Pushkin. Sometime around twenty eighteen, it became clear that transitioning away from fossil fuels was not going to be enough to manage climate change. On top of moving away from fossil fuels, on top of ceasing to emit carbon dioxide into the air, the world would also need to figure out how to take some of the carbon dioxide we'd already put into the atmosphere out of the atmosphere. And it was also clear that just planting more trees wasn't going to do it. It was too much carbon dioxide
and not enough land to plant trees on. A few years after those things became clear, a company called Stripe, that helps online businesses do things like process payments, decided to dedicate a relatively small amount of money, a million dollars, to pay to have carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere.
Twenty twenty, we made our first purchases from four carbon removal companies.
This is Nan rants Off, the head of climate at.
Stripe, and at the time, you know, two sort of interesting things happened. The first is that the field had this sort of almost weirdly positive reaction to a pretty.
Small amount of money a million dollars is ultimately not that much.
It's in a way quite a bad sign if people get excited, yes for a whole field about a million.
No, that's exactly right, and it's concerning, like why are people getting so excited about this million dollars? So that was an interesting signal, which to us just said, well, this field has been starved for a market, and that such that a million dollars could you know, make anybody pay attention.
The second thing that happened, Nan said, was Stripe started hearing from the companies that used Stripe services, and a lot of those companies also wanted to start paying for carbon removal. So Stripe set up away for those companies to purchase carbon removal and tens of millions of dollars flowed in.
Good step, but it's still quite small. So then, you know, we've been doing this for about a year and a half and our team gotten room. We said, well, you know, on the one hand, this is ten x progress. You know, we are making progress, but this number is still so short of what the field needs. And we came up with a bunch of ideas and we killed a bunch of ideas and one of the ideas that we couldn't
kill was this concept of an advanced market commitment. That is ultimately what has since become Frontier, which is we've launched a now over one billion dollar advanced market commitment to buy permanent carbon removal between twenty twenty two and twenty thirty and there are still many more steps on the journey, but that's one of the big ones that we've been working on recently.
I'm Jacob Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem, the show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress. In addition to being a head of Climate at Stripe, Nan Ransohoff is also head of Climate at Frontier. That's the organization she mentioned a minute ago. Frontier is a wholly owned subsidiary of Stripe, and it is the vehicle through which Stripe and a bunch of other companies have pledged to pay one billion dollars to
have carbon permanently removed from the atmosphere. I wanted to talk to Nan for a couple reasons. One, her job gives her a great overview of what is going on in carbon removal as a field, and two, the specific mechanism that Frontier is using that advanced market commitment that Nan mentioned. Is this really powerful, relatively recent economic innovation. So what's an advanced market commitment?
An advanced market commitment is basically a way to guarantee future demand for a product that you want to exist but that doesn't exist yet. And advanced market commitments are a basically a kind of way of collecting revenue and demonstrating that there is a market for a product. And
we borrow this concept actually from the vaccine space. So the first AMC was started in the mid two thousands for the world wanted a new macco vaccine for low and middle income countries and because the end customers are from less wealthy countries, if pharma companies are not incented to actually develop that vaccine because the end demand is uncertain or small.
Right, it's not going to be a profitable enterprise probably, Right. They're going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars a billion dollars to develop a vaccine and the price at which they could sell it is not enough to recoup their investment. And we should say I feel like the new macacco vaccine is underrated in part just because of the name. Like I think that you know, this is a terrible infection that killed huge numbers of children, and
it was clearly vaccine preventable. And there was this frankly economic problem was the vaccine didn't exist, and how could people with money in the rich world create the incentive structure for it to be worth it for a private company to develop the vaccine?
Very well said yes, And that is a generalizable concept of AMC's is that they're trying to there's a public good or something that is of real value, societal value that should happen, but there's an incentive problem that is
preventing that from happening. And AMCs are one of a broader set of what economists would call market shaping tools that we can utilize to help fix those incentive problems and make it more likely that these public goods these societal goods actually exist and scale up to the numbers that we want them to.
Well, And AMCs are a little bit like clever, subtle, non obvious, right, Like the more obvious thing is like, well, the government could just spend money to develop a vaccine, or even could just subsidize one vaccine maker to do the research it, but like why is an AMC better in some settings than those options.
