The data problem undermining carbon markets with McGee Young (Founder & CEO - WattCarbon)

Welcome to another episode of Transmission. Today, Q is joined by McGee from Watt Carbon, a company that operates as the weights and measures of the new energy economy, tracking the true value of every watt hour and gram of carbon savings. In this episode, they explore two major themes. First, how What Carbon is moving beyond traditional carbon accounting by tracking time stamped, location specific energy attributes that capture the real value of clean energy projects.

And second, their Presbyterian approach to climate action, building bottom up, community driven decarbonisation programs rather than relying on top down mandates. One thing I found particularly interesting was McGee's concept of a sleeved VP for a VPP, a virtual power plant, where large consumers like data centers pay utilities to run local demand response programs instead of building new infrastructure, which is essentially creating cheaper solutions that benefit entire communities. If you're enjoying transmission, please like and follow wherever you get your podcasts.

Now, let's jump in.

Hello, McGee, and welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

Okay. So, McGee, you're a CEO and a cofounder. And when we have founders of start ups on, I always like to ask questions about company building in the energy sector. So we're gonna get into that in a minute. But for our audience and our listeners, please can you explain what what Carbon does?

We're sort of like the the weights and measures of the new energy economy. So if you think about historically, energy has been, you know, the delivery of a KWH or the non delivery of a KWH if you're thinking about energy savings.

But now the energy system's a lot more complicated. It depends on what time of day the energy gets delivered, if it's going forwards or backwards, how far it had to travel, how clean it is. And all of those attributes of energy are valuable, to some extent today, but we don't really have consistent, say, like, gap accounting, in the world of energy. So you have a lot of uncertainty, a lot of friction, associated with making transactions, based on the the kind of broader value of energy.

So what what Carbon does is it creates measurement and verification. So it allows for the savings calculating savings of distributed energy resources primarily. So energy efficiency, electrification, solar storage, EV charging, and also the all the attributes associated with that. Like I said, the time and location and carbon intensity and whatnot.

And then it creates a system of record for tracking the impacts of projects.

So if you're doing, some energy efficiency projects or if you've delivered demand response savings, you wanna be able to, prove that. That might be important if you're doing your carbon accounting. It might be important if you have a a market.

And so Wire Carbon has built, kind of a tracking system that allows for third parties to verify claims, regarding the the impact of distributed energy projects.

So a system of record business, that implies that there's a read write element. So do you have third parties that write to those records? So meter data, for example, or things like that. And then and then there's a there's a two way pipe.

Yeah. So we pull meter data from, obviously, buildings or inverters or other, you know, kind of telemetry devices, weather data, because a lot of these calculations need to be weather normalized, grid, carbon emissions data. So there's a lot that that has to come together, to make these calculations possible. And then, obviously, the output, is both, you know, sort of in a in a UX, you know, an app, but as well as, again, to this system of record so that, third parties can build, you know, full on marketplaces on top of our platform and be able to to transact, the value of the energy.

And can we just talk about your customers for a moment then? So what's the profile? What's the what's the ideal customer profile for your business?

So the way I the way I talk about this is, I I get in trouble actually, because I talk about it in terms of religion. So this is not meant to offend anybody. This is meant merely as illustrative.

But Alright.

So we just so you know, we have done two hundred episodes of this podcast without touching on religion. So this is a this is the first.

I mean, it's very rare.

Sail through this.

Well, so, this actually comes from one of my favorite books is, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations.

I thought you're gonna say the Bible, which would have been a great big great beginning. Also.

But in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith talks a lot about the difference between Catholicism and Presbyterianism.

And his market philosophy and actually, like, Alexander Hamilton read this and modeled a lot of the US constitution, on this same principle.

But his theory of the market was that it should work like Presbyterianism.

So Catholicism, he says, you know, sort of starts from this top down. The pope says something and then, you know, you go to a Catholic church anywhere in the world and it's basically teaching the same thing.

