Good Morning
What we’re reading this week:
The U.N. Issues a Final Warning on the Climate—and a Plan (NY)
Is ocean conservation the next climate tech? (TC)
The Greendicator
Top Deals of the Week
Amogy, a three-year-old Brooklyn startup that is developing ammonia-based fuel cells for the heavy-duty transportation sector, raised a $139 million Series B-1 round led by SK Innovation
Reebelo, a marketplace for affordable and sustainable consumer electronics, raised a $29M Series A extension led by Cathay Innovation (PRN)
Candela, a nine-year-old Swedish startup that designs and manufactures electric-powered hydrofoils, raised a $20 million round. The deal was co-led by EQT Ventures, Joel Eklund, and Svante Nilo Bengtsson (TC)
EV Fleet-as-a-Service startup Revolv raised a $15M Series A led by Greenbacker (PRN)
Andes, a five-year-old startup based in Alameda, Ca., that adds microorganisms to soil in order to remove CO2 and thus generate carbon renewal credits, raised an additional $15 million in Series A funding. Investors included Voyager VC (TC)
Windfall Bio, a climate startup capturing and converting methane emissions into organic fertilizer, raised a $9M seed round led by Mayfield and UNTITLED (BW)
The Climate Choice, a three-year-old Berlin startup that helps companies track CO2 emissions in their supply chains, raised a $2 million pre-seed round led by Gutter Capital and Possibilian Ventures (TC)
Green Theory
Racism’s costs to the environment, and the dividends of solidarity
When you think of big oil, do you imagine the rolling waterfront hills of the northern California Bay Area? For the residents of Richmond, CA, there isn’t much of a choice. From many vantages around the Bay, in fact, Chevron’s enormous oil refinery can be seen extending across the landscape.
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The neighborhood segregation, by wealth and racial identity, combined with large corporate polluting presence, made Richmond, CA the perfect place for Heather McGhee to explore race and the environment in the US.
McGhee dedicates an entire chapter of her 2021 book, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, to the costly links between white supremacy and climate denialism. McGhee also traces the path to prosperity, in detailing stories of multiracial coalitions that united to overcome corporate capture and self-destructive white governance, and implement policy victories for the environment and communities.
How Racism Supercharges Environmental Degradation
To start, even when controlling for political party, white people in the US are more likely to disbelieve manmade global warming, the stronger an individual’s racial resentment. The disproportionate amount of white people in denial of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change signals the grip that fossil fuel interests have in manipulating white supremacy to their advantage. McGhee goes on to show that, despite being the most likely to push for climate action, non-whites are grossly underrepresented in “Big Greens” (climate organizations and lobbying groups).
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What can explain this illogical rejection of science among white people? McGhee focuses in on three supporting structures that enmesh people in climate delusion: social dominance theory, racial resentment, and system justification. She explains the reasoning and fault of this coalescence of ideas when it comes to climate:
“Perhaps it makes sense, if you spent a lifetime seeing yourself as the winner of the zero-sum competition for status, that you would have learned along the way to accept inequality as normal: that you’d come to attribute society’s wins and losses solely to the player’s skill and merit.
You might also learn that, if there are problems, you and yours are likely to be spared the costs. The thing is, that’s just not the case with environment and climate change. We live under the same sky.” —The Sum of Us, Heather McGhee
There are few better technologies for maintaining the illusion that we do not live under the same sky. Sacrifice zones represent the horrifying name for areas designated for pollution or waste, and they’re most likely to be found in historically exploited communities. The separation of powerful decision makers, from communities witnessing damages first-hand, cloaks the shared burden, and risk, that everyone truly faces. If we continue to ignore climate change as the pressing issue of the decade, the most vulnerable will suffer “first and worst,” surely, but none are immune to climate risk.
Despite disproportionate exposure to other city and corporate waste products in poorer and less-white areas of Richmond, California, the wealthy parts of the city still see about the same number of air-polluting toxins, measured at dangerous levels, for about the same number of days as the other neighborhoods.
