Evidence for carbon removal
First off, as promised, here are the best examples the AirMiners community uses to talk about carbon removal.
Sometimes I have these conversations about carbon removal and my head hurts. As one AirMiner wrote about their experience, "reactions ranged from, ‘we’ll never do it’, to ‘even if we do, China is not going to’, to ‘I love your optimism’, to ‘why can’t we just plant trees."
But a few emails ago I said don't get distracted. And in the face of "how does this serve the goal of removing 1 billion tons by 2030?", however much this drives me nuts when random people don't get it, that's mostly a distraction right now.
I just got back from Pittsburgh where I spoke* at a Department of Energy conference. While there I learned a lot about the Carbon Negative Shot, the DOE's initiative to hit $100/ton for carbon removal by 2032.
They'll probably spend tens of billions of dollars, perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars to get to $100/ton over the next ten years. There's already billions of dollars allocated towards getting there, including $1.2B on DAC hubs.
The US Department of Energy doesn't need any more evidence that carbon removal is needed.
What they need are your solutions.
It's go time.
DAC startups -- DOE is giving out $100,000 prizes each to 7 DAC startups, and the top winner gets $1,000,000. I recommend every DAC startup reading this apply by September 26th. After you apply, hit reply and let me know.
Lastly, if this whole "all we need is decarbonization" conversation continues, yeah, it might be a problem for us in the future. I would love for all AirMiners to have a shared narrative about this. If you want to solve it, hit reply to this email and I'll connect you with others like you.
Tito
*AirMiners won a $100,000 prize to develop our accelerator's DAC capabilities!