“The way that we remove politics and polarization is by building actual solutions […] That’s how we take the concerns, the worries, the power out of it, and put it towards reversing climate change and building a better world.” — Tito Jankowski

On Travel Beyond, we’ve often discussed decarbonization—reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that visitor economies add to  the atmosphere. Carbon removal is a parallel climate strategy that is gaining momentum. It could soon present an enormous opportunity for the travel industry. But what is carbon removal, and why is it so important?

Removing the carbon that has already been emitted is essential to achieve global and national net zero targets, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Capturing and storing carbon has to work in tandem with emissions reduction to limit the effects of global warming. And as Tito Jankowski explains, it’s already happening. 

The Co-founder and CEO of AirMiners isn’t worried about the future. Tito is leading an accelerator for entrepreneurs and innovators working on reversing climate change through carbon removal, and he leads a thriving community of around 2000 scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers, policymakers, and others dedicated to reversing climate change. In 2021, AirMiners also partnered with Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) and XPRIZE Carbon Removal to support start-ups aiming to win some of the $100 million in prize money for new, working solutions. He believes that future generations will look back and envy our opportunity to be the ones discovering how to build a sustainable world. 

Right now, the carbon removal industry is still in its early stages, but since he began AirMiners six years ago, Tito has witnessed a surge of entrepreneurs shifting their focus to carbon removal. The key challenge now is scaling up these efforts quickly and monitoring potential side effects associated with different removal methods. Given the scale of the challenge, he believes this is the beginning of a trillion-dollar industry.

The travel industry’s long-term success is inevitably tied to carbon removal, says Tito. Stay tuned for part two of his interview, where he discusses travel’s opportunity to play a leadership role in building a stable climate. 

On this episode of Travel Beyond, you’ll also learn:

• Why Tito was inspired to look for solutions to climate change.
• Why carbon removal is an industry on the brink of massive growth.
• What Tito believes is the biggest challenge of the climate crisis.
• About the need to rapidly scale carbon removal solutions, and how that can happen.
• The importance of being in discovery mode while collaborating on solutions. 

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Show notes

AirMiners — An accelerator for entrepreneurs and innovators building solutions for carbon removal. 

Carbon removal — Technologies, practices, and approaches that remove carbon from the atmosphere. See this fact sheet from the IPCC.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — An intergovernmental body of the United Nations that assesses the science related to climate change.

XPRIZE Foundation — A non-profit organization that designs and hosts global prize competitions intended to encourage radical technological development.

Episode transcript

Tito Jankowski: This is the generation that gets to discover how to build a stable climate. If you believe the climate is gonna fail, or you believe that we’re gonna solve climate change, fundamentally those are the same thing. You have some belief about the future that isn’t actually real yet. What we get to switch to is discovery mode.

Where we get to discover how to make that happen together.

David Archer: Hello, and welcome to Travel Beyond, where we partner with leading destinations to explore the greatest challenges facing communities and the planet, surfacing their most inspiring solutions. I’m David Archer from Destination Think, and I’m recording from Haida Gwaii, the territory of the Haida Nation off the north coast of British Columbia, Canada.

On this show, we look at the role of travel, and choose to highlight destinations that are global leaders. We talk to the changemakers addressing regenerative travel through action in their communities, often from the bottom up. Last episode, we heard from Paul Cubbon from the Creative Destruction Lab, or CDL, out of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

And if you remember, CDL is an international program that provides mentorship for founders of startup companies that are seeking to scale their businesses. And today we’re going to speak with the co-founder of a project that has also accelerated the growth of startups. The project is called Air Miners, and as the name suggests, it focuses on one particular climate solution, and that is carbon removal.

You can think of carbon removal as another tool that the world has in preventing the greenhouse effect. It’s different than decarbonization, which we’ve talked about here a lot on Travel Beyond. For example, you can scroll back to season two of the podcast, which brought us to the Queenstown Lakes District in Aotearoa, New Zealand, where the community set a goal to reach carbon zero by 2030.

That is about decarbonization, which is reducing the amount of greenhouse gas that you’re putting into the atmosphere in the first place. But what about all the carbon we’ve already emitted? I was happy to find out that there are many people working on ways to remove it from the atmosphere, or in other words, do some carbon removal.

Tito Jankowski is a co founder of AirMiners and he’s going to explain what carbon removal does, why it represents an important opportunity and what AirMiners is doing to help. In 2021, he and AirMiners partnered with CDL and XPRIZE Carbon Removal, which belongs to the Musk Foundation to support startups aiming to win some of the 100 million in prize money from XPRIZE for new working solutions.

Now that’s one with eight zeros afterwards. And this isn’t only an idea from the tech industry and university campuses. In a 2022 report, the IPCC notes that carbon dioxide removal is required to achieve global and national targets of net zero. The report goes on to caution us that this isn’t a replacement for reducing emissions immediately, it has to happen in parallel.

And as Tito will explain, it’s already happening. Some carbon has already been removed using new methods, although the amount is quite tiny compared to what is needed. The bigger question then is, how fast can carbon removal be scaled? And what might be the potential side effects to watch for, depending on the chosen method?

In order for carbon removal to take off, it’s going to need some investment, which leads to another question, who’s doing something about carbon removal in the travel industry? And in this interview, you’ll hear Tito say that no one is except for Rodney, which is obviously meant tongue in cheek. But Tito’s point is that the CEOs of large companies like airlines might be actually missing an opportunity to get in early.

And that’s a topic we’re going to pick up next episode. Well, I won’t keep you any longer. Here is Rodney Payne from Destination Think speaking with Tito Jankowski from AirMiners.

Tito Jankowski: My name is Tito Jankowski. What I do is I’m an airminer. Are you worried about climate change? Worried about it? Sometimes I worry about it, but usually when I’m worrying about it it means I’m not taking action on it. And I’m not worried about climate change right now, because I’m here in Vancouver meeting you for the first time, and that’s coming from a place of like, let’s go remove a billion tons of carbon by 2030.

Rodney Payne: Can you tell me a little bit about your career trajectory? Leading up to AirMiners. 

Tito Jankowski: What I usually say is, uh, I, I started out in college as a biomedical engineer. I studied synthetic biology, DNA, making the world a better place through health and, and, and biology. And at a point, I was living in San Francisco, and I was really looking at biology, and I said, you know, cells are these really small living things.

I want to work on some really big living thing. So I’m going to go work on this climate change thing. People keep talking about. Do you remember the moment you got infected by the climate problem? Yeah, I do. The moment I got into climate was I was listening to Leonardo DiCaprio accept his Oscar award.

