With carbon capture project, Silicon Valley pursues a moonshot that matters

A pedestrian walks past signage at Google Inc. headquarters in Mountain View, California, U.S., on Wednesday, April 25, 2018. Alphabet Inc. is pushing efforts to roll back the most comprehensive biometric privacy law in the U.S., even as the company and its peers face heightened scrutiny after the unauthorized sharing of data at Facebook Inc. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Last week brought what now seems like the usual crop of bad news from Silicon Valley: an alleged cover-up of sexual harassment at Google, culture problems at Netflix Inc, more foreign meddling on Facebook Inc and even underwhelming quarterly earnings from Amazon.com Inc and Alphabet Inc. 

So perhaps you missed a more sanguine development that harkens back to old, romantic ambitions of how technology can solve the world’s most critical problems. Y Combinator, the famed startup school that birthed companies like Airbnb Inc, Stripe Inc and Dropbox Inc, said it would start looking for startups working on breakthrough technologies in the field of carbon capture, the science of pulling carbon-dioxide molecules out of the atmosphere, where they are contributing to a rapidly warming planet.