Saving the Planet with Tokenised Carbon Credits. Episode16: Interview with Guy Dickinson, Founder & CEO, Betacarbon
Interview with Guy Dickinson
Want to help the planet? Then have a listen to this episode. Two of the biggest macrotrends – decarbonisation and digital assets come together in one of the hottest Web3 plays around – Betacarbon. Recently the Smorgon family made a large investment in Betacarbon using ANZ’s new stablecoin to facilitate the token purchase.
Buying carbon credits is a massively complex proposition and there are only 50 or so companies in Australia actively trading carbon. For the rest of us, the closest we get is whether we want to pay some extra money to the airline to offset the carbon emissions when we buy a plane ticket. Betacarbon changes all that. This company allows everyone to buy/trade carbon credits – using tokens.
In this episode, you will learn:
- How the carbon credit and offset regimes work in Australia
- How you can access those markets using Betacarbon
- How the Smorgon/ANZ stablecoin transaction worked – seeing tokens as the future of investing.
Guy started the business with his son Jules so we also get a bit of parenting advice thrown in – at no extra charge.
Transcript
Nick Abraham:
Joining me today is Guy Dickinson, the founder and CEO of BetaCarbon. And I love the tagline for this company. More tokens, less carbon. Guy, welcome to the show.
Guy Dickinson:
Thanks very much for having me, Nick.
Nick Abraham:
So you’ve been on quite the journey. A career banker and now sitting at top one of the hottest crypto plays. So what is BetaCarbon exactly? What’s been your journey, actually, to get to be BetaCarbon?
Guy Dickinson:
Yeah, I think BetaCarbon is probably, it is a crystallization of the skills that I’ve learned as a banker around markets and incumbency. What is good in financial markets, what is bad in financial markets. And it’s also the power of blockchain and what it can do when you put those two things together. I think we’ve all seen recently a lot of friction, a lot of volatility in the space. The narrative gets very lazy when people lose money. And I think what’s really incumbent on companies like BetaCarbon is to keep delivering value to both consumers, merchants, investors across the value chain. And I think that’s what BetaCarbon is. We’re doing it in a space which has a mission to increase the take up of carbon units in part of the investor climate, but also to provide a much better choice, solution, transparency to the sustainable merchants and vendors out there across the country. But more ambitiously globally as well because there’s a lot of countries that really haven’t stepped into this journey yet.
Nick Abraham:
Yeah, yeah. Just, you mentioned that idea of what you saw as good and bad as a banker and so forth. And what you’re doing with BetaCarbon is tokenizing, I guess, a non blockchain asset or an off chain asset. Has it surprised … We’ve had blockchain for 13 or so years since Bitcoin first arrived and it’s really been a bit of a solution looking for a problem and the idea of tokenizing assets or off chain assets hasn’t really taken off. Did that surprise you? What do you think is the issue around the lack of tokenization of off chain assets?
Guy Dickinson:
Well, it’s interesting isn’t it? Is that going on this journey, as we start to talk about that exact factor around tokenizing everything, well, let’s just step back and go does everything need to be tokenized? And my answer to that is no. And we’ve seen a lot of projects out there which are tokenizing assets, which are available to anyone anyway. What’s the point of tokenizing a listed share? Zero, really. Unless you want to put it in some fancy dashboard and call it a different code.
Guy Dickinson:
When we looked at this asset class, we stepped back for that and said, well, we have an intrinsic issue around access. We have an intrinsic issue around the variability of people being able to get in, the transparency of the market, the value proposition to the people who use this asset class and actually who is this asset class relevant to. And when we step back from that, we had 55 odd people trading these actively amongst one another, when frankly, there’s 26 million people that are affected by pollution. So why shouldn’t we have a call to action? So that’s when I … You gel up the need, that use case. That’s carbon markets and you gel up how do we get it to people? That’s blockchain.
Nick Abraham:
Brilliant, brilliant. Because I must say over the years, I’ve had clients try to tokenize a bunch of different assets, whether it’s property or cows or whatever. And I guess the question always comes down to what is the utility, the additional utility that you get from the blockchain? And so that’s brilliant. You’ve hit the nail on the head there for me, which is if there’s only 55 organizations trading carbon credits, there’s clearly an access to market issue. So what does BetaCarbon do? What’s the proposition?
