In this business-focused episode of Carbon Removal Newsroom, we’re discussing the major carbontech funding announcements that occurred throughout September, along with the news from Norway’s $1.4 trillion sovereign wealth fund that they’ll be requiring their portfolio holdings to go net-zero.
This episode is hosted by Radhika Moolgavkar, Nori’s Head of Supply and Methodology, along with Holly Jean Buck, Assistant Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University at Buffalo. Plus, give a warm welcome to our new co-host for business-focused episodes: Susan Su, partner focused on climate investing at Toba Capital and course creator for Climate Change for VCs, a course and community through terra.do.
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We start the episode by discussing the news from Norway’s sovereign fund: with $1.4 trillion of assets, this fund is the world’s largest single holder of stocks, and is the latest pool of investment money using its influence to decarbonize the economy. The fund currently holds a position in several of the world’s largest oil companies, so achieving ‘net-zero’ may necessitate use of carbon offsets and carbon removal.
Meanwhile in the carbontech start-up world, the sustainable chemicals company Solugen announced $357 million of new investment in a venture round lead by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund as well as Blackrock, Carbon Direct, and others. Solugen makes chemicals out of sugars, as opposed to the fossil fuel inputs traditionally used by the highly emitting chemical industry. In the future, the company aims to use CO2 as a feedstock, potentially creating a vast new market for CO2 utilization.
Also in September, Prometheus Fuels announced a $1.5 billion valuation after a series B funding round led by shipping giant Maersk and BMW. Prometheus aims to sell ‘electro-fuels’ by capturing CO2 directly from the atmosphere, mixing it with water, and then using proprietary catalysts and filters to restructure the chemical bonds to create hydrocarbons. They also say their product will be cheaper than fossil fuels very soon.
Also, Droneseed’s $36 Million A valuation is more evidence that the carbontech space is hot.
On September 8th, Swiss company Climeworks held a launch event for their new Direct Air Capture facility named Orca in Hellisheidi, Iceland. Orca is now the world’s largest DAC plant and plans to capture and permanently sequester 4000 tonnes of CO2 per year, and turn it into basaltic rock.
Charm Industrial announced the delivery of 1000 tonnes of permanent carbon removal ahead of schedule using their bio-oil technology.
Finally, Holly Buck finishes the episode with a good news story of the week.
Full Transcript
Announcer: You’re listening to Carbon Removal Newsroom, a weekly show about current events in the world of carbon removal, from technology and innovation to policymaking and job growth. Brought to you by Nori, the carbon removal marketplace.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Hello, Carbon Removal Newsroom listeners. Thanks for joining us after a brief hiatus of the show. I hope you enjoyed last week’s panel interviews that we broadcast. We took a brief break because we’re going to try a new format moving forward. And we’re going to have three episodes a month and each will focus on a different area of carbon removal, policy, science, and business. Holly and I will be part of every show and we will have a rotating third host. So Chris will be back when we talk policy. Jane Zelakova from Colorado State University will be here on Science Week.
And this week we have our new host, Susan Su, for our business focus. Welcome, Susan. Thanks for joining us. Really happy you’re here. And Susan is a partner focused on climate investing at Tova Capital and a course creator and lead climate change for VC, a course and community through Terra. do. Holly Jean Buck is our erstwhile panelist and Assistant Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Buffalo. And I’m Radhika Moolgavkar, Head of Supply and Methodology at NORI. So welcome both. Thanks for joining.
Susan Su: Thanks so much for having us.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah. How are you doing, Holly?
Holly Jean Buck: I’m doing great. Thank you.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Good. With that, we’re going to jump into our first topic this week and I’ll let Susan introduce it. So Susan, floor is yours.
Susan Su: Yeah, great. Thank you, Radhika. So there’s some big news coming out of Norway this week, which is that the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund, which is one of the, I think it’s actually the largest single public equities asset holder in the world. They hold 1. 5% of all stocks and shares around the world as a single asset holder. So it’s Quite a large fund. They just announced a new plan requiring their portfolio holdings to go to net zero. So that is a really big deal. They didn’t specify, I think some of this is still being worked out.
They didn’t specify a certain timeline yet, but the fact that they are mandating a net zero commitment across all of their holdings is a pretty big deal considering their very influential position in the global public equities market.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah. So, I mean, I think their size begs the question, how is Does such a large fund achieve net zero and do they have to sell off their fossil fuel shares because they have a pretty significant number of fossil fuel shares is my understanding.
