The ramifications of Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse two weeks ago are still rippling across the global economy. SVB was a major lender to VCs, and served silicon valley: two factors that meant its rapid demise will affect the climate tech industry.
SVB worked with 1550 climate tech companies, and gave the industry billions in loans.
Other banks may fill the void to support this lucrative sector, but many carbon removal companies are now spending time figuring out their financial stability, rather than developing their CDR products.
Peter Reinhardt, Founder and CEO of Charm Industrial, told Semafor that “…the SVB collapse will cause a one to two-quarter delay on a lot of things in climate tech. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you look at how much needs to get deployed in the next decade, losing half a year is really not good.”
The business panel also discusses some other recent CDR business news:
South Korea’s announced carbon exchange
a new alliance of carbon removal companies
Na’im’s work as the ED of the brand-new org Carbon Removal Canada
On This Episode
Na’im Merchant
Susan Su
Radhika Moolgavkar
Resources
NYT Article on SVB’s climate lending
Semafor Article w/ Reinhardt quote
Na’im on diverse sources of funding
South Korea’s new carbon exchange
Giana Amador
Carbon Removal Canada jobs- work with Na’im!
Subscribe to Climate Workers Anonymous
My other show, Reversing Climate Change
Books referenced in the podcasts, at Bookshop
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, everybody. We are here on March 23rd, 23, so kind of a cool number 32323. [music] Talk about carbon removal news in a business sense. So with me as always is Susan Su, who is a partner focused on climate investing at Toba Capital. She also serves as a board member at the Carbon Business Council and a board advisor to the Environmental Voter Project. Hello, Susan.
Susan Su: Hello.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And as always, we also have Na’im Merchant, who is the new executive director of Carbon Removal Canada, which he’ll talk about at the end. A new climate nonprofit focused on advancing inclusive policies and innovations to scale up carbon removal in Canada. In addition, he runs the Carbon Curve podcast and newsletter on the policies and technologies needed to grow the carbon removal market. Naeem, thanks for being here in the midst of all this.
Na’im Merchant: Good to be with you both.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And as always, I’m Radhika Moolgavkar, Head of Supply and Methodology at NORI. So unless you’ve had your head in the sand or been on a desert island, everybody has heard about the Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse two weeks ago, and its impact is still rippling through the global economy. SVB was a major lender to VCs and served Silicon Valley, two factors that meant its rapid demise will have probably an outsized impact on the climate tech industry. SVB worked with 1,550 climate tech companies and gave the industry billions in loans. The bank’s collapse has threatened payrolls, the ability of startups to pay suppliers, and could stall deployment of new infrastructure.
Other banks may fill the void to support this lucrative sector, but many carbon removal companies are now spending time figuring out their financial stability rather than developing their CDR products. Peter Reinhart, founder and CEO of Charm Industrials, Said that the SVB collapse will cause a one to two quarter delay on a lot of things in climate tech. Maybe that doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you look at how much needs to get deployed in the next decade, losing half a year is really not good. So we’re going to jump in and talk a little bit about SVB.
We’ll start with Susan to just give us maybe a big picture focus on what have you seen in the world of climate tech generally since the collapse of SVB.
Susan Su: There’s been a lot happening. It touches not only climate tech, but also, you know, broadly all of tech and actually the entire financial sector. If you want to zoom way out, I don’t think we have time to get into all of that today, but I do think that SVB was, first of all, man, it just sucks because SVB did a really great job at what they were good at and they made mistakes at things that they weren’t good at, but Regardless, there are many thousands of people that will be kind of permanently affected on the employee side, even as the deposits have been made liquid, made recoverable again by the federal government.
But yeah, I mean, in the acute term, there were a lot of companies scrambling and spending, a lot of founders dealing with a lot of stress and spending their time that they would otherwise be spending Running their companies or fundraising or doing something else essential to the operation of their toward their mission, spending that on, you know, trying to move money from their bank. So there is that impact that lost time that will never get back. Also, a lot of that money has been moved. And even though, you know, SVB is kind of trying to revive itself and book itself as the safest place to store your money now, a lot of people are not totally trusting that.