Guy Dickinson:
Yeah. It’s a good question. And because I’ve been living it day to day, I often go go to the end game very quickly. Look, what BetaCarbon does, we take a carbon credit that is issued by the clean energy regulator that then sits in a registry called the Australian national registry of emissions unit, which is administered by the government through the clean energy regulator. And it’s a closed loop. So a carbon credit can’t ever really leave there. So that’s a really important factor that makes tokenizing this asset class really clean because the thing is being held in a government registry. That’s a really important point.
Guy Dickinson:
Now what we do is we take that ton and then we notionally back the token by that ton. So when we mint a token, that ton of carbon that sits in the registry moves into a new legal ownership structure whereby the token holders know that the backing asset, which is notionally backing, which means the token is backed by a thing that the token holder will never really be able to come and get the carbon because it’s now held in escrow in the custodian, which is called carbon swap.
Guy Dickinson:
We then mint 1000 tokens. So we have one ton, i.e. a thousand kilograms. We meant 1000 tokens, which each represent one kilogram of captured carbon that is removed from the general supply of the market. Now, what do I mean by that? The general supply of the market. If someone wanted to buy that carbon credit, they would need to buy the token to have some form of participation in the carbon credit, which beta carbon has purchased and put into escrow. So it’s really creating an alternate market for these units by drawing the units out of the institutional market, putting them into the BetaCarbon marketplace and allowing people to interact with the BetaCarbon marketplace. BetaCarbon will interact with institutional market on behalf of the token holders.
Nick Abraham:
It’s fascinating. Just to back it up so we can try to understand this carbon credit market. Because I think, in one sense we see it as a member of the general public, when you’re going through and booking an airline and it’s like, would you like to offset this? So is that why organizations are buying carbon credits? Because there doesn’t seem to be a mandate for government. Obviously we are trying to head to emissions reduction targets. So is buying carbon credits, for a big organization … I assume they’re the people, they’re the organizations that by and large, potentially organizations that produce a lot of carbon. So they’re buying the carbon credits. Are they to offset the carbon that they are producing?
Guy Dickinson:
Yeah. So I might even step back one layer and say, what is a carbon credit?
Nick Abraham:
Yeah, great. That’d be good.
Guy Dickinson:
So often we assume that everyone knows this, but 95% of people didn’t even know this is an asset class, which is really … That’s a bit of a travesty and we here fix that. So we step back. What is a carbon credit? So there’s two types of carbon credits, if you will. One of them is an emissions allowance, which is when the government issues a certificate to pollute without there being any carbon sequestered through a project. That’s like the EU scheme where companies are forced into that mechanism. It’s got a lot of influence and it creates a reduction in emissions.
Guy Dickinson:
And then the Australian carbon credit is issued off the back of a project. 40 odd methodologies that exist to create a carbon credit. There’s over 1100 projects that operate at the moment across from a technology basis, landfill, gas, new methods like carbon capture and storage, human induced regeneration, reforestation, avoided forestation, indigenous co-benefit credits from Savannah burning, which stops big Bush fires. It’s an amazing process. Actually, if you can ever watch a video on how the traditional owners do do their back burning, it’s pretty inspiring.
Guy Dickinson:
And so that is what a carbon credit is as opposed to an allowance. It’s actually captured carbon. It’s done the work. Now, that’s where you can stand behind that as a brand and say, okay, I want to align myself with a certain type of project. And what we’ve found is the vast majority of liquidity is trading in anything that is nature based or has co-benefits. It’s trading at an extreme premium to the standard baseline [inaudible 00:08:47], which is trading today around $29.50. You then have other units like the human induced regeneration, which is nature based. Growing local vegetation. That’s trading, probably it’s somewhere between a $2, a $3 premium, depending on what time of day it is. And then a co-benefit credit with an Aboriginal co-benefit or an Indigenous kind of line to it could be trading anywhere 25 to 40% higher than the baseline ACCU price. So when you see an ACCU price, there’s actually many, many different processes. And actually most of them, where the liquidity is trading today, are not trading whether you see that price, it is actually much higher. So the portfolio that BetaCarbon holds is a portfolio aligned to a more nature-based portfolio. Therefore, it trades at a premium to the price that you’ll see in the ACCU market.
