Ryan Orbuch
Partner, Lowercarbon Capital. On 1 show, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorfounderoperator@orbuch ↗LinkedIn ↗orbuch.com ↗
Ryan Orbuch is a Partner at Lowercarbon Capital, where he leads investments in early-stage carbon dioxide removal and climate technology startups. He previously initiated and led Stripe's carbon removal procurement program and co-created the award-winning iOS app Finish.
1shows
2appearances
25statements
6resolved
6supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
Everything Ryan Orbuch said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Orbuch: Legacy carbon registries protected brokers by pretending cheap offsets were real
“The original sin with carbon markets was this bad incentive structure encouraged by registries that weren't aligned around the problem to protect the interests of the sellers and brokers of the credits, to make them look like there are enough credits at low en…”
Orbuch: Legacy carbon offset market operated as an aligned house of cards
“Because the registries and the feedback loop with the registries is to just keep issuing credits and make each credit look the same as every other credit, everyone's incentivized the other way because the buyers don't want to go back and say, Wow, all this mon…”
Orbuch: Legacy registry credits only vaguely corresponded to actual carbon cycles
“You need someone whose job it is, is to figure out the effect of a given thing on the carbon cycle. And we have said that the old registries played this role, and people believe they played that role, and that's what it meant for them to issue a ton. And that'…”
Orbuch: Many low-durability carbon credits represent completely non-existent carbon removals
“Many of the, what we could refer to as low durability, low end credits today, whether it's something like improved forest management or otherwise, it's not that they're low durability, they actually just don't exist. Right? So, like, you have this weird thing …”
Orbuch: High-quality carbon removal offtakes rival legacy voluntary market size
“Most of the dollars that have gone into the sort of market for higher quality removals are forward offtakes, right? Shayle Kann: Right. Shayle Kann: I guess that's true. Ryan Orbuch: So the cash is spent when the removal is delivered. And like, if you add up a…”
Orbuch: Buyers cannot purchase real carbon removal for $10 per ton
“Turns out you can't spend 10 dollars a ton and do anything real.”
Orbuch: Carbon credit registries face structural conflicts when paid by suppliers
“The methodology creation itself is often conflicted, where the supplier is paying the registry to create a methodology for them, which has some obvious issues. Or they're using some other one that some other supplier created.”
Orbuch: Legacy carbon markets lied to buyers about scientific uncertainty
“Buyers have been Implicitly comfortable with uncertainty for decades because we'd lied to them that the uncertainty didn't exist.”
Orbuch: Avoided deforestation carbon credits have near-zero net impact due to leakage
“Avoided deforestation, for example, is like a classically cheap and conceptually compelling credit especially in, you know, say the Amazon that's I mean, basically impossible to prove the counterfactual because there's often significant amounts of leakage, and…”
Orbuch: The Clean Air Act caused net warming by reducing reflective aerosols
“The Clean Air Act was pretty meaningfully net warming for Earth, right? Like, it was an objectively good thing, obviously. Like, it saved probably millions of lives. It protected, you know, millions of people, and especially vulnerable communities from really …”
Orbuch: Forest carbon protocols completely ignore albedo effects that negate carbon storage
“No freaking forest carbon protocol accounts for albedo. And in some cases, it's, like, enough to almost undo the carbon storage provided by the forest.”
Orbuch: Next-generation carbon registries must be buyer-funded with ex-post credit issuance
“So there's two things that change. One is that the buyer pays the registry to evaluate deliveries and two, the credits are issued after they've been delivered, not preemptively before.”
Orbuch: Overly conservative scientific governance breaks carbon removal project finance
“Like, loudest, most conservative scientist in the room-based governance doesn't work for this. You actually do need to make something off-takeable and contractable, and the way you do that is for these emerging more uncertain approaches, or the approaches that…”
Orbuch: Categorize CDR by trapping mechanism rather than natural versus engineered
“One thing that I found a little more useful is to kind of just think about like, what's the actual trapping mechanism for the CO two? Like where does the carbon actually end up? And there you can sort of think like, okay, well, it's leaving the air and another…”
Orbuch: Carbon removal is fundamentally costlier than basic emissions reductions
“Carbon removal is never intended to be a substitute for emissions reduction, and, like, to that point is going to be dramatically more expensive than the vast majority of reductions, right? Like, that's just how this works. Like, not burning something is going…”
Orbuch: Carbon removal must match emission permanence to achieve true net zero
“An emission is permanent, basically. Like, an emission of CO₂ stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of thousands of years, not forever, but hundreds of thousands of years. And if you want to somehow net that out with a proportional removal, like, it's not propo…”
Orbuch: Direct air capture will be far easier to verify than biomass
“Some of the more expensive methods, like direct air capture, are gonna probably be easier to verify. And some of the potentially cheaper methods, especially those using biomass, are probably gonna be harder to verify.”
Orbuch: High-quality reforestation carbon removal projects cost over $50 per ton
“Good reforestation costs north of 50 dollars a ton, and if your system is set up to tell people that 12 dollars a ton is good, then no one's gonna buy that if you make the 12 dollars a ton thing look the same.”
Orbuch: Tying supplier margins to narrowing error bars aligns incentives with science
“What you want is you want the supplier to be able to sell more tons and make more money for the same cogs if they can bring in the error bars around the uncertainty. And innovate on measurement, innovate on modeling, innovate on how they deploy, innovate on th…”
Orbuch: Removing biomass for CDR severely depletes ecosystem nitrogen and phosphorus
“It's not like the plants are just like creating a block of carbon. Like there's nitrogen and phosphorus and iron and other stuff in there. And if you're taking that out of the cycle, you're taking the nutrients out in ratio with the carbon. Right. In contrast,…”
Orbuch: Carbon removal lifecycles do not pencil out without renewable energy
“Like there's going to be a lot of energy use and like no one's life cycle pencils without renewable energy use.”
Orbuch: Carbon dioxide removal must become a standardized commodity market to scale
“Eventually it needs to get there, I think. It's going to be really bumpy and sloppy on the way. Long-term fullness of time, CDR needs to become a commodity market. I don't think there's a mechanism to scale it otherwise.”
Orbuch: Current ocean modeling resolution is too coarse to evaluate alkalinity enhancement
“Most of the modeling of ocean gas exchanges is done at, like, large global climate model tile sizes, not at small enough scale to actually know what part of the ocean is actually potentially good or bad to add some alkalinity to.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Ryan's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 CATALYSTLEDGER | Partner, Lowercarbon Capital | 2 | 25 | 100% 6/6 | full record on Catalyst → |