1/ A lot to learn from this story, including some interesting carbon market history on how the Kyoto Protocol laid a (fundamentally flawed) foundation for voluntary carbon markets.

The structural problem is simple: the business model of traditional offsets is false equivalency.
The role of carbon markets should be to enable payment for the service of directly removing carbon: actually touching the carbon cycle. The sketchy accounting and tactics described here are made possible by paying for something very abstracted from the underlying carbon cycle.

An idea re carbon removal MRV: the community is confused right now partly because there's no market-legible price of MRV that expresses the uncertainty of a given approach as an actual dollar amount.

Breaking out the MRV "cost" from the removal price might be a good step. Doing this would enable the MRV itself to have a initial price and (hopefully) a cost curve that can (and will!) move based on different factors than the "bundled" CDR price that's reported today.

Then, we as a community can focus on bringing MRV itself down the cost curve.

A weird property of the frontier: finding the edge forces a realization that there’s very few people there, the others who’ve found it are tightly clustered and therefore quite happy to see you, and you all can’t help but ask “where is everybody?” in escalating confusion This, combined with the fact that the distance to the frontier is surprisingly short, is a giant mindwarp that might be the strangest thing so far in learning about climate

Anyone have similar experiences in other fields? It’s been difficult for me to articulate

Here's your reminder that the whole idea of a personal carbon footprint was a targeted BP media campaign in 2005 and it worked so well that it seems like we've all forgotten this researchgate.net/publication/30… This piece goes into the history mashable.com/feature/carbon… and here's a 2006 op-ed from a guy who literally worked on the ad campaign acknowledging it nytimes.com/2006/08/14/opi…

For years, carbon removal has suffered from a lack of demand, and therefore been slow to scale.

With Stripe Climate, we hope to assemble a coalition of buyers to begin changing this.

https://twitter.com/nanransohoff/status/1321453783663009792

When we made our first carbon removal purchases earlier this year with the help of our scientific advisors (stripe.com/blog/first-neg…), we asked carbon removal projects what one thing would most supercharge their progress. The vast majority listed “recurring demand”.

👋🌎 With guidance from climate experts, @nanransohoff and our team allocated @Stripe’s money across four negative emissions projects!

We focused on storing more carbon outside of the biosphere:

stripe.com/blog/first-neg…

🧵/ 1/ This field is diverse, approaches vary from reforestation and improving soil carbon storage to direct air capture, and speeding up the earth’s natural weathering process.

Basically, there are a handful of ways to take CO₂ out of the air and a handful of places to put it.

👋 I’ve been at Stripe for one year now!

It’s my first non-founder job. Coming in, I didn’t know what good looked like

The biggest thing I learned this year is that I could be motivated by the people I’m around, moreso than the idea of the thing we’re building Previously, I’d worked on education, something I was quite emotionally drawn to

I imagined I’d have to twist payments around in my head until I could get emotionally attached to it

I didn’t! I’m not really emotional about payments and it... turns out that’s totally fine