Good Morning
What we’re reading this week:
Why polar bears are no longer the poster image of climate change (BBC)
New (sustainable) grain just dropped (NPR)
Should we slap cigarette-style warnings on meat? (T)
The Greendicator
Top Deals of the Week
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Technique Solaire, a French solar energy distributor, raised a $213.7M funding round from Bpifrance and Crédit Agricole (EU)
Element Energy, a Menlo Park-based battery management technology startup, raised $111M in financing: a $73M Series B co-led by a large clean energy generation company and Cohort Ventures and a $38M debt facility provided by Keyframe Capital Partners (PRN)
Deep Sky, a Montreal-based carbon removal project developer, raised a $57.5M Series A co-led by Brightspark Ventures and Whitecap Venture Partners (PRN)
Tenet, a climate fintech platform helping consumers and businesses drive EVs, raised $30M+ in funding: a $10M Series A led by Nyca Partners and a $20M warehouse debt facility from Silicon Valley Bank (BW)
French single-use plastic product reduction startup Le Fourgon raised a $10.8M Series A led by Id4 and Teampact (EU)
Switch Maritime, a startup developing hydrogen fuel cell and battery electric zero-carbon ferries, raised a $10M Series A led by Nexus Development Capital (FN)
Ridepanda, a provider of a micro-mobility-as-a-benefit platform, raised $7.5M in debt and equity led by Blackhorn Ventures and Yamaha Motor Ventures (FN)
Optiwatt, a consumer energy optimization app and operating system, raised a $7M Series A led by Navitas Capital (FN)
InPlanet, a Munich-based startup working on carbon removal, raised $5.8M in funding led by FoodLabs and Salvia (FN)
OCOchem, a startup commercializing technology to electrochemically convert carbon dioxide and water into sustainable platform molecules, raised a $5M seed round led by TO Ventures (VC)
Italian DAC startup CarpeCarbon raised a $1.8M pre-seed round led by CDP Venture Capital (EU)
Bio-Logical, a Kenyan biochar-based carbon sequestration startup, raised a $1M seed round led by Steyn Group (FN)
Green Theory
Sinking, Fast and Slow
In 1935, a true colossus of the skies soared north along the California coast off Big Sur. 785 feet long, the US Navy’s rigid flying airship, the USS Macon, boasted an impressive speed of 85 mph, a range of nearly 7,000 miles, and carried a small fleet of planes inside it. Little did its commander know, this flight would be the Macon’s last voyage. The airship’s dramatic destruction not only marks the end of the dirigible, lighter-than-air dreams of the US Navy, but also holds lessons for the modern conversation over the energy transition.
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Two camps wrestle over whether we can tech our way out of the climate crisis.
On one side, systemic doomers say that the energy transition (swapping fossil fuels for renewables) won’t solve all of our ecological problems, so it merely distracts us from the more dramatic changes needed to protect us and the planet.
On the other side, technological optimists believe we will solve all challenges by building and deploying the right hardware and the right software.
In the latest episode of Chris Nelder’s Energy Transition Show (full-length episode available for free), he unpacks both of these perspectives with an Oxford lecturer. After illuminating where each side makes important points or acts willfully ignorant, the interview shifts to focusing on how these groups ended up so far apart, and what a less-polarizing, realistic view may be: the transitionistas.
Indeed, we face more problems than the energy transition alone can solve. At the same time, does that fact free us from needing to clean up our energy supply, when we know how to do it already?
Doomer Rumors
Calling the energy transition an extension of “business as usual” anchors the systemic doom view. As one analogy goes, swapping out the Titanic’s engines for electric motors wouldn’t have saved it from the icebergs ahead. The systemic doomers are correct that we need to seriously rethink the ways we live and interact in order to prevent the many of the worst ravages of the climate crisis. They point to the relatively small share of renewables in the global energy mix to say that renewables “transition” is simply a way to extend the use of fossil fuels. Systemic doomers often absolve themselves, therefore, of needing to work toward lowering emissions—they’re planning their theories of change for a post-ecological collapse world, since most think we are headed through planetary tipping points, past which we cannot reverse. Before society as we know it falls apart, they advocate slowing or reversing growth as the only solution to climate change.
(tech)no problems
Technological optimists have some powerful retorts to offer. For one, even if tech can’t solve everything, at least the energy transition does something good. Though renewables are a small part of the mix today, they’re dominating new energy capacity. What’s more, while the systemic doomers have been slandering renewables for decades, the clean energy industry has innovated its way to far less expensive, greener solutions.
Early in the adoption of a new energy technology, optimists point out, it’s easy for detractors dismiss it as reinforcing incumbent energy sources. Oxford lecturer and researcher Marco Raugei draws an analogy to animate this optimist counterargument: solar is no more an ‘oil-extender’ than coal was a ‘horse-extender’, even if early coal mining relied on horse-drawn carts, at first. Renewables aren’t fossil fuels in disguise, but instead key emissions drawdown solutions.
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Where and why these camps went wrong
Nelder repeatedly criticizes systemic doom papers for using outdated figures on renewables, though it’s understandable that individuals outside the clean tech sector may not see the stunning pace of progress, and how it would alter their models. This doomer mistake is great news for those worried we have no control in staving off societal collapse!
