Humans have an enormous impact on planet Earth, but from both an animal welfare and an environmental perspective, perhaps nothing is more important than our diets.
In 2022, more than 82 billion livestock animals were slaughtered for meat, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United States, with the majority of those animals being factory farmed. In addition to enormous animal welfare implications, the practice of farming animals is estimated to account for somewhere between 11% and 20% of all greenhouse gas emissions.
All things considered, what is the most ethical diet? According to utilitarian moral philosopher Peter Singer, it’s one that includes zero — or at least very few — animal products.
Singer is among the most influential living philosophers and is widely credited for putting animal ethics on the map with his controversial 1975 book, Animal Liberation. Because most nonhuman animals have the capacity to suffer, Singer argues, we should not exploit their suffering for our own good, particularly with the horrific conditions of practices like factory farming.
Peter Singer at his office in Princeton University on Sept. 22, 2022. Derek Goodwin Photography
More recently, he published an extensively revised version, Animal Liberation Now, which brings to light the brutal living conditions for tens of billions of animals today.
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Singer and discussing speciesism, the conditions of factory farming and how to have an ethical diet.
You’re widely regarded as the father of the animal rights, or as you may prefer, the animal liberation movement. Can you make your case for the pursuit of animal liberation?
The case for the animal liberation movement is that to disregard or discard the interests of beings because they’re not members of our species is indefensible. I use the term “speciesism” to describe that, and that is intended to make the parallel between other -isms such as racism and sexism that most people — certainly I hope the audience that I’m addressing — reject and say that although the analogy is obviously not complete, in all of these cases there’s been a dominant group which has developed an ideology to enable it to justify using a group that it dominates. In one case, nonwhites, in another case, women, and then in this case, nonhumans. To justify using that group for its own purposes in ways that are clearly very harmful to the group, but somewhat beneficial to the dominant group.
So I think we ought to be able to see that the difference in species is not relevant to how bad it is when a being is suffering, if the being is capable of suffering. What matters is how much the being is suffering, what kind of suffering that is — can we compare it with the suffering that we humans may experience? To some extent, I believe we can. And when we make that comparison, it’s not difficult to see that there are many areas in which we inflict immense suffering on nonhuman animals for either no benefits or minor benefits to humans. So I think it follows from the idea of equal consideration of similar interests — which is a principle that I think should hold irrespective of species — it follows from that that many of the things we do to animals are unjustifiable, and that’s the case for animal liberation, or if people want to so put it in terms of recognizing the rights of animals, or, I would say, the case for equal consideration for similar interests across species.
Should we all become vegan or vegetarian?
I would say not in absolutely all circumstances, but if we’re thinking about the situation of somebody who has the option of nourishing themselves well, having an adequate diet, being healthy without consuming animal products, and if those animal products come from commercial enterprises where there’s a profit motive for not being concerned about the wellbeing of the animal beyond productivity of the enterprise, then I think it does follow that we ought not to be consuming those products.
So as I say, there are various other circumstances — that would be circumstances of people who can’t nourish themselves adequately without eating animal products — they have a much larger sacrifice to make than others. And there may be cases where you’re not getting your animal products from large commercial enterprises where the animals have good lives and are humanely killed that would need separate consideration, but the claim I make is one that obviously applies to billions of people in the world today, so that’s enough, I think, to try to get that changed.
You first published Animal Liberation in 1975. And then in May of 2023, you published an updated version, Animal Liberation Now. Surely, much has changed in terms of factory farming practices, the state of animal welfare, among many other factors. In your view, what are some of the most significant changes since 1975, and what made you decide that it was time to publish a revision of Animal Liberation?
