One percent of every purchase, spent pulling CO₂ back out of the air
You have seen the line at checkout. This page is what sits behind it: where the money goes, why we buy permanent removal instead of cheap offsets, and why a business built around cars has no honest way to sit this one out.
Contributed out of our revenue through Stripe Climate — never added to your price.
See our Stripe Climate profileThe numbers this industry lives inside
of all global CO₂ emissions come from road transport
of CO₂ from one typical passenger vehicle, every year
of CO₂ to build an average combustion car before it moves a metre
of CO₂ that has to be removed this century in median 1.5 °C pathways
Why this weighs more on automotive businesses
Most companies can describe their footprint in terms of offices, flights and cloud bills. In the automotive world the footprint is the product. A car's entire purpose — the thing the customer is paying for — is to turn fuel into motion, and roughly a seventh of all human CO₂ emissions comes out of the other end of that transaction.
The emissions are in the product, not the office
Switching a dealership to LED lighting or a greener hosting plan is worth doing, and it is a rounding error next to the vehicles moving through the forecourt. Everyone earning a living from cars — dealers, marketplaces, workshops, insurers, parts suppliers, a VIN-check service like ours — earns it inside that 15%. Reduction alone cannot reach emissions that belong to the product itself. That gap is exactly what removal is for.
The transition leaves a tail behind it
Even the fastest realistic shift to electric leaves decades of combustion vehicles already titled and already on the road, plus the emissions locked into building their replacements. Those tonnes are in the atmosphere now. Nothing anyone stops doing tomorrow takes them back out.
Buyers and partners have started asking
Fleet tenders, corporate procurement and marketplace partners increasingly ask what a supplier funds rather than what it intends. A commitment that is published, dated and verifiable is a far easier thing to answer with than a sustainability statement.
An industry with a trust problem needs receipts
We work in a corner of the market defined by odometer fraud, washed titles and rebuilt wrecks sold as clean. Being able to prove a claim is the entire business. We hold what we say about climate to the same standard as what we say about a vehicle: if we cannot point at the record, we do not print it.
Removal is not the same thing as an offset
Most of what is sold as “carbon neutral” is avoidance: paying for an emission somewhere else not to happen. It has a place during the transition, but it takes nothing back out of the air. The IPCC defines carbon dioxide removal narrowly — CO₂ physically taken out of the atmosphere and stored durably, in rock, underground, in the deep ocean or in long-lived products.
Stops a future emission
Pays for something not to happen: a protected forest, a cleaner cookstove, avoided methane. Useful, cheap, and reversible — and under the emerging net-zero standards it cannot neutralise emissions that were actually released.
Takes back a past emission
Extracts CO₂ that is already in the atmosphere and locks it away for centuries or longer. It is the only thing that counterbalances residual emissions at net zero — and today it is scarce and expensive, which is precisely why it needs early buyers.
The IPCC's median 1.5 °C pathways need more than 300 billion tonnes of CO₂ removed this century. Nothing remotely at that scale exists yet. It gets built the way solar panels and batteries got built: because somebody paid too much for the first units.
Where your 1% actually goes
Four steps, none of them us. We do not run a tree-planting programme or issue our own credits — the money leaves our account and is spent by people whose job is buying carbon removal.
- 1
You buy a report
One percent of what you paid is set aside from our revenue. Your price is unchanged: the contribution comes out of our margin, not your wallet.
- 2
Stripe Climate pools it
It joins the contributions of more than 30,000 other businesses making the same commitment, which turns a great many small amounts into a purchase large enough to move a market.
- 3
Frontier buys the tonnes
The pool is spent through Frontier, an advance market commitment founded by Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta and McKinsey Sustainability to put around $1 billion into permanent carbon removal. A technical team vets suppliers and contracts removal that can be measured and verified.
- 4
Suppliers deliver, then get paid
The money reaches companies taking CO₂ out of the air and storing it — mineralising it into rock, capturing it directly from the air, sinking biomass. Deliveries are verified and the purchases are published.
Honestly, the 1% is not the biggest thing on this page
Building an average combustion car emits roughly 5.6 tonnes of CO₂ before anyone drives it, and manufacturing accounts for something like a fifth to a third of a conventional car's lifetime emissions. A used car that stays healthy for another eight years spreads that carbon across many more miles. A used car that dies in eight months does not: it sends its owner back to the market early and scraps a vehicle whose manufacturing emissions were never earned back.
That is what a vehicle history report is quietly for. A flood car sold as clean, a structurally written-off vehicle rebuilt and retitled in another state, an odometer wound back by 80,000 miles — each of those is a vehicle that will fail early, be repaired badly, or be scrapped young. Catching them keeps sound cars in service and keeps unsound ones from being resold into another short, wasteful life.
We are not going to pretend that the price of a report offsets a car. It does not. But keeping good vehicles on the road for longer is one of the few genuinely large climate levers a used-car buyer actually holds, and it happens to be the one we were already built to pull.
Every year a sound used car stays in service is a year nobody has to build its replacement.
What we are not claiming
One percent of revenue is a contribution, not a footprint calculation. We have not measured every tonne our servers, our staff and our suppliers are responsible for, and we are not going to call ourselves carbon neutral on the strength of a checkout badge.
What the commitment is: money moving, on every single sale, into a market that will not reach the scale the climate needs unless early customers pay above cost for the first tonnes. That is a smaller claim than most companies make, and one we can stand behind without an asterisk.
Frequently asked questions
Does the 1% add anything to my price?
No. The contribution comes out of our revenue after the sale. You pay exactly what is shown at checkout, whether or not this page exists.
What is carbon removal, exactly?
Taking CO₂ that is already in the atmosphere and storing it durably — mineralised into rock, injected underground, sunk as biomass, or locked into long-lived materials. The IPCC definition requires both halves: the removal and the durable storage.
Why not just plant trees?
Trees are worth planting, but forest carbon is reversible: a fire, a drought or a change of land ownership can release it within a human lifetime. Tonnes that have to counterbalance residual emissions need storage measured in centuries, which is why the money goes to durable removal instead.
Who actually receives the money?
Stripe Climate collects the contribution and directs it through Frontier, an advance market commitment founded by Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta and McKinsey Sustainability, which vets suppliers and buys verified permanent removal. The purchases are published and our own profile is public.
Does buying a report offset my car's emissions?
No, and we would rather say so plainly. A typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 tonnes of CO₂ a year; 1% of a report purchase is nowhere near that. The commitment funds removal capacity, it does not neutralise your driving.
Can I see what has been funded?
Yes. Our Stripe Climate profile is public, and Frontier publishes its suppliers, the tonnage contracted and what has been delivered.
Every report we sell adds to it
Check a VIN for free, and see the full history before you buy the car.