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).
Bankers make money by investing in bankable projects. Accordingly, they have plenty of technical experts on staff--especially the VCs and investment banks, who are in a higher risk position.
Do they? The 'experts' have the built in bias of 'if I tell them that the entire banking system (and probably the bank they work for) has been hugely influential in bringing the climate crisis to where we are today, I could get fired'.
This bias toward pleasing the usually short term financial interests of the shareholders and executives of the bank, means the 'experts' may hold back on telling hard truths (or searching for them).
Still seems like lots of opportunities for greenwashing, but as my follow up said, maybe that's the best they can do under the current system, I don't know.
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.
Bankers make money by investing in bankable projects. Accordingly, they have plenty of technical experts on staff--especially the VCs and investment banks, who are in a higher risk position.
Do they? The 'experts' have the built in bias of 'if I tell them that the entire banking system (and probably the bank they work for) has been hugely influential in bringing the climate crisis to where we are today, I could get fired'.
This bias toward pleasing the usually short term financial interests of the shareholders and executives of the bank, means the 'experts' may hold back on telling hard truths (or searching for them).
Still seems like lots of opportunities for greenwashing, but as my follow up said, maybe that's the best they can do under the current system, I don't know.
I guess she does go into the grant type program. I suppose that's maybe the best they can do at the present until governments get their act together.
And I guess the bankers can lean on the expertise of the experts who had to approve the PPA (or whatever it's called).