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There may be no better signal that a corporate initiative has potential than when customers reach out and beg: “Take my money.” After Stripe, the online payments company, committed to spending at least $1 million on carbon-removal technologies a few years ago, two things happened. One, “we got a surprisingly positive reaction from the carbon-removal community,” says Nan Ransohoff, Stripe’s head of climate. And two, businesses that use Stripe began calling. According to Ransohoff, they were “basically saying, ‘Hey, we wanted to do something in climate for a while, but we haven’t because it’s hard to figure out what to do. Could we wire you some money, and you figure out what to do with it?'”
Tackling climate change is going to require more than cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Society is going to need to pull carbon out of the atmosphere. By the next decade, the world may need to remove tens of millions of tons of CO2 from the air annually; by 2050, that number could grow to 10 gigatons a year. Natural solutions, such as planting trees, can only go so far.
Stripe Climate, launched in October 2020, lets its customers join its carbon-removal strategy by contributing a percentage of their digital sales that flow through Stripe’s software. In spring 2021, Stripe adjusted its onboarding process to allow new customers to join the program. Soon, one in 10 was opting in. Tens of thousands of businesses are now part of Stripe Climate.
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