And so there’s a lot of continual, I think, flight to safety in terms of where companies and Funds and GPs and individuals. It’s like so many different types of entities that are, so many different types of depositors, I should say, that are implicated in all this. There’s a big change in where all of that energy is headed. So everybody’s, you know, opening up an account or has been opening up an account at JPMorgan Chase over the last couple of weeks. The folks at JPMorgan Chase That I happen to know have been, and this is like unheard of working around the clock on the weekends.
And like, you don’t take a job at JP Morgan so that you can work on Sunday afternoon or Sunday night and Saturday night, by the way, and Sunday morning. And yet they have been. And so that’s another kind of big change that’s happening. I have also found that at some of these more established kind of like really large banks, folks are not as, and we’ve seen this all over Twitter too, but I’ve also seen it in my own conversations, folks are just not as familiar with these like very like, Illiquid, cash-burning business models that are, aka startups, and especially aka climate tech startups, which are even more capital intensive in some cases, and even longer timeline to revenue than, let’s say, a SaaS company.
And so there’s a little bit of like a, I guess, an awkward getting to know you period that I think we’re still in right now. Um, so that’s, that’s another impact that’s being felt, but I think that the bigger thing, and then I’ll just maybe stop after this is I, you won’t see this in the, um, in kind of like the big headlines on mainstream media because they’re focused on reporting on the news here now. But I think the bigger question to be asking ourselves is where are we in the macro cycle and what does that mean for climate tech companies?
Last year we had the IRA that was a boon. Suddenly all this money is going to be coming in supposedly coming from the federal government, but you know we’ve been having these rate hikes now people are really spooked in the financial sector, are they going to be deploying money into. Very liquid high risk asset classes, such as venture capital, and in particular, such as climate venture over the next few years. There’s all this dry powder from still from 2021 and somewhat from the beginning of 2022, but I just think a lot of the news focuses on this week, next week, this month, maybe next month, but what about later this year?
What about 2024? A lot of the companies that we’re talking about in climate tech and in particular in carbon removal, they’re not one week, two week, couple quarter companies. They’re on very, very long cycles. And so these founders and operators and their investors have to think about what is the financial outlook going to be and what is the financing picture going to be for them in 2025 or six or seven? And things get murkier and murkier, but they also are now not looking as, they’re looking even worse than they were previously, in my opinion.
Not to be a pessimist, but just being real.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So Naeem, I’m curious after hearing Susan’s analysis and knowing that you work pretty, you’ve worked with a lot of CDR startups, particularly DAC startups who obviously have a long timeline and very intensive capital buildups. What is your reaction to what she said, and how do you see it maybe playing out more within this more narrow CDR space, these larger macroeconomic conditions we’re getting into?
Na’im Merchant: Well, I think Susan makes a really strong point around the impact that this is going to have on the broader climate tech field. We’re talking about not SaaS companies, but companies that have a long lead time. And that is particularly problematic for capital intensive new carbon removal companies that don’t have a very clear business model that sometimes don’t have, you know, a clear path to generating any kind of revenues in the in the near term. You know, you can make the argument with a lot of other climate technologies that long term, you know, these projects or these new technologies are going to come down the cost curve.
They’re going to be competitive with their, you know, the traditional technologies that they’re replacing. Carbon removal is a public good, essentially. And so as a public good, you know, it’s going to, it’s going to, I think, feel the impact of something like this. Uh, much more acutely, um, especially as we get kind of, you know, investors that want to see a return on investment. Uh, I think we’re going to see, you know, a real challenge there for CDR companies to, to, um, uh, to make a strong case for why they’re, you know, that’s where investors should be deploying capital relative to everything else that’s out there.
