I question how much of this is going to actually help with climate change and how much is just inflating another bubble that will enrich investors and do little for the climate.
So many of the startups being backed are building things that either have a very minimal impact or they're based on technologies that are so far out they won't be commercially viable for 20 years, if ever.
The big things we need are all boring infrastructure investments that don't have startup-like returns. Things like rearchitecting the electrical grid, upgrading rail and public transit, etc.
> So many of the startups being backed are building things that either have a very minimal impact or they're based on technologies that are so far out they won't be commercially viable for 20 years, if ever.
Sometimes I wonder if this the true cost of finding successful breakthroughs. Presumably lessons will be learned from these failures that will eventually lead to the successful implementation down the line. It's not a start up but if for example Meta collapses then it will still have done a lot of good for advancing VR tech.
Your reply is the evidence, you didn't quote the Hyperloop vs Magnetic Train argument, you don't care about the problem, you care about an argumentation that is against personal gain ;)
Have we replaced the ISS? Why haven't we?
Why Europe was so dependent on Russian energy and was hesitant to give up and pursue nuclear for this long?
Why does the west still need to burn coal in 2023?
Why isn't there any Magnetic Train in the US?
Why nobody has access to universal free healthcare in the US?
I can continue for hours, but you shown your lack of interest
What science needs a manned orbital space station? Maintaining one, particularly in LEO, is expensive. That money is better spent on unmanned orbital experiments, unmanned space telescopes, unmanned robotic missions and developing technological capability for manned space transport. Not on vanity projects.
> Why does the west still need to burn coal in 2023?
This is a strange stone to throw at the West after complimenting China.
> Why isn't there any Magnetic Train in the US?
Where did magnetic trains of all things come from?
The broad point is massive collective benefits have been realized by people pursuing selfish ends. It takes an incredibly skewed reading of history to conclude otherwise. That doesn't mean selfishness and greed don't have problems, or that every system must rely on them exclusively.
Those things may require government investment, but if there is going to be a lot of investment in those things then it becomes worth it to figure out how to do those things more efficiently. Startups can innovate on the technology for upgrading the grid, or methods of financing it.
No startup is going to do didly-squat about the climate. If you want to reduce CO2 you will need nation-state commitment to nuclear power. Nothing else matters.
We should try though, for example did you know that 1% of humanities global energy production (that is, our civilisations entire output) is sunken into producing nitrogen based fertilisers,
That’s why my startup is working on catalysis models, so that we can get some catalysts to dramatically decrease the energy requirements of these enormous industrial processes. Also things like green chemistry (another project we are working on) is going to remove the need for a petroleum based chemical and replace it with an organic one that comes out of discarded orange peels.
Yep sure, I’m not going to have a nation-state level of impact, but the discovery of the right catalyst can often change entire industries.
So I’m trying as hard as I can, every day, to push towards a sustainable future, if enough people do it, we might be able to start to move the needle
If you want to do fundimental new discoveries like this, then a lot - there's not a lot of open source code out there - most of what's on github is just students re-hashing methods from > 5 years ago. If you want to push the boundaries the best way is to read papers, practice implementing yourself, and befriend quantum physicists and computational chemists around the world that you can ask when you get stuck.
Chemistry is an enormous field too, you would have to concentrate on a much smaller section, I have been self studying for about 8 years now, (+ I have 20 years software development experience) and I think I'm getting to the point where I have complete understanding of the current SOTA and am pushing at the boundaries -- most of the ideas I am implementing are coming out in papers weeks or months later, so I feel like I'm at the edge.
Self study requires an enormous amount of discipline though, which is partially why universities exist - because most people do not have the discipline to stick at something for 3-8 years, and I am doing it 7 days a week, almost every day of the year - because I just love this stuff, it's not tiring, it's exhilarating!
I totally agree that a large commitment to green energy (which will have to include nuclear) is necessary. But not sufficient, imo.
> Nothing else matters
I assume you're writing this as hyperbole, but for readers who may not realize, this is definitely not true. Even if the entire grid was nuclear, there are still lots of other greenhouse emitting sources that need to be decarbonized. For example, building materials (like concrete) and livestock emissions account for ~10% of emissions alone [1]. Not to mention that many sources of transportation (16.2% of emissions) are currently not capable of running on just electricity (i.e. aviation) and need technology innovation. This problem is too complicated to be fixed by one single thing.
