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A podcast by GBH News reporter Ian Coss gives this notorious project a long-overdue reappraisal. Bonus: The show comes with lessons for climate infrastructure projects of the future.
If you’ve lived in Massachusetts at any point in the last 50 years, you’ve heard of the Big Dig. It’s infamous — a tunnel project that was supposed to bury an elevated highway in Boston to the tune of $2 billion that eventually ballooned in cost to $15 billion and took a quarter of a century to finish.
The Big Dig was more than just a highway project, though. It was a monumental effort that Ian Coss, a reporter at GBH News, calls a “renovation of downtown Boston.” The project built tunnels and bridges, yes, but it also created parks, public spaces, and mass transit options that transformed the city. In a nine-episode podcast series appropriately called The Big Dig, Coss dives into the long, complicated history of the project, making a case for why the Big Dig was so much more than the boondoggle people think it was.
I talked to Coss about how the Big Dig came to be and the lessons we can learn from it as we continue to adapt our built environment to a changing climate. Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I moved to Boston for college in 2010, and I remember going to the North End and being struck by how beautiful it was. I didn’t realize how recently that view had changed until I listened to your podcast — I mean, the Big Dig had only wrapped up a few years earlier.
It’s easy to forget how quickly it transformed. I grew up in Massachusetts, so when I would come into the city I would see [the Big Dig] being built — I have vague memories of the elevated artery. And when I moved to Boston Proper in 2013, which was less than a decade after the project wrapped, it was stunning for me to be like, “oh, this is what that project was,” because I definitely didn’t understand it at the time.
What made you decide to create an entire podcast about this “renovation” of Boston?
I think part of it was this disconnect where I grew up hearing about the Big Dig and mostly hearing bad things about it — it was behind schedule, it was a disaster, a boondoggle, etc. — because that really was the reputation of the project, nationally and locally. And then moving to the city and seeing the fruits of it, it was hard to reconcile those things. Like, this “disaster” created a greenway through the middle of the city. Now you can actually get to the airport.
What was driving that narrative of its being a disaster?
The Big Dig went on a very long emotional journey. It started as this kind of visionary, idealistic project championed by activists and supported by politicians of both parties. And then, after navigating the process of funding, permitting, contracting, managing, and designing, by the time it's in construction, it really is not a source of pride.
There are a number of technical things about the Big Dig that could have been done better, and we can learn lessons from it. The way it was contracted could have been done better. The management structure could have been done better. There were flaws in the design, including a fatal flaw that cost the life of a driver in the tunnel.
I think a lot of it is about the storytelling. Just to give one example, so much of the negative narrative around the Big Dig was around the cost. You often hear about how it started with an estimated cost of $2 billion and wound up costing $15 billion. But I think that narrative misses a few things.
One is that it was never going to cost $2 billion. That was not a realistic estimate. But in our country, it is so hard to get approval, political support, funding, and permitting in place that there is a very strong incentive all throughout the process to downplay the costs, downplay the risks, downplay the disruption, make it sound like this is going to be quick and easy and painless and cheap, just to get to the starting line. Because the paradox of it is that if we had known in 1983 or 1987 or 1991 that this was going to be a $15 billion project, it would have never happened. And yet, in hindsight, there are many smart people who told me that this project was a bargain at $15 billion because of what we got in terms of economic benefits, transportation improvements, and environmental improvements.
There’s almost an element of asking for forgiveness rather than permission here, but that forgiveness is inevitably laced with anger because of those expectations.
Right. If only it were just forgiveness.
The Big Dig had its roots in the National Highway Program. Were all those projects going constantly over budget?
There’s a great paper that I cite in episode four where the authors studied the cost of highway building per mile every year from the 1970s through the 1990s, and it’s actually a great sample set because we’ve built so many highways of different sizes in different states. Basically, what they found is that highway costs per mile really ramp up significantly in the 1970s. And that’s, of course, the period when the [Big Dig] was first getting conceived.
So the short answer to your question is, it was cheaper once. But there were other costs, in that those early highways in the ‘50s and ‘60s largely did not consider the impact on communities or on the environment. They did not make a lot of mitigation efforts to minimize the day to day disruption caused by those projects. So I think part of what the Big Dig captures is this really historic change in the way we build things in this country that was ushered in by the anti-highway movements, by citizen activism, and by the National Environmental Policy Act. Over the course of the 1970s we made it much harder to build things, for very good reasons.