Guy Dickinson:
Because ultimately we’re trying to serve corporates and give them access to carbon units, which they can retire to lower their emissions or their net emissions. They want to be able to put their brand behind projects, they want to be able to effectively go and have a picnic there, which is where we’ve got this really interesting… And I’m digressing a bit, but it’s a good time to do it. If we go through the climate active labels, which is a government approved accreditation of carbon neutrality could be for your office, it could be for your whole operations, it’s kind of choose your own adventure. Most people choose the first adventure, which is the cheapest and they’ll they’ll offset their office.
Guy Dickinson:
There is definitely an influence by the people who are doing the measuring to push them into voluntary carbon markets, which are out of India and China, which trade at a much lower price point. And frankly, it’s very hard for any brand to stand behind a Chinese hydro power station. It’s not a great brand accretive sort of project. That’s where we know that there’s going to be a natural affinity to start using more carbon projects in Australia. And perhaps the concept of being carbon neutral is less important to being carbon active in Australia. If you pollute in Australia, you should probably clean up in Australia. How is this any different to the rubbish wars we had? And we’re sending all our recycling to China and Malaysia, and they eventually said, “Stop.” This is no different. It’s a different spectrum of light, you can’t see it, but this is no different to picking up plastic on the beach and someone paying you 35 bucks to pour it back out on the beach.
Nick Abraham:
Right. And so you mentioned that there’s 55 active traders in the sort of carbon credit space.
Guy Dickinson:
When we started.
Nick Abraham:
Yeah. And so who are those folks? Are they big organizations wanting to do the sorts of project based activities? Or are they speculators? What’s the sort of-
Guy Dickinson:
Yeah, it’d be that the types of guys you’d expect to play at an institutional grade level, so enterprise. So from a corporate perspective, it’ll be your airlines, it’ll be your miners, it’ll be your coal miners, it’ll generally be the bigger names that we understand are the bigger polluters. And they have a plan, right? They do participate in this market in case the regulatory landscape changes, they’ll have hedging programs. So you’re talking about people with really big capital and deep pockets. Then you’ll have brokers and you’ll have intermediaries, which trade and offer services to those bigger institutional groups. And below that, a lot of the trading will be by the project proponents, the green collars, the South Poles, the big farming operations who actually own credits. And so today, to just give you a sense of the 11 to 12 million credits that are delivered and available, close to 45, 50% of those, and this is all CEO data, are actually held by the project proponents, i.e., the primary producer.
Nick Abraham:
Right.
Guy Dickinson:
Then you’ve got enterprise kind of level holdings. And then you’ve got another 25, 30% represents the facilitating part of the market, i.e., the BetaCarbons or the Jardens who are facilitating that trade. And I think what’s interesting is without really having launched our project on a digital basis yet, we’ve got about a 3% market share. So it shows you how small this market is.
Nick Abraham:
Wow.
Guy Dickinson:
We’re talking about getting in at the early stage of the picks and shovels opportunity. To me, frankly, and I align this to other conversations like Bitcoin in 2011. This is really early, and it’s very similar in terms of that understanding. People going, “What?” But even 2015, I’ve heard of it, Bitcoin, but I didn’t really get into it. It takes time. But what we’re finding is we have the amount of pledges, everyone’s measuring, you can really only measure for 12 months. After you measure for 12 months, you have to start acting. And I think what’s really exciting is we know that brands want to align to Australian projects. And I think what we really want to offer is the best range of projects, so those corporates can align their brands to something they want to stand behind.
Nick Abraham:
Yep. Yep. I must say, in discussions with organizations that have committed to reductions targets and so forth, there’s a lot of concern, because obviously on my side of the table, which is sort of more legal and compliance, it’s like, how does the organization actually confirm that it is on track to hit those sorts of numbers and what you’ve said to the market? And so it seems like this, as an overall market has a tremendous inertia to it, as in positive inertia, that will push it into being a much bigger market over the next couple of years.
