Hi all,<p>We're Fabienne and Ewan of Climacrux. Today we're proud to launch our latest project to try and make carbon dioxide removal as accessible as possible: CDR Platform [1].<p>In short: it’s an API to connect to a portfolio of carbon removers. You can purchase from as low as a single gram and select from both natural and technological removal methods.<p>Longer: A couple of years ago we launched an alternative to carbon credits, Carbon Removed[2], designed for individuals to buy and subscribe to CDR. But we always had the nagging thought that there was more that could be done.<p>CDR Platform is our foundation for that - a simple API to get prices and purchase (at the moment). Our plan is to become the Stripe of the carbon removal ecosystem, seamlessly connecting the supply to the demand.<p>We’d love to hear your feedback. Do you see a use case for this and would you use it? What features have we missed? Do you understand what we’re doing and if not, what’s unclear? We’d love to hear from you.[3]<p>Many thanks and happy hacking, Climacrux.<p>P.s. If you are a carbon remover, send us your prices, life cycle analysis and some more information about your removal timeline. Our aim is to bring your services to a wider audience so you can focus on reducing our CO₂ levels. Thanks for your work!<p>[1] <a href="https://docs.cdrplatform.com" rel="nofollow">https://docs.cdrplatform.com</a><p>[2] <a href="https://carbonremoved.com" rel="nofollow">https://carbonremoved.com</a><p>[3] ewan@climacrux.com
The more negligent and incompetent methane emissions become, the more carbon credits will be devalued.<p>Do you consider methane leaks as a 10 year investment plan? There is no tracing where the co2 came from once ch4 turns into co2 (we've had methane leaks for decades). :)<p><a href="https://clear.ucdavis.edu/explainers/gwp-star-better-way-measuring-methane-and-how-it-impacts-global-temperatures" rel="nofollow">https://clear.ucdavis.edu/explainers/gwp-star-better-way-mea...</a><p><a href="https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/MethaneMatters" rel="nofollow">https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/MethaneMatters</a><p><a href="https://www.epa.gov/natural-gas-star-program/estimates-methane-emissions-segment-united-states" rel="nofollow">https://www.epa.gov/natural-gas-star-program/estimates-metha...</a><p>The opportunities for fraud have already been proven.<p>There is no money (gdp) in preventing methane leaks and we get the upside of higher temperatures and carbon credit manipulation.<p>Carbon credits schemes profit from neglect. The "save the world types" just chased co2......
I took a look at the website front page, but I couldn't see <i>how</i> CO2 is removed.<p>Does the money go to planting trees? Lab diamonds? Coal buyback?<p>I love the idea of offsetting my intensive compute use. But I'd like to know who is doing the removal and how they're doing it.
This is awesome! I can't believe all of the negative comments about lowering the barrier to do something this important. We only have one earth, it is priceless because we cannot live without it, and we are really messing it up with massive amounts of CO2. It really doesn't matter much how expensive, difficult, or inefficient removing the CO2 is... it must be done, we have no other choice. Like any tech, it will get better over time when more and more money goes into it.
Great idea, wishing you luck!<p>While carbon removal today is inefficient, it's not set in stone to always be that way. For example, olivine is super interesting - one of the most abundant minerals on earth - it absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere passively when ground down into small pieces. The Cascade Mtns in Washington state are full of the stuff and not far from the beach. The ocean grinds rocks into sand all day with zero carbon costs. With the right combination of luck and strategy, I don't see why some forms of carbon removal can't eventually be extremely cheap. It might be the greenest thing we can do to literally turn our beaches green!<p>This is nice for folks like me who make business SaaS so we can add a nice line item "removes some carbon!" to the checkout list. I know to some, that's probably disgusting and cynical, but I <i>strongly</i> prefer surrounding myself with optimists, so, it works for me!
Hi Ewan, Fabienne. I have been following since a while (Ewan, we exchanged some emails at some points).<p>This API is great. Somehow I forgot to comment a week ago.<p>Some feedback.<p>It's clear it's an API/Github project, but it's not clear how to get an account. It feels like I arrived to Stripe's docs, but without a path to go to the Stripe page where I can get an account.<p>The fixed fee makes it feel less Stripe-ish, less like an infrastructure that just "works" (like tap water) and then the user needs to time the system, instead of simply use it without friction. (I'm guessing this if because you're starting).<p>More clarity, maybe a sample on the certificates.<p>A video, gifs, illustrations on the homepage would be great.<p>But this is great, and I know how difficult is to push something like this. I will continue to see you grow. Congrats on the launch.