Susan Su: Yeah, so you know, the little bit ironically, the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund was actually originally seeded by oil and gas money, I think. Some folks might think this is obvious and this might be new to others. So its revenue originally has come from taxes on Norwegian petroleum, Norway’s vast petroleum industry. I mean, Norway is essentially A petro state in many ways, and yet its citizenry and increasingly now its government with the new Norwegian Labour Party that’s come to power has been turning more and more towards climate action. So it’s this kind of interesting tension that they’re handling.
So they actually sold off a really big tranche of their oil and gas holdings at the end of 2020. This was something that had been going on for a couple of years after Norway’s finance ministry recommended divestment actually as a hedge against price volatility. Not out of the goodness of their hearts, but basically to stop hemorrhaging money They nonetheless saw about $10 billion of losses across the oil and gas portfolio in that year, I guess, before they were able to offload the worst of the performers. But I think what’s really notable, and I think what some of the news gets wrong or kind of misses, is that this sell-off That wrapped up at the end of 2020 actually exempted many of the oil and gas majors who have more mixed businesses, meaning they do some renewables as well as as well as their core business in oil and gas.
So specifically, it excluded some of our household names in fossil fuels like Shell and Exxon and Equinor. And so those are still part of the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Funds portfolio, and they are going to be affected by this net zero pledge that they’ve made. And so to your question of how do they actually do this with such a large fund, are they going to be sort of selling off all of these holdings to get to net zero? The net zero announcement is more of a move that will put pressure on these remaining holdings and doesn’t necessarily signal immediate or ever divestment, which I think we should actually view those of us on the kind of climate action side should actually view as a very good thing.
They’re saying that they’re ready to become an activist investor that holds onto their seat at the table and uses it to exert pressure towards net zero activities. Then they’re saying that companies in their portfolio, including the ones that I mentioned earlier, We’ll need to have credible action plans, not that they need to be at net zero tomorrow or even ever, but that they need to have plans to get there. I think what’s really interesting is Harvard actually recently made some very similar moves. Harvard is the largest endowment in the US.
Saying that they would no longer invest in new fossil fuel assets and would let their old holdings, mainly through managed funds, managed private equity funds, would let those just kind of expire at their expiration dates. So I think that’s what’s really important to get clear is that divestment is not what they’re saying they’re going to do. And actually, that’s probably a good thing because we want them there to continue to exert pressure on these large oil and gas majors to move towards net zero.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, that’s a really good point. A little investor activism can go a long way. Well, and this isn’t obviously a little investor activism. Holly, I’m kind of curious about your response to this. I know you’re a resident oil and gas skeptic. And also what you see is, or if you see this potentially being an issue for the carbon removal space, if these big sovereign funds start exerting pressure by meeting net zero through purchases of carbon removal credits.
Holly Jean Buck: Well, I mean, I think a lot of us see this as kind of a belated move, like people have been watching, you know, why are they still holding in ExxonMobil or Chevron? So great. I think, you know, I’ll quote Larry Fink, which is not something I plan to do, but he... Mentioned to the G20 finance ministers a few months ago that divesting might move an individual company closer to net zero, but it does nothing to move the world closer to net zero. That’s not to pour cold water on all the movements that have done really important work in that space.
So I think divestment is one part of it, or even stepping back and requiring transparency that’s even more baseline, but We need to think too, what about these national oil companies? What are their off-ramps going to be in other parts of the world? Because you could have, like I’ve probably said, beating on this drum, but you can have some more progressive entities greening things up and other parts of the world falling behind. So how do we really move all of this forward across the globe? Really hard problem.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, definitely. So I’m also curious, Susan, do you see this as scalable to other large sovereign wealth funds or any indication that they may be considering these same things? And also what does the impact of a public equity like this have on private financing markets?
Susan Su: Yeah, sure. You know, funny you should mention other sovereign wealth funds. I think they’ll all kind of take Different versions of the same move. So Saudi Arabia very recently, I think about a week, week and a half ago, announced that their sovereign wealth fund, which is $430 billion, not nearly the size of Norway’s, but quite substantial nonetheless, was going to start focusing more on ESG, however they define that, but starting with green debt issuance. Saudi Arabia is a country that has long understood that it needs to diversify. They’ve been making large investments in technology as part of that over the past 10 years.
