2022 Climate Tech VC funding totals $70.1B, up 89% on 2021
holoniq.com
holoniq.com
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.
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.
They seek personal gain (ROI), wich is not compatible with collective gain
I think we'll see the end of VCs this century, hopefully earlier otherwise China will already have its bases on both the Moon and Mars
Wat.
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.
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
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!
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.
The devil is in the details
[0] - https://twitter.com/ForrestFleisch1/status/14440088233506037...
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.
Once we have these two, full electrification become possible
> 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.
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.
- 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.
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 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".
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.
And your FUD about cAn'T mEeT bAsElOaD is just false. Even with just existing hydro most countries can meet the overwhelming majority od demand https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z
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.
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.
As for BRI related issues this is good: https://thecradle.co/Article/Columns/20037
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.
Afaiu, the only option is to reduce the quantity of energy the Sun sends towards us by 3%.
Don't know how, btw.
Massive volcanic eruption.
(Joking, but I do wonder what effect such an event would have, or more likely CO2 would become the least of our worries)
For example: https://theconversation.com/yes-eating-meat-affects-the-envi...
> 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, [...]
Yeah, I'm not a climate change skeptic but I've basically become skeptical of any claim I read about it now.
One of these days I'll actually read the IPCC report so I can hopefully sift through the claims myself.
> 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.
[1] https://bze.org.au/research_release/rethinking-cement/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_concre...
We’ve been waiting decades to replace all the coal power plants.
30 years of “it takes too long to build nuclear power plants” and “solar is almost ready” and now we’ve got what looks like an unavoidable problem.
That's the antithesis of conservationism
Plane travel alone counts for like 11% of emissions globally iirc
https://wttc.org/Portals/0/Documents/Reports/2021/WTTC_Net_Z...
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-aviation
Coal powerplants account for 20% of emissions. Those can be replaced immediately and no one would know the difference.
Aviation accounts for 17% of tourism-related GHG emissions (pre-pandemic)
17% of tourism-related emissions, 2.5% of total emissions.
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.
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.
https://assets-global.website-files.com/620ed79721f9271deec0...
Had no idea there were so many segmentations in the space.
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.
Thank you for repeating exactly what I said?
Anyway, it’s not “net new” if it’s not reproducing on average with >=1 offspring per its life.
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).
[1] https://reneweconomy.com.au/forrest-strikes-huge-green-hydro...
Maybe “cleaner tech” is a better label.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/new-fossil-fuels-incompatible-wi...
at this point they simply must stay in the ground
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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
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 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.
we need political decisions not startups selling snake oil.
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.