Good Morning
What we’re reading this week:
Mapping California’s ‘Zombie’ Forests (NYT)
Global carbon emissions hit a record high last year (BBG)
The Greendicator
Top Deals of the Week
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Electric truck maker Volta Trucks is in advanced talks to raise up to ~$264M (RT)
Silfab Solar, a North American photo-voltaic module manufacturer, raised a $125M round led by ARC (BW)
Residential energy retrofit platform BlocPower raised a $155M Series B ($130M in debt / $25M in equity) led by VoLo Earth Ventures (TC)
Palmetto, a technology enabled clean energy platform, raised $150M in funding from TPG Rise Climate (FN)
Industrial Sun, a developer of solar projects for industrial clients, raised a $90M round led by EIG and Modern Energy (FN)
Clean energy asset platform Banyan Infrastructure, an SF-based fintech startup, raised $25M led by Energize Ventures, SE Ventures, and Elemental Excelerator (PR)
Textile recycler Circ raised a $25M Series B extension from Zalando, Avery Dennison, and others (FN)
Geothermal Engineering, a UK-based developer and operator of geothermal plants, raised a $17.9M round led by Kerogen Capital and Thrive Renewables (FN)
Geothermal energy startup XGS Energy raised $19M in financing which included a $14M Series A led by Anzu Partners (BW)
Rubi Labs, a startup using CO2 emissions to create carbon-negative textiles, raised an $8.7M seed round led by Talis Capital, Tin Shed Ventures, and H&M Group (FN)
immi, a low-carb high-protein plant-based instant ramen brand, raised a $10M Series A led by Touch Capital (FN)
Rubi Labs, a startup using CO2 emissions to create carbon-negative textiles, raised an $8.7M seed round led by Talis Capital, Tin Shed Ventures, and H&M Group (FN)
Shifted Energy, a distributed energy resources platform, raised a $4.3M seed round led by EPIC Ventures and Kapor (FN)
Subscription-based climate media company Heatmap raised a $4M Series A at an $11.5M valuation led by Autumn Road Capital (AX)
ViridiCO2, a startup aiming to convert waste CO2 into valuable chemical products, raised a $3.6M seed round led by EQT Ventures (FN)
Carbon nanomaterials startup DexMat raised a $3M seed round led by Shell Ventures (FN)
itselectric, a curbside EV charging startup, raised a $2.2M pre-seed round led by Brooklyn Bridge Ventures (PRN)
Green Theory
ClimateTech or ClimateWreck?
In the 1960s and 70s, something hazy choked US air, and lowered the IQ of those alive then by around 2-6 points per person. The mystery substance wasn’t grown from a plant and smoked, but synthesized in 1920s labs, and propagated throughout the gas-guzzling world, over the next few decades. The compound was tetraethyl lead, a lead-based additive that a General Motors chemical engineer found to reduce engine knocking (the annoying bang of internal combustion engines).
The inventor who discovered this application, Thomas Midgely Jr., achieved business chemistry’s essential trinity of success: finding a lead chemical that was effective, inexpensive, and patentable. Midgely Jr. was heralded as a brilliant inventor by some, and paid handsomely for his scientific achievements, but his inventions’ damages to society, and himself, overshadow their benefits.
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Midgley Jr.’s dubious history of disastrous discoveries holds lessons for climate technology—and technology, in general—today. Technology offers us abundant, sometimes overwhelming, potential to transform our world and society, but this power comes with dangerous downsides, especially when implemented just for the sake of making money. Midgley Jr.’s tragic life forces us to ask: Does the solution need to be a fancy, novel technology, like a new chemical compound? Have we considered the consequences of this technology before releasing it into the wild? Are our businesses aligned with societally safe goals for our families and communities, or ruthlessly focused on exclusivity and profit?
Chill Food, Cooked Planet
In the late 1920s and early ‘30s, Midgley Jr. had turned away from lead, to focus on refrigeration. The running refrigeration chemicals at the time were toxic, so once he developed a process for making a novel group of chemicals more efficient, all he had to do was show the compounds as ostensibly safe, and Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) could really take off. To prove their safety, Midgley Jr. inhaled CFCs in front of audiences. Production and adoption of CFCs skyrocketed through the next half century.
Finally, families could keep food fresh for longer: saving trips to the grocery store, and wasting less food—on the surface, an environmental success story. Midgley Jr. certainly didn’t desire CFCs’ buildup in the atmosphere, and chain reaction depleting the critical ozone layer, but is that enough to excuse the abuse to the planet and human life? Only if we believe Midgley Jr. couldn’t have been expected to anticipate such a result, as economic historian and journalist Tim Harford outlines.
