To my wealthy friends,

I’m asking for your help because I need you to push me.

Today I’ve been posting on Facebook about how:

“climate change is slowly kicking our asses and I struggle to motivate myself to take action. Instead I’m thinking to myself, “I’m a good person, I will help… some day…””

Since the post was for social media, it was extremely simplified so I would like to elaborate in this post.

What are the most efficient things we can do?

We have all heard about the things we can do to help the environment, “stop flying”, “don’t eat meat” etc. and sure, these are good things – but to be honest, most people will not stop flying or eating meat anytime soon, and even if they did, it wouldn’t be enough.

What are the big things we can do that have an impact? Here are some of the top technologies that I’ve found when doing research and talking to experts.

Replacing diesel engines with zero emission ammonia engines

The marine shipping industry goes on diesel and emits about 2,5% of all the CO2 into the atmosphere, every year. A big challenge here is that it happens on open waters, no country needs to account for these numbers. To me the fact that no country is held responsible means that this is the entrepreneurs problem to solve.

The shipping industry can’t use batteries because of the vast distances and amount of fuel needed – but there is a good alternative. Ammonia. Ammonia contains no carbon atoms, which make it burn with zero CO2 emissions. Ammonia engines exist already and society knows how to produce ammonia at a grand scale. We don’t even have to replace the existing engines in the ships, we just need to make adjustments to them.

The challenge is to commercialise the existing technology, make it accessible in harbours around the word and build a market demand. This is best done by getting large cargo owners like Amazon and Nike to request the shipping companies to become environmentally friendly.

Donations toward this cause goes towards getting policy makers and authorities to drive the question of ammonia engines forward to make it available and requested on a very large scale – hopefully to replace all current Diesel engines.

Creating tax benefits for coal and gas plants

The existing coal and other fossil fuel-fired power plants emit billions of tons of CO2 each year and account for about 26 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. 

There is a technology called “carbon capture” that can be used in coal plants. It filters the emission made by the coal plants and reduces the CO2 let into the atmosphere by 80% or more. The CO2 is then stored in the ground.

This technology is currently expensive which makes it hard to encourage coal plants to install it even though it’s highly effective. The organisation Clean Air Task Force have spearheaded a campaign to create tax credits for coal plants that install carbon capture technology. For every tonne of CO2 that the coal plants capture and store away instead of letting it out in the atmosphere, the coal plant gets a tax cut.

The tax cuts create a financial incentive for the coal plants to install this technology – and when more coal plants install it, the demand for research of the technology increases. The technology gets better and better and the prices goes down.

Donations towards this cause goes to getting more countries to apply carbon capture tax credit systems to impact coal plants on a very large scale.

Increased focus on new nuclear technology

Nuclear power is far, far safer than fossil fuels, contrary to public belief.  It is true that people have died due to nuclear accidents, but the pollutants from fossil fuels are far worse. Nuclear results in more than 442 times fewer deaths than the ‘dirtiest’ forms of coal; 330 times fewer than coal; 250 times less than oil; and 38 times fewer than gas.

Nuclear is also by far our most powerful source of energy and it’s completely free from CO2 emissions. Unfortunately nuclear technology has gotten a bad name due to accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima as well as for the use in atomic bombs. This has lead to many nuclear plants have been turned off and few new nuclear plants have been built.

What isn’t talked much about is that the plants that have been in accidents have had very old technology and the technology of today is far safer and far more advanced. It can even be run using old uranium leftovers from previous nuclear plants, meaning that it would reduce nuclear waste rather than increasing it.

The new nuclear plants can also be built much smaller, at a much lower start cost. The increased use of nuclear would also be a great compliment to the ammonia production mentioned above, with cheaper electricity, we would be able to create cheaper ammonia – that would drive market demands.

A big challenge of nuclear power is the political climate and the general view of it by society. I can highly recommend the Netflix documentary by Bill Gates where he explains their research on the topic.

Donations towards this cause goes both to research around nuclear technology as well as towards impacting the political climate to increase nuclear usage on a large scale.

There is one simple way to support all of these different approaches. It’s the Climate Fund by Founders Pledge. They have experts evaluating the most promising projects out there and they funnel your donation towards the ones that will have the biggest impact.

Please, force me to take action!

I know how to solve the problem. Still I don’t take action and donate.

Right now, I’m doing NOTHING. You can force me to give ONE MILLION EUROS.

HERE’S MY CHALLENGE TO YOU – PUSH ME!

This is a promise.

I will double all donations being made to the Climate Fund between today and 31st December 2020. Up to €1 000 000.

If you take action and donate €100 000, I have to double it and donate €100 000 as well.

If you take action and donate €10 000. I have to do the same.

We are all entrepreneurs, we take action, we solve problems, we take responsibility. Sometimes we compete in business, but in this one we are all together.

“The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it.”
– Robert Swan

 

We owe everything to our planet. If you want to pay her back – Take action and responsibility for saving her.

Please email myself on [email protected] or Founders Pledge at [email protected] and we will help you with your donation. 

If you think that someone else will save our planet, feel free to ignore this post.

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If you are from the press and want to discuss the campaign. Feel free to email me or call me on +35677755519.