There are a lot of companies that want to buy carbon removal and don't have the budget to participate in Frontier or Symbiosis. What are they to do?
Until now, they either had to pay expensive consultants or vet projects and contracts themselves and stand by their choices alone. No longer!
The new AirMiners Buyers Club could not be arriving at a better time. Federal policy for carbon removal is in an extremely turbulent moment. Buying momentum is not growing to the degree that we need to see. The AirMiners Buyers Club aims to solve for the missing middle of carbon removal buyers.
Do you work at (or know someone who works at) a company that could be passionate about supporting cutting-edge carbon removal companies? Are you a high-net-worth individual? Involved in philanthropy? If so, please reach out to Tito Jankowski directly (tito[at]airminers.com) and see how you can work together to grow CDR during its Dark Night of the Soul.
Additionally, if you personally want to support CDR in non-monetary ways, come join the so-called Rebel Alliance in AirMiners. We'd love to have you.
Thank you so much for your love and support of carbon removal!
Resources
Become a paid subscriber of Reversing Climate Change
Join the AirMiners Buyers Club by emailing Tito Jankowski directly: tito[at]airminers.com.
Form to join the Rebel Alliance
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m a longtime climate tech and carbon removal entrepreneur. Today I have two alumni coming back to the show to talk about an exciting new initiative they are doing. One thing you may know about me: I am currently an entrepreneur in residence at AirMiners. AirMiners is an amazing community of carbon removal professionals. One of the main things I’ve been doing is working as a mentor in the Launchpad accelerator program that AirMiners runs, and that’s been an amazing experience. I’ve done two cohorts with them and it’s been amazingly rewarding personally, and I just love helping early-stage carbon removal startups go to market. So it’s been great.
Adina Mangubat, who’s on this show, she is the accelerator director at AirMiners. She’s been on the show before. She is currently a regular panelist on Carbon Removal Newsroom, and I’m glad to welcome her back. Alongside Tito Jankowski, who is the CEO of AirMiners and the co-founder of it. They have an exciting new initiative that we’ve all been working on together. It’s the AirMiners Buyers Club. And when we think about buyers clubs or advanced market commitments, Frontier comes to mind. Symbiosis comes to mind. And those are amazing initiatives. They’ve been industry-defining in so many ways. Symbiosis is newer, but hopefully it has a similar effect on the marketplace. Frontier has been a huge deal.
Winning an offtake and/or pre-purchase agreement from Frontier connotes a lot of quality. I can tell you a lot about a company just by virtue of them receiving such a deal. And one thing to keep in mind about these advanced market commitments is that they’re consortia of multiple participants that are woven together into a club to vet projects together, to work through the legality and the financing together. It’s a way of sharing cost and multiplying impact, which is really cool.
The downside of what exists for carbon removal at the buyers club level, advanced market commitment level, is that the buy-in — it is very steep to get into Frontier. I’m told the minimum amount that one needs to be able to put up is $10 million, and there are not that many companies willing to put $10 million into carbon removal. But there is appetite at smaller price points for companies that would love to support carbon removal, especially in an era where policy support for carbon removal and climate tech and climate work in general is being stripped out of the federal government, where demand is not feeling as robust as maybe it once did with carbon removal. I think morale is not feeling as good as other times as it has in our industry, but there are some people who very much want to.
Wow, no joke, I just saw a bald eagle fly over me. Oh man, there’s two of them. I’m recording a podcast right now, an intro, and just watching bald eagles fly over. Well, it’s not fun. I wonder if they got lost. Okay.
Anyways, there are companies, though, that would love to support carbon removal. They just can’t pay the price of admission to join Frontier or Symbiosis. So what AirMiners is doing is gathering companies that want to make significant contributions to carbon removal right now in a group, in a Buyers Club, that can vet projects together, find the most catalytic uses of their funds, and make this whole thing much easier for potential buyers in carbon removal. We need more demand right now, making sure that it is not nearly so monopsonistic, that there’s a wider base of support for carbon removal.
