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The Earth is a living organism. The beauty of the symbiotic relationship between its plants and animals is one of its most fundamental. Plants provide all of the oxygen needed for the animals to exist while they (we) provide the carbon dioxide they need to exist.

Levels of carbon dioxide have fluctuated greatly over millennia. The ice cores from the Antarctic and Greenland show a cyclical pattern that has been more or less consistent over millennia. Some of these cycles cover thousands of years while other shorter cycles occur over hundreds. It was only a few hundreds of years ago that we were in a”little ice age”

The levels of carbon dioxide are currently near the lower end of this cyclic process. Recent increases in carbon dioxide have enabled plants to grow in places not seen in recent history. This increase in plant life is providing corresponding increases in oxygen emissions. The Earth doing its thing. Why anyone should fear the natural cycles is beyond my understanding. Taking all of the attention and human energy that is, to me useless and directing it to the real issues of pollution, water desalination, and tapping the natural heat energy under our feet seems to me to be the most useful focus of our time and resources.

Rory OBrien

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Interesting insights. And, like beauty, integrity is almost always in the eye of the beholder... I might suggest that a primary constraint on scaling the market is that there is very little correlation between the cost of producing a ton of offset C (either nature-based or engineered) and the price. As long as the market is structured as if C is a commodity, balancing supply and demand will be driven by the mis-match in market participation (between buyers, sellers, and market makers) than by true costs of "integrity"...

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