The problem is that we don’t know how to get rid of the carbon on anything like these scales. Our current options include things like planting trees, building a carbon absorber, and spreading carbon-absorbing minerals around. But all of these are expensive, unreliable, short-lived, untested, limited, or challenging.
Lowercarbon capital was founded in 2018 by Chris and Crystal Sacca, who oversaw early-stage investments in Instagram, Slack, Twitter, and Uber at their previous firm, Lowercase Capital. It has quickly emerged as one of the most prominent companies focused on climate technology.
Company, which lift up a separate $800 million climate fund last summer, supporting companies “give us time to un**ck planet“Through three main approaches: adapting to rising hazards, cutting greenhouse gas emissions or removing those gases from the atmosphere. Previous investments in the following areas include Heirloomare using minerals to capture carbon dioxide; Running Tide, which lives on seaweed; and Verdoxdeveloped an electrochemical approach.
In a letter to potential contributors to the new fund, Chris Sacca wrote that “for its own devices, the Earth could take up to 100,000 years to cool back down to safe levels,” adding : “Therefore, in addition to reducing emissions significantly, we need to capture CO2 from the sky and put it underground.”
Clay Dumas, a founding partner at Lowercarbon, says there is a rapidly expanding market opportunity in this area as companies like Airbus, Microsoft, Shopify and Swiss Re buy increasing tons of removed carbon. . He also noted that the emergence of multiple platforms promises to help companies evaluate and purchase reliable carbon removal vehicles, such as patch, Promise, There is a sourceand Stripe Climateallows its customers to spend a portion of the revenue to buy tons of discarded carbon in the future.
In related news, Stripe itself announced on Tuesday that major companies including Alphabet, Meta, McKinsey and Shopify have committed to buying $925 million worth of permanent decarbonization between now and 2030. The online payments company is also an investor in the company. Lowercarbon’s new fund and it plans to reinvest any profits from those investments into additional decarbonisation.
There are concerns around this emerging sector, including concerns that companies or policymakers will consider removing carbon instead of figuring out how to cut emissions.
Nan Ransohoff, head of climate at Stripe, stressed that “radical emissions reduction” should remain a priority for governments and companies.
“It’s really important for people like Stripe and all the partners that are working on it [the carbon removal program] to re-emphasize that this is not a silver bullet by any stretch of the imagination,” she said. “The math is clear: we need both.”
There are also questions around how cheaply we can get rid of carbon, who will permanently pay the cost of reducing billions of tons, and why.
As with emissions cuts, achieving truly substantial carbon removals will likely require government policies that encourage or mandate such activities, such as high carbon prices. Some of the support measures are was in positionand a a fistful of hands of the additional suggestions to be is considered.
Ransohoff says policy will be essential, noting that the level of carbon removal that may be needed by 2050 could cost around $1 trillion, about 1/100th of this year’s projected global GDP.
“It is very difficult to imagine voluntary markets scaling up like that,” she said. “Voluntary markets are great for getting us to the first facility, but policy will have to take us all the way. I really don’t see any way around that.”
