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It may or may not be a perfect climate solution, but it is an extremely simple one.

Low-tech carbon removal is all the rage these days. Whether it’s spreading crushed rocks on fields or injecting sludgy biomass underground, relatively simplistic solutions have seen a boom in funding. But there’s one cheap, nature-based method that hasn’t been able to drum up as much attention from big name climate investors: biochar.
This flaky, charcoal-like substance has been produced and used as a fertilizer for millennia, and its potential to lock up the carbon contained in organic matter is well-documented. It’s made by heating up biomass such as wood or plants in a low-oxygen environment via a process called pyrolysis, thereby sequestering up to 40% to 50% of the carbon contained within that organic matter for hundreds or (debatably — but we’ll get to that) even thousands of years. Ideally, the process utilizes waste biomass such as plant material and forest residue left over from harvesting crops or timber, which otherwise might just be burned.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says biochar could store about 2.6 billion metric tons of CO2 per year. And by some metrics, this ancient method of carbon removal is already leagues ahead of the rest. Last year, biochar accounted for 94% of all carbon dioxide removal credits that were actually fulfilled, according to CDR.fyi, which tracks the CO2 removal market. That means that while corporate buyers are purchasing carbon credits that use an array of different removal methods, biochar has thus far dominated the market when it comes to actually making good on these purchases.
Some of the largest corporate buyers of CO2 removal credits have biochar in their portfolios. Microsoft, by far the most prominent player in this space, has bought over 200,000 tons of biochar credits — part of its quest to become carbon negative by 2050 — although that’s still a mere fraction of the over 6.6 million tons of CO2 removal the company has bought overall. JPMorgan Chase, which aims to match every ton of its operational emissions with carbon dioxide removal credits by 2030, has bought nearly 19,000 tons of biochar credits, representing about 26% of its CO2 removal portfolio.
But despite its technical maturity, biochar has yet to generate the same level of excitement or venture capital investment as more complex methods of carbon removal such as direct air capture, which garnered $142 million in investment last year. By comparison, biochar companies raised a cumulative total of $74 million in 2023. While that’s no small change, it doesn’t compare to the amount of capital VCs and other climate tech funders have poured even into other similarly elemental carbon removal technologies.
For example, Frontier, a collaborative fund for tech companies to catalyze emerging solutions in this space, recently announced a $58 million deal with Vaulted Deep, a startup that injects wet biomass from food waste to poop deep underground. And at the end of last year, Frontier inked a $57 million deal with Lithos Carbon, a company pursuing enhanced rock weathering. This involves spreading crushed up rocks onto fields, which react with the CO2 in the air to form bicarbonate; that’s eventually carried out to sea, where the carbon remains permanently sequestered on the ocean floor. In other words, it’s just an acceleration of the natural weathering process, which normally takes hundreds of thousands of years. VCs backing Lithos include mainstream names like Union Square Ventures, Greylock Ventures, and Bain Capital Ventures, while big-time climate tech VC Lowercarbon Capital led Vaulted Deep’s seed round.
The questions around biochar’s durability — that is, how long it can actually lock away carbon — are potentially unanswerable, and that’s at least partially driving investor reticence.
“Biochar falls in this very interesting middle ground - you create it, and then it is constantly degrading,” Freya Chay, program lead at CarbonPlan, a nonprofit that analyzes different carbon removal pathways, told me. She said that we just don’t have the scientific know-how “to predict, really clearly, how much is going to still be in your soil at 100 years or at 1,000 years.”
Frontier, for its part, only considers carbon removal “permanent” if it can sequester carbon for at least 1,000 years. Some studies indicate that a large proportion of biochar can achieve this, but it’s hard to definitively prove, and we’re far from a scientific consensus. Thus far the fund has steered clear of investing in biochar, noting that detailed protocols must be developed to measure its durability under a variety of soil and weather conditions.