And now realizing that ESG can also be part of their broader portfolio. So it was actually really impressive to me that I think we should be skeptical of all this, but like some of these dates are kind of crazy to me. So Saudi Arabia’s head of the National Debt Management Center has said publicly that he sees 2022 as like a long term target, as like the kind of like minimum threshold target and that he could actually see some of that action activity happening even sooner. So I think that’s like a pretty interesting consideration as well as that it’s not just about holdings and divestment, but there’s a lot that these sovereign wealth funds can do in terms of investing in frontier technologies that are on the ESG side or issuing debt to fund infrastructure, whether that’s within their borders or elsewhere.
And that money is certainly needed and will be put to good use. And so unlocking these billions, trillions of dollars locked up in sovereign wealth funds towards those ends is actually going to be a highly productive effort, I think. So to your second question about are we going to start seeing this trickle? I guess, is it up or down? I don’t know which direction we would say that it is into the private markets. I mean, I think absolutely. Look, there’s really this misconception that public and private are kind of like these two bifurcated categories.
In reality, they are two ends of the same spectrum. Where public markets activity creates opportunities in growth equity, which then creates opportunities in early stage private equity, aka venture capital. When we see all of this kind of market pull on the public side, it creates not only exit opportunities through IPOs or SPACs, but also exit opportunities through really substantial mergers and acquisitions. And that in turn gives investors, whether that’s at the growth equity stage or at the early Stage venture capital kind of side of things. It gives investors a way to make back their money on these climate bets and it gives founders more opportunity to actually get funded and continue to kind of scale up their businesses.
You know, I think when we look at previous go rounds on what used to be called clean tech and has now been cleverly rebranded as climate tech. Financing risk, they’re all like so many types of risk that an early stage company faces, right? But financing risk is definitely not the least of them. And when it comes to climate tech, which often touches science, it touches hardware, it touches infrastructure, you need money to scale all that stuff up. And then you need, as part of needing money, you need a reliable source of money.
Aka a deep pocketed investor, not only at your seed stage, not only at your Series A, Series B, Series C, but all the way through to whatever your ultimate exit is going to be. And so I think that we’ll see fewer of these companies dying on the vine for lack of being able to secure funding in that very difficult kind of growth equity stage. Phase where historically climate tech companies have maybe struggled to secure financing. So I think that’s going to be one really material way that all of this ESG activity in the public markets is going to impact the earlier stage markets.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, so at some point I definitely want to come back to the whole Saudi Arabia and the green tech, but not today because you have just given us the perfect segue into topic number two, which is all the crazy Funding that is going on in the world of carbon tech, if you will, clean tech, maybe more broadly. So again, Susan, if you can kind of walk through some pretty significant funding announcements that have happened in the last few weeks, that’d be great.
Susan Su: Yeah. So it’s actually incredible because the ones that we’re going to mention are like all in the classic, like do not touch areas of venture capital and Chemicals, another one that’s in chemicals and then hardware. So solugin, which is, I guess, kind of like green chemicals. They make chemicals out of sugars instead of fossil fuels. And then eventually they can even use CO2 itself as a feedstock into their chemical process. They raised $357 million of new capital. I think the valuation was, I don’t have the notes in front of me here, but I saw the other day that it was north of $1.
5 billion, definitely north of a billion. I can’t remember if it was 1. 5 or 1. 3, but somewhere in that ballpark. Led by Singapore Sovereign Wealth Fund with participation from BlackRock and Carbon Direct and other investors. Right on the tails of that, Prometheus Fuels raised, we don’t know exactly how much, but their valuation was also across the billion dollar mark, over a billion and a half dollars in a series B round led by Maersk. And BMW. So what they do is capture CO2 directly from the atmosphere, mix it with water, and then do all sorts of science magic to actually create hydrocarbons directly from the direct air captured CO2.
So you kind of have this like circular net zero fuel that can potentially power a car or maybe a container ship. So the third one that we’ll just throw in there that was just announced this week is that drone seed, which operates heavy lift drones to reforest, to replant wildfire burned areas. And so I think that’s a really interesting thing that’s a large Series A, but also Prometheus and Solugin. I mean, those are like companies that, again, I would say five years ago, VCs would have said, oh, What excuse can I think of to say no to this?
