FINN wishes you a breath of fresh air for 2021
At FINN, we like big ideas that start small, especially when they sound crazy.
That's why we decided to start subscribing to Climeworks, a Direct Air Capture carbon removal startup based in Switzerland.
Climeworks will remove 2500 kgs of CO2 from the air every year for us. That is the equivalent of the use of our office space with about 20 people. (More on that later).
Climeworks doesn't offset emissions, it removes them from the air and puts them back in the ground.
Carbon removal is not an accepted idea yet. It irritates some people, who think that we should avoid emissions rather than try to scrub them from the air. But irritating ideas are ideas worth watching. They might just break through and become mainstream. (We wrote about this before).
In a recent post on Bloomberg, science fiction writer Kim Stanley makes a convincing case that Direct Air Capture is not that crazy.
Yes, it's expensive, but so are many other things (like sewers and roads). Yes, it might require 2% (or more) of the global electricity supply - but we spend that on Bitcoin today. He notes, with a sense of understatement: "a similar amount directed to saving civilization could be considered reasonable". Indeed.
This is where our core business - communication and persuasion - comes in. We can't save the planet. But we can change minds.
Changing the world by changing the debate
Klaus Lackner is a professor at Arizona State University's Center for Negative Carbon Emissions. He thinks we will run out of our carbon budget long before EVs and renewable energy find mass adoption. "We will have to figure out how to go negative", he says. "We have to think of it as a waste management problem, like garbage or sewage."
