Patricia Estridge's birthday celebrations have always coincided with a bonfire on November 5, when the UK commemorates Guy Fawkes' failed attempt to blow up Parliament. For as long as she can remember, she has watched locals in fancy dress march through her hometown in southeast England to a huge bonfire in an ode to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. These fires now remind Estridge more of a climate crisis than any botched suicide attempt. The former Googler and software engineer experienced the brutal reality of the climate crisis firsthand when she lived in California during a wave of devastating wildfires. “I thought, 'Oh, interesting, someone has a bonfire. That's unexpected,'" she told Insider. "Then I realized it wasn't a fire at all - the state was on fire." A few weeks of soul-searching while locked inside away from clouds of smoke set Estridge on a path that eventually led her to found Seaweed Generation, a climate-tech startup dedicated to sequestering carbon dioxide deep in the ocean, in 2021. She is part a wave of new "blue economy" entrepreneurs using seaweed to remove carbon. Seaweed is an attractive play for investors and environmentalists due to its ability to rapidly absorb carbon and the well-established supply chains used to transport it in areas including food, biofuels and cosmetics. Seaweed sequesters an estimated 175 million tonnes of carbon per year when it sinks to the deep sea – about 0.5 % of global emissions. (Tasmin Lockwood, Business Insider)

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