Of all philanthropy globally, only a couple percentage points go to climate in general. And of that couple percentage points, only something like 2% of climate giving is dedicated to carbon removal.
The problem is, we need to fund several gigatonnes of carbon removal per year by 2050 to combat climate change. And that’s going to cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
So, how do we encourage governments, corporations and philanthropists to support carbon removal? How might the average person make a tax-deductible donation to fund carbon removal?
Alex Roetter is Founder of Terraset, a new nonprofit climate fund that uses private philanthropy to invest in carbon removal projects.
On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Alex joins Ross to explain how the underfunding of carbon removal inspires his philanthropic work, and why reducing emissions alone is not enough to curb climate change.
Alex discusses the well-known donors and carbon removal providers Terraset is working with and describes the criteria his team uses to evaluate the projects they choose to fund.
Listen in to understand how giving to a 501(c)(3) makes your dollars go further and learn how to make your own tax-deductible carbon removal purchase through Terraset.
More from the show
Ad-free episodes and other benefits come with a paid subscription.
Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
Carbon Removal Memes is still going.
Resources
Email hello@terrasetclimate.org
Dr. Marcius Extavour on Reversing Climate Change S3EP28 Bonus
Charm Industrial on Reversing Climate Change S3EP27
Heirloom on Carbon Removal Newsroom S3EP23
Yvon Chouinard Gives Away Patagonia
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change. Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast at Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon and I’m the creative director at Nori, one of the co-founders here. Today we have with us Alex Roetter, founder of Terraset, a new nonprofit climate fund that is using private philanthropy to invest in carbon removal projects. Thanks for being with us, Alex.
Alex Roetter: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Ross Kenyon: I am too, although I feel like I have a minus five on my charisma stat today, because I got my mouth partially numbed at the dentist. I hope this will be fine to continue with. I can already feel myself slurring in strange ways. Can you hear it? Or am I still charming?
Alex Roetter: You sound great.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, that’s great.
Alex Roetter: But if you want to pause, that’s cool. If you start drooling, I won’t make fun of you. So whatever you want is fine with me.
Ross Kenyon: Audio only for this, so it seems pretty safe to me to just continue as is. I do have to ask you though, the obvious: you’re formerly the head of engineering at Twitter — what a title that is. You probably have a lot on your mind right now. I try not to poke at that. Do you want to say anything about it, or not really?
Alex Roetter: That’s probably a whole podcast episode in itself. It’s certainly wild. I think it’s disappointing. I think there are certainly some changes that needed to happen at that company. I don’t think what’s currently happening is the right way to go about it, if it’s the right way at all. So yeah, I feel really bad for people that have had to go through this inside the building, and it’s a lot. And like I said, one day, when you want to do an eight-hour podcast on a different topic, we can go into it in more detail.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, fair enough. Sorry to spring that on you.
Alex Roetter: It’s okay. I get asked that a lot.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, you’ve had such an interesting career, and then on top of all of it, you’re into aviation, you’re a pilot, and that’s just too many things for one person to be good at, frankly. Alex, what am I supposed to do after learning that there are people like you out there?
Alex Roetter: I think that’s very kind, and I appreciate that sentiment. I feel like I’m very lucky. I get to know a bunch of amazing, accomplished people, and you compare what you’re doing with what other people are doing. And so I think we’re just kind of all on our own little adventures doing awesome things, and I’m excited to be part of it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, sorry, too. I realize it’s hard to receive a compliment like that. It’s a strange one. But you’ve been involved in tech and startups from so many angles. You have a lot of larger-company experience, especially early in your career. Then you worked at some small companies that later became big companies. You’ve been an investor both as an angel and as a GP. Now you’re involved in philanthropy and carbon removal. So you’ve had a sort of grand tour of the broad tech ecosystem, I think it’s fair to say. Of all the mechanisms available to you, why are you working in philanthropy now?
Alex Roetter: Right. So I think I just have adult-onset — not ADD, but wanting to do a lot of things a little bit. Basically I think that’s what that is. The philanthropy question is broader. So climate in general is so massive. It’s not a type of startup, it’s not one issue. We’re talking about changing the whole way we live, the way the whole economy works, the way we grow food, the way we get around, the way we heat and cool buildings, the way we live. It’s everything. And a problem of that scale can’t be solved just by the government. It can’t just be solved by venture capitalists. It can’t just be solved by corporate commitments. It can’t just be solved by philanthropy. It’s really a yes-and. We have to do all the things to tackle the problem.