Zero-sum Dumb
McGhee’s argument exposes the way racism costs everyone, in not only helping conceal environmental catastrophe from those in power, but also blocking climate action. Zero-sum thinking (gassed up by fossil fuel media) locks some into believing public protections are wastes, or that the government can’t ever be trusted to regulate. When white people wield their outsized political power to protect corporations, rather than the environment, short-term gains for the wealthiest are prioritized above guaranteeing subsistence for the most at-risk.
Further, corporations, such as Chevron, here in the Bay Area, actively exploit racial divisions among local communities to block governance acting against company interests. Much to the contrary of what Chevron politicians claim, it’s in everyone’s best interest to protect the most vulnerable, and start to recover the over $250 billion annual cost of climate change in the US (as of McGhee’s 2021 writing).
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A Swedish researcher, accompanying McGhee on a trip in the US, was shocked to see such a dramatic level of class disparity visible on public transit, and walking down the street. McGhee posits that countries such as Sweden, where rights such as housing and healthcare are protected, find it easier to unite on climate action. Since there’s a clear, shared public value around the government’s responsibility to prevent suffering of the unsheltered or unwell, there are fewer politicians stalling out progress, or actively trying to burn everything down for a buck.
In the both diverse and infamously white-supremacist US—where social protections lack—McGhee suggests climate action and other progressive measures hated by conservatives and moderates are blocked by the same lines of thinking: these groups being largely dominated by white people, who believe individuals must/should fight for their slice of the pie.
Even if someone doesn’t want to establish housing as a right in the US, there’s simply no way to fight over the climate pie, and end up with a country, or a planet. Instead, we must focus on expanding the pie, by sharing it better. McGhee summarizes:
“... with the environment and climate change, many white people’s skeptical worldview, combined with their outsized political power, has life or death consequences for us all.” —The Sum of Us, Heather McGhee
The most vulnerable will be the most impacted by climate change, but that doesn’t change the fact that, as McGhee explains: most white people in the US are neutral on, or opposed to, fighting climate change, and a majority will suffer, nonetheless. Human flourishing, and harmony with planetary systems, is anything but zero-sum.
The Solidarity Dividend
Centuries of white supremacy and exploitative corporations, among other forces, have pushed human civilization disastrously close to climate breakdown, as more and more species go extinct each year. Even in the super-polluting US, however, organizers and activists are looking past racial divides to find the solidarity needed to better protect common goods, such as the land, air, and water, often gobbled up by corporations and their customers, today.
McGhee wrote, in early 2021, “there is more energy and alignment in the climate field than there has been in decades, in large part because movement leaders have been forced to see the damage posed by white supremacy inside and outside their ranks.” The chapter concludes focusing on the recent trend of unity that holds the key to shifting business practices to align with climate needs:
“Siloed, and often at cross-purposes, [climate] groups weren’t powerful enough to take on the strategic deployment of white identity politics, backed by fossil fuel billions…Now they’re linking arms around a shared vision of a sustainable Just Transition from fossil fuels, that guarantees economic security for all those who are suffering, whether they’re asthmatic school kids of color, or—yes—coal miners.
That vision is popular with 59% of the [US] population. Multiracial coalitions in cities and states have won versions of the Green New Deal in California, New Mexico, New York, and Washington.” —The Sum of Us, Heather McGhee
In concert with lessons for regulation, climate tech proponents must also be wary of the blind spots, or destructive cycles, caused by tech’s embedded white supremacy.
Co-founder with Bill McKibben at 350.org, May Boeve told McGhee: “It was naive, looking back at it now … but we didn't realize how much racism was holding us back from building the coalition we needed to win. We’re trying to make sure the whole field never makes that mistake again.”
If those with the most power and influence can recognize their own benefit in helping the most vulnerable, perhaps we can finally safeguard our planet. In order to outperform the outsized influence of fossil fuels and white supremacy’s teamwork, and unlock the solidarity dividend, environmental organizations and climate companies must champion diversity.
The Closer
Shrimp week at the Monterey Bay Aquarium!