Presbyterianism is more bottom up. You know, they all use kind of roughly the same bible, but it's sort of YOLO, you know, in any kind of Presbyterian church.

And and he says this is a good thing because you, you know, you get lots of, you know, kind of regional variations.

The local minister has a lot of discretion into exactly what they teach. So if you think about then the world of of energy and and climate in particular, you know, historically, you know, the last, like, decade, two decades, we had kind of treated this like Catholicism, that we'd have an international agreement like the Paris Accords and the sort of top down implement decarbonization across the planet according to this, like, kind of higher rule.

Then that didn't work. So we kind of went to national level, top down. And you saw this with the Biden administration. And and and, obviously, in the last couple of months, that has proven to be pretty short lived. And so the solution, if you go ask Adam Smith, he would say the solution is Presbyterianism.

It's bottom up. Right? So we need in our local communities to build decarbonization programs that meet the, you know, kind of particular challenges of that that community. So our customers are, you know, companies, agencies, even some utilities who are trying to build decarbonization programs that make sense for their community. And they're gonna look a little bit different from each other, but they all have the kind of the same fundamental, premise, which is that in order for it to be real, you need the measurement and verification. You need to prove that the money that you're spending is having the impact that you intended.

And then if it's gonna scale, you have to do it through markets.

So being able to kinda efficiently transact on the value of that energy enables these programs to to achieve the scale that they need.

And so I know I can just I can hear we've got listeners around the world with their AirPods in right now going, but what's wrong with the current units of measure? Right? So you've got a kilowatt hour and you have a kilowatt hour is a very useful measurement of energy. It's a SI unit in carbon. Carbon, you you have, kilograms or tons of of carbon. That's a very useful measure.

So why is there even a problem here to be solved?

So if you think about a a kilowatt hour, right now where I'm at in in California, it's the middle of the day. It's not all that hot out. How much is that worth? Well, not that much probably.

If you saved energy, if you were if you put in some new lights or new HVAC system and you saved energy during the middle of the day, all you're doing is kind of making us turn off of turn off our solar panels. Like, we have plenty of clean energy. And so if you were to save energy right now, it'd be sort of, actually, like a bad use of money.

And so when I say, like, I'm gonna buy a kilowatt hour from you, you're gonna say, well, what time did is that kilowatt hour gonna be delivered? Because if you if that's at noon, I'm not interested. If that's at six o'clock or eight o'clock, sign me up. The grid is congested where the solar is out. We're relying on batteries. What, you know, power is being generated by the natural gas plants is dirty.

Now we're really talking. Right? But unless we're able to specify which hour that is, how dirty that is, which direction that energy is flowing, we have no idea how to value that kilowatt hour. And so the weights and measures we're not we're talking about is really the ancillary attributes of that kilowatt hour. We can still, at the end of the day, still measure the kilowatt hour, but it's all of the defining features of that kilowatt hour that give energy its value.

It it feels a bit like when, geotagging first came to digital photos, and it unlocked all sorts of things that you could do. And now there's all sorts of, hidden data in in behind JPEGs and whatnot.

And it feels a bit like that. So you've got a time element to it. That bit makes sense. What other attributes are there that that you're interested in or that that add value as part of a system or underpinning a marketplace?

Yeah. So if you think about a company like Google has announced a goal to match all of its energy consumption with clean energy production every single day of the year, every single hour of the day. This is twenty four seven carbon free energy. So for them, the time value is really important.

Other companies like Amazon have said, we want to match the emissions caused by the electricity we use with emission reductions from clean energy projects. Now for them, the time may be immaterial. It's the emissions impacts of that clean energy that they want to measure.

Then you have a data center that's trying to get located or get cited. That data center is running into local capacity constraints. During certain hours of the year, there's just too much demand for power on the grid, and so they can't put the data center in unless they expand the capacity of the grid. Well, that takes a long time and costs a lot of money.

