Counting in Trillions
Survival in the Anthropocene will require carbon dioxide removal. Thriving depends on doing so regeneratively.
“The balance of nature is not a status quo; it is fluid, ever shifting, in a constant state of adjustment. Man, too, is part of this balance.” Rachel Carson, Silent Spring.
1.5 trillion tonnes - that’s how much carbon we’ve emitted as a species into the atmosphere. Our world, as we know it today, rose from burning an enormity of fossil fuels to fuel the industrial revolution. A trillion of anything is a practically impossible number to conceptualise; it's a denomination reserved for the size of major economies, the complexity of cells in a human body. One and half trillion constitutes at least ten, if not fifteen-fold, the amount of stars in the milky way.
In the nineteenth century, pre-industrial carbon levels sat at around 260 parts per million in the atmosphere. Two hundred years later, we face the immensity of what we’ve sacrificed in the name of our extractive and consumptive lifestyles. Suspended in our atmosphere are levels of carbon which have not been experienced on our planet since the cessation of the Pleistocene two million years ago. By 2019, when carbon concentrations hit 411 parts per million, an overwhelming majority of the International Union of Geological Sciences voted to refer to our new geological epoch as the Anthropocene.
The IPCC AR6 report opens with a simple assertion: “human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming.” The science lacks ambiguity, but our trajectory from this point onward is fundamentally uncertain. Referring to our new age as the Anthropocene marks more than an arbitrary semantic shift — it’s a departure onto unknown frontier, a reluctant acknowledgment that our activities, namely the burning of fossil fuels, have shifted the planet’s trajectory in ways so fundamental that we can no longer consider the Earth to be operating on the same conditions that conceived and nurtured our special and societal developments.
Climate change is a wicked problem, as carbon emissions and their relationship with climate dynamics do not exist in a vacuum, nor is the state of our planet merely threatened by a warming atmosphere. Biologic, geologic, human and economic systems are all intertwined with climate in complex overlapping networks, and together are jointly threatened by resource extraction, pollution, and development.
Despite this, the ingenuity and resilience of our ancestors allowed us to survive the pressure of massive changes at this scale. After all, it was the harsh conditions of the Pleistocene that bore a more intelligent and inventive form of humankind. We all stand as living evidence of our innate ability to fashion abundance in the face of wicked problems – an intrinsically human quality which we’re being compelled to call upon today.
Carbon removal strategies are a fundamental part of the 1.5 degree pathway outlined in the AR6 report. They’re also incredibly polarising. Coming from a background where my first observations of the climate emergency were through a justice and political economy frame, narrow conceptions of climate solutions as ‘carbon-tech’ have always struck me as reductionist and dangerous. Even as I dedicated myself to studying the physical dynamics of the changing climate and formed an understanding of the base necessity of the projects, the overwhelming majority of climate scientists I’ve encountered have been incredibly cautious to accept existing carbon removal approaches. Both the natural sciences and social sciences agree that a single technology cannot control complex systems, and that with carbon, the equation is not so simple as removal = reversal.
It makes sense, therefore, that the policy apparatus addressed by the scientific body of the IPCC report considers the climate crisis primarily through the lens of future emissions trajectories. This falls into line with many outspoken climate actors, who justifiably advocate that enabling higher emissions today under the assumption that late-century deployment of carbon removal technologies ignores the impacts of present and legacy emissions on natural systems, and relies on a false equivalency of the impacts of carbon removal to the impacts of carbon emission.
That said, my generation’s outlook and the scientific consensus underwriting the AR6 report are balancing hand-in-hand on a steep precipice. Climate justice advocates will begin demanding we address the damage already enacted. Irreversible tipping points will be triggered if greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced quickly. And the vast majority of emissions have been unleashed by countries and economies which will experience the alien conditions of the Anthropocene in their least brutal form. To put it simply, you can't put the genie back in the bottle with greenhouse gas emissions of the past 200 years.
Conversation at ReGen HQ and debate at investment committees drives a constant refinement of understanding how solutions to planetary threats can be truly regenerative. Regeneration entails acknowledging and harnessing the many interconnections between climate impacts (carbon, methane, and NOx emissions), nature (biodiversity, resources), and human health (mental, physiological, economic, and societal). We don’t imagine the future as one where we merely subsist within the broken, extractive systems which perpetuated the degradation of our planet to begin with. These approaches are built in the model of positive feedback loops, supporting the reuse of existing inputs, and healing natural systems.
For these reasons, our thesis around carbon removal has been crafted with careful intention to span boundaries beyond carbon, and address issues through a whole-planet lens. As investors, we’re compelled to approach the problem of atmospheric carbon concentrations through the lens of regeneration — targeting deep, systemic transformation, understanding that in the face of climatic upheaval, there are no silver-bullets.
Moving from Removal to Regeneration
It is both possible and necessary to invest in regenerative carbon removal. The restoration of pre-industrial systems, including the carbon cycle, is a key component of our thesis.
Out of the recognition that the allocation of the fund should directly reflect the priorities of a 1.5 degree pathway, and understanding the inextricable links between human and earth systems – we envision the future of carbon removal as one which addresses previous emissions to restore the relationship between human and nature – rather than using technology as a bandage to enable a slower energy transition, the continuation of ecosystem degradation and the perpetuation of environmental inequalities.