And I was just like, I was just having dinner. My buddy was over. I was not following climate stuff at all. And Leo got up and I’m like, it’s Leo. Cool. He got this Oscar. Uh, and he gets up and he said, he’s, he’s holding the Oscar and he says, climate change is real. And I was like, are you kidding me? Like, you’ve been, like, the, the, we know climate change is real.

Is that still like the, where the level of dialogue is? Like, everybody knows that it’s real. And so I started digging into it and it turns out, like, there’s still a whole thing about whether stuff is, whether climate is changing or not. Um, and there’s, there, what’s, what’s not happening or what hadn’t been happening was, was actually solving it.

And so that’s that, that’s the moment where I started looking for, this is something interesting. This is the moment where I started looking for solutions. 

Rodney Payne: You did a TEDx presentation early on in the AirMiners journey. Can you tell me about that? 

Tito Jankowski: When I was first getting started in carbon removal, I gave a TEDx talk in San Francisco and it was all about air mining.

Um, and it centered on, that we need to remove carbon from the sky, we need to either do useful things with it, or store it. And it was really galvanizing to get up in front of that audience and say, this is something that we need to do, and here’s this whole community called AirMiners that’s positioning to, to bring this to reality.

Rodney Payne: Can you describe how AirMiners came to be? Like, how did it get funded? How, what were you doing in the beginning? 

Tito Jankowski: AirMiners started as a spreadsheet. I quit my job to go work on climate. And this was like after the Leonardo DiCaprio speech that inspired me. I was like, okay, I’m going to go quit my job. I’m going to do something about this.

So I started a, uh, a company mostly doing consulting, but like when you first start out doing consulting, what that means is like that you’re like doing a bunch of work and not getting any money. And so we had like, we had a week of money in the bank. Um, and I went back to this guy, Matt McCrown. who is a, he’s, he’s one of the creators of the, uh, one of the first index funds.

He’s like a financial wizard. Went back to him and said, Hey, remember that topic, carbon sequestration, that, that you were, you were really excited about? You were talking about pulling a conference together. We want to do that conference for you. We don’t want, like, don’t know what carbon sequestration is or what carbon removal is.

We’re going to do that for you. And he said, okay. That’s how we got started researching carbon removal, researching all these startups, all these professors and scientists. And, uh, it was a, it was a spreadsheet. It was like, we’d go in every couple of weeks and see Mac and take him a, you know, a printout report of like this spreadsheet of startups that we had found.

Um, that’s how AirMiners began. It began as, as these reports. And then we said, Hey, let’s take these spreadsheets. And I’m like, we should put them on a website somewhere. And then the, as the world started to get more interested in carbon removal. Those people all came to AirMiners and just started to discover what was happening and, and join in.

And what does AirMiners do now? AirMiners is a community of risk takers working on reversing climate change through carbon removal. That means we help people get inspired, educated, and accelerated working on carbon removal solutions. One of the core pieces of that is our accelerator program. We work with early stage startup companies.

That are taking carbon dioxide from the air and figuring out how to build a business from that. And so of course, around that, we have, uh, educational programming. We have events. We have an incredible community of people that want to start their own companies or join new companies. Uh, and that’s how, that’s what AirMiners is.

Rodney Payne: So you’re working on carbon removal and helping businesses to do that. How do you explain that to someone on the street who doesn’t know about carbon? 

Tito Jankowski: The way I explain carbon rule is there’s too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We’re adding more every single day. What we really need to do is to stop adding more carbon and take out, we’ve already added.

Rodney Payne: So it’s not enough that we just switch to AVAs and put up more solar panels. You’re saying that we actually need to remove carbon from the atmosphere. 

Tito Jankowski: We actually need to remove carbon from the atmosphere. It’s not enough just to decarbonize. It’s not enough just to stop emissions. It’s not enough just to stop putting more carbon in the air.

We actually need to remove carbon as well. 

Rodney Payne: Can you really pull carbon out of the air? Like is it even, is it even really possible to pull carbon out of the sky? How do you do it? 

Tito Jankowski: Yeah, trees already. Well, I don’t want to go down the trees route, but like trees already pull carbon from the sky. Trees do it every day.

That’s, that’s, uh, what trees are made of. They’re made of water and material like carbon pulled out of the air and some from the soil. So why don’t we just plant more trees? Uh, we would need trillions of trees in order to have the impact needed to remove the amount of carbon that we need to remove. And so what are the other alternatives?

We already know how carbon gets removed from the, from the air. Some of it, uh, is already happening. If you look at trees, they’re naturally removing carbon from the air. Uh, and if you look at submarines and spaceships, they all have systems to, uh, take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere so that the astronauts can breathe.

So if you look at how to scale that up, that’s really what carbon removal is all about. There’s carbon in the sky. You can grab onto it. You can use something with biology. You can use chemistry. You can use rocks to do it, and there’s a whole range of different businesses, and there’s a whole range of different Startups.

Different technologies. Yeah, there’s there’s different technologies. A lot of it comes down to how long the carbon is removed for. Because not only do you have to capture the carbon, you have to, you have to grab it and then you have to make sure that it stays out of the atmosphere. So you can turn it into products, you can store it, and really the technologies to do that are across this range of biology, chemistry, and rocks.

Rodney Payne: What motivated you to work on carbon removal specifically as opposed to other climate solutions? 

Tito Jankowski: I chose to work on carbon removal specifically because the whole challenge of The change in climate comes down to the planet getting warmer and the primary reason the planet is getting warmer is because there’s too much carbon dioxide in the sky.

We’re adding more every day. What we need to be doing is to be decreasing what we add and removing what we’ve already added. And that’s where this all comes down to carbon dioxide. What have been the greatest challenges as you try to solve this problem? The biggest challenge of the climate is making it click at an individual level.

What can I actually do about it? I see this every day in air minors. I think of the, in a way, there’s so many people around the world that want to take action on climate, but the challenge is, it’s kind of like there’s a doorway to Taking action on climate and that doorway is crammed with people who want to take a stand for something They want to be part of the solution part of a discovery of how this world Actually gets sustainable.

They won’t be part of that adventure But the doorway is crammed because it’s actually been pretty small in terms of the ways that you can take action on Changing the climate. So I want to do is to is to grow that doorway To give people places and ways to, to give people things to do. To give people ways to take action on reversing climate change.

What I’m convinced is going to happen is that the next couple generations are going to look back on today and say, Wow, I wish I was around there because they got to be the ones to discover how this sustainable world works. They got to discover how to create a planet that works, an entire civilization and living things.

And I wish I was there for that. 

Rodney Payne: How quickly do we need to grow the carbon removal industry? Does it keep you up at night? 

Tito Jankowski: That part keeps me up at night. The scale at which carbon removal is needed rivals the growth of the solar industry, the computing industry. According to the IPCC climate models, it looks like we need to remove something like 10 billion tons of carbon from the air every year by 2050.

