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Clearing the air

Dean Takahashi is applying the lessons he learned at the Yale investment office to a new challenge: taking carbon out of the atmosphere.

By Dylan Walsh ’11MEM | Mar/Apr 2025

Dylan Walsh ’11MEM is a freelance writer based in Chicago, covering science and criminal justice.

Dean Takahashi ’80, ’83MPPM, noticed pieces of wood on the river bottom. He was on a canoe trip with colleagues on the St. Croix River, the watery border between Maine and New Brunswick, Canada. The group was fishing, examining timber holdings, and building team rapport.

The sunken logs stuck with Takahashi. He knew that almost a century prior to his boat slipping by on the surface, local timber companies had run log drives down the river. This well-preserved relic of the time was his first encounter with a carbon sink. The drowned tree had lived many years inhaling carbon dioxide, converting it to the substance of leaf and branch and root. Now, lodged underwater, it served as a vault for the carbon, locking it in place so long as the wood did not decay.

At the time, Takahashi was second-in-command at the Yale Investments Office, but the prospect of pulling carbon from the atmosphere and stowing it continued to occupy his imagination. He investigated whether the university should purchase a peat bog. He awoke one morning beset with nighttime visions of kelp. What if, he wondered, we could farm kelp—one of the world’s most efficient absorbers of carbon—then pack it tightly in concrete cubes and sink those cubes into the deepest reaches of the ocean? He ran experiments in his garage to test designs of garbage cans to collect and measure methane.

 “I had this growing awareness of the importance of dealing with climate, and also a growing awareness that it was something I really cared about,” Takahashi says. He found himself discussing the topic with financial magnates like Tom Steyer and Jeremy Grantham. “I was also realizing that there is this gap in the world in terms of taking ideas that are basic science research and getting them where they need to be as a commercial reality. We need people coming up with creative ways to make that jump from research to market.”

In late 2019, after 33 years building Yale’s endowment, Takahashi announced he was leaving his job to found the Carbon Containment Lab (initially known as the Yale Carbon Containment Laboratory). He raised money from individual friends and supporters. He lined up an eclectic team of five full-time employees, from trained scientists to entrepreneurs. In January 2020, the new project formally launched. For Takahashi, the management of money gave way to the management of climate.

He encountered a steep learning curve. There were decades of scientific research to digest; there was a new world of climate adaptation and mitigation technologies to explore. But a powerful philosophical cord connected past with present. While at the investments office, Takahashi and his boss David Swensen ’80PhD redefined the institutional investment model, moving away from the safely conventional bonds and S&P 500 to invest in private equity, real estate, venture capital, hedge funds, and timberland. They sought and found value where others weren’t looking.

This approach now motivates the Carbon Containment Lab, which, in some respects, has no interest in the best-known ways for solving our climate crisis. These wide paths are relatively crowded with people, research, and money. Instead, the lab is hunting for the best unknown solutions to the climate crisis, the corners of science and engineering that, empty of people and devoid of money, brim with unrealized promise.

The carbon containment lab became an independent nonprofit in February 2024. It currently employs eleven people full-time. It will always be small, because Takahashi prefers a flat hierarchy and the intellectually egalitarian culture born from this flatness. Ideas are welcomed and debated from all corners. People follow curiosity to far-flung ends then rigorously judge the merit of whatever ideas they bring back.

“The fact that Dean Takahashi and a group of talented people are scouring the world for investable propositions related to climate change is perhaps the most exciting thing happening in this space on the planet,” says Environmental Defense Fund president Fred Krupp ’75, who has gotten to know Takahashi over the last several decades. “This is a giant intellect applying himself to one of the major challenges of his generation.”

When the lab finds an attractive idea—“attractive” implying, most fundamentally, that it is largely overlooked, relatively inexpensive, capable of removing, storing, or preventing greenhouse gas emissions, and could one day prove economically sustainable—they often seek partnerships with other people or organizations attracted to or already working on the same idea. This search for partnerships is the crux of their work, and it is an approach that Takahashi borrowed from his years in the investments office. When he and Swensen started, the bias was toward managing university endowments internally. They resisted with the simple logic that a greater pool of talent and expertise could be accessed beyond the reach of Yale’s recruitment arm. They were in the business of cultivating relationships with smart people in other investment organizations as much as they were in the business of personally hiring smart people to make good investment decisions.

The same formula animates the Carbon Containment Lab. They join and support the efforts of other universities, government agencies, entrepreneurs, researchers—whoever it makes sense to partner with when pursuing a particular project. For this reason, “it’s tough to summarize how we work or who we are,” says Justin Freiberg ’10MESc, managing director at the lab. He describes the lab as a “catalytic” force for “convening” and “coalition building,” adding that “the common thread is that we look for bottlenecks or limiting factors in a system, and then we address them.”

Take, for example, their work on wood vaults, which are designed to manage the tinder-dry overgrowth that is increasingly responsible for calamitous wildfires. The standard practice for the US Forest Service is to clear and then burn this wood, which releases the carbon dioxide stored in the wood back into the atmosphere. The Carbon Containment Lab is studying the best way to bury these logs in shallow pits instead. (The lab is also looking at ways to process this timber for use in modern wood skyscrapers.)

