Stripe's Frontier initiative

Cristina Bunea
9 replies
Yesterday Stripe announced a $925M advance market commitment (AMC) in an attempt to accelerate carbon removal. What are your thoughts? What interesting companies / projects do you know in the space? https://twitter.com/stripe/status/1513850236929822722

Replies

Bogdan Bocse
Hmmm ... My first thoughts are - ”this is probably just another marketing stunt by the big players, to keep from falling from the graces of the market” - the combined valuation of those companies is well over one trillion dollars - the fact that they are investing less than _one in one thousand of their valuation_ in a critical problem of the planet they monopolize Internet technology on sounds somewhere between ”too little, too late” and ”not even trying” - ”I think Cristina is trying to score some cheap content by crowdsourcing questions to the network” :) My second thoughts are that environmental sustainability, including carbon removal, needs some more drastic, creative solution than just ”let's use one per thousand from the new money that gets printed". An example of such economic solution, with deeper implication in terms of finance and financial management protocols, is described here https://bit.ly/Tensor-Currency If your can tell me more about the objectives of your research, maybe I can help out with additional resources :) If you are genuinely interested to drill down into the duties of technology companies regarding environmental and cultural stability, I'd be happy to jump on a call. I sent out a Linkedin invite also Best regards, Bogdan@Knosis.ai
Sarah Wright
I think it's a very captalistic approach to carbon removal — and for all my issues with capitalism, I'm not ruling it out as promising solution (I do also think Stripe and Meta leadership are celebrating too early). Curious what others think about the model, other than the fact that it's a drop in the bucket for these companies. I like that they're taking the lead from models followed successfully by UNICEF and the World Bank. Usually, it's the other way around when it comes to international development.
Nik Hazell
Zappi Ad Predictor
Zappi Ad Predictor
Whilst I certainly don't think that we should take the blame away from the biggest polluters - governmental policy, petrochemical companies, and various others - I also don't think we should down-play the impact that we; the consumers, capitalists, (co)founders, can have. I think this kind of things is pretty exciting.
Alvaro Luis Campos
Sorry Cristina, I just totally agree with Bodgan. I just would like to remaind that Germany decided to spend 100 billion euros in defense this year and 2% of his budget in the next years. It is hard to beliefe that such an important problem, is so disregarded, except if I was wrong all the time and climate change is just a hoax to keep poor countries without access to their own resources.
Bill Hash
As i said all bullshit
Girish Jain
Happy to see such initiatives! We need the awareness and more corporate sponsorships for carbon removal..
Roberto Oliveros
I have some carbon removal devices back home if they are interested. Splendid technology, they even reproduced themselves, they only need some water and sunlight.
Imène M
Thank you for the prompt Cristina. The latest edition of Azeem Azhar newsletter, Exponential view, provides a compelling graph to summarize the matter. https://www.exponentialview.co/e... The decarbonation levers according to the last IPCC report are compared to the amounts invested by VCs over the last 2 years. --> blatant mismatch, especially when it comes to biodiversity restoration/preservation. After 10 years in the #Impact Investing space, I have sooo many questions about this initiative: - EFFECTIVENESS: how effective and efficient the solutions funded will be? - TIME SCALE: how they will balance deep-tech uncertain long term solutions vs low-tech immediately available cost-efficient solutions? - GREENWASHING: will it not be used as a green pass to keep on growing consumption (when the IPCC insists on the need for significant behavioural changes on the demand side)? - CARBON MARKETPLACE: will it become a massive carbon offset marketplace, given the leverage of the founding partners in global economy cash flows?