Stripe’s climate initiative is a gift because it removes all barriers to positive action. This programme makes it easy, and valuable, to do the right thing. We’re proud to be part of it.
We need to solve climate change, but individual actions can only get us so far. Because we’re a small team we’re very focused on our core product, so it was an easy decision to join the growing group of companies using Stripe Climate.
Stripe Climate is Stripe at its best: taking something hugely complicated, doing all the work to boil it down to something understandable, and making it as easy as possible for us to be a part of it.
A lightbulb went on for us after we read about Stripe’s initial carbon removal commitment. Being a team of meteorologists, we’re especially concerned about climate change, so signing up to support next-generation climate technologies was a no-brainer.
To prevent the most catastrophic effects of climate change, we should aim to limit global average temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, which corresponds to reducing global annual CO₂ emissions from about 40 gigatons per year as of 2018, to net zero by 2050.
To accomplish this, the world will likely need to both radically reduce the new emissions we put into the air, and remove carbon already in the atmosphere.
Existing carbon removal solutions such as reforestation and soil carbon sequestration are important, but they alone are unlikely to scale to the size of the problem. New carbon removal technologies need to be developed – ones that have the potential to be high volume and low cost by 2050 – even if they aren’t yet mature.
Today, carbon removal solutions face a chicken-and-egg problem. As early technologies, they’re more expensive, so don’t attract a critical mass of customers. But without wider adoption, they can’t scale production to become cheaper.
Early purchasers can help new carbon removal technologies get down the cost curve and up the volume curve. Experience with manufacturing learning and experience curves has shown repeatedly that deployment and scale beget improvement, a phenomenon seen across DNA sequencing, hard drive capacity and solar panels.
We work with a multidisciplinary group of top scientific experts to help us find and evaluate the most promising carbon removal technologies. Explore our growing portfolio of early-stage carbon removal projects, read the criteria we use to select them, or view our open sourced project applications.
Climeworks uses renewable geothermal energy and waste heat to capture CO₂ directly from the air, concentrate it, and permanently sequester it underground in basaltic rock formations with Carbfix. While it’s early in scaling, it’s permanent, easy to measure, and the capacity of this approach is theoretically almost limitless.
CarbonCure injects CO₂ into fresh concrete, where it mineralises and is permanently stored while improving the concrete’s compressive strength. Today they source waste CO₂, but represent a promising platform technology for permanent CO₂ storage, a key component of future carbon removal systems.
Project Vesta captures CO₂ by using an abundant, naturally occurring mineral called olivine. Ocean waves grind down the olivine, increasing its surface area. As the olivine breaks down, it captures atmospheric CO₂ from within the ocean and stabilises it as limestone on the sea floor.
Charm Industrial has created a novel process for preparing and injecting bio-oil into geologic storage. Bio-oil is produced from biomass and maintains much of the carbon that was captured naturally by the plants. By injecting it into secure geologic storage, they’re making the carbon storage permanent.