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    Home » Beyond Offsets: How to Build a Carbon Removal Industry – RBC Thought Leadership
    Carbon Credits

    Beyond Offsets: How to Build a Carbon Removal Industry – RBC Thought Leadership

    userBy userMay 6, 2025No Comments29 Mins Read
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    John Stackhouse: [00:00:00] Hi, it’s John here.

    Sonia Sennik: and I’m Sonia Sennik, CEO at Creative Destruction Lab.

    John Stackhouse: This is Disruptors x CDL: The Innovation Era.

    Sonia, we just marked Earth Day last month, and while a lot of things happened that day, one of the coolest was some XPRIZE announcements, particularly the winners of its a hundred million dollar carbon removal competition, which included a lot of Canadians.

    Sonia Sennik: Yes, John. We were at the New York Stock Exchange with the XPRIZE team to celebrate Earth Day and the top three winners, we had Mati Carbon that came through our CDL program from India that won the $50 million prize Vaulted Deep from the United States that won the $8 million prize and UNDO, that does their work between the UK and Canada who won the $5 million prize.

    XPRIZE also gave out a few other prizes for most promising companies in certain areas, and the X [00:01:00] Factor Ocean Prize went to Canadian company Planetary from Nova Scotia. It was a really exciting day to see people rally around the carbon removal market, and the most interesting part about the event was listening to all the different ways that people from everywhere around the world are tackling this problem. There’s not one way to approach it, which leaves the world ripe for innovation in this space.

    John Stackhouse: Well, let’s zoom in on Mati Carbon, the Indian company for a moment, the one that won $50 million for carbon removal through enhanced rock weathering.

    Sonia Sennik: So an essential part of Mati Carbon strategy is working with small farmers in India.

    As you know, in India, there’s a lot of farmland and mad carbon has seized the opportunity of helping farmers advance their technologies while also giving them the benefit of contributing to carbon removal. They also have best in class monitoring, reporting, and verification. You’ve heard it in any MBA class.

    If you can measure it, you can manage it. Their tech stack [00:02:00] includes novel methods for soil monitoring that are coupled with sophisticated mass balance and calculations that can determine the bulk CO2 removal.

    John Stackhouse: So zooming back, all of these innovators are trying to solve the same problem, and that is carbon in our atmosphere, carbon dioxide.

    There’s not only the enormous amounts that we as humanity are putting into the atmosphere every year. There’s legacy carbon and that goes back centuries. That’s still sitting up there. And these combine to warm our planet. Lots of exploration going on, as we’ve discussed over many episodes about new technologies that can reduce the amount of carbon that results from all of our activities.

    But there’s also some impressive innovation, which we’re going to hear about in this episode, to get that carbon outta the atmosphere and back into the earth and also back into the ocean.

    Sonia Sennik: Absolutely. John, we need 10 billion tons of carbon [00:03:00] dioxide removal by 2050 to stay on track for that one and a half degree Celsius warming measurement just for reference, one mature tree absorbs 22 kilograms of carbon dioxide a year, meaning you’d need 45 mature trees to offset the average Canadian’s annual emissions. But when the problem seems as big as this is John, we can sometimes get a bit overwhelmed and think, well, how do we even approach it?

    And if we haven’t figured it out by now, will we figure it out? Through our partnership at Creative Destruction Lab with XPRIZE, we’ve seen incredible advancements in these startups.

    John Stackhouse: Well, let’s get at it. We’re gonna hear from a couple of really impressive innovators who have been recognized by the XPRIZE, and we’ll also hear from the world renowned scientist, David Keith, a Canadian who’s been a pioneer in carbon removal for decades.

    But before we jump into those conversations, Sonia. Give our listeners a sense of the XPRIZE and why it matters to innovators.

    Sonia Sennik: [00:04:00] XPRIZE is truly a one of a kind organization. Their mission is to inspire and empower humanity to achieve breakthroughs that accelerate an abundant and equitable future for all.

    They do this through setting up incentive prizes. For example, the XPRIZE Carbon Removal Prize was a hundred million dollars incentive prize. The idea is that they were inspiring scientists and technologists from all around the world to start focusing their efforts. On carbon removal technologies. What that sparked was thousands of teams applying to be part of XPRIZE and a rapid increase in acceleration in the technological development of these startups.