Guy Dickinson:
Yeah. And we’ve undergone a lot of reviews with Andrew McIntosh, Angus Taylor’s moved from the fix to floating contracts in March. There was a story only last night on that on the ABC, and it’s old news, frankly. I think what’s really important here is we’re opening the kimono. Just as much as I’ve opened the nightclub to anyone who wants to participate in the asset class, 55 has gone. Now, it could be five and a half million if we want it to be, that’s really what we’re talking about here. So with that comes transparency, price transparency, understanding of the provenance of projects, should we be operating a project where there’s zero rainfall and the tree would never exist? These are good questions to ask.
Guy Dickinson:
What I would say to you is if we have a defined forward view of supply, based on what the government is contracted to buy through those fixed contracts, and we do a review on a whole lot of that forward looking deliveries in ACCUs, and the review says, “Hmm, maybe we’re a bit generous. We should provide less units in the future.” You don’t have to be a genius to understand what happens to price in that situation. It is priced today for the amount of supply that they can see on the market. They’re definitely not going to come in and say, “We’re going to give you more.” What they’ll probably say is, “We need to be a bit more stringent about how we issue ACCUs in the future.”
Guy Dickinson:
So for me, what is already a very constrained supply is going to be more constrained, which is actually music to my ears because it’s twofold. We have a government which is moving into a mechanism around safeguard compliance, working out your baseline and saying, “You need to do better every year.” 5%. These are really important steps. This is the nascent stage of Australia’s version of an ETS. And I think when we sort of sit back on that, we’re going to incentivize more projects. They’re the projects where companies want to do more work, which is around nature.
Guy Dickinson:
Technology will respond when price is there to respond. We’ve seen technology unable to respond to the current price around any voluntary work. So if a voluntary credit trades, probably best case 20 bucks on a really good day, that’s not going to inspire new people to come in and come new forms of technology. Those things trade at a $1000, $700 a ton. That’s where companies are being coalition at the willing, and that’s what Australia’s market represents. It represents quite a woke community of people who know that we actually just have to lift the pen on this ourselves. We have to do the work ourselves. And they’re voluntarily stepping into the space, which is really exciting when you overlay that with governments who have quite ambitious, nationally defined commitments around 2030, and try and put it into legislation. So I can see a lot of positives out of the recent reviews that we’re doing. And I’m really excited to launch the business into that transparency.
Nick Abraham:
Yeah. And who’s the target market for BetaCarbon? Who’s buying?
Guy Dickinson:
As you’d know, Nick, on any startup joint journey, you can always in your head find a target market, but you have to do the research. And we’ve done that research, so it’s clear to us that we have probably 98% of the corporate environment. I mean, non-enterprise. They have no idea how to access these things. We have a program where companies just will not sell them less than 1,000 ACCUs. That’s a $50,000 ticket. Or $40,000 ticket, to put that in perspective. These are not small margins, not small amounts.
Guy Dickinson:
So the target market is definitely corporates who want to offset. It is investors who want to participate in the asset class, and we have two products for that, it’s not the same product. We have this digital token, which represents your ownership of a carbon credit. I.e., it’s your representation of market movements. It’s a way to hedge your future carbon liabilities, et cetera, et cetera, if you’re a company. If you’re an individual who wants a call to action, you like the idea of putting your money to work by buying carbon credits because you have a view that there’s going to be a tenfold increase in the amount of companies that are going to use ACCUs to offset themselves. Partly because the government forces them to, or it’s voluntary. Then you can say that’s an asset class I want to be part of. It’s a very early stage.
Guy Dickinson:
And then it’s also the idea around how do you integrate merchant and consumer propositions. We are here to put this asset class to people on the street. This is about creating mechanisms which make sense for you as the consumer, that roll up at an entity level for the person who’s selling you that product. It’s providing value to both of you. Today, all you get is you get asked by an airline, “Please give us $12 to offset your flight. Thanks very much.” And you get a firework on the screen, you get nothing for it. That’s not value proposition, that’s a swindle, in my view. And I think those days are gone, frankly, because there was an online retailers conference last week, and out of the eight main themes, the highest, most spoken about theme was sustainability. There’s only so many ways you can do it. You can reduce, you can get in there and try and create some new green product which has some supply chains, which is all good stuff. At the end of the day, there’s only so much you can do without trying to step into the offsetting space.