What that means is something like a top 20 industry just for taking carbon dioxide out of the sky. That keeps me up at night. Some nights it’s because like, gosh, I don’t know if we’re going to get there. Other nights it’s like, there’s going to be a trillion dollar industry born overnight the next 30 years.

Yeah, it’s exciting. 

Rodney Payne: It’s exciting. When you think about what that industry looks like, and you think about other comparisons, right? Like if you think about. Refining fossil fuels that happens in a relatively centralized way. Or if you think about solar panels, they’re made in factories, but they’re all over the world.

How do you see carbon removal happening? Is it, is there a silver bullet? Is there like, is this just going to happen in one in the Nevada desert for the whole world? And America’s going to own the industry or is it going to happen everywhere? Is it, is it one technology or many? Like what, how do you picture this?

Tito Jankowski: One of the biggest challenges of carbon rule is there’s so many different ways to do it. And it’s hard to tell what’s going to be best. It’s also the greatest opportunity for carbon removal, uh, because the carbon dioxide is spread throughout the entire atmosphere. You can remove it using biology or chemistry.

You can use machines or soils or forests or oceans. Uh, and so that challenge actually becomes something where we get to see this whole industry worldwide grow up to remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide using all these different methods. Carbon removal benefits everyone.

Rodney Payne: How do you think we can remove politics and polarization from the climate change and carbon removal conversation?

Tito Jankowski: To me, the way that we remove politics and polarization is by building actual solutions. Solutions that people can see, that people can interact with, founders and teams that you can meet with and ask questions. Make the solutions real. Is how we take the, the concerns, the, the worries, the power out of it and put it towards reversing climate change and building a better world.

Rodney Payne: Can you list, quickly, as many different types of carbon removal as you can think of? Give me a laundry list. 

Tito Jankowski: Yeah, well, there’s director capture in kind of big systems. There’s director capture in smaller modular systems where you can take carbon out of your, the air at home. There’s carbon removal in the.

Uh, using the, the, uh, wave action of the ocean to remove carbon. Uh, there’s ocean alkalinity enhancement. There’s, uh, biochar, where you’re taking, uh, plant material and you’re, you’re, what’s called pyrolyzing. You’re kind of burning it in a special way that doesn’t remove, doesn’t release the carbon, but it gets trapped in this bio solid, um, in this charcoal.

There’s, um, uh, Something similar in the ocean, where you can, uh, grow seaweed in the ocean and then, and then sink it, where the seaweed then is, uh, stuck at the bottom of the ocean and not, the carbon dioxide from the seaweed isn’t released. Like, the main, the main categories are, like, you can either take the car you, you grab onto the carbon, you’re either storing it or turning it into products.

And so on the storage side, you can store carbon dioxide in the ocean, you can store it in rocks, you can store it in soils and living things like trees. On the product side, you can turn carbon dioxide into building materials, into plastics, uh, into other useful things. We need to do both, and we need to do a lot of carbon storage.

We need to use whatever we can, but there’s just, there’s so much carbon dioxide in the sky that a ton of it, uh, most of it just needs to be stored. 

Rodney Payne: We both know the difference, but can you explain the difference between carbon removal and carbon capture?

Tito Jankowski: The way I come at it is I talk about, like, decarbonization.

In order to build a stable climate, we need to reduce our emissions, and we also need to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. There’s a lot of different ways to reduce emissions. You can switch to solar, you can use an electric vehicle, anything that, where you’re emitting carbon, and then you lower your emissions.

Carbon capture, So you can imagine carbon capture like putting a thing on the tailpipe of your, of your gas car that captures all the carbon dioxide out of it. Usually it’s on industrial facilities, uh, factories. And things like that, um, but you’re really, you’re, you’re capturing the carbon dioxide that’s coming out of, um, out of a machine.

So that’s really decarbonizing the emissions of that machine and the emissions of that factory. Carbon removal is totally different because what you’re doing is you’re, you’re grabbing the carbon dioxide that’s in the atmosphere and you’re taking it out. So it’s not in the decarbonization bucket, it’s in the removals bucket.

And if you look at the IPCC models, we need to do both. We need to rapidly reduce our emissions and decarbonize, and we also need to remove carbon dioxide that’s already in the atmosphere. Basically, if we could decarbonize everything tomorrow, there’s still so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that we have to take out.

And so even if we could decarbonize tomorrow, we still need to remove carbon dioxide. 

Rodney Payne: Are there any environmental or ecological or societal downsides associated with large scale carbon removal. Any things we need to be worrying about?

Tito Jankowski: First off, adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere is, is really expensive.

It’s like taking a bucket of marbles and throwing it across the room and the marbles go everywhere. Carbon removal is going and then picking up those marbles. The best solution is to stop carbon removal. dumping the marbles everywhere. Now, if your job is to be a person going around picking up marbles, it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of energy.

The marbles are everywhere. Carbon dioxide removal takes energy, land, infrastructure to remove the carbon. And that’s whether you’re doing things on land, in the ocean, uh, in, in soils and forests. Different carbon removal solutions need different things. If you’re working in the ocean, you need access to the ocean.

You need access to monitoring and reporting systems based in the ocean that can measure the carbons removed and how long it stays out. If you’re removing carbon using soils or forests, then you need land with forests and soils on it. Uh, you need to be able to measure and monitor those things too. If you’re using, uh, direct air capture systems, You’re using a lot of energy to run the system, not so much land as, uh, as you might in other solutions.

Yeah, you’re using energy and land and water, um, for all of these solutions. 

Rodney Payne: So, for direct air capture, you need abundant cheap energy. For ocean solutions, you need a lot of ocean. And for natural restoration or mineralization, you need a lot of land that you can use. How are we doing? In terms of carbon removal, where are we at?

How much are we going to remove this year or last year, and where do we need to get to? 

Tito Jankowski: The carbon removal industry is at its infancy. We’ve removed something like 100, 000 tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Every year we put about 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And every year we’ve actually put more and more and more carbon dioxide into the air.

Every year except 2020. There’s on the order of a few hundred companies, a few hundred people working on how to remove carbon from the air. And I think we really need a shift to understand that when we talk about a circular economy, it’s that we are putting billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere.

We know how to do that really effectively. We don’t know how to remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Every nine days we add another billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Last year, All carbon removal companies on earth removed about a hundred thousand tons of carbon from the sky.

So you have, what is that, a thousand fold? Billion to a hundred thousand? Yeah, wow. We got a ten thousand X. We have a ten thousand X just to undo the emissions from the last nine days. Last year, the carbon removal industry removed one minute of our annual emissions. 

Rodney Payne: What do you need to help the companies that you’re working with To scale up fast enough to have a hope of fixing this problem.