    Vaulted Deep, a Houston-based startup that was part of our XPRIZE CDL Carbon Removal stream, removed over 2000 metric tons of carbon dioxide in just four months of operations. So one can just imagine with the right level of support. Investment and their recent win from XPRIZE. A company like Vaulted Deep along with so many others can [00:05:00] scale over the next five to 10 years, removing carbon from our atmosphere at a pace we just haven’t seen before.

    John Stackhouse: Our first guest is Dr. David Keith, a professor at the University of Chicago, and one of the world’s leading experts on climate science and energy technologies. Over his career, David has helped pioneer research on carbon removal and solar geoengineering. He founded Carbon Engineering, a company advancing direct air capture technology, and he brings a rare perspective that bridges science policy and entrepreneurship.

    David, welcome to the podcast.

    David Keith: Hi there. Pleasure to be on.

    Let’s start a bit with your own background. Tell us how you got into this field and what attracted you first to CDR or carbon dioxide removal for those who are still catching up with the acronym.

    David Keith: I started working on climate in the late eighties. I started working on some climate engineering technologies back then, simply because nobody else was doing it. So I’ve done a big range of things from climate modeling to observations to early work on some carbon removal [00:06:00] technologies. I wrote one of the very first papers on biomass with capture. I did work on direct air capture and then later founded a company. I’m not involved anymore. I’ve done a big range of things, but it’s only one piece of what I’ve done on climate.

    John Stackhouse: We have a pretty clear idea of the climate challenge right now, particularly carbon in the atmosphere and the amount that we’re adding to the atmosphere was the problem as clear to you then, as it is now?

    David Keith: Yeah, I mean, so the very first report that went to the most powerful leader in the world to President Johnson had already the data from the global carbon data that showed the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. And they were able to do the rough balance and knew the OS ocean and doubt. So the problem has been well understood for a long time, way before I got involved.

    John Stackhouse: Maybe take us into some of the technology. For those not familiar with how carbon removal works, give us a 101 if you can.

    David Keith: Maybe the single most important thing to know about climate change is that the amount of warming is [00:07:00] proportional to the cumulative emissions over overall industrial time. And that means that even if we brought emissions to Zero tomorrow, that wouldn’t stop climate change.

    It would just stop it getting warmer, but it would still be warm. That would still be all the climate damages would be there. And if we want to reduce the warming, if at any time people want to make the planet cooler than it is when they make that decision. You have to either pull carbon out of the atmosphere or do sunlight reflection, so engineering or a combination of them.

    But cutting emissions will not make the planet cooler. It just stops making the planet warmer. I think if, if the fundamental risk is caused by moving fossil carbon from these deep geological reservoirs where the carbon’s been isolated through the atmosphere for. Billions or hundreds of millions of years.

    Then the only kind of carbon removal that can really reduce the long run risk is to put it back in some kind of stable [00:08:00] reservoir. Growing trees may be great. There’s lots of places where there’s deforestation and we need trees, but trees are inherently unstable. They want to be oxidized to burn to rot, and so they don’t remove carbon in the long run.

    They don’t undo the consequences of. Burning a ton of fossil fuels and putting in the atmosphere. No amount of tree planting cannot undo that. What can undo it is either capturing carbon dioxide, the gas, and shoving it deep underground and there. Different ways you could capture it or reacting carbon dioxide with base minerals.

    Carbon dioxide is a weak acid and people know that acid plus bases makes salts, so that’s what naturally wants to happen anyway. If humans all went away. The carbon dioxide would eventually be removed by reacting with these basic minerals that are all over the earth’s surface. And so perhaps the most important long runways to remove carbon are to accelerate those [00:09:00] reactions with the base minerals that have a endpoint of the CO2 being in stable salts.

    Sonia Sennik: How has the conversation changed over time with people’s openness to seeing carbon removal as a commercially viable approach to business and a good use of their science and technology research?

    David Keith: Well, it was kind of a nothing burger forever than the Paris agreement that had this stretch goal of keeping temperatures to 1.5 came about, and then modelers who model kind of economic system and, and carbon.

    These models happened to have biomass with capture and at one kind of carbon removal technology, and they suddenly found in these economic models that that was the only way to meet 1.5. To be clear, these models didn’t have sunlight reflection in them. And it’s not obvious that 1.5 is a sensible, it’s not a scientific target.

    So in some ways I think that was a kind of [00:10:00] intellectual nonsense, but it meant that carbon removal suddenly became very visible. And then there were lots of people, including lots of people promoting their businesses, putting out the idea that scientists say we have to have five gigatons or something of carbon removal by 2050.

