Kauk said those very issues drove Shopify to set out on its current path to fund more reliable, permanent carbon removal and storage. There are criticisms, mainly that efforts like Frontier will distract and take funding away from the more urgent need to cut fossil fuel use and the shift to renewables. In California, wildfires are destroying thousands of acres of forests previously counted as carbon credit reserves, releasing all of that carbon into the air. Offsets also often have a limited impact: On a recent episode of Last Week Tonight,John Oliver identified forests that had been counted as offsets even though they were never under threat. Critics have noted that some companies use these projects as a way to offset carbon emissions rather than mitigate their carbon footprint. Nature-based sequestration projects such as forest preservation are one way to remove carbon from the atmosphere, but they are imperfect. “But there isn’t a world where we can have the life that we enjoy living without also actually developing this removal technology, and at massive scale.” “Carbon removal is not a replacement for deep decarbonization,” said Peter Minor, director of science and innovation at Carbon 180, a nonprofit advocacy group for carbon removal technology. In the latest assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), experts called carbon dioxide removal “an essential element of scenarios that limit warming to 1.5° C or likely below 2° C by 2100.” Yet, because of the amount of greenhouse gases that have already been released into the atmosphere, that shift alone won’t be enough without also removing existing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Top climate scientists agree that a rapid global shift away from fossil fuels to renewable energy is the most critical step to prevent catastrophic climate outcomes. By pooling their resources together and continuing to bring in new players, the companies hope to more meaningfully move the needle on climate change while offsetting their own emissions. Like Shopify, Stripe was already investing in carbon removal via Stripe Climate, but the technologies are incredibly expensive. It has the potential to develop a market for carbon removal, a practice that climate scientists say will be necessary to fight climate change. In the case of carbon capture, a similar market gap exists, and the Frontier AMC essentially promises that there will be buyers waiting once companies advance their technology and scale up. Now Heirloom is poised to scale up its innovative carbon capture solution further, since the recent progress means it can qualify to sell its carbon credits to Frontier, an advanced market commitment (AMC) that is putting close to $1 billion into accelerating the development and growth of technology-based solutions to draw down, or remove, carbon at an unprecedented scale.ĪMCs are funding mechanisms that have been used to incentivize vaccine development in cases where a lucrative market for the lifesaving product did not already-and might not ever-exist. “Since our purchase, they’ve dramatically improved the rate that they’re able to demonstrate carbon capture using limestone, and that enabled them to unlock their latest Series A funding round, where they managed to pull together $53 million,” explained Stacy Kauk, Shopify’s head of sustainability.
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