He’s got something new to sell you. Photo: Michael Kovac/Getty Images for WeWork A luxury afforded to billionaires is that they don’t have to fade away no matter how spectacularly they fail, and Adam Neumann, who both co-founded and was exiled from running WeWork, is a prime example. When he was the CEO of the real-estate company, the footloose Silicon Valley entrepreneur marketed expensive shared office space by using a kind of spiritual gibberish.
But now he’s back, baby! Neumann is behind a new company whose market is once again as expansive as life itself: the air we breathe and the environment we live in. Reuters reported Tuesday that he’s the force behind Flowcarbon, a trading platform that, in its own words, “operates at the intersection of the voluntary carbon market and Web3, leveraging blockchain to scale climate change solutions.
Here’s the thing about carbon offsets: They’re not going to save the environment. Under this system, companies that add more carbon into the atmosphere can pay — via the credits — for projects that in theory subtract carbon from the air somewhere else in the world. It’s also supposed to create an incentive for lowering emission overall. But in practice, it’s easy to game. According to Bloomberg, only 5 percent of the credits actually remove carbon from the atmosphere.
These kinds of accounting tricks have big implications. The rise of environmental, social, and governance investing — an increasingly influential investing philosophy that seeks to nudge corporations toward greener behavior — led to about $400 billion in funds as of last year. But the whole market is rife with stretched definitions of what counts as environmentally responsible, a problem that’s gotten so out of hand that the Securities and Exchange Commission is looking to reform it.
Neumann’s company doesn’t really address any of this, but it does have backing from investors such as Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm, and the deck has input from McKinsey. Really, what he’s trying to do here is to make it cheaper and easier for the companies most likely to need carbon credits — like those in finance, insurance, and energy — to buy them. It’s entirely possible the market could develop into something that has more accountability to it.
KevinTDugan Ummm… sounds like more hot air - should get into the balloon industry
KevinTDugan This f**king guy again