Measurement, reporting and verification is often the downfall for nature-based solutions (see: the hoopla around bogus forest carbon credits). And while it is simple to measure how much of the carbon in biomass ends up sequestered in biochar, “it's where you draw the project boundaries in terms of where the MRV falls apart,” Annie Nichols, director of operations and project management at Pacific Biochar told me. For example, one might want to ensure that trees aren’t being cut down or crops aren’t being grown just for the purpose of creating biochar, and this often falls outside the scope of traditional measurement protocols. Pacific Biochar, for its part, sources its waste biomass from forests in high fire risk areas of California, where the excessive accumulation of woody debris poses a danger.
Pacific Biochar ranks as the world’s third largest supplier of carbon removal, with over 28,000 tons of credits delivered. Biochar “got a lot of attention before there was actually much utility,” its CEO, Josiah Hunt told me, referring to the period in the late 2000s when Al Gore was heavily hyping its benefits. In his 2009 book “Our Choice,” Gore called biochar “one of the most exciting new strategies for restoring carbon to depleted soils, and sequestering significant amounts of CO2 for 1,000 years and more.” But at that time, Hunt said, “There weren't really carbon markets ready to work with it yet.”
Prior to 2020, Pacific Biochar’s revenue relied solely on biochar fertilizer sales to farmers. It was only when the carbon credits market picked up that the company was able to scale. Today, Pacific Biochar sells most of its credits directly, as opposed to on an independent exchange, though it works with the carbon credits platform Carbonfuture to deliver credits to customers and perform the necessary verification to ensure the company’s carbon removal data is accurate.
Pacific Biochar’s credits sell for $180 per metric ton, cheaper than nearly all other removal methods and far below the weighted average of $488 for CO2 removal. That’s because producing biochar via pyrolysis requires much less energy than something like direct air capture. It’s also a more mature process than most emergent nature-based solutions such as enhanced rock weathering, meaning that comparably less money needs to be spent demonstrating that the process works as intended.
A number of biochar companies told me they think biochar has been overlooked in favor of more novel technological solutions. “There's this fixation on trying to find the high tech solution, the SaaS app that's going to solve climate change,” Thor Kallestad, CEO and cofounder of Myno Carbon, told me. By comparison, biochar can seem like a relic of an earlier era that never quite reached its potential.
Myno, founded by oil and gas veterans, is self-funding the buildout of a large-scale biochar and electricity co-generation facility in Port Angeles, Washington, which will source its fuel from the copious timber waste in Washington State. It’s still in the initial design phase, but the ultimate goal is to produce about 70,000 tons of biochar per year alongside 20 megawatts of power. That amounts to about 100,000 carbon dioxide removal credits, which Kallestad hopes to sell for less than $100 per metric ton. Ideally, he said, the plant will serve as a proof of concept that will help drive future investments.
While there haven’t yet been any major scandals in the biochar-sourcing world, the BBC ran an exposé in 2022 on a biomass-fueled power station in the UK that was logging old-growth forests to create wood pellets that were then burned for power. The company, Drax, had previously claimed that it was only sourcing sawdust and waste wood. While Drax maintains that its biomass is “sustainable and legally harvested,” further reporting indicates that as of last year, the company was still sourcing from old-growth forests. The worry is that something similar could happen with biochar production as demand ramps up.
Chay says the cost-benefit analysis for making biochar gets even thornier when taking into account the “counterfactual of how we otherwise could have used biomass.” After all, biomass can also be burned for energy, and if the emissions are captured and stored, that’s a carbon removal strategy too. And with many looking towards biomass-based fuels as a way to decarbonize industries such as aviation and shipping, demand for waste biomass appears set to increase alongside uncertainty regarding its best use case. “Zooming forward to 2050, I'm not sure there is anything such as waste biomass,” Chay told me.
But in the short-term at least, there’s enough to go around. A recent Department of Energy report noted that “available but unused” biomass such as logging and agricultural residue could contribute around 350 tons to the nation’s supply every year. That’s about as much biomass as the United States uses for bioenergy today
“Certainly biochar has a place,” Chay said. She’s not convinced that it will ever make sense to conceptualize biochar production as “permanent carbon removal” though. “Maybe we just let it be this kind of interstitial durability. We figure out how to value that while also optimizing for agricultural co-benefits.”
