Frontier – An advance market commitment to accelerate carbon removal | Hacker News Reader

Frontier – An advance market commitment to accelerate carbon removal

frontierclimate.com

83 pointsjohn_cogs15 comments

Frontier is promising to buy $925M of permanent carbon removal between 2022 and 2030.

They have criteria such as Permanence, Cost, Verifiability etc.

Seems like a great program and we need many more like it.

This is really interesting. I wonder whether they can increase their impact by narrowing the time frame and also adding repeatability to the list of criteria, so as to better motivate building capacity that can lower the price for the broader market in the years before/after.

In looking at the Founder Advisory board, I was surprised that all of these companies have dedicated roles/teams focused on climate/sustainability.

Very cool to see and hopefully a sign there will be more leadership on climate coming from the business community.

This is a really cool idea and much more beneficial than simply buying carbon offsets and calling it a day.

$925M sounds like not a lot, though. It's a start.

Is there something like this that individuals can contribute to? I'd love a subscription I could pay into monthly that could be used for something like this. Short term, put it in inflation protected securities. Long term, buy me carbon removal once certain criteria are met.

Arcadia, perhaps?

They look like an interesting company, but I don't see any kind of offering like this.

I would avoid Arcadia's wind offering. They lost their certification a few years back, probably because they were buying worthless Texas RECs which cost less than $1. Last I looked they were still sourcing from Texas. They do have community solar options in some markets which appear to be what they say they are.

Many people aren't aware of it but a large part of the US population has the option to choose an alternative electricity supplier, including those that offer varying percentages of renewables. Usually it costs more but at times I've gotten lower rates. There are unscrupulous companies out there that will try to lock you into a bad contract so read any fine print closely. For options by state and zip code see

https://www.electricchoice.com/

No need for fancy financial products. You can literally buy carbon removal today.

https://charmindustrial.com/ https://climeworks.com/

http://wren.co (YC S19) is a literal monthly subscription to offset your carbon footprint.

carbonremoved.com

I started this a year ago with exactly this purpose. Recently we added the ability to fully customise your removal plan and will shortly also have carbon removal via mineralisation in concrete to choose from.

Of course, reading this makes me very happy, and I am getting more hopeful by the day because it seems that more and more things are finally happening. But I also can't shake the feeling that a lot of these programs/investments are just a complicated way of doing a carbon tax.

This is really great. Hopefully industrial commitments to net zero carbon can create a market for removal without government assistance, which seems less likely in our current political quagmire.

Does this perpetuate the idea that companies can pollute now and simply “buy” their way out? Isn’t this especially true if a lot of carbon removal technologies are unproven, or proven at a minuscule scale of what is needed?

I’m all for initiatives addressing the climate crisis at this size and scale, but not if this follows a similar path to the carbon credits and carbon offsetting markets we have now.

See this FT article for example: “Carbon offset transactions surge despite environmental concerns” https://www.ft.com/content/5ca87325-0baf-47fb-85e0-b1e4746f4...

I imagine for companies like those funding this, it's part of their bigger-picture plan to offset their carbon emissions, aiming for net zero and whatnot.

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