Yeah, it's a really good question. So when we think about the types of financial interventions here, we can think about them like push. People often talk about push mechanisms are like grant funding. You typically pay for folks to upfront for an input.
An input in this case is research vaccine development.
Yep, you're giving someone a grand.
Here's a billion dollars go make the vaccine.
Or you're giving somebody a grant to figure out if it's even possible, and you're giving them upfront before you get the end outcome. Pull funding are mechanisms that you're paying for something when it's delivered, you're paying.
For the output.
And a prize an is sort of an example of that. It's like a one time if somebody can develop this, we'll give you a prize.
And there are famous examples of this. I think Longitude the British and was it the eighteenth century they needed to they needed a clock that worked on a ship that's basically right. Or the DARPA Prize for self driving cars right, which sort of kicked off the self driving car revolution.
Prizes can be very effective mechanisms, and AMCs are not always a good fit for a problem. They tend to be a good fit for the problem when a couple of things are true. If you think about the thing you want to exist, and why the organizations are the people that could have invented and scaled those things aren't doing it. The problem in their mind is there's no end revenue for it. That's criteria one. Criteria two is that you can actually define the thing that you want
to exist. So you can we, in this case, define the target product profile of the new macagual vaccine that we want, or in our case, can we outline the criteria for the kinds of carbon removal that we want to exist. And then a third criteria is essentially like, once the thing is actually invented, will market forces take over to actually make it scale on its own. So basically, if once a thing invented that is true, you should do a prize because you don't need a long term market.
You're just trying to get the initial invention interesting.
But in the case of you know, the new macaco vaccine, for example, you want the pharma companies to invent the solution, but you ultimately care about is that the people who needed are getting the vaccine. So in that case, the incentive design there is you're taking all of the R and D and development costs associated with that, but you are giving it back to the pharma companies by amortizing it over all of the doses.
So, just to be clear, the advanced market commitment for the vaccine was not will give you the money when you invent the vaccine. It's will pay an extra couple bucks per vaccine delivered in the field in this part of the world exactly.
And there are genuinely different ways. AMCs are a pretty broad term that you know, can encompass a lot of different sure mechanism designs. But you described that well, it's like you want to you're paying for the outcome of somebody actually getting the vaccine.
The marginal use cast. Yeah, okay, By the way, are there more criteria or do we have the criteria now in place?
Those are sort of rough criteria that and they're not perfect, but there's sort of rough criteria that will help you know. Are we even in pull funding territory and within pull funding should be considered an AMC versus a prize versus something else. Those are sort of loose guiding criteria.
So now we have our framework, apply it to carbon removal. As you were thinking about it in twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two, why did it seem like a good fit for that problem at that time?
Yeah, I mean, I think a fundamental problem with carbon removal. So carbon removal is, for all intents and purposes, it is a public good. Unlike with energy. You know, humans derive value from energy. That is, we get value from that. When you are secking CO two out of the atmosphere and storing it somewhere permanently. You know, there are small markets where people can benefit from them. You're using the CO twos, you know, an end product, But at the
scale we're talking this is mostly a public good. And as a result, it is a very reasonable question for entrepreneurs and investors to basically ask, if I start company in this space, who's going to buy the end product that I am selling? It is fundamentally a open question
about the market. And I would say it's even more of an open question if I'm building a really early stage technology that is expensive at the beginning, because there are now there's some voluntary market that exists, but that's a twenty dollars a ton, and if you're building, you know, a new technology at the beginning, your price is going
to be high. And so that fundamentally that first criteria is extremely applicable to carbon removal because it is created as chicken and egg problem that we're trying to solve.
You use the term public good, which people use in a kind of vernacular sense, but there's a technical economic sense in which you are using it and which applies here, right MLL. It's non rivalrous and non excludable, right, which means basically, even if only one person pays for it, everybody benefits, and you can't even exclude somebody from benefiting if you want to, that's right, right. A lighthouse is
the classes, that's right. Right. It doesn't make sense for any one shipping company to pay for a lighthouse because all those other cheap assholes who didn't pay for the lighthouse are also not going to crash into the boxes, right.
