Month: August 2024

creativity

Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund creates economic opportunity and protects the planet

Christa Avampato

The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund is a powerful climate finance policy in the U.S. that hasn’t gotten enough attention. It effectively leverages blended finance, creating an effective model for future policies. Here’s the deal:

With the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Vice President Kamala Harris announced a $20 billion investment in climate and clean energy projects: three under the $14 billion National Clean Investment Fund and five under the $6 billion Clean Communities Investment Accelerator. They will create a national clean financing network for clean energy and climate solutions across sectors, ensuring communities have access to the capital they need to participate in and benefit from a cleaner, more sustainable economy.

Together, the eight selected projects will deliver on the three objectives of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund: reducing climate and air pollution; delivering benefits to communities, especially low-income and disadvantaged communities; and mobilizing financing and private capital. As part of this collective effort, selected applicants have committed to the following:

Fund projects across sectors that will reduce or avoid greenhouse gas emissions

  • These projects fund net-zero buildings, zero-emissions transportation, distributed energy generation and storage, and the decarbonization of agriculture and heavy industry.

Reach communities in all 50 states, the 6 U.S. territories, and Tribal Lands, with a particular focus on low-income and disadvantaged communities

  • $14 billion funds low-income and disadvantaged communities that need it most, ensuring that program benefits flow to the communities most in need and advance the President’s Justice40 Initiative
  • Over $4 billion to rural and energy communities
  • Nearly $1.5 billion to Tribal communities

Mobilize private capital at an almost 7:1 ratio over the next seven years, with every dollar in grant funds leveraged for almost seven dollars in private funds

  • This is a significant point because a sustainable world requires private investment. This means $20 billion in U.S. government funding activates an additional $130 billion in private capital from banks, asset managers, and individual investors for a total of $150 billion. (This is known as “blended finance” — investments from different sources are combined to achieve a common goal.)

Fund community lenders and partners who are already working in communities across the country to deliver investments quickly

  • 1,000 community lenders are lending in low-income and disadvantaged communities, including Community Development Financial Institutions (including Community Development Loan Funds, Community Development Banks, Community Development Credit Unions, and Community Development Venture Capital Funds); low-income credit unions, and green banks.

Hundreds of thousands of good-paying, high-quality jobs, especially in low-income and disadvantaged communities

  • Create hundreds of thousands of good-paying, high-quality jobs, supported by a number of local, regional, and national labor union jobs

Vice President Harris has spent her career standing up for people and the planet. She’s not resting on her laurels. She’s moving us forward toward a healthy, sustainable world for all. The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund is a cornerstone of a set of policies that create economic opportunities while protecting the planet we share.

creativity

Mine for metal with plants

Christa Avampato
Metalplant co-founders Laura Wasserson, Eric Matzner and Sahit Muja with the Albanian farming team.
Image: Metalplant

Plants like sunflowers are viable nature-based solutions that remove heavy metal from polluted soil through the scientific process of phytoremediation. The term is a combination of the Greek phyto (plant) and Latin remedium (restoring balance). Simply, brilliantly, and quickly, the plants take up the heavy metal in large quantities and store them in their fatty tissues. This causes no harm to the sunflowers, nor to the land. They also thrive in hot, dry climates. What a wonder for a world wracked by pollution and climate change impacts. 

Now imagine taking this incredible adaptation even further. What if we extracted the metals from the plants and use these metals in our technology so we didn’t need to mine for them? 

This is exactly the mission of Metalplant, a startup in Albania transforming some of the most degraded land in the world into a lucrative venture. This idea of phytoremediation isn’t new. Many have tried. Metalplant added another step to their process. While mining with plants (a process they call phytomining), they also remove CO2 from the atmosphere by spreading large volumes of rock dust on their farms. That rock pulls carbon out of the air. This process is known as enhanced rock weathering.

I worried about the impact of the rock dust on the soil and the life within that soil. Thankfully, enhanced rock weathering is a regenerative practice, using mycorrhiza and other fungi fostered by the roots of the plants absorbing the metal from the soil. 

Curious and want to learn more? Metalplant would love to hear from you. Get in touch with them at https://metalplant.com/contact/.