Online payments company Stripe has established a fund totalling US$975 million to speed deployment of technologies that can reliably capture and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and help limit global warming.
The Frontier fund includes financial contributions from Alphabet, Shopify, Meta, and McKinsey and Co., Bloomberg News reports. While emissions reductions are the first priority for climate protection, carbon capture is widely believed to be a necessary component, and nature-based solutions like growing trees can’t do the whole job, Bloomberg reporter Akshat Rathi writes.
The Frontier fund will entertain a wide variety of proposals from start-ups and evaluate them based on factors including permanence of capture, cost per tonne, scalability, and community impacts. The fund will purchase offsets from successful proponents, enabling them to demonstrate their technologies, secure venture capital funding, and raise funds to build commercial-scale facilities.
A similar approach by the Gates Foundation supported the development of a vaccine for a pneumococcus bacteria which saved the lives of 700,000 children in the first decade, Bloomberg says.