So what the data center really needs is load shifting to happen in the community so that those peak periods, which maybe now I think it might be people running space heat space heaters. If you live in the south, for example, you know, where I grew up, we had baseboard, you know, electric resistance heating. Our wintertime electricity bills were the really expensive, and that's when the grid is most stressed. But what if you could put heat pumps in those houses instead of the space heaters?

The heat pumps use about, you know, three times less energy, especially during those winter morning peaks. And in that case, now the data center has the capacity that it needs to be able to be running on a twenty four seven basis on that grid because the grid still has capacity.

And so, you know, different, use cases have different criteria that matter to them. You might be, you know, particularly interested in, helping the energy transition, you know, in poor communities.

And so, therefore, your focus might be, are you know, is this energy being delivered equitably? And are we providing low cost financing for folks to upgrade their energy, systems?

All of these, you know, at the end of the day are about the delivery of a KWH or the savings of a KWH, but how that gets packaged up and valued is gonna depend on a it's gonna vary on a case by case basis.

Okay. Okay. So then let's go back to the business for a moment. So who who's the customer right now? Can you give some example customers? And where are you on in your business's journey?

So we founded the company almost four years ago now. We started out building kind of the core data infrastructure for the carbon accounting. So, you know, one of the challenges is that if you get a bill from your utility, it says nothing about how clean your energy was or where it came from. And that actually is gonna vary on an hour by hour basis.

And so being able to kind of connect the dots between your energy bill and the grid is a big part of kinda understanding the value of the energy.

We built that system of record that I talked about Every single watt hour or gram of carbon savings gets a unique serial number.

And so you're now looking at the ability to locate, you know, on an hourly basis, you know, down to the gram level, you know, how much was saved from any any given project.

And we ran the first ever kind of marketplace for what we called energy attribute certificates. So this is a way for companies to kind of buy carbon offsets.

We we say plant heat pumps, not trees.

So if you're a company trying to meet net zero goals, why not invest in a bunch of heat pump projects? Like, as you know, these might have, you know, beneficial grid benefits or the also, you know, health benefits inside the home and use that as your milestone for achieving your net zero goals. And it's provable, right, because we have the data. So we ran a full marketplace last year, for buying and selling those those EACs, which was now turned over to third parties.

So we, you know, ultimately, wanna be the system of record. Right? So running the marketplace was a little bit of a conflict of interest for us. But now it's, companies like Prologis.

Prologis is working with us to create their own system of record for all of the energy that gets delivered within their warehouses, their EV charging stations, their data centers.

And so, again, they're thinking about themselves more and more like an energy company, and they wanna be able to prove that the claims that they're making around their clean energy are backed up by a reputable third party. So having us come in and track all of the data. So if a if a truck comes and charges at a ProLogistix charging center, ProLogistix can actually tell that truck, hey. Here's the carbon intensity of the electricity that went into your truck. Here's the what you can claim as part of your net zero goals for the EV, the savings in carbon that you got from from charging with at our facility.

So companies like that, we worked with Rewiring America.

Rewiring America is is out putting heat pumps into people's homes. So how do you monetize the value of those heat pumps to help drive more value into those projects? Those are good examples of, you know, kind of this grassroots bottoms up, mentality out there, thinking about what can I do as a whether I'm a company like Prologis, a nonprofit like Rewiring America, to accelerate the energy transition and use the EACs in the system of record as a way to create legitimacy around that?

Okay. And then so is this a a WET? Is this what we're talking about now?

Yeah. The the WET carbon energy attribute tracking system. So that's Okay. That's Wheats.

W e a t s.

Right. Right. Right. So that's where we're gonna keep keep all of those serialized, EACs, keep track of the ownership of those and transfers that happen, etcetera.

Oh, okay. And that's diff that's different from a traditional offset because it is it has the the location and the the time stamped and all these other attributes?

Yeah. So, like, we think about it as different in a couple of ways, actually. Like, a traditional offset historically has been, like, planting trees.