It’s actually worse. Even if we dropped our emissions to 0, global warming still keeps going because we’ve pumped so much greenhouse gasses into the air already.
I think OP is correct that we have to get behind nuclear in a big way. A way that we haven’t even started going down. You’re also correct that it’s not sufficient.
However. If you have a lot of nuclear capacity (and I’m talking a massive overbuild in capacity), suddenly spending gobs of it on CO2 recapture isn’t a big deal. That’s probably why OP is saying nuclear at this point is the only viable path forward. Because if you want to do recapture at scale (and you have to go try to even try to arrest the growth), nothing other than nuclear can provide the capacity needed.
Climate Change predictions are an aggregate of multiple models which have already proven unreliable. These models are made up of thousands of variables and parameters estimating things for which there is none to little real data.
For example, take a model of
aX + bY + cZ = m
X,Y,Z are known values
a,b,c are parameters
A parameter is usually selected as a mean value of a range of potential values, a statistical distribution. So the parameters form an N dimensional space representing their ranges. In the given example it is three dimensional.
When the parameter ranges are not well known the area of the N dimensional parameter space increases because a weak estimator requires a higher confidence interval than a strong one.
So the question in complex modeling, and climate modeling is highly complex, is how close is the parameterization selected to the real parameters?
Wide parameter spaces across high dimensions are really fragile because the space is so wide. Good models account for this by spanning the parameter space, i.e. taking all the combinations at intervals and running the models multiple times.
The problem is, climate models are so big, and and have so many parameters that you cannot calculate them all on a human lifespan timescale.
If we are in a worst case scenario with climate change then we should be thinking 100% in terms of mitigations. More green and sustainable pathways make more sense with longer timelines.
Under any condition it does not look like Russia, India, and China are willing to cut their carbon profile in the future which means we really should be focused on mitigation and sensible sustainability projects.
Modeling is a very useful and valuable tool but it's easily misused and manipulated, and policy decision makers generally do not understand it's frailties.
If you listen to what the BRICS+ nations are discussing it's not COP and IPCC topics. There is a lot of dependence on petroleum both as an energy source and a revenue generator. They show no evidence of movement on zero carbon absent free money from the west.
Even if we started building thousends of new nuclear power plants:
- we dont have enough trained staff to build and operate them
- it takes 5-10years to build one
- we dont have infrastructure to supply them all with fuel and dispose waste (even new ones that can run on previous waste MSR)
- we are too divided as a spiecies and too occupied with worthless disputes (are you pink or blue? Yada yada)
Ppl at the top realized that they cannot stop changes, so instead are preparing for alternatives. We cannot stop it nor reverse, so all we can do is adapt.
There is not much place left to run to, so better get trained now to defend yourself and your family.
Ps. Yes, millions if not billions of ppl will die. Top does not care. It wont be them.
Ps2. To recapture CO2 we have all energy we need provided by sun. All we need is to reforrest half of the land globe.
I have no interest in being part of a death cult. The best time to plant a forest is a decade ago. The second best time is now. I find this attitude particularly toxic because it’s basically “too hard. Don’t do it” and is just as bad as all the FUD against nuclear.
How about this. It’s ok to declare nuclear a failure once we actually make a serious attempt to do it in the first place.
> The best time to plant a forest is a decade ago. The second best time is now.
The best time to focus on developing already invented renewable technology was over a decade before the first fission reactor. The second best time is now.
Nuclear has had trillions of public money and countless lifetimes of research spent on it. And cost trillions more in externalities. A tiny fraction of that investment that finally started getting spent in earnest in 2010 has overtaken 70 years of nuclear construction with the buildout mostly happening in the last five years.
It's not "too hard, don't do it" it's "stop trying to hold back the thing that's working to chase a failed dream".
Nuclear has seen a dearth of investment for about 40 years since everyone went into a crazy panic over Three Mile Island (non event) and Chernobyl (legit issue but addressable). Fukushima provided a final topper. Even though with each accident designs incorporate more and more security features so that safety is automatically passive. At the same time, governments increase regulations and permitting complexity which drives costs up DESPITE increasing safety standards negating the need for that.
Renewables like solar and wind don’t work at grid scale to supplant base load provided by fossil fuels without batteries. Regardless of the details, batteries have only just started to be able to be used for that, primarily due to smartphones and now electric cars increasing demand. You were never going to get there faster. And batteries, still, have terrible displacing base load because they’re not energy dense compared with fossil fuels. Oh, and batteries are NOT renewable, requiring strip mining precious metals that will get more and more expensive as easily accessible resources are depleted.
