Here's the last of my charts from Nat Bullard's climate deck. But first, here's a look at the overall venture capital market:
After peaking in late 2021, the VC market has returned to its normal pre-pandemic levels. But climate tech is taking a bigger and bigger share of that:
The total amount of VC funding for climate tech was around $25 billion in 2023. That's nowhere near enough,¹ but at least it's going up.
¹My rough guess is that total climate tech spending (VC plus everything else) needs to be in the ballbark of half a trillion dollars per year. We're probably spending around a quarter of that right now.
Did you know that both Saudi Arabia and China are targeting 2060 to reach net-zero?
There's no way China will meet their projection based on current trends and Saudi Arabia's target is entirely reliant on CCS offsetting its continued pumping of fossil fuels. The Line project sure looks like Saudi Arabia understands where the future is headed, so as to keep the gentry safe, they're going to damage ecosystems to save the rich folk. After all, if climate change is going to destroy ecosystems, might as well not worry about it.
I feel bad for the kids but ehh, the future is intensely very bright and hot.
by 2080 texas will become uninhabitable and the magas will claim it was the dem's fault for letting them destroy the planet
at that point they'll say they have no choice but to kill all the liberals (and say it was self-defense so jesus lets them into heaven)
You feel bad for kids who might live in a world 2 to 3 degrees F warmer as they live to 150 and never die of cancer, heart disease, stroke or auto accidents? Why?
LOL! They won't die of those things because they'll die in the resource wars that will engulf the planet as hundreds of millions of displaced people invade to take what they have.
How many have died in resource wars over the past 100 years? Meanwhile, the first human trial for serious longevity increase is set to start this year or next at Harvard.
Is the logevity increase miracle drug made by burning saudi oil? No? Then could we maybe have both miracle medicine AND no climate change?
When extrapolating from present trends, results are sensitively dependent on how you extrapolate; linear, geometric, or exponential?
There are also outside factors and discontinuities. For instance, Saudi Arabia's projection of continued pumping of fossil fuels assumes that there will be a continued market for those fuels. With the rest of the world decarbonizing, that may be an unjustified assumption. Tech improvements that will affect the pace of decarbonization can also be expected.
I see VC in a headline and I assume we’re talking about Vietnam. Damn, I’m old.
There have a bustling industry there, e.g. Vingroup (maybe?).
Know how to accelerate that VC investment in climate tech?
Enact a Carbon Fee and Dividend law. That puts a rising fee on every ton of coal, oil, and natural gas and then distributes 100% of the proceeds to households, equally per capita.
Why does that work? Because all businesses will know that fossil fuel inputs will get more expensive every year while zero-carbon energy will not, and consumers will have extra money to spend. Add 2 + 2 and they will see that the path to market competitiveness is to get the hell away from fossil fuels. That includes energy companies. Private capital would run toward climate tech as fast as its little feet (shod in expensive Italian loafers) could take it.
The CF&D came pretty close to passing in 2020, but old habits die hard, and the only climate policy deemed "politically acceptable" was a package of subsidies and regulations, embodied in the Inflation Reduction Act. Politicians like to control where the money goes and who gets it. The IRA is way better than nothing, but a CF&D on top of that would supercharge private capital like gangbusters.
So why hasn't this happened if it's so great? Because it would work.
It will eventually run into the same issue as tobacco taxes, as consumers become dependent on the windfall from fossil fuel consumption.
10% is a pretty good number. I wonder if that includes *battery tech* which is climate related, but also, maybe not. Definitions, applications…
I did find a mutual fund that invested in sustainable energy....and the major holding is....wait for it....Microsoft.
FWIW, Microsoft does have clean energy requirements for the electricity that powers its server farms, and in fact recently intervened in the Georgia Power IRP to argue against Georgia Power's proposal to add more fossil energy to its portfolio on those grounds.
My default assumption has been for a few years now that the high altitude aerosol sulfate geo-engineering thing is too cheap and likely effective to *not* become the back-up plan. And the existence of a (seemingly) viable plan means not much else would be done.
20 years ago, I never expected solar to get so cheap so fast. The economics alone might get fossil fuels down to 10%-20% of energy totals, just riiiiight about the time it’s a little too late (20 years from now)?
But cheap energy and development has surely saved/created a lotta lives, as I’m sure it’ll take some in the future. How it balances out I don’t know.
Fertilizing the ocean with iron, thereby stimulating phytoplankton growth and CO2 uptake, seems to me to be the cheap approach, and the one least likely to cause harmful side effects. Any scheme that involves reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth seems likely to also reduce plant growth, thereby being to some extent self-defeating
Apropos of nothing, I still parse "VC" as "Vietcong." Well, close enough, it seems.