Obviously there has been a lot of changes and that’s why it’s really virtually a new book, rather than just a new edition because I’d say probably about half of the text is new. And not so much on the philosophical argument that I just gave you. I think that that has stood up very well to criticism and discussion. But the two longest chapters of Animal Liberation are largely factual where I’m describing research done on animals, and the other describing factory farm conditions. Those chapters had to be completely rewritten. And then there were other discussions about climate change, for example — which was not on my radar or not on many people’s radars in 1975 — had to be brought in because that’s very relevant to the ethics of eating animal products. And I wanted to talk a bit about the progress that the animal movement has made and the progress that it has not made. So those are important changes to the book, and I wanted to talk about that — the new discussion about ethical questions relating to animals, which again was very much a neglected issue, hardly an issue that anybody touched upon in 1975, but now has quite a major literature. So a lot of different things. And also, I should add, there’s more research on animal sentience. So I think we can have more confidence in saying that fish, for example, are sentient, which is something that some people questioned after the first edition was published. And the sentience of octopuses, and even some crustaceans, like lobsters, I think is now much more firmly established than it was. So there’s been a lot of science that has supported the view that I was taking about animal sentience and actually has extended it.
Peter Singer with a previous version of Animal Liberation, on Sept. 22, 2022. Derek Goodwin Photography
In terms of the most significant changes, well, I think some things have gotten better and some things have gotten worse. I talked about the improvements in regulation of factory farming in a few places, most notably the European Union. Also some states of the U.S., but only a minority, particularly California, which passed stricter legislation. So those are good things, but there have also been negative developments. In the case of the chicken industry — chickens are, by far, the most numerous of the land-based vertebrate animals we raise for food — that’s gotten worse because chickens have been bred to grow even faster. And this causes all sorts of problems for them and causes skeletal abnormalities. And they put on weight so fast now that their legs are immaterial for bearing their weight. Chickens are slaughtered when they’re very, very young birds — about six weeks old when they’re slaughtered. And so they’re really babies and their leg bones just aren’t strong enough to support the weight that they’ve put on because they’ve been bred to eat so much and grow so fast. So there’s actually a new cause of pain to bear. They have difficulty bearing their weight, difficulty standing up and walking around because of how fast they’ve been bred to grow. So there are new developments, like that, that make factory farming even worse in some respects than it was.
You describe yourself as a flexible vegan. So you must believe that there’s at least some wiggle room when it comes to having an ethical diet.
That’s because, you know, my ethics are utilitarian or consequentialist. I’m always looking at the consequences of what I do, and my ethics is not about rigid rules. So for me, being vegan is not like somebody — a religious person — who will only eat halal or kosher meat and will think it doesn’t matter how much non-kosher or non-halal meat you eat. It’s just wrong to do it and the wrong would be as great if you ate more of it or less of it. But for me, I want to not be complicit in supporting these industries that treat animals so badly. And the degree of complicity obviously varies by how much I’m spending — to what extent my dollars are supporting those industries. So if for most of my everyday shopping, I avoid animal products, but sometimes when I’m traveling there’s nothing much to eat that doesn’t have some, you know, something like a dairy product, let’s say in it. It’s not a significant contribution that I’m making, and if it’s going to be really difficult for me to get anything to eat that doesn’t contain an animal product — or if I’m in social circumstances where it would disturb the group if I said no, I can’t eat anything here — I’ll eat something that’s vegetarian but not vegan. So that’s the sense in which I’m flexible.
So for people who recognize the cruelty of factory farms and the climate implications of factory farms, and even the climate implications of organic animal farms, but don’t feel ready to commit fully to veganism or vegetarianism, how can those people eat more ethically?
Well, they can still avoid factory farmed products which I think is really important, because that’s where the vast majority of the suffering we inflict on nonhuman animals is. So I would say, depending on how much you feel you want to eat in terms of animal products, I think if you’re talking about the most affluent countries, including the United States, the animal product that perhaps is most easy to get in a form that is not ideal, but is still acceptable, would be eggs from pasture-raised hens. So if you can find a farm that is producing eggs, and the hens really are out on pasture — it’s not just that they’re cage-free, which still might mean that they’re locked up in a big shed — but they’re actually able to go outside and exercise, chase insects, dust bathe, all of those things that are natural for the hens, then you could at least say, well, if the hens are having a reasonably good life here (and sure they’re going to get killed prematurely, and sure the male chicks of that breed are going to get killed immediately on hatching because they’re of no commercial value), it’s a better product definitely than products from animals who are inside all of their lives, very crowded. So I would start with that.
