Pirate's Cove

OK, so, you’re going to fund this with your own money, right, Peter Gajdos at Tech Crunch?

Why the next big entrepreneur must come from climate tech

When I started getting involved in clean tech 1.0 financing back in 2005, “climate change” was some future event.

Hurricane Katrina had just happened, and many experts viewed it primarily as a failure of the government to take care of its weakest citizens in the face of a natural disaster, not as climate change’s early shot. Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” had not come out yet. The scale of human-made CO₂ and its impact on temperature were still somewhat debated. Most key scientists and investors understood, but the general population and politicians were ambivalent at best.

Fast forward to 2021: Climate change looks like a misnomer and we are in a true climate crisis. We see historic fires in Greece, Portugal and North America’s entire West Coast; epic floods in Germany; devastating tornadoes in historically temperate geographies such as the Czech Republic; record-breaking hurricanes in the Caribbean and Philippines; drought in Syria that ultimately led to civil war; destruction of the Great Barrier Reef. The list goes on. Nearly every region in the world has been heavily affected.

Same old same old. Because these things never happened before fossil fueled vehicles. Much like the cultists are blaming the tornadoes last night on the climate emergency, despite there being big, recorded tornadoes in the mid-1800’s.

The climate crisis is real, happening now and really hurting us. So what do we do about it, and how do we allocate our money, time and brainpower to develop solutions? I believe it is a financial and a moral imperative to make climate technology, together with medicine, the main priority of humanity.

Our money? How about your money?

If you don’t reduce carbon in your portfolio and in your business, you will become a dinosaur. Several stakeholders are coming together to create a financial groundswell.

Or, you could mind your own f’ing business and let people do what they want with their own money

Governments are finally putting tough building codes in place. For example, 10% of buildings in London will not be up to code in early 2022. U.S. cities and states have been slower to adopt, but if you don’t think this is coming, look at other regulatory patterns where the EU led and the U.S. followed.

So, he wants Fascist, dictatorial government. Here’s the key part

While technological progress has been on an encouraging trajectory in energy and in transportation thus far, we are nowhere near done, especially in real estate and critical infrastructure. Specifically, just deploying the existing technologies in the built environment/real estate will not be sufficient. Even if we ignore payback and return requirements, which are often too difficult to meet, we would take care of less than 50% of the carbon emissions in the built environment with existing technologies, according to a Fifth Wall analysis. Therefore, I believe the focus needs to be twofold:

• Scale up existing technologies so that payback declines from more than 10 years to two to five years. That’s where growth capital and eventually infrastructure investments come in.
• Invent and firm up new technologies. That’s where government, national labs, universities, angel investors and venture capital come in.

To tackle the crisis, capital must flood in and even more so than in the past few encouraging years, during which climate tech VC investment increased 40x between 2013 and 2019. We already have several multibillion-dollar tech and biotech venture and growth funds; now is time for several multibillion-dollar climate tech funds globally.

Notice the part about the government. Taking your money to invest in shady ventures which rarely pay out. See Solyndra, for one. Most of the “green tech” money from Obama’s Stimulus was wasted, and never repaid where there were loans. And left environmental messes behind. If these Warmists want all this investment, why are they not using their own money? Why does it always have to be someone else’s.

He also goes on to note that this is a Moral Imperative, and “not investing in climate tech is inexcusable.” Piss off.