Can rocks absorb enough CO2 to fight climate change? These companies think so
A startup called Lithos Carbon spreads crushed basalt across farmlands to trap carbon dioxide in rock. | Image courtesy of Frontier
Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, and a slew of other companies plan to spend more than $57 million cumulatively to fight climate change by spreading crushed rock over farmland.
The aim is to use rocks’ natural ability to absorb carbon dioxide, which might sound low-tech, but speeding up the process and finding a way to reliably measure how much CO2 is sequestered has proven pretty hard. It’s a tactic for trapping planet-heating carbon dioxide called “enhanced weathering” that researchers have studied for decades, but it has lagged behind other emerging technologies in moving to commercialization.
The deal was announced today by Frontier, a carbon removal initiative led by Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, and McKinsey Sustainability. Autodesk, H&M…