The technology for wood vaults is relatively straightforward: dig a hole, fill it with wood, cover the wood so that it doesn’t decompose and emit greenhouse gases. The matter of best practices, however, is poorly understood. Nobody has researched the ideal conditions for preserving wood underground. Having identified this lack of knowledge as a bottleneck, the Carbon Containment Lab has partnered with the Forest Service, universities, and private companies to conduct experiments on seven sites across the country, from Mississippi to the desert West.

They have buried wood in different conditions and are digging it up in two-year intervals, investigating how soil conditions, climate, and hydrology affect the rates of decomposition and related greenhouse gas emissions.

 “Very few people are focused on this,” says Sinéad Crotty, a director at the lab who is overseeing these experiments. “We come back to this question with every project: how can we be uniquely beneficial to implementation?”

The answer takes different shapes with each project. In the case of the lab’s involvement in capturing and disposing of methane emissions from coal mines, the science of these emissions is well understood, as are the technologies required to abate them, but the economics are questionable. And so the lab has focused its energies on helping a group of entrepreneurs build a business case for their work, partnering with them to craft an attractive investment opportunity and then raise funds for the initiative.

Central to the lab’s work is the potential for the ideas it pursues to reach market viability. As a nonprofit, however, the lab invests on timescales far longer than those of most private companies. Many years may pass before an idea matures. This long view, according to former Yale president and Carbon Containment Lab board member Rick Levin ’74PhD, is precisely what the field of climate investment needs: money and other resources to help technologies cross the “valley of death” that separates lab-scale demonstrations from commercial application. The Carbon Containment Lab, says Levin, “is identifying the gaps to adoption and then bringing together the people and resources to close these gaps.”

Given its ecumenical vision, the name “Carbon Containment Lab” is becoming a relic of the group’s founding. When the lab started, their focus was square on carbon dioxide, the most abundant and longest-lasting greenhouse gas traceable to human activity. We have known about CO2’s effects for more than a century. It is the greenhouse gas most prominent in public discourse, most familiar as a problem. But in the lab’s widening hunt for overlooked and economically attractive ways to prevent climate change, they have gotten involved in the world of short-lived climate pollutants, like methane and hydrofluorocarbons (used in refrigerants). Though these last only years or decades in the atmosphere, compared to centuries or millennia for carbon dioxide, they are, respectively, 80 times and thousands of times more potent short-term drivers of warming than CO2. This makes them intensely problematic over the span of one or two decades.

 “One of the things I took from the investments office is that you go back to first principles,” Takahashi says. In the case of the endowment, this meant supporting the university in perpetuity. In the case of climate change, it implies not just finding ways to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, but, more fundamentally, seeking paths to prevent warming. “Just as David Swensen and I found that there was a lot of opportunity outside of the S&P 500, there is a lot of opportunity outside of fossil fuel–generated CO2.”

The lab persuasively articulates the importance of this approach in a report titled “How to Win the Race Against Climate Change.” They note that decarbonization is a necessary goal for 2050—the target set through the United Nations climate treaty process. But the world at large must simultaneously, and in the near-term, invest heavily in the abatement of shorter-lived greenhouse gases. Reducing their emissions will buy time. It could help avoid climate tipping points, like the conversion of the Amazon rainforest to a savannah, the irreversible melting of polar ice caps, or the slowing and eventual stopping of ocean currents that define the Western Hemisphere’s pleasantly arable climate. The loss of life and the human suffering likely involved if one or more of these thresholds is crossed would render the fight to cut carbon almost pointless.

We’re doing an objectively bad job addressing this challenge, despite the stakes. Carbon emissions were at a record high in 2023. They are projected to set a new record in 2024. Temperature measures in recent years have dramatically exceeded baselines from climate models, hitting numbers that climate scientist Zeke Hausfather ’08MEM described as “absolutely, gobsmackingly bananas.” And yet the most recent round of international climate negotiations in Azerbaijan ended with annual financial commitments of only about $300 billion, even though a London School of Economics study released during the conference suggested a need for roughly $6.5 trillion per year to sufficiently address the crisis.

“If you just look at emissions and temperatures, it’s not a good story,” Takahashi admits. He’s pessimistic about our current political path. He finds it highly unlikely that global temperatures can be limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial averages—the aspirational target set by international climate negotiations in 2015 and one, reportedly, breached in 2024—and even two degrees appears to be a fading prospect. But, rather than engendering paralysis, these trends motivate the work of the lab.

 “Dean’s very focused on implementation, on learning as quickly as possible and getting out there in the real world and trying things out,” Crotty says. “That’s one of the things that is so encouraging in our work, in a world where we see the effects of climate change almost daily.”

Takahashi has met with organizations and individuals around the world, and the lab is in various stages of collaboration on projects in the UK, Morocco, Iceland, Thailand, India, Indonesia, and Japan. It has been five years since the lab started, and they have a goal of helping to remove, store, or prevent 30 million metric tons of carbon (or equivalent) emissions by 2030, and one billion metric tons by 2050.

This second figure is a lofty goal, amounting to more than half of annual emissions from the United States transportation sector. But reflecting on Takahashi’s record at the investments office suggests it isn’t unreasonable to be hopeful. When he started, one year after Swensen, Yale’s endowment was $1.75 billion. When he left, it was $30 billion. Such magical results are what his team is reaching for when it comes to climate change.

“Even if the outlook is grim, we can have an impact if we really just work on problem solving, on making all of these solutions come to fruition,” Takahashi says. “That is what motivates me. Not that the end is near.”  

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