Tito Jankowski: I need a hundred million dollar fund buying carbon renewable credits from early stage startup companies. No, no, what we can call that. Uh, I need a million dollars for a thousand companies. So a billion dollar fund for carbon renewable innovation. 

Rodney Payne: And can you give me some of the stats on your traction with air miners?

How many people in the community, how many startups are you helping? How, you know, have you got any financial numbers you can share in terms of how you’ve helped them? 

Tito Jankowski: Yeah. Through the air runners accelerator, we’ve graduated 95 startup companies across the whole range of carbon renewable solutions in terms of trees and soils, oceans, director capture, mineralization, those, those 95 companies.

Have raised 93 million of venture capital and grants in the two years since we started this program. 

Rodney Payne: And how many air miners are there? How many scientists and engineers and entrepreneurs do you have in your slack channel? 

Tito Jankowski: We have an incredible community of 2, 200 scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers, policy makers, everybody who wants to be part of reversing climate change.

Rodney Payne: So, you know, when I met you, it was spreadsheet and slack channel. 

Tito Jankowski: Yeah. And now look where we are. Yeah, totally. When we first started working together, you got me thinking about what is the biggest impact AirMiners could have on reversing climate change. And so our first step was looking at, well, what are the impacts that are already happening in this community through the events and conferences that we’re doing?

And what we saw over and over and over again were startup founders, people with an idea, people with a dream connecting to what they needed. to start turning that idea into reality. We were working on building our accelerator program, and then we got a call from the XPRIZE. And they had just announced their new 100 million carbon removal XPRIZE.

And they said, you were our first call, because if we could just get all the air miners together in one room, we’d have this whole prize taken care of. So coming out of that, we partnered with XPRIZE and Creative Destruction Lab to launch. Our carbon removal sort of accelerator. 

Rodney Payne: Who’s doing a really good job in this space?

Like who, who are the companies and brands that have helped to, to get this going? 

Tito Jankowski: I mean, when I look at like the forefront of the industry, a lot of what people hear about in carbon removal or direct their capture companies, companies like Climeworks and carbon engineering, and they’re, they’re really leading the way in terms of getting people to think about taking carbon dioxide gas out of the atmosphere, storing it durably.

They’ve been really big leaders. 

Rodney Payne: Who are the main corporate brands that you think of that are like, care about this space and are putting their money in?

Tito Jankowski: The corporations leading in carbon removal are companies like Stripe, Shopify, Microsoft. Stripe and Shopify created a new coalition called, called Frontier.

That’s joined by Meta, Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey, uh, towards removing carbon dioxide from the sky. And the way that they do that is they, uh, are, are purchasing carbon removal credits from early stage startup companies. Is there anyone in the travel sector that’s doing that? There’s no one in the travel sector doing anything about carbon removal, except Rodney.

Rodney Payne: So can you tell me about some of the individuals and companies that you’ve worked with to get air miners off the ground and who are involved in the community? Who’s funded you? Yeah. Uh, what are some of the big names playing the game? 

Tito Jankowski: Our Accelerator was built in partnership with XPRIZE and Creative Destruction Lab.

We’ve been financially supported by the Grantham Foundation and the Anthropocene Institute. Our teams have gone on to sell millions of dollars of credits to Stripe, Shopify. The most recent Frontier purchase, five of twelve of those companies were AirMiners graduates. Of the most recent, uh, Klarna Milkywire purchase, five of eight of those companies, five of eight of those winners were AirMiners graduates.

Rodney Payne: That’s really epic. I didn’t know that. 

Tito Jankowski: Yeah. Yeah. The, the frontier stuff just came out last, last week. It was like 46%. 

Rodney Payne: What’s it? You got to tell me this stuff.

Tito Jankowski: Yeah. 

Rodney Payne: That’s epic. 

Tito Jankowski: It’s, it’s insane. That was like, it is insane. I want to figure out how to do more with that. That one’s like. That’s Frontier.

That’s like, that’s the biggest name in carbon purchases. And I did, it was 46 percent of their purchases went to Launchpad teams. Like that’s like, like we’re, yeah, right? Like that’s, yeah. And it’s, and it’s not because we’re calling up Frontier and saying, Hey, take this team, take this team. It’s because we, it’s because we helped build good teams.

Rodney Payne: If you could stand up at a pulpit in front of the 8 billion people in the world, what do you wish they would know about carbon removal? 

Tito Jankowski: What I wish people knew is that we’ve had 95 startup companies through Accelerator in two years. The most recent batch of teams we have, we have 28 startup teams working on removing carbon dioxide from soils, forests, oceans, minerals, direct air capture, the whole range of carbon removal solutions.

I wish the whole world knew that. Sometimes carbon rule gets treated as this impossible, imaginary option. And if I could meet with every person on the planet, I would tell them adding carbon dioxide heats up the planet. We don’t have ways to remove carbon from the air. How do you think that’s supposed to work?

We need to build that. And I, uh, Convinced we can why do you think we can yeah since I started working on carbon removal six years ago What I’ve seen is a whole wave a whole generation of entrepreneurs turn their focus to Removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere These are early leaders like Climeworks and carbon engineering and new entrepreneurs who are showing up at Airminer and saying I want to be part of this solution It includes policymakers starting to fund research and development for more carbon neutral solutions.

It includes some of the world’s most successful companies signing up to buy carbon removal credits. All of this is happening in just the last couple of years. And to me, that’s what, when I think about what’s possible. 

Rodney Payne: What’s holding them back? Like, what are they just going to, are they going to fix the problem?

What’s what’s wrong with that? 

Tito Jankowski: There’s a critical funding gap for early stage startup companies. These are people that are going out, they’re starting their company. They’re looking for their first million dollars of funding to explore a new solution to carbon removal, to take something that’s already been tried and figure out how to make it work better.

And that’s where there’s a gap for early stage. Founders working on new solutions. This is the generation that gets to discover how to build a stable climate. We’ve never done that as a species. The best we’ve done so far is to destabilize our climate. This generation gets to figure out and discover how to do that.

That’s where it’s at. The thing is, if you believe the climate is gonna fail, or you believe that we’re gonna solve climate change, fundamentally those are the same thing. You have some belief about the future. That isn’t actually real yet. What we get to switch to is discovery mode. Where we get to discover how to make that happen together.

David Archer: This has been Travel Beyond presented by Destination Think. And you just heard from Rodney Payne from Destination Think and Tito Jankowski from AirMiners. We’ll include links to more resources on the blog for this episode at DestinationThink. com. My co producer is Sarah Raymond de Booy. This episode has been produced and has theme music composed by me, David Archer, Lindsay Payne, and Corey Price, provided production support.

You can help more people find this show by subscribing to future episodes, and by leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you happen to be listening. We’ll talk to you next time.