And so I think this project with AirMiners is very important. If you’re at a company that potentially would be willing to support a buyers club for carbon removal, I think this is a great way to do it. This is the chance. Come to the AirMiners. There has probably never been a time where your support and your company’s support would matter more than it has right now. I don’t think that there’s another time that I could point to that would feel that way, given where we are right now early in the Trump administration, part two.
So I humbly ask you to follow the links in the show notes and see if you can join the AirMiners Buyers Club, if you at all can. Secondarily — deeply, secondarily — but also I should say, please become a paid subscriber of this show if you like what we’re doing here. If you love it, there is an option for $5 a month to support the show. It helps me keep this thing going, it helps me expand it, offer new ways of delivering value to you, gives you exclusive benefits like bonus content. I’m working on some other things too. I would love to have your support. $5 a month, link in the show notes. It mostly takes place through Spotify. Thanks so much for listening. Here’s Tito and Adina.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. This is the — this is the Reversing Climate Change podcast.
Tito Jankowski: This is like, this is our stand. This is fucking Sparta.
Adina Mangubat: This is — this is a disaster already. What are we?
Ross Kenyon: This is Tito’s “let’s fucking go” speech. It’s fine, Tito.
Adina Mangubat: Yeah. Tito’s LFG.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, thanks for being back, to you both. It’s been some time as we’ve done this. AirMiners is doing something new. It’s something interesting. I don’t think anyone else is doing anything like this that I’ve seen. The world could use a little bit of good news. What are you working on and why?
Tito Jankowski: We’re building a buyers club. It’s more accessible for basically anybody who’s leading carbon or climate from within a big company. They can join this buyers club. They get safety in numbers, which means that you don’t end up in a Guardian article all alone by yourself. You get access to diligence — access, like, really understanding the diligence process, being part of the RFP process, being able to access, talking to the different teams. That way you can champion this stuff internally to your CEO, to your CFO. You also get access to group buying power and group media. So you come in with a $100,000 budget and you can be a part of this buyers club that’s getting a big story about purchasing carbon removal. That’s all to figure out: how do we unlock this next wave of carbon credit buyers? And that’s the Buyers Club we’re building.
Ross Kenyon: Why would someone want to join AirMiners for the Buyers Club rather than Symbiosis or Frontier?
Tito Jankowski: Symbiosis or Frontier are awesome. You should totally join us if you can. You know, from a budget standpoint, if you’ve got $100,000 or $1,000,000, you’re not able to meet the threshold for some of those bigger programs. We’ve also heard, you know, Frontier focuses on really high-durability stuff, Symbiosis focuses on lower-durability stuff. Sounds like biochar is, like, not in either of them. And the buyers we’re talking to, I mean, they’re looking at portfolio prices of something like $45 a ton to $200 a ton on average, right? So with that you’re going to mix in a little bit of sprinkling of direct air capture and a bunch of biochar, or whatnot. And so that’s where we see this space in the middle is this more accessible Buyers Club. Someone’s out there, they don’t have the budgets of a Fortune 100 company, but they want to buy. I almost said buttloads of — buttloads of biochar.
Ross Kenyon: Is that — it’s got an alliteration, we’ll go with that.
Tito Jankowski: But we’ve got, like — people can come from even some of the world’s biggest corporations. They just don’t necessarily have the budget for it. So you might be one of the world’s largest banks or one of the world’s largest airline companies and they’ve got, you know, a $100,000 budget for carbon removal. So it comes from kind of corporate leaders, sustainability leaders of all sorts.
Adina Mangubat: Yeah. I mean, we’re definitely seeing folks that are like, okay, I can’t get my CFO over the line for a huge $10 million commit upfront for the next, you know, between now and 2030 — like, not gonna happen. But I can salami-slice my way in by, let’s say, starting with a category. Like, one of the ones we’ve heard is: what if we did carbon removal for all of our flights? We can do that, which is great. Like, everything helps and you’ve got to start somewhere. I think it’s a really, really tall ask to have everybody jump in from zero to 60. And so this is really a: how do you make the on-ramp more accessible?