After that, it does get harder. Many people will say, well, what about dairy products from organically raised cows — cows who are outside on pasture again. And that’s certainly better from an animal welfare point of view — as for that matter is beef from grass-fed cows — but it’s worse for the climate, because cows are ruminants and they emit a lot of methane. And the fact that they’re on grass doesn’t really help in terms of reducing their methane output. It’s still there. And in fact, some studies suggest that with grass-fed beef, it’s actually higher, because if you don’t feed them on grain as most beef is fed, for at least the last six months of their lives, they put on weight more slowly, and so for each pound of beef produced there’s more digesting and more methane produced. So you know, that’s a dilemma. But again, if people say, well, I just want to do this occasionally as I need it, or I’m not prepared to go without it, maybe eating small quantities of grass-raised or pasture-raised dairy or beef products might be the next thing to do.
I understand that you’ve recently stepped back from your teaching role at Princeton. So if you don’t mind sharing, what’s next for you?
Yeah, you’re right, I taught my last semester at Princeton now but I’m I’ve got plenty of opportunities to write, to speak, to give interviews like this one. And I’ve got offers of taking visiting positions in other parts of the world which I plan to do, the first of those probably going to Singapore for about a month during 2024. There are other possible places that I will be going to and speaking out in Europe and possibly in Asia. So yeah, I’m planning to keep pretty busy.
That’s all the questions that I had prepared for you. But I’d also like to ask if there’s anything else you’d like to share? Maybe something that we haven’t touched on that you’d like to add?
Oh, I think we’ve covered quite a lot. Obviously, I have a broader interest in bioethics beyond what we’ve spoken about. And so there are a variety of things I’m interested in and I’m continuing to work with the organization The Life You Can Save, which tries to encourage people to give to the most effective charities helping people in extreme poverty. So I think that’s also an important thing to do. And if people want to know more about my work there, they can have a look at my website, petersinger.info, or also go to thelifeyoucansave.org where they can download a free digital copy or audio copy of my book The Life You Can Save and learn more about my work for people in extreme poverty.
The post A Philosopher’s Guide to an Ethical Diet: A Conversation With Peter Singer appeared first on EcoWatch.
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Last winter, we kept our house at 60 degrees and our electric bill was STILL $280. I’ve been interested in solar for a long time, but on the long list of house projects (especially when you’re restoring a 200 year old house on the historic registry) some are more pressing than others.
But with a few of those major projects wrapping up, and a daunting bill before me, I figured now was the time for a quick google search on solar panels, and let me tell you….. It can be very overwhelming.
Figuring out the rules (cough, cough, historic society), incentives or rebates if applicable, how much it would cost, how much we could save, etc. felt a little like a part-time job. But, one website made it really easy to compare things, and I am happy to be partnering with Aurora Solar to share that site with you.
Because I think you should be able to easily run the numbers on your house without a lot of hassle!
This post is sponsored by Aurora Solar, but all thoughts and opinions are my own.
If you’ve ever gotten a solar quote, there’s a good chance that Aurora Solar was involved. Aurora was founded in 2013 after its co-founders spent seven months trying to design a solar energy system using a patchwork of different tools.
Afterall, designing a solar system shouldn’t be harder than actually installing one. So they built software specifically for solar professionals. Today, more than 7,000 solar organizations use Aurora, and more than 20 million solar projects have been designed using the platform. They are also the largest solar software provider in the world. Their software is used by roughly 80% of the top 75 residential solar companies in the U.S.
