after that minimum threshold is met.
David Valerio: I love that Paul quote you brought up, and I think it strikes at the heart of what the Christian message is. Various other world religions, like Buddhism, suggest the answer to suffering is to essentially stop being yourself—suffering stops because you are not there to experience it anymore. Whereas for the Christian, suffering in any situation we encounter in the world can be transfigured and come to have transcendent meaning and value. So even if the experience might be painful, you can be joyous while undergoing it.
I've not cracked that nut for myself, but that's what was most attractive and mysterious to me about the faith. You could be the richest person in the world but still be abjectly depressed. You're not married, you don't have family, you don't have God. Where is your meaning in life? Whereas you could be the poorest person in the world, but if you have God, you have everything.
Will Clayton: I had a mentor once who was helping my wife and I gain some perspective on a decision we were making early in our marriage. I think we were moving or something. He highlighted that there are actually two decisions you're making. One is on the physical plane, or the particular circumstances we were facing in our lives. What city were we going to be in? That was the first decision and was a pretty obvious one that we had reached out for perspective on.
But what I wasn't seeing was this second plane, a parallel plane, and arguably a higher plane of the spiritual decision—how are we going to engage in that circumstantial decision? How are we going to treat each other in that decision process? Are we going to be sacrificial or selfish? Are we going to be kind and gentle or manipulative? Those are all options humans face every day in all kinds of decisions. I had never heard that framework of two parallel planes to any kind of decision. And I've found that helpful many times since. What you said reminds me of that.
David Valerio: That's a beautiful framing of the relationship between the spiritual and the physical.
Non-sequitur: how has your economics training helped you think about ecology?
Will Clayton: In economics, one of the terms that often comes up in talking about environmental problems is "externalities." Externalities have to do with this idea of the "tragedy of the commons." The original example of this was a bunch of people living in a village with a common field in the middle. You could graze your livestock there, but because no one owned it, everybody felt free to use it as much as they wanted, and maybe as much as they could, because if they didn't use it somebody else was going to. So the commons, this field at the center of the village, would get overgrazed because nobody was managing it with a long-term perspective.
The parallel today might be our atmosphere. No individual entity, person, corporation, or country has responsibility for managing greenhouse gas levels over the long run. So any of those individuals face a very real incentive to do what they need to do without regard to that externality. To translate that to economic jargon, there's a cost that is not included in the price we pay for things. It has not been internalized. The simple nomenclature for that is the cost of carbon or a carbon tax. Some countries like Canada have one. A state in Mexico has one. They usually have limitations or loopholes. But in the United States, broadly speaking we don't have one. These externalities are not baked into the price of goods and services we consume.
Your question about broader ecological systems is a good one. The one I'm most focused on at Sky Harvest is specifically greenhouse gas emissions and thinking about this risk of existential damage to the planet. How do we mitigate that risk? How do we move it lower down the risk-reward scale? There are concrete actions we can take. In the absence of something like a carbon tax that internalizes the cost of carbon, you need other mechanisms.
Fortunately, there are a lot of corporations who are, at great expense to themselves, taking a leap of faith and doing something to mitigate their climate impact. They're doing it in the belief that it's either the right thing to do, or that it's going to come back around to them. They're going to grow their market share by making a deeper connection with their customers, receive a lower cost of capital, or talent. Regardless of their motivations, they’re acting with this broader vision of abundance, growth, and multiplication in mind. I think that there's something really redeeming about that.
I think there are various motivations that folks have for participating in the voluntary carbon market as buyers. Those motivations are important to each specific buyer, but ultimately, all the motivations lead to traction in the market and they lead to impact. It's important that all of those motivations are creating traction.
David Valerio: Tell me about your experience working at BCG.