Part Two

Tito Jankowski: The carbon removal industry removed about 100, 000 tons of carbon last year. To hit the climate goals, we need to multiply that by 10, 000 times. The only way that we’re going to get there are having leading industries, like the travel industry, investing in carbon removal. Investing in the innovation and research needed to make those 10, 000 fold improvements.

David Archer: Hello and welcome to Travel Beyond, where we partner with leading destinations to explore the greatest challenges facing communities and the planet, surfacing their most inspiring solutions. I’m David Archer from Destination Think, and recording, as always, from Haida Gwaii, the territory of the Haida Nation off the north coast of British Columbia in Canada.

On this show, we look at the role of travel and choose to highlight destinations that are global leaders. We talk to the changemakers who are addressing regenerative travel through action in their communities and often from the bottom up. Last episode was part one with Tito Jankowski, the CEO and co-founder of Airminers.

And in that episode, Tito explained what carbon removal is. That’s why it’s important and how his organization is helping to accelerate startup companies that are making carbon removal happen in many different ways. This episode turns toward Travel’s role in carbon removal. But before we get there, I wanted to share this clip of Tito describing the way he’s inspired by seeing carbon removal actually in operation, something that I haven’t yet seen personally, at least in this way, and I suspect many of you haven’t yet either.

Here’s what he says. 

Tito Jankowski: I think like one of the benefits of carbon removal is it’s, it’s really, it’s really visual. If you’re talking about forests and soils and oceans and rocks, you can go and you can see these things. I was uh, hiking in south San Francisco the other day and I drove past uh, Heirloom, which is one of the big direct air capture companies.

I was really excited. I was like, look, that’s where they’re making direct air capture machines. Um, and I think for, for people that are invested in a stable climate, being able to, to see. These places where climate action is happening is incredibly inspiring. Whether it’s going to a city that has a really good bike infrastructure or visiting Hinwil, Switzerland.

I got to go there and see the, the Climeworks pilot facility. It was the first direct air capture system that built at that scale in the world. Uh, and there’s something really powerful about being able to, you know, hear about in, in, in contrast to hearing about climate change on the news and hearing about.

Uh, all the, all the changes that are happening worldwide and be able to go to a place and say, wow, here’s some people that are actually doing something about it. Here’s where the carbon is getting taken out of the sky. There’s something really empowering about that. Being able to go to a place, uh, and, and experience that.

David Archer: So that’s some of the inspiration Tito draws from seeing the industry in action. And to create more moments like that and accelerate carbon removal projects will require investment, which, as we noted last time, leads to the question of who’s doing something about it. Who’s doing something about carbon removal in the travel industry?

Are airlines, for example, aware of the potential opportunities they might have to invest early? And when you’re booking a flight and you click on the offset button, what actually happens? How can airline customers reduce and remove greenhouse gases by the most trustworthy methods? And that’s where we pick up the conversation today in part two, as Rodney Payne from Destination Think speaks with Tito Jankowski of Airminers.

Rodney Payne: So you, you’ve dedicated your career. To helping unleash lots of people to work on carbon removal. How do you feel about carbon offsets? 

Tito Jankowski: To get to a stable climate where civilization can thrive, we need to rapidly reduce carbon emissions and remove carbon that’s already there. We need a working system to reduce emissions.

So in some way you need to be able to pay people, to pay corporations to reduce their emissions Today, that’s called carbon offsets, and it’s not working. But we do need a system that does work. We also need to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. And that’s in its early stages of development, and I’m confident we can build a working carbon removal system.

Rodney Payne: You flew to Vancouver today from San Francisco. Yeah. How’d you feel getting on that plane? 

Tito Jankowski: How did I feel getting on that plane? Tired, just like everybody else. Um, but I also thought about my contribution to this documentary. The carbon impact of it is pretty high. I went to a conference in Basel, in Basel, Switzerland, and they emailed me afterwards.

They did all the calculations for all the, all the speakers, all the attendees. My attendance at that conference was almost 30 percent of the carbon footprint. Was it 30%? It might be 10 percent I’m blanking on that. 

Rodney Payne: Because you flew so far. 

Tito Jankowski:Because I flew so far. Yeah. 

Rodney Payne: Have you changed your own travel behavior since you’ve become more and more immersed in the climate problem?

Tito Jankowski: Whenever I travel I buy carbon removal credits to compensate for the carbon dioxide that I’ve, that I’ve emitted into the atmosphere as part of my travel. Uh, what that’s opened up for me is seeing this stuff, not as like the guy running a startup accelerator, helping carbon companies, but as a person that’s actually trying to just buy some carbon removal credits, um, and seeing what’s out there, seeing, seeing the pull to get the cheapest thing.

I always try and use those experiences to talk about it with other air miners and say, here’s, here’s what this is like to be on, to, to be on the other side of not removing the carbon, but, but paying for it to get, to get removed. Do you think we should stop flying? That’d be just great. Um, like I, during, during COVID, we all got to connect virtually.

We got to know each other the last three years. Rodney, we’ve never even met. Today is the, today’s the first day we’re meeting in person. And while that adds a certain dimension to our, to our meeting, I’m still discovering what’s possible in person. What’s possible by physically traveling. That’s not in a virtual meeting.

I think we should figure out better ways to travel either to lower the emissions of travel Raise the value of travel or figure out how to remove all the carbon from travel Which is probably the most expensive of those other options. 

Rodney Payne: I know you stopped traveling for a while Yeah, like seriously were questioning flying.

Tito Jankowski: Yeah, why I to me it goes back to that like it comes back to it comes back to What’s actually the value of travel Like, do we need to meet to, to change the world? 

Rodney Payne: And now? Do you have some kind of subconscious program running in the back that’s filtering travel decisions? Like, are you, are you traveling personally or are you traveling for work or purpose or?

Tito Jankowski: Yeah. These, um, these days I’m traveling for purpose. Traveling for work. Traveling to go meet other ear miners and to take action. In those, in those meetings, the bar I’ve set for my travel is, is much higher. I think meeting people, you know, I can, I can do a lot of that online, just kind of talking with people, but in terms of getting somewhere, making a decision, talking about things that we couldn’t otherwise talk about, having experiences we couldn’t otherwise have, that’s when I think about traveling, that’s really where the bar is, is the person I’m going to meet somebody otherwise wouldn’t be able to have that conversation with.

Rodney Payne: Okay, let’s talk about offsets. Yeah. You mentioned that when you flew here, you bought carbon removal credits. Did you buy them through the airline? 

Tito Jankowski: I haven’t bought them yet. Uh,  so for, so for this trip, for my last trip, I bought them through the airline. They had a, a button to offset your credits. And what I like to do with these purchases is to do if, if there’s something that they suggest, sure, I’ll buy that and try it out.

