🔝 10 Climate Bites to Read this Week

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⚡ Carbon & Energy

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[17:36] “To add flexibility to the grid, what you really need is a dispatchable load that you can sort of fire up and say […] we need you to eat some of this power, or ramp down, we need more power. […] Getting that to become part of the grid infrastructure at scale has been challenging. There's lots of demand response things that are out there, industrial players participate in that and so forth. But what's interesting here is when you look at the nexus between crypto and renewable energy, it’s a really innovative way to solve some of these problems.”

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[4:44] “Planetary is […] a really innovative approach to what's called CDR or carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere. And […] what we do is we take the largest store of carbon on the Earth's surface, which is the ocean. And we enhance its ability by speeding up a natural process for it to take carbon dioxide out of the air and store it safely and permanently for 100,000 years at a time. And then side benefits that we get [are] decarbonisation benefits. So we produce hydrogen, and we produce battery metals at the same time that have a big decarbonization benefit on top of the carbon removal benefit, because we know we need to do both of those things.”

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[22:21] JZ: “We knew that the entire industry used […] petroleum or natural gas to derive this foam called EVA. […] There's 20 billion pairs of shoes sold around the world every year and so there's a huge impact that EVA is having as a component. It's probably number one or number two in terms of its ubiquity in the footwear industry from a component perspective. We went down to Brazil, and linked up with a bio chemicals company that could produce at scale, an EVA equivalent utilizing the waste stream from sugarcane production. And when doing that, it becomes a carbon negative material.”

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[27:31] “Long term […] CDR needs to become a commodity market. I don't think there's a mechanism to scale it otherwise. But along the way, I think what we'll see is hopefully […] a better monitoring and verification system that comes into place that could put up something like a leaderboard of what is the cheapest, actually delivered, genuinely real, high durability, carbon removal time. As they become more deliveries, this basically becomes like a spot price. And hopefully, carbon removal companies, if this thing is credible, and actually does a good job of knowing whether or not a ton has been delivered, are extremely aggressively competing to be at the top of the leaderboard, or the bottom of the spot price or whatever it may be. And you start kind of coalescing the community around the actual deliveries, which is kind of far from what most of the carbon removal discussion is about right now.

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[4:34] “The way that we've done it at RiseBoro has been to use passive house construction. Passive houses are a type of building that's been around for quite some time in Europe, and recently came back to the US in the last 10 years. And it's really all about insulation and air sealing. So if you have a really well insulated building that isn't leaky and is airtight, you can drastically reduce your loads in the building and then use far less energy. […] These are deeply efficient buildings that use anywhere between 60 and 80% less energy than a standard building.”

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[15:12] “Time and time again, I would see the same thing, which is that in this universe […] where the planet is basically on fire and we have no time, we're still f*cking around with sort of the traditional model of investing. There's a lot of classic debt, which is for late stage companies with collateral requirements, personal guarantees, all sorts of complexity, nine month underwriting process, you name it. And then on the other side of the market, you have VC. And there's grants and there's project finance. But if you look at corporate finance, there's this big empty hole, where people aren't really innovating, they're not really driving change. And in a world where we need to hit, call it four or five, some people say 10 trillion a year of investing, and we're seeing 600 billion flow into the market every year, that's a big open space, where a fairly significant transformation needs to happen.”

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[2:30] “In the United States in just eight years, from 1977 to 85, US oil use fell 17% while the economy grew 27%. Oil imports fell 50%. Imports from the Persian Gulf fell 87%. So America proved able to save oil faster than OPEC could sell less oil. And the cartel’s sales dropped by nearly half, breaking its pricing power for a decade. Per dollar of GDP, US oil use fell 35%, that's 5.2% a year. And such a pace could eliminate Europe's fuel imports from Russia in four years, just to put that in perspective. […] But now the US and much of the world could rerun that play only more effectively. And not just for oil, but also for gas and coal, because we have now much more powerful ways to save our fossil fuels.”

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[24:36] “[Frontier] is an advanced market commitment fund. […] The goal of an advanced market commitment is really to guarantee a viable market for a product that hasn't yet been developed. And it's a concept that's borrowed from vaccine development. […] We want to take that same concept of saying, if you build something, there's going to be a market and apply it to carbon removal, which faces a number of the same market failure problems.”

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💧 Food & Water

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[7:55] “The talking point from the industry has always been that plastic is inert, […] meaning it doesn't react. And in a way they're right. When plastic enters the environment, it breaks down so slowly, because it is inert. But inert doesn't mean non-toxic. And that has fooled people, regulators, scientists, the common citizen into thinking that it's safe. And we didn't really start learning that plastics are in our bodies until the past few years. And we didn't need to know whether or not it's inert to be concerned. The average person, whether they know a lot about toxicology or little is going to feel uneasy about having plastics in their lungs, in their blood, in their unborn children. […] We just haven't really started looking for it in the right places until just recently.”

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[4:41] “Mainly the challenge that […] I was trying to solve this feeling of needing open green space in cities and escape. And trying to solve the challenge of this extremely complicated system of doing any sort of renovation and retrofitting to your building. And so essentially, the idea was, can I do that structural upgrade, pair that with the permitting and the install, and basically offer a packaged rooftop transformation?”

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🏆 Top 10 Climate Bites to Read this Week

⚡ Carbon & Energy

💧 Food & Water

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