Last month Stripe announced a major initiative to support carbon removal. Last week Shopify followed suit. What is going on in tech that is helping carbon removal get so much traction? Nori CEO Paul Gambill joins the show to help explain.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to Carbon Removal Newsroom. I’m Ross Kenyon, lead strategist with the Nori Carbon Removal Marketplace. Today I have with me Paul Gamble, CEO of Nori. We saw a big announcement late last night, thought it was time to do it first thing in the morning, get an episode out and talk about what’s happening in the world of high tech and carbon removal. So Paul, what has been happening? What am I alluding to?
Paul Gambill: There have been a couple major announcements by a couple major companies that are involved in e-commerce, Stripe and Shopify, who have made very large, splashy commitments to spend money on removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Ross Kenyon: That is a big deal. We have been waiting for stuff like this for a long time, and now it seems to be just an avalanche of stuff. I think more to come, right?
Paul Gambill: Yeah, I mean, this is super exciting for us because this is what we foresaw. And so we built Nori to be able to service that demand. And now we have these big, big companies making really, really audacious commitments to pay for doing so.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s gigantic. Well, why don’t we walk through a little bit of the specifics of each of these. Stripe has made certain types of commitments. Shopify now has as well. What do we know about both of these programs?
Paul Gambill: Well, it started a couple of weeks ago when Stripe put out an announcement that they wanted to pay for removing carbon because they wanted to push the industry to bring the cost down of removing carbon and try to push others in.
Unknown speaker: Kudos, Stripe. That’s a big deal. Any price per ton just to get carbon removal going. That’s a meaningful commitment.
Paul Gambill: Yeah, they’re acknowledging that some of the more very permanent methods of storage, like direct air capture into mineralization, is still quite expensive. Hundreds of dollars, if not over $1,000 per ton. So they want to show up with the demand to help drive that price down.
Ross Kenyon: And what about Shopify?
Paul Gambill: So Shopify followed suit yesterday with a nearly identical announcement. So they said, and I’m quoting again, Shopify commits to spending at least $5 million, US dollars, annually to fight for our environment. They broke that up into a few different categories. But the relevant one here is that they will be buying $1 million of sequestered carbon annually at any price. Shopify is committed to investing that money into carbon sequestration, and their goal is to kickstart the demand and predictability of this market so industrial engineering can scale and the price can come down.
Ross Kenyon: Cool. That is very exciting. Why this sector? Why do they care about carbon removal all of a sudden?
Paul Gambill: Well, in Shopify’s case, they’re in e-commerce. So as e-commerce industry has been growing, people are getting many, many more packages delivered to their door. I do this. You do this. Probably all of you listeners are getting a lot more packages delivered than you used to do maybe 10 years ago. And those packages require a lot of emissions in order to get them to your door. So Shopify is recognizing that their entire business model makes a rather large and outsized impact on the amount of carbon going into the air.
Ross Kenyon: They could have supported just conventional offsets. They could have done a number of insetting programs with a beating with inside of their supply chain. Why go outside of it to carbon removal?
Paul Gambill: So in their announcement, they do say that they are... They are planning to power 100% of their global operations with renewable energy by 2020. And they’ll be offsetting all travel related emissions too. But in their announcement, they went out of their way to talk about the difference between carbon offsetting and carbon removal. So I’m going to quote them again here.
Ross Kenyon: This is Shopify?
Paul Gambill: This is Shopify, yeah. Plus, carbon offsets don’t often reduce carbon in the air. At best, they slow emissions. At worst, they fund ineffective projects. Even if we could offset all future emissions, there’s still too much in the air right now. Offsets are better than nothing, but they’re not good enough.
Ross Kenyon: I love it when we see Nori rhetoric mirrored. I have no idea which direction the causality runs. If we were just picking up on something in the ether or if someone read something that we did or if this is now just becoming mainstream. I don’t know where exactly it falls. But I love it in any of those cases.
Paul Gambill: I think it’s a mix of all of those, most likely. I mean, as I was reading the Shopify announcement, it was just fun because it seemed like I was reading the Nori white paper. It’s basically the same perspective and point of view on this. So I’m really excited to see that. And I fully expect to see many more companies following suit. This is not going to stop with just these two tech companies. These are dominoes falling. And this is part of a larger trend that the world’s moving towards.
Ross Kenyon: What do you think happens inside of these sustainability offices at big companies? Because clearly they want like the value to their brand of being seen as supporting something that’s cutting edge and more effective seems like why they would support a lot of something like carbon removal, right?
Paul Gambill: Yeah, I think that we’re in a really transitional moment right now. So for the past 20 years, there have been some pretty small scale experiments in creating carbon offsetting, carbon offsetting markets. The amount of offsets that have ever been sold is minuscule in comparison to the total amount of emissions over that time. So we’ve learned a lot of lessons from the way that those markets have run and it’s time to build the next generation. Create solutions that actually remove carbon dioxide from the air. And there’s a growing recognition from sustainability officers, from consumers, from employees of companies like the employees at Amazon who are organizing walkouts next week.
There’s just a growing recognition all around the world that we have to move on to removing carbon from the atmosphere.
Ross Kenyon: Well, that’s great. So then you think this is the beginning of a trend. We’re going to see a lot more of this.
Paul Gambill: Absolutely. This is like when I started working on the concept of what might eventually become NORI back in 2015, I was looking at it and thinking, well, emissions are high and going up and we’ve emitted way too much already. So it seems to me, it seems fairly obvious that the demand for removing carbon is only ever going to increase. It’s like a business model that can’t fail. Of course people are going to want to pay for removing carbon dioxide because they will have to. So this is just the beginning of getting a large number of people rallied around this cause.
Ross Kenyon: Have you seen any rumblings or are you willing to make any predictions on who might follow Shopify and Stripe?
Paul Gambill: Well, the technology companies and the technology industry is where I see a lot of the movement happening here. And I think that there are some cultural causes for that. For one, many of these companies employ people who tend to hold value. That are more aligned with socially conscious actions like dealing with their environmental footprints, dealing with their waste, dealing with their emissions. People who work in the technology industry, I won’t say this for every single person, But I think as a general rule, people in the technology industry are doing so because they want to make the world a better place.
And so the idea of removing carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere in order to help solve climate change very much aligns with that. So we’re seeing companies being pushed by their employees, by their shareholders and by their customers to take action. And they’re responding in kind.
Ross Kenyon: Well, terrific. I hope you’re right. I hope you see more of it. I think you’re onto something and I think that is a trend. So we’ll keep our eyes peeled for more announcements. Hopefully they’re fast and frequent. That’s my hope. I hope we can do many more shows about this.
Paul Gambill: I would love to do many more shows about these announcements. These are easy shows to produce too. So I don’t mind.
Ross Kenyon: Great. Well, is there anything I didn’t ask you that I should have?
Paul Gambill: No. We’re good.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. Well, thank you. That was Paul Gamble, CEO of Nori. Thanks so much for listening. If you like what we’re doing here, please rate and review us on iTunes or Apple Podcasts. Also on Stitcher, we’ve been using that lately to get our reviews up. So thank you if you have reviewed us. I saw some new ones go up. And thank you so much for listening.