And you know, you look at these things and it’s like, It doesn’t. Years ago, I was in San Francisco airport and there was something about, there was some kiosk I was going, I was going through and this kiosk had something about like, buy a bunch of trees. We’re going to plant a bunch of trees to offsets your offset, your credits, something about that.

And it was just, I did it because it was just kind of entertaining. And I don’t, in my mind, there wasn’t any connection between flying and carbon emissions. This was before I got into climate, right? It was kind of like some sense of like, Oh yeah, you know, you emit carbon when you fly. Okay. Something about trees.

I don’t know, I guess I’m trying to get this answer right, but like, these days I look forward to traveling because I get to remove my carbon. I get to go out and see, is the airline going to offer me something? Am I going to get to dig through this stuff myself? I’m going to ask my friends, what are they doing to remove carbon?

What are their answers? It’s the opportunity to start a whole conversation. And continue a whole conversation every time I travel. 

Rodney Payne: The things you’re seeing the airlines do, the things they’re offering upon a sale, is are they the most effective things we could be doing? 

Tito Jankowski: The things I see when I buy a ticket are basically non existent.

Even the options that are there are, um, you know, they’re just, they’re kind of sweeping things under the rug. It’s like, oh yeah, we’re gonna, we’re gonna offset your carbon footprint. And it’s just like, that’s the idea, like that’s good enough. And it’s like, I mean, certainly I’m like really, really deep into this stuff, but just even again, as I approach it as a, as a person and I click on the checkout thing, stuff is, it’s, it’s, it’s.

It doesn’t speak to me. It’s, it’s boring. It just feels like a waste of money. 

Rodney Payne: Okay, so if you, you’re really deep into carbon removal, right? Like, you think about this stuff in your sleep, and you have to do a bit of digging when you’re off of things to alleviate your travel footprint. For the, the one in six or one in seven travelers who are actually bothering to click on the offset your emissions button, What are they really getting when they purchase an offset for 8 or whatever they’re paying? Like what, what is that? 

Tito Jankowski: Ostensibly what they’re getting are carbon offsets. That’s what it says on the button, is you’re gonna get carbon offsets to offset your footprint. My understanding of this stuff, again, is we do need to pay to reduce carbon emissions, but if I look at a lot of these projects, it’s just so tricky to, to keep track of this stuff.

If, if some, if a business converts to using solar power. That’s a carbon offset. If you don’t cut down some trees, that’s a carbon offset. I think that a lot of the tracking and science for this stuff is really tricky. Like I said, we, we, we need to make a working offsets market, but what exists today, isn’t it?

So that when you click that button, you’re not actually helping with carbon removal. Right. Yeah, yeah. Every time I click one of these buttons, I’m looking for, are they talking about carbon removal, or are they talking about carbon offsets? Every single one I’ve, I’ve seen so far has been just offsets, which is we’re going to take a couple bucks.

We’re going to throw it into some project that doesn’t have an impact on carbon removal, doesn’t really have an impact on innovation, on discovering new ways to do things. Yeah, it just kind of keeps us doing what we’re already doing.

Rodney Payne: So, you’re telling me that all this time I was spending 8 a ton to alleviate my guilt when I fly isn’t cutting mustard?

Tito Jankowski: I mean, you tell me, like, is that, is that doing it for you? Like, if you ask somebody who actually buys removals, is it, is it alleviating their guilt? I’d ask them. Um, but yeah, on the flip side, I mean, we’re emitting more carbon dioxide than ever. What we need are new solutions to rapidly decarbonize and Remove carbon dioxide from the sky.

So if you see a offset that says, hey, we’re using this money to switch to We’re investing in electrification of our planes or electrification of our cars and trucks, you know That’s an investment into decarbonizing But a lot of the stuff that I’ve seen is just kind of it’s it’s not sure where the money is going 

Rodney Payne: So like what’s currently happening now in the airline industry, right when you’ve got flying that is You Arguably, like, one of the worst things you can do as an individual in your year.

The things that we’re offering, and what that gets you for the price, compared to what it actually costs to remove a ton of carbon. Yeah, really. Do you think that’s just really greenwashing? 

Tito Jankowski: Knowing what I know about carbon removal, taking carbon dioxide out of the sky is expensive. Like I said, it’s like taking a bucket of marbles, dumping the marbles everywhere, and then you have to go pick them up.

Carbon removal costs anywhere from 100 a ton to 1, 000 a ton today. So when I’m out there traveling and flying, and I’m given the offer to offset my carbon footprint for 5 or 10, and I see the impact that’s needed in carbon removal, I just wonder if that money could be going towards carbon removal instead.

Because I don’t know what impact it’s having. in offsets. What I’ve heard is a lot of it is bad accounting, bad practices. It’s not actually helping reduce the amount of carbon in the air. Yeah, I was talking to a big airline company and they said, um, they wanted to participate, but they didn’t want to buy carbon removal tonnage because they didn’t want to get involved in this whole discussion around tons, around offset tons or removal tons.

What did they want to buy? They wanted to like fund innovation. They should give money to air miners. Yeah, so I’m talking with them about that. Just directly. As a gift. Yeah, yeah, if we can get there, that’d be cool. It’s a discussion, I mean. I get it, the airline is hesitant because they’re on the front page of the news sometimes around the carbon offsets that they purchased and where that money actually went or didn’t go.

And so there is this trauma or this, this experience they’ve been through where it’s like they’re not eager to. get into carbon removal and start talking about, you know, how the climate impact moving, moving people and things around is really energy intensive. And what flying does is it makes it easy to move things and people and things around really long distances, but it doesn’t mean that it’s energy efficient.

Uh, the challenge with, with flying especially is that there aren’t any good alternatives in sight. If you’re in a car, if you’re in a truck, if you’re on a boat, There’s options coming up around electrification, around using solar and wind, but for long haul travel, there’s nothing really in sight. 

Rodney Payne: We’ve currently got a world that depends on aviation.

Tito Jankowski: Yeah. Not even just travel and the travel economy and the systemic risk there, but like healthcare for people in northern communities here in Canada or like Pacific Islands. Food, medicine, like there’s a bunch of stuff that goes on planes. And we couldn’t do that if it wasn’t underpinned by the leisure travel sector.

Rodney Payne: Uh huh. Right?  So what do we do? Do we shut off flying? What’s our, what are our other options? 

Tito Jankowski: Given the huge impact of travel, they really need to face the options. Yeah, I think that, I think the travel industry has a huge opportunity to play a leadership role in building a stable climate.

The reason is because there’s, there’s not really some easy way out of this. For flying, you either can not fly, you can fly less, or you can remove carbon, which is really, really expensive. And so. The travel industry has the option to pick which, which way they want to take us. Do they want to encourage us not to fly?