Will Clayton: I had an internship with BCG in Dallas while I was in college, and then I was there right out of undergrad for about six years. It was really fun. It was fast-paced. It was crazy. It was sexy in a vocational kind of way. You're 22 and you're around brilliant people who teach you things really quickly. You're drinking from a fire hose and are put in environments where you're learning rapidly. You're exposed to this wide variety of problems faced by different companies and organizations. HBO made a series about it. There was something kind of compelling and entertaining about it. I think it unfortunately called "House of Lies" or something like that. It was certainly sensationalized, but there are elements of truth in it.
But easily the best parts for me were the people I got to work with. I got to work around some truly brilliant people. I felt like one of the things that defined the people at BCG was that they were more interested than they were interesting. And they were all really, really interesting. We had an Olympic medalist, a professional soccer player, and a former Army Ranger in my starting class. They'd all done these crazy wild things, and yet they're more interested in what's going on with you, or with their client, or these problems in the world that you're working on. I found it to be really attractive and intoxicating being around people like that. I wanted to adopt and jump into that culture.
The second thing I loved was the problem solving. We would get these thorny problems and be tasked with unlocking them. That moment where you got to a part in the case where you cracked the code, or found the key insight through a bunch of field research or data analysis, was a big aha moment that was always fun to share with the client. It fostered one of my driving motivators in life: Understanding how things work and sharing that knowledge with people. That's what you do as a consultant. You come in and try to understand the nature of the problem. Once you understand the nature of the problem, the solutions are generally pretty self-evident. Then you communicate them to the client in a way that leads to action
It wasn't up there with the people, who were just spectacular, but a close third was getting to work on problems like that every day, across countries, cities, and all types of organizations. I worked in the private sector and public sector, in the Middle East and with clients in China and North America. That was really great exposure.
There were downsides too. It's not all rose-colored glasses. But I'm extremely grateful for the time, and I feel like I was getting a lot of extra credit during the years I was there. One year into my time at BCG, I felt like I had gotten two years of work experience. When I was talking with other folks I had graduated with, it felt like that was true.
David Valerio: What were the scope of problems that you engaged with as a consultant?
Will Clayton: Leave it to consultants to develop a framework for this. We had a matrix with different industries on one axis and different functions on the other. A project would typically be at the intersection of an industry and a function. For example, you might be doing growth strategy for a consumer packaged goods company. We were an expensive group to bring in for generally making ourselves valuable, but at the start of a project there was typically a pretty clear problem we were trying to solve.
I had a CEO walk into our team room on day one of a project at a fast food chain and say, "Here's our annual revenue target for six years from now. You can change everything but the name of the company. In six weeks, I want to hear your best ideas. Nice to meet you all. I'll see you then." I found it really empowering to receive those degrees of freedom to solve the problem from the top on day one.
I worked with a foreign government that was trying to figure out how to empower their workforce. We were looking at all kinds of initiatives to seed capital into workforce development initiatives. As a 25-year-old, I was managing a fund that was deploying capital into a wide variety of projects within the country, overseeing the projects and ensuring they delivered what they promised and achieved the intended impact. That was really fun work and certainly adventurous.
A particularly fast-paced project I had was with an American hotel chain looking at entering a new market. We had a team in Dallas where I was based, and a BCG team in the other country's market on the other side of the globe. We would work 18 hours a day, and they would work 18 hours a day. We had six hours in the morning and evening where our workdays would overlap. The project had this momentum where it was constantly going, 24 hours a day. On one hand, it was exhausting. On the other hand, I'd never seen something move so fast. We helped this huge international company figure out when, how, and if they should move into a new market. It expanded my perspective on what's achievable, stretching my understanding of how quickly complex problems can be solved and how effectively diverse, international teams can collaborate.
David Valerio: Tell me about your journey from BCG into renewables, then ultimately into forest carbon.
Will Clayton: For background, Sky Harvest creates and sells carbon credits to companies to help them mitigate their climate impacts. We do so by paying disadvantaged US landowners not to harvest their timber. Why did I start a company like that? How did I even get into that space from management consulting?
