A climate-focused venture firm plans to invest $350 million into carbon removal startups


The problem is that we do not know how to extract carbon from anything like these scales. Our modern options include such things as planting trees, building air-conditioning systems, and distributing carbon dioxide. But all of these are expensive, unreliable, temporary, untested, limited, or other difficulties.

Lowercarbon Capital was founded in 2018 by Chris and Crystal Sacca, who oversee businesses starting from Instagram, Slack, Twitter, and Uber at their previous company, Lowercase Capital. It has quickly emerged as one of the most well-known companies focusing on climate technology.

The company, which raised $ 800 million last summer, helps companies “buy us time to destroy the world” in three main ways: overcoming increasing risks, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, or eliminating emissions. in the air. Old investments in the latter area include Heirloom, which uses salt to capture carbon dioxide; Running Tide, which relies on seagrass; and Verdox, which has developed an electrochemical approach.

In his letter to potential donors to the new fund, Chris Sacca wrote that “in the long run, the world could take 100,000 years to return to a safer place,” adding: “So, in addition to significantly reducing emissions, we absorbing CO2 from the air and placing it on the ground. “

Clay Dumas, co-founder of Lowercarbon, says there is a growing market potential in the region due to the growing tons of carbon mined by companies such as Airbus, Microsoft, Shopify, and Swiss Re. He is also seeing the emergence of a number of platforms that promise to help organizations evaluate and purchase reliable emissions systems, such as Patch, Pledge, Sourceful, and Stripe Climate, which allow its customers to donate a portion of their revenue to purchase future tons of carbon dioxide. .

In a related article, Stripe himself announced Tuesday that major companies including Alphabet, Meta, McKinsey and Shopify have pledged to buy $ 925 million in fixed emissions between now and 2030. An online payment company is an Investor in the new Lowercarbon fund, and is planning to reintroducing any benefits from the material to a more efficient exhaust system.

There are concerns around the next phase, including fears that companies or policy makers will rely on air purification instead of finding ways to reduce emissions.

Nan Ransohoff, chief of weather in Stripe, emphasizes that “greenhouse gas emissions” must remain at the forefront of governments and corporations.

“It is very important for people like Stripe and all those who work with them [the carbon removal program] to emphasize further that this is not a silver bullet in the imagination, ”he says. “The math is clear: we want both.”

There are also questions about how we can get rid of cheap air, who will constantly pay the cost of dropping billions of tons, and why.

As with carbon emissions, meeting specific carbon emissions requirements may require government regulations that promote or regulate such practices, such as the high cost of carbon. Several remedies already exist, and only a few additional ideas is suspected.

Ransohoff says the plan will be important, knowing that the amount of emissions needed by 2050 could cost $ 1 trillion, which is close to 1/100 of this year’s global GDP.

“It’s hard to imagine the volatile markets going up and down,” he says. “Voluntary markets are good for us to get started, but the principles should get us there. I don’t see any way out of that.”





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