The technological optimists get a bit lost in thinking growth cures everything. As the venture capital firm Andressen Horowitz published in a manifesto last month: “We believe everything good is downstream of growth.” Given the dubious history of tech’s ‘growth’, we must ask of this manifesto: ‘good’ (and ‘growth’) for whom? When techno optimists get this extreme, they lose their minimal common ground with systemic doomers. Since the more important bottlenecks to climate action are political and social, rather than technological research and development, it’s essential to recognize technologists’ roles in undermining social and political institutions, and doomers’ role in unwittingly propping up the oil agenda.
Raugei explains how each camp stopped listening to the other, in two crystallizing lessons that would make Dr. Katharine Hayhoe proud:
each side can have core parts of its argument that are correct, while other parts are completely wrong or outdated
each side can learn sound concepts and theories, while completely misapplying those concepts to their subject
Attempting to shore up weak parts of their own arguments with distractions or abstractions, instead of listening to the genuine critique from the other side, each deepens the divide and loses touch with a shared reality.
Tech: angel, devil, or something else?
In their purest forms, each camp either paints tech-driven growth as the savior or destroyer of humanity and ecology. If the doomers are right, and we’re headed toward ecological collapse, there’s no doubt that renewables will slow that collapse, and shape it for the better, compared to fossil fuels. Instead, many doomers go so far as to say that all crisis mitigation efforts, such as the energy transition, are a distraction from the dire need to train humanity for survival without electricity.
Unintentionally illustrating the systemic doomers’ envisioned world, Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel, Station Eleven, portrays humanity’s struggles through a post-energy future, after a terrifying societal collapse. Though an entertaining and ostensibly realistic image of a world where society fell apart in 2010 or so, readers in the decades to come will be lost wondering one key question: where are the renewables?
St. John Mandel was writing her book at a time when solar was 2-3x as expensive as it is today. Back then, the feasibility of the energy transition, and possibility of robust and resilient distributed energy sources, seemed far slimmer, especially in the public eye. But it’s not the 2010s anymore, and it’s undeniable that a home or community with rooftop solar would be better equipped for societal collapse than one without.
Systemic doomers, stuck citing outdated figures for the cost and efficiency of renewables, can’t imagine a world where we still have energy, and it’s not from fossil fuels. If they were serious about wanting to prepare humanity for the worst, and not just repeat their decades-old talking points, they’d be the biggest champions of renewables, rather than detractors. On the flip side, many techno optimists are the same folks responsible for accelerating our clip toward collapse—exacerbating inequality, environmental degradation, and institutional erosion. Chris Nelder offers a middle path: be a transitionista.
Transitionistas smoothing the path
As Nelder puts it, transitionistas simply want to replace the destructive and wasteful fossil fuels with renewable energy, without campaigning for or against growth itself. Transitionistas accept that the energy transition won’t solve the entire climate crisis. Transitionistas accept that much, if not most, tech is an unproductive waste of time and resources, as we barrel toward catastrophic disaster. Even holding these truths, the transitionistas still develop and deploy clean energy because it’s one of the only strategies that is working to fight climate change and secure energy resilience at scale.
As the systemic doomers know, political and social change will be needed to fight the climate crisis. As the tech optimists argue, that fact shouldn’t trivialize the importance of the energy transition. Regardless of where society’s headed, renewables will put us on a brighter path than we could otherwise walk. If social and ecological collapse are a guarantee, transitionistas know we still need clean energy, and the Macon crash helps show us why.
How would you handle Mayday?
When a strong storm gust sheared off one of the USS Macon’s main fins, and several helium bags began to lose their precious gas, the airship and airplanes within were already destined to sink to the ocean floor in a crumpled wreck. Between oil fires and massive metal frames disintegrating around the escaping crew when the dirigible buckled into the water, you might imagine the 80+ crewmen as victims of a salty, drowning nightmare that would leave few survivors: like the crash of its sister airship, the USS Akron, two years earlier, where over 95% of the crew died. To the contrary, the Macon’s crew hardly got wet, and only 2 fatalities resulted from the demise of the largest flying craft the US ever built, as they guided the airship carefully to the water over a 20-minute period. The Macon was done for, but it didn’t mean the crew needed to be goners, too.
Whether or not you think society’s ‘ship’ is doomed, we should all want to keep as many folks from drowning as we can. The transitionistas offer us a more balanced and actionable strategy to secure human flourishing than either the doomers’ de-growth or techies’ growth-worship ever could. The climate crisis is real, but so is our opportunity to act on it, by transitioning our energy supply.
The Closer
A bobcat atop a very tall saguaro cactus at Lost Dutchman State Park in Arizona.
[📷 P. Giebelhausen + H. Sunderland-O'Neal]
Thanks for writing! This was a very helpful articulation of a middle way. What I’ve been grappling with for the past decade, though, is how to orient career in light of this tension. Do I go into climate tech, despite being more of a doomer than technocrat, work on systemic issues - but where to even start within a deeply entrenched economy and society - or jump ship to some other more tangible dimension of impact such as education which inevitably has implications (though indirect) for climate? Curious if you have thoughts on where the “transitionista” view leads you in terms of deciding where to focus in the face of such a massive problem.