Ten thousand employees; 185,000 acres of Central Valley farmland; $2.5 billion in philanthropy; $11.2-billion combined net worth. But for Los Angeles, the key figure is this: $750 million. That's the historic donation California agricultural barons Lynda and Stewart Resnick made to Caltech in 2019 to fund sustainability research, the largest amount in the field and the second-largest U.S. higher education gift of any sort, at the time. L.A.
Caltech President Thomas Rosenbaum said the donation has funded research that has already borne startup companies, including Captura, which is developing mass-scale electrodialysis to remove carbon dioxide from the ocean so it has the capacity to absorb more from the atmosphere. Another company, Calcarea, aims to capture carbon dioxide from ship emissions and sequester them in the ocean.