And, honestly, like, it's a bunch of horseshit.

Like, it's just, you know, like, we're gonna soak up the CO two from the atmosphere magically and everything's gonna be okay. So, like, we sort of have, like, a fundamental problem with the idea of, like, offsetting your emissions by planting trees or sucking the CO2 out of the atmosphere or something like that. Fundamentally, this is about the energy transition. We need to stop using fossil fuels and start using the plentiful solar and wind and other non carbon emitting resources that we have available to us. Now that's not always feasible today for all companies.

We're on the grid, right? So we're a little bit dependent on what's served to us.

So if I have a, you know, climate goal, if I'm trying to make sure that the planet's gonna be around for the next generation and I wanna act on that, how do I do so in a way that's a credible, b provable, and, c, like, truly impactful. So the energy attribute certificate is kind of that proof.

How that gets generated can vary. And so that's a thing I think it's like a program design question. Do you fund these projects upfront? If you wanna, like, you know, if you wanna maximize impact, you probably wanna fund the project upfront.

If you simply wanna kinda animate the market, you might treat it more like a wreck and buy it after the fact after it has already been generated by somebody else and that's really you know a market design question that you know we leave to to other folks to kind of figure out what works best for their particular again, Presbyterianism as it were.

If we just think about the carbon match credits today, who who's buying twenty four seven matched carbon credits today?

Google and Microsoft are certainly, you know, the leaders on that on that front. Actually, in the tech world, there's a split between the twenty four seven buyers and the, what are called, emissionality focused buyers.

It's a bit of a hot mess in terms of trying to get that approved by the greenhouse gas protocols and various other kind of stakeholders.

But generally, the tech, you know, the big tech companies will divide themselves up into into one of those two camps. And then I think, you know, beyond that, there's a there's a whole bunch of folks who are out there kind of left wondering, how do I actually have an impact? What can I actually do? I I don't feel great about the way in which the world is going, but I look around and I see a lot of, like, kind of sketchiness.

And I think that's where actually the majority of people are still today is this kind of paralysis that we don't really have we do feel like we're getting scammed most of the time when it comes to climate stuff on all sides. Right? And I think actually, like, that's that's the problem that we need to collectively overcome as an industry is is, like, stop hiding behind, like, false metrics and pictures of baby seals, you know, and, like, actually start creating markets that have real meaning to them, so that people aren't just doing this for PR purposes, but they're actually making, like, real investments of real capital into these types of projects.

It's been tricky because there's been some incredible work done in carbon reduction and accounting for it.

And yet it's like that thing where it takes you decades to build a reputation and you can lose it overnight. And so on balance, actually, the the work is really valuable globally and and and a good thing to be doing and good for the economy and good for the planet. But then there's a small subsector of of companies and and approaches which have undermined the whole thing.

And it's a real shame. It is a real shame because now, as you say, skepticism is is at is at fever pitch levels.

And, yeah, somehow we've gotta bring credibility back bring credibility back to carbon markets. So then just come back to these twenty four seven matched carbon credits or certificates then. So on that, do you pay a you must pay a premium for them to be matched. Right? What what does that premium look like?

You know, when we did our our market, you know, kind of pilot last year, we initially just sort of set the price and said, you know, this this is you know, there's it's there's very little liquidity in these markets. Price discovery is is still a a big challenge. We've kind of stepped back from that market making role, this year and are letting, you know, kind of it's mostly bilateral offtake agreements that are getting signed. And so the price there kind of gets negotiated.

And it really kind of depends on, you know, both the buyer and the seller as well as the type of project. So if it's kind of a low impact project, it's gonna be a little cheaper. And if it's, you know, if you're putting heat pumps into multifamily low income buildings, that's gonna be a lot more expensive. And so you would you would kind of expect, you know, the price for that type of work, to be a little bit higher.

We still don't have, like, a great heuristic for how to price carbon or how to price decarbonization.

