The payments company Stripe recently unveiled a nearly billion dollar pot of money to fund carbon dioxide removal (CDR). I talk with Nan Ransohoff, Stripe's head of carbon, about why the company is doing this, how the financing works, and what sorts of CDR technologies show promise.
The odd thing to me in this whole process is that you're still taking a highly complex calculation (whether or not this company will be able to take more carbon out of the air or water than they are consuming in the process) and leaving whether or not that is attempted up to bankers and money men who have no training in that (the companies have to go and get loans to finance still).
Why not have a fund that at least attempts to help funding at the start based on some expert opinion? Yes, the bankers may be more willing to loan knowng that there will be a buyer in the end, but they have little technical skill to determine which companies are likely to succeed. It still incentives fudging of numbers to get the loans (because bankers don't know the technical aspects necessarily).
The odd thing to me in this whole process is that you're still taking a highly complex calculation (whether or not this company will be able to take more carbon out of the air or water than they are consuming in the process) and leaving whether or not that is attempted up to bankers and money men who have no training in that (the companies have to go and get loans to finance still).
Why not have a fund that at least attempts to help funding at the start based on some expert opinion? Yes, the bankers may be more willing to loan knowng that there will be a buyer in the end, but they have little technical skill to determine which companies are likely to succeed. It still incentives fudging of numbers to get the loans (because bankers don't know the technical aspects necessarily).
This wasn't the model for the Manhattan Project.