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1 month ago | 
forbes.com | Phil De Luna
There are many ways to ignore climate reality. One of the most effective is to stop measuring it. That’s what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) just did. Quietly, without much public fanfare, the agency announced that it will retire its Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disastersdatabase after 2024. This isn’t just an administrative footnote.
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1 month ago | 
forbes.com | Phil De Luna
Here’s a question climate policy watchers didn’t expect to be asking in early 2025: What happens when the tailwind of America’s Inflation Reduction Act becomes a headwind? The answer, at least in part, is $8 billion in canceled, downsized, or shuttered climate tech projects in just the first three months of this year. That’s not a typo.
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1 month ago | 
illuminem.com | Phil De Luna
UnsplashIlluminem VoicesGreen Tech · Renewables Tech · Public GovernanceFor decades, we've idolized the college dropout founder. The genius who leaves a top university, armed only with vision and a laptop, to disrupt an industry and become a billionaire. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg—these are names that have shaped the modern definition of disruptive innovation.
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1 month ago | 
forbes.com | Phil De Luna
There’s something thrilling about betting on the edge of impossible. That’s what the $100 million XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition set out to do when it launched in 2021: a moonshot challenge to pull carbon out of the sky—or the sea, or the soil—and lock it away. Permanently. Sustainably. Affordably. Four years later, the results are in. And the winners—spanning continents, carbon pathways, and philosophical approaches to climate tech—are more than just a hopeful vignette.
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1 month ago | 
forbes.com | Phil De Luna
There’s a moment in every technological revolution where the story shifts. It stops being about startups and starts being about ecosystems. It's not about invention anymore — it's about scale, integration, and consolidation. That’s where direct air capture (DAC) finds itself in 2025. And the latest sign of this maturation? Occidental Petroleum’s quiet but telling acquisition of Holocene, a young DAC startup with a novel take on liquid sorbents.
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1 month ago | 
forbes.com | Phil De Luna
In a world increasingly obsessed with gigaton-scale solutions and trillion-dollar climate pledges, it’s easy to overlook policy experiments that don’t grab headlines. But every so often, a quiet reform starts to reshape the rules of the global climate game. Japan’s carbon market is one of those. Over the past two years, Japan has been rolling out what could become Asia’s second-largest emissions trading system. It’s not flashy. It’s not even mandatory—yet.
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2 months ago | 
forbes.com | Phil De Luna
Global emissions hit 41.2 billion tons of CO₂ in 2024—up nearly 1% from the previous year—and the trajectory remains troubling. Companies are increasingly aware that reducing emissions isn’t just an ethical imperative; it's a financial one. Governments worldwide are implementing tougher climate regulations, translating directly into higher penalties, tighter lending standards, and steeper borrowing costs for companies dragging their feet.
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Mar 5, 2025 | 
forbes.com | Phil De Luna
The carbon removal market is, in many ways, a classic policy problem. Companies know they need to act. Governments are inching toward regulation. Investors see opportunity, but they also see risk. And sitting in the middle of it all is a market that should be booming—but isn’t yet. The 2025 Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) Market Survey, conducted by CDR.fyi and Sylvera, offers a fascinating look into why this is happening and what might come next.
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Feb 17, 2025 | 
forbes.com | Phil De Luna
Net-zero isn’t just a goal—it’s a deadline. Yet, too many companies treat it like a distant target, banking on future carbon removals instead of acting now. The problem? Delay makes solutions harder, costs higher, and climate risks more severe. Carbon removals must be integrated into corporate strategies today, not as a last-minute escape plan. The Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) has been setting the gold standard for corporate climate action, and now it’s evolving its approach.
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Feb 12, 2025 | 
forbes.com | Phil De Luna
For decades, we've idolized the college dropout founder. The genius who leaves a top university, armed only with vision and a laptop, to disrupt an industry and become a billionaire. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg—these are names that have shaped the modern definition of disruptive innovation. But in climatetech, where the problems are physical and the solutions to reversing climate change demand serious scientific rigor, a new kind of founder is emerging: the PhD founder.