Do they want to encourage us to fly less? Do they want to encourage us to fly more and have bigger impact with the trips that we take? Do they want the world to remove carbon from the sky?

Rodney Payne:  Do you see anyone stepping into this space? 

Tito Jankowski: I’ve heard from airline companies. I haven’t heard from any travel companies.

What are the airline companies looking for? The airline companies are looking for a way out. Again, moving people and objects long distances is energy intensive and there’s not, there’s not a low energy, there’s not a low carbon footprint option in sight and what I see is they’re trying to figure out how does carbon removal work?

What role is carbon removal going to play in our future? But they’re, yeah, they’re trying to figure it out. But I also don’t know, like, if I do just talk like a normal person, like, I mean, in these conversations, like I can’t tell if they’re, if they’re, if they’re trying to adopt the existing offtake programs that they’ve got to just like check some box or they actually invested in having this impact.

So it means in every conversation I’m, I’m asking about that. I’m asking like, well, do you have a plan for this? Are you taking action on this? Some of them have plans, but they’re stuck not taking action on it. Um, some of them don’t even have plans. And so that’s what I’m always asking for as, as in my role as, as an air miner is.

Are you participating in creating this stable climate or are you trying to check some box somewhere?

Rodney Payne: The way I think about it is like it’s not just reducing we have to eliminate it. We have to get to zero yeah, we get it to 50 percent in like five years and then we’re getting to 100 percent by 2050, which means we’ve got to go negative 

Tito Jankowski: Yeah, that’s massive, right? It’s not it’s not like offsetting and and reducing.

Rodney Payne: Yeah, it’s like it’s eliminating and like, then cleaning out the mess. 

Tito Jankowski: When I get out of bed in the morning, I’m looking at creating a stable climate so we can have a thriving civilization. And in that world, reducing our emissions just doesn’t, it’s not really in that. What we need to do is to eliminate our emissions, to remove the carbon that’s, that we’ve already added to the atmosphere.

That’s how we stabilize the climate. It’s not by going more slowly over the cliff. It’s, we did. Hit the brakes, and get to a stable climate. 

Rodney Payne: So we don’t have a ton of time, right? You said it yourself. Yeah. At the moment, I think, airlines are on a trajectory to be 27 percent of humanity’s emissions in 2050.

Tito Jankowski: Yeah, that’s a lot. 

Rodney Payne: We know how long it takes to put new technology into the air, right? Yeah. Because there’s safety checks and balances. What happens to aviation? 

Tito Jankowski: If aviation doesn’t do something  radical, my sense is, I don’t know what happens. It seems like culturally, societally, you just get pushed out of the way.

I mean, you, you, everybody switches to, to driving. Um, what happens to flying is it gets incredibly expensive. You start to see carbon taxes come online and that just adds to the cost of every trip. It gets expensive. Personally, because I’m spending the money. And it gets expensive from a client perspective because you’re adding so much carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every trip that you take.

Rodney Payne: Do you think carbon removal is the only option for airlines? And travel? Like, you know, for a system and a globe that’s become dependent on international aviation? 

Tito Jankowski: Yeah, that’s an easy one. I think carbon removal is the only option for aviation industry. Um, I mean if I think about like sustainable aviation fuels, like where do those fit in?

I don’t know. Like, is it possible for an airline to completely switch to net zero fuels? Maybe, I mean, maybe that’s, maybe that’s the plan for the aviation industry, right? Like if, if all they’re doing, if they’re just completely using net zero fuels, isn’t that good enough? Part of me wants to say yes.

Cause I, cause I want to get to this decarbonized and net negative world. Um, I don’t know how quickly they’re going to be able to do that. We’re missing a huge moment in terms of, in terms of innovation, in terms of research, development. Piloting demonstration facilities. Uh, I have a major concern that existing offtakes, I don’t know if that’s actually contributing to moving the bar forward on innovation towards a stable climate and a thriving human civilization.

I know that the money is getting spent and the money is going somewhere, but is it actually advancing our ability to do this thing that we’ve never done? Is it actually advancing our ability to decarbonize? [00:21:00] And to remove carbon and to grow at the pace that’s needed. That’s where I have major concerns about, about offtakes.

Offtakes in a way they continue, they let us keep doing what we’re doing, but what we’re doing isn’t working. So like, that doesn’t make any fucking sense. Yeah. Like, like doing more of what we’re doing doesn’t work. The way offtakes are currently set up, that’s what they’re enabling. They’re enabling people to do more of what isn’t working.

What removal stands for. Is reversing climate change is removing carbon dioxide from the sky in parallel to building sustainable solutions, solar wind as our energy sources. 

Rodney Payne: Yeah. So what happens to really carbon intense industries that can’t decarbonize in a meaningful timeframe? 

Tito Jankowski: My sense is industries that can’t decarbonize are just going to get competed away.

Primarily if you look at, uh, a carbon tax getting added, I mean, that’s, that’s just, that goes right to their costs. If you start adding a carbon tax to fuel, to fossil fuel emissions, that just drives things that are cheap today, like hopping on a plane from San Francisco to Los Angeles. It makes it, uh, Way more expensive, which means I don’t want to do it anymore.

Um, and I think like hard to decarbonize industries really need to face up to that and, and figure out what’s next. That’s what this comes down to. It’s not just facing up to it and then pulling the, you know, pulling the covers over your head. It’s figuring, okay, well, how are we actually going to address this?

How is this potentially a huge opportunity for our industry, for industry to reinvent how things work, for industry to lead this way into. Uh, into a sustainable future. If you look at the travel industry, I mean, there’s sustainable aviation fuels, there’s offsets, neither of which I think is necessarily super scalable.

Ultimately, if you’re emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, you’re going to be an industry that’s riding on top of, driven by carbon emissions. If you have a different view of where the industry goes, that’s fine. But if there’s any vision where you’re continuing to emit carbon, it means that carbon removal needs to be at the core of that industry.

And that means that being a leader in carbon removal today is part of the future of that business. Otherwise, I just don’t think it works. There’s not a pull the covers over your head version of the future where, where heavy industries that emit lots of carbon exist. You’re just not going to be able to get away with that.

Um, in a world where you couldn’t get away for free with emitting carbon dioxide in the air, what happens to your industry? What happens to, to travel? What happens to other heavy industries that emit carbon dioxide? Something happens to them, they either don’t exist, they get used less, or they figure out a way to reverse the impact that they’re having and remove carbon.

Rodney Payne: What if travel was leading carbon removal? 

Tito Jankowski: Yeah. When I think about the alternatives today for travel, like remote meetings, virtual reality, Zoom calls, at best, all those solutions are carbon neutral. So they’re really just decarbonizing these experiences that I’m having. The opportunity that the travel industry has Is to lead the way on not just decarbonizing but even removing carbon dioxide by being a leader in carbon removal Do you see a world where travel can save its future by doing that?