My best excuse is I don’t know this space. Goodbye, like way too much risk on this. And it’s awesome to see them getting the capital that they need in order to scale up. Yeah, so that’s kind of like the summary of those funding announcements. But I think what’s really important about them is not just the size of those funding rounds, but more so kind of the nuances around it, which is one, the kinds of investors that are getting involved At these kind of like growth stages. So it’s sovereign wealth funds like Tomasek, who’ve actually been really active in climate, but it’s also BlackRock, you know, Carbon Direct is in there, obviously.
It’s essentially no longer These kind of early stage investors looking to make a 50X or even 100X return on a very high risk bet. But it’s these very boring kind of investment bank like entities. And actually that’s what’s really interesting to me. They’re looking to do like a sure bet 3X on this deal as opposed to like a moonshot 100X on some kind of seed deal. And I think that’s awesome because it signals a degree of boringness Around these businesses that I think is really, really healthy for this space. It’s telling the world that, hey, we think that Solugen, we think that Prometheus have a very, very good shot at getting to liquidity very soon.
And by the way, we’re ready to be their customers. Which leads me to that second point of, again, the investors who are involved is super important. These strategics are all a part of Prometheus. And I think there’s some potential partnerships that we’ll see down the road that help to bring incumbents like BMW and Maersk into a carbon neutral world. So, you know, for all the criticism that strategics can sometimes get in the world of venture capital, this is clearly a, truly a strategic rather than just a returns focused move for them.
And I think that we can read it as an indication of their long-term interest in this space.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Thanks. So Holly, curious, you know, do you, how you view these announcements and, but more importantly, I’m Wondering if you think that these are, they’re going to stay. Is the carbon tech revolution here to stay? I recently read a Wired article who kind of compared what’s happening now to internet 1. 0, lots of money flowing and exuberance, but potentially a bubble that’ll pop. Though I think Susan just made a very compelling argument why that’s not true, because it’s kind of boring money in it versus like hype money, if you will.
But kind of, Holly, what do you think? What are your thoughts about all this money flowing into the system?
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, I think these three companies that were mentioned are maybe in different, I’d consider them differently. So with the aerial seeding, That sounds really cool. I’m skeptical about how it will work. I think that growing new forests is complicated. But with Prometheus, I think this is really exciting. I think this is an example of something that will stay. So it’s basically a mitigation technology for aviation. And it’s something that the aviation industry needs clearly to develop sustainable aviation fuels. There’s going to probably be Increased regulation and pressure. So I think that’s something that’s like a lasting solution.
It’ll be expensive at first. Hopefully it’ll come down and really do what, you know, Prometheus says it wants to do is replace fossil oil and gas. And then cellogen, that’s really interesting because personally, I think we need not just an energy transition, but a materials transition. And so I’m excited to see more people thinking about that because I don’t want the strategy for the fossil fuel industry to just be like, okay, we’ll step back from fuels, but we want to ramp up our petrochemical businesses. I would prefer to see extraction, you know, finished and move to a circular economy.
So if we have options for that, I think that’s great. I think that’ll be a harder lift just because of the vested interests and maybe the structure of that industry.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, and this is sort of a question for both of you, but I’ll start with you, Holly, because I think it leads nicely from what you just said is, you know, these are companies that are trying to unseat large incumbent industries. What do you think their chances are of success? Holly, I’ll start with you then. Susan, love to get your thoughts too.
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, I think it depends on your theory of change. I’d like to be optimistic and say that they do have a chance because I think that, you know, the public is with them. I think that there’s a lot of people on the tech side that are with them. I think there’s certain investors that want to support this. So, you know, what do you do about Joe Manchin? I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know. I have some hope.
Susan Su: Yeah, I guess it sort of depends on how you define success too, right? I think there’s like a low, medium, high version of that. And, you know, how effective are they going to be in the short term in completely displacing incumbents in these sectors? Well, first of all, if you look at Solugin and Prometheus, they’re not trying to displace And so I think that’s actually really smart. And in terms of their ability to, you know, kind of edge out traditional petrochemicals or the traditional oil and gas industry, I don’t even think that’s really for them to work on.
