On Monday, climate tech startup Isometric launched a publicly accessible platform to vet the science behind the growing number of startups pulling carbon from the atmosphere.
Carbon removal will be key to staving off catastrophic global warming in the coming decades. It also has the potential to be a US$1 trillion industry, according to BloombergNEF estimates.
But while a growing number of startups are promising to do so, the emerging industry has no widely agreed upon standards or shared protocols, or methodology for assessing how much CO2 was removed by their processes. Isometric is one of a number of companies attempting to change that. As the industry attempts to scale and commercialize, experts agree that it’s critical that startups selling carbon removal services establish robust measuring, reporting and verification techniques to prevent greenwashing.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The London and New York-based startup, which also announced on Monday that it raised a US$25 million seed round led by Lowercarbon Capital and Plural, is launching its carbon registry later this year that will list only fully verified, delivered credits from what it deems long-duration carbon removal suppliers.
As a precursor, Isometric released an online science platform, which is free and available to anyone who wants to review or contribute. On the site, scientists and researchers are able to view and comment on data provided by carbon removal startups, which could range from early test results to a visualization of their removal processes. The goal of the platform is to accelerate early carbon removal science in part by making it easier for scientists to collaborate, according to founder and chief executive officer Eamon Jubbawy.
“The thing about academia is there’s a very rigorous way of doing things. The peer review process and things like that are decades old and work pretty well, but they are slow,” Jubbawy said. “It’s a months-long cycle of getting to answers or getting to some kind of consensus versus what we want to do is get that cycle down to days or even hours.”
The science platform has launched with six carbon removal companies that are providing data: Charm, Eion, Mission Zero, Planetary, Brilliant Planet and Andes. Jubbawy said others are lined up to join in the coming months. By sharing early versions of their protocols for review, these startups are able to gather feedback from the wider scientific community as well as help buyers understand their processes.
“[Isometric’s work is] important because we need to know if the money that we are spending on carbon removal is having an effect on the carbon cycle or not,” said Ryan Orbuch, a partner at Lowercarbon who leads the firm’s carbon removal work. “That’s the reason that any of this is worth doing.”
He compared creating a registry to providing buyers a receipt saying the tons of carbon they paid to have removed from the atmosphere were actually grabbed and stored.
Currently, no such registry is equipped to support the young industry, Orbuch said. Traditional carbon offset registries like Verra and Gold Standard have not only been plagued by controversy around over-crediting projects and generating junk offsets that don’t contribute to emissions reductions, they’ve also not yet embraced carbon credits for newer forms of removal like direct air capture and enhanced rock weathering. To date, most carbon removal purchases of this variety have through been private agreements between buyers and suppliers, with the suppliers only beginning to provide third-party verified CDR services to their first corporate buyers.
“We see [Isometric] as an accelerant to the trajectory of high-quality, durable carbon removal,” Orbuch said, while calling the firm a potential “referee of the industry.”
A role like that will be increasingly important as the carbon removal industry attempts to scale up. Limiting warming to 1.5C will likely require removing billions of tons of carbon from the air, but that only makes a difference if it actually happens.
Last month historian Stephen Wertheim of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published an opinion piece in the New York Times with suggestions for an “America First” foreign policy for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Of course China and Taiwan received a mention. “Under presidents Trump and Biden,” Wertheim contends, “the world’s top two powers have descended into open rivalry, with tensions over Taiwan coming to the fore.” After complaining that Washington is militarizing the Taiwan issue, he argues that “In truth, Beijing has long proved willing to tolerate the island’s self-rule so long as Taiwan does not declare independence
Big changes are afoot in global politics, which that are having a big impact on the global order, look set to continue and have the potential to completely reshape it. In my previous column we examined the three macro megatrends impacting the entire planet: Technology, demographics and climate. Below are international trends that are social, political, geopolitical and economic. While there will be some impact on Taiwan from all four, it is likely the first two will be minor, but the second two will likely change the course of Taiwan’s history. The re-election of Donald Trump as president of the US
Nov. 25 to Dec. 1 The Dutch had a choice: join the indigenous Siraya of Sinkan Village (in today’s Tainan) on a headhunting mission or risk losing them as believers. Missionaries George Candidus and Robert Junius relayed their request to the Dutch governor, emphasizing that if they aided the Sinkan, the news would spread and more local inhabitants would be willing to embrace Christianity. Led by Nicolaes Couckebacker, chief factor of the trading post in Formosa, the party set out in December 1630 south toward the Makatao village of Tampsui (by today’s Gaoping River in Pingtung County), whose warriors had taken the
The Mountains to Sea National Greenway (山海圳國家綠道) draws its name from the idea that each hiker starting at the summit of Jade Mountain (玉山) and following the trail to the coast is like a single raindrop. Together, many raindrops form life and prosperity-bringing waterways. Replicating a raindrop’s journey holds poetic beauty, but all hikers know that climbing is infinitely more appealing, and so this installment picks up where the last one left off — heading inland and uphill along the 49.8-kilometer Canal Trail (大圳之路) — second of the Greenway’s four sections. A detailed map of the trail can be found
RSS