Ross Kenyon: It’s a great idea and I love to see it, and it makes me think, why the bigger buyers clubs or advanced market commitments don’t do this too? And I’m wondering, is it sort of like being at a startup and having a really crowded cap table? We have all these investors and it just gets very difficult to administer with so many people involved. Or what’s the reasoning for not being easier to include smaller sizes or ticket sizes in a Buyers Club?
Adina Mangubat: That’s a good question. I mean, I think that what we’ve heard, having spoken to some of the bigger buyers clubs, is that part of it is administrative, certainly, but part of it is that it’s brand, right? They only want people that are, like, full-on 100% in. Which I get — like, I want to be in a club of people that are full-on 100% in too. But what about everybody else? Like, what if you need help convincing your CFO to increase your budget? Who the hell do you go talk to then, right?
Ross Kenyon: So, you know, you’re saying they’re bi-curious, is what you’re saying.
Adina Mangubat: That’s right. I am carbon removal curious.
No, you know, I actually made the same point on the Carbon Removal Newsroom podcast. That episode is going to drop soon. But, like, there’s this question of, like, oh, should people be doing nature-based at all? Shouldn’t we just be only doing durable? And I was like, well, if people could afford only durable, that would be great. But how are you going to convince people to do that right out of the gate? You can’t. So you need to sprinkle in this, like, let’s go from avoidance offsets to nature-based removals. Then let’s move from nature-based removals to more durable stuff, because then the price point kind of ramps up over time and you can get more and more buy-in from your CFO.
Ross Kenyon: I really get tired of those arguments, and I often think of it as being related to that old yarn people say: what’s the best church? The one that you’ll go to. So, like, honestly, if you’re going to buy avoidance credits, like, thank you. Thank you for — hopefully they’re better than nothing and they’re good. And hopefully if you’re going to buy durable removals or nature-based solutions, hopefully, like, all of the cumulative effect of all of those things should be directionally correct. And I’m supportive of that. I don’t even — I used to be, I think, more of a jerk about it, a little bit more critical. I don’t feel that way anymore.
Adina Mangubat: I hear that, I hear that. I think that I was in a similar camp too, right? I mean, even when it comes to, like, who we’ve got to work with, right? You know, once upon a time there was, like, a whole conversation of, like, oh my gosh, the oil and gas people — we won’t be involved, we shouldn’t talk to them at all. It’s like, you know what, guys? The earth, the climate, like, doesn’t care who’s involved. It just needs it handled, right? So we’ve, I think, got to be a little more open-minded about what people can do. And so if it’s nature-based, great. And if it’s durable only, great, fantastic that you can do that. And if you need to do a hybrid of both, let’s make sure that you get that handled too.
Ross Kenyon: The oil and gas point is well taken. I imagine during the good years there was a, “oh, we don’t — we’re too good for your money. We don’t want it. We’re okay.” And now it’s like, so [unclear], could you come, come back and invest in us?
Adina Mangubat: Yeah, that is no longer — it’s…
Ross Kenyon: It’s easier to be highfalutin when the times are good, maybe.
Adina Mangubat: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a really good point. And if you look at what’s happening right now at a US policy level, we need everybody that we can possibly get in the Republican camp to advocate for this, right? And there are a bunch of oil and gas folks that are very, very invested in the direct air capture hubs happening. And so if we can empower their voice, we absolutely should. Because, you know, just having the, as you said, highfalutin folks advocating for this isn’t going to do it.
Ross Kenyon: I’m worried because the first time Trump was elected there was the strong We Are Still In group of mayors and companies who were still committing to their net zero goals. And I think we’re all seeing various climate commitments being rolled back. Policy isn’t feeling great. I’m not sure what buying appetite is like in general. I’m hopeful for things like this. I hope that it can fill some of the gaps that are maybe opening up. But how are each of you feeling about this exact moment in time?