And it's a classic case of market failure for that reason, right, because the person paying for it only captures a tiny and in the case of carbon removal, truly tiny, tiny part of the benefit, and so no one's going to pay for it, except in like weird edge cases, well said like stripes one million.
Dollars precisely, precisely.
Yes, okay, so that's good. That's one.
What else that's very important one?
The second one is can we define the shape of the thing that we want to exist? And in our case, when we're thinking about carbon removal, we have a set of criteria that we are that sort of try to characterize the gap in solutions that exist that would essentially get the world to the ten gigatons plus career needed
by twenty fifty. Okay, So the kinds of things that we care about on this list are things like does this technology have the potential to be under one hundred dollar in the future, And that is a you know, we can come back to the specifics, but does it have the potential to be cheap? Does it have the potential to be very huge? We're looking at solutions that have the potential to be more than half a gig aten per year in carbon removal.
We also care a lot about permanence.
So when you emit a ton of CO two into the atmosphere, that is permanently up there, and so we want to take it out permanently as well. And then you know, there's a whole host of other criteria that we care about. But when we sat down to do our initial million dollar spend for stripes that first blog post, we spend a lot of time thinking about, you know, how do we characterize the kinds of solutions that we
want to exist? And an important part of that characterization is can we be specific enough that people understand what it is that we want, but can we be broad enough to invite a whole host of creative solutions to the starting line, Because this entire field is basically, you know, six years old. This started, you know, carbon removal. The starting gun for carbon removal was a twenty eighteen ACCC report and that was not very long ago. And so
maybe it's direct air capture. Maybe it's enhance rock weathering, maybe it's ocean alkalinity enhancement. Maybe you know, there's all these different solutions. Let it's too early to pick a horse. Let's get a bunch of the best ideas to the starting line, see how they do, and then some of them won't work, but the ones that do, let's really
double down. So that's a long wooded way of saying we were trying to define that this target criteria in a way that sort of balanced the specificity needed to guarantee this for suppliers, but also was broad enough to invite the innovation that we think is necessary.
Yeah. I mean, well that's the market force part, right, That's why it's a poll. If it's too specific, then it's like, well, just give a grant to one company. But that's what you're trying to avoid, right, You're trying to avoid picking a winner, precisely. Is there one more criterion?
And there's one more criteria, which is essentially, once the thing is invented, if you have the recipe for the thing, our market force is going to scale it up on its own. And in the case of carbon removal, somebody could come up with the best possible solution and the long term market for this isn't quite there yet.
It's the public good problem again, exactly. So yes, So it's yes, yes, and yes to your three criteria for advanced market commitment.
Yes, And I will say that, like, there's a few differences in this in the frontier AMC and the initial AMC for New maccacle. I think one of the things that is challenging in carbon removal is that lack of long term market. So like frontiers a billion dollars, it's going to run out eventually, so we're sort of building the plane while we're flying it. We have to make sure that once these initial funds are out, that long term market does exist.
So we can talk about what that looks like.
But I think that you know, in the case of the new Maccacle vaccine for low middle income countries, there was a point at which it made sense financial sense once for pharma companies to continue to st reading the vaccine on their own. In our case, you know, that is only true if we can also put a sort of semi state market in place.
If that makes sense, Yeah, I mean is it? Because for the for the vaccine, most of the cost is upfront exactly, and in fact there is marginal benefit for people who can pay a very small amount or for countries that can pay a very small amount, so there is once the vaccine companies have recouped the R and D cost, the marginal cost actually works in a market based way, which will never be true for a carbon capture because it's a public good, that's right. So I
was thinking, we get to this later. But whatever fundamentally, there is a policy problem that somebody has to solve before too long, because this isn't going to work forever, you wrote, without government action. Frontier is building a bridge to nowhere.
Yes, these private sector of voluntary commitments are a great way to help this field get to first base, but they are not going to get us all way there. So you know, if we if we zoom all the way out and think about to quick demand mouth, how big does this market need to be in for how long? So carbon removal roughly needs to scale to and this is rough numbers ten billion tons per year by twenty fifty. And if we say that, you know, for example, we think we can do it at one hundred.
