Nicolas Pujols
I believe every CEO should be a designer. If it had been the case in the last few decades, we wouldn't be in the environmental mess we're in today.
I'm a workaholic business designer, I juggle between business, design and engineering to build the carbon-free economy we need. Working exclusively on climate related project, especially hard tech. I entered the entrepreneurship world at 19 years old, studied Business at Hec, Paris-Sud and French incubators early on. I came to London to reenforce my engineering and design thinking skills.
If climate change silver bullet was easy we would have solved it long time ago. I believe in the potential of unconventional tech to disrupt the offer, and to disrupt the demand radically : change what people dream of. But in a frictionless manner, solely through desire, not constraint. We've tried that for far too long. Didn't work out great
That carbon-free economy exists. It is within our reach. It’s all about turning it into a reality in time, and not falling in disappear in front of the incoming climate storm, or even worse cynicism. My personal blog, killgreenwashing.com is all about a witch hunt against falls savior that destroy the credibility of climate tech as a whole at such a pivotal moment, when it's the most needed.
2200 Gigatons of CO2. 66 gigatons per year. That carbon monster we've built would require us to remove all the CO2 from one third of the athmosphere, making a sphere of CO2 When we should be decreasing CO2 emission and with promesses of a "green stimulus", structural instabilities and the appetites from developing countries for our carbon intensive lifestyle : the reality is stark. the green transition is not happening. By a long stretch.
To face that carbon monster, we only have two shots : carbon reduction, and carbon removal.
Shot number 1 : Carbon reduction. We're so bad at reducing our emissions despite a sky high awarness. the COP26 "empty words" commitments put us at barely 7.5% of CO2 reduction by 2030, where we should be at 55%. And those are just words. We know the gap between words and actions. Actions shows us that despite growth of renewable, our energy appetite has increased to the point that the share of renewable is almost exactly the same as several decades ago. Worse, developed countries have decided exploiting more of their fossil fuel ressource. We're taking the path of the worst IPCC scenario : +8.5°C. Most and especially biodiversity, will not survive this.
Shot number 2 : Carbon removal. Our runaway car from our climate action doesn't just have a flat tire, it's a wreck : 99,499% of the carbon offset market is scientifically speaking greenwashing. Because if you’re erasing the debt of a company with a carbon offset that’s lacking one of the 6 holly grail of a scientifically valid carbon offset (same year as emission, additional, safe, permanent, measurable and scalable), you're doing greenwashing. You're part of the problem.
The carbon offset market is toxic and is stopping real climate action, scientifically valid carbon offsets, essentially direct air capture, from taking off and reach the scale economy they need. Representing 0.01% of total offset volumes, we're very far from anything that might do a dent to the climate. And they're not perfect either. Direct air capture requires a ridiculous amount of capital expenditures, and needs to run with renewable energy which isn't cheap or available at scale either.
Avalanche's mission is quite simple. Making carbon removal work at scale, now, without CAPEX, at a market ready price, below 100$ per ton of CO2. Scalable to the size of the problem we're facing. We have to make carbon removal great again, make it sexy, and affordable. We have to become the Tesla of the carbon market.