I think the Big Dig — which some people describe as the last great project of the interstate era — captures an attempt to do a massive, ambitious infrastructure project that is also loaded with environmental mitigation and also has a robust community process. Part of what we learned through that is that you can have a project that’s cheap and efficient, you can have a project that’s democratic and humane, but it’s tough to have it all. And the Big Dig was trying to have it all, and we did get it all, but at enormous cost. That was the thing that could never be solved.
You make a connection between the Big Dig and climate change right from the first episode. What are the climate lessons we can learn from the Big Dig?
In some ways, it’s ironic to hold up the Big Dig as a case study for climate change because it’s a highway project. My point is not that the Big Dig is, like, the future of infrastructure. But what it offers is a recent case study on a massively ambitious building project. We have some distance, and you can see the whole arc of it, but it very much lives within our era. It’s not the Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge or any of those other big projects built in a different time under different conditions.
The way I see it is that in order to mitigate or prevent the worst effects of climate change — and you can feel free to disagree with me — we’re going to need to build a lot of stuff. This is not a problem that we’re going to solve by riding bicycles and growing vegetables in the backyard, both of which I do and hope everyone does. And of course, those projects might look different than the Big Dig because building a wind turbine isn’t exactly analogous to building a downtown tunnel. But I think there are relevant analogies, especially things like coastal mitigation in cities, improving mass transit, building high energy transmission lines — these large scale projects that will affect people but also are an important public good.
You talked on the show about the Big Dig as an attempt to make this process more democratic at some level. People on both sides had very strong feelings about it. This reminded me of the NIMBY/YIMBY dichotomy of climate projects. Did anyone mention any best practices that could be applied to future projects of this kind?
I’ve talked with Fred Salvucci [former Massachusetts Secretary of Transportation and driving force of the Big Dig] about this. He mentioned this biblical parable — he’s full of parables — about Jesus walking across the water and then turning to his disciples and telling them to follow. But they step into the water and fall right in, and when they get back out they say it’s impossible. And then Jesus says, “It’s easy to walk across the water. You just have to know where the stones are.”
And Fred said the lesson there is that, in order to navigate this kind of process, you have to know where the flashpoints are, what the issues will be. That way you can anticipate them rather than just going in and saying “this is my project, I’m going to do it this way and you can fight me on it.”
Part of what I think is really interesting about this, which I think speaks to present-day projects like offshore wind, is that in that fight, you have very well-intentioned actors who are trying to make the project better and using the environmental process to do that. And you also have bad actors who are weaponizing and manipulating the environmental process to their own personal ends. And those two things get all mixed up.
You know, I’m an environmentalist. I believe in environmental review. I don’t want to sit here and say that we need to get rid of all environmental permitting because it makes it too hard to build things. But I think it’s also important to recognize that these things can be weaponized.
Scheme Z, which proposed this big spiral loop of ramps and a bridge over the river, is a good example. Politically, that became very messy — they were trying to impose concentrated harm in the name of a public good. And I know, strategically, maybe there are things [Salvucci] could have done to mitigate that or circumvent that, but given the structures in place, the logical outcome is that it spends a decade in lawsuits and review committees and you wind up with something that’s okay, that everyone can live with.
The funny thing about that is that it turned into the Zakim Bridge, which is now a Boston icon.
Right. I mean, that’s part of the communication piece, too.
I was biking under the Zakim bridge the other day, and I biked through where there’s a nice pedestrian and bicycle bridge and this skate park that is always filled with people. Truly, that is maybe the best utilized public space created by the Big Dig.
It’s easy for me to play Monday morning quarterback and say “oh, you should have communicated that better, you should have told the story better.” I mean, he was saying all the right things. But then all you had to say on the other side was “it’s 18 lanes and five ramps,” and that sounded terrible and looked terrible on the page. And I mean, sure, I wish there weren’t all those ramps there, but like you said, ironically, the bridge became an icon of the city.
I think a big part of the lesson for me is how hard it is to build infrastructure democratically because the timescales are all wrong. These things have short-term costs and cause short-term disruption and bring very long-term benefits.
I was constantly struck by this issue of scale, both in terms of time and money. It’s hard to wrap your head around the idea of billions of dollars and projects that span decades. These are just things that are impossible for any regular person to really plan out.