And I think we had moments there for a while where we had, you know, thought about a social cost of carbon, but these are still all voluntary markets. And so how you kind of get somebody to spend extra is a tricky, you know, it's a tricky challenge. What is interesting about energy and distributed energy is that it's not actually all that common to have to sacrifice.

Like the economics just kind of work for solar and storage and in a lot of places, heat pumps. EVs are cheaper than than, you know, over the course of their lifetime, cheaper than a a traditional car.

So the work here to get done is actually not necessarily to convince somebody that they have to, like, pay extra or there's some sort of, like, green premium tax. It really is just overcoming the bias or the sort of, like, expectation that it's gonna be more expensive.

A lot of the companies that we work with are actually quite profitable doing, you know, doing the green thing, right, and keep wanting to invest in it. The opportunity for them is just to make that more explicit. They can sell even more of their product when they can show their customers how much money they save, how clean the energy is, how they can stack the benefits, of their products, so they they can earn grid services revenue on top of a lower bill, on top of reducing their carbon footprint. And so I think actually the future is really understanding just how much better clean energy is than, you know, historical fossil fuel energy and just overcoming a lot of that latent bias that still exists.

So I've got to ask you, why did you focus on the demand side? If I I've got it right. You focus on the demand side Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. The supply side. And the supply side surely is where most of the the burning stuff happens. So why do you focus on the demand side?

It it's not clear to me that that's true, that the supply side is where most of the burning, happens. And it's also you know, forty percent of emissions come from buildings.

And it is where you know, the grid is the grid is having kind of this, like, thermonuclear moment right now where it's both imploding and exploding at the same time. So you have the inability to serve large loads and mass defection, happening as people realize that they can put solar panels on their roof and a battery and stop paying their utility exorbitant rates.

Defection. That's such an excellent word for that.

Yes. Exactly.

It's like an old so is, you know, you think of it as like the old Soviet command and control Crossing it.

Stuff.

Yeah.

We're we're we're land.

Totally.

Jumping over the Berlin Wall or something. Yeah. Something like that. And their and the utilities are pushing back.

Right? Fighting as hard as they can to keep, you know, their customers from defecting. And and but I think it's a losing battle. And I think that the again, if you follow this kind of model of Presbyterianism, this grassroots, you're going to see the opportunities for the energy transition mostly present on the demand side.

This is where we, as communities, can actually, like, make decisions, make investments that move the needle on climate much more so than we can, you know, simply trying to, like, buy cleaner energy, which is a good thing in and of itself, you know, but there's just so much more opportunity, I think, for impact on the demand side of the of the ledger.

And so what's next for What Carbon then? What are you working on right now, and what are the next few years look like?

We just launched, our what we call Aristotle, which is our, automated measurement and verification platform, and we're building artificial intelligence into it. And I think one of the big barriers in the industry is, you know, especially on the demand side, has been how hard it is to actually have actionable data, to be able to to go from I might have my historical utility bill or something like that to how can I be really smart about the investments that I'm making? I might own a portfolio of buildings. I might run an energy efficiency program. I might be responsible for a decarbonization goal. And we're, you know, flying blind, essentially. We're asking for investments to be made based on balance sheets instead of cash flows, which makes them really expensive investments.

And so the world of AI is obviously consuming us in in, you know, so many ways. But one of the things that I'm most excited about is the ability for AI to break down some of those barriers to entry into the energy world. It's it's a lot of nerdy guys like us, you know, who get get really excited about you know, they're pretty esoteric. But for the most part, it's like people whose job you know, like, it's the tenth most important thing that they have to do in the day is, like, figure out their energy stuff.

And then you, like, present them with a wall of data and and jargon, and and they're just not ready for it. Right? So I think what we can do with AI is help to break down some of those barriers to give people an entry point to allow them to ask the dumb questions and to engage the material on their own terms to start on a kind of chipping away at that. And and as that becomes possible, there's, you know, to your to your point, about, you know, software that we can build better tools.