So within climate tech, I think CDR could be in, in more trouble than, than the rest of the space.
Susan Su: And I think that investors have always wanted to make a return on investment. But to add to that, it’s also just simply a liquidity issue. Is there money to actually put into these categories? Are these categories going to be categories that can recycle liquidity back to be able to do investments faster versus slower? So it’s not just absolute returns, but it’s also IRR and this thought about what role does time play in all of this? And I think people are just going to be scrutinizing that a lot more closely where quite frankly, CDR doesn’t win on the time rubric, on that particular equation.
And so I think that’s really too bad. Um, there’s a guy named Jeff Snyder. If anybody wants to list, he’s been doing a couple of podcasts and some good, um, interviews lately, and it’s very wonky. So, you know, I know most of the people who listen, um, here aren’t necessarily, you know, all about being a finance wonk, but if you do really want to understand, or at least have a different thought, different voice in your ear about where things are going in the macro environment, I think his stuff is really worth listening to, but he basically Is asking the question, almost rhetorically, is this the end of the banking crisis?
Was the Fed backstopping deposits the end of the banking crisis or just the beginning? And he obviously thinks it’s just the beginning. And what that means for us is that, you know, It’s just the same flight to safety that we’re seeing founders and VCs exhibit by moving their money to JP Morgan is going to be happening in the market at large. And I think without having to be a finance expert, everybody can understand that compared to other types of asset classes, venture is not safety. And then within venture compared to other investment categories, CDR is not really safety.
And so you don’t have to be a super wonk to get that this is probably not good and it’s beyond SVB. It’s bigger than SVB. It’s sort of SVB as the canary in the coal mine and what that could imply for the next few quarters and years. So it’s such a bummer because in some ways, It feels like it was so avoidable. We were so close to being able to avoid it. But in other ways, if you look at the macro picture and the conditions that led into this, maybe it wasn’t avoidable.
Part of the reason why SVB got into so much trouble and wasn’t able to withstand the early outflow of deposits was because they had no liquidity. And part of the reason they had to make that $20 billion sale of treasuries Which caused them to post a loss, which is ultimately what was one of the initial triggers for the run on the bank, was because they didn’t have a lot of liquidity. Well, why didn’t they have a lot of liquidity? Because a lot of their money was tied up in, now this is arguable, it wasn’t a huge part of their balance sheet, but some of it was in venture debt.
Some of it was being banked to these companies that aren’t making revenue because they raise a big chunk of money. You raise $10 million. You don’t make any money for many, many years. And you’re just taking out. You’re just debiting against that $10 million that you raise for your Series A or whatever it is for a very long time. And so that’s all just downward pressure on liquidity for SVB. And then when it came time to, people wanted to take their money out. There was a lot less. So all of that is kind of bad news for, or it reflects badly, I should say, reflects very, very badly on venture.
And it also, for climate tech as a subset of venture, I think it’s probably one of the areas that ultimately will be harder hit. And that’s not even getting into SVB’s loan book for community solar, which was a big part of I think other banks will step into that kind of stuff, but it’s more the broader implications for how money will flow that I think is an area to watch here.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Naeem, you’ve sort of though maybe been a little prescient in this case because you’ve talked and written about the need for CDR to be more broadly funded than VCs and in more traditional investment styles. What would you advise a CDR company today and how should they continue to grow their businesses? Because as you said, it’s a public good and a public necessity.
Na’im Merchant: Well, I think that individual carbon removal companies probably don’t have a lot of room to maneuver here. You know, there’s a limited amount of things that a carbon removal company can do. But I actually wanted to point out A great article that came out today from Dai Ellis, and we should link to the article if we can on his sub stack, The Great Unwind. And I also believe the piece was written in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. And essentially the takeaway from the article is that catalyzing the market for CDR so far has really focused on advancing government policy, which is great and what we need to do.
