Over the past few years, many of Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists, tech executives, startup founders, software engineers, and idle rich folks have started to wake up and smell the climate disaster, manifested in a campfire scent of burning redwoods. Policy debates and international negotiations weren’t their forte, though. Neither was the real estate game of renewable energy development; nor was it marching in the streets or throwing food at art. What the Bay Area engineering and investment complex is good at is making new thingamajigs—app-based ride hailing or wifi-enabled smart juicers—and then scaling them up with loads of VC cash and marketing hype until they either change the world or flash back out of existence.
It happened though, that there was a new area of climate action well-suited to Silicon Valley’s interests. Decades of delay in cutting emissions had painted humanity into a corner. More and more scientists were saying that wrenching the world back onto a livable emissions trajectory would no longer just require halting carbon pollution, but also involve somehow finding a way to remove billions of tons of emissions from the atmosphere in the decades ahead.