Like, we can build tools that engage people that allow them to work collaboratively with, you know, other stakeholders that aren't designed to create walled gardens, but instead designed to create communities.

And I think that's gonna fundamentally be the way in which we start to really tackle climate change. It's not by solving energy from the top down, but really giving people the tools they need to make a difference in their own in their own communities.

We heard it here first, Presbyterian climate accounting and, and doing things bottom up. So now let me ask you our two final questions. So is there anything that you wanna plug for our audience who tend to be energy storage and energy flexibility and power generation bobs from the US, Europe, and Australia?

The the concept that I've been really excited about is something I call this is no. Okay.

Full stop here. This is gonna be very, very, very wonky. And, apology. You could if y'all have anything better to do out there in the in the listening world, please take out the trash, clean the toilet, like, whatever it is. Like, this is it's probably better than what we're about to talk about here.

But Yeah.

Just just click on Joe Rogan. It's gonna be better than this.

It's but I I have been kind of thinking about this concept of a sleeved VPPA for a VPP.

And Alright. Yeah. Let's do hold on.

Let's do let's just do some acronym busting there.

Yeah. So sleeved, in the world of energy procurement, when you have when you have a vertically integrated utility and the utility buys power on your behalf as a user, you will sleeve into that contract. So your your utility is buying power for you. A VPPA, a virtual power purchase agreement, is where you buy the power but you don't physically off take that power. The power just goes into the grid on your behalf.

And a VPP, a virtual power plant, is the term that we use for distributed energy resources that are coordinated to deliver some value to the grid. So think like collective demand response, or load shifting. So let's say I wanna go site data center, and I've got grid constraints around me, and I can't get the interconnection permit done. And but it's really only about twenty hours a year that we have problems.

What if I could just buy from my local utility demand response and pay for it? And that local utility would then take his demand response program and go out into the community and say, hey, Anybody who wants to sign up, who wants to shift their load or participate in in demand response can sign up, and the data center will pay for it.

And that's gonna be way cheaper than building out a new substation and way faster than waiting for new physical infrastructure to be built. And, potentially, it reduces the bills of the customers without incurring any ratepayer costs. Right? There's no additional utility costs.

So everybody wins in a situation like that. And and it's how we can start rethinking our energy system and the role of utilities, especially as we have the rise of these, you know, large consumers. We're not gonna just electrify not just gonna build data centers, but we're gonna electrify heavy industry vehicles. You know, we'll see these you know, already in China, BYD is building these big massive charging, facilities.

How do you combine, you know, the expectation of all of these new loads with the flexibility that's gonna be required to serve them, I think the demand side is is really the the place to look. So new structures, new contract structures that take advantage of the flexibility that's out there, I think that's where I think the, like, most interesting stuff is gonna happen.

Very cool. It's a bit like going and knocking on your on the door of your neighbor and saying, hey. Look. I wanna would you mind just just a few times a year, I'll give you a call and please don't charge your electric vehicle?

That's the time we call. I'm gonna pay you I'm gonna bring you a nice little pecan pie once a week to make this good good, but it it means we don't have to put a new transformer in. We don't need these horrible overhead lines. We don't need all this stuff.

Yeah. Very, very cool. So what what what we're calling that?

It's a it's a sleeved A sleeved VPPA for a VPP.

Sleeved VPP. Okay. Okay. That was really nerdy.

That that's it.

I'm Well, that was now I'm gonna ask you a contrarian view, and I've got no idea what you're gonna come out with.

So what what is the thing that you believe that not a lot of other people believe?

As a startup, in the world of, you know, kind of climate tech, I can tell you that a lot of investors don't believe that voluntary climate action is gonna be a thing.

So you there's this incredible pessimism in the world, the investor world, you know, that's like, oh, that's never gonna work. You know, nobody's ever gonna really do that. It's gonna be impossible to scale.