I have no problem with renewables and we SHOULD be investing in it. Unlike fossil fuels, nuclear can turn generation on / off pretty quickly without issue. So the more renewables are able to provide, the less we run the plants (it changes the unit economics of course, but we should be ok running nuclear at a loss, and yet we insist it must be profitable). But we should be honest about the reality and the consequences of going down the route of renewables without nuclear. Battery technology is great and improvements go faster than nuclear. That’s for sure. But
a) it’s still veeeeery early days for grid scale batteries
b) batteries are tiny bombs with potential for runaway chemical reactions. As density increases and larger battery installations are made, those are essentially massive bombs and fire risks. I’m not sure that’s less risky vs nuclear unless it’s in the middle of nowhere. I would personally feel more comfortable living to a nuclear plant than a massive battery (eg look at why fly wheels aren’t used even though they have insanely better density than lithium ion and as battery density increases, I suspect you’ll just approach flywheel behavior). Radioactive materials by comparison are more stable outside the reactor.
Look. I don’t disagree that nuclear had challenges to handle. However, to me they seem solvable because necessity is the mother of invention and we know that nuclear can meet all the every needs of earth many many times over. That seems harder with batteries because it starts way further back and requires meaningful R&D advances to make renewables viable to maybe take on current energy needs.
Finally your point about meeting the world's needs many times over is also blatantly wrong. Existing designs run out of fuel almost immediately at a few TW, and the more burner reactors you build the longer your fictional breeder fleet takes to start.
One theory was that global warming would increase the quantity of clouds in the air. And the question was whether it would act more as a sun rays shield, or more as a warmth shield.
I'm very much a layman when it comes to this area, but I once read that livestock emissions are exaggerated when it comes to climate change. I.e. it's true they account for a large amount of emissions, but that the missions aren't as harmful as was previously thought. Is there truth to that, or was it just hearsay?
> Why the misconception? In 2006 the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization published a study titled “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” which received widespread international attention. It stated that livestock produced a staggering 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. The agency drew a startling conclusion: Livestock was doing more to harm the climate than all modes of transportation combined. This latter claim was wrong, [...]
In any case, meat production's externalities go far beyond direct emissions.
> Half of all habitable land is used for agriculture. [...]
> There is also a highly unequal distribution of land use between livestock and crops for human consumption. If we combine pastures used for grazing with land used to grow crops for animal feed, livestock accounts for 77% of global farming land. While livestock takes up most of the world’s agricultural land it only produces 18% of the world’s calories and 37% of total protein.
Also a layman but my understanding is the issue is 'percent of emissions' part of the fact. The emissions are methane, which are 'worse' than CO2 - so some statistics normalize for this and result in a high % of emissions. I think it's semantics and bad-faith actors use the wording that helps them the most, which muddies the waters.
Only nuclear? That seems more like a political attitude than a considered stance. Especially with the amazing progress that has been made with wind and solar.
Not just political gridlock. Is a political identity.
Oh wow, what an amazing coincidence that the only thing that will work is directly tied to keeping the specific people in power and universally subscribing to their tax plan.
Yeah, destroy those ecosystems. Most tree planting projects are either scams or leave the local area worse off than when it started, unless it's replanting efforts on burned areas. And even then when done at a large scale to accommodate the feel-good goals of some startup, tree diversity is also not valued, and so again the ecosystem gets worse than when it started.
"In the last week I've started to receive inquiries from people running tree planting programs wanting my help. I am suggesting that they shut down their programs. Here I will explain why:" - [0]
Not if you’re a for-profit VC firm looking to invest in an area with changing regulation, which could lead to trillions of dollars of economic opportunity.
Yes. Commit to a method that will run out of fuel in under a decade before even solving half of the problem and has had well over half a century of work spent on it instead of the thing that has already eclipsed it after a decade of actually trying.
If there are going to big investments in nuclear, then it'd make sense to invest in R&D to improve nuclear power. The same goes for any other renewable energy technology.
"Big Industry" matters a lot, but personal transportation is also a large part of emissions. Especially for people that fly intercontinental more than once a decade.
It's wrong to assume that you can just convince people to give up their fossil fuel SUVs, but that means another mechanism has to be used to make them, not that aggregated personal choice doesn't have a huge impact.
