600 Seconds With: Wilder Kingsley, Co-Founder and Head of Go-to-Market at EarthScope
How EarthScope is empowering organizations like yours to tackle Scope-3 emissions reductions and create supply chain visibility.
Ed: My name is Ed Thomas, with the Climate Innovator, and today I'm being joined by Wilder Kingsley, who is a co-founder of EarthScope, which is an exciting new digital platform that we're going to learn a little bit more about .
Wilder, before we get started, let me just give you a second to introduce yourself to our audience, and then we'll dive into the product that you guys are working on.
Wilder: Sure. Wilder Kingsley, born in Boston but moved to New York when I was about six months old. I'm a proud Brooklynite and grew up here in New York where my great-grandparents originally settled. I really focused on languages [initially] and connecting with all sorts of different people. I started studying Chinese, Spanish, and eventually Portuguese and traveled to a number of different countries where they speak those languages, and I lived in a few of them. I've always focused on connecting with people and, that, corporate career-wise, led me into sales.
I started in sales in B2B SaaS about seven years ago. I was initially focused on international markets, specifically Latin America for the last few years, but I’d been worrying about the climate crisis for years and years and years.
I got to a point a few years ago where I felt uncomfortable not working directly in trying to address the crisis,. I then had the rare opportunity to bump into a gentleman at a climate tech networking event called Green Drinks here in Brooklyn. It was almost exactly two years ago, and I was fresh into climate. He had just launched a platform called EarthScope, which is a SaaS platform. He needed some sales advice, which lead me to become an advisor and eventually a cofounder.
I'd sold SaaS for years before. And he said, EarthScope is just working on Scope 3. And I said, “What is Scope 3?” and that led me down a rabbit hole that I've been down for the better part of two years now, helping him bring to market the product that he put together and simultaneously learning a lot more about the very messy subject.
The largest elephant in the room within corporate sustainability is tracking your upstream and downstream supply-chain-related emissions. It's one that I think EarthScope is addressing quite uniquely, but what I've learned along the way in climate and particularly within Scope 3 is we have a unique approach that can help folks in a certain way.
We absolutely must partner with other folks who address Scope 3 in a different way. This is much more about coalition building and picking the right solution for the right scenario. I have tried my best to veer away from the natural competition that occurs, particularly within the kind of techier part of climate tech.
Ed: Wilder, as we look at the product and think about kind of the service that you guys offer, it sounds like you're focused on a problem area that not a lot of other organizations are focused on right now in Scope 3 emissions. Is that right? Tell me more about the product that you guys have built and how it can be impactful for a corporate sustainability office.
Wilder: I would actually argue and push back a little bit on one thing you said: I think folks are really worried about their Scope 3. They are worried about their supply chain emissions. Their focus is on Scope 1 and 2 because it's within their control. It's within their boundaries of control. And it's an important exercise in beginning to make pretty significant operational changes for emissions reduction.
But I do believe that most folks who have a sizable organization, say $50 million and above in revenue, are aware loosely of what Scope 3 is and they're worried. They're worried because it is outside their boundaries of control. And it's a large source of emissions.
With that in mind, I think what we're able to help provide is assuaging some of those worries. The biggest barrier to measuring and tracking what your Scope 3 is engaging your suppliers effectively. We strongly believe in veering away, not abandoning, but veering away from the spend-based approach [to carbon accounting] towards using your procurement spend with each supplier as a calculation of what their potential emissions might be.
What EarthScope does is it's a software that sends out iterative assessments to each of your suppliers to actually capture your primary emissions data. So “what are the suppliers’ actual emissions”, and then do that at scale. A lot of this kind of supplier engagement requires having conversations. And if you can do that—initially manually and then automated en mass and scaled—it makes that kind of daunting task of engaging suppliers around sustainability a lot more manageable and palatable.
I think we have a situation which frankly is completely understandable within corporate sustainability, where folks are so scared to do something about their Scope 3 that they don't do anything about their Scope 3. It's the same thing that you and I go through as individual consumers: “I’m worried about the climate, you know, but I don't know what to do. It all seems bad. So I'm just not going to do anything.”
That's partially, honestly, why I moved into climate and climate tech—I was worried about how much of an impact I can really make as an individual on a daily basis.
Ed: That makes total sense and completely resonates.