And kind of depending on some of these early stage investments, which are obviously also critical. But we’re not doing enough on some the more innovative financing mechanisms like advanced market commitments, volume guarantees, buyers clubs, other ways to kind of buy down the price premium of carbon removal and other climate technologies. And so their point is like there’s just a need to see more of the likes of efforts like Frontier. And we also need organizations, I guess, to kind of more directly answer your question, We need organizations that can do some of the market quarterbacking that’s missing right now, you know, that coordinates all of the relevant actors that are necessary to turbocharge market creation.
And I think that’s going to be essential if we are going to have any chance of powering through the medium and long term implications of SVP and similar kind of banking challenges and what that could pose to the CDR market. So I’d highly recommend people take a look at that article. Also a little bit wonky, but very, very prescient. I think Dai has done a lot of thinking on this and has taken some of his experience in the global health field and adapted it in, I think, a really thoughtful way to what’s relevant in the CDR market.
And I think that some of the tools that he’s talked about to kind of shape the market we want to see in CDR become ever more important when we’re looking at a situation Where one of those critical levers, one of those critical tools to building the CDR market, we are not going to be able to depend on as much right now. So that’s, and again, I’ll emphasize, I don’t know that’s something that an individual CDR company can really influence or affect right now. And so we need some of these actors that are building different alliances, organizations, ecosystem partners to start thinking about building these sorts of mechanisms going forward.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Susan, last question for you on this SVP but broader topic. If you were talking to a founder of a CDR company today, what would be your best piece of advice to them?
Susan Su: I think my advice would be what Naeem just said, which is that they should be looking for All the other sources of funding that they can. And I’ve never thought that VC is the best source of funding for CDR companies. It’s very expensive funding. And in many ways it’s a very poor fit on both sides, but there’s, it’s kind of like in a relationship, like you just don’t belong together, but you really both wanna make it work. There’s a little bit of that dynamic. And I think people need to be realists and rip the bandaid off and kind of move on or at least diversify.
So that would definitely be my advice is to really understand what types of other funding does your company qualify for. If it doesn’t qualify for any other types of funding, then you may need to rethink the shape of that company.
Radhika Moolgavkar: All right. Well, we are going to move on. Susan, can you tell us a little bit about South Korea’s new carbon market and who is going to be using it and how it works?
Susan Su: Yes, so this is pretty interesting. The Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry is starting a voluntary carbon market that is going to supplement their existing emissions trading system. So this expands the scope of that existing ETS because it’s going to allow retail participants to buy and sell carbon credits. Um, it’ll operate a lot like any voluntary carbon market of your imagining, um, except that it’ll be focused on Korean CDR projects and their companies or CDR companies and their projects. And also has, um, uh, they want to do their own certification.
So they want to be the Vera or the gold standard. They want to do that work. And they want to do it in about a third of the time that it currently takes for Korean companies to go through a Vera or a gold standard process. So those are some of the key differences. They’re trying to launch it in the second half of this year. And already, according to some of the news that I read already, the Korean Chamber of Commerce and Industry, again, the entity that’s launching this, has shown some intent to white label this model to other countries.
In particular, the UAE is one country that they’re speaking with, as well as some other countries in MENA. And I think that’s kind of interesting that Well, first of all, I mean, it’s kind of coming from the government. They want to shop it around to other governments. They’re kind of building this franchise that they want to expand. And that is going to really be meaningful in terms of if it’s successful, it’ll reshape how the world thinks about voluntary carbon markets if they all start to be run by these governments or they start to be Really balkanized in this way where there’s like a lot of different markets with different players run by sorry with different players and run by different entities.
So does that mean that you know you are going to have to list on. I think this one doesn’t quite have a name yet, but are you gonna have to list on the Korean voluntary exchange, the UAE voluntary exchange, like et cetera, et cetera. What does that look like if you are a CDR company? I do think it’s really, there are positives and negatives. I think there’s probably a lot of risk for greenwashing because you have to ask yourself, what is their motivation to get this out there and who’s really driving this, especially if it’s coming from the entity that ran basically Emissions that granted emission certificates to polluting industries.