    And that’s kind of ignited a whole bunch of sudden attention to carbon removal in a, in a boom. To be clear, scientists don’t say that if you are thoughtful about it. And there’s certainly been a kind of boom of hype cycle though, driven by that argument.

    John Stackhouse: You refer to 1.5 as intellectual nonsense. Give us a bit more sense of where you’re coming from with that comment.

    David Keith: Well, I mean, the, um, there isn’t a scientific threshold or argument that 1.5 is the right target. 1.5 was a, I think, very clever. Political choice by the environmental community to make a really near term target that was unattainable so there wouldn’t be attained so that you could build political pressure for more action, [00:11:00] which is happening.

    Last year, the world spent $2 trillion, just a little under 2% of the entire world’s economy on clean energy, which is a stunning success, and we’re likely going to see emissions peak in the next couple years, which is also a stunning success. But that doesn’t mean that it was kind of intellectually or in terms of environmental policy, the right place to aim that is that 1.5 is the right place to aim.

    It was a a political negotiating tool, I think a really effective one.

    Sonia Sennik: And so with that type of investment, David, do you believe where you’re sitting now that we will be able to tackle the challenge ahead of us?

    David Keith: I think that with current technologies, no fundamental unobtainium, no giant innovation, it’s possible to do carbon removal in a way that really does reverse a bunch of the emissions that humans made.

    So I think you could say that if you started kind of mid-century. That [00:12:00] there’s strong lines of evidence that say that for something like 1% of GDP spend over a hundred years, over another century, you could remove something like a thousand gigatons of carbon, which would be, for example, that’s about just under half of cumulative emissions to date.

    To be clear, I don’t think it makes sense to do large scale carbon removal until emissions have been reduced, at least down to half or or a third of their current levels.

    John Stackhouse: When you think about the next few years, how do you think about the business model for these sorts of technologies? Are we on the right course that they’re going to come to fruition and scale, or do we need more significant changes to both the business model and the broader economics? Of intervention?

    David Keith: Uh, no. I don’t think we’re on the right course. Most of the carbon removal efforts now are driven by voluntary [00:13:00] offset markets that I think nobody I know believes are long-term scalable things. Uh, well, there’s a lot of hype and excitement. It’s important to say how small it is. So there’s this sort of 2 trillion total and clean energy.

    The total money moving in carbon removal is a few billion, so really tiny compared to that. And I think that the system’s been driven by money coming in from venture capitalists and by companies with these voluntary offsets that I think are not a scalable way to do this. And it’s resulted in a whole network of startups.

    But a lot of those startups are missing some of the things that are probably most scalable and low environmental impact, like large scale open ocean Alkalinity, for example. So I think the way I view it is, at least what’s happening now is there’s. People are actually beginning to try some of these things out.

    At least much more research is happening than than five years ago. I think there isn’t a clear pathway forward for how to do it in the end. You want a public good like this to get paid for. It needs to get paid for as a public good. That’s the only way that I know we’ve ever done it.

    John Stackhouse: You’ve [00:14:00] mentioned Open Ocean Alkalinity.

    I would just wonder if you could give a quick explanation.

    David Keith: If you take a glass of pure water and put it on a counter, it will gradually become acidic. Where did the acid come from? The acid is actually from carbon dioxide in the air that makes carbon acid a weak acid in water just kind of automatically, and you would pull the CO2 outta the air.

    If you put some antacid in it, which is a magnesium hydroxide, you would neutralize that acid and pull more CO2 outta the air. And then you have a little machine for capturing CO2 outta the atmosphere by adding this an acid to your little glass of water. That works stably at the global scale. Most of the carbon that in the kind of act of biosphere is locked up in the ocean as carbon.

    That is in this acid-based salt balance, which is stably there basically forever. And so if we can add more of these bases to the ocean in a way that doesn’t have local environmental harm, then we would both reduce ocean acidification, which is say damaging coral reefs and also permanently remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

    And the big question is. [00:15:00] How to make the bases that will dissolve at scale and how to distribute them in the ocean. And for both of those things, the idea is old. The first big paper on this topic is published in 1995, but there really hasn’t been much work. We’re now doing a bunch of work at U Chicago.

    We’re working closely with Frontier, the Stripe funded big, big actor in the, in the carbon removal space. But there isn’t really a kind of coherent research effort.

    John Stackhouse: Talk to us a bit about the tech challenges right now with respect to direct air capture. What are the biggest hurdles on the technology side in your mind in the coming years?