All of this tech has been primarily used by professional installers to map your roof and then create a proposal, but now Aurora is offering this tech to us to help compare quotes.
So instead of having to call a bunch of different installers, I could use the Aurora Solar Marketplace to understand my solar potential, compare estimates, understand my possible savings, look into battery storage and other home electrification incentives, and map out different financing options.
1. know how much electricity the system will actually produce
Before you even get into the price, make sure you understand what you’re actually being quoted.
Two solar systems can have very different prices because they may not be the same size or produce the same amount of electricity. A cheaper system might simply have fewer panels and offset less of your electric bill.
With Aurora, you can compare solar estimates and see the system size, energy production, and how much electricity the system should offset.
You can also upload your utility bill to get a solar estimate based more closely on your actual energy usage, to make the quote accurate for you instead of a ‘generic household’.
2. understand the solar payback period
Aurora calculates things like payback period and lifetime savings, which makes it much easier to understand the long-term finances.
The solar payback period is basically how long it takes for your estimated savings to make up for what you spent on the system, and this is the number that surprised me most!
One estimate had a payback period of around 7 years, and another was closer to 11 years! Over 25 years, two of the estimates I looked at had almost a $13,000 difference in projected savings.
Of course, these are still projections as electricity rates can change (HELLO 2026) but when you’re trying to compare two options for the same house, knowing that one is projected to pay for itself four years sooner is pretty useful information.
3. look beyond the monthly payment
Depending on the installer, you may be looking at a cash purchase, solar loan, lease, or power purchase agreement.
But thankfully with Aurora you can compare the different financing options side-by-side which makes it a lot easier to see the trade-offs. One option may have a lower upfront cost, another may have a lower monthly payment, and another may give you better long-term savings.
4. find out which solar incentives actually apply to you
The minute you start Googling solar, you can find federal incentives, state incentives, utility programs, rebates, net metering, and a whole bunch of information that may or may not even apply to where you live.
And some of the articles ranking at the top of Google are several years old! (RIP to the federal incentives canceled at the end of 2025.) But, Aurora can account for solar incentives when calculating the cost and savings of a system, including state, local, and utility-specific programs.
I would still double check any incentive or tax benefit you’re planning to use before signing a contract, especially because programs and eligibility can change, but having all the relevant information in the same place makes the research process much less overwhelming.
5. research the installer, equipment, and warranties
Aurora lets you compare solar installers based on things like reviews, reputation, pricing, and financing options, which I think is just as important as the actual quote.
I’d also look closely at what equipment is included. What panels are they using? What kind of inverter? How long are the equipment warranties? Is there also a workmanship warranty from the installer? Who handles repairs if something goes wrong five or ten years from now?
And, I know I’ve said it a million times, but it’s nice to see it side-by-side without having to fill out a bunch of forms and be hounded on the phone just to get an idea of what solar may look like.
The post How to Compare Solar Quotes: What to Look For Before You Choose appeared first on Going Zero Waste.
How to Compare Solar Quotes: What to Look For Before You Choose
Green Living
Sustainability In Your Ear: XPRIZE’s David Babson on Why Climate Grand Challenges Need Buyers, Too
Buyers contracted nearly 30 million tons of durable carbon removal in 2025, more than triple the 2024 total, according to CDR.fyi data reported by Heatmap. About 90% of those purchases came from a single company, Microsoft, and suppliers delivered only about 450,000 tons during the year. That is a sliver of the six to 10 billion tons of removal a year that climate scenarios suggest the world will need by 2050. The technology to pull carbon out of the air works, but the customers needed to scale it remain scarce.