Investors may remain wary of a solution that occupies this hard-to-define space between short and long-term CO2 removal, but Hunt’s not too worried. “I don’t think that’s horribly detrimental,” he told me. He sees biochar’s strong performance in the carbon credits marketplace as enough to sustain the industry for now. “I do think the buying community is what drives our growth. And even if we’re not the unicorns, even if we’re just the work mules, that’s fine with me. I don’t mind being the mule of climate change action.”
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The storm currently battering Jamaica is the third Category 5 to form in the Atlantic Ocean this year, matching the previous record.
As Hurricane Melissa cuts its slow, deadly path across Jamaica on its way to Cuba, meteorologists have been left to marvel and puzzle over its “rapid intensification” — from around 70 miles per hour winds on Sunday to 185 on Tuesday, from tropical storm to Category 5 hurricane in just a few days, from Category 2 occurring in less than 24 hours.
The storm is “one of the most powerful hurricane landfalls on record in the Atlantic basin,” the National Weather Service said Tuesday afternoon. Though the NWS expected “continued weakening” as the storm crossed Jamaica, “Melissa is expected to reach southeastern Cuba as an extremely dangerous major hurricane, and it will still be a strong hurricane when it moves across the southeastern Bahamas.”
So how did the storm get so strong, so fast? One reason may be the exceptionally warm Caribbean and Atlantic.
“The part of the Atlantic where Hurricane Melissa is churning is like a boiler that has been left on for too long. The ocean waters are around 30 degrees Celsius, 2 to 3 degrees above normal, and the warmth runs deep,” University of Redding research scientist Akshay Deoras said in a public statement. (Those exceedingly warm temperatures are “up to 700 times more likely due to human-caused climate change,” the climate communication group Climate Central said in a press release.)
Based on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded in 2024 that “tropical cyclone intensities globally are projected to increase” due to anthropogenic climate change, and that “rapid intensification is also projected to increase.”
NOAA also noted that research suggested “an observed increase in the probability of rapid intensification” for tropical cyclones from 1982 to 2017 The review was still circumspect, however, labeling “increased intensities” and “rapid intensification” as “examples of possible emerging human influences.”
What is well known is that hurricanes require warm water to form — at least 80 degrees Fahrenheit, according to NOAA. “As long as the base of this weather system remains over warm water and its top is not sheared apart by high-altitude winds, it will strengthen and grow.”
A 2023 paper by hurricane researcher Andra Garner argued that between 1971 and 2020, rates of intensification of Atlantic tropical storms “have already changed as anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have warmed the planet and oceans,” and specifically that the number of these storms that intensify from Category 1 or weaker “into a major hurricane” — as Melissa did so quickly — “has more than doubled in the modern era relative to the historical era.”
“Hurricane Melissa has been astonishing to watch — even as someone who studies how these storms are impacted by a warming climate, and as someone who knows that this kind of dangerous storm is likely to become more common as we warm the planet,” Garner told me by email. She likened the warm ocean waters to “an extra shot of caffeine in your morning coffee — it’s not only enough to get the storm going, it’s an extra boost that can really super-charge the storm.”
This year has been an outlier for the Atlantic with three Category 5 storms, University of Miami senior research associate Brian McNoldy wrote on his blog. “For only the second time in recorded history, an Atlantic season has produced three Category 5 hurricanes,” with wind speeds reaching and exceeding 157 miles per hour, he wrote. “The previous year was 2005. This puts 2025 in an elite class of hurricane seasons. It also means that nearly 7% of all known Category 5 hurricanes have occurred just in this year.” One of those Category 5 storms in 2005 was Hurricane Katrina.
Jamaican emergency response officials said that thousands of people were already in shelters amidst storm surge, flooding, power outages, and landslides. Even as the center of the storm passed over Jamaica Tuesday evening, the National Weather Service warned that “damaging winds, catastrophic flash flooding and life-threatening storm surge continues in Jamaica.”
With Trump turning the might of the federal government against the decarbonization economy, these investors are getting ready to consolidate — and, hopefully, profit.
Since Trump’s inauguration, investors have been quick to remind me that some of the world’s strongest, most resilient companies have emerged from periods of uncertainty, taking shape and cementing their market position amid profound economic upheaval.