This campaign promoted an inefficient mechanism, fully knowing it wouldn't work, but that doesn't mean that peoples lifestyles don't matter.
Arguing that only industry needs to change is also a cheap cop-out, belying the scale of the problem.
The point is simple. CO2 emissions suffer from tragedy of the commons. The person taking individual positive action can only suffer from it. Tragedy of the commons requires government action like carbon taxes and subsidies. This is easy to implement. Making snide comments on online forums does nothing, nor does making individual personal sacrifices that obviously don't scale.
I bought an EV not because I have any delusions that my purchase of an EV would save the planet. I bought it because California offered me free car pool lane access that would get me back 20 minutes every day on the commute. With the subsidies etc, TCO worked out to be the same as a Camry.
When 100 million EVs are sold we will see some meaningful impact.
Individual sacrifices (I would rather say individual lifestyle changes) do scale somwhat (for example meat consumption has gone down in germany by almost 10% over the last 10 years and it's not because meat is expensive or had disincentives attached to it), but not to the degree needed.
Saying we only need nuclear power is obviously not true and in this case the snide comment points to the fact that the lifes of individuals will also need to change and pushing all needed change away to the industry is wrong. Peoples lifes will need to change, encouraged and enforced by legislation.
And I do think people also hava a individual responsibility (especially for stuff that can't be decarbonised in the near future with good alternatives like meat consumption or flying, but also for buying unneeded large cars or wasting energy), even though it doesn't work for change on a larger scale.
> for example meat consumption has gone down in germany by almost 10% over the last 10 years and it's not because meat is expensive or had disincentives attached to it),
Any citations to show that this reduction was through altruistic individual action for climate change?
And this is definitely incomplete, so the real number is probably significantly larger. I know of multiple climate tech deals not present in the data they cite.
Going forward, the best solution is to implement Wilson’s "Half-Earth" biosphere reserve proposal, more popularly known in its current, reduced form as "30 by 30", an agreement by 100 nations (currently) at the COP15 meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity to conserve at least 30 percent of our land and water. If more people got behind this initiative, the number of new business and economic initiatives supporting this idea would be astronomical, and would form a new paradigm for thinking about the way we see our planet. Travel, hotel, and tourist opportunities would present unlimited growth opportunities, and the new scientific research coming out of it would benefit humanity in unique ways. My overarching point is we need to stop thinking about the problem of climate change remediation as the only issue, it’s deeply connected to how we see the planet and use our resources wisely.
I’m referring to unlimited growth opportunities in the new paradigm of turning the planet into a protected biosphere. Not just green tourism and hospitality and all it entails such as education, but also new scientific research. Less than 10% of species are formally described and studied, and the amount of new knowledge that we can learn from studying instead of destroying nature is unfathomable. We talk a lot about how great space exploration is and how we need to travel to new planets in our Solar System to get the goods on the most pressing questions, but the reality is that we haven’t begun to study Earth in any measurable way, and we are losing species and ecosystems faster than we can learn from them. This is the unlimited growth potential.
Wilson originally proposed 50% but it was recently reduced to 30% by interest groups. Wilson argues that his calculations support 50% because it allows 80% of species to stabilize, species that we rely upon for survival and planetary equilibrium.
without evidence, the 30x30 initiative may in fact be a land grab by the militarily well-connected around the world. Public forests or public wetlands have never been "pure" conservationalist. It is too tempting once the doors close on the back room dealing.
I would like to hear more about why you think this. Isn’t the opposite currently occurring? In other words, we have land grabs by private companies responsible for destroying entire ecosystems for mining, agriculture, livestock and seafood, as only a few examples. We have products like Brazilian beef and Indonesian palm oil that are destroying whole biospheres. And it’s exactly the kind of back room dealing that allows these exports to flood our markets knowing full well the damage they cause.
yes agree and, simple statements certainly do not portray complex systems.
this topic calls for a substantive response. I will note quickly that the ability to measure and compare over vast areas, is increasing dramatically in the Information Age.
There has to be a civilian, science-based and impartial component, along with the diligence and readyness of dot-mil participants, to steer away from the worst outcomes. No one should take political statements or partial information at face value -- critical thinking, checks and balances, trust and verify, are crucial IMHO.
With the Belt and Road Initiative and the increased transit that it will bring across the Eurasian continent, fueled by Russian oil, these have to be recognized as pipedreams.
