Good Morning
What we’re reading this week:
Canadian wildfire emissions reach record high in 2023 (R)
America aims for nuclear-power renaissance (E)
The Greendicator
Top Deals of the Week
![BLUU SEAFOOD BLUU SEAFOOD](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd2fe6110-b810-4534-bf0d-44e13d4b0142_1031x911.jpeg)
Carbon Recycling International, a company that produces methanol from carbon dioxide, raised a $30M round led by Equinor Ventures (PRN)
GeologicAI, a startup using AI to digitize rocks and minerals, raised a $20M Series A from Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BW)
Low-carbon cement startup Material Evolution raised a $19M Series A led by Kompas VC (TC)
Cultivated fish products startup Bluu Seafood raised a $17.5M Series A led by Sparkfood and LBBW VC (TC)
Carbon removal marketplace Supercritical raised a $13M Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners (TC)
Laser-based nuclear fusion startup Focused Energy raised an $11M Series A led by Prime Movers Lab (PRN)
TreaTech, a Swiss engineering company focused on circular waste treatment, raised a $10M Series A led by Engie New Venture and Montrose Environmental Group (FN)
HVAC innovation startup Gradient Comfort raised a $9M Series A led by Climate Investment (FN)
Hyf, a startup transforming food by processing wastewater into feedstocks for biomanufacturing and clean water, raised $9M in funding led by Synthesis Capital (FN)
Raincoat, a scalable climate insurance solutions company, raised a $6.5M seed round led by Two Sigma Ventures (PRN)
Carbonwave, a developer of ultra-regenerative advanced biomaterials made from seaweed, received a $6M investment from Pegasus Capital Advisors and the Global Fund for Coral Reefs (PRN)
Rhizocore Technologies, a startup producing special fungi to ensure trees survive and thrive, raised $4.5M in funding led by ReGen Ventures, Collaborative Fund, and Grok Ventures (FN)
Crux, a provider of an ecosystem for sustainable finance, raised a $4.3M seed extension round led by Ardent Venture Partners (FN)
Highwood Emissions Management, a startup providing emissions management software, raised a $3M seed round led by Energy Capital Ventures (FN)
Green Theory
Techno-imagination: Looms, Chess, and Snowflakes
“Okay—business idea…” starts the infamous Silicon Valley line of chit-chat. Even if the speaker suggests that their idea is original, a common response will be: “I’m sure that, even if—especially if—it’s a good idea, someone else is already doing it.”
In defense of these skeptics, they are often correct. A cursory search will yield past or current examples of the same ideas.
Still, if everyone employed this self-defeating logic, there would be no new businesses. True innovation often lies where no one else is willing to go, and that may include leveraging a novel advantage to compete directly with an entrenched industry.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa2c15830-670b-4311-b3c3-722e92bfbaf0_1362x928.png)
It often takes a dreamer, or an accident, to break through the veil of stagnation, and introduce change. As we see from the transformative inventions of the early industrial revolution, it doesn’t take an expert to catapult a sector forward. Further, although hoaxes and deceptions (in business, or otherwise) are largely negative, they can have surprisingly powerful ripple effects, when we consider their role in expanding imaginations.
A story of imagination, lies, and innovation touches every piece of cotton cloth. Perhaps you’re wearing some, right now. How does this tale teach us about innovation amidst the climate crisis?
Slow Fashion, speeding up
In the age of fast fashion, it’s easy to forget that the industrial revolution started by industrializing clothing production, over 200 years ago. At the same time, the mechanization didn’t occur all at once. Invention by invention, the way we made cloth changed, and those employed in the making—whether operating a loom at home, or shoveling coal outside a factory—were forced to adapt to these shocks to their industry.
Through the 1770s, the craft of weaving cotton grew so profitable that cotton spinners (the step before weaving) strained to keep up with demand. A series of inventions (or ancient tools adapted to 18th-century England) brought the industry into temporary balance, by mechanizing spinning. Not everyone supported these devices. Brits rioted in protest of new machines—destroying prototypes and equipment town by town.
Nevertheless, rioters couldn’t dismantle new machines faster than they were built, and now England had the opposite problem: too much yarn, rather than too little. By royal decree, this yarn had to stay on British soil, until woven, but the excess was piling up. If the cotton yarn were exported, some feared the entire domestic weaving industry would disappear.
Stubborn Faith
In 1784, in Derbyshire, a clergyman sat to share a drink with several other tourists. They discussed the expiration of a cotton-spinning patent, due in 1785, which would further worsen the glut of yarn, and what could be done about it.
