The Circular Carbon Economy

As the most significant of the greenhouse gases that are driving global warming, carbon-dioxide has rightly become a focal point of our efforts to address the climate crisis. But carbon itself is not our enemy. It’s an essential part of life on Earth. What if we could capture carbon-dioxide emissions and convert them into useful items?

Jennifer Holmgren is CEO of LanzaTech – a company whose mission is to transform our current linear model, which involves extracting carbon from the ground to create products we eventually discard, into a circular carbon economy.

LanzaTech's process captures waste gases before they reach the atmosphere, and uses bacteria to convert them into fuel and chemicals that can then become the basis of everyday products.

This does not replace the critical and urgent need to reduce global emissions, but it does help us reuse the emissions we capture while making the transition to a sustainable future.

Finance is essential to realising this vision at scale. As Jennifer explains, businesses, governments and financial institutions must be willing to take short-term risks and fund the transition, because the cost of inaction is one that we truly cannot afford.

To learn more about LanzaTech, visit their website.