    David Keith: Well, direct capture is just one of many of these technologies. It’s one I was personally involved in. I think the big question is to actually shake out these technologies and understand what they cost on the sort of plant two or three. It’s very hard to know what things cost until you actually go build them in the real world.

    Sonia Sennik: You mention in that description that offset credits won’t [00:16:00] last much longer. That is probably peaking the interest of some of our listeners. Would you mind just double clicking on that?

    David Keith: Well, I mean, I don’t think in the end companies do big things voluntarily. I, I don’t think they really should. It’s not the appropriate place for companies to do stuff.

    I mean, if you look at the giant successes that we’ve had in environmental policy, clean air, removing lead ozone, I mean, the world has made enormous progress. Air is much cleaner around the world than it was when I was a kid. And water is too. Those are fundamentally done by government setting rules. And then companies competing under those rules.

    If you think about the giant success of the sulfur cap and trade market, that helped to be the core of the US Clean Air Act that’s been copied around the world. The idea was government shouldn’t be deciding the exact technology. Government should say there’s a total amount of emissions you can have and you guys can trade inside that.

    But that’s very different from a tradable offset credit, which there’s [00:17:00] no cap to, and not really a, a way to verify and, and you don’t really, there’s not a reason for companies to do it at scale. They can do a little bit for the kind of PR reason, but in the long run, you’re not gonna spend the kind of 1% of GDP for PR.

    John Stackhouse: I. The broader infrastructure projects, carbon infrastructure projects, and I suppose this is what IRA in the US was, uh, starting to move towards. Are you seeing success on that level at scale

    David Keith: Really too early to say. I mean, I’m totally thrilled that the plant from Carbon engineering technology that I, you know, I founded the company, is now actually just coming into operation at a half million tons a year.

    Absolutely fantastic and I’m super thrilled that Oxy was involved and that IRA and these US government antennas that helped to make it happen. But that’s the first plant. It’s a half million, 10 a year plant. You don’t really find out how these things really work and begin to really understand and plant costs until you built quite a few plants, which, you know, Oxy is keen to do and I’m thrilled they are.

    And [00:18:00] of course, not just one line of technology. I. Obviously was one of the innovators, so I’m excited about it. But there’s a bunch of other lines in direct air capture and then there’s all these other methods, and I don’t think right now that the kind of innovation ecosystem for carbon removal is effective and focused as I’d like to see.

    John Stackhouse: And with respect to the Oxy project, this is Occidental Petroleum in Texas. For those who aren’t familiar with it, it involves enhanced oil recovery, EOR, which some people have concerns about, ultimately leading to the production, not leading to reduction of fossil fuels. How do you think through some of that complexity?

    David Keith: I have no problem with EOR. Obviously it really gets under the skin of, of some of the environmental community. But if you actually have a third party regulator that ensures that the amount of carbon that went down the hole is the same amount of carbon that went up in oil, then you really have made a hydrocarbon fuel, which you can use for things that are hard to decarbonize, which has no net emissions.

    And I think that’s a [00:19:00] useful thing to have.

    Sonia Sennik: I’m curious to know if you could make one policy change that you think would really. Improve outcomes or set the rate incentives for advancing carbon removal, what would that be?

    David Keith: So in Canada there’s a bunch of subcritical little academic research and then startups.

    What there isn’t is a serious effort to build some kind of public, private entity that really has research muscle in the public interest, say for some of these emerging technologies like Enhanced Rock and Ocean Alkalinity, and then to have. Canada government actually makes some choices about where it’s gonna push.

    I mean, I’m a super proud Canadian. I love it. But of course, sadly we had to sell Carbon Engineering to a US company. I think Canada is awesome, but Canada is only 40 million people. And the idea that you’re just gonna kind of let every flower bloom and have [00:20:00] all this stuff spread around the country with no center and no focus is not a recipe for winning. We need a much larger system-wide approach, is what you’re saying. Yeah. And for some of these things like. The innovation model that works so well in pharma and it where there is an underlying giant commercial market for the products. If you could make the market work is just different here.

    Sonia Sennik: Yes.

    David Keith: And I think a different kind of innovation answer is needed. I definitely don’t think this should all be on my academics or government labs. It, it needs private innovation. It, and I think the point is maybe there’s some ideas that come totally outta left field. But I think the big message here is that most of the carbon removal technology we’re talking about are all have been known for decades.

