A couple notes on practicality

In which climate tech gets off its high horse and promises to make money this time

Before we begin, a confession/exhortation: I must start writing more. The most obvious reason is that I am starting something new, and the problem that unifies people working on something new is that largely no one knows or understands or cares. Perhaps I can convince you to know, and understand, and care, about the nature of my work. If I do well, it will be our work.

But, if I do not, I will still be glad to be writing more, because of my less obvious, but more pressing, reason for writing: If writing is thinking, then I fear I’ve been thinking less. I find writing challenging. Some people think in structured ways, and so writing is the translation of thought into prose. Do I need to tell you that I do not think in structured ways? I fear I do not. As you can imagine, this makes writing especially valuable to me, and but also painful and laborious; more akin to sculpting in an unforgiving medium. So, in hopes of finding a way to teach you about my work, while also not losing some Good Thoughts to the wash of ubiquitous algorithmic slop, I must write more.

No man is an island (especially me, I’m barely even a peninsula). Send me encouragement! I will do the same. Let us all write more! Let us be civilized together.

Onward!

Whelp, it’s time to be practical you guys

A return to “practicality” is probably the consensus celebratory note trumpeting from Midtown conference rooms and relayed via LinkedIn Climate Week wrap posts. We can all agree this was coming, so I find it quite heartening and meaningful. It is also a little hilarious - the narrative switch putting the excesses of the heyday of climate tech in harsh relief. “We’re going to focus on unit economics, and on markets with proven demand!” we attest, a little too proud of our newfound, externally-enforced, restraint. “Not like before,” everyone echos in sotto voce, the conversation returning quickly to the multi-trillion dollar AI datacenter buildout.

Haha! Haha? In the language of Silicon Valley, our revealed preferences suggest that we just don’t like to be practical. In trying to write this out, I came to the conclusion that the story of “practicality” is actually two related stories:

1. A rejection of the prescriptive and moralistic climate narrative.

2. A prioritization of profitability within climate action.

Stop telling everyone what to do

Over most of the first period I worked in climate (2020-2024) the predominant argument made for climate action leaned moralistic, and ~reducible to a list of “shoulds” and “musts.” As in:

“We must save the Amazon.” “We should decarbonize as fast as possible.” “Companies should buy carbon removal now.”

I still believe those things to be true, but in retrospect it’s obvious that this type of argument would be slow to propagate; striking many as more wishful than convincing. That moralistic arguments generated alignment and climate action for some (governments, companies, people) while inciting significant opposition in others suggests that driving broad action via morals has been a failure. In the US at least, the moment for prescriptive moral arguments for climate action culturally (and economically) appears to be over, or at the very least, on indefinite leave.

If climate tech is collectively descending from its high horse, and we’re not going to tell people what to do though, what should we do? What does climate action look like in an unaligned world?

Do what makes money

Whiplash aside, I think this is where everyone in climate is now and why they’re particularly happy about it in Midtown. In absence of broad alignment which allows us to prioritize moral action, we can revert to the world’s best amoral capital allocation framework: capitalism. Why was NYCW a mediation on AI? Because climate companies answer that question in the same way that bank robbers do: that’s where the money is.

This all feels a little easy, but the central idea is this: I think we could do a better job of allocating capital and attention for long term climate success. Which is to say this is something of a kick off. In the next couple weeks, I’ll explore:

• Why I think the story about tackling climate change on ethical grounds proved more challenging than expected in generating alignment. I promise not to give up though, and will discuss where I think broad alignment can work, and where narrow alignment works. And perhaps, how we think about organizing and collaborating on the way toward progress given this lens.

• I’m also curious to put onto the page why I think profitability is a narrow frame, and how we might describe a better frame for pulling the economic levers for climate action, particularly as we reorient from transformational change via invention to transformational change via deployment. As part of this, I’ll try to explain what I think non-hardware people can learn from deployment led innovation.

More soon, and until then,

Peter