Philanthropist and Ripple cofounder Chris Larsen has launched a novel climate fund that will combine grants, investments and support leaders working to shift policies. “We’ll be investing in the people, organizations and companies that are doing some of the most important work on climate change in the US and around the world,” said Michael Brune, the CEO of the Clean Break Fund, in announcing the news on LinkedIn.
As the name suggests, the new fund wants to do things differently, leaving behind “pessimism and doomerism, ideas that don’t work anymore” and “dogmatic thinking,” according to Brune, the former executive director of The Sierra Club.
Take carbon dioxide removal, an early stage technology that removes carbon from the atmosphere, but that environmentalists have said takes attention away from stopping emissions in the first place. “CDR is no longer an optional ‘insurance policy’; it is a foundational pillar of climate stability that must scale rapidly to rebalance our atmosphere,” Clean Break declares on its web site. The fund has invested in CDR startups Heirloom, Twelve and AirCapture, and has made grants to organizations including the Carbon Removal Alliance and Carbon 180, which advocate for supportive policy.
Clean Break has also provided grants to organizations including Extreme Weather Survivors, which provides trauma support, training and community to people that have gone through floods, fires, superstorms and other extreme weather events, and Sunrise, a movement building organization focused on climate justice.
Since leaving the CEO role at blockchain startup Ripple in 2017, Larsen has focused on climate philanthropy and investing. He set up the Larsen Lam Climate Change Foundation in 2021, which has now become Clean Break Fund