Dollars a time.
Okay, that is a trillion dollars per year okay, in demand that is needed. And of course if we end up needing less carbon removal, that numbers goes down, and if we can do it for cheaper, that numbers go down.
But just back of the envelope, it's a trillion dollars a year, which is a big number. Right.
Global GDP is about one hundred trillion.
Dollars, So one percent of global GDP is a tremendous, a tremendously large number that it is dauntingly large.
In fact, it's dauntingly large.
Can you get another order of magnitude out of the price? It's the first question I have for you.
So I think that that is why it really matters that we are so hunting for a solution that can be much cheaper, because you know, being able to get down to seventy or fifty or thirty dollars a ton does make a really big difference. Yeah, I would call out though that like, is half a percent or a percent of global GDP a lot? I mean, of course the answer is in one sense yes, But of course as a current moment a tough.
Time to be getting countries to coordinate on global public goods.
But it's not totally out of the realm of possibility, especially if and as the world gets richer that percentage goes down.
Well, So, okay, fine, we're saying all these numbers. It's a lot of money, but what does it mean in terms of policy? Right, it's fundamentally a public good. Public goods we know the most basic economic way are not provided by the market, So like, what do governments have to do to sort of take the baton from Frontier.
I think that probably in practice, the collection of policies that get to these hundreds of billions of dollars per year ends up looking like a patchwork quilt of demand policies. I think it is unlikely that there is sort of one thing that ultimately gets us there.
We can talk about what the shape of.
Those things could look like, but at a high level you can kind of imagine a couple of different worlds. One world is that governments treat carbon removal like sanitation, and they say, you know, going to We're going to do this clean up on behalf of our citizens, and we're going to coordinate with other countries to do that. We could put that in the kind of category of like direct government procurement. Governments are the ones that are
doing it themselves. There's another worldview, which is that governments are essentially trying to quantify the negative externality of a ton of emissions and then push that onto the players that are emitting, private companies.
Some kind of carbon tax. Basically that is funding carbon removal.
Yes about the other thing, Yes, the dream, the dream.
Let's dream about a carbon tax for one moment, because it makes so much.
Sense, and they are different, and there are different sort of ways of implementing that that I think are sort of further or closer to a traditional carbon taxing. So that's a long winded way of saying there are a whole host of bets I think that the world needs to make, and some of them will pan out and some of them won't. But it is very important to start planning those seeds now so that the market is where it needs to be when it needs to be there.
We'll be back in just a bit. Let's go back to the recent past. So you have this idea for big advanced market commitment for carbon capture and removal.
What do you do you know at the time AMC's there, there only really been sort of one or one and a half AMC's and they were all in the context of health. So is this Initially mccaggo vaccine AMC GAVY and then Operation Warp Speed incorporated some components of this as well, for to.
Develop the coronavirus fix to great success, to great success, underrated, so underrated operation like nobody wants to own it politically, which is so sad. Like it was great, it worked, it was amazing.
It was amazing.
So what is Frontier at launch in twenty twenty two.
What we wanted to do with Frontier, the spirit of what we wanted to do was say, there is a big market for carbon removal and what does that mean?
A big market? A billion dollars.
Was an imperfect number that we came up with that was that both met the criteria of it. We thought it would be big enough to get people's attention and send a strong signal to entrepreneurs and investors that there is a market, but it was still something we felt was in the realm of possibility, Like we can't go raise one hundred trill you know, a trillion dollars that is that is not something we were able to do. So a billion dollars was the number that we settled on.
I will sort of want to asterix and call out the fact that like it is a sort of imperfect number because it does not solve the whole problem.
Kind of the minimum viol both number in contact.
That's exactly right, Yeah, and that's different than the new Macauga vaccine. Like you know, initially when they put together the billion and a half dollars from countries and the Gates Foundation that they thought it was enough to get the vaccine to the point that they wanted to get to, So I will sort of call out the flaw in that, but we said, okay, a billion dollars Stripe can put in some of that. We have now tens of thousands of Strike Climate users that are giving money for carbon removal.
So in the context of Stripe.
