✖️ Myth buster: every CDR startup needs to reach a gigaton ✖️

🤔 Have you noticed that many CDR startups around the world are claiming they will all reach a gigaton of carbon dioxide removal (hashtag#CDR) - each?

🤷 Is this pie in the sky thinking, a white lie, or somewhere in between?

😬 An entrepreneur confided to me recently, “...as a CDR startup, you cannot raise money from a VC without a slide that shows how you hit a gigaton.”

🧐 While I am all for ambition, I think it’s important that we consider the implications of this unrealistic benchmark and how it could be harmful to the successful scale-up of our industry.

Let’s put things into perspective:

👶 The CDR industry is only around five years old

🙋There are already around 350 startups delivering or aiming to deliver carbon removal

📈 We need between 4 and 10 gigatons of CDR annually by 2050

👷 The best path to get to this scale? Not 4 to 10 HUGE companies, but hundreds, yes thousands, of companies adopting a wide range of different technologies, all delivering megatons (or less) of CDR.

🌟 I believe that decentralisation, diversity, and modularity will be instrumental to ensuring the necessary high learning rates and the development of a truly global, resilient industry.

🕺 Real talk: can we just drop the BS, leave behind this gigaton assumption, and focus on actually scaling from kilotons to megatons?

❓ What is your take? What am I missing here?

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