This problem — I mean, this is the biggest existential crisis of our generation, possibly maybe that humanity has ever faced, I’m not sure. And so we have to do everything. And so really, Terraset — I didn’t start out wanting to get into philanthropy. I just looked around at what existed and what didn’t exist and thought, what is the best thing we can possibly do to accelerate things? And much to my surprise, I found that there wasn’t a philanthropic avenue to move money into carbon removal. And yet I talked to a lot of philanthropists, and there was tons of demand to do this. And so, as I mentioned before we got started, I spoke to so many people who loved the idea of what eventually became Terraset. We figured it must exist, so we went looking for it, and we were all shocked to not be able to find it. And that’s why we started it.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve heard of meetings taking place with various family offices. I know that there’s larger involvement in carbon removal from, I think, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, or whatever it’s becoming now. So there is some philanthropic involvement in carbon removal. But I think the average person listening, unless they work in that field, probably thinks it’s only really rich people who know how it even works. How does philanthropy work? Give us the bird’s-eye view of it.
Alex Roetter: Right. So I don’t know if I know how philanthropy in general works at the large organizational level — you know, how the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation works. I have no idea, to be honest. It’s very impressive seeing what they do from a distance. But I can tell you what we are trying to do and the gap we saw, which is: philanthropists aren’t just really, really rich people. Those are the famous ones, when you hear about people giving away billions of dollars. But there are plenty of people that give twenty dollars to their favorite organization at the end of the year, or give four dollars a month to something. And that matters too, and it matters for two reasons. One, summing all those numbers up actually can be a meaningful amount of money. But two, it gives people agency.
Like, they can do something, and it gets them interested, and they get educated, and maybe they join a mailing list when that happens, and then learn a little more, and they become a small part of the solution. And a lot of people doing a little bit in the right direction adds up to something. So the reason we started Terraset is that carbon removal — we know now that it’s not just emissions. It’s not carbon removal versus stopping emitting carbon. Like anything in climate, it’s a yes-and. We have to reduce our emissions. About forty gigatons a year right now — we have to bring that down by about thirty-five gigatons a year, but there are some hard-to-abate industries. And so carbon removal is going to be part of the solution. The IPCC is very clear about that.
But to get to five gigatons a year — that is a massive change from where we are today. Five gigatons a year by 2050 is a massive challenge. I forget the exact number, but we worked it out the other day and it’s something like sixty-five percent a year growth, compounded year after year, for twenty-eight years. And so how are we going to do that? We have to throw everything against it. And there are some corporate commitments — Frontier is probably the most famous one, and certainly in Silicon Valley land. There are some government programs: 45Q, the IRA is helping with this. But there also is a lot of private money that was really interested. And one thing we heard was, I don’t know how to get started, I don’t know what projects are high quality, I don’t know how to engage with these companies. It’s very expensive, so I want my money to move as far as possible. That’s where the tax credit comes in.
And so we just saw a hole. I don’t have a holistic map for you of everything every other philanthropy is doing and how it all fits together. That would probably be very expensive to figure out, even if it was knowable at all. But where we are is we’re so early and we have to go really, really fast and try a lot of things. And at some point, as these things coalesce and grow, we’ll probably figure out what is the optimal way that Frontier and Terraset and the Gates Foundation and the Ford Foundation and some new government agency and a government in the EU — how those all work together. So we’ll figure that out. But right now, we need to start all the things and run, run, run and generate as much quick progress as possible. That was a very long, wandering — I don’t even know if that answered your question, but that’s sort of how I think about that general area.
Ross Kenyon: I think it’s a fine place to start. I want to ask you — I hope this isn’t too interrogating a way to put it, I’m really loading a lot into this thing up front. It’s sort of a founder question that you might ask as an investor: but why you? You could have done so many different things. Why carbon removal? And then also — well, I guess you kind of answered that — but why not start another business? Or why not focus on… I see you’ve worked on flying cars, you’ve worked on mobility and transit. Why not work in that sector? Is that no longer the place where you see there is the most leverage at this point?