Nick Abraham:
Yep. I mean, does that mean as we go through and do our airline tick-the-box exercise, and there’s that slightly awkward shameful moment where you’re asked if you would like to offset. So is there a world where that would be, rather than we just pay additional money and we’re not really sure why we are doing that, but where we could actually be paying that money and we would get the asset? So that would be a BetaCarbon token or something like that.
Guy Dickinson:
Yeah. It’s a tricky one here, Nick. So, I think what we’re talking about here are two different things, right? It’s saying, “What do I need to do as a company? What could I do as an individual?”
Guy Dickinson:
Now, companies have a profit motive behind everything they do. It’s no different with sustainability. They’re trying to move into sustainability to sell you more stuff. That’s generally how it’s going to work. The person who is in that institution cares about sustainability to their core, no doubt. However, the institution is there to make money, it’s a commercial operation. If we step into that and we think about what does Nick need out of this as an individual? Well, I would say, Nick, you’ll probably click on that button once and feel quite flat afterwards. The firework on the screen didn’t do much for you.
Guy Dickinson:
I would say to you, let’s say in theory, you went and bought $12 worth of BetaCarbon, and the price of carbon’s $32 today, and it goes to $50. You’ve now effectively made probably close to 60% of your money, to start with. And you’ve taken that carbon credit out of supply for a period of time. Now, if you sell it back into the BetaCarbon world, it’s still in the BetaCarbon world. Someone else has taken that off you. So effectively, you’re taking your bag of rubbish which you collected on the beach, and you’re giving it to someone else who wants to hold it for a period of time. Now, that’s for you as an individual. It’s not an offset, but it is a call to action. It is driving the price of carbon up, which will incentivize how big corporates emit. We are not going to solve this through offsetting, we can only solve it by influence and emissions. And that’s what BetaCarbon’s here to do.
Guy Dickinson:
So while we look like we are playing an offset space, our mission is emissions, frankly. And that’s what people realize when they look through into our data streams and what we’re trying to achieve, it’s influence. We are trying to create influence so that you can have a say as opposed to just going to an election every three or four years, and booting out the incumbents because they didn’t do enough about the environment. You can do something every day and not necessarily… you don’t need to say you’re offsetting. You might want to do that, and there’ll be avenues for that as well, but that’s not what the BetaCarbon token is, but we also, we are fully licensed to offset on behalf of wholesale and corporates.
Nick Abraham:
Right, right. To try to summarize that I guess, the mission is ultimately to drive up the price of carbon so that then [inaudible 00:23:27]-
Guy Dickinson:
Yeah, I don’t like the words “drive up”. It’s to create a demand vehicle which warrants who it affects. Now, if there’s only 12 million credits in Australia today, we think about a municipal council I looked up this morning, it has 6,000 tons. That’s one little area that’s doing it’s a little bit, they’re trying to do the right thing. But those 6,000 tons actually were spent on a Indian wind farm and a Chinese hydro plant. Probably paid 2 or $3 a ton. Doesn’t need that much. You really haven’t taken responsibility for what you’re doing right here.
Guy Dickinson:
So I think I probably digressed a bit there, but I think what’s really important is that we need to get ACCUs into the hands of corporates because they actually do want to sit behind… they want to go and have a picnic at the project. They want to know where it is, they want to see where it is, they want to see that it’s an Australian project and it’s got some sort of co-benefit, and this is a brand play at the end of the day. It’d be very nice if we all had an infinite amount of money to create the technology to do all those things, but frankly, we need to get it there. So it’s not about driving up the price, it’s about driving the demand. Price will do what it does.
Nick Abraham:
I see. No, very good. Oh, so you made great headlines recently when the Victor Smorgon Group purchased some of your tokens actually using an ANZ stable coin, which is sort of groundbreaking on two fronts, I guess. Obviously, the Victor Smorgon Group made a significant purchase of the BetaCarbon tokens, but also that ANZ has shown a… this is its second significant stable coin transaction. I appreciate there’s a lot of complexity to the transaction, but can you just talk us a little bit through how that transaction worked?