But on the other hand, if it gives a chance to Korean companies that are trying to You know, do low carbon manufacturing or that are trying to do carbon removal projects, genuinely trying to do that, and it gives them a shot that’s much easier than what they had to do before, then that’s really positive. And I, for one, would love to see CDR as an industry bloom in every country in the world, not just in the US and Canada or in Europe, but So from that perspective, it’s really cool to see people having an outlet and getting involved, but I do think we have to see exactly how it shapes up.
And as usual with all things CDR, we should have always a healthy dose of skepticism kind of in our back pocket as we’re looking at these developments.
Radhika Moolgavkar: It does sound a lot like what Nori’s trying to do, except without the government intervention. So if anyone’s listening from South Korea, let me know. I have to chat. Naeem, I have to admit, I have not actually talked to any company who’s doing CDR in South Korea. I’ve talked to companies in Japan. I’ve talked to companies in other parts of Asia, but not South Korea. So do you know of any? And do you know if they’re focused in a certain area of CDR?
Na’im Merchant: You know, I don’t. I’m not aware of any CDR activity in South Korea, but I’m really excited for that to change. I think we’ve seen a ton of focus and attention on CDR Here in the US, but there’s actually a lot going on around the world, whether in the Middle East or Kenya, or now it sounds like South Korea, China has a lot happening around CDR that we don’t hear about as much. And so I’m excited for the narrative on CDR to shift to global efforts to scale the industry. I think some countries are going to have a comparative advantage on scaling CDR, and I think I think that’s critical as a market accelerator for this industry.
We need to get to a place where every country is capitalizing on their respective strengths to build a global CDR industry. So I’ll be paying close attention to what South Korea does here. I think this is a really, really cool program. And if it’s designed well, it can be a great blueprint for other countries to follow up.
Radhika Moolgavkar: All right. Well, final topic of today is the Carbon Removal Alliance. Naeem, so what do you know about this new coalition launched by Carbon 180 co-founder Gianna Amador?
Na’im Merchant: Well, first and foremost, the group couldn’t have picked a better person to lead this new effort. So they’re already off to an amazing start. But this is a new initiative started by leaders at Stripe and a handful of CDR companies that wanted to advance tech neutral policies for long duration carbon removal methods. And so this new initiative is effectively representing the interests of about 20, 25 or so members, mostly CDR companies that want to see a more supportive policy environment around carbon removal. And I think it’s addressing an important policy gap in the market.
Current efforts to advance carbon removal policy, at least to me, feel either too narrowly focused on direct air capture or too broadly focused on every carbon removal method approach business model under the sun. And then sometimes CCUS gets thrown in there too. And so I think what the founding members realized was Hey, what we really care about is advancing policies that support any method of carbon removal, so long as these have the potential to be high integrity methods of carbon removal and long duration approaches as well. And they need to be able to demonstrate some kind of positive benefits to local communities.
And so this arm has this, sorry, this group has a lobbying arm that will advance the interests of its members. I think it’ll also do some great kind of research and advanced kind of knowledge, general knowledge around carbon removal and the ecosystem, which is always needed, but ultimately does have a lobbying arm that I think will look out for the interests of these 20, 25 and growing members. And I think that demonstrates a degree of maturity in the CDR market. Groups like Carbon 180 or other kind of policy shops are meant to be focused on looking out for the public interest and not industry interests.
And so for the CDR industry to have an organizing mechanism like the Carbon Removal Alliance is, I think, overall a really good thing. And they found an absolute rock star to run it. So I’ll be really interested to see what they do.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Susan, so What kind of activities do you think would be helpful from a trade group to help grow this industry?
