🏭 Listed companies = 40% (not 20%) of all GHG emissions + 🌲 $50M for startup using satellites to count (conserve) trees
Your 3-minute summary of climate tech, startups, better habits, and deep work.
Good morning, folks.
In today’s 3-minute read, we’ll cover the following:
Listed companies = 40% (not 20%) of all GHG emissions.
9 steps for allocating more capital to BIPOC managers.
Marc Benioff backs start-up NCX that uses satellites to count (preserve) trees.
40 public Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) project proposals.
Be curious, not judgemental. (Thanks, Ted Lasso.)
Enjoy.
Chris
🏭 Listed companies account for 40% (not 20%) of all GHG emissions.
The prior estimate of 20% was based mostly on direct emissions only (aka, Scope 1).
But this new 40% estimate of the world’s [10,000] publicly-listed companies’ GHG impacts also includes Scope 2 (indirect emissions) and Scope 3 (supply chain).
See the image below for a sense of magnitude.
Who did these calculations?
Generation Investment Management — the $30+ billion asset management firm led by Al Gore and David Blood
Check out the full report here.
What else might this research teach us?
Focus on the biggest levers: Not all sources of GHG emissions are the same. Not all solutions deserve the same attention.
Our climate-related data is imperfect: Expect more double-digit reassessments in the future. But those won’t (usually) mean we’re on the wrong path.
Out of sight, out of mind: The impacts we don’t see (e.g., Scope 3) are sometimes bigger than those we do (e.g., Scope 1). Gotta check those blind spots.
🧑🏾🤝🧑🏾 9 steps for allocating more capital to BIPOC managers.
Enter Due Diligence 2.0.
“Traditional due-diligence and risk-assessment frameworks in the asset management industry have led to a system in which white, male asset managers control 98.7% of the investment industry’s $69 trillion in assets under management.” - Source: Institutional Investor
So how can we move more assets to BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) managers?
Below is a teaser of 3 of their 9 suggested action items.
Learn more here.
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Shout out to these leaders behind Due Diligence 2.0.
🌲 Marc Benioff backs start-up NCX that uses satellites to count trees.
Kudos to NCX cofounders — Zack Parisa, CEO, and Max Nova, COO and Climate Mastermind peer group member at Entrepreneurs for Impact.
Here are the highlights from their CNBC article last week:
Marc Benioff backs start-up that uses satellites to count trees and pays people not to cut them down
On Wednesday, NCX announced it had raised $50 million from a number of investors including Benioff’s investment fund, Time Ventures, and J.P. Morgan.
It will use that money, part of the $74.4 million it’s raised in total, to grow outside of the United States and to develop software management tools for other natural resources besides trees.
“Our job as a company is to help make it so that every landowner in the United States can sell the carbon from their forests to help meet this just skyrocketing demand,” Nova told CNBC on Monday.
In addition to making tree-mapping software, NCX has created a marketplace where it brings together forest landowners with companies looking to buy the resulting carbon credits.
“We called the company the Natural Capital Exchange, and not the Forest Carbon Exchange, because there’s all sorts of things that we want more of or less of in the woods: We want more carbon, less wildfire, more animal habitat, less erosion. And so carbon for us is really step one,” Nova said.
The company is also hiring rapidly. In the last year, the team has grown from 10 to 50 people, and expects to have 100 employees by the end of 2022.
☁️ 40 public Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) project proposals.
In the CDR Database from carbon(plan), you can search CDR projects by:
Method of removal — forests, DAC (direct air capture), mineralization, soil, biomass, or ocean
Volume
Permanence — e.g., years the carbon is stored
Price per ton
Buyer — Stripe or Microsoft
Year — 2020 or 2021
It even shows the proposals used to arrange for these carbon-sequestering purchases.
Below are samples search results. Pretty cool.
Full citation:
F Chay, D Cullenward, J Hamman, J Freeman (2021) “CDR Database” CarbonPlan doi:10.5281/zenodo.5715460
That’s all, y’all.
Make it a great week, because it’s usually a choice.
— Chris
P.S. “Be curious, not judgmental.” (Thanks, Ted Lasso.)
OK, the quote was actually from American poet Walt Whitman.
If you haven’t seen this 1:36 minute video from Ted Lasso, it’s worth it.
See how he puts an adult bully billionaire in his place.
It might also explain why haters act the way they do. 🙄
—
Dr. Chris Wedding
Founder and Chief Catalyst, Entrepreneurs for Impact
The Only Private Executive Mastermind Community for CEOs, Founders, and Investors Fighting Climate Change