🥑 Can Profit-Seeking Cos Really Help Save the Planet?
(069) With a little help from informed citizens and their gov'ts - maybe
Good Morning
What we’re reading this week:
Can Profit-Seeking Companies Really Help Save the Planet? (E)
Bill McKibben’s Too Much Climate Energy, Not Enough Climate Action (NY)
Australia Passes a Law to Reduce Emissions, At Last (E)
Mexico Named Deadliest Country for Environmental Activists (NYT)
The Greendicator
Top Deals of the Week
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Farizon Auto, an EV truck brand owned by Geely, is seeking to raise ~$300M in a round set to be led by Singapore-based logistics and real estate giant GLP (BBG)
Clean energy storage startup Moxion Power raised a $100M Series B led by Tamarack Global (BW)
Sitetracker, a startup providing deployment operations management software for critical infrastructure providers, raised $96M: a $66M Series D led by Energize Ventures and a $30M RCF from BridgeBank (PRN)
Prolific Machines, a two-year-old San Francisco startup that aims to develop cell-based meat without using expensive recombinant proteins for cell production, raised a $42 million seed and Series A. Investors included Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Mayfield. TechCrunch has more here.
Solfácil, a four-year-old São Paulo startup that sells solar equipment and finances loans to consumers, raised a $30 million extension to its Series C round. Fifth Wall Capital led the round (BBG)
SINAI Technologies, a five-year-old San Francisco startup whose mission is to help companies automate the way they are monitoring and pricing carbon analysis to better calculate their emissions, raised a $22 million Series A round led by Energize Ventures (R)
Plant-based food company Wicked Kitchen raised $20M in funding led by Woody Harrelson, Ahimsa VC, and NRPT (PRN)
Woltair, a four-year-old Prague startup that connects consumers who want to install heat pumps and solar panels with installation and maintenance technicians, raised a $16.3 million Series A round led by ArcTern Ventures (FT)
EverestLabs, an AI system which sorts recyclables, raised a $16.1M Series A led by Translink Capital (TC)
Flora, a tech-driven sustainable ecommerce platform, raised a $9M seed round led by Lux Capital, Climate Capital, and Gokul Rajaram (BW)
Aspen Creek Digital, a renewable bitcoin mining operator, raised an $8M Series A led by Galaxy Digital and Polychain Capital (PRN)
Climate Club, a one-year-old New York startup that incentivizes employees to reduce their carbon consumption, raised a $6.5 million seed round co-led by XYZ Venture Capital and Vestigo Ventures (LL)
Kopperfield, an 11-month-old, Bend, Ore.-based startup that aims to create a platform that makes installing a charger as easy for homeowners as ordering new furniture, has raised $5 million in seed funding. General Catalyst and investor Lachy Groom co-led the round (TC)
Bitgreen, a New York startup that has built a blockchain platform to enable backers to finance critical sustainability projects, raised a $5 million round through Republic, a crowdfunding platform. TFN has more here.
Papaya Technologies, a London startup that is developing software to help fleet operators source and manage electric or light-electric vehicles, raised a $3.5 million seed round led by Giant Ventures (TC)
Green Theory
Volcanoes’ Curse: A Lava and a Fighter
In 2015, the Polynesian Kingdom of Tonga got a new king and a new land mass. Joining two previously separated islands, the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruptions left a new, larger island in their wake.
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Flash forward to activity in December of 2021 to January 2022, and a few massive underwater eruptions and global shockwaves later, Hunga Tonga and Hunga Ha’apai, the two adjacent islands, stand alone once more. The country of dozens of nearby inhabited islands suffered from flooding, ash, and other destructive impacts.
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In addition to troubling local devastation, the plume sent particles some 30 miles up into the stratosphere. The sulfuric exhaust of the Mt. Pinatubo eruption in 1991 cooled the earth by an estimated 1℃, but also darkened the sun by about 10% for the year. What makes the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption different? Given the underwater source of the blast, 55 million tons of water vapor (a major greenhouse gas) also joined the upward ascent, inducing a warming effect, to the tune of 0.5℃ for the next 3-5 years.
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Proponents of solar geoengineering look to volcanoes as their prime example of the power of emitting sun-darkening molecules at high altitudes to cool the planet. Unfortunately, these underwater eruptions deliver the opposite effect, and (just as with above-ground eruptions) diminish access to solar energy. The 2022 eruptions having increased stratospheric water vapor content by about 5%, the moist air robs solar panels and plants of rays of light while redirecting that energy to heating the globe faster. Higher levels of stratospheric water vapor sets off rising temperature feedback loops, and higher levels of humidity and heat are known to diminish solar panel efficiency. A 5% increase in humidity accompanies around a 7.5% loss of power. While land eruptions may bring temporary cooling, both land and undersea volcanic activity threatens our access to the sun.
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The stakes for solar energy today sit much higher than three decades’ past. 10% dimming from Mt. Pinatubo in 1991 would have eliminated 50GWh of solar electricity, or roughly 5, 000 US household’s annual use in 2021. Though the stratosphere doesn’t contain all of the relevant water vapor for this calculation, if we assume just a 1% loss over our planet’s 2021 production of 1002.9TWh in solar energy, that’s the equivalent of over 90,000 US households’ annual electricity use lost, not counting new solar added this year and beyond.
Humanity’s grasp of volcanoes leaves much to learn, even today, but the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai 2022 eruptions underscore the risk of banking on dimming the sun. Planetary-scale events expose our new energy systems to new threats, and injecting even more particles into the stratosphere presents a tantalizing but hazardous band-aid to slowing global warming.
The Closer
“Within two hours, a team of researchers from Monterey Bay Aquarium and Cal State Long Beach tagged four juvenile white sharks and observed two or three others, all within a short swim of a popular Santa Cruz County beach. It was the first time the team had tagged them north of Santa Barbara…” -SF Chronicle