I think that’s for the markets to start accurately pricing oil and gas. We mentioned earlier in this episode that the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund lost $10 billion in 2020 on its oil and gas holdings. That’s what is going to ultimately displace the oil and gas, the energy incumbents, not some upstart that’s making electro fuels from the air like magic. That’ll be helpful and it will provide some of the kind of scope three user base with a new alternative. So I think it’s more like, you know, how you think about what they ultimately can do and how high those expectations are.
I tend to think that there will be at least some degree of success given how many partnerships that they’ve kind of struck and signed. I tend to think that for their earliest stage investors, these will have been good companies to have invested in. For the folks that are like at the very much later stages, you know, again, looking for that 3x, we... Don’t know what all they’ve seen on the inside, but we should probably trust their underwriting since they’ve done a fairly good job managing their portfolios to date. And so if they believe that there’s a steady 3x coming from or 5x coming from solugin and Prometheus, then I’m willing to believe it too.
And just back to a comment that Holly made about drone seed, I think it’s a really great point. There’s a lot of controversy around just reforesting after wildfires and how effective that really is, whether that’s the right way to be focusing our energies and whether that’s the right thing to be compensating with these kind of ex-anti-carbon credits. That said, I will say that I think it’s interesting to note again to my previous point, who is in the deal, not just how much money was raised, but specifically which investors, which personas are participating and what that says about the company.
So in particular with Drownseed, we don’t have a bunch of strategics. These kind of very high flying, classically Silicon Valley investors looking to make their bet in climate tech. And I think that’s great. There’s nothing wrong with that. But I also think that it would probably have said something different about the company if there had been a bunch of climate tech investors in there. Or folks that were maybe from the lumber industry or other folks that had invested heavily in carbon markets. And we’re not seeing that. So I think that’s also part of the read that you have to take on that particular deal.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And spoiler alert for our listeners, next week during our Science Talk segment, we will be talking a little bit more about reforestry efforts and their Controversial nature, as Susan and Holly both alluded to, and whether reforesting a monoculture is the same as reforesting a forest. So stay tuned for next week when Jane joins us. Finally, or nearly finally, Holly, can you kind of walk us through these recent more carbon removal specific business announcements from both Climeworks and Charm Industries?
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, so I’ll start with Charm Industrial. They, earlier this month, announced that they delivered 1,000 tonnes of permanent carbon removal ahead of schedule to Shopify, who is their buyer. And so they inject bio oil made from pyrolyzed sawdust and corn remnants into underground geologic formations. And that’s exciting because it’s, you know, I mean, I find Shopify’s strategy here just generally pretty exciting of Trying to focus on this permanent carbon removal, which some other actors are doing too. And so Climb Works on September 8th held this launch event for their new direct air capture facility, which is also permanent carbon removal.
This is in Iceland. The facility is named Orca. And it’s now the world’s largest direct air capture plant. And it is going to permanently sequester 4,000 tonnes of CO2 per year. So partnerships with Microsoft, Shopify again, and Swissme, and 8,000 private individuals supported that. And some people are like, oh, well, it’s only 4,000 tonnes and we need gigatonnes, right? But I think that’s the wrong way to read this particular launch. I think that this was significant in that it’s kind of a blueprint for how direct air capture could be. I mean, it’s permanent sequestration and it’s run with renewable energy.
There’s some really like Positive things and it gives a tangible example to people about what this could look like. It’s kind of how to do it right. And the second thing that’s notable about this is they had a lot of politicians on board. It was a pretty high profile launch. So, you know, the prime minister of Iceland spoke and she said, decarbonization is the most important thing for net zero, but it isn’t enough. We need to deploy direct air capture technologies at a large scale to reach those goals. And so that’s significant because it’s like a high level buy-in to the concept itself, some of the highest level buy-in we’ve seen.
So pretty excited about that, even though it is 4,000 tonnes.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Could you expand a little bit, because you briefly touched on it, why you are excited about Stripe and Shopify’s strategic choice? I mean... They could do forestry based offsets at $10 a tonne. Why are they choosing to buy things at direct air capture for eight or $600 a tonne?