Tito Jankowski: I’ll jump in. I think there’s a really good moment for people who are committed to taking action on climate, whether it’s got sustainability in their job title or carbon. Like, if you are at a company or you have a job and you want that organization to participate in this or participate more, you have the opening to do that. I’ve always said that, you know, climate action has this challenge of, like, the doorway — it’s not clear what actions a person can take on climate. There are a lot of people that get stuck, that they sort of get stuck saying, well, I can’t do this full time, I can’t join a startup, so I can’t really do anything. This moment is your moment.
If you’re at a big company, to say, look, your big company has a sustainability goal. They have a net zero goal, they have a decarbonization goal — whatever that’s called, they likely have one. You can research it online, you can find out about it. You can go talk with the team. If you’ve got a friend at one of these companies that has a goal, you can talk with your friends. Hey, do you know what their goal is? Do you know — like, can you go talk with them and figure out how to have them taking this action they’re committed to, or more of this action they’re committed to? I think in this moment, it’s becoming abundantly clear that it’s us. We’re the ones that get to — that get to take this on.
Ross Kenyon: You want to talk a little bit about Rebel Alliance, Tito, as we’re affectionately calling it?
Tito Jankowski: Yeah, and everybody’s invited to the party. We are building what we’re calling the Rebel Alliance, which is — this is everybody on the planet that’s out to put things on a different path. You know, the White House has deleted climate change from its websites, and we see something else is possible. So this is for people that say, hey, I want this Buyers Club to exist. If they can’t directly sign up for it, but they want to help, they can help. They can introduce us to potential buyers, to sustainability leaders, to people with carbon and sustainability in their name. With somebody, it’s like, you know, I don’t have sustainability and carbon in my name, but I’m willing to email that team, and I can get on their calendar because I work for the company. That’s what the Rebel Alliance is all about.
Interviewing folks, coming to meetings, doing debriefs of the meetings of, like, okay, what actually happened in that meeting? We host weekly meetings of the Rebel Alliance, Thursdays at 1:00 PM Pacific Time. And it’s really this community of people that want to take action now on how to reverse climate change. And it’s people that are saying, like, gosh, we have to do something. It’s people that are thinking that, like, hey, if you’re listening to this and you’ve thought in the last couple weeks, like, I have to do something, or I wish I could do something — usually followed by lots of, like, logical things, like why you can’t. This is something that you’re able to join, and we would love for you to. We’d love to hear from you.
Also, if you’re a designer and you want to make a cool logo for the Rebel Alliance — we’re not naked right now, but we need, like, some, you know, some logoed T-shirts would be cool. You can make a difference, you can make a difference, and you can have fun. You should expect that some of those debrief meetings will have lots and lots of Star Wars references thrown in. Only hope, etcetera. You know, you get the vibe.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, the first one was replete with them, and I was thinking about Tito. If I had to pick for you, it’s Chewbacca among the Ewoks, for sure.
Tito Jankowski: Yeah, that’s — really, really strong.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t even have, like, a second — second up for it. Just that, that’s all I have for you. Smashing down a starship door to go knock out some stormtroopers.
I think the subtext here, and I think it would be a mistake not to point to it, is that I’m personally very concerned about the future of carbon removal. I am not seeing as much buying appetite as maybe we have in the past. Policy of course is going to be less present and that’s really concerning. I’ve been advising companies for a while now to be looking to non-voluntary carbon market revenue as much as they can, to make sure that they’ll be able to have money coming in if offsets are not saleable, or not nearly as saleable as maybe they once were. How do you feel about that? Do you think that’s — am I being a little bit of a Chicken Little here? Am I crazy, or is what you’re suggesting additive to what I’m suggesting?
Tito Jankowski: Yeah, it’s additive. Right now I’m — I’m right there with you. Like, and people listening might be experiencing some level of panic, of upset, of betrayal. And we want to give you a way to channel that, because panicking isn’t going to make a difference.
