Almost every landfill in Pakistan is venting methane over the people living beside it, and has been for decades. Many of those people are children.
Pakistan is not unusual. It is most of the world.
I have spent 3 years working on this and written almost nothing about it, because there was too much talk and too little walk. That changed in the last 3 months.
It is not easy doing something no one has ever done before. You have to build a path that doesn’t exist and then walk it. The second person gets to simply walk it. But there will only ever be one first, and the scrapes, the setbacks and ultimately the glory of seeing the new dawn are only available to the one who goes first.
Starting CH4 Capital , a fund that finances Bitcoin mining on landfills, was the hardest thing I have ever done in business. Harder than a bioinformatics startup in 2003. Harder than leaving tech companies for coaching in 2009. Harder than my first two climatetech funds in 2020 and 2021. In 2024 I moved my family from New Zealand to Costa Rica to be where the projects are.
It brought together 4 things I knew nothing about.
landfill gas to energy projects
landfill gas carbon credits
bitcoin mining
infrastructure finance
Happily that forced me to find some top people who knew each of those areas. But the bigger question is “Why would anyone start a fund that requires knowledge of something you know so little about?” Maybe because I was crazy, or naive (still in my 50s!) But also because I had a vision, which I still hold unflinchingly.
I believed it was possible to destroy half the world’s landfill methane using Bitcoin mining, helping communities who live near landfills to a better life, and pulling on our strongest lever to slow climate change in the next 25 years (methane destruction)
But also the way to make Bitcoin the world’s first carbon negative industry, and the way to get non-Bitcoiners who think they already know what Bitcoin is to take a second look at Bitcoin.
Skip forward through 3 years of setbacks on many levels, and in the last 3 months several miracles have happened.
Fund 1 is almost fully subscribed
3 Bitcoin mining companies from the first Landfill gas accelerator program I ran 3 years ago are at an advanced stage on landfill projects across 4 nations.
And a chance meeting has us working at government level with Pakistan, on exactly the landfills I opened this letter with.
Bilal bin Saqib, who chairs PVARA, Pakistan’s virtual assets regulator, saw what that meant before we finished explaining it.
The gas is free, so there’s no tariff to argue about. And it positions Pakistan as a world leader on cutting methane.
We have 2 even more advanced projects in Latin America. The more advanced and smaller of the two is still significant: 2 MW in size. This project will destroy 300,000 tonnes of what’s called CO2e (or CO2 equivalent) emissions every year. That’s equivalent to taking 65,000 cars off the road. And there is scope to go from there right up to 8 MW. And there are several other landfill owners surrounding the same city, all watching with great interest, ready to do something similar.
In the last 2 months I’ve been contacted about landfills in India, the Philippines, Colombia and 2 African nations. One landfill operator spent 18 months evaluating all available solutions for destroying his landfill methane, concluding Bitcoin mining was the only one that made economic sense. We did say that 18 months ago, but I get and respect that people need to do their research too.
Sharing something I’ve not shared until now
A while ago, I was unexpectedly contacted by one of the world’s top advertising creatives (who is also a bitcoiner).
He shared his #1 adoption concern: Retail’s lack of interest in Bitcoin.
“They think they know what Bitcoin is, and based on that, they’re not interested”
What he said next floored me. So I’ll say it in full.
“I’m in a unique position of both caring deeply about bitcoin and working with advertising at the highest international level.
And I don’t see a better story to open people’s minds about Bitcoin than the methane story. Nothing is even close.
If we want retail to give Bitcoin a second look, we need to hook them with something unexpected.
The methane story is surprising, hope-inspiring and it can be communicated in one sentence. No other single sentence about Bitcoin has the same punch”
He proposed that we shine a light of truth in the darkness: A full page ad in the New York Times.
The ad could create enough of a stir to get this message heard on some big podcasts and other broad media outside Bitcoin-land (with a little help from his PR colleagues).
So he orange-pilled a colleague, and they made this ad for the campaign, free of charge. Imagine opening the NYT and seeing this truthbomb!
And here it is:
The NYT print edition has 570,000 subscribers, many of whom are very influential.
So the ad can make a real difference for how Bitcoin is perceived. And it can accelerate our goal to make Bitcoin mining carbon-negative. Also, most people still think Bitcoin = crypto (no surprise they’re not interested in BTC!)
Repeating “Bitcoin not crypto” doesn’t change that. But of the world’s top cryptos, only Bitcoin mitigates methane. This ad shows a huge audience that Bitcoin ≠ crypto.
A version of this ad has already run on Instagram, where it outperformed every other post on that account, including the lighter and funnier ones.
How do we find the funds to run the ad to a larger circulation? By working together (like we did to defeat GreenpeaceUSA). That means crowd-funding this thing to create history.
If we raise $70,000, we can put the ad in the NYT.
If we raise $2K, we can put it in a small but influential magazine like the Royal Geographical Society’s magazine. And there are lots of interesting spots in between.
My involvement in fighting environmental FUD on Bitcoin showed how a small group of people can permanently change history. You can join me through this Geyser link.
Usually we only get to watch history happen. This is our moment to create history.
Let’s do this!