Susan Su: Well, a trade association is an interface between private industry and government. So in addition to lobbying, which is probably the number one, although your lobbying power is going to be as big as your pocketbook, as big as your trade membership. So just keep that in mind. We’re not talking about The big tech lobby here, but it’s good to aggregate everybody together because there’s definitely power numbers, even if those numbers start out small. But in addition to lobbying, I would say the other piece is there are a lot of existing policies and existing budgets that can benefit carbon removal companies, especially ones that have the complexity of long duration, storage, Technological removal, infrastructure building, that there’s a lot going on there.
And so companies that are working in that space need a lot of help from the powers that be that do control things like infrastructure development, you know, sort of repurposing land to be able to inject into oil and gas wells and things like that. And so Just being able to go through and identify opportunities, whether those are budgetary opportunities or whether those are sort of like program opportunities at the government level and then sharing those with these member companies, that’s a huge kind of help that a trade association could offer as well.
And the thing about a lot of those opportunities is that they’re Some of them live at the federal level. Some of them, we’ve talked about this before, some of them live at the state level. And so there’s a lot of fragmentation and different altitudes at which companies can go and get theirs. And it’s kind of a lot to sort through if you’re also doing a deep tech company that’s trying to operate, hire, fundraise, further your science, and do your marketing. I mean, a whole policy arm is not necessarily within reach or affordable by every company.
Something like a carbon removal alliance could maybe be a shared resource on that front as well. I’m sure that’s something that they’re thinking of, but just to develop that expertise and then make that available to member companies is going to have an impact.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So final question of this topic is we already have the Carbon Business Council and they seem at least on the face to be very similar. So how do you Both think about the differences between the two groups and what just having two groups like this say about the scalability and maturity of the CDR industry. Naeem, I will begin with you and then I’ll end it with Susan, who is a board member of the Carbon Business Council.
Na’im Merchant: Well, I think it’s great. I think that I think that both, you know, I think while there’s certainly some overlap between what the Carbon Removal Alliance and what the Carbon Business Council is trying to do, I think that the Carbon Removal Alliance is really trying to focus on CDR methods that are a bit more kind of novel in their approach that are focused on kind of the long duration or permanence around the storage of carbon removed from the atmosphere. Whereas I think You know, as we’ve built up the carbon removal industry over the last few years, there are so many different business models and companies that are being set up around carbon removal or tangential to carbon removal.
Marketplaces, crypto plays, like whatever. There’s a lot of different companies that are being built around this entire ecosystem. And it feels like the Carbon Business Council is there to represent this larger ecosystem that’s being set up around carbon removal. And some of the carbon tech related work, as well as marketplaces and some of the other actors involved. And so, you know, I think that there’s a home for either type of company to have a group that represents the interests of what they’re doing. If you’re a Early startup building a highly capital-intensive, very experimental approach to carbon removal, maybe the Carbon Removal Alliance is the group that’s right for you.
And if you are a different type of play within the carbon removal space, basically anything else, maybe the Carbon Business Council is the right move for you. And in some cases, both of them might make sense. But I would say that I think While there is some overlap, and I think Susan could probably speak to this far more eloquently than I could, I think each organization will have a different theory of change around what they’re trying to impact and how they’re delivering value to their members. And in some cases, it’ll make sense that there are two groups here that a company could join.
And in some cases, it might make sense that a company joins one or the other. The fact that there is this kind of industry consolidation I think is a net positive so long as we have other organizations that are properly resourced that are advancing policies without that industry interest also at the table. And so that we are ultimately shaping the policies and regulations and investments in carbon removal that are informed by a diverse group of actors as humanly possible.
Susan Su: Well, this is the business episode, but I always really appreciate how Naeem centers us and reminds us that business isn’t everything at the end of the day. And there are so many different types of stakeholders that need to be involved in order to make this whole huge economic turnover happen. That’s going to definitely happen in the next few decades or else, and we don’t want to know what happens or else. So I would say probably the biggest difference in the simplest way for me to think about the difference between the Carbon Business Council and the Carbon Removal Alliance is related to this long duration, the kind of technological versus nature-based bifurcation.
