JPMorgan Chase on Tuesday announced that it would spend more than $200 million to purchase the removal of a massive amount of carbon dioxide from the air in a bid to boost the development of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technology.
The massive investment from the largest bank in the U.S. would pull the equivalent of 800,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the air, the second-largest carbon removal purchase by volume in the industry’s history, according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the announcement. Although this investment still falls well short of the nearly 3 million tons of removal purchased by tech titan Microsoft, JPMorgan expects that it will allow it to fully offset any and all operational carbon emissions with CDR by 2030, according to a press release from the bank. (RELATED: Oil Giant’s Shareholder Meeting Devolves Into Chaos As Climate Protesters Attempt To Storm Stage)
“It’s a big shot in the arm for us to go scale up our operations,” Peter Reinhardt, CEO of CDR startup Charm Industrial, told the WSJ. JPMorgan announced that it will purchase nearly 30,000 metric tons of CDR from Charm over the next five years, and deliveries are already underway.
Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co. speaks during the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, U.S., May 1, 2017. REUTERS/Mike Blake.
The major purchases by both JPMorgan and Microsoft are helping boost an industry that promises to give companies more certainty that they are actually mitigating their climate impacts compared to more traditional carbon offsets, according to the WSJ. More traditional carbon credits typically rely on planting trees or other methods of offsetting carbon in the future, which makes them difficult to verify and the subject of increasing scrutiny from climate activists.
“The voluntary carbon market needs science-based and equitable criteria to ensure carbon credits represent genuine emissions reduction or removal,” Taylor Wright, head of strategy, operational sustainability and carbon management at JPMorgan Chase, said in the company’s press release. The company further noted that it was investing in ways to build “more unified global standards” for best practices in the carbon market.
A JPMorgan spokesperson directed a DCNF request for comment to the company’s press release.
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