    The issue isn’t to advance some totally new thing. The issue is to actually take some of the things we understand and march them down the playing field by. Building them at scale, doing industrial engineering, and crucially coupling that with [00:21:00] studying their environmental impacts. ’cause the issue isn’t just can we capture carbon?

    It’s can we capture carbon at a low enough cost with a low enough environmental footprint? And I. Putting those together, I think requires a kind of government action and a government action is able to not pick one winner, but say We’re gonna look at this set of things, not the usual. Very sad, I love Canada, but usual way that Canada has been kind of funding research in this, which is this.

    Everybody gets a little money sprinkled everywhere and sprinkled regionally, which is just not a way to win.

    John Stackhouse: You are suggesting we need more state capital, but this can’t be done by government. It needs to draw in private capital at scale, not vc, but big long-term capital, and then pick some industrial projects to just build at scale.

    Demonstrate with engineering, it’s not the first project, it’s the second and third to see if you can cut the cost by 50% with each iteration.

    David Keith: So one thing we don’t have is applied environmental science. [00:22:00] One part, I think. Is and should be. A government function is really high quality applied environmental science that can help answer the public interest question, which is what is the environmental impact of some of these technologies?

    And that doesn’t work well by just a few university grants. It requires something that looks more like a coordinated center. That focuses on this really applied work, working closely with technology developers and that that’s something it wouldn’t cost that much and that Canada could do on some of these technologies easily.

    There. There’s a little bit where Canada’s kind of started a nice road on some of the ocean liny things. There’s a project on the east coast, I. Dalhousie center that has some of that, but you could do that for one or two things in a serious way. That’d be an executable thing the government could do.

    Sonia Sennik: David, thank you so much. This was fantastic.

    Our next guest is Mike Kelland, CEO and co-founder of Planetary Technologies, a Canadian company and CDL alumni, pioneering a unique approach to carbon removal using ocean alkalinity [00:23:00] enhancement. Planetary was recently awarded the $1 million XFactor prize from XPRIZE, carbon removal for its breakthrough work, turning the ocean into a natural carbon sink.

    Mike Kelland: So the process is very simple. We actually call it seawater restoration. The easiest way to think about it is that the ocean essentially breathes and everything we put up in the air and everything that’s in the atmosphere gets breathed in by the ocean. So when we put extra CO2 up in the air. The ocean’s gonna breathe all of that.

    CO2 in the CO2 concentration of the ocean builds up really quickly and CO2, when it gets into water, turns into an acid. So you can kind of think of the ocean as having like a little bit of heartburn. What we do is we work inside coastal plants to reverse some of that acidification. We source a natural mineral and we introduce that into the water that flows through power plants and wastewater plants.

    And as we do that, we’re gonna reduce that acidity in the water that’s flowing through. And what that does is it allows the ocean in the local region to essentially [00:24:00] breathe again. We’ve been doing this for about five years now, and the question when we started was always, can you measure this? Are you able to really see that reduction of acidity, that reduction of CO2 in the ocean as you’re moving forward?

    And over the last year, we actually showed that we were able to directly measure using some really cool sensors. We were able to show this direct measurement of the reduction of CO2 in the surface ocean as a result of our activity. It’s a really exciting space right now, and what we’re seeing more and more is these papers coming out saying, okay, we were worried about biological impacts.

    Now actually we’re seeing biological benefits. So we’re seeing things like an increase in the biomass of commercially important fisheries. We’re seeing increase things like shell growth and things like that for a variety of shellfish and important commercial fisheries. So there are those co-benefits, but fundamentally what we see is that this is a very high quality, very scalable, ultimately very cheap way [00:25:00] of permanently, hundreds of thousands of years timeframe, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

    And I think that that’s gonna be the funding model. The bottom line is we need. A huge amount of carbon removal. So we need enough carbon removal to get to the net in net zero, but we also need to be removing legacy emissions. None of this carbon removal stuff matters if we don’t reduce our emissions, but it’s too late to solely rely on that.

    30 years ago, we had done that and really sort of bent the curve downwards on emissions. We wouldn’t need to do a lot of carbon removal, but at this point it’s too late. We’re gonna lose so much if we don’t have carbon removal. As part of the portfolio of solutions, carbon removal has to become a $1.2 trillion market by 2050 if we want to hit our climate goals.

    That means that 10 years from now, we need to be scaling pretty rapidly on these technologies. There’s gonna have to be a lot of public funding that goes into this. We kind of have to think of this. I. Like waste management, how do we pick up the garbage that [00:26:00] we’ve put into the atmosphere as quickly and easily as we possibly can and as cheaply as we possibly can?