Adina Mangubat: Definitely. And for, you know, the startups that are actually doing the supply — I mean, like, look, if you can buy yourself an alternative revenue stream to help weather the storm, you totally should. And the entire point of this Buyers Club is to make sure that we have a robust next wave of buyers coming in, because we know that this market has had a concentration problem for a long time. And I don’t mean paying attention — I mean, like, the buyer power is concentrated in the hands of a handful of companies, you know, Microsoft being among them for sure and leading the pack there. So there’s been this question of, like, where’s the next wave of buyers coming from? And if you look at the CDR.fyi report that was released a little bit ago, you can see that it’s fairly flat. Like, there’s not a ton of new buyers, there’s not a ton of new unique purchasers.
And so we’ve been asking ourselves why. Why is that? And so when we had conversations with the buyers that were in the room at Carbon Unbound, at the buyers workshop, the things that they said that they needed in order to be able to move forward were all of the things that we’re trying to include inside of the Buyers Club. Because it’s confusing, right? Like, if you’re a chief sustainability officer, sustainability leader, 80% of your job is doing the reporting and the decarbonization strategy. And then, you know, maybe 20% of your job — maybe it’s more like 10% of your job — is trying to figure out how to deal with the residual emissions, where you have to figure out how the heck does all of this carbon removal stuff work. And it’s complicated. We do not make it easy.
And there’s all the different types, and how do you do the contracting, and how do you make sure that it’s actually good and additional and all of that. It’s messy, right? And so you’ve got to make it accessible. Otherwise it’s just way easier to do nothing, because you’re scared of making the wrong step. And I get it. So that’s why we built the Buyers Club based on feedback from 36 buyers that said this would make a difference for them.
Ross Kenyon: Makes sense why you’d want to do this in a group. I hear so many novel CDR approaches pitched to me, and every so often I’ll hear one, I’m like, this is genuinely new and very interesting. And that’s always a concern, right? You’re like, this idea, if it’s right, it’s very right, and if not, it doesn’t make any sense at all. And I always go right away to all my chemist friends, like, is this a real thing? And they’re like, it doesn’t do that. Oh shit, that’s too bad. Or they’ll be like, very interesting. But having a Buyers Club where you have people who are de-risking purchases — I can imagine it must feel terrible to buy something where the benefits are oversold or unlikely to materialize, and to have that failure all on your own. It makes you especially vulnerable to your boss or your employer saying, like, well, you made a terrible decision. You have no one but yourself to blame. Why are you making these decisions by yourself in this kind of way?
And also the community of people who still care, who maybe are still caring about climate change and carbon removal in a time where it is no longer as rewarding to do so. This is a Buyers Club for people who remain hopeful, who still want to act even though it is a hard time to hope and to act.
Adina Mangubat: Yeah, definitely, definitely. Yeah, at least, like, this is the place to find your people, right? Because if you’re the lone sustainability officer — because we talked to a lot of buyers and, like, they’re like, I’m a one-person department, I’m to myself, or maybe two people if I’m really lucky. You kind of just feel like nobody gets it. And so you get to have a conversation — like, not only do you get all this buying power stuff, right, which is awesome, and the group diligence, because not everybody has a chemist friend that they can call, right, and Ross. But then you also get to connect with other people that are in the same boat as you, that are trying to have the same conversations with their CFOs or their legal department. And you can really share all of that knowledge and be in it together. So I think there’s a huge amount of value in that.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. So it’s pretty clear who should join the Rebel Alliance. That sounds like, if you’re in CDR and you are concerned about the general direction of things, and want community and some activist community of people who are so invested in CDR. How accurate is that, by the way? Am I — is there an okay way to frame it for you guys?
Adina Mangubat: Yeah. I’d be about the activist part, but…
Ross Kenyon: Let’s talk about the activist part. If you — I mean, if you just define it broadly enough, maybe it counts. But yeah, you don’t — you don’t love it. Okay, whatever else. Are you an activist, or do you consider yourself an activist?