Our guest today, David Babson, is executive vice president of the Energy, Climate, and Nature domain at the XPRIZE Foundation. He calls the slow progress a market failure, because the technology is progressing faster than it is being adopted. Babson previously led MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges initiative and was a program director at the U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA-E. His portfolio includes XPRIZE Carbon Removal, which drew 1,334 teams and whose participants have raised more than $3.3 billion. In April 2025, Mati Carbon won its $50 million grand prize for spreading crushed basalt on smallholder farms in India, where the rock locks away carbon dioxide. “If people could make money taking carbon out of the air and putting it underground, as opposed to only being able to make money taking it from underground and putting it in the air, we would be in a better place,” Babson says. Mati is weathering the slump in part because its rock dust also improves soil health and crop yields, giving farmers a reason to participate that doesn’t depend on carbon credit prices.
XPRIZE’s answer is to change what winners receive. Babson describes “mixed purses” that pair a cash award with a guaranteed buyer through an advance market commitment, a power purchase agreement, or an offtake contract. In one thought experiment, a carbon removal prize would come with a separate $1 billion fund raised from credit buyers, which qualified teams could draw on as they deliver verified tons. XPRIZE is applying the same thinking to a planned series of fusion energy prizes, pairing technical milestones with market mechanisms to build the supply chain that commercial fusion will require. The same gap between invention and adoption shows up in other XPRIZE competitions. On September 23, XPRIZE Wildfire awarded about $4.55 million from its $11 million purse, with defense contractor Anduril Industries taking first place in autonomous fire response along with a $1 million Lockheed Martin bonus. Babson expects costs to fall as fire agencies adopt the tools and as startups license individual components into cheaper platforms, though underfunded agencies will need a way to buy the first systems. He also notes that the competition left fuel management and ground-based autonomy for future prizes. Earlier this year, program director Andrea Santy told us that field testing had moved ahead of drone regulations. In biodiversity, Limelight Rainforest won $5 million for surveying 100 hectares of tropical forest in under 24 hours and identifying more than 250 species. Biodiversity still lacks a price, but Babson argues that once ecosystems can be measured, slow-walking policy becomes “a dereliction of what they should be doing.”
We also discuss the tension inside XPRIZE’s vision of “equitable abundance,” including a $101 million Healthspan prize that could add years of consumption to longer lives. Babson argues that abundant, cheap clean energy would let society move beyond efficiency as its organizing principle, powering uses such as indoor vertical farms that could return millions of acres of farmland to nature. You can follow XPRIZE’s new competitions and get involved in its prize ideation workshops at xprize.org.
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Interview Transcript
Mitch Ratcliffe 00:36
Hello. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.
Let’s talk about the power and the uses of grand challenge programs to kickstart low-carbon industries and respond to the changing environment. Over the past several years, we’ve talked on the show with leaders of grand challenge programs designed to accelerate progress on humanity’s most difficult challenges, from pulling carbon out of the atmosphere to fighting rapidly growing wildfire threats in cities and rural communities. Many of these competitions have been launched by XPRIZE, whose leaders have shared on the show the stories of these competitions as they launched and unfolded.
Today is a chance to take stock, to look back and think about how climate markets, technology, and politics are changing fast, and how that makes this a good moment to ask the question: Are these programs designed to accelerate progress actually delivering that progress?
Our guest today designs XPRIZE’s climate bets. David Babson is executive vice president of the Energy, Climate, and Nature domain at the XPRIZE Foundation. Before XPRIZE, he was the executive director of MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges initiative and a program director at the U.S. Energy Department’s ARPA-E energy technology research agency.
His portfolio includes the largest incentive in prize history. In 2025, Mati Carbon received a $50 million grand prize for their enhanced rock weathering solution for capturing and drawing down carbon, and XPRIZE now reports that companies participating in its programs have raised $3.3 billion. That carbon removal win arrived just as the removal market hit serious turbulence, and as XPRIZE’s wildfire competition wrapped up with its top prize still unclaimed.
So we’re going to discuss what grand challenges can really accomplish, which winners continue to build and which stall, and what the reasons are, as well as the tensions inside a portfolio that funds both climate solutions and longer human lifespans. We’ll get to the conversation right after this brief commercial break. Stay tuned.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear, and welcome, David Babson, to Sustainability In Your Ear. How are you doing today?