I was talking to someone who said that their dad was in his 70s when the Big Dig was just getting started. And for him, it was like, “my city’s going to be torn up for the rest of my life,” right? That’s what this project meant for him — he would live with this mess of a project and never see the results. And he had to deal with that so that you could move to Boston in 2010 and never know the city another way. The cost of that benefit is borne by another generation.
And it’s the same thing with climate change. It moves on a scale that is so much longer than politics. The Big Dig took almost 40 years from conception to completion. So if you’re thinking about political capital, if you’re thinking about two- and four-year election cycles, it’s very, very hard to conceive, plan, and deliver a project on that kind of time scale.
The benefits and costs are almost inverted in climate change, in a way. We’re talking about future benefits, yes, but we’re also talking about future costs if we don’t do anything. But it’s so hard to make people think in a 40- or 50-year timescale.
If the Big Dig was so hard to make happen politically with what I think was a more genial political environment overall, it feels kind of impossible to think of building anything on that scale right now.
I gave a talk at City Hall a few weeks ago and I was talking with some of the young planners there, people who are in their 30s. Some of them have been listening to the series, and they told me they could not imagine what it would be like to get that kind of federal funding out of Washington, get all the local players on board, get it through the permitting process, and get it contracted. Because right now if they try to take away one parking spot and put in one bike line, they’re bogged down in meetings for a year.
I think climate change is also the inverse of projects like this because with the Big Dig, for example, you can feel the tangible benefits of a quicker commute and a more beautiful city. But with climate change, if the projects work, you’d actually feel nothing.
Exactly. Climate change is way, way harder. A road project or a rail project will have benefits. You get ribbon cuttings and photo ops. But if we make Boston resilient to flooding or something, you know, do some big project that would improve the shoreline or whatever ideally, that historic storm surge may never come, or it’ll come and we’ll be prepared for it and nothing will happen. But yeah, you’re working with long term counterfactuals.
It feels to me like climate change was designed in a laboratory to flummox institutions. It takes all of our cognitive biases, our ingrained social and biological blind spots and weak points and just flicks them all at us at once.
All nine episodes of The Big Dig are out now. You can listen on theWGBH website,Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Current conditions: Yosemite could get 9 inches of snow between now and Sunday • Temperatures will rise to as high as 104 degrees Fahrenheit in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, as Central and Southeast Asia continue to bake in a heatwave • Hail, tornadoes, and severe thunderstorms will pummel the U.S. Heartland into early next week.
It was a busy week of earnings calls for the clean energy sector, which, as a whole, saw investment dip by nearly $8 billion in the first three months of the year. Tariffs — especially as they impact the battery supply chain — as well as changes to federal policy under the new administration and electricity demand were the major themes of the week, my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote.
Like companies across many different sectors, inverter and battery maker Enphase, turbine manufacturer GE Vernova, Tesla, and the utility NextEra all mentioned the tariffs in their earnings reports and calls. Enphase, for one, is bracing for as much as 8% knocked off its gross margin by the third quarter, while Tesla’s highly-anticipated call managed expectations for the rest of the year, with the company citing the difficulty measuring “the impacts of global trade policy on the automotive and energy supply chains, our cost structure, and demand for durable goods and related services.” Meanwhile, on Thursday, Xcel Energy — which recently reached settlements for its role in the ignition of the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history and the largest wildfire in Texas history — reported missing first-quarter estimates and feeling the squeeze of high interest rates at a time of soaring, data-center-driven electricity demand.
The Department of Justice’s lawyers warned the Department of Transportation that its case against New York City’s congestion pricing program is likely a loser. We know this because someone mistakenly uploaded the DOJ’s memo into the court record for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s lawsuit challenging Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s actions. Whoops.
As my colleague Emily Pontecorvo reports, the leaked memo was dated before Duffy announced “he would put a moratorium on any new federal approvals for transit projects in Manhattan until the state shut down the tolling program.” But as Emily goes on to say, the memo “warns that continuing down this route could open up both the department and Duffy personally to further probes.” The New York Times adds that the DOT has since replaced the DOJ lawyers who authored the memo and plans to transfer the case to the civil division of the Justice Department in Washington.
More than 100 new cars and vehicles are expected to debut at the 2025 Shanghai Auto Show, which began on Wednesday and runs through next Friday. Of the approximately 1,300 total vehicles on display, 70% are new energy vehicles, according to Gu Chunting, the vice chairman of the Council for the Promotion of International Trade Shanghai, one of the event’s organizers.
