July 7th, 2026
A buyer's lawyer calls the organization behind a carbon standard. The standard itself is airtight – pipeline specs, meter reads, methane measured to the molecule. Then she asks one question: can you show me the paperwork proving you actually own what you're selling us? Silence. Then, a week later, scrambling.
That call belongs to Deanna Reitman, an energy and commodities attorney now at Foley & Lardner. She's spent two decades inside markets built to look solid from a distance, finding the one load-bearing wall nobody checked. Her take, stated plainly: "You can't sell something you don't own."
Reitman didn't plan a career in commodities. She needed a job with hours that let her make a 4:20pm Spanish class, so at eighteen she took work as an office manager on a commodities trading desk – open at 7am, closed by 4, timed perfectly around school. The role paid for her securities licenses before she understood what a derivative was. Law school came next, then Citigroup's commodities legal team, then a transfer to Houston to help stand up an energy trading desk nobody else wanted. Twenty years on, buyers bring her in early, before a deal closes, not after it's already gone sideways.
Carbon and methane standards are, by Reitman's account, remarkably tight on the technical side. They spell out exactly how to measure leaking gas, over what timeframe, using what equipment, before anyone can claim a reduction happened. What gets skipped is a legal question: does the seller actually hold the property right to what's being reduced?
She's seen project developers plant trees on land they don't own, measure the growth, and try to sell the removal anyway. The chemistry holds up fine. The ownership never gets checked. A market built almost entirely on trust, since the product itself is intangible, won't survive many buyers finding out what they paid for belonged to someone else.
As monitoring shifts toward satellite imagery and real-time tracking, Reitman draws a distinction worth holding onto: data shows something occurred. Only an underlying legal instrument – a lease, a deed, a signed agreement – establishes who has the right to claim it. Satellite footage of a property in Uruguay proves the land changed. It says nothing about who's allowed to sell that change. Treat the two as interchangeable, and you're one bad discovery away from an expensive lesson.
The biggest misconception Reitman runs into isn't technical. Plenty of people assume a voluntary carbon market means no rules apply. Nobody's required to participate, but once a company does, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's (CFTC) fraud and market manipulation authority kicks in fully, regardless of the word "voluntary" attached to the market's name. Cross-border deals add another layer: an instrument the US treats as a physical, non-financial commodity can turn into a financial instrument requiring MiFID-level reporting the moment a UK buyer enters the picture. Same credit, two different rulebooks, depending on which side of the Atlantic the sale lands.
Reitman's answer to the question she asks every guest didn't come from a courtroom. It came from a volunteer-run youth lacrosse program she and her husband built from scratch in their backyard, over more than a decade, to give local kids a shot at recruitment they couldn't otherwise afford. A community meeting turned on her anyway, accusing her of running an exclusionary program for profit she never took. By her own account, it was one of the more painful things she's been through. Her takeaway wasn't caution. It was clarity: if the reason behind the work is sound, what people assume about it later doesn't get to rewrite it.
That same instinct shows up again in how she vets a deal: do it right regardless of who's watching.
Ownership is the layer everyone assumes someone else already checked. Reitman's entire practice exists because that assumption keeps being wrong, across carbon credits, land leases, and now digital assets moving faster than the paperwork behind them.
For Demia, this is the exact terrain the work lives in. Provenance and chain of custody are what answer Reitman's question before a buyer ever has to ask it: who produced this, who holds the right to claim it, and can that chain be checked at every tier, not just taken on faith. Carbon accounting is one layer that rides on top of that record. It isn't the record itself. Trust doesn't need more promises. It needs a paper trail that holds up at the same resolution as the science underneath it.
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