Personally I'd care about the quality of the schemes before learning the exact API. I had to navigate around to find some partial information, it would be nice to see a table of the schemes, their attributes, and their cost.<p>Personally I don't like the inclusion of tree planting schemes and that greensand scheme because as long as unmeasurable and uncertain schemes like that are selling low cost credits there is not going to be a market for carbon removal, just a lot of corporations running ads congratulating themselves for being "net zero" while the planet burns.
This seems like a really cool idea! Making it easy to do good is almost always a wise choice.<p>Personally, up until now I've been subscribed to Wren to offset some of my personal CO2 footprint and get a little bit more educated about climate adjacent topics: <a href="https://www.wren.co/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wren.co/</a><p>It's not really something you'd use in an automated fashion, but rather a yearly subscription, so not comparable against the solution in the post 1:1, but it still might be of interest to some.<p>Of course, one can also talk about the impact of personal decisions vs those of corporations and the need for legislation and so on, but I'll take what's achievable for me, even if I do a little good.
Reduce energy usage to reduce CO2. That means reduce internet calls, and reduce CPU utilization to do the thing.<p>Strip the tracking crap out of your app.<p>Reduce/eliminate all but the absolutely necessary API calls required.<p>edit: To be honest, anything that causes bloat is what pushes the "get rid of current device and get newer device". And it's not 1 app, but dozens over bad upgrades and bad features, tracking, monetization, etc.<p>I don't just think of the CO2. I also think of all the industrial e-waste in silicon chip making, and the fact that their cradle-to-grave cycle is a "local landfill".
$5/tonne for forestation? I did the numbers - some time ago so my memory is hazy at best - but I'm pretty sure we ended up at one big tree being roughly one tonne of carbon, and big trees are not five dollars a pop. Have we not included the cost of the land?
I think there is a place for frontier carbon removals, but I agree with other commenters that it's not as effective as some of the (much much cheaper) solutions that we already have.<p>There's nothing wrong with incentivising carbon avoidance, deforestation etc while also keeping an eye on burgeoning solutions.<p>Another caution is that most removals are selling you forwards, not credits. So you can't actually claim you are offsetting your carbon today.<p>Full disclosure, I work for Fenix Carbon (www.fenixcarbon.com) where we're specifically focusing on high quality offsets and connecting buyers directly to the project developers.
Your docs mention biochar but your main site and pricing don't.<p>Also, everything seems to be phrased-for/aimed-at the buyer, do you intend to be a marketplace or to only work with some upstream supplier?<p>[edit: nvm I found the 'removal partner' page. let me put it differently then: if i went and bought 100 acres, grew hemp or something on it, ran it through a giant biochar retort, and buried the resulting biochar >20cm deep... what would you give me for a ton?]
I've grown increasingly skeptical of carbon removal. It strikes me as incredibly inefficient; there are much easier and cheaper gains to be made by no longer removing carbon from the ground in the first place.<p>Further: The Carbon Removed website claims that carbon is "permanently" removed from the atmosphere, and yet lists some of the carbon removal sources as "reforestation." This doesn't add up. Forests are part of the carbon cycle, and not a way to "permanently remove" carbon from the atmosphere.<p>Overall, I very much doubt that our society will do enough to stop climate change from drastically changing our planet. I wish that I saw initiatives like this as a source of hope, but don't see much, if any evidence to support such hope.
Carbon capture isn't real (as advertised). If you take green energy out of the supply to capture carbon, a carbon producing power plant will have to make up for it.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJslrTT-Yhc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJslrTT-Yhc</a>
feels like putting a bucket under a waterfall to be honest. For what it's worth, tech behind it looks kind of cool.<p>We need leaders around the world to move off of cheap energy (ie, oil and gas) and subsidize it for developing countries. We need strict penalties for producers and we need to get off of animal products.