And I think in addition to some of the like kind of more picks and shovels type businesses that get included in the Carbon Business Council, I actually don’t think that’s their focus. The main focus is really just around carbon removal companies that are not necessarily You know, doing DAC, bio oil, mineralization, like they don’t necessarily have to have that sort of thousand year permanence factor as a requirement. And so many carbon removal projects are going to fall into that category. Everything from soil to some ocean stuff to of course, trees and other nature-based solutions.
And so I think it’s really important to, Have something there for all of those carbon removal efforts simply because it’s a really big share today and it probably will continue to be going forward and there needs to be a policy interface there too because of how it interacts with land use and with groups like let’s just say farmers that have a really important political voice. So yeah I agree with Na'im that there’s space for Both, of course, and that they do slightly different things, but also that we shouldn’t forget that there’s space for even more, and that trade associations are not going to solve our climate problem by themselves, and trade associations are not going to solve the carbon removal conundrum by themselves either.
They’re one factor in it, and it’s important to engage the private sector, but As an investor, I’ll say that we can’t solve everything and we really need to bring everybody on board and not forget our place, which is big, but also small. And remember to play nice with everybody else.
Radhika Moolgavkar: All right. With that, I am going to turn it over to Naeem to talk about his new endeavor. So Naeem, floor is yours.
Na’im Merchant: Thank you. And I’m a bit biased. Well, I’m very biased, but this week I had the opportunity to announce a new initiative I’m leading known as Carbon Removal Canada. And so for the last year or so, a number of Canadians committed to seeing Canada play a leading role in scaling up CDR have helped get this initiative off the ground. And it’s focused on advancing policies that help Canada rapidly and responsibly scale up CDR. Canada has the world’s second largest landmass, the world’s longest coastline, plenty of experience with carbon storage, existing regulatory frameworks, and a thriving startup ecosystem.
So it has a lot of the ingredients needed to play a big role in scaling up CDR. And now what’s needed is a comprehensive set of smartly designed policies, as well as some of the market quarterbacking that I was talking about earlier. And innovative financing approaches to really leverage those strengths and help build a thriving, inclusive CDR sector in Canada. So over the next few months, I’ll be spending time listening to stakeholders across Canada, as well as here in the US, and talking about what Canada can do to advance CDR in an innovative and inclusive way.
And taking the time to learn from the experience of groups like Carbon 180 in the US or Carbon Gap in Europe while I’m still here in the US. And I’m really excited to be stepping into the role as executive director. We’ll do a more official launch in the fall where we’ll kind of present a clear kind of strategy and vision and theory of change in a set of early kind of products that will kind of define what we are trying to do. But the reason we did this preview or introduction of this new initiative, Carbon Removal Canada, is to stimulate this early conversation that needs to happen around what Canada’s role in carbon removal should be, and recruit for some critical roles in government relations, policy, and communications that we know we’re absolutely going to need in order to be successful, and we’ll need those positions filled soon.
So I’ve started recruiting for those roles. I’ll also say yesterday when I announced this effort, I managed to send a blast email out to a number of people addressing myself at the top. And then I proceeded to lock myself out of my own Twitter account. So while I feel good about what we’re going to achieve, I’m going to need a lot of help. And so I’d love for Canadians who are listening today to check out the job postings and consider being employees two, three, four, and five. For Carbon Removal Canada and help leverage our strengths to grow the CDR industry.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, thank you, Naeem. That’s super exciting. And I wish you all of the luck. It’s an amazing organization you’re trying to, you’re standing up.
Susan Su: Huge congrats, Naeem. Great job.
Radhika Moolgavkar: With that, that will be the end of our business episode this week. As always, thank you, Susan and Naeem for your insightful comments and your time. And we will be back in your feed in a couple of weeks with our next episode.
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