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Midgley Jr.’s stunts with CFCs showed a personal endorsement of their smooth inhalability, but once scientists started raising alarms about atmospheric buildup, the business interests were quick to suppress, dispute, and obfuscate the findings. In his piece on Midgely Jr, The inventor who almost ended the world, Harford goes on to explain how the CFC industry deflected scientific criticism by minimizing robust theories as “computer projections, based on series of uncertain assumptions.” It would be decades before scientists’ evidence was compelling enough for public action to overcome industry lobbyists, and move to correct corporate misdeeds.
In 1987, world governments convened to phase out CFCs, and agreed to The Montreal Protocol. In 1995, the Nobel Prize in chemistry went to the scientists whose evidence pulled the ozone back from the brink, and all of us with it. Today, the ozone hasn’t completely healed to pre-1980 levels, but the collective action to move in the right direction still presents a global triumph in more responsible climate stewardship and market regulation. Midgely Jr.’s ignorance might not have cost society so dearly, had only profiteering not continued to block the way of science, policy, and justice, for decade after decade.
Weighing Us All Down
The story of Midgley Jr.’s other globally threatening invention (leaded gasoline) may have met official sanctions in the US sooner than CFCs, but his role in concealing known dangers from the public is far more disturbing. Midgley Jr. pushed forward tetraethyl lead factory projects after an initial chemical plant killed over 10% of its workers, and its directors committed over half of the remaining workers to psychiatric institutions by force, as a result of chemical exposure. Though “he’d just taken months off of work to recover from lead poisoning, himself,” Midgley Jr. nevertheless poured tetraethyl lead “all over his hand and breathed it in deeply,” as part of a staged performance advocating for lead’s safety, Harford conveys.
Perhaps worse, a safer, cheaper alternative was readily known by Midgley Jr. and his business associates: ethyl alcohol. Despite its chemical and cost efficiency, Midgley Jr. couldn’t market ethyl alcohol as the solution to engine knocking, because, as Harford illuminates;
…any old farmer could make ethyl alcohol from grain, but tetraethyl lead was something that could be patented and monetized.
By this line of thinking, manufacturing and marketing leaded gasoline was a business necessity, regardless of harm to hundreds of millions of people.
It took a full century after Midgley Jr.’s fatal lead discovery for humanity to fully end its use in gasoline: achieving this milestone when Algeria finally outlawed the fuel for cars in 2021. In those 100 years, the elevated lead levels in human blood has been linked to over 1 million premature deaths per year, a boom in 20th-century crime, and lowering IQs of US-born babies of the 1960s and ‘70s by over 5 points each, to name a few impacts.
Technolegacies
Whether the human suffering after blatant lying was worth the money or temporary fame to Midgley Jr., he wouldn’t get to enjoy it past the age of 55, since another of his own inventions strangled him on accident.
When technologists insist on moving fast and breaking something, the chance of negative unintended consequences undoubtedly amplifies. What’s more, when strong financial incentives promote a wall of lies to defend business interests in the face of their clear social ills, science and human advancement is hindered by the partnership of business and technology, not accelerated.
Entrenched industries tend to insist they are the only, or best, option for society to achieve a certain aim. And yet, Harford chronicles, “when governments finally banned leaded gasoline, scientists found different ways to prevent engine knock. When governments banned CFCs, scientists found different ways to make fridges, and air conditioners, and aerosols.” Alternatives exist, if only we can compel businesses to act with our society’s interest in mind, through levers such as conducting oneself with integrity, advocating for sound policy, and seeking and supporting responsible businesses.
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Climate tech, if implemented thoughtfully, also puts pressure on incumbent, socially damaging industries to act more responsibly, by unlocking competitive sustainability for their sector, or competing with them directly. At the same time, risks of greenwashing, unnecessary production, heedless resource extraction, and misleading spending loom. Ethyl alcohol ought to remind climate technologists that high-tech business wants can conceal low-tech solutions, and the missions climate tech companies claim to support.
Holding businesses accountable is the only way to safeguard society from runaway market forces, and channel private scientific spending toward more human flourishing, and less short-term profiteering to our collective misfortune.
The Closer
A legend!
“Today was Fletch's 100th day at Palisades Tahoe. At 70 years old, he's clocked in 1,311,197 vertical feet and 1,168 lift rides this season through the app… it's a love affair a lot of us can relate to.”