As Victoria Finlay recounts in the thorough and insightful Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World, an unsuspecting clergyman, Edmund Cartwright, went from knowing nothing of weaving to the category’s foremost inventor.
There was one obvious solution, [Cartwright] pointed out, which was to apply the same ideas to weaving as to spinning, and make a mechanical loom. Not possible, said a man from Manchester, ‘on account of the variety of movements required in the operation of weaving’.
That man knew looms. Cartwright, on the other hand, had never actually seen one in operation nor—on his own admission—had he ever spent even an idle moment wondering how they worked. –Victoria Finlay, Fabric
Neither objections from industry insiders, nor his self-awareness of ignorance stopped Cartwright. Finlay continues: [Cartwright] decided to build the machine that would justify the argument. He still didn’t think to look at a [hand-operated] loom, which is probably why his first prototype … was such a monster.”
One patented device deep, Cartwright finally stooped to consider others’ constructions and admitted: “you will guess my astonishment when I compared their easy mode of operation with mine,” but he was just getting started.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd02e5811-8f22-4e55-afe9-420a6ded1657_2090x1188.png)
Cartwright went on to create two more improved editions of the weaving machine. Though his inventions could seem inevitable, we still can’t make a crochet machine in 2023. Perhaps another inventor would have come along soon after, in absence of Cartwright’s ingenuity, but what can explain his audacious leap from clergyman to machinist?
Automatic Checkmate
Finlay traces Cartwright’s mechanical inspiration to the source. In contrast to leading textile practices and devices,
[Cartwright] did know about a different kind of machine, shown in London the previous year, attracting huge and admiring crowds. The astonishing Automation Chess Player – also known as the mechanical Turk – consisted of a life-sized robotic figure … who would take on all comers at chess. –Victoria Finlay, Fabric
Hundreds of years before Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov, a chess-playing “robot” was already wowing people. For a time before computers, the inventor of the Chess Player was obliged to offer mechanical explanations to the audience, as Finlay relates:
It appeared to work by being wound up like a pocket watch every ten moves or so, and its inventor was always meticulous about letting audiences see all the wheels and levers and mechanisms inside it before it started. If the Chess Player could win at chess, Cartwright argued, there was no doubt that a Weaving Machine could be applied to the altogether simpler task of making cloth. –Victoria Finlay, Fabric
Cartwright took a powerful lesson from seeing the Automaton Chess Player, but it was based, in hindsight, on a completely false premise. Finlay postulates, and reveals:
And perhaps if anyone had told [Cartwright] then that the Automated Chess Player was a hoax [emphasis added] – controlled by a small person who was extremely good at chess, with their legs hidden … – he might not have had the courage to just go ahead and invent what he had imagined. –Victoria Finlay, Fabric
Lacking the powerful demonstration of what he thought was a machine, Cartwright would have much more easily folded to the Manchester loom expert, who called his idea impossible. Despite the complete falsehood of the Automated Chess Player’s mechanical appearance, it opened Cartwright’s mind to new possibilities.
‘Why is nobody doing these crazy big things anymore?’
Tech ideas that claim to be bold practically grow on trees, but which ones truly inspire you? As Tim Harford covers in The Man Who Played with Hurricanes, 20th-century inventors tried to push the limits of the material world.
The 1940s inventors trying to manipulate the weather (launching dry ice from bombers into hurricanes, among other audacious stunts) exhibited an astonishing level of imagination. After recounting these unusual, “pure science” explorations by General Electric, Harford invokes Elizabeth Kolbert’s Under a White Sky, and her discussion of carbon capture and other geoengineering efforts.
Creating a through-line from the 1940s to today, Harford explains, “[Kolbert] also talks to a physicist who founded the field of negative emissions (basically, sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere). He came up with the idea after asking a friend over a beer, ‘why is nobody doing these crazy big things anymore?’”
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fae79c900-70d4-4041-83be-c4f7a084a30b_1006x1380.png)
Harford answers this question much in the way discussed in Did one 1920s techie make all of Gen X dumber? To paraphrase, scientific discovery, especially supercharged by business interest, can damage society horrendously, as unforeseen (or intentionally hidden) downsides accumulate.
In the last hundred years, we have far more evidence of our inventions going awry, and so some scientists and engineers are wise to ponder the impacts of their work more deeply. Ultimately, we must balance pragmatism with imagination, to solve the climate crisis. We ought not rely on longshot technical fixes to bail us out, given we already have advanced, proven climate solutions, such as solar, today.
We can and should take inspiration from the most absurd human endeavors—indeed, even hoaxes—but cannot overlook the lesson to carefully consider the social and planetary costs when someone says, “Okay—business idea…”