Guy Dickinson:
Yeah. Look, we can definitely simplify the complexity and that’s our job, isn’t it? I’ll just talk to the stable token of ANZ first. If they were paying X amount for the tokens that the Smorgon family bought, they would put that those real Aussie dollars into a trust, which is held on behalf of the issuance of the token. So very similar to the structure, the difference would be which entity is holding the backing, right? So. That’s the main difference here. So, ANZ as a bank obviously has guaranteed deposits, so that sits really nicely in terms of anyone accepting their stable token.
Guy Dickinson:
And I’ve known Nigel Dobson for a long time. We used to work together at Nat West when my hair was color more desirable than it is today. And he reached out to me after we… I quite like commenting on LinkedIn and we reconnected after a while because I lived away for 20 years. And that was a conversation which went pretty quickly, if I’m honest. They wanted to definitely show more use cases around tokenization, and the use of blockchain, and it’s all about the rails, it is about use case. And it made perfect sense for them to loop in the Smorgon family who’s a trusted client of ANZ for a long time. And we also had Zerocap sitting in between because they’ve actually listed our token, so if people want to buy BetaCarbon outside our exchange, they can do it and they’ll come to us with pricing. So in simple terms, what we’ve done is we’ve effectively tokenized two things which… The benefits of tokenizing the Aussie dollar instant settlement, don’t have to wait to… And I guess you have that through national payments platform as well, but it’s domestic. So you could send that token offshore if you wanted, you could send it off to America, you could send it off to anywhere else that would legally allow it to be a destination. And it’s the same thing with the BetaCarbon token. So while it is primarily focused on Australian corporates, the token itself could be purchased by someone outside the country. If so required at the end of the day, they would need to bring it back to BetaCarbon for it to be retired. So for me, that’s an investment vehicle. We know that we have to centrally retire those units on behalf of wholesale customers.
Guy Dickinson:
So I guess in what we’re really talking about here is two real world assets, which have been put onto a… They’ve been given a new face and that new face allows it to move between borders much quicker, it allows it to be settled much quicker, and it allows access to an asset class, which didn’t exist before in a… You could have got access, obviously, a saller family, something like that can always get access to asset classes. Would’ve taken upwards of six months to open an account, minimum transaction of half a million dollars, all the usual hurdles that come in this market, which we’ve broken down and they didn’t want to have to run through.
Nick Abraham:
Brilliant. And I think you’ve got an upcoming transaction that I think… Can you tell us about that one?
Guy Dickinson:
You made it sound so covert.
Nick Abraham:
Well I just… Just in case I don’t want to bridge any in… [crosstalk 00:28:45]
Guy Dickinson:
What I’ll say is we’ve got an ASX listed company who’s purchased some BetaCarbon with the view to retire those units into some co-benefit [Acus 00:28:57], which have Aboriginal co-benefits to them. They did that as part of week. And they’re doing that to offset part of their digital asset platform, which is, it’s a really neat use case. You’ve got a digital asset platform which has probably a negative narrative around usage of energy aligned to that asset class and they’re doing something about that narrative. They’re taking action. Now BetaCarbon allows them to choose from over 30 projects to offset and they can do that because we have an AFSL which allows us to accept the BetaCarbon as a payment to go into the registry on their behalf and cancel carbon through a second token distribution mechanism, which we don’t need to get into now.
Guy Dickinson:
But what it does, it allows companies to hedge their future carbon liabilities as well. Because one of the biggest things that stops people, dipping their toes into the sustainability lake is, it’s all well and good that I did it this year, but what’s carbon going to cost next year. And if you think about the European unit 2017, it’s trading at two Euro, it’s now 80 Euro. If you think about that, once you sign up for this stuff, it’s very hard to pull away, but there’s definitely value in dipping your toe in the lake. You don’t need… For me, you don’t need to be carbon neutral today. You need to be on a path and you need to stick to that path. And we allow you to stick to that path by hedging your future carbon liabilities, which is a product which simply doesn’t exist in the market today.
