Millions of dollars are pouring into startups with plans to turn climate pollution into cash, despite trouble on the horizon for the nascent carbon removal sector.
The recent flurry of support — from the Frontier buyers club, the startup accelerator AirMiners, and the Japanese firm JX Nippon Oil and Gas Exploration — comes as some energy companies and financial institutions have watered down their commitments to limit global warming. Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump has promised to rollback federal climate subsidies if he wins the election — some of which have benefited carbon removal startups.
James Lawler, the founder of the New York-based enhanced rock weather startup Anvil, said those potential challenges won’t undermine an emerging industry focused on sucking carbon dioxide from the sky.
“We think about this as a very long range problem, and a lot the buyers in the space and investors in the space are thinking along similar lines,” he said Tuesday on a call with reporters organized by Frontier, a consortium mainly funded by Google, Stripe and other tech companies. “The amount of CO2 we have to remove from the atmosphere is not going to change based on a changing administration.”
