E115: Mast Reforestation and the carbon-credit glow-up

This week on Everybody in the Pool , we’re talking about one of the biggest blockers to real climate action: amazing solutions that never scale because no one pays for them . My guest is Grant Canary , founder and CEO of Mast Reforestation , a company rebuilding forests after catastrophic wildfires — and reinventing carbon credits so that reforestation can actually fund itself. Mast takes the most expensive part of post-fire recovery — dealing with hundreds of dead, unstable, methane-emitting trees — and turns it into a high-integrity carbon removal credit . The fire-killed biomass gets buried in engineered clay “vaults” that lock away carbon for centuries, and the revenue pays for restoring forests with native seed, nursery-grown seedlings, and good old human labor. It’s the super-sexy carbon accounting we desperately need. We get into: Grant’s origin story: the high-school teacher, the brutally honest friend, and the maggot factory (this is a true story) From DroneSeed to Mast: why drones weren’t enough and what really unlocks reforestation What high-severity “Mordor” fires do to ecosystems — and why invasives take over How biomass burial works: clay soils, lasagna layers, 24/7 monitoring, and 5 different verification processes Why high-quality carbon credits are hard — and why they matter Who buys these credits (tech, airlines, real estate, Shopify, consulting firms) and the incentives behind each Why relying on altruism won’t scale — but pricing ecosystem services will How modern carbon accounting sets the stage for the actual holy grail: a price on carbon Link: Mast Reforestation: https://www.mastreforest.com/ All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/ Subscribe to the Everybody in the Pool newsletter: https://www.mollywood.co/ Become a member for the ad-free version of the show: https://everybodyinthepool.supercast.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.