Adina Mangubat: I often felt uncomfortable with it, but I feel more comfortable with it these days than I have in the past. I think I’ve been in the past — I guess maybe in the context of the current political climate in the United States, then we are all activist types. But I would just say, if you are an individual that wants to take action on having carbon removal and that whole entire market exist and thrive, come chat with us, right? And you want to be able to actually do something, like take real action. This is not for the sideline folks or the people in the State House. This is for the people who want to get in the game.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, I like that. So if that’s you, I’ll have a link that you can go and join. I’ll — go ahead, Tito.
Tito Jankowski: Yeah. Oh, I just didn’t put that in.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, yeah. There you go. Thank you.
Adina Mangubat: And we’ll have, like — we’ll have specific things that, like, you know, we know we have a list of folks that we’re specifically looking to get in contact with. I don’t know, Tito, if you have that list of folks on hand.
Tito Jankowski: Yeah, I do. It’s a whole software crew, and then there’s an extended crew, and we can put all of that list of corporates that we’re looking to connect with in the show notes. That way, if you want to contribute, you can look. I’ll just read a couple of them, like Adobe, Atlassian, Coupa, DocuSign, Netflix. Like, you know, I can hear people being like, oh, I don’t know if anybody that works in sustainability of those companies, but, like, maybe you have a friend who works there, right? Like, maybe you have a friend who’s a developer at Netflix, or works at Lyft. Like, cool. Well, they can potentially get connected to the right people in those organizations. And so you could be the one that makes it happen.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, access to a company directory is a big deal. So you can do that. Now is really the time. I’m expecting — if you guys don’t like this or don’t want it, then you let me know — but I would be surprised if we didn’t see some M&A activity this year, some carbon removal companies close down this year, next year. Like, I’m not feeling overall super great. So if you do have connections, and presumably you do, now is really the time to get support for carbon removal, to keep these companies on life support, to make sure that they do not find themselves in extremis, essentially. I don’t really like saying that. I’ve never said that, put so fine a point on it, in public.
Adina Mangubat: Yeah, I mean, you know, I think — I don’t know if I would go as far as, like, life support, right? But, like, what I think we can definitely say with confidence is that if we do not get the next wave of buyers online, there will not be a robust market for this, period. And if there’s not a robust market for this, then we’re not going to scale to the scale that we know that we need to in time. And then we’re going to see — we’re definitely going to overshoot and we’re definitely going to be dealing with the worst impacts of climate change. So now is the time to activate the next wave of buyers. And they need our help, because right now they’re trying to do it alone and it sucks.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, I like that reframe. That’s better. And then how about your ideal profile for the Buyers Club? Who is it?
Tito Jankowski: Ideal profile is somebody that’s already got a budget of $100,000 or $1,000,000 scoped out. They’re trying to figure out what to buy, how to go about that process, and doing that as part of a community is something they would really, really love. They get to learn diligence process. They get to be alongside other people doing it, and they want to learn from leaders in carbon removal. We’ve got coming as speakers from Stripe, from Shopify, Frontier, Amazon, Google, Boston Consulting Group — people coming in and sharing, here’s what worked for them, here’s what didn’t work for them. If that’s you, we would love to hear from you and get your sense on this Buyers Club.
Ross Kenyon: If you’re listening and you work at a company for whom that could be an attractive offer, it is the time to try to make it an attractive offer and make it a reality. I’ll put the link in the show notes if you’d like to get in touch with Tito and Adina and try to figure out a way to get your company involved. Or — I imagine there’s probably other institutions that might be able to participate beyond just companies. Or is it focused primarily on companies, though?
Tito Jankowski: Yeah, our conversations have all been with corporate leaders, and if there are other people that want to play this game too, awesome, let’s talk.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. Is it high-net-worth individuals could come knock on your door? Philanthropy?
Adina Mangubat: Yeah, totally. Yeah, if you want support in purchasing carbon removal and you don’t want to do it by yourself, and you’re early on, you can’t join Symbiosis or Frontier — yeah, have a conversation with us. We’d be happy to help.
Ross Kenyon: The link to the Rebel Alliance and the AirMiners Buyers Club are both in the show notes. Thanks for being here, Adina and Tito. Glad to have you back.
Adina Mangubat: Yeah, thanks for having us.