Alex Roetter: Well, I think they’re very different. I’m not saying we should have carbon removal instead of flying cars, although I suppose if you really pushed me and I could only pick one, I would pick carbon removal. But I do think removing gigatons of carbon from the air is ultimately more important than having electric flying cars, as much as I like aviation and as much as I hate traffic. But it’s really not a [unclear]. I’m really grateful — they’re extremely intelligent, talented, driven people working on flying cars, some of whom I was lucky enough to work with before. So that’s great. That is happening. It’s almost like a happenstance thing.
So I started looking, you know, reading IPCC reports, and I saw that carbon removal is massively underfunded for how big a part of the solution it needs to be. So as I mentioned, of the forty gigatons a year, thirty-five needs to come from emissions reductions and five needs to come from removal. So it’s about an eighth of the total problem. And yet it’s very underfunded. Of all philanthropy globally, only a couple percentage points go to climate in general. And of that couple percentage points, it’s only a couple percent that go to carbon removal — even though it needs to be an eighth, if not more. Some people estimate ten gigatons a year, an eighth to a quarter of the entire solution, and it’s getting almost none of the funding.
And I looked at a bunch of these startups, because there is a lot of startup activity in the space — and that’s why Terraset can exist, that’s who we purchase from. And I talked to them about what they need. And I originally thought they didn’t need more demand, more money, because they were so supply constrained. And it’s not true. This is such a large-scale, industrial, capital-intensive business that they need a cheap cost of capital. And people purchasing out of the goodness of their hearts and immediately retiring any credits they’re given or any offsets — that is the cheapest capital you can get. Venture capital is very expensive. Debt capital used to be relatively affordable — even still, it wasn’t free — but of course, in the interest rate environment we’re in now, that’s no longer true.
But people purchasing just because it needs to exist and immediately retiring the carbon removal services — that is the thing that we can do to ensure that we maximize the probability that a lot of these services and carbon removal products exist over the long term. And it seems like such a simple idea. I was surprised it didn’t exist already. So I looked around and tried to find it, and eventually we gave up and realized we’d looked hard enough that it must actually just not exist. And so we were sufficiently annoyed by that point that I figured, you know, I might as well just start it.
Ross Kenyon: We had Marcius Extavour from XPRIZE on recently and we were discussing the various fundraising gaps that exist or have been filled to this point within carbon removal. And one that we singled out is that once one gets to about series B, once you start becoming more attractive to debt financing, a lot within carbon removal dries up, because a lot of companies haven’t made it that far, or they just don’t have enough traction to prove it. There’s a couple of exceptions that have raised series B or beyond — they’re into hundreds of millions of dollars being raised and projects being developed. Are you coming in later, in that stage, where there’s large amounts of money being moved? Or are you still looking more at like the seed, series A, pre-seed kind of area?
Alex Roetter: So the thing we care about — we picked 2050. It’s an arbitrary date, but it is a date at which a lot of climate milestones are set. The thing we care about is doing everything we can to maximize the chance that, as a species, we are removing gigatons a year of carbon from the atmosphere by 2050, because the scientific consensus is very clear on that being absolutely critical to avoid the worst climate outcomes. So we don’t have religion over what stage company. It doesn’t even need to be a company. If there were another nonprofit doing carbon removal, we’d be happy to buy carbon removal services from them. If it were a B Corp, a government agency — it doesn’t matter.
What we care about is doing everything we can to move this entire space forward, and being an early customer of something is a way that that something will continue to exist in the future at higher scale and at cheaper unit cost. You know, the price of carbon removal today is insane. It will never scale to gigatons a year, and that’s because we’re very early. Many things in the early days are expensive. So we don’t have a thesis on stage. What we do look at — we do have a bunch of criteria that Terraset looks at when we’re evaluating projects. So, is it additional? Is it verifiable? Is the project ethical? Are we storing carbon — we call it long-term — storing carbon for centuries or millennia? Does the project have the ability to scale? It’s okay if it’s not scaled right now, but it needs to have the ability to scale, theoretically and in practice. And is it validated by a bunch of other really smart researchers and scientists and organizations? So we need all that. It doesn’t matter — we don’t care if it’s a company or not a company, if it’s series A or it’s late stage. That doesn’t matter to us.