One of the concerns I hear from sustainability folks in the corporate sector when it comes to Scope 3 is, “Oh my gosh, Scope 3 can almost literally be anything, depending on how you draw the boundaries.” There are no clear rules yet around how those boundaries should be drawn, and, to your point, it leads to people just shutting down.
Can you walk me through how EarthScope as a product and platform helps organizations get Scope 3 management together and under control?
Wilder: We don't define anything for anyone, but what our product is doing is focusing just on your upstream suppliers.
In order to produce or provide the service that you provide or produce the product that you produce, you require good services from a lot of different people. If you're able to engage those folks using a combination of technology and person-to-person, one-on-one conversations around sustainability, you can offer them things like more favorable contract terms—a carrot approach—or more of a stick approach of “If you want to bid for our business, you have to disclose your Scope 1 and 2 to us.”
We found that, like similar issues in our society, meeting people where they are on their Scope 1 and 2 for your Scope 3 is crucial. So using curiosity, moving the needle gradually, and then listen, when the needle's not being moved enough and regulations are starting to hit at end of this year, now that we're in 2025, you can say, “Listen, we need your Scope 1 and 2 emissions or you can't RFP for our business next year.” That makes sense.
Ed: OK. As a downstream organization, I finally have visibility into what my suppliers are doing and what their numbers look like through your platform, if I understand correctly. I can then start having conversations with folks about what we're doing jointly and what I'm looking for in my suppliers and my vendors.
Wilder: That's correct.
Ed: That makes a lot of sense. You guys are talking to, I would imagine, a host of different organizations across different industries and sectors. Have there been specific areas or sectors that had been most receptive to your platform? Where do you think you can add the most value?
Wilder: I am glad you asked because it's something that we've really been a lot more focused on in the last quarter or two. How do I approach this from a go-to-market motion? How do I start making dents within my territory and where are we finding the most repeatable, successful processes?
What we found overall is Transportation Logistics is our bread and butter. It is our stickiest industry. We have the strongest mobilizers or champions who really evangelize our technology and shop it internally within the organization to help them in their daily jobs.
Just to give you a profile of who those folks are, it's generally supply chain leaders or sustainable procurement leaders where they have either a direct tie to their success being linked to sustainability or it's a looming issue from a regulatory standpoint. So we found Transportation Logistics to be our stickiest customers and also the vertical in which we're still having the most conversations. We haven't shied away from talking to other folks in Retail, Mining, Oil & Gas to a lesser extent. But as of now, transportation seems to be lagging in its sustainability progress—not commitments, but progress. There's a lot of greenfield opportunity there for folks to be leaders.
Ed: That makes a ton of sense. If I think about a transportation organization, I'm already kind of the linchpin between clients on both sides. So my mindset is probably already to be networked into both my customers and the folks upstream from me, and you're just enabling me to have a different conversation with those folks.
Wilder: Right. But I think where I'm personally not super interested in, in jumping forwards, but where there could be further opportunity is helping Transportation Logistics companies with their downstream emissions because then it gets really granular and really complicated. For now I want to stick to what we can do best.
Ed: Wilder, if I'm a chief sustainability officer or maybe a procurement officer or something like that, and I'm looking at your solution, how should I be thinking about evaluating your product and your offering right now?
Wilder: I think I’d ask how effectively can you engage your suppliers on sustainability, and what kind of KPIs are you looking for? How many suppliers have signed up to the platform and how many suppliers are reporting to the platform? Within your first year of using EarthScope or another reporting solution, what percentage of my suppliers am I still using a spend-based approach to calculate their emissions for? I think deploying our technology successfully is crunching those numbers.
Ed: That makes a lot of sense. Just so I understand, can you differentiate for me the difference between a spend-based approach to carbon calculations and the way that your platform goes about doing it?
It sounds like you guys are a heck of a lot more accurate.
Wilder: A primary emissions or direct emissions approach is far more accurate. That's the approach that we take. We didn't come up with it, but it's the one that we use, and we built a technology around it to capture that type of data.
What spend-based is, is looking at your list of different suppliers and then applying emissions factors from each industry. So if you have a supplier in Transportation Logistics, spending a certain amount with you, you can apply that procurement spend against those industry emissions factors to estimate what their emissions will be.
