Building a high-impact carbon removal program at Google featuring Randy Spock

I’m excited to share the third conversation in my LinkedIn interview series with Randy Spock , who is the Carbon Removal Lead on my team at 谷歌 . We talk about the role carbon removal plays in Google’s net zero efforts, the even bigger role of carbon removal in fighting climate change at the planetary scale, and what we’re learning as we develop a portfolio of solutions to solve the challenges of scale and certainty in the carbon market.?

MT: Tell me about what you do on the Climate Ops team and your journey to get here.?

RS: My work focuses on Google’s efforts to help develop and scale climate solutions that remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. So for example, building a machine that captures CO2 and stores it underground or restoring trees and mangroves in a damaged ecosystem. These are solutions that can help the world reach a state of net zero emissions and ultimately negative emissions.

Mitigating climate change is obviously a huge challenge, and there are many ways to work on it. I first got interested in carbon removal specifically because it’s unlike almost any other sector of the economy in that it measures progress in long-term outcomes, rather than short-term activities. For example, when you go to the doctor you pay them for their services, not for the quality-adjusted life years. But carbon removals are priced in terms of the outcomes - buyers, usually companies or governments, purchase “credits” that represent the CO2 removed from the atmosphere by a given project. I thought this was so fascinating, both philosophically and as a business proposition.?

So, after graduating from business school, I went to work on the supply side of the carbon removal industry, helping launch an early large-scale carbon removal program at an ag tech company called Indigo. I also worked at a start-up called Patch, which builds technology to facilitate the buying and selling of carbon credits.?

MT: Google’s clean energy and net zero efforts are first and foremost focused on reducing the carbon emissions from our global operations and value chain. So, why exactly does Google care about removing CO2 from the atmosphere??

RS: It’s one of the reasons I wanted to work on carbon removal specifically at Google - because, as a company, we’re putting most of our resources toward the more urgent work of reducing our own emissions. But there will inevitably be some so-called ‘residual’ emissions that we won’t be able to reduce in the foreseeable future, and that’s where we see carbon removal playing an important role in our net zero efforts.?

Even more importantly, we know that carbon removal has a significant role to play in the world’s pathway to net zero emissions. The IPCC has said that even if the world rapidly reduces emissions, we’ll still need carbon removal solutions to counterbalance hard-to-abate residual emissions. So, we need to start developing a wide range of solutions now, with an eye to removing CO2 at the gigaton-scale in the long run.

MT: I’ve talked previously with Savannah and Michelle about how Google aims to accelerate clean energy solutions that won’t just enable us to achieve our own 24/7 carbon-free energy goal, but will also help move entire energy systems and markets toward a fully decarbonized future. What are some of the system and market level challenges for carbon removal solutions, and how are we working to address them??

RS: If we only cared about neutralizing Google’s own residual emissions, our challenge would be much easier. We’d just focus on buying “good enough” carbon removal credits at the lowest possible price and call it a day. But, similar to our carbon-free energy strategy, we’re using all of the levers in Google’s toolkit to solve foundational challenges in the carbon removal space and accelerate solutions that will enable the world to reach net zero emissions and negative emissions

Carbon removal is a small but important lever in the world’s pathway to net zero emissions and negative emissions. Source: Frontier Climate

We see two main challenges facing carbon removals: solutions either don’t have a promising path to scale, or we don’t have a high degree of certainty that they will have their intended impact. We’ve built our program around addressing both of these challenges, with the ultimate goal of giving ourselves and others the ability to invest in carbon removals with greater confidence and conviction.?

In 2022, we co-founded Frontier with Stripe, McKinsey, Meta, and Shopify to accelerate “breakthrough” carbon removal technologies that are highly promising but face barriers to achieving scale. Through this advance market commitment, we’ve been making bets on a diverse set of solutions - from companies that apply crushed rocks to farmland to absorb CO2 to ones that convert plant waste into bio-oil to store CO2 underground - and pooling our purchasing power to help these technologies move down the cost curve and toward their full potential to remove billions of tons of CO2 at a planetary scale.?

But while we work to get these nascent technologies off the ground, we’re also addressing challenges facing what I call? “bridge solutions,” for example nature restoration projects, that have higher scale today but lack certainty in their atmospheric impact. Just last week, we announced that we have co-founded a new advance market commitment called Symbiosis, which aims to set a new standard for measuring the climate impact of nature-based carbon removals. Working with Microsoft, Meta, and Salesforce, we’ll make purchases from best-in-class nature restoration projects, backed by the latest science, and boost credibility in the nature-based removal market as it continues to scale.?

I have two young kids. When they’re older, I don’t think they’ll care all that much about what Google’s carbon accounting ledger looked like in a given year. What they will care about is whether the world has figured out how to stop climate change. And I’m really proud of how Google is approaching its net zero efforts in a way that will make that outcome more likely.???

MT: We helped found these multi-company initiatives like Frontier and Symbiosis because we know that Google can’t solve these complex market challenges alone. What have we learned at Google that can help other companies as they consider the role of carbon removals in their own net zero strategies?

RS: First, I think it’s important to emphasize the scale of the problem we’re trying to collectively solve. The total amount of high-durability carbon removals sold to date is about 11 million tons. It’s estimated that the wildfires that burned across Canada last year released more than 400 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere.?

While decarbonization is still the priority lever for companies to directly reduce emissions in the near-term, there has never been a better moment to start supporting carbon removal solutions and accelerate progress towards longer-term, larger-scale climate benefits. It’s been incredibly exciting to see the US Department of Energy step up with a pledge to purchase its own carbon removal credits, which creates an easier and lower-risk pathway for other companies to follow suit and play a meaningful role in kick-starting the carbon removal market.

MT: You’ve worked on both the supply side and the demand side of the carbon removal market, and gained a broad education and perspective from wearing both hats. What advice would you give to people hoping to enter or grow their career in this space??

RS: Firstly, I would encourage anyone interested in these topics to follow that interest and find ways to get involved - this is an exciting, fast-growing space and we need more thoughtful, dedicated people driving solutions across many domains. My main advice to those entering the field would be to make sure to understand the underlying math and principles behind the earth’s current predicament before rushing into any one specific approach to solving it. Whatever they choose to do will be one part of a larger portfolio of solutions we’ll need to address climate change, and approaching this work with context, humility, and perspective will help ensure that they are applying their skills and passion in a meaningful, high-impact way.