Ross Kenyon: Sounds fairly within the realm of advanced market commitment, like Frontier. Is there a point of contrast you might draw, or are you fellow travelers?
Alex Roetter: Pretty seriously, the mission is very aligned. The main contrast I would draw is just the source of the money. So I’m very glad that Frontier exists. It’s also the case that it’s too big of a problem that we should just rely on four companies with benevolent CEOs doing the right thing. And so we also need the government doing this. We need federal governments, local governments doing this. We need private philanthropies doing this — both small-scale donors and massive philanthropies. Again, the likelihood that we over-solve the climate crisis and we realize in fifteen years, wow, we’re blowing this 2050 thing out of the water, we really should relax because it turned out to be way easier than we thought — that would be an amazing success problem to have, and I’d be happy to do fewer things if that were the case. But where we are right now is we’re facing this daunting task, really with not as much time as we would like, and we have to do absolutely everything. So compared specifically to Frontier, it’s really the same in cause, but private philanthropic money, not corporate balance sheet money.
Ross Kenyon: Got it. Are you able to share much about with whom you’re working and how it’s going, what you’re thinking about right now?
Alex Roetter: Sure, yeah. So, you mean like the providers that we’re purchasing from — is anyone that we would know, or are we even able to say? Yes, we’re public about the two first providers. You probably know both of them. Charm Industrial is one — they’re bio-oil — and Heirloom Technologies is another one. Both of those, we have visited the factories, and there are a bunch of other very smart people that we respect who have either purchased from them or invested in them or are partnering with them. They have two different technologies. It’s important that over time — we’re just getting started — so over time we need a really diverse set of providers that we’re purchasing from, because there is technological risk and we want to have a bunch of bets, so that the ultimate thing we care about, removing gigatons by 2050, is most likely to happen. So Heirloom is an enhanced weathering company, Charm Industrial is bio-oil. Those are probably familiar to a lot of your listeners, and both are alums of the show and probably the other show, Carbon Removal Newsroom, too.
Ross Kenyon: What about the other side? Are you able to talk about the source of this money?
Alex Roetter: Sure. So we’re very early. We’ve announced a couple donors. Tim Ferriss is a donor of ours. Calvin French-Owen, one of the founders of Segment, is a donor of ours. We have a bunch of other individual donors we haven’t talked about publicly. I will say we’re very early on that. And one thing that’s important that we do is, I believe this mission is one of the most important things we can do — by that I mean solving climate change, of which we’re playing one part, an important part, but one part. And so allowing Terraset to run as quickly as possible is very important. And as it is right now, it’s a side project by a bunch of very committed people, but we are working on it part-time on the side. So what we’re really trying to do is raise enough money so we can put a full-time team — a very small, lean team, but a real full-time team — against this, so they can just run, run, run and maximize the impact that Terraset has on this industry as quickly as possible.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. So you’re on the development trail, sounds like — probably kissing babies, shaking hands, that kind of deal. I feel like it’s my whole life, between being a VC and this. It’s always asking people for money. What’s it like making VC-style pitches versus philanthropic pitches? Does it feel pretty similar, or is it entirely different?
Alex Roetter: It’s a good question. I mean, I think at its core it’s — I mean, obviously the people are different and their motivations are different, and maybe the format is different, but at its core it’s very similar. I mean, I am doing something that I believe is fundamentally, extremely important and can play a meaningful role in the biggest problem we’re facing as a species, and raising money. And similarly, when I’m running a VC fund, I believe that we have differentiated access and differentiated decision-making and we can provide outsized returns. So it’s really about pitching: why are you doing what you’re doing? What’s unique and different about it? And what is meaningful to the person giving money that should cause them to give money to you instead of doing something else? So I think at a high level it’s similar. It’s about what are we doing, and why are we the people to do it, and what difference does it make in an additive way in the world?
Ross Kenyon: Do you have any sense of what kind of scale we might be able to expect? I guess you’re a lean, mean team — most of that money is supposed to be going towards carbon removal directly, I imagine, right?