David Babson 03:10
I’m doing well.
Mitch Ratcliffe 03:11
I’m glad to have you here. You’ve run research portfolios at ARPA-E and MIT. What can a prize purse accomplish that a well-funded grant program can’t, or are they complementary?
David Babson 03:22
They’re absolutely complementary. The way that I think about it is that the value of these different mechanisms for promoting innovation is at different parts of the innovation supply chain, if you will. A prize is not a substitute for the very necessary investments that places like governments make into basic, applied, and advanced research. In fact, those types of investments are really valuable for establishing the innovation ecosystems and the technical capacities to eventually win prizes.
Where the prize is very valuable is somewhat downstream: translating technologies, ideas, and innovations that are coming out of academia and labs to market for scale. It challenges the innovators to imagine those technical capacities as solutions to global challenges, and then the visibility that the prize brings to those translations of technologies de-risks funding to flow to those innovators so they can imagine their uses in practice.
So I actually see them as very complementary, particularly when it comes to solutions in the energy and climate space that require rapid adoption of technologies in markets to have impact. Just having an energy solution or a climate solution is not valuable unless it can be de-risked and connected to markets to scale for impact. And that’s what the prize is actually very good at doing.
Mitch Ratcliffe 05:22
That comes through in the impact report that you all published recently. About 1,300 different organizations were catalyzed. The groups came together, apparently, because of their desire to compete in the competition.
What I’ve found in my work with public-private partnerships, in particular, is that impact investors are looking for that initial traction, and to a degree, the prize and the distribution of money within the prize group is that catalyst that says there’s a real opportunity for an impact profit, something that both does good and is profitable. How does the organization consult with the financial communities that are going to back these companies once your prize has been awarded? Is there a backroom conversation about that, for lack of a better way of putting it?
David Babson 06:10
Not an explicit backroom conversation about it, but the prize itself brings attention to the innovations that are coming out to win the competition. Oftentimes, as you’re noting, these impact investing communities exist, and they are looking for technologies to invest in to have impact.
What the prize is effective at doing is casting a wider net and surfacing the best solutions across the board, where there may have been silos in the past, or there may not have been transparency to individual investors about where to put their money. The prize is capable of elevating all of them, creating better visibility, and therefore, just by its inherent operation, creates better opportunities for investment capital to flow to the right types of teams to have greater impact more quickly.
So we don’t have explicit discussions with those types of investor communities to have them directly connected to individual prizes. But we often consult with investors and experts in industry to inform the metrics that we would want to have demonstrated, so that we know that when teams are winning our competitions, the demonstrations that they do are de-risking capital to flow to those innovators so that they can be translated to market.
Mitch Ratcliffe 07:47
We’re talking about growing industries, which of course means diversifying into a lot of specializations. Once you’ve got this kind of anchor winning team or teams, how does XPRIZE think about propagating the information that’s necessary for the rest of the industry to grow and fill in around them, in order to provide the kind of comprehensive geographic coverage and range of functions that are necessary for the industry to thrive? Is that something that you think about cultivating, like you would in agriculture?
David Babson 08:22
It is something that we think a lot about. With a few of the more recent prize competitions that we’ve run, we have also paired those competitions with a subsequent impact phase, which is designed to further build the community that has been established through the operation of the prize and connect the technologies that came out of the competition to the right types of markets and investors so that they can scale.
So that is one of the things that we’re thinking about in future competitions as well: not just running an innovation competition to surface new innovations, but how do we augment the community building that the prize provides as a way to also promote the back-end business models and industries that can scale those solutions for impact?
Mitch Ratcliffe 09:19
How would you describe the patterns you’re looking for that indicate that an organization can become that durable enterprise? What separates them from the rest? Have you got thoughts about that?