The show is already off to an exciting start. Volkswagen is showcasing 50 new models, including three electrified concept vehicles specifically targeted at the Chinese market: the ID. Aura sedan, the ID. Evo SUV, and ID. Era three-row SUV, a hybrid with over 621 miles of range. BYD’s Denza line also premiered its Z, a luxury electric vehicle designed to compete with Tesla and Porsche. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, of course, but most people will find the Denza Z to be drop dead gorgeous,” Clean Technica raved.
That’s not all. The Faw Group, a Chinese state-owned car manufacturer, showed off a flying vehicle with a range of 124 miles, while fellow Chinese automaker Changan Automobile announced an autonomous flying car that reportedly already has government approval to transport passengers, per IoT World Today. France’s Le Monde was wowed by China’s innovations all around: “Gone are the days when the vast exhibition space had one hall dedicated to foreign brands and another for Chinese ones. Today, each Chinese group occupies a hall, showcasing domestic brands and leaving only some space for foreigners around the edges.”
Volkswagen
In a private ceremony Thursday night, President Trump signed an executive order to “unleash” deep-sea mining. The order — which directs the secretaries of Interior and Commerce to accelerate “the process of renewing and issuing seabed mineral exploration licenses and commercial recovery permits” for the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf and “areas beyond national jurisdiction”— is an attempt to offset China’s dominance of the critical minerals supply chain. Deep-sea mining operations harvest “nodules” that take millions of years to form and contain minerals like nickel, copper, cobalt, and manganese necessary for lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, among other applications. “For too long, we’ve been over reliant on foreign sources, and today this historic announcement marks a big step in the right direction to onshore these resources that are critical to national homeland security,” a senior administration official told reporters on Thursday, as reported by CNN.
Deep-sea mining is controversial due to how little we know about the ocean’s abyss, including the potential impact of large-scale mining operations on marine biodiversity and carbon sequestration. The United States has largely abstained from the deliberations of the United Nations’ International Seabed Authority, which determines whether and how to mine the seabed for critical minerals. The industrial mining of international waters, as cued up by Trump’s executive order, is opposed by “nearly all other nations,” The New York Times writes, and is “likely to provoke an outcry from America’s rivals and allies alike.”
It has already been a tragic year for wildfires, with more than 57,000 acres of Los Angeles and the surrounding hillsides burned in January. Now, AccuWeather is predicting that fires in the U.S. could “rapidly escalate” and burn up to 9 million acres total this year, well above the historic average of 7 million acres and close to the 8.9 million acres that burned in 2024.
Specifically, AccuWeather predicts an extreme fire season in the Northwest, northern Rockies, Southwest, and South Central states, particularly as late summer and fall approach. “There was plenty of rain and snow across Northern California this winter. All of that moisture has supported a lot of lush vegetation growth this spring,” AccuWeather’s lead long-range expert, Paul Pastelok, said. “That grass and brush will dry out and become potential fuel for wildfires this fall,” when any “trigger mechanism … could cause big wildfire problems.”
AccuWeather
Slate Auto, a three-year-old Jeff Bezos-backed startup, has announced an EV truck that will cost less than $20,000 after the federal tax credit and before customization. “It’s the Burger King of trucks,” writes Car and Driver, because “it’s affordable” and “lets customers ‘have it their way’ with a lengthy accessory list, including one that turns this pickup into an SUV.”
Three weeks after “Liberation Day,” Matador Resources says it’s adjusting its ambitions for the year.
America’s oil and gas industry is beginning to pull back on investments in the face of tariffs and immense oil price instability — or at least one oil and gas company is.
While oil and gas executives have been grousing about low prices and inconsistent policy to any reporter (or Federal Reserve Bank) who will listen, there’s been little actual data about how the industry is thinking about what investments to make or not make. That changed on Wednesday when the shale driller Matador Resources reported its first quarter earnings. The company said that it would drop one rig from its fleet of nine, cutting $100 million of capital costs.
“In response to recent commodity price volatility, Matador has decided to adjust its drilling and completion activity for 2025 to provide for more optionality,” the company said in its earnings release.
In February, Matador was projecting that its capital expenditures in 2025 would be between $1.4 and $1.65 billion.This week, it lowered that outlook to $1.3 to $1.55 billion. “We’re very open to and want to have reason to grow again,” Matador’s chief executive Joseph Foran said on the company’s earnings call Thursday. “This is primarily a timing matter. Is this a temporary thing on oil prices? Or is this a new world we live in?”