We found that approach to be inaccurate, and that's part of why EarthScope focuses on gathering primary emissions data. A spend-based approach paints only a small picture because, you know, different suppliers within the same industry can have very, very different emissions. And it furthermore doesn't lead to this conversation, to a two-way street between you and your supply base on “what are we doing on sustainability?” “Well, we're doing this, we're doing that. How can we work with you guys to incentivize you to do better on sustainability?” It's not just pulling their numbers that show their spend and then calculating [a carbon impact] on your own. And by the way, that’s generally done in a spreadsheet, supplier by supplier, and it takes a really long time.
That's why we lead with a primary-emissions approach first.
Ed: That's fascinating. It does cover up probably a lot of the nuances that make one supplier better than the other from a carbon standpoint. It does make a lot more sense.
Wilder: I mean, listen, we're helping one of our clients right now calculate their entire Scope 3 inventory for an SBTI submission. They've been working with us for a year and a half, and we probably have 30% of their suppliers onboarded, which for us is pretty high. But we're absolutely using a spend-based approach to calculate the rest of their inventory. That deadline is hard and fast and it's approaching, and a spend-based approach is not wildly inaccurate. It just doesn't paint the full picture.
One of the many daunting factors of Scope 3 is this is probably a five- or 10-year project of onboarding all of your suppliers and getting them to report. So the more accurate of a sign you can tell of what your Scope 3 inventory is, the better you're going to be able to make decisions for your operations and for your company.
Ed: One of the things that we focus on within our community is different innovations and different ways that people are bringing technology into their organization to try to address climate issues—be it decarbonization or carbon capture or whatever their challenge is.
You're working with a ton of different organizations and businesses across different industries. What innovations have you seen recently that get you really excited, as someone who's passionate about climate change and the climate crisis?
Wilder: I recently spoke to a company called Sunshine Platform, which helps corporates abate their CO2 emissions by making it easy for them to invest in renewable energy assets and thus drive impact, reduce emissions and generate financial returns. They're based in the EU and they work with large corporates—I believe H&M is their largest partner—to buy renewable energy to, in theory, offset some of their operations. It's pretty different from the offsets and a lot of the hubbub around that topic than you and I probably are more used to. I remember it being a really innovative and nuanced one-off approach to further decarbonize your daily operations.
Then I took a sustainability accelerator over the summer called OnePointFive Academy and had Oppenheimer's grandson speak to us about nuclear energy.
Ed: Oh, that’s cool.
Wilder: He dispelled every myth or assumption I'd made about nuclear energy. I have hope in our democracy and our society to make swift strides towards nuclear, but should we do that? I think nuclear will not ever be the silver bullet that humanity keeps hoping for with every problem that they try to solve, but I do see it as enormously helpful and maybe the thing that keeps us from going extinct.
Ed: It's interesting because it feels like across climate, no matter what the sector, everyone always is hung up on finding that one silver bullet where—if we just do that!—we're fine.
But it's never that. It's always an entire portfolio of solutions that are needed, and we should do it all because it's not going to be one solution that solves everything. We need a portfolio of solutions.
Wilder: It shouldn't be which one do we do, it's which one do we do first.
Ed: Fully agree. OK, final question: What have you read recently or listened to that you'd recommend to folks who are reading our discussion?
Wilder: They're not climate related. But there is a book that I read a few years ago about The Troubles in the north of Ireland, and the sectarian conflict that really accelerated in the late sixties.
It's called Say Nothing by a brilliant author named Patrick Radden Keefe, who studies current and historically impacted conflicts throughout the world and how they're still very much in flux today. I mean, there's a ceasefire in Northern Ireland, but sectarian tensions are extremely tense.
There is now a TV show on Hulu called Say Nothing based off the book by Patrick Radden Keefe that I highly, highly recommend. It's probably, I think in terms of numbers, I would assume it's the number one show on Hulu right now.
And in addition to the book that I read and the TV show that I'm now watching, there's a podcast called The Troubles Podcast that I've been listening to religiously for the past two years. It's incredibly informative. It takes a neutral approach and stance towards exploring the different, stakeholders within a conflict: Republicans, Catholics, Unionists, Protestants, British soldiers and everyone in between, and kind of learning more about their own perspective, as well as documenting some more grisly bombings and attacks and conflicts that occurred throughout the period known as The Troubles.
Ed: Thank you for the recommendations! That’s a period I know almost nothing about. So I'll definitely look into that. Thank you for the recommendation and your time here, I appreciate it!