Nick Abraham:
Fantastic. And I guess sort of just, I guess, bring it to a bit of a closer with what’s the future for BetaCarbon? I mean, do you go offshore, is the Australian market big enough? How does the business…
Guy Dickinson:
Yeah, look, it’s a really good question. We’re deep in it at the moment. And the answer is yes, absolutely we go offshore. If we think about which carbon markets we want to play, and we want to play in carbon markets, which have a need. So for me, I define that carbon need based on what is the national defined commitment of that country and what does the carbon market look like today? So if I take Australia, for instance, I have a concept of a carbon coverage ratio, now sounds complex, it’s not. In Australia each person puts out about 16 tons. We have 25 million people, that’s your baseline and we have 12 million carbon credits available in the market at the moment, carbon coverage ratio of Australia, 4%. Carbon coverage ratio of New Zealand, 65%. Their market is five times bigger than Australia.
Guy Dickinson:
So it’s actually 20 times bigger on a per capita basis than the Australian market. Shows you how far this market has to go to create the influence, to get to those nationally defined commitments. We probably were never going to make 28. We’ve just moved it to a base of 43% by 2030. It’s quite ambitious. You tell me how I’m going to be 60% more efficient between now and then my mind boggles, I’m already trying to get rid of stuff and I’ve probably gone down to 15 tons. So America has a 50% ratio, they have a 7% carbon coverage ratio. So extremely underdeveloped in terms of creating the influence to get to those nationally defined commitments. That’s where BetaCarbon plays because we need every man, woman and child to be somehow involved in this market.
Nick Abraham:
Fantastic. Now, you talk about every man, woman and child, just as a final thing, I know you started this business with your son [Jule 00:32:30], so how is it being in business with your son? How does that all work?
Guy Dickinson:
It’s like being a dad.
Nick Abraham:
I would’ve thought you got to leave the dad bit.
Guy Dickinson:
Well, no, I did. And that was probably the hardest part, I think. I’m quite a different person at work than I am at home. It doesn’t mean I didn’t bring my whole self, but business is business and home is home. So what we did is we gave him a different reporting line. We put him underneath some really professional individuals who I was told in no uncertain terms not to take his resource and it worked really well. He took on a whole new set of skills, which I couldn’t give him. He’d seen my skills. And funnily enough, he started back at uni today after the last… He probably took nine months off. Back to uni today, really neat timing, nervous, excited, gets to go there with a part-time job has a decent set of equity in the company has a view to that generation. If I look out in the office right now, we have three or four people who are probably two or three years older than him. So we’re 20 to 23 kind of age group.
Nick Abraham:
Right.
Guy Dickinson:
They’re a really important barometer for us. So it’s not just about having my son, it’s about distancing myself from him at work. I think the notion is quite romantic, the reality is challenging. But it’s like parenting, right. It’s wonderful and hard all at same time.
Nick Abraham:
And I imagine… The opportunity for the 360 review, he gets a chance to provide feedback on you as well.
Guy Dickinson:
Every night.
Nick Abraham:
Terrifying.
Guy Dickinson:
Not every night now, only twice a week now. But I think what’s really been neat through that. Is he actually, he started this company. I was still at HSBC. He got his Oztrack, he got his approval through Oztrack himself.
Nick Abraham:
Brilliant.
Guy Dickinson:
He was probably the youngest Oztrack approved person in Australia at the time. As a 19 year old, that’s quite a big deal. So he’s shown a great deal of maturity that frankly, I don’t think I had it a 19 year old. And that’s been a pleasure to watch.
Nick Abraham:
Oh, it’s fantastic. I mean, the whole story is just great. The sort of more layers we unpack the better it becomes. I mean, the family bit is sort of the icing on the cake. But if you look at what are the big challenges or the big sort of talking points at board level and so forth. So sustainability is huge indigenous welfare and what we are doing in that space. And then also what’s happening in Web3 blockchain and digital assets, and it seems like BetaCarbon is sort of right at the forefront of those three particular issues coming together. And I mean, especially the sustainability and the blockchain digital asset stuff. So fantastic business look forward to following the success. So guy, thank you very much for joining us.
Guy Dickinson:
Thanks, Nick. It’s been a pleasure. Hope to chat soon.
Nick Abraham:
Terrific.
Guy Dickinson:
Cheers.