There was a necessary intermediary step. I worked in the solar industry for about four years with a large, vertically integrated developer of utility-scale solar farms. One of the things I found really interesting was that when you produce electricity from a solar farm, it goes into the grid just like any other generator. If you get an electron off the grid, you can't tell if it came from a coal plant or a solar farm or a wind farm or anything else. So there needed to be some mechanism to value the lower-emissions nature of solar electricity.
The way this was done in the solar industry is that every time the meter turned where your solar farm connected to the grid, every time you generated one megawatt hour of electricity, you would generate this thing called a renewable energy credit. There was a value to that. You could go and sell it. If somebody who was buying electricity off the grid wanted clean electricity, they would buy some of these renewable energy credits that had been separated at the meter. Then they would get rejoined behind the customer's meter on the other side.
When I understood how that worked, I was amazed. It's a really clever mechanism to create a marketplace, which is going to be more efficient than any other mechanism to value the environmental benefits of solar. But it's done via this proxy metric, which is electricity. In theory, the more solar that you produce, the more high-emissions electricity you're displacing from the grid. But I'm not sure that's how it actually works. It might just be additive. Maybe electricity is just cheaper because there's more energy to go around. I wasn't sure. It just felt like a proxy metric rather than the thing we actually cared about, which was emissions.
When I started pulling on that thread, I started learning about the voluntary carbon market. A friend at the time wanted to start a business on the demand side of the voluntary carbon market, and we spent quite a few months diligencing that idea. Ultimately, it wasn't the direction I wanted to go. I realized that really wanted to be on the supply side of the market. I wanted to be removing carbon from the atmosphere, storing it in the biosphere, and helping solve the problem in a more direct manner.
As I was starting to learn more about the voluntary carbon market, I thought, "This feels like one of those immature industries that's just getting going." Relative to some industries, it was. It had been around 10 years, or maybe a little bit more than that, and gone through several iterations. The best description I've heard from a friend in the industry is it's a little bit like five-year-olds playing soccer. Somebody kicks the ball and everybody runs to the ball, and everybody's trying to kick it somewhere else. Which is great when you're five years old. But when you look at professional soccer, everybody has a role to play, the team is working as a unit, they're spread out, and placement is important. It's more effective.
It felt like this industry was going to mature. It certainly seemed like there was a role for this industry in the coming years and decades. I wanted to get into it and see if I could help solve some of the problems I saw. The very first thing I did was create a scorecard for a carbon project. I said, "I'm going to start with a blank page and create the criteria of a good project. Once I have that scorecard, this will be how I define a good project. Then I'll go design a project and see if I can meet my own scorecard’s requirements."
For this scorecard, I was standing on the shoulders of giants. I was drawing on work from BCG, the Environmental Defense Fund, the World Wildlife Foundation, and other sources. Ultimately, I was trying to design a project that would meet my own standard. I told myself, "If I can do this, I'll start the company. If I can't, I won't. I'll go do something else, because it's not worth starting a company that can't generate credits that meet these criteria." That's when I started Sky Harvest.
David Valerio: How did you end up deciding to work on improved forest management instead of other carbon projects?
Will Clayton: There were two important things to that. The first and most simple is that I approached it like an economist would. If we're going to approach this problem of climate change, we want to have the most impact we can given the resources we have at our disposal. We live in a world of scarce resources. We're only going to be able to dedicate so many of those resources to the problem of climate, so we need as much bang for the buck as we can get.
There's this concept of the marginal abatement cost curve, which lists all the projects from the ones that have a positive economic return to the ones that are most expensive in terms of mitigating one ton of carbon. You might imagine somebody that operates a natural gas pipeline that's leaking. Not only is methane terrible for the atmosphere, but you can easily fix the leak to stop the externality and get revenue for selling the natural gas. You already have a positive incentive to do it. On the marginal abatement curve, that's like a negative cost.
On the other side of the spectrum, you have direct air capture. You build massive machines that are in R&D phase right now, but in several years may be able to vacuum carbon dioxide across a membrane, trap the carbon, and inject it into a well that's drilled 10,000 feet into the Earth to store it. That's a really good technical solution, but as it sounds, it's very expensive. Not a lot of great bang for your buck in a solution like that.