On the one hand, this can sound like folks grasping at optimism during a time when Washington is taking a hammer to both clean energy policies and valuable sources of government funding. But on the other hand — well, it’s true. Google emerged from the dot-com crash with its market lead solidified, Airbnb launched amid the global financial crisis, and Sunrun rose to dominance after the first clean tech bubble burst.
The circumstances may change, but behind all of these against-the-odds successes are investors who saw opportunity where others saw risk. In the climate tech landscape of 2025, well-capitalized investors are eyeing some of the more mature sectors being battered by federal policy or market uncertainty — think solar, wind, biogas, and electric transportation — rather than the fresh-faced startups pursuing more cutting edge tech.
“History does not repeat, but it certainly rhymes,” Andrew Beebe, managing director at Obvious Ventures, told me. He was working as the chief commercial officer at the solar company Suntech Power when the first climate tech bubble collapsed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Back then, venture capital and project financing dried up instantly, as banks and investors faced heavy losses from their exposure to risky assets. This time around, “there’s plenty of capital at all stages of venture,” as well as infrastructure investing, he said. That means firms can afford to swoop in to finance or acquire undervalued startups and established companies alike.
“I think you’re gonna see a lot of projects in development change hands,” Beebe told me.
Investors don’t generally publicize when the companies or projects that they’re backing become “distressed assets,” i.e. are in financial trouble, nor do they broadcast when their explicit goal is to turn said projects around. But that’s often what opportunistic investing entails.
“As investors in the energy and infrastructure space — which is inherently in transition — we take it as a very important point of our strategy to be opportunistic,” Giulia Siccardo, a managing director at Quinbrook, told me. (Prior to joining the investment firm, Siccardo was director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Manufacturing & Energy Supply Chains under President Biden.)
Quinbrook sees opportunities in biogas and renewable natural gas, a sector that once enjoyed “very cushioned margins” thanks to investor interest in corporate sustainability, Siccardo told me, but which has lately gone into a “rapid decline.” But she’s also looking at solar and storage, where developers are rushing to build projects before tax credits expire, as well as grid and transmission infrastructure, given the dire need for upgrades and buildout as load growth increases.
As of now, the only investment Quinbrook has explicitly described as opportunistic is its acquisition of a biomethane facility in Junction City, Oregon. When it opened in 2013, the facility used food waste — which otherwise would have emitted methane in a landfill — to produce renewable biogas for clean electricity generation. But after Shell acquired the plant, it switched to converting cow manure and agricultural residue into renewable natural gas for heavy-duty transportation fuels, a process that it’s operated commercially since 2021. Siccardo declined to provide information about the plant’s performance at the time of Quinbrook’s acquisition, though presumably, it has yet to reach its total production capacity of 730,000 million British thermal units per year — enough to supply about 12,000 U.S. households.
The extension of the clean fuel production tax credit, plus the potential for hyperscalers to purchase RNG credits, are still driving demand, however. And that’s increased Siccardo’s confidence in pursuing investments and acquisitions in the space. “That’s a market that, from a policy standpoint, has actually been pretty stable — and you might even say favored — by the One Big Beautiful Bill relative to other technologies,” she explained.
Solar, meanwhile, is still cheap and quick to deploy, with or without the tax credits, Siccardo told me. “If you strip away all subsidies, and are just looking at, what is the technology that’s delivering the lowest cost electron, and which technology has the least supply chain bottlenecks right now in North America —- that drives you to solar and storage,” she said.
Another leading infrastructure investment firm, Generate Capital, is also looking to cash in on the moment. After replacing its CEO and enacting company-wide layoffs, Generate’s head of external affairs, Jonah Goldman, told me that “managers who understand the [climate] space and who can take advantage of the opportunities that are underpriced in this tougher market environment are set up to succeed.”
The firm also sees major opportunities when it comes to good old solar and storage projects. In an open letter, Generate’s new CEO, David Crane, wrote that “for the first time in nearly four decades, the U.S. has an insatiable need for more power: as much as we can produce, as soon as we can, wherever and however we can produce it.”