And I think that that's, in fact, the only thing that's going to work. I have faith that as a planet, we're going to still we're gonna want to grapple with the challenge of decarbonization on a, you know, on an ongoing basis. We're not just gonna throw up our hands and be like, oh, well, let's just, you know, like, not try. We're not gonna do it from a top down command and control.

You know, they're just it won't work in the United States to do it that way. And so I think that the economics have fundamentally changed with regard to these resources that's going to make it possible to run markets, real markets, where we're you know, it's not a fakey fake market. Like, I'll trade you my trees for your, like, direct air capture or something like that. But, like, I would like to invest in a battery on your behalf and get some return on that investment because it's going to help me reduce my emissions, and it's gonna solve the congestion issues on the grid.

Like, these are real value stacks that are that are emerging, and those markets will be what animates the energy transition on a going forward basis. I'm I don't know how contrary it is, generally speaking, to to say that, but I think that people have sort of, like, thought this is all over. Right? Like, oh, climate tech had its, like, moment and it was a, you know, COVID thing and and, like, it's gonna go away.

And I think we're just getting started.

I really like that. And we've got lots of examples where the economics textbooks don't really apply to real life. So just think about in the UK, in Great Britain, we had this incredible demand flexibility service, which is a domestic flexibility, essentially.

And it was run by Octopus Energy, of course, in the United States and pretty much everywhere, like an octopus.

And they rolled out this program where you could you could domestic users could could turn down their their demand, and they get paid on their bills. Now the the economics of it don't really make sense. Right? Because you've got, like, I don't know, fifty p if you took part five goes in a row. I mean, it it was totally gamified.

And the numbers, it wasn't worth doing, really. But then the uptake, the compliance was absolutely massive. And so there are plenty of examples where if you get the right you get the right marketing and the right mission, you can get people to really change behavior beyond just a a nudge, but, you know, really actively changing their behavior. So totally agree with you that that it is possible even if it doesn't result in lots of dollars going to people.

I think just another comment, which is that I'm, of course, an Englishman who lives in the United States now. I feel pretty American, actually. In fact, my second daughter was born here. She's got a passport with an eagle on it, which I always think is really cool.

But it's taken me it's taken me all the two and a half years where I've been here to really understand that I think in Europe, we're quite happy to be compliant about these kind of programs, but there's something about the American spirit, which I'm learning, which really doesn't like being told what to do. And so the the carrot and stick dynamics are so different as part of this this country, which is all about freedom and and independence, which is is still quite alien.

Yeah. Yeah. We we have to think that it's our idea, right, to get involved in there. Exactly.

But if you do that, like, we we're all in. Like, we're in, like, a hundred x when everybody else is in because, you know, like, gosh darn it. This is an American thing. And and so I think, like, it's just a matter of we can't guilt people into doing things. We can't force people into doing things, but there are ways I I think about my kids, you know, spend all day long making content on behalf of Instagram and TikTok.

And nobody you know, like, they're, you know, like, happy happily just feeding those algorithms with their pictures and their selfies and their, you know, the and so we will do crazy and and to no real return for them. They don't get paid for this. You know, they they get, you know, they their friends their friends don't even look at it. Their friends are all you know, like, it's it's like the psychology of this stuff, I think, confounds us. And a lot of times, especially in the energy space, we think, but it's purely, like, an economic rational decision.

And, it turns out that oftentimes, there are much deeper values at play that we can tap into.

Yeah. Vibes trumps everything, I think. Just to clarify, no disparagement there on the American psyche at all. Just an observation.

And, with that, McGee, I wanna say a massive thank you for joining us on the podcast. It was a delight to have you on and hear your thoughts and your your vision. And if you wanna find out more about what what Carbon have been up to and how you can contact Magee and get involved, then please check out the show notes. We're going to put some links in there. And, we'd love to have you on again sometime in the future and hear how it's all going again.

I appreciate it. It's been a fun conversation, and thanks for having me on. Pleasure.