The Texas Coastal Exchange (TCX), a Texas non-profit organization, is up and running and ready to hear from you if you are interested in doing something about climate change that will also help the Texas Coast.
For years, they have been working on a system to help Texas coastal landowners keep their land natural so that it can be flooded without great damage when big storms hit the coast. Given that regulation is not an option in Texas, we figured out that we needed to find an economic solution that worked for Texas landowners. To do this, we focused on the idea that coastal ecosystems – our marshes, our bottomlands, our prairies – take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in either the soil or the wood of trees. We are now able to offer you the opportunity to make a donation and store your carbon footprint in the soil and timber of the Texas coast. We have developed a web site that is powered by the Topl blockchain that will keep up with our carbon inventory and allow you to store your footprint in coastal lands. In order to store your footprint, we are requesting a donation of $20 per ton. If you are interested in this system, you can learn more at: https://www.texascoastalexchange.org/.
The system TCX is establishing is simple and based on the concept that carbon storage is like growing potatoes. Our basic concept is that these landowners are helping us all – helping society – by removing carbon dioxide, and we should support these landowners. This is true of marshes, of bottomland hardwoods and of native coastal prairies with deep root systems.
These protected lands will not only be able to store carbon but will also store flood waters, may supplement groundwater and surface supplies as one moves further away from the coast and will certainly support birds and other wildlife as well as coastal fisheries. We believe that this system is an excellent start to supporting an economic system that recognizes and rewards landowners for taking actions that benefit nature and the Earth as well as humanity generally.
This is exciting. If you want to participate as a donor, go to the website now. If you want to participate as a landowner, get in touch with them.
Thank you to Jim Blackburn, Elizabeth Winston-Jones and everyone at the SSPEED Center at Rice who have worked on this for so long!