So why did I land on forestry? Because it is economical and you don’t have to build energy systems to power the vacuum. The sun has been doing it for millions of years. Trees grow on their own. They remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in the biomass of the tree. The quickest and easiest way to prevent the release of that carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere is to maintain those trees. As you do that, the trees continue to remove more carbon by growing. It's a very cost-effective mechanism for achieving a lot of climate impact with the limited resources that we have.
But even within that world, there was a glaring problem that I saw which is ultimately why I started Sky Harvest. The concept behind a carbon credit is that it can offset or mitigate the impact of emissions somewhere else in the world. Imagine a factory somewhere with a smokestack, and one ton of carbon dioxide comes out of that smokestack. In theory, one carbon credit is supposed to offset that, but in practice, the ton of carbon dioxide that came out of that smokestack is going to live in the atmosphere for the next thousands of year, and it's going to have an impact on global warming that does diminish, but it persists for a really long time.
Our carbon credits are not equivalent to that. Our carbon credits store carbon for between 10 and 100 years. So you have this timing mismatch that is totally unaccounted for in the carbon market. It seemed wild to me that nobody talks about it. In the banking industry or in insurance and project finance, the time value of money is of critical concern. There are whole industries built on it. But nobody was talking about the time value of carbon. It just felt like a really obvious opportunity to me that to create equivalence with the emissions coming out of the smokestack, we might need more than one ton if we're only storing that ton for 20 years.
So I started educating myself on how one could actually do that and developed a project methodology that says, "We're actually going to need more than one ton to create equivalence with what's coming out of your smokestack," because what's important is that we fully offset it. It's not important that we have one ton on both sides of the scale. What's really important is that the climate impact on both sides of the scale is balanced. Sky Harvest was founded on this differentiating principle of emissions equivalence.
So, why forestry? Forestry is a sector within the carbon market where timing is really important. This is probably the most glaring issue that exists in the voluntary carbon market today.
David Valerio: I was also very confused about this when I came into the market. From the perspective of the Earth system, nothing is ever permanent and things are always in flux. So I was like, "Well, how long are these credits supposed to last for?" The fact that nobody explicitly talked about it blew my mind. Why do you think nobody talks about this?
Will Clayton: I don't know. I think it's so wild. I'm glad you see it too. There have been a lot of exposés and articles in the last couple of years about the quality of carbon credits, and I think that's fair. I think a lot of it is merited. But that's only one shoe that’s dropped. There's this whole other shoe that hasn't dropped yet, and it's about the timing of carbon credits.
Why doesn’t anyone talk about it? I don't know. It's a little bit more complex. Generally, people aren't scared of complexity when there’s an obvious solution. The question at hand is permanence, and we have all these mechanisms for solving permanence that are complex, convoluted, and rife with conflicts of interest. But there's a solution here that's actually very quantitative and clear, yet no one's adopted it.2
So my conclusion has been that things are going well for the people in the system today. There's a status quo. The folks who are in the system are saying, "Why change it?" Perhaps they're benefiting from it. But over here at Sky Harvest, we think we have to change it because the scales don't balance. If we care about this climate impact thing, the only ones we're shortchanging with imbalanced scales are our customers and ourselves. So we want to balance the scales and serve our customers well and give them that confidence.
David Valerio: I think the answer is what you mentioned, that there are certain people in the system who have incentives to not raise this topic. On one side, it's the existing carbon market operators who have been around for 20 years. To point out that there's a fundamental flaw with the entire system would be a big deal to an industry already reeling from various controversies. That's one reason not to poke the bear.
On the other side, there are the new carbon dioxide removal people define "permanent carbon removal" being a thousand plus years of storage. They're incentivized not to talk about it because they can just say, "Well, our solutions are permanent which means one thousand plus years." Everything that stores carbon for less duration then that arbitrary permanence definition is supposedly unrigorous and not actually removing carbon from the atmosphere.
