Today: Anthropic joins other tech companies in putting nearly $1 billion into carbon removal; U.S. EV maker Rivian lays off hundreds of staff ahead of a new vehicle launch; Oatly switches up the way it markets its ‘milk’.

Welcome back: A group of mostly tech companies are committing $915 million to buy carbon-removal credits, despite worries over dwindling venture-capital funding and government support, particularly in the U.S.

The new commitment from the Frontier group that includes Stripe, Google, Salesforce and newly joined Anthropic, as well as fashion giant H&M, comes on top of $1 billion it previously pledged to buy removal credits backing technologies that take carbon out of the atmosphere. These include direct air capture, enhanced rock weathering and bio-energy production combined with carbon capture and storage, Sustainable Business reports.

Frontier made its first advanced market commitment in 2022, providing startups cash to build technologies that eventually would generate carbon credits, in turn allowing companies to neutralize their emissions.

The market has grown significantly since then. To date, 49 million credits have been sold to companies for roughly $12 billion, up from just a few hundred million dollars four years ago, according to CDR.fyi, a carbon removals tracking database.

Reader Note: The Sustainable Business newsletter will be taking a break for the Juneteenth holiday, and will return on Monday June 22.

Electric vehicle automaker Rivian laid off hundreds of employees Tuesday, a move to make the business profitable as it launches a key new model.

The cuts represent less than 2% of Rivian’s workforce, a spokesperson said. The company had about 15,200 employees at the end of last year, Ryan Felton and Becky Peterson, report exclusively for the Journal.

“We recently restructured a handful of teams within Rivian as we work to profitably scale our business,” the company said.

The layoffs, effective Tuesday, impacted employees in Rivian’s service and customer organization, which handles sales and marketing. The changes were made to ensure the company can scale efficiently, the company said.

Rivian’s success is riding on the R2 SUV which debuted last week. The automaker posted $5.4 billion in revenue last year with sales of about 42,000 vehicles, but it has never turned an annual profit. The R2’s predecessors, the R1S and R1T, can cost as much as $100,000 and sales of both have slid 15% and 4% respectively, in May from a year ago, according to data from industry-research firm Motor Intelligence.

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The Justice Department moved to block an NAACP lawsuit challenging xAI over allegations that gas turbines powering its Mississippi data center risk polluting nearby communities, Clara Hudson reports for Sustainable Business.

The lawsuit filed by the civil-rights group said xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial-intelligence company, and its subsidiary MZX Tech are violating the Clean Air Act by operating gas turbines without an air permit at a data center in Southaven, Miss.

The DOJ said in its filing this week that the data center “trains and develops new AI models that are critical to the economy and the Department of War.” The department asked the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi to dismiss the lawsuit.

The department’s filing said the xAI chatbot Grok was used in Operation Epic Fury—a military offensive against Iran—and helped U.S. forces “to deploy over 2,000 munitions to 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours.”

• A North Carolina couple won't stop feeding the wild vultures that circle the neighborhood. Now the town is suing them. (WSJ)
   
• Countries and companies response to the energy crisis is varying, some betting on renewables, some on fossil fuels. (FT)
   
• The green economy has a record high market value of $10 trillion according to the London Stock Exchange Group. (Bloomberg)
   
• The SBTi's net-zero standard overhaul is redefining how companies should approach electricity decarbonization (Trellis)
   
• The Iran war and lower crop prices have hurt makers of sulfur-based supplements. But farmers won’t skip nitrogen-based fertilizers. (NYT)
   
• Sea ice is melting fast, worsening the climate crisis, but a bold attempt to rethicken it is showing early signs of success (Guardian)

WSJ Pro Sustainable Business gives you an inside look at how companies are tackling sustainability. Send comments to bureau chief Perry Cleveland-Peck at perry.cleveland-peck@wsj.com and reporters Clara Hudson at clara.hudson@wsj.com and Yusuf Khan at yusuf.khan@wsj.com. Follow us on LinkedIn at wsjperry, clara-hudson and yusuf_khan.