natural system climate intervention winners 10/17/2024
close to home
the winning climate companies that have physical effects to the environment (ie. any natural system climate intervention) are the ones with close community ties
without these ties, you do not win and arguably may be doing a disservice to the entire industry without proper community consultation (see sunsets setting the SRM field back for years with the enslaught of negative press... although maybe for the better. gives us more time to think about decarb/cdr if people are not distracted by bandages)
maybe the only time where nimbyism is justified. if someone dumped stuff into my backyard (even if it was good) without telling me, i’d be mad too
from the grapevine: it was not difficult to sell the community onto riving liming. didnt even need to mention carbon removal. “i am deacidfying our acidic river” - “ok lit!”
some things that may or may not be true: can you successfully scale with this model? or is it arguably not in the hands of a startup to do these interventions, but rather the community members themselves (with the assistance of a startup/non profit to guide them?)
right now i actually lean towards the startups. they are not going to be unicorns by any means, but they will find success in their own means; meaningful work, employ lots of people, and exist for the greater good. this is what a business is about. not about glamourous, baseless equity
that’s why it’s perplexing to see VC dollars in this space. what returns are you exactly expecting from these companies that exist for public good benefit? is it even morally correct to have a stake in a company that alters global climate? this proof is left as an exercise to the reader
another complexity is the scale of the natural systems themselves. community engagement peaking at ~50k people verses the hudson river. how do you successfully engage a large community to understand what is going on / even be aware of alterations?
it’s really interesting to see carbon credits pay for cobenefits (on top of cdr, of course). right now people are paying for the removal but there is no real quantification around the anti-acidification, the rising fish populations, and basically everything that the community wants (with carbon removal being the co-benefit/second of mind for them!
but no one will ever pay for the co-benefits beyond carbon removal. at least not now. so the existence of a carbon credit is a pretty neat thing.
i wonder if there are ways to influence the price of credits that also offer co-benefits to be more appealing than, say, a DAC ton… not necessarily trying to stir competition in the market. all quantifable tons are equal afterall. but some tons also bring you more fish
who pays for benefits? yea… implicit economic decline i guess… so that is the stick to pay for restoration. but instead the increased cost goes onto the consumer. so this sucks!
maybe a world where fisheries will subsidize a small percentage of a carbon credit (without being able to claim it for themselves) just so they can reap the co-benefits of increased yield
on a different note: are there ways to value CDR that don’t require knowing how much you removed? who is to say…