    And that that really is how the market has to eventually develop in terms of our technology. In particular, study after study, after study is showing that. This form of carbon removal is the most scalable and is the cheapest. The ocean is is really a global commons, and we have to be super, super cautious with the work that we do there.

    But once it starts to scale, it’s gonna go really quickly because it is such a scalable and low cost solution.

    Sonia Sennik: Our next guest is Jim Mann, founder and CEO of UNDO, a carbon removal company that aims to capture huge amounts of carbon dioxide from our atmosphere. UNDO was recently awarded $5 million for its enhanced rock weathering solution via XPRIZE.

    Jim Mann: So we did a lot of our early experimentation in the UK where we spread basal, which is a silicon mineral onto agricultural land.

    And then as we’ve started to scale up, [00:27:00] we focused much more on Canada where we are using a manual called tonite and applying that to active football. And farmers get a benefit from the application of minerals. It has a pH stabilizing and raising effect, which is good for farmers and it also absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere.

    Enhanced truck weathering is an open system, and in these complex systems it becomes very difficult to get accurate measurements. So we’ve had to develop and actually file patents on new techniques that enable us to empirically measure the removal of CO2 within that complex field environment. We give the minerals to farmers for free.

    They get all the benefits on their agricultural land, and as we generate carbon credits, we sell those carbon credits at a very reasonable price, which we sell to companies, the likes of British Airways, Microsoft, McLaren Racing, Barclays Bank, big organizations that have a footprint that they can’t avoid, and so they are [00:28:00] contributing to the removal of the emissions they’ve put out there.

    But the whole of that rural ecosystem is benefiting right along supply chain. In terms of the markets, I think this is very different to historic markets where we were looking more reduced emissions. Typically, this is your removal technology. We’re actually taking the CO2 back outta the atmosphere. I.

    And, um, as long as you can measure that and quantify that, I think we’ll build much more robust and credible markets. We’re starting to see regulators move towards that space and we can be confident about strong market going forward. I think in terms of the agricultural community, well, that’s why we structured the business model the way we have.

    They often see a benefit very, very quickly, both in terms of the pH and soil health, but also depending on what crop they’re growing, they can see a benefit in. The quality of that crop, and this is a measured quality standard that they get more money for as early as the first year of the application.

    So we don’t have to persuade them that the carbon [00:29:00] markets are a good thing. So it’s a very easy conversation for us. Our vision is to build an organization that can have a real impact on the world. We want to remove a billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. And this accelerates our progress towards that goal.

    Sonia Sennik: John, what an incredible set of conversations that showcased how many different people are taking so many different approaches to solving the problem of carbon removal.

    John Stackhouse: It’s remarkable to hear the extent and depth of science that’s going on, not just here in Canada, but around the world in this.

    Different kind of space race to figure out how we can capture all that carbon in the atmosphere and get it back into the ground and maybe into the ocean. It’s ambitious and we can’t assume that these technologies are gonna work or work at scale in the timeframe that we need. So we also have to focus on our own activities, whether it’s as consumers, citizens, or companies in pretty much all [00:30:00] sectors to get emissions down.

    I was also intrigued by some of the comments about measurement, which remains a bit of the Achilles heel. To be frank in all of this, there’s certainly lots of MRV systems emerging, but nothing in place now that people are willing to bet billions of dollars on to accelerate and scale what we need. So it’s not just the science, it’s the business models and the measurement reporting and verification models that all have to come together and have to come together pretty soon.

    Sonia Sennik: What an interesting marketplace. The carbon offset market is a multi-sided marketplace to ultimately support carbon removal, while big companies build large data centers and energy facilities to support our increasingly digital world. It’s an interesting way to take responsibility to counteract the carbon that’s being released into the atmosphere.

    And companies like Shopify, Disney, Stripe have all voluntarily committed to purchase carbon offset credits to get this marketplace going. I [00:31:00] cannot wait to see where we’re at five years from now.

    John Stackhouse: Five years in the span of the earth is just a blink of the eye, but it’s also a reasonable timeframe for us all to set for ourselves in terms of marking material progress in the science and technology that we’re doing, and.

    Who knows. Maybe we’ll be back at that time and hear from these innovators to see what they’ve done. This has been Disruptors, an RBC podcast. I’m John Stackhouse.

    Sonia Sennik: And I’m Sonia Sennik.

    John Stackhouse: Talk to you soon.



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