Carbon & Emissions Tech Startups Raised $13.8 Billion In 2022
According to a recent Pitchbook.com's Emerging Tech Research, Carbon & Emission Tech Startups raised $13.8 billion in 2022. The research explores recent VC trends in carbon & emission tech, spotlights key players in the space, and highlights emerging opportunities in ocean carbon capture and biopolymers. "From the perspective of carbon and emissions tech, perhaps the largest impacts will be to the various forms of carbon removal, which already saw their highest year of VC investment in 2022," PitchBook reports.
The world is currently removing only about 2 billion tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere yearly, and the forests are doing most of the removal work. Climate experts say that the CDR (carbon dioxide removal) capacity needs to increase by 1300 times by 2050. Five large companies (Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, Shopify, and McKinsey) – launched an initiative called Frontier to invest around $1 billion in carbon removal by 2030. Their goal is to help CDR startups scale up and lower the cost of CO2 removal (source).
California's "cap-and-trade" program limits carbon emissions, creates a market for tradable emissions credits, and helps fund climate-related projects. According to Carboncredits.com, the program's basic concept is to "create a market-based compliance approach to drive investments in climate strategies. It's the only economy-wide carbon market in the U.S. and one of the largest ETS in the world. It supplements a range of various carbon reduction programs in the state". The program focuses on meeting California's climate goals:
To reduce emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 (completed in 2016),
40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030,
80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050
Additional goals include reaching 100% carbon-free electricity by 2045 and economy-wide carbon neutrality. Washington state is the most recent to follow in California's footsteps by launching its own carbon removal program. The program aims to drop statewide greenhouse-gas emissions by 95% by 2050. Washington is the first state to pair cap-and-trade with a regulatory air-quality program to help people in the most polluted areas breathe cleaner air (source).