As investors in early-stage technologies which share our restorative vision, our mandate as a firm of late has been to build an understanding of how carbon removal might depart from incremental improvements in sustainability to deep, systemic transformation and regeneration. Our firm’s role is to pinpoint and accelerate removal methods which we would like to see secure a sizeable chunk of the eventual suite of removal companies because of our key insight - their regenerative advantage. Carbon removal does not rely on investment from our fund to catapult it to scale in the same way other emerging regenerative technologies with less established funding pathways might. Venture capital investment in carbon and emissions-related technologies such as carbon capture hit $13.8 billion in 2022. In July of last year, the UK government had invested £54 million into 15 projects that develop CDR technologies. The US Department of Energy also announced the funding of $3.7 billion to help build a commercially viable CDR industry in the country.
Our goal has always been to identify and nurture companies that heal existing systems that have supported species and the health of the planet for millenia – a model which carbon removal has the capacity to fit within. As such, we’ve defined criteria for what regenerative CDR entails to laser in on the technologies which will go beyond removal to healing. Whether each company or technology is restorative needs to be assessed individually, and as the technology matures our understanding of the space will continue to evolve, however, following the same understandings and principles in the area can help create a heuristic for envisioning a future in which we choose to remove carbon regeneratively:
1. Net-Negativity - Restoring the balance of planetary cycles.
The technology must be guided by a goal to regenerate slow and fast carbon cycles, restore depleted carbon sinks to their pre-industrial state (eg. reforestation), and/or move carbon from fast to slow carbon cycles - not to support a slow phase-out of fossil fuels.
Carbon flows in two interlocked systems: slow and fast carbon cycles. The fast, or biological cycle, takes place over the course of years, moving carbon between the atmosphere and ecological systems. It's most easily represented through animal respiration and photosynthesis. The slow, or geological cycle, may extend deep below the earth’s surface, where the fossilised remains of dead plants and animals form fossil fuels after millions of years of exposure to heat and pressure in Earth's crust.
Carbon found in this slow-form geologic storage is what we use to produce oil and gas. When we burn fossil fuels, we’re essentially taking carbon from slow cycles and rapidly pushing it into fast carbon cycles where it remains stuck between the atmosphere and biosphere.
This means that any continued extraction of fossil fuels, even at ‘net-zero’ emissions, is antithetical to the goal of moving gigatonnes of carbon back into slow carbon cycles, negating any restorative effects of carbon removal on a balance of carbon in the carbon cycles that supports a stable climate and carbon fluxes.
2. Deeply Transformative - Intersectional, systems-level change.
The impacts of the project should not only be significant in terms of emissions abatement, but also address biodiversity, human wellbeing, and not adversely affect the functioning natural systems - regenerative approaches will go beyond reversing the negative, and directly provide value to ecosystems.
Our investments should actively seek to facilitate a competitive advantage and high margins in the areas of carbon removal with profound co-benefits, and rapidly scale these projects to capture a larger market share – earlier than even equally viable technical CDR solutions with less beneficial or even negative co-impacts. We see this as a ‘trojan horse’ for facilitating wider financing in areas such as ecosystem restoration without a mature biodiversity market funnelling large flows of investment into the area. Restoration cannot be taken as regeneration at face value - in the case of nature-based solutions, the restorative aspect of the solutions must take into account the complexity of the degraded ecosystems, avoid creating a monoculture, and protect existing life, rather than displace it.
3. High Quality - Permanent, durable, and additional.
The primary justification for CDR is to abate the emissions from sectors which will not be able to completely decarbonise, due to social and practical constraints - as a result, it is critical the CDR projects related to an investment are both additional and durable in order to actually account for these emissions.
If the technology's standout value proposition is to abate carbon and sell offsets, it must move carbon to long term storage (100+ years) to both regenerate the pre-industrial balances between slow and fast carbon cycles and ensure resilience to the changing climate.
4. Catalytic - Contributing to decarbonisation goals.
When the outputs of the technology are contributory to decarbonisation, it forms a positive feedback loop. A regenerative technology which uses the carbon abated as a feedstock for fuels, to create novel materials and goods, to substitute either new inputs and extraction, a carbon intensive process, and fossil fuels.
We see this as regenerative in several ways:
It uses an existing waste product (carbon) to create goods which would otherwise be produced off the novel harvest of materials to create the inputs for production. In some cases, this could address leakage, by reducing our dependence on extracting natural resources.
The more we decarbonise, the more effective carbon removal will be. If a CDR process also enables reducing the embedded carbon in manufacturing processes, carbon removal technologies are more effective, as the significance of their impact is directly relative to the level of active emissions.
5. Restorative - Centring climate justice for all humankind.
Considering the portfolio holistically, we understand that systemic change also involves transforming and nurturing livelihoods that were dependent on broken systems for their livelihoods.
Human wellbeing, particularly relating to those dependent on highly emissive sectors for employment and security, is at stake during the energy transition. Carbon removal strategies can be considered regenerative if they address restorative justice by prioritising communities impacted most by legacy emissions and enable a just transition.
“There is science now to construct the story of the journey we have made on this Earth, the story that connects us with all beings. Right now we need to remember that story — to harvest it and taste it. For we are in a hard time. And it is knowledge of the bigger story that is going to carry us through.” Joanna Macy
Our reason for being is to become the world’s foremost early-stage regenerative investor. It is an honour and a responsibility to be stewards of capital dedicated to catalysing the development of the most scalable and nature-positive solutions for planetary health. We are in love with the potential for these technologies to enhance and enrich the lives of everyday people. If you hold a strong perspective on catapulting regenerative technologies, or if your life’s work has been contributing to a CDR approach which is potentially and fundamentally regenerative — you can reach me at elena@regen.vc.