I think that’s the only I mean how else are they going to do it like the you know Offsets and and sustain if if if offsets and sustainable aviation fuels are going to work for you long term that you can exist And and prosper in a world. That charges for carbon then by all means do that. I don’t believe that’s going to happen I think you have to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to make travel make sense whether it’s Just for the fuels or it’s all the other environmental impacts of travel Ultimately, you’re going to have to remove carbon from the sky.

And that means today you have an opportunity to be a leader in this emerging industry of carbon removal.

Rodney Payne: What are the companies need that they don’t have right now? 

Tito Jankowski: Uh, the companies need funding to hire their team, to build out their, their plants. They need help on, uh, on land equipment, people to hire. They need, um, policies. that help them do the research and development they need to do the scale up and demonstration facilities they need, whether they’re working in forestry and soils, whether they’re working in direct air capture, enhanced rock weathering or oceans, all of them need support across energy, land, policy, and so on. And funding to develop what they’re, what they’re building. 

Rodney Payne: Why can’t they just go get it from venture capital? 

Tito Jankowski: Um, there’s a critical funding gap in carbon removal that venture capital is not able to solve. The challenge with carbon removal is it’s unclear how quickly the carbon removal industry is going to grow.

We know how quickly it needs to grow to hit climate targets. But a lot of that comes down to, are the policies in place to purchase carbon rule credits. are the innovations in place to actually deliver on that. The reason venture capital gets stuck on the sidelines is because it’s unclear how quickly this industry is going to grow, how profitable it’s going to be.

So what that means is there’s a funding gap at the very early stages of carbon removal to create new innovations, new solutions, and to scale those solutions to remove carbon from the air. 

Rodney Payne: Knowing that funding gap, And knowing the caliber of people working on really exciting solutions. How does it make you feel knowing that 40 billion gets spent on offsets a year?

Tito Jankowski: 40 billion. You kidding? That’s God. It just feels like a, it feels like a waste, right? If I look at the 95 companies that have gone through the Emirates accelerator, I said 93 million of venture capital and grants has been raised. by those companies, but that’s gone to a handful of the companies some of the best companies in our program don’t get funded.

They don’t connect with venture capital They don’t connect with grants and they go along either go out of business or they go along very very slowly And the money that we’re spending on offsets again The money that we’re spending on offsets doesn’t raise the bar On what we can do. It doesn’t raise the bar on our ability to remove carbon from the air You It’s still, to me it comes down to, if I’m the CEO of an airline company or a travel company, do I believe that carbon removal is necessary?

That is the key piece. If they believe it is, then hot damn, this is an opportunity to invest, to participate, to lead. If they don’t think carbon removal is necessary, if they think it’s just another sustainable aviation fuels thing, then whatever, it’s just another sustainable aviation fuels thing, or another offset.

It’s all waste in that sense. Yeah, I’ll just waste some money on this stuff to check a box. But if you get to the point where carbon rule is core part of the future of the business, that’s where all this stuff starts to make sense. Um, and that’s where whatever the heck, whatever the heck Airminers is doing starts to make sense.

That’s, that’s how we built, all we do at Airminers is build things that are obviously missing. to create a trillion dollar carbon removal economy. The carbon removal industry removed about a hundred thousand tons of carbon last year. To hit the climate goals, we need to multiply that by ten thousand times.

The only way that we’re going to get there are having leading industries, like the travel industry, investing in carbon removal. Investing in the innovation and research needed for that. To make those 10, 000 fold improvements. 

Rodney Payne: You and I have been on quite the journey together the last few years. Like it’s quite cool to hear you talk about it from fledgling group of people through to bootcamp and building launchpad and getting a bunch of teams helped.

Picture 12 months from now, what does wild success look like for our collaboration? 

Tito Jankowski: Wild Success looks like the travel industry leading on carbon removal and investing in early stage companies that are coming through the Airwiners program. 

Rodney Payne: What does it look like in 12 months if we can encourage the travelers and the travel industry to supercharge the companies that you’re trying to help.

What does that do for the world? 

Tito Jankowski: I think it completely changes the world. Like I, I think it completely changes the travel experience. It goes from this one where there’s this background conversation about guilt and about carbon impact to I’m part of this. I’m part of this. I’m working on supporting companies that are removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

And more than removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, they’re discovering how we get to build a stable climate. How we get to unlock a thriving human civilization. That’s what’s possible. 

Rodney Payne: What do you hope the world looks like in 10 years? 

Tito Jankowski: One billion tons removed by 2032. More than a billion tons of carbon removed by 2032.

Rodney Payne: Are you optimistic for the future? Or scared?

Tito Jankowski: Probably more on the optimistic side. 

Rodney Payne: Um, What gives you hope? Airminers teams coming in with new ideas that I’ve never heard of before. Um, and that they want to make it happen. 

Rodney Payne: What brings you the most joy? 

Tito Jankowski: Working with a person working on a carbon removal solution.

Um, actually, Meeting somebody who’s been in air minors or got something out of air minors and that they tell me like, Hey, this is, this is what this did on my journey. And I’ve never even heard of them before. And I don’t even know the milestones that they’re necessarily talking about. They’re saying, I went to the boot up and that got me thinking about director capture.

I just met somebody who said, like, I met somebody at a conference who said, I went to boot up. I learned all about carbon removal in six weeks online. And then I learned all about director capture. And now I started a director capture company. That stuff brings me incredible joy. It’s at that ecosystem level.

It’s at that community level. I didn’t go to that person and say, Hey, here’s what carbon rule is. Hey, you should start a direct air capture company. [00:32:00] It was creating this, this ecosystem, this community that enables and empowers people to take action on, on building a stable climate. 

Rodney Payne: If you could speak directly to the head of Expedia or the head of United Airlines, what do you want them to know? What do you want them to do? 

Tito Jankowski: They need to get clear on the role that carbon removal plays in their industry. They need to get absolutely clear on it. And then they need to, well, what do I want them to do? I mean, it doesn’t need to be hard. Like, I want them to invest in carbon renewable startups. And I want them to invest directly in the innovation gap, which is early stage companies, first million dollars of funding.

David Archer: This has been Travel Beyond presented by Destination. Think, and you just heard from Rodney Payne from Destination Think and Tito Jankowski from Air Miners. We’ll include links to more resources on the blog for this episode at destinationthink.com. My co-producer is Sarah Raymond de Booy. This episode has been produced and has theme music composed by me, David Archer, Lindsay Payne, and Cory Price provided production support.

You can help more people find this show by subscribing to feature episodes and by leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. Spotify, or wherever you happen to be listening. We’ll talk to you next time.