https://archive.md/fhe6C
"The town hall in Akranes, on the west coast of Iceland, filled quickly as
locals streamed in to the residents’ meeting. The mood was happy, positive,
relaxed. In between speeches, a woman sang folk songs while her family played
guitar and melodica. Yet when the guest speaker, an American named Marty Odlin,
took the stage, he struck a deadly serious tone.
“We woke up Godzilla,” he told the assembled residents. “It’s burning down
forests and towns and stealing fish and doing all sorts of terrible things.
It’s a horrible monster, but we did that. We woke it up. And so we have to fix
it.”
Odlin, the founder of a US climate startup called Running Tide, had become a
well-known figure around Akranes that summer of 2022 in his signature neon
beanie and fisherman’s flannels. He was setting up a base of operations in a
nearby harbor, planning to unleash a counteroffensive against the Godzilla of
climate change. Odlin had outlined a plan to create jobs in this former fishing
hub of 8,000. He’d need people to help sink huge volumes of biomass in the
surrounding ocean. Together, they’d remove gigatons of carbon from Earth’s
atmosphere—and make money by selling carbon credits to Silicon Valley
hyperscalers. The exponential growth in tech companies’ emissions, driven by an
explosion in demand for data centers and AI, had made the carbon-credit market
hotter than ever. Lowercarbon Capital, a VC firm cofounded by Chris Sacca of
Shark Tank, had led a $54 million Series B funding round for Running Tide
earlier that year.
At first, Running Tide painted a vision of free-floating “micro forests” of
seaweed seeded on biodegradable buoys, which would float in the ocean before
sinking under their own weight, locking that carbon deep in the sea. Within
nine months of his appearance in Akranes, though, that vision had morphed into
something else: dumping around 25,000 tons of chemically treated Canadian wood
chips off Iceland’s coast. Some ocean-carbon experts describe the work as “poor
science fiction” that likely removed no atmospheric carbon while contributing
to marine pollution. Ship-tracking data indicates that in the process, the
startup likely violated the maritime rights of multiple countries.
By the time WIRED visited Running Tide’s Iceland headquarters in the autumn of
2024, the party was over. An orange jacket emblazoned with the Running Tide
logo hung on a coat rack. A sensor buoy gathered dust in a corner. Gone was the
founder, along with his grand plans and his neon beanie. Gone were the hundred
or so workers once employed by the company. The startup, at one time the next
great hope for carbon removal, left in its wake thousands of credits
uncertified by any independent entity."
Original at:
<
https://www.wired.com/story/how-the-next-big-thing-in-carbon-removal-sunk-without-a-trace/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