Mizuho Securities analyst William Janela wrote in a note to clients Thursday morning that, as the first oil exploration and production company to report its earnings this go-round, Matador would be “somewhat of a litmus test for the sector: we don't believe the market was expecting E&Ps to announce activity reductions this soon, but MTDR's update could signal more cuts to come from peers over the next few weeks.”
West Texas Intermediate crude oil prices are currently sitting at just below $63, up from around $60 in the wake of President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcements. While the current price is off its lows, it’s still well short of the almost $84 a barrel crude prices were at around this time last year.
The price decline could be attributable to any number of factors — macroeconomic uncertainty due to the trade war, production hikes by foreign producers — but whatever the cause, it has made an awkward situation for the Trump administration’s energy strategy.
The iShares U.S. Oil & Gas Exploration & Production ETF, which tracks the American oil and gas exploration industry, is down 9% for the year and more than 13% since “Liberation Day,” while the rest of the market has almost recovered as the Trump administration has indicated it may ease up on some of his more drastic tariff policies.
If other drillers follow Matador’s investment slowdown, it could imperil Trump’s broader energy policy goals.
Trump has both encouraged other countries to produce more oil (and bragged about lower oil prices) while also exhorting American drillers to “drill, baby, drill,”with enticements ranging from kneecapping emissions standards to a reduced regulatory burden.
As Heatmap has written, these goals sit in conflict with each other. Energy executives told the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas that they need oil prices ranging from $61 to $70 a barrelin order to profitably drill new wells. If prices fall further, “what would happen is ‘Delay, baby, delay,’”Wood Mackenzie analyst Fraser McKay wrote Wednesday. “We now expect global upstream development spend to fall year-on-year for the first time since 2020.”
A $65 per barrel price “dents” margins for drillers, meaning “growth capex and discretionary spend will be delayed,” McKay wrote.
Matador also announced that it had authorized $400 million worth of buybacks, and itsstock price rose some 4% on the earnings announcement, indicating that Wall Street will reward drillers who pull back on drilling and ramp up shareholder payouts.
“We’ve got the tools in the toolbox, including the share repurchase, to make Matador more value quarter by quarter,” Foran said. Rather than “blindly” pouring capital into growth, Matador would aim for a “measured pace,” he explained. “And if you mean what you say about a measured pace, that means when prices get a little lower, you take a few more moments to think about what you’re doing and don’t rush into things.”
At San Francisco Climate Week, everything is normal — until it very much isn’t.
San Francisco Climate Week started off on Monday with an existential bang. Addressing an invite-only crowd at the Exploratorium, a science museum on the city’s waterfront, former vice president and long-time climate advocate Al Gore put the significance and threat of this political moment — and what it means for the climate — in the most extreme terms possible. That is to say, he compared the current administration under President Trump to Nazi Germany.
“I understand very well why it is wrong to compare Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich to any other movement. It was uniquely evil,” Gore conceded before going on: “But there are important lessons from the history of that emergent evil.” Just as German philosophers in the aftermath of World War II found that the Nazis “attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false,” Gore said, so too is Trump’s administration “trying to create their own preferred version of reality,” in which we can keep burning fossil fuels forever. With his voice rising and gestures increasing in vigor, Gore ended his speech on a crescendo. “We have to protect our future. And if you doubt for one moment, ever, that we as human beings have that capacity to muster sufficient political will to solve this crisis, just remember that political will is itself a renewable resource.”
The crowd went wild. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took the stage and reminded the crowd that Gore has been telling us this for decades — maybe it’s time we listen. But I missed all that. Because just a few miles away, things were getting a little more in the weeds at the somewhat less exclusive venture capital-led panel entitled “The Economics of Climate Tech: Building Resilient, Scalable, and Sustainable Startups.” Here, I learned about a new iron-sodium battery chemistry and innovations in transformers for data centers, microgrids, and EV charging infrastructure.
I heard Tom Chi, founding partner of At One Ventures, utter sentences such as “parity dies because of capex inertia,” referring to the need to make clean tech not only equivalent to but cheaper than fossil-fuels on a unit economics basis. Such is the duality of climate week during the Trump administration — occasionally lofty in both its alarm and its excitement, but more often than not simply business-as-usual, interrupted by bouts of heady doom or motivational proclamations.
