Sergey Brin-Backed Carbon Removal Startup Nears Firing Up Its New Plant
280 Earth CEO John Pimentel will appear at Bloomberg Green Festival in July. In his first comments since taking over, he explains why he’s aiming for a moonshot.
The world will almost certainly need to remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year by mid-century.
Photographer: Prashanth Vishwanathan/BloombergOf all the climate technologies under development, direct air capture (DAC) is perhaps the biggest reach. Efforts to suck carbon dioxide out of the ambient air are still fledgling, with the biggest DAC plant in the world currently removing just 4,000 tons annually.
That’s equivalent to just a few seconds of humanity’s emissions. But cleaning up the atmosphere is critical to meeting global net-zero goals. Many companies, from Microsoft Corp. to Meta Platforms Inc., have already paid millions of dollars to nascent startups to remove CO2 in the future. Doing so is an essential part of their own corporate climate targets.