Crane sees it as the duty of Generate and other investors to use mergers and acquisitions as a tool to help clean tech scale and mature. “If companies across our subsectors were publicly traded, the market itself would act as a centripetal force towards industry consolidation,” he wrote. But because many clean energy companies are privately funded, Crane said “it is up to us, the providers of that private capital, to force industry improvement, through consolidation and otherwise.”
Helping solar companies accelerate their construction timelines to lock in tax credit eligibility has actually become an opportunistic market of its own, Chris Creed, a managing partner at Galvanize Climate Solutions and co-head of its credit division, told me. “Helping those companies that need to start or complete their projects within a predetermined time frame because of changes in the tax credit framework became an investable opportunity for us,” Creed told me. “We have a number of deals in our near term pipeline that basically came about as a result of that.”
Given that some solar companies are bound to fare better than others, he agreed that mergers and acquisitions were likely — among competitors as well as involving companies working in different stages of a supply chain. “It wouldn’t shock me if you saw some horizontal consolidation or some vertical integration,” Creed told me.
Consolidation can only go so far, though. So while investors seem to agree that solar, storage, and even the administration’s nemesis — wind — are positioned for a long and fruitful future, when it comes to more emergent technologies, not all will survive the headwinds. Beebe thinks there’s been “irrational exuberance” around both green hydrogen and direct air capture, for example, and that seasoned investors will give those spaces a pass.
Electric mobility — e.g. EVs, electric planes, and even electrified shipping — and grid scalability — which includes upgrades to make the grid more efficient, flexible, and optimized — are two sectors that Beebe is betting will survive the turmoil.
But for all investors that have the capability to do so, for now, “the easy bet is just to move your money outside the U.S.” Beebe told me.
We might be starting to see just that. Quinbrook also invests in the U.K. and Australia, and just announced its first Canadian investment last week. It acquired an ownership stake in Elemental Clean Fuels, an energy developer making renewable fuels such as RNG, low-carbon methanol, and — yes — clean hydrogen.
Last week, Generate announced that it had closed $43 million in funding from the Canadian company Fiera Infrastructure Private Debt for its North American portfolio of anaerobic digestion projects, which produce renewable natural gas — Generate’s first cross-currency, cross-border deal.
Creed still has confidence in the U.S. market, however, telling me he’s “very bullish on American innovation.” He certainly acknowledges that it’s a tough time out there for any investor deciding where to park their money, but thinks that ultimately, “that volatility should manifest itself as excess returns to investors who are able to figure out their investment strategy and deploy in this environment.”
Exactly what firms will manage this remains an open question, and the opportunities may be short-lived — but it’s a race that plenty of investors are getting in on.
“I mean, God bless the Europeans for caring about climate.”
Bill Gates, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft and one of the world’s most important funders of climate-related causes, has a new message: Lighten up on the “doomsday.”
In a new memo, called “Three tough truths about climate,” Gates calls for a “strategic pivot.” Climate-concerned philanthropy should focus on global health and poverty, he says, which will still cause more human suffering than global warming.
“I’m not saying we should ignore temperature-related deaths because diseases are a bigger problem,” he writes. “What I am saying is that we should deal with disease and extreme weather in proportion to the suffering they cause, and that we should go after the underlying conditions that leave people vulnerable to them. While we need to limit the number of extremely hot and cold days, we also need to make sure that fewer people live in poverty and poor health so that extreme weather isn’t such a threat to them.”
This new focus didn’t come with a change in funding priorities — but that’s partly because some big shake-ups have already happened. In February, Heatmap reported that Breakthrough Energy, Gates’ climate-focused funding group, had slashed its grant-making budget. Gates later closed Breakthrough’s policy and advocacy office altogether.
Despite eliminating those financial commitments, he still dwells on two of his longtime obsessions in the new memo: cutting the “green premium” for energy technologies, meaning the delta between the cost of carbon-emitting and clean energy technologies, and improving the measurement of how spending can do the most for human welfare. The same topics dominated his thinking when I last spoke to the billionaire at the 2023 United Nations climate conference in Dubai.
