Giana Amador
Cofounder/ Carbon180
Giana Amador grew up in California’s Central Valley, where her family owned an almond orchard. The Central Valley is a region—and community—that produces a quarter of the U.S. food supply. To most, that’s an abstract amount of food. But in 2015, as California suffered through one of its worst droughts ever, Amador saw exactly what was at stake—for her home, her family, and the nation.
By then, Amador was an undergrad at the University of California, Berkeley, studying climate change and frustrated by the slow rate of reform. While reading a lengthy, dense report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, she noticed a solution that seemed critical but was, oddly, barely mentioned: “removal of the destructive mass of carbon dioxide already in the air.” As Amador and a fellow Berkeley student, Noah Deich, made inquiries to policymakers and investors, they found a haunting inertia. “No one was willing to move into the carbon removal space,” Amador remembers. How was there so much investment in and commitment to curbing future emissions—via electric cars and renewable energy—but so little for removing the gasses poisoning the atmosphere right now? Scientists agreed that both were needed to avoid catastrophe. That’s when Amador and Deich decided to start Carbon180, a nongovernmental organization devoted to carbon removal. But more than that, Carbon180 needed to build an entire industry.
Industries need not only private partners, but public policies, mountains of federal funding, research, development, progress tracking, and government incentives—along with endless information-gathering and explanation and advocacy. Today, Carbon180 influences all of this for carbon removal. It helps federal agencies with policy analysis and development. The organization advises both major companies like Stripe and Shopify and smaller entrepreneurs on how to invest in carbon removal projects. In 2021, it
