--- --- Oct 30, 2025 # Nan Ransohoff Head of Climate, Stripe and Frontier by Nan Ransohoff  Photo-Illustration by TIME (Courtesy Photo) _Nan Ransohoff is the head of climate at fintech company Stripe who spearheaded the Frontier experiment, where Stripe, working with a group of other influential companies, committed a pooled $1 billion to buy credits from permanent carbon removal startups. As part of this, Frontier pre-purchases contracts from early-stage carbon removal ventures that take effect as they deliver verified carbon removal. Having guaranteed customers could help startups finance and develop their operations. The idea was borrowed from the pharmaceutical industry, where governments and philanthropists used a similar model to encourage the development of vaccines and medicines for low-income countries._ **What is the single most important action you think the public, or a specific company or government, needs to take in the next year to advance the climate agenda?** When it comes to carbon removal, the single most important thing governments can do is create the demand necessary for carbon removal to scale. The challenge with market creation for carbon removal is that it’s a public good, leaving it with no “natural” customers. And, we have to do a lot of it—scientists say 5-10 billion tons per year by 2050, which would require hundreds of billions of dollars per year to pay for it. Voluntary buyers—like Stripe, Microsoft, and Google—can help this field get to first base by being early customers. But it’s extremely unlikely that carbon removal will get anywhere near climate-relevant scale without government intervention. That could take many forms—from direct government procurement (think: “waste management”) to putting a price on the negative externality of a ton of emissions. Whatever the tactic, governments have a critical role to play in getting carbon removal to gigaton scale. **What is a climate solution that isn't getting the attention or funding it deserves?** Solar radiation management—reflecting a small fraction of sunlight back to space much like volcanic eruptions do naturally—could temporarily slow global warming, reducing the immediate impacts of extreme weather on vulnerable populations and buying the world valuable time to decarbonize. The technology needed to do this is cheap and relatively straightforward—yet it gets virtually no research funding because of fears it will be a distraction from emissions reductions. But the magnitude of the potential benefits warrants at the very least a much better understanding of the basics: if the world does end up needing solar radiation management, what’s the best version of what that looks like? How would we actually do it? And under what circumstances? Doing the work now to answer these fundamental questions will give us another tool in our collective toolkit—if and when we need it. **What gives you hope about the future of the planet?** We tend to underestimate how fast progress can happen. Solar is a classic example: costs have fallen about 90% since 2010, and global capacity passed 1 terawatt in 2022, almost two decades ahead of early forecasts. That pattern isn’t unique: EV adoption has surged far faster than expected, battery costs have collapsed, global CO2 emissions have plateaued, and the world is spending over $2 trillion a year now on clean energy. On carbon removal, it’s still early, but in just six years the field has grown from nothing to hundreds of companies and billions in demand Nan Ransohoff: The 100 Most Influential Climate Leaders of 2025 ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"Article","@id":"https://time.com/collections/time-100-climate-2025/7326563/nan-ransohoff/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/collections/time-100-climate-2025/7326563/nan-ransohoff/"},"headline":"Nan Ransohoff","datePublished":"2025-10-30T11:30:16.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-03T01:01:20.170Z","description":"","url":"https://time.com/collections/time-100-climate-2025/7326563/nan-ransohoff/","keywords":["TIME100 Climate 2025","list","franchise","Magazine","Special Project","sponsorshipblock","Accolades"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6601512d6585b8cc/6998cb00d32e930cc0cd7773/Innovators-Nan-Ransohoff.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"TIME Staff","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/time-staff/"}],"creator":"TIME Staff","articleSection":"Climate","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6601512d6585b8cc/6998cb00d32e930cc0cd7773/Innovators-Nan-Ransohoff.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/climate/","name":"Climate"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/time100-climate-2025/","name":"TIME100 Climate 2025"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/collections/time-100-climate-2025/7326563/nan-ransohoff/","name":"Nan Ransohoff"}}]}] ```