Giving Compass' Take:

• Adele Peters reports that Stripe is going beyond buying carbon offsets to paying for carbon capture to transition from being carbon neutral to carbon negative.

• How can funders help companies transition toward environmentally-friendly practices? 

• Read more about carbon capture technology. 

Like many companies, the payment processing company Stripe is trying to eliminate its emissions. For the emissions it can’t find ways to mitigate, it buys carbon offsets to help reach its goal. But the company recently announced that it would take the more radical step to start also investing in negative emissions—like direct air capture plants that suck CO2 from the atmosphere so that it can be stored underground.

“We were thinking, how could we and other companies have the most possible impact?” says Christian Anderson, head of merchant intelligence at Stripe. “And one area of increased impact that we saw was to look further down the technology learning curve at technologies that climate science tells us are likely to be very important.”

For the world to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees or 2 degrees Celsius, every scenario from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change includes “negative emissions” as part of the solution. One recent report from an independent research group estimated that we’ll need to pull as much as 1,850 million metric tons of CO2 from the air each year to reach the widely accepted goal of net-zero emissions by midcentury; shifting to renewable energy and other approaches like reforestation aren’t enough on their own. Negative emissions tech exists but is in a nascent stage—and paying for a ton of CO2 from a direct air capture company can be 100 times more expensive than paying for a simple carbon offset from, say, a tree-planting project.

Stripe will continue to buy carbon offsets, but now plans to begin paying for negative emissions at whatever price is necessary; it plans to spend at least twice as much on the program as it does on offsets, at a minimum commitment of $1 million.

Read the full article about becoming carbon negative by Adele Peters at FastCompany.