This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
The town hall in Akranes, on the west coast of Iceland, filled quickly as locals streamed in to the residents’ meeting. The mood was happy, positive, relaxed. In between speeches, a woman sang folk songs while her family played guitar and melodica. Yet when the guest speaker, an American named Marty Odlin, took the stage, he struck a deadly serious tone.
“We woke up Godzilla,” he told the assembled residents. “It’s burning down forests and towns and stealing fish and doing all sorts of terrible things. It’s a horrible monster, but we did that. We woke it up. And so we have to fix it.”
Odlin, the founder of a US climate startup called Running Tide, had become a well-known figure around Akranes that summer of 2022 in his signature neon beanie and fisherman’s flannels. He was setting up a base of operations in a nearby harbor, planning to unleash a counteroffensive against the Godzilla of climate change. Odlin had outlined a plan to create jobs in this former fishing hub of 8,000. He’d need people to help sink huge volumes of biomass in the surrounding ocean. Together, they’d remove gigatons of carbon from Earth’s atmosphere—and make money by selling carbon credits to Silicon Valley hyperscalers. The exponential growth in tech companies’ emissions, driven by an explosion in demand for data centers and AI, had made the carbon-credit market hotter than ever. Lowercarbon Capital, a VC firm cofounded by Chris Sacca of Shark Tank, had led a $54 million Series B funding round for Running Tide earlier that year.
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