Marty Odlin

With support from Microsoft, Stripe, and Shopify, Running Tide billed itself as on the cutting edge of carbon removal. In the end, it resorted to dumping thousands of tons of wood chips in the sea.  American Marty Odlin spoke at a town hall meeting in Akranes, Iceland. Odlin, the founder of a US climate startup called Running Tide, had become a well-known figure around Akranes that summer of 2022… He was setting up a base of operations in a nearby harbor, planning to unleash a counteroffensive against 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. …Hróbjartsson, Running Tide’s former general manager, is skeptical about how much positive impact the marine carbon-removal industry can have. “We’re just making a prettier carbon-offset market,” he says of the industry. “It’s lipstick on a pig.”