Some panels, like the one I moderated on the future of weather forecasting using artificial intelligence, made it a full hour without discussing Trump, tariffs, or tax credits at all. So far, that’s held true for a number of talks on how AI can be a boon to climate tech. It makes sense — the administration is excited about AI, and there’s really no indication that Trump has given any thought to either the positive or negative climate externalities of it.
But rapid data center buildout and the attendant renewables boom that it may (or may not) bring will certainly be influenced by the administration’s fluctuating policies, an issue that was briefly discussed during another panel: “AI x Energy: Gridlocked or Grid Unlocked?” Here, representatives from Softbank, Pacific Gas & Electric, and the data center builder and operator Switch touched on how market uncertainty is making it difficult to procure energy for data centers — and to figure out the cost of building a data center, period.
“There is a lot of refiguring and rereading contracts and looking at the potential exposure to things like the escalation in the cost of steel for construction projects,” Skyler Holloway of Switch said. Pinning down a price on the energy required to power data centers is also a bottleneck, Gillian Clegg, vice president of energy policy and procurement at PG&E explained. “For projects that want to connect between now and 2030, any kind of uncertainty or delay means that the generation doesn't get to the market,” Clegg said. “Maybe the load gets there first, and you have an out of balance situation.”
Everyone acknowledges that uncertainty is bad for business, and that delays related to funding, contracts, and construction can kill otherwise viable companies. But unsurprisingly, nobody here has admitted that said uncertainty might put them out of business, or even deeply in the red.Every panel I attend, I find myself wondering whether a founder or investor is finally going to raise their voice, à la Al Gore, and tell the audience that while their company’s business model is well and good, the Trump administration’s illogical antipathy towards green-coded tech and ill-conceived trade war is throwing the underlying logic — sound as it may have been just a year ago — into disarray.
None of the seven energy, food, and agricultural startups that presented at the nonprofit climate investor Elemental Impact’s main show, for instance, discussed the impacts of the administration’s policies on their businesses. Rather, they maintained a consistently upbeat tone as they described the promise of their concepts — which ranged from harnessing ocean energy to developing plant-based fertilizers to using robotics for electronics recycling — and the momentum building behind them. Nuclear and geothermal companies, seemingly poised to be the clean tech winners of Chris Wright’s Department of Energy, have been especially optimistic this week.
But really, what else can climate tech companies and investors be expected to do right now besides, well, rise and grind? It’s not like anybody has answers as to what’s coming down the policy pike. In a number of more casual conversations this week, a common sentiment I heard was that it’s not necessarily a bad time to be an early-stage startup — keep your head down, focus on research and prototyping, and reassess the political environment when you’re ready to build a pilot or demonstration plant. As for later-stage companies and venture capital firms, they’re likely working to ensure that their business models and portfolios really aren’t dependent on government subsidies, grants, or policies — as they keep assuring me is the case.
Even that might not be enough these days though. Chi said he’s always tailored his investments with At One Ventures towards companies that are viable based on unit economics alone, no subsidies and no green premium. So he wasn’t initially worried about his portfolio when Trump was elected. “None of our business models were invalidated by the election,” he said. “The only way that we could be in trouble is if they mess it up so bad that it ruins all of business, not just climate …”
Oops.
If there’s one dictum that I would expect to hold, though, it’s that the startups that make it through this period will likely be around for the long haul. I’ve been hearing that sentiment since the election, and Mona ElNagger, a partner at Valo Ventures, echoed it once again this week. “Microsoft and Apple were founded in the mid 1970s, which was a time of severe recession and stagflation. Amazon started at the tail end of a big recession in the early 1990s,” ElNagger reminded the audience at the Economics of Climate Tech panel, which she moderated. “Companies that survive and actually thrive in such periods share a common thread of resilience.”
As that panel wrapped up, things got existential once more as Chi’s talk moved from describing his investment thesis to the moment at large. “This time period in history is going to bring us tragedy after tragedy, and it’s really that moment that we’re going to understand the deep underlying structure of half of the world that we’ve built, and also the character of who we are,” Chi told the audience. It was unclear whether we were even talking about climate tech anymore. Chi continued, “It’s in that time period that we are going to step up and become whatever we are meant to be or not at all.”
The crowd sat there, a little stunned. Were we, in this very moment, becoming who we were meant to be? I took a bite of my free sushi as the networking and hobnobbing began.