We were actually able to underwrite a huge amount of that initial billion dollars ourselves, but we weren't able to get to that full billion. So we said, okay, how can we find other like minded organizations that would be interested in sort of this kind of wonky experiment that
we want to try and run. And so we ended up in the spring of twenty twenty two launching with Google and Shopify and McKenzie and since then have added other folks like you know, JP Morgan and h and M and Autodesk work Day and the numbers have grown.
But at the time it was.
Sort of, how do we get as close to that billion dollars as number as we can, as fast as we can, because these suppliers need as much time as they as they could possibly get to build.
And so what everybody who puts money into that pot is promising is we will buy this amount of money, this number of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars worth of carbon removal if it needs some set of specifications some time between now and twenty thirty. That is what everybody is promising, like contractually promising to do yes.
That is the spirit of what it is.
And in practice, most of those dollars get spent and contracted through something called an off take agreement, and an off take agreement is a legally binding contract between a buyer and a supplier that the buyer is going to buy a certain number of in our case tons at a certain price if the supplier can deliver. So when companies initially signed up to Frontier, they basically said, you know, we're going to put in two hundred million dollars and this is how we are sort of able to budget
that each year from twenty twenty two twenty thirty. And at that point it's it's an intention. It's an intention to spend, but it's not a legally binding contract. It becomes a legally binding contract in these off take agreements where buyers are prompting to buy a certain number.
Of tons of certain price.
And the reason that off take important contracts are really important for carbon removal companies is because if you are a carbon removal company and you want to build a big new, say dock facility.
That's direct air catch direct air cash, and.
You go to a bank and you're like, I want to loan to actually finance the bill. The first question they're going to ask you is who's going to buy the thing that comes off of this plant? Right?
If they if they take the time to talk to you at all, yes, they're going to say, you want to build this thing that nobody's ever built before, and you don't know who's going to pay you for it, and it's a public good, so why should anybody even bother to pay for it? So basically a company gets an off take agreement and then they can take that literally to the bank and use it as collateral for.
A loan exactly. And there's a lot of other things as you've called out, that have to go write in order for that loan to actually happen. But one of the things that this helps the risk is is the demand side, is there a customer to buy the end thing that we're doing.
That's the genius of the advanced market commitment fundamentally, right, That's right. So how's it going. You're three years in out of eight, right, so like things are happening. You're kind of in the middle now of the project.
Yes, the goal, our goal at Frontier at a very high level is to get carbon removal on its best possible trajectory. We are sort of working on behalf of the ecosystem, largely through these off take agreements. But our goal, you know is sort of is very world first and by the numbers. So we're, as you said, about three
years in. We have contracted now over five hundred million dollars with several dozen carbon removal companies, and so much of our time at Frontier is spent sourcing, getting to know and diligencing and ultimately writing contracts with the best carbon removal companies out there. And we're, you know, we obsess over how to spend and how to contract each of these dollars.
You've committed half of the pot so far.
We've committed half of the pot across several dozen companies. And these companies cover lots of different pathways, some of which we've talked about, and in some sense it's too early to tell if things are quote unquote like definitely working.
But we look at some leading.
Indicators to tell us what to help us triangulate, like is this doing the thing that we wanted it to be doing. And one of those leading indicators is like, what is the number of companies for whom sort of Frontier was the first customer. And the reason that we hear about that metric is we're trying to pull this field forward, So like going early versus following on is a good indicator that we're like, yeah, we're pulling companies forward.
And I mean, you want you want to be the marginal buyer, right, you want to be the buyer that they need if somebody else was going to buy it anyways, that's not as useful, right at some level exactly.
And we because you know, we're not hunting for the cheapest tons, We're looking long term at you know, our we're looking for technologies that have the potential to be really low cost and high volume in the future. We are typically buying more expensive tons earlier on as the first buyer, and we are the first ever customer for seventy eight percent of companies and we're the first off taker for as of you know, as of now eighty two percent of them. So like you know, we're we're coming in early.
Yes.
