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The Almighty Buck Technology

Payments Company Stripe Is Kick Starting Market For Carbon Removal 23

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Stripe is signing up to pay for carbon-removal technologies that haven't been invented yet. The payments company has formed a partnership with Deep Science Ventures, a London investment firm that specializes in building technology companies from the ground up. DSV will recruit scientists to develop ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. If they come up with viable concepts, Stripe will be their first customer. It will pay DSV startups $500,000 each up front to capture and store carbon, then a further $1 million if they meet performance milestones.

The new partnership marks an expansion of Stripe's effort to provide a market for unproven technology that could potentially help limit the damage of global warming. The United Nations' scientific panel on climate change says the least-bad global-temperature scenarios depend on people removing billions of tons of planet-warming gases from the atmosphere. It also cautions that companies and governments may never be able to deploy the technology on the scale required to make that happen. Since August 2019, when it promised "to pay, at any available price, for the direct removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and its sequestration in secure, long-term storage," Stripe has committed $9 million to 10 carbon-removal projects.

Stripe's carbon-removal procurement is led by Ryan Orbuch, who was a product manager before focusing on climate, and the team's projects are vetted by a panel of industry experts. Costs vary, with the most expensive service costing more than $2,000 per ton of carbon removed. Scalability is more important than current pricing. Stripe says technologies should have the potential to remove half a gigaton of carbon dioxide a year by 2050 at a cost of $100 per ton, and store it for at least 1,000 years. Stripe has tethered its core business of operating payment infrastructure to its side project. Stripe Climate, a tool introduced in October 2020, lets Stripe's customers divert a percentage of revenue to the carbon-removal pot. Roughly 9,000 of Stripe's millions of business users have enrolled contributing nearly $3 million a year collectively, and roughly 8% of new Stripe users sign up [...].
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Payments Company Stripe Is Kick Starting Market For Carbon Removal

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  • Trees (Score:4, Insightful)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Wednesday October 27, 2021 @05:03PM (#61933491)
    So has anyone come up with a more efficient, effective, cheap & sustainable carbon capture technology than planting trees & re-wilding the areas of the planet we've ravaged so far? Given the opportunity, nature can reclaim areas remarkably quickly. In the meantime, wouldn't it also be a good idea to ensure that the fossil fuel companies, that are backing these energy-intensive carbon capture & storage projects, phase out producing CO2 as quickly as is feasibly possible rather than making plans to squeeze every last drop of oil & gas out of the earth & burn it?
    • So has anyone come up with a more efficient, effective, cheap & sustainable carbon capture technology than planting trees & re-wilding the areas of the planet we've ravaged so far?

      Trees are nice. Planting trees is not going to fix global warming.

      There is nowhere near enough land available for tree planting to make a difference.

      making plans to squeeze every last drop of oil & gas out of the earth

      Proven oil and gas reserves are far higher today than a few decades ago, and will be even higher when we stop using fossil fuels. We aren't going to stop using oil because we "run out".

      & burn it?

      The FF companies don't burn oil, gas, and coal. Consumers do that. The problem isn't "them", it's "us".

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        The problem is the FF companies, because they spend a huge amount of money lobbying for us to continue burning fossil fuels and do everything they can to discourage us from switching away from them.

      • This is not the case. Educate yourself on this. This is harmful misinformation that is common and not necessarily to blame on anyone except FF companies. This only postpones coming to a solution to climate change. FF companies use/have used misinformation campaigns to place the blame on consumers that have little to no impact overall on the use of FF. At the same time, FF companies have lobbied for the continued use of fossil fuels. YouTube channel Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell has a video titled "Can
      • Re: climate change, there is no single "final solution" & anyone suggesting that there is is most likely working on behalf of the fossil fuel lobby, either wittingly or unwittingly. We need multiple, coordinated, practical, sustainable solutions to limit the use of fossil fuels, produce more sustainable energy & consume less energy in general. Tree planting & re-wilding are well-recognised & supported strategies supported by the UN panel on climate change. Carbon capture & storage is not
    • Carbon capture means nothing if we can't lower CO2 emissions. We have had governments pay some very intelligent and educated people to look into solutions. Their solutions are public record. Those not following their recommendations are not taking the problem of CO2 emissions seriously. There are many options to solve the problem but all of the options include nuclear fission power. How much nuclear power is required is debatable, it can be dozens of nuclear power plants, more like hundreds of nuclear

    • So has anyone come up with a more efficient, effective, cheap & sustainable carbon capture technology than planting trees [...]

      Yes, there are lots of approaches.

      We'll need to find out which ones are the most efficient ones really fast now. Personally, I bet on mineralisation / Enhanced Weathering: https://www.projectvesta.org/ [projectvesta.org]

      To incentivise development, we'll probably need Carbon Takeback Obligations: https://www.biobasedpress.eu/2... [biobasedpress.eu]

      The 'fruit hanging order':
      Lowest: Reduce emissions
      Medium: Carbon capture and mineralisation / storage from high concentration sources (flue gases, industry, traffic, ...)
      High: Direct Air Capture (m

  • Good

    Now just be careful you don't go too fast or overboard.

    Moving in from the sea over 100 to 300 years is an irritation.

    Accidentally inducing an ice age, which can come on in as little as 2 years (geologic records-- you just need a summer where the winter snow doesn't melt, and the lack of summer warming due to sun reflection will make the next winter start at winter temps, not end at them.)

    So easy does it.

    • If we accidentally go too far and trigger an ice age (haha), we can reverse it in a heartbeat by pumping out freon.

      Chlorotrifluoromethane is 14,000 times as effective as CO2.

  • Next up, get your carbon crypto coins while the ponzi scheme lasts!

  • Now there are a lot of paid companies, each of which offers its own services, so you can choose what suits you the most. As for my business, I decided to choose the swipe4free service and purchased a credit card processing machine [swipe4free.com] . I think that with the help of this terminal, the payment process has become much easier.

It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.

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