Several large tech and consulting companies including Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, Shopify, and McKinsey, just committed $925 million to carbon capture technologies.

According to the company's website, the new initiative is called Frontier and “aims to accelerate the development of carbon removal technologies by guaranteeing future demand for them.” Frontier works to make purchasing carbon capture more affordable to companies looking to offset their environmental footprint. According to an article from The Verge, the company acts as a liaison between “buyers that want to pay to draw down greenhouse gas emissions and suppliers that can do that for them.”

While carbon capture infrastructure exists, production is currently operatingat too low of a scale to address the climate crisis. Frontier’s website states that “as of 2021, less than 10,000 tons of carbon dioxide had been permanently removed from the atmosphere by new technologies -- 1 million times short of the annual scale needed.”

According to the International Energy Agency, in order to mitigate the major effects of climate change, direct air capture technologies need to capture 85 million metric tons of CO2 by 2030. With Big Tech and McKinsey contributing just shy of a billion dollars to Frontier, the entities are making a bold statement to entrepreneurs and researchers alike that the market for carbon capture technology is growing, and the time to invest is now.