Another leading indicator that we look at is is basically like, are are we picking companies that are actually starting to deliver the tons? Like Vaulted, for example, delivered twelve thousand tons of carbon removal last year. This is the most of any company working on carbon removal, permanent carbon removal, by a significant margin. You know, Chrum has injected and
several thousand tons last year. Lithos applied three hundred thousand tons of rock this year, which is positioning them to put in some pretty significant numbers in the coming couple of years. So these numbers are still small, but they are much larger than we've seen in previous years. And I think that that is really promising. I think we feel those are good early indicators. But you know, it's going to take a decade or so, I think to know if this really had the effect that we wanted to.
Let's talk a little bit about kind of the state of the industry itself, right, because you are kind of at the center of it. You have a nice perspective. Yeah, I mean, let's just step through like a few companies doing with a few different kinds of technologies, right, I feel like the one the most people have heard of is direct air capture. Right, is just fans and filters and whatever, like, should we start there? What's happening with direct air capture? Sure?
So direct air capture, Yeah, you've probably seen these big fans kind of looks like a vacuum cleaner or something. You're like, you're pulling an air You're finding the co two particles from the other million air particles, You're compressing those and then injecting that usually underground somewhere, and there are a number of direct air capture companies out there. I think direct air capture is a technology that has high long term potential, but it's very capital intensive and
it's very energy intensive, especially early stage. And there's a number of in our opinion, really promising approaches that have the potential to be super low cost. And that is both because of sort of cheap off the shelf capex and because of their ability to do that process for really low energy. But it's basically a game of capex and energy for DAC that's really important. It's technically infinitely scalable, right, but cost is the challenge for DAC. It's permanent, it's scalable.
The question is cost, which is a function of capex and energy.
Okay, what do you want to do next? Should we talk about plants next? What do you want to talk about next?
Let's talk about plants. Then we're going to talk about rocks.
Okay, plants go.
So plants, of course, as we know, naturally sucks you two out of the air. And they do this sort of in a quote for free because they're using using solim from the.
Least they use leaks, photos, sus.
The challenge with plants is when in the context of carbon removal is two things. One, they take up a lot of space and so at the scale that we're talking they're sort of limits. The second thing that is challenging about plants is they're not permanent. Trees can burn down.
Or just die, even right at the time scales we're talking about, even if there is not a fire, they will die and decompose. Right.
Plants are very important for many reasons, but in the context of carbon removal, that the types of solutions that we are looking at because we care about the permanence piece A lot is how do you take what nature does for free and make that sort of permanent. So Charm Industrial is an example of a company that takes waste biomass, so sort of leftover corn stover for example,
that farmers would you know, have from growing corn. They take that, they pyalyze it, which basically just means they heat it up without oxygen, and they turn it into at oil that they can then direct back underground.
I talked to Sean Kinnetic who used to be there on this show a couple of years ago.
Oh fabulous.
So why is that one promising and why is that one? What are the limits?
It's promising because you get the capture part for free from plants. It's challenging because there is a limited amount of quote unquote waste biomass, So like there is a sort of tap on probably how big that can be because there is only so much waste biomass. And then there's a question of like what is the best thing to do with that waste in a given scenario based on where it is.
And so just to be clear, like in the case of Charm they go out to cornfields where after the corn has been harvested. There's all this just like the corn plant is just sitting there on the ground, right, and that is essentially carbon that has been captured that's about to go back into the atmosphere. But if they can piraalize it and stick it in the ground for
ten thousand years, that's great. But it doesn't scale that much because there's not that many corn stocks sitting on the ground in various forms around the world.
It gets you to probably actively and you know, there are different estimates for this, probably in the order of like a gig a ton plus per year by twenty fifty, so that's not nothing, okay, but it's probably not going to get you to ten gigatons a year. So it's by itself, it's not going to get you all the way there.
But it's a non trivial chunk if it works, if it comes cost effective, I mean presumably for all these cost is still they're still quite expensive, and you have to get the cost exactly.
And in the case of you know, some of there are different biker's approaches, but there's case to the capex, there's a case there's the cost of sometimes transporting the biomass, but it's again it's very sort of case by case specific. I would just call out that the waste biomass problem, there's a real limit to how big it can be, and so that's why we can't put.
All of our chips in that basket. Yeah, now we can talk about rocks.
Most of the world's carbon actually is in rocks in the lithosphere, and it just takes a really long time to get there. A reactive rocks, if it's an alkaline rock, will absorb carbon roughly proportional to a surface area.