Alex Roetter: Yeah. Maybe we want to hire one full-time person, so we don’t duplicate research. We don’t think that Terraset adds value to the world by being smarter at evaluating carbon removal projects than other people. Frontier’s very good at this. They have a bunch of PhD scientists. Lowercarbon is very good at this. Breakthrough Energy is very good at this. DARPA — you know, there are a bunch of people researching this. And we’re lucky in that a lot of that research is published openly, so we don’t spin up and we will not spin up a bunch of research, because we want as much money as possible to go to the advanced market commitment and actually purchasing removal of carbon. That is the thing that people donate to us for. That is the thing that adds value to the world and is the direct philanthropic effect. So that is not an area where we invest.
But your question about the scale — I mean, the ultimate scale comes from the top-level climate goal. We need to be removing five gigatons a year. The price for that, it’s sort of unclear what the prices may be. But if it’s a lot of money — if it’s a hundred dollars a ton, that’s five hundred billion dollars a year in 2050. If it’s half that, it’s a quarter of a trillion dollars a year in 2050. We’re nowhere near this. The prices now — the early-stage things, because they’re so high quality — now cost between, call it, six hundred and twelve hundred dollars a ton. So that needs to come down substantially. But there is a lot of money given philanthropically annually. Like I said, only two percent of all climate giving — which in turn is about two to three percent of all total giving — goes to carbon removal. So I do think there’s a really big opportunity. But the short answer on scale is we need to grow like crazy as quickly as possible.
Ross Kenyon: You focused — sounds like long durability is quite important to you in selecting for these. I think that’s certainly the way that much of the thinking in carbon removal has gone recently.
Alex Roetter: It’s also the case that we’re not an offset, so we don’t give offsets to people. There’s no value given back to our donors. They’re donating just for a better planet. But there have been people who buy offsets, and there are some good ones. And there are a lot of greenwashed ones of questionable quality. And not only do you not get the benefit atmospherically that you think you’re getting, but I think it also is a mark on the entire industry. So we want nothing to do with that. We are advancing the world’s highest quality, most permanent, durable, long-term stored carbon removal that exists. We are willing to buy very expensive projects today because we believe that by doing that they will scale and ultimately become cheap. But this is not an offset game. In fact, you don’t get offsets. We don’t even — we buy carbon removal, not offsets. It’s not a minimizing price-per-ton game. It’s none of those things, because what the planet needs is long-term, durable carbon removal and storage.
Ross Kenyon: I love the focus on getting out of the price-per-ton and carbon accounting framework, which I feel is quite a dead end. I much prefer the how much impact can you have with your dollars. If you’re pushing technology down the cost curve, it doesn’t matter how many tons you’re able to claim. How much doesn’t really matter relative to your impact. I think being able to free yourself from that opens up a lot of new possibilities that are really powerful.
Alex Roetter: It is good for the planet if we suck carbon out of the air today. And more is better, obviously. But I don’t care what you’re doing in your personal life, that you feel guilty or not guilty, or you’re trying to cancel something. I don’t care about any of that. It is a good thing for everyone on the planet — everyone and every living thing — to remove carbon. And so we allow philanthropists to move that forward.
Ross Kenyon: It sounds like kind of an easy sell, especially in Silicon Valley. Is it okay making this pitch with the people that do this sort of thing all the time?
Alex Roetter: I do joke, like, thank goodness this is a nonprofit, because I think this is the world’s simplest, least defensible idea. People ask, why don’t other people do that? And I would say, please go do it. It would make me so happy. I want everyone to do this all the time, which is the least defensible part of it, Terraset. I think it’s okay. We’ll purchase carbon removal and use philanthropic organizations and donor-advised funds and foundations that need to move through this 501(c)(3) machine. We’re going to do this to do a thing that’s good for the planet. Suck carbon out of the air. It seems so simple. I was shocked no one was doing it. I wish everyone would do it. But for better or worse, here we are, and we’re doing it, and I’m excited about it.
Ross Kenyon: I’m excited to see. Why is it that way? I could also see it being so easy a sale. But your guess — are you saying people are just used to maybe a more quid pro quo kind of relationship? Is it something like that?