David Babson 09:29
I do have thoughts about it. In a lot of ways, the rigorous metrics that we set up when we’re designing the competition are informed by what experts believe would be the necessary demonstrations to actually generate a solution that is market viable. So a lot of it is very quantitative in terms of how we architect the competition.
But what we’ve also seen is that there are elements of winning teams that can’t always be controlled by just the scientific metrics. A lot of times, it’s the composition of the team, how diverse they are, and the unique mentality that the leaders of the team have in terms of their vision and their ambition. Those are parts that you can’t control for, but the prize model is very effective at also attracting the type of entrepreneurial, big-thinking individuals that actually tend to be behind some of the most successful companies.
Mitch Ratcliffe 10:40
Those big-thinking individuals often struggle with the transition from inventor. And to your point about the academic community often being the source of many of the teams that are competing, that’s not something that academics are necessarily good at. As part of the prize process, do you also begin to coach them on how to staff for the operators who are going to be able to translate the invention into a market success?
David Babson 11:04
Absolutely. On the front end, the prize itself sets a target that is typically beyond what researchers in an academic setting are imagining for what they’re doing. It gives them a way to imagine their technical innovations as scalable solutions to big problems, so that gets them excited to be in the competition. But you’re right: they’re not necessarily all business-minded or have the types of experience that would allow even very, very good solutions to become very strong companies and business models.
So one of the things that we have tried out recently, and it’s a model that we could replicate in future competitions as well, is an accelerator cohort in the carbon removal prize. It was optional for teams to opt into the cohort to get additional guidance and consulting from experts in startups and technology translation. That would help them think about the unique elements of their proposed carbon removal strategy, how they would connect it to markets, and how they would drive greater value for their solutions.
That is something that we can do as part of the competition, because we’re building a community of innovators that are striving toward a shared aim. Therefore, we can better define what an accelerator cohort looks like, so that the guidance that is provided is more effective at actually generating the right type of thinking for scaling the solutions that we’re interested in.
Mitch Ratcliffe 12:52
That kind of accelerator approach gets you ready for market competition, but it doesn’t always get you ready for the market in which you’re going to have to exist as an organization. It’s templated, and the specifics of any individual company’s success are very unique.
Let’s take Mati Carbon as an example. They won the $50 million prize. They are doing carbon drawdown using basalt ground up and mixed into farmers’ fields, but their success is really anchored in the carbon credit market’s growth. How does the prize work with those sources of carbon credit purchases, for instance, Meta or Microsoft, to connect them to these opportunities to make prize winners thriving organizations?
David Babson 13:38
There are some limitations to what we can do in that space. I think the uncertainty and the pullback in commitments to carbon credits and carbon markets is a challenge to the cohort of teams that competed in the carbon removal prize.
Ironically, I think one of the things that is allowing Mati to continue growing on the business plan that they have is that a lot of the value that they’re able to assign to their solution actually goes toward the agricultural implications: the ability for their treated lands to not just remove and store carbon, but to improve soil quality and soil health to improve agricultural yields. So there’s a different value stream that they can draw from. Broadly, it would be much better if there were a great deal more certainty in the market for carbon removal attributes.
Mitch Ratcliffe 14:47
This is a systems thinking problem, and your domain includes nature alongside energy and climate. How do you think differently about designing a prize for an ecosystem as compared to designing one for a technology that has a clear cost curve and an adoption challenge?
David Babson 15:02
I think that it’s a really interesting question, and one that we’ve been thinking about a lot in my domain in particular. As I was saying earlier, it’s not sufficient to just surface new innovations that could be a solution. In order for them to have impact, you have to figure out how you connect those to markets and get them into use, so that they can scale to drive that impact.
So there are two parts of the incentive model that we need to push on. We need to continue the incentive that the traditional non-dilutive purse offers in attracting innovators to demonstrate their potential solutions. But we also need to consider the market mechanisms that would help accelerate the transition of those technologies from the lab into the market.
So we’ve been thinking a lot about how we might develop mixed purses: a purse th