It also cares about.
Other things like you know, it doesn't have access to water and temperature, et cetera. But you can kind of think about reactive rocks. Some rocks are like sponges for carbon. So the question is is how do you find or make alkaline rock which is very reactive rock that is kind of in its most squeezed sponge form, and what do you do with that to turn that into carbon ruble to sort of get it to do this sponge activity. And there are a number of different ways that we
are looking at. One of them is called enhanced rock weathering, and this is taking sort of taking that reactive rock, spreading it on fields where it has access to air and it has access to sort of rain and water, and eventually that makes its way into the ocean and is stored as bicarbonate. But that is sort of one use of a rock. There's another category called it doesn't really have a good name yet. We talk about it
as like surficial mineralization. But essentially, yeah, taking this rock, grinding it up to air and some water, it mineralizes, it turns into a carbonate, and then you essentially put it in these giant piles that are piles of carbon removal. And you know, it sounds it sounds a little wild, but it's quite interesting because.
I like how simple it is. If it works, it sounds really simple, which seems good.
Yes, And you know, we know how to do things like grind up rocks. We have an existing big mining industry. In this case, the carbon removal actually stays in place, so the monitoring and verification is quite easy.
You just go and look at the big rock and you say, yeah, it's still there. Basically yeah.
You know, we're very excited about rocks in general, and I think that this is this is a thing that nature already knows how to do and if we can find or make enough alkaline rock and that those are you know, very scalable and sort of infinitely scalable sponges that we can use to suck out a lot of cotube from the atmosphere and oceans.
So it sounds like a direct air captured plants and rocks. You seem particularly bullish on rocks.
I think that rocks are under explos relative to their potential, is why I'm quite excited about it. You know, I think that, you know, people ask us a lot like, well, what's your favorite one? And I am always hesitant to answer that question because.
I wasn't planning to ask you that, But it feels like rocks are your favorite.
I'm excited about rocks currently because I think they are under explored, and I think the combination of the scale potential, which is functionally unlimited, the permanence and the simplicity of rocks could be interesting.
Obviously, in terms of the whole field of carbon removal, it's super early, right, But in terms of the life of frontier, it's not that early, And so I'm curious what has been different than you expected, Like what has gone better, what has gone worse?
What?
What have you learned?
You know, I've been surprised by how at the time when we launch Frontier, I wasn't sure for the reason that we discussed that a billion dollars was going to send an appropriately loud signal. I don't think that it can. It didn't convince everyone, and that's fine, but I think it convinced enough startups and entrepreneurs and investors that this was a big enough market for them to try. And so you know, the numbers that we talked about earlier that surprised me. I think in that sense, it worked
better than expected. I think that a thing that is also I don't know if we should be surprised by this, but you know, carbon removal is still really early and when companies start and not all approaches work, and that's not because they weren't good ideas. It's because you got to test your idea in the real world, and sometimes
they those don't pan out as you expect. I've been also a little bit surprised by like how quick people can be to sort of catastrophize what I think in any other in any other field would just like look like early innovation like there's a bajillion AI startups. Not all of them are going to make it, but like some of them will, and that's that is there's some normal dynamics for an early ecosystem.
I feel like with carbon removal, there's haters on both sides, right, because like, people who don't care about climate change of course hate it. But the surprising one is that some of the people who do care about climate change hate it. Right, there's the it's just going to distract us from the energy transition argument, right, So I do feel like you're up against a lot of haters.
Yes, I think that's right.
And on that point, I think that, you know, the moral hazard piece is an argument that people have been talking about in the conducts of CARMEEU for a long time.
And just to be clear, moral hazard our second fund econ term of the conversation, after public goods, is basically the idea that like, oh, carbon removal will just let people keep emitting. It'll it's a signal that oh, I don't have to worry about it because they'll just suck all the carbon out of this.
Yes, and you know, I think that, you know, our perspective is like if we had done. As a world a better job with emissions reduction earlier, we wouldn't have to do the carbon removal.
It's a great world where we don't have to do. Really, it's a dumb thing to have to spend money on. If we'd have been smarter, we wouldn't have to spend money totally.