Alex Roetter: Oh, I don’t know. I was just commenting in general on why this doesn’t exist. There’s no secret sauce that no one could do. We’re just doing it. I don’t know if fundraising is ever easy. I mean, there are some things that make it easier than fundraising for other things. Everyone knows — I think this is the world’s biggest problem. Or I should qualify: the people that don’t know that are not going to be convinced by me and probably aren’t our target donors. So I tend to not spend much time convincing them to give money to Terraset, because it would never work. So we have massive interest. That’s one thing that really blew me away, how much interest there is for this. So that helps us. There are more public commitments about climate. Obviously younger generations care about this more.
There is also — I haven’t directly seen this helping us, but I think over time there is a well-documented massive transfer of wealth happening to millennials and younger, as older people pass down their estates. What I’m hoping is that as that money falls into the hands of folks that care about climate more, that that will accelerate all sorts of action on climate. Not just Terraset, not just philanthropy, but all sorts of action. But I’m not going to sit here and say fundraising is easy, because it’s not. Fundraising is hard.
Ross Kenyon: Is there a parallel problem where sometimes in fundraising you’ll have people who are like — this happens in Hollywood, it happens everywhere, I think — but, I love the project, it’s a great idea, we’re not going to lead but we’ll definitely follow, so come back to us? And you’re just like… I guess it’s kind of a lead thing, right? A lead donor is a nice person to dangle in front of people. Does that dynamic happen when you’re fundraising for philanthropic purposes too?
Alex Roetter: I’m well familiar with that dynamic from raising my own funds on the venture side, from funding other companies and hearing what VCs ask about. And as you mentioned, Tim — I’m super thankful and grateful that he donated to us in the early days, and also that we were allowed to use his name on our website. Super thankful. It does take these early pioneers who just say, yeah, this makes sense, let’s do it. I also think it’s a momentum-begets-momentum thing a little bit, so it should get easier over time, which is why I’m especially thankful for the early people, you know, the famous ones like Tim and the other people that are just doing the right thing and doing something a little bit different, which is what we are.
Ross Kenyon: If someone’s listening and they want to participate, do they need to be accredited in this sort of way? Are there possibilities for smaller donations?
Alex Roetter: Yes. Think of this the way you might at the end of the year — you might give twenty bucks to the American Cancer Society because that’s affected your family, or you might give ten bucks to a local soup kitchen because you care about food insecurity. Or you can go to terrasetclimate.org. There’s a little link to donate. You can donate a dollar if you wanted to donate to us. Or, you know, you can email me, and if you want to wire me a million dollars, that’s great too, I would love to talk about that. But one thing that we care about is really making this easy for everybody. There’s tons of demand to take action on climate, and I think there’s more demand than people know exactly what to do.
And the average person can’t go research the twenty carbon removal companies. I suppose they could, and then try to call them and ink advanced market commitment deals with all of them — I’m not really sure how that would work. So we try to make it really easy. We do that work for people by leaning on the research of other really smart organizations, like I mentioned, and just make it really easy for everyone to participate, and they can do so at any level. It’s like donating to NPR — there’s the five dollar level and you get the free tote bag, although we actually don’t do anything like that because it’s silly, you know, the fifty dollar level and you get the AM radio or whatever. We just want to meet people where they are, and if they want to participate, we’re super grateful.
Ross Kenyon: Trying to think how many carbon removal companies really do have a strong B2C focus. I can’t think of — like, Nori sells some B2C, but it’s not a huge part of what we do. Climeworks famously has their subscription, although it’s quite expensive; I don’t think it makes up a lot. And then most carbon removal is often sold out quite far in advance, as you know, for B2B deals. So, wondering where even would an average person who wanted to buy certain types of carbon removal even go. Maybe it’s to you guys.
Alex Roetter: I hope so. And if they find something else to do, they should do that too. I mean, a benefit of us, because we’re a 501(c)(3), is it’s a tax write-off for you. So you are doing a thing that is good for the planet, and the tax code is written so that that gives you a tax benefit. So, you know, for people living in California who are above a certain income level — I don’t know what the marginal tax rate is these days, but it’s over fifty percent — so you’re really getting over half off while doing something which is good for the atmosphere and it’s good for the planet.
Ross Kenyon: Wow, I really buried the lede on this episode, clearly. Being able to make a tax-deductible carbon removal purchase slash donation — that is definitely value-added. People ask us about that sometimes too, and I kind of deflect, like, no, that’s not a thing that you can do with these. But in this case, yes, you can, right?
