Stripe’s ‘Negative Emissions Commitment’ to pay for removal and sequestration of CO2 to mitigate global warming

Yesterday, Stripe, the online payments platform provider, announced a phenomenal initiative of ‘Negative Emissions Commitment’. According to the commitment, Stripe will pay for the removal and sequestration of carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere in a secure and long-term storage to mitigate or delay global warming.

[box type=”shadow” align=”” class=”” width=””]Carbon sequestration is the process of capturing and storing atmospheric carbon dioxide or other forms of carbon for a long term in a secure storage.[/box]

Besides Stripe, there are other growing startups such as Carbon Engineering, Climeworks, and Global Thermostat, which are actively working in this space.

Stripe seeks to purchase negative carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions at any price per tCO2 (total Carbon dioxide). The official blog post adds, “And so we commit to spending at least twice as much on sequestration as we do on offsets, with a floor of at least $1M per year.”

This initiative of Stripe comes after IPCC in its recent summary report stated that in scenarios where the temperature usually stays below 2°C of temperature increase will have “substantial net negative emissions by 2100, on average around 2 gigatons of CO2 per year.”

Image Source: IPCC

Stripe plans to work with experts in selecting successful carbon capture solutions based on cost-effectiveness as it is expected that it will cost more than $100 per tCO2, as compared to the $8 per tCO2 that the company pays for offsets.

What are Stripe’s current efforts in technology landscape?

There are three ongoing projects that the software company expects funding for,

• First, is the land management project, which aims to improve natural carbon sinks by forestation initiatives, soil management reform, and agricultural techniques. Scientists and entrepreneurs can try to increase the duration of CO2 storage by hacking plant roots such that more CO2 can be stored for an extended period of time.
• The second ongoing project is on enhanced weathering. The project will make CO2 in a gas or liquid to react with silicate minerals and rocks rich in Ca and Mg to form carbonate minerals. This collected carbon is later sequestered for centuries in the mineral.
• Next, is a direct-air capture project, which is an industrial installation that uses energy to force air into contact with a CO2-sorbent. Later, the CO2 is separated from the sorbent and transported to long-term storage sites.

Stripe believes that humanity will need more such techniques in the coming decades in order to achieve the collective goal of removing negative emissions from the atmosphere.

The company expects that if a scalable and verifiable negative emissions technology is made available for $100 per tonne of captured CO2 (tCO2) in the market, it could turn out to be a trillion-dollar industry by the end of the century.

Such kind of projects will not only help in reducing negative emissions but will also put an end to anthropogenic climate change. Stripe has also announced that they are open to funding such projects to mitigate negative emissions in the coming decade.

People all over the world are admiring Stripe’s commitment in mitigating negative emissions.

Many are also expecting that other companies will follow Stripe in this initiative.

For more details about Stripe’s Negative Emissions Commitment, head over to Stripe’s official blog.

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