Why Counteract?
This post was first published on Medium in February 2021
Why launch a company to invest in carbon removal? In the end for a single reason: Believing it’s how we’ll make our biggest contribution to the future.
Counteract will invest in technologies and ventures with the potential to remove at least 1mio tonnes a year of carbon dioxide equivalent from the atmosphere.
Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5°C”, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
The IPCC says that carbon removal in some form will be essential in all pathways which keep global temperature rises to the 1.5oC target of the Paris Climate Agreement or return it to that level after a higher peak. Countries and organisations are starting to commit to dates for ‘carbon neutrality’ and energy generation is shifting toward renewable sources but there are no viable solutions yet for alternatives or hard-to-remove emissions in areas like shipping, aerospace, cement or much chemical manufacturing, or to remove historical and excess emissions if we overshoot 1.5oC. These problems need solving.
But carbon removal is currently under-supported and under-developed. It has consistently accounted for less than 0.5% of the global investment in clean energy and efficiency technologies (IEA, 2020b). In 2020, Just 0.04 Gigatons of CO2 were captured globally but the IEA forecast we’ll need to be capturing 5.6 Gigatons annually by 2050–140 times as much. This means scaling faster than the oil industry did at its peak.
COP26, the world climate forum, is happening this year and carbon trading, one of the key enablers for developing a carbon removal economy, is being championed as a major topic of conversation. The US is rejoining the Paris Agreement and the UK has announced £12bio of ‘green investment’ with an initial £200mio for carbon capture. Elon Musk has promised a $100mio prize for the best carbon capture technology. The enthusiasm and market conditions for carbon removal are starting to change.
Today, though, the whole sector is new for investors and existing businesses are very young. Many of tomorrow’s unicorns are only an idea or even still undreamt at all. This means that ventures are too early in their lifecycle for larger VC, PE or corporate investment and there is an incredibly difficult gap for entrepreneurs to leap. That’s where we can help.
We believe some of the best ideas will come from people who have never founded a company, or potentially even worked in the for-profit sector before, and we don’t want the world to miss out on that science.
Our aim is to identify early-stage ideas and businesses and support these to develop so they can reach mainstream funding and achieve the results their founders dream of and our environment needs. That will take money but we believe or personal experience in founding and growing businesses can also make a real difference to success.
Three of us have worked together for 20 years — Andrew, Matt and I founded and grew Essence which, over ten years, became the largest independent digital media agency in the World — and Caitlin also joins our founding team from a sustainability & deep tech investment background. We’ve engineering, materials science and economist educations and 30-plus ventures between us. We’ve built our own desks … and then teams and operations on three continents. We’ve started with ideas and turned them into industry-leading propositions and technology. We’ve understood our own market and then led communication strategy and advertising for some of the world’s largest brands. There’ve been ups and downs, euphoric moments and tough decisions.
Every step has been a lesson though, success and setback alike. We hope and believe that, together with the right funding, our experience growing businesses can help make the difference to entrepreneurial scientists, engineers and innovators who are looking to develop a product or idea and bring it to market.
If you think you might be one of those entrepreneurs then get in touch, wherever you are, and let’s see what we can achieve.