And like ninety percent plus of the world's efforts should stay focused on a miss introduction, because without that there is no path to solving climate change full stop. But the math also, unfortunately for all of us, doesn't work without carbon removals, so like we have to learn to walk and chew them at the same time.
So fun you were surprised by the haters. I'm sorry, what else I.
Think that I am generally an impatient person, and I have to you know, my team's already reminding me that to build real things in the real world takes time.
Yea, this is physical hard tech, right, It's not software. You can't just iterate every day and ship every day. It's like physical things. It's rocks, right, It's rocks in the world that take time to do the thing that they do exactly.
And so we are sort of we as a team talk a lot about sort of inhabiting different mindsets. It's like we are rushed and we're we're sort of where we are running to get, you know, our fund contracted as robustly as possible, and at the same time, we're playing the long game like this is going to take decades. This this industry is going to take decades to really materialize and form. And we are still you know, we're We're closer to the starting line than any other place.
We're five six years into this. So I think that trying to sort of both have that short term urgency but also really realize that, like you know, climate and carbon removal is more than one administration, It is more than one country. The timeframes that we're talking about just requires a sort of steadfastness that I should have appreciated at the beginning, but that I don't think I really internalized until probably like the last.
Year or two.
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
Let's finish with the lightning round. Great, he is romanticism making a comeback in San Francisco.
You know, I'm sort of.
I wrote that piece in part because I think the answer is yes, and part because I'm trying to manifest it.
I love that.
I do see tells.
I've lived in San Francisco for a long time, and I think that there are tells that San Francisco is rediscovering it's humanism, we are rediscovering enjoyment, we are rediscovering our sort of soul in a way that I think, to me feels very exciting and a little bit different and sort of zaggy from the past ten years in SF.
So I hope.
So.
I mean, you talk about it as this sort of you know, reaction to the Enlightenment as it was the first time, right, which is fun. Who's the byron? Is there like a Byron of San Francisco.
That's a really good question. I don't know, but I will think about that. I mean, I also like the piece of it is the byron. I don't know you live there, and like I'm not, I'm not in the mix. I would love you to tell me somebody I should listen to or read or watch or whatever.
I will think about that.
I do think. I mean, there's another piece of it that you write about, right, which is particularly interesting right now, which is a reaction to AI reductively right and more specifically like this idea that if AI commodifies intelligence, what does that mean? Right, Like that's a super There's like all the sad Ai things, which fair enough, but there's a kind of interesting, maybe happy version of like, you know, embodied. I was talking to a guy at Anthropic the other week.
I said, if you weren't working there, what would you be doing? And he said, I'd be a massage therapist. And he's say it and he's like, I'm really into embodied stuff, which is super romantic in the capital.
R sense, right, Yeah, I think that.
Yeah, there's there's sort of like this re emergent interest in the physical world and in tactile things and beautiful things and a beautiful built environment. I think that, And it's just sort of aesthetic aesthetics generally, I think are on the rise, and those all they're not all, you know, definitionally I guess physical or or sort of analog non digital, but I think a lot of them. I think a lot of them, A lot of them are that.
That feels true to me.
What was the hardest thing about building a coffee table?
Well, you know, I didn't know how to how to use a drill.
I awesome drills they are amazing.
I use a drill.
I didn't know how to use a sander, and I I'd really never built anything before. I tweeted. I tweeted, did anybody have these things? And a neighbor had had all the tools, taught me to use them, and essentially, you know, this coffee, this coffee I'm looking at it right now, this coffee table is I love how it looks, and I had a very specific thing that I wanted it to look like. But I am pretty sure that it is going to decompose by ever trying to move
it. It is not built very well, but it does serve its purpose, at least at this at this moment.
I mean, maybe it's purpose was building it.
Right.
Oh, I love that. Yeah, No, you're probably right.
Man Ransoff is head of Climate at Stripe and Frontier. Please email us at problem at Pushkin dot fm. We are always looking for new guests for the show. Today's show was produced by Trina Menino and Gabriel Hunter Chang. It was edited by Alexander Garreton and engineered by Sarah Bruguier. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and we'll be back next week with another episode of What's your problem,