We prioritize green electrification at the cost of mitigation strategies. Probably a bad choice given the in the plans Russia, India, and China are already implementing with the strong support of the Global South.
Sustainable is great, but it's got to have a real scale and a real ROI.
No, the carbon is released when the plants die. So you’re only holding the carbon for the lifetime of the plant. Even if the plants are “net new”, their CO2 will still be released when they die.
If you grow a new forest in an area that was previously empty of biomass (not necessarily an easy thing to do), the trees don't all grow and then die and decompose with nothing to replace them.
Trees die, decompose, and others take their place. So long as the forest survives, the trees in that forest at any particular time are a net carbon sink.
Yes you could do that, but that sounds more like farming. Additionally, you should only get the carbon credit once you actually sequester the kelp, but this isn’t don’t in practice. E.g. some managed forests get carbon credits for trees that they plant, but sometimes those trees burn in a forest fire before they can be sequestered.
Time to capitalize on all the fearmongering of the last few years, before people realize we are not going to blow up in a ball of fire by 2030!
The useful idiots are not going to milk themselves, you know...
Some solar companies did well this year. I’m sure some ETFs claim to try to basket this tech, but I personally think those will always miss the big winners, turn into an AARK with a few good years followed by steep losses, or just do less than the market index anyway. I think I might use a small % of my bankroll, choose a few favorites and do my own basket after getting some ideas from a list of what professionals are buying, use a long holding timeframe and try to hit a big winner.
Big down turn in US government solar subsidies starting this year. I have no stake but it will be interesting to see if these solar companies keep their performance up.
Only if they're split out into fully Green Hydrogen Vs. Blue Hydrogen. Vs Wishy Washy Hydrogen.
This [1] (factored by press release PR) is a sincere effort to use renewable energy to produce scalable amounts of hydrogen product (eg: Ammonia), whereas other (sorry pressed for time ATM, (TODO backfill a link)) companies are loudly producing Hydrogen but quietly doing so as a by-product of fossil fuel extraction (ie. no net climate benefit).
gas is emitting half of CO2 than coal, it's also much cleaner: coal emits heavy metals and radioactivity when burned.
Gas also enables a higher penetration of renewables. We won't get to zero emissions in the next 10 years, but we can get to zero emissions for days on end, because of gas plants.
Gas emits less CO2, but when it leaks it's much worse (Methane) so in the United States it's not far off in the normal pipeline network.
In most countries we're not close to a penetration of renewables that significantly profit from the flexilibilty of gas. Thus building new gas infra isn't really helping. If storage (not just batteries) pans out the way we're hoping, gas can just be skipped. If not, it can be built quickly.
Switching over to natural gas from worse fuels, which has been enabled by fracking, is responsible for most of the emissions reductions that have happened in the past decade.
this is the new crypto. I mean crypto was already the new climate.
can you guys remember how it was in the 90s in western countries with the "ozone hole" or the "ozone depletion" and how it evolved to the new "global warming".
of course tech funding would grow as climate is something even more intagible than crypto or the economy. no one knows what will happen. al gore predicted we'd be already dead and it made him a millionnaire.
n,b: im obviously not saying it is an hoax but that as it is intangible it is easy very to market the fear it creates and make a lot of money out of it. as capitalism taught us: why solve something that makes you richer
You should check what happened with Ozone. It was a real problem and it ended up being solved thanks to useful regulations and an amazing show of global cooperation.
Yeah, and now no matter what happens gets blamed on global warming... I mean climate changes (had to rename it because it's not warming as fast as they hoped for). Snow? Effect of climate changes. No snow? Effect of climate changes. No matter what, they'll blame it on climate change.
And of course they implement lots of policies restricting movement, taxing and limiting airplanes... except for private jets which are always exempt from those policies.
It was renamed from global warming because the changing climate involves a lot more than warming. You had senators bringing snowballs into congress to “prove” that global warming is fake.
Have you actually read any climate science, as opposed to political prattle about climate?
Do you really think climate change is intangible? Serious, detailed, empirical work done by tens of thousands of scientists, converging across 10s of different fields of endeavour, in hundreds of research institutions (private, public, profit, non-profit), in dozens of nations from communist to capitalist (many of whom consider each other adversaries, some of whom are literally at war with each other). All these people are conspiring to work on intangibles for profit? It's a miracle (quite literally, and I mean literally in the English sense of the word - 'actually the case', rather than the Internet sense of 'not literally').