What seems to have shifted, instead, is the global political environment. The Trump administration and Elon Musk gutted the federal government’s spending on global public health causes, such as vaccines and malaria prevention. European countries have also cut back their global aid spending, although not as dramatically as the U.S.
Gates seemingly now feels called to their defense: “Vaccines are the undisputed champion of lives saved per dollar spent,” he writes, praising the vaccine alliance Gavi in particular. “Energy innovation is a good buy not because it saves lives now, but because it will provide cheap clean energy and eventually lower emissions, which will have large benefits for human welfare in the future.”
Last week, Gates shared his thinking about climate change at a roundtable with a handful of reporters. He was, as always, engaging. I’ve shared some of his new takes on climate policy below. His quotes have been edited for clarity.
The environment we’re in today, the policies for climate change are less accommodating. It’s hard to name a country where you’d say, Oh, the climate policies are more accommodating today than they have been in the past.
The thesis I had was that middle income countries — who were already, at that time, the majority of all emissions — would never pay a premium for greenness. And so you could say, well, maybe the rich countries should subsidize that. But you know, the amounts involved would get you up to, like, 4% of rich country budgets would have to be transferred to do that. And we’re at 1% and going down. And there are some other worthy things that that money goes for, other than subsidizing positive green premium type approaches. So the thesis in the book [How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, published in 2021] is we had to innovate our way to negative green premiums for the middle income countries.
Climate [change] is an evil thing in that it’s caused by rich countries and high middle-income countries and the primary burden [falls on poor countries]. When I looked into climate activists, I said, Well, this is incredible. They care about poor countries so much. That’s wonderful, that they feel guilty about it. But in fact, a lot of climate activists, they have such an extreme view of what’s going to happen in rich countries — their climate activism is not because they care about poor farmers and Africa, it’s because they have some purported view that, like, New York City, can’t deal with the flooding or the heat.
The other challenge we have in the climate movement is in order to have some degree of accountability, it was very focused on short-term goals and per-country reports. And the per-country reporting thing is, in a way, a good thing, because a country — certainly when it comes to deforestation or what it’s doing on its electric grid, there is sovereign accountability for what’s being done. But I mean, the way everybody makes steel is the same. The way everybody makes the cement, it’s the same. The way we make fertilizer, it’s all the same. And so there can’t be some wonderful surprise, where some country comes in and, you know, gives you this little number [for its Paris Agreement goals], and you go, Wow, good! You’re so tough, you’re so good, you’re so amazing. Because other than deforestation and your particular electric grid, these are all global things.
If you’re a rich country, the costs of adaptation are just one of many, many things that are not gigantic, huge percentages of GDP — you know, rebuilding L.A. so that it’s like the Getty Museum, in terms of there’s no brush that can catch on fire, there’s no roof that can catch on fire, adds about 10% cost to the rebuild. It’s not like, Oh my god, we can’t live in LA. There’s no apocalyptic story for rich countries. [Climate adaptation] is one of many things that you should pay attention to, like, Does your health system work? Does your education system work? Does your political system work? There are a variety of things that are also quite important.
The place where it gets really tough is in these poor countries. But you know, what is the greatest tool for climate adaptation? Getting rich — growing your economy is the biggest single thing, living in conditions where you don’t face big climate problems. So when you say to an African country, Hey, you have a natural gas deposit, and we’re going to try to block you from getting financing for using that natural gas deposit … It probably won’t work, because there’s a lot of money in the world. It’s not clear how you’d achieve that. And it’s also in terms of the warming effect of that natural gas, versus the improvement of the conditions of the people in that country — it’s not even a close thing.
People in the [climate] movement, we do have to say to ourselves, For the Europeans, how much were they willing to pay in order to support climate? — and did we overestimate in terms of forcing them to switch to electric cars, to buy electric heat pumps, to have their price of electricity be higher? Did we overestimate their willingness to pay with some of those policies? And you do have to be careful because if your climate policies are too aggressive, you will be unelected, and you’ll have a right-wing government that cares not a bit about climate. I mean, God bless the Europeans for caring about climate. You worry they care so much about it that the people you talk to, you won’t be able to meet with them again, because they won’t be in power.