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I mean, basically because they’re looking forward, they’ve read the IPCC reports about the climate math and they’re thinking about how do we kickstart a whole industry and get to where we need to be in 2030, 2050. So they’re playing this really important role. I wish there was more money and then more effort going into it besides a few million dollars here and there from these companies that are basically More like philanthropy than, you know, investment at this point, but that’s a good first step in the absence of concentrated government funding, which I think we need more of.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So Susan, yeah, I’m curious whether you think this, these kind of proof of concept announcements will garner more interest from the business community and will they start investing and More of these direct air capture type facilities? Or do you think, as Holly said, we need more government intervention and government funding to really show direct air captures metal before the business community will jump in?
Susan Su: I think the business community is like already all over DAC, particularly at the early stage kind of venture side of things because it’s really sexy. It’s like technological. There’s a lot of fits all around. And I will note that Peter Reinhart, who’s the co-founder of Charm is also the CEO simultaneously of Segment, which is one of the best known Marketing analytics companies used by pretty much every tech company seed to series B around. And so he’s doing like a Jack Dorsey here, basically. And I think that’s really he has a he’s very well regarded.
He has a great reputation in his own right as the founder of an analytics company. And now he’s doing this other crazy thing. He’s got all these relationships already in Silicon Valley and he has a lot of well-earned respect. As an entrepreneur. So I think that other folks who maybe know him from his other life are intrigued and excited and happy to support him over here, even if they don’t fully understand the landscape or even understand necessarily all of the science behind CHARM. So, but, you know, to Holly’s point, you know, government support, government intervention is just going to be completely necessary.
You know, this has already been widely cited, but with everything from EVs via Tesla to solar and wind to other frontier technology like nuclear or even rockets, All of these have really leaned heavily on government money, non-dilutive government money and door opening to get to scale. So it’s great to get to your first 4,000 tonnes and your first couple of customers, but ultimately the way that these technologies solve any problem is when they are at scale. So whether we’re talking about direct air capture or some other type of carbon removal, Or carbon utilization, whatever it is.
We’re talking about a combination of science, hard tech, and infrastructure deployment, and it is going to need government support.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So one thing that I often wonder about, and maybe one or both of you have a thought about this, is when I work in the nature-based solutions side of the world, There are usually other benefits and other economic benefits that come from participating. So if you’re doing soil ag, you’re getting better yields, your soil is healthier. So the carbon credit is only one part of an overall economic model. What I don’t understand about like the charms and the climb works of the world Is what is their economic model outside of carbon credits?
Is there one that I’m missing or do we really need carbon credits to be at a certain value for their models to work longer term? Any thoughts? I’ve silenced the room.
Susan Su: I’m happy to jump in. I mean, if you’re talking about carbon removal purely Through these technological means, no, I don’t think there are a lot of other co-benefits aside from carbon removal. You’re not talking about carbon removal and then subsequent utilization. You’re talking about carbon removal and then storage. And so it is ultimately a cost center. And so like when we’re talking about how do we price that, you know, it’s hard to think of other Business models that they can kind of tack on aside from selling credits for the work that they’re doing.
And I guess like maybe cynically, one co-benefit of supporting these technologies is that we can, you know, to a certain extent, Continue living our lives, our comfortable carbon intensive lives as they are and have, you know, these machines kind of working or these processes working in the background to clean up the mess. And we don’t necessarily have to go through a kind of belt tightening process, which most people are not too excited about, particularly in the developed world.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Holly, anything you want to add to that?
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I mean, I think the model that we should be advocating for is for these to be public utilities with full transparency and we need, you know, fees on pollution that fund the public utilities. And we need to design it all in a way that doesn’t hit the poorest, the worst in terms of driving up costs for everything.
Radhika Moolgavkar: All right. Well, I think this is a topic that we’ll probably come back to because it’s pretty interesting and I would love to unpack it a little bit more, but we’re running out of time. So I want to end with what I always like to end with, which is some good news in the climate space. So Holly, you’re on this week.
Holly Jean Buck: Well, we have a finalized new climate rule that cuts the use of greenhouse gases used in home refrigerators and air conditioners. So the EPA now has a program to cut the use of hydrofluorocarbons by 85% over the next 15 years. Long overdue. I’m glad we’re going to do it.
Radhika Moolgavkar: All right. And with that, Polly, as always, lovely to have you and Susan. Quite amazing to have you today. Love your perspective and all that you bring to the show. Thank you both. And we’ll see you two together in a few weeks. Bye.
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