Re your daft reference to the 'ozone hole'. The underlying cause of the was fixed by the Montreal protocol. It didn't 'evolve' to climate change. They are scarcely related. Do you know anything about any of this at all? There are books! There are articles! There is sci-hub if you want to check sources. It's all in the open for you to explore if you have the will.
Did y2k 'evolve' into React. What does all this nonsense even mean?
> al gore predicted we'd be already dead
Al Gore is a politician and businessman. What has he got to do with anything? Would you quote Michael Bloomberg if he said something silly about quantum physics as evidence? What on earth are you talking about.
Honestly climate change brings out the ridiculous in so many people. It turns grey matter to gruel. No wonder ecosystems are collapsing all over our one and only common home.
my point is clearly not about the reality of climate change. earth changed climate a millions time this is a known fact. the intangibility is obvious its been decades and no one is able to tell what will happen exactly even next week or in one month. I don't understand your reaction.
my point is about why vc would be interested about "climate tech" as being a new bitcoin. selling stuff and "tech" leveraging the fear mongering that politicians and marketers use to sell climate related goods.
al gore was the flagship person talking about climate and got shilled by pretty much everyone for a decade. he got to do everything with the current politizing and marketing around climate change.
your reaction is similar to a religious person feeling offended for someone opposing your views especially I wasn't even an opponent of climate change merely an opponent of the shills making money out of it
two things can be true here. our model of incentivizing change is still steeped in a crudely market driven and politically corrupt set of levers. that's the global system we've inherited.
the other thing that is true is that the problem is not about climate change (a catch phrase the fossil fuel industry has trained us to use so that weak arguments can fall back on 'but there's always been change!'). we're talking about climate destabilization, of proven anthropogenic causes. no we cannot precisely predict what the tipping points are or how bad it will be, but we have decades of research showing that it is human caused and operating on a trajectory unlike anything before the industrial era. and we know it is worsening and the stakes for civilization are high.
how we rise to this challenge today, with our current tools, involves investment human and capital. we can hope that those investments are allocated wisely. we can expect that there will be charlatans and waste, as there has been any time a complex problem has been tackled.
My local area has been devastated by historically unprecedented floods twice just this year, with nearly complete destruction of all local infrastructure. I know two people who drowned. I have had complete loss of roads and bridges out of the valley where I live, necessitating long walks with a backpack to get supplies. Internet and electricity gone for weeks at a time. My nearest town (Lismore, NSW) may not survive at all. Large numbers of people here, many in their 50s and over, are now homeless, living in tents and caravans. Such consequences, having been predicted now for over 30 years and systematically suppressed or rubbished by the fossil fuel industry and their purchases in government, are happening all over the world. Waves of further natural disasters, and the consequent millions of refugees spreading across the world, will cause political convulsions making the last couple of years seem like an oasis of stability.
My anger is not religious, it's personal grief and fear about the destruction of our physical world. Anyone who is not angry by the sheer vast scale of the emergency is a fool or a psychopath.
Your trivial focus on the temerity of companies working in the climate change area trying to make money, as opposed to the worldwide horrific real consequences of climate change itself, to all denizens of our world, human and non-human alike, is so weird its motivations are deeply suspect.
I understand then your anger and it is justified and humane. I can have a trivial focus on companies trying to make money out of climate change because in the bigger picture they are working against your beliefs and against the idea that we can solve it. they don't want to solve it they want to milk it.
we need political decisions not startups selling snake oil.
Your ire would be better directed towards fossil fuel companies, who have spent millions designing and then infecting the public sphere with irrelevant rhetoric designed by marketing companies to distract (all the 'points' you made btw parrot these almost word for word). They have known (informed by their own employed scientists) since the 1970's that continued growth of their trade would lead to disaster, but spent vast scads of cash corrupting governments all over the world to push that growth, and hence the breakdown of our climate systems, ever further.
Anyway, this is isn't productive. To be perfectly honest I don't accept your honesty or good will given the foolishness of what you've written, so the conversation's a bit pointless. Last word to you if you want it.
So many of the startups being backed are building things that either have a very minimal impact or they're based on technologies that are so far out they won't be commercially viable for 20 years, if ever.
The big things we need are all boring infrastructure investments that don't have startup-like returns. Things like rearchitecting the electrical grid, upgrading rail and public transit, etc.