Working against the clock – literally!

The time of this post is 7 years, 94 days, 23 hours, 29 minutes and 24 seconds in the Climate Clock.  For those of you who don’t know, this is the time we have left to prevent the effects of climate warming from becoming irreversible.

I have started Transformers exactly 7 years, 193 days, 20 hours, 41 minutes and 18 seconds ago. The idea is to talk to change makers who are actively trying to stop this clock. Technology and business acumen exist: it took one company – Stockholm Exergi – to make Stockholm city climate positive by 2025.

It is good business too. Anders Egelrud is woking to create bilateral agreements with corporations from other sectors that need to remove and reduce emissions by offsetting from Stockholm Exergi. Bio-CCS technology is developed, but the EU must create targets for removal and cap to reach the Paris agreement. Legislation is needed to regulate price of the carbon removal and reduction to shape this new market. Exergi Stockholm is not the only company waiting for legislation. Ragn-Sells, the waste company is the world’s first to create processes to stop landfilling by fly ashes. The Ragn-Sells plant extracts three types of salt (potassium chloride, sodium chloride, and calcium chloride) from the fly ash. Once separated, these materials can then be sold on as fertiliser, a replacer for cement in the concrete industry or as salt to de-ice roads. The technique can recirculate the resources and not just wash them away into lakes or oceans. But Ragn-Sells needs the EU to pass legislation to make the New Circular Action plan a reality. At this moment, any salts that the company recycles cannot be sold within the EU. The EU legislation is yet to recognise that recycled salts are as good as mined ones. The same can be said of recycled rare earth metals. Recycling can significantly impact on the use of new resources. The technology can deliver, but law makers must make it possible.

To help stop the clock we also need a lot of money to be injected in green impact investments and to develop the low carbon economy exponentially. And this is exactly what the fintech Green Assets Wallet is doing. Cecilia Repinski is its Executive Director (listen to my interview with her here).  They have created the world’s first blockchain platform for easy validation and impact reporting of green bonds. The Green Assets Wallet blockchain platform provides trusted data and facilitates the communication between issuers and investors. This fintech has addressed and resolved the bottleneck problem for the growth of green investment: it lists all the companies that are offering projects for investment with efficient quantifiable impact reports and validations pre and post issuance.   

Green Assets Wallet makes green bonds transparent and builds confidence much needed for new market of green bond investment to grow. We need this growth to be exponential.

Since I started to write, the time we have left in the climate clock is now 7 years, 94 days, 21 hours and 27 minutes and 08 seconds.