Alex Roetter: Yeah, you can. Because the key with 501(c)(3)s is — and I’m not a tax lawyer or an accountant of any sort — but if you’re doing a thing for which you don’t get a benefit back, that is a tax-deductible behavior. So if you give money to a soup kitchen and they feed someone else, that is tax deductible. If you just buy soup and eat it, that’s just grocery shopping, right? And so this is — you don’t get offsets from us, you don’t then get to go say that your vacation was net zero, any of this garbage. You’re just doing something which the planet needs and as a side effect helping to contribute to an industry that needs to scale very quickly.
Ross Kenyon: Is there anyone else?
Alex Roetter: As far as I know, there isn’t anyone else doing it. Like I said, I would welcome them. I would love more people to be. This is not a company where we worry about competition, right? We are literally all in this together, stuck on the same little pale blue dot. So it would be great if there were, but as far as I know, I don’t know anyone that’s doing exactly what we’re doing.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. Yeah, I can’t believe we got to the very end of the show before that one came up, because that’s how I’m going to title the show, with tax-deductible.
Alex Roetter: Maybe I should mention that. I think I spend so much time thinking about the problem and how we solve it and the size of the solution, I spend little time thinking about the underlying mechanics and donation receipts and all that kind of stuff. I probably should have led with that, because that is really meaningful for the people who purchase through us. That is meaningful. I mean, you can think of it basically as your money going twice as far. I mean, it depends on your marginal tax rate, but basically your money is going twice as far through us.
Ross Kenyon: Now, that’s absolutely huge, and I think that should be celebrated much more. I’m wondering if that’s going to cause — you’re paying less tax for a good thing, but are people going to be salty about, like, less tax revenue coming in because of carbon removal? Surely it’s such a small scale. What do they care?
Alex Roetter: Well, I mean, do people get angry that people donate to the Cancer Society and [unclear]? There’s like a reaction sometimes against philanthropy — billionaires and millionaires shaping policy without going through the legislature and stuff like that. So there was this crazy thing when Yvon Chouinard gave away Patagonia and people started complaining, well, it’s just a tax dodge, right? If you give away a hundred percent of your net worth, that is not effective. No wealth advisor would tell you to do that to minimize your taxes. That is not [unclear]. And, you know, anyone that knows him, it’s really clear that [unclear]. You know, having seen the internet before and having worked at Twitter — haters gonna hate. So I’m sure no matter what you do, someone will decide you’re a big jerk for doing it and you shouldn’t do it. But I don’t care about that. Fundamentally, this is a very important thing. Solving climate change is very important, and this is one piece of the puzzle. We should go do all the things.
Ross Kenyon: If someone wants to get involved, where would you direct them?
Alex Roetter: It depends. So if you want to start donating every month, go to terrasetclimate.org. If you want to read more about us, terrasetclimate.org. You can write us: hello@terrasetclimate.org. We’re very lucky in that the public launch went about as well as it could have, so we’re a little bit behind on email, but we do read all the emails and will get back to people as soon as possible. And we’re looking for, you know, volunteers, donors, people that know about new projects that we can fund as the donation level continues to grow. So yeah, I would say go to our website, and even shoot us a note at hello@terrasetclimate.org.
Ross Kenyon: Cool. Well, links are in the show notes. Thanks for hanging out, Alex, this was really fun.
Alex Roetter: Ross, thanks for having me. I hope you feel better. You did great. I never would have — unless you had told me about the dentist thing, I never would have known. It was great.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve had a couple of moments where I slurred a word, and I’m going to listen back and I’ll be like, oh, those Rs really gave me a hard time today.
Alex Roetter: Oh, I have those moments all the time. I have them ten times on the show and I have no excuse. I didn’t see the dentist today, so I wouldn’t worry about that at all.
Ross Kenyon: The whole thing — maybe it’s humanizing.
Alex Roetter: That’s good too.
Ross Kenyon: Hey, thanks so much for listening. I hope you had a great time with Alex and me. If you’d like to follow along with Terraset, there’s links in the show notes, go look there. Give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. We really do appreciate it. Send it to a friend, and thanks so much for listening. Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify, that’d be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people. You can sign up for our newsletter at nori.com. Follow us on social media. We will catch you next time.