Will Clayton: You're right. Engineered carbon removal solutions are pretty expensive today. When you account for time value of carbon, that 999th year of storage which is so far down in the future is not as valuable to us today. So when you account for that, it looks even more expensive than something that's creating an impact today. That direct air capture solution maybe doesn't even start for a few years. They're technically the best quality credits around. But if we put all of our resources into that, we're going to have less climate impact than we could by putting them elsewhere.
I think the folks who are going to change this are not the standards bodies that have emerged. I think the folks that are going to change this are the buyers. The buyers are getting educated on this, and they're getting pretty sophisticated in a way that they didn't need to be several years ago. As buyers start to understand this, they're saying, "Hey, wait. Twenty years doesn't equal infinite years. Those scales don't balance. How do we correct for that? How do we account for that?" Fortunately, there's a great solution to it. Sky Harvest is trying to spread the word on that and develop projects under that framework to get it out there.
Communicating the time value of carbon to someone unfamiliar with the time value of money is a bit difficult. The best metaphor I've found is this: Say that you want to buy a puzzle. You go to the store and find the puzzle you want. If it's a thousand-piece puzzle, you buy it, go to the checkout counter, bring it home, open the box, and there's a thousand pieces there. You start to build that puzzle. We all get that. It's a satisfying experience to complete the puzzle.
The status quo today without accounting for timing is equivalent to going to the store, buying that puzzle, coming home and opening the box, and there's like 20 pieces in the 1,000-piece puzzle. There's an IOU that says, "We're going to send you another 20 pieces every year for the next 100 years." And by the way, at the end of the 100 years, or whatever the time scale is, you're still not going to have all 1,000 pieces. You're going to have a partial puzzle with 700 pieces or 400 pieces, depending on the project.
It's kind of crazy. There's no other market that works that way and where buyers are satisfied with that experience. So ultimately, it has to change.
David Valerio: I’m curious about how you’ve balanced running a startup with your spiritual and family life. Could you tell me about that?
Will Clayton: I don't know if my goal is balance. Sometimes I’m all in on one and sometimes I’m all in on the other. I'm not great at it. It's something I'm actively figuring out with mentors, friends, and my wonderful wife—day to day and month to month. At different points in time, the family or vocational responsibilities pull on you more strongly.
I am naturally an achievement-oriented person, so an easy way to write my mission statement would that I want be to achieve X, Y and Z in life. I would love that. But that's not the mission statement I described earlier. The verbs are to surrender, to seek, to ask, to glorify. Those process verbs are part of a journey. There's a tension between the achievements that you're tempted to strive for in a vocation, and the experience of journeying through life with your family and friends. I have found that tension to be a good forcing function for reflection. It forces you to decide, because you can't do both. There's a real trade-off there.
Something else comes to mind. I read a book earlier this year in a book club with some friends. It was a biography of John D. Rockefeller.3 A couple of things struck me. What tremendous wealth this oil baron had, at a time where there was no income tax. iI multiplied very quickly. The moment of greatest stress in his life was not in the crucible of building this empire. It was figuring out how to give it away.
We know his name. There are biographies written about him. I learned a lot reading that one. But in even a couple of generations, I think his name will fade. In reading and discussing this book with some dear friends, I recognized that whatever legacies we might think we're creating, they too are going to fade. It's a little bit... It sucks the air out of the room to realize that, but I think it's true. It's humbling. It puts our egos in perspective.
At the end of the day, for achievement-oriented people, of whom I'm foremost among—that's how I'm wired—it's good to have the counterbalance of recognizing the importance of the few things in life that are eternal, like our children and the relationships we build. At the end of times, we're going to look back and those are going to be the things that we'll probably remember more than anything.
David Valerio: That was super insightful for me. The usual question I leave people off with is, "What are you striving to achieve in your life and work?" You sucked the air out of that question by indicating that the question itself is misguided. Yet another rejection of the premise.
Will is referring to tonne-year accounting. Review his manifesto on fixing carbon credits here.
I believe Will read Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
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