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New federal safety regulations could push PET plastic-makers out of the country for good.
There are an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 chemicals used commercially today worldwide, and the vast majority of them haven’t been tested for human safety. Many that have been tested are linked to serious human health risks like cancer and reproductive harm. And yet, they continue to pollute our air, water, food, and consumer products.
Among these is 1,4-dioxane, a chemical solvent that’s been linked to liver cancer in lab rodents and classified as a probable human carcinogen. It’s a multipurpose petrochemical, issuing from the brownfields of defunct industrial sites, chemical plants, and factories that use it in solvents, paint strippers, and degreasers. It shows up as an unintentional contaminant in consumer personal care products, detergents, and cleaning products and then goes down the drain into sewer systems.
It is also an unavoidable byproduct from the production of polyethylene terephthalate, more commonly known as PET, one of the most ubiquitous materials in the world. PET is the clear, odorless, food-safe plastic bottle you drink water out of. It’s also the basis of the world’s most popular fabric, used in everything from yoga leggings to baby onesies and area rugs; more than half of all fabric manufactured worldwide today is polyester. “You can't make PET polyester without creating this toxic byproduct 1,4-dioxane,” Mike Belliveau, co-founder of the advocacy organization Defend Our Health, told me. “It’s uniquely tied to the chemistry of the polymer.”
To be clear, there is no 1,4-dioxane in polyester products themselves. But like so-called “forever chemicals,” 1,4-dioxane dissolves quickly and completely into water, making it almost impossible to remove once it gets into a river or reservoir.
In 2012, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency included 1,4-dioxane in the third iteration of what’s called the Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule, a list the agency puts out every five years of chemicals it considers suspicious and wants states to start testing for. The EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory data shows that in 2019, the top four industrial producers of 1,4-dioxane in the U.S. were PET plastic or polyester factories; in 2022, it was five out of the top 10. That same year, a polyester manufacturer lost its permit to dispose of its waste at a treatment plant in New Jersey after state authorities discovered 1,4-dioxane in the drinking water and traced it back to the company.
Now, nearly 12 years later, not only has 1,4-dioxane proved to be shockingly prevalent, it has also been shown to be shockingly dangerous. The EPA may be on the verge of declaring, effectively, that almost any exposure to 1,4-dioxane constitutes an unreasonable risk to human health. Doing so would rock the American chemical and plastics manufacturing industry. But the alternative is being okay with rising cancer rates – an inconvenient fact the chemical industry would rather you not think about when you’re at the store.
North Carolina offers one representative case study. In 2013, a team from NC State University began testing for and finding 1,4-dioxane throughout the Cape Fear watershed, a network of rivers that starts in the mountains above Greensboro and flows southeast through Fayetteville and Wilmington before emptying into the ocean. At first, it was unclear exactly who the culprit of this widespread carcinogenic contamination could be. But by 2015, researchers had pinpointed a handful of sources: the wastewater treatment plants of Asheboro, Greensboro, and Reidsville.
Greensboro processed wastewater from an industrial waste transporter and chemical plant, Asheboro from a plastics plant, and Reidsville from Dystar, a dye and chemical manufacturer, and Unifi, a polyester manufacturer. DAK (now known as Alpek), another plastic manufacturer in Fayetteville, was also releasing 1,4-dioxane into the Lower Cape Fear River near Wilmington at a high enough level to consistently violate its permit. It is impossible at the moment to distinguish 1,4-dioxane’s impact on the health of people in the Cape Fear watershed from the impact of the more infamous class of carcinogenic forever chemicals that also lurk there: PFAS. But as with many pollutants, in the U.S., 1,4-dioxane’s is disproportionately found in Black and Brown communities.
Wherever PET or polyester is made, from the Gulf Coast to the Nakdonggang watershed in Korea, 1,4-dioxane is a problem. Typical water treatment technology can’t remove it, so when polyester manufacturers or other industries discharge contaminated wastewater to municipal treatment plants, the carcinogen flows right through and ends up in the groundwater or watershed.
In North Carolina, the state, the cities, and manufacturers began arguing about what could, and should, be done about it. “My biggest concern in drinking water in North Carolina right now, it’s 1-4 dioxane,” Tom Reeder, Assistant Secretary for the Environment at the state Department of Environmental Quality, said in 2016.
Dystar and Unifi submitted remediation plans to Reidsville, and Dystar told the NC Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Water Resources that it was distilling the 1,4-dioxane out of its wastewater and storing it on-site. Dystar didn’t answer Heatmap’s questions, and Unifi said the spokesperson qualified to speak on the topic wasn’t available. The NC DEQ referred Heatmap to Reidsville, which didn’t respond to calls and emails. The lead 1,4-dioxane researcher at NC State also did not respond to requests for information or an interview.
Perhaps this is because of how contentious this issue has been for all involved parties. In 2022, the NC Environmental Management Commission attempted to make a rule limiting 1,4-dioxane in factory wastewater to .35 parts per billion. Unifi and Dystar wrote letters protesting the rule and Asheboro filed a lawsuit against the limits, with Reidsville attempting to join. The rule was eventually nullified because it didn’t fully consider the financial burden it would impose on these cities.
But the way the science is going, these decisions may be taken out of North Carolina’s hands.
In 2016, Congress passed an amendment to the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA, or “toss kuh”) instructing the EPA to fast-track risk analyses of chemicals of concern. Under the new law, if the EPA finds that a chemical poses an “unreasonable risk” to human health, it is required to regulate it down to reasonable levels — regardless of the economic impact. One of the first 10 chemicals on the docket was 1,4-dioxane.
Then, of course, came 2017 and the arrival of the Trump administration, which interfered to weaken EPA’s published toxicity findings to make them cheaper for industry to comply with. For example, the 1,4-dioxane analysis excluded the risk of exposure via drinking water, even though more than 7 million people in the U.S. have drinking water with detectable levels of 1,4-dioxane. Many of the findings were repeatedly challenged in court.
When the Biden administration reanalyzed 1,4-dioxane, the draft findings published in 2023 said that 1,4-dioxane poses an “unreasonable risk” to the health of PET and polyester plant workers and people with contaminated drinking water. “As high as 2.3 in 100 exposed workers would be at risk of cancer over a lifetime of exposure,” Jon Kalmuss-Katz, a senior attorney with Earthjustice, which has submitted comments to the EPA, told me. “The EPA considers the range of unreasonable risk to be one in 10,000 to one in a million.” That’s a 100- to 10,000-fold difference.
Some advocates saw a death knell for any remaining environmental arguments for polyester. “The federal government basically concluded that polyester PET poses an unreasonable risk to human health,” Belliveau told me.
The risk evaluation has already gone through a comment period and a peer-review process, and the EPA expects to finalize its evaluation this year. When asked for comment, an EPA representative said, “Actual conditions and releases are highly variable and subject to site-by-site process conditions. The draft supplement to the risk evaluation should not be interpreted to suggest all sites that manufacture PET or polyester present unreasonable risk.”
Despite letters from the American Chemistry Council, the Cleaning Institute, the Plastics Industry Association, and the PET manufacturer Alpek (formerly DAK) attempting to poke holes in the science, the advocates I spoke to were confident the “unreasonable risk” determination will stay.
At that point, the EPA has several tools it can use. “EPA can regulate manufacturing, can ban the chemical, can ban uses of the chemical, can restrict releases of the chemical to the environment,” says Kalmuss-Katz. “But the underlying mandate is always the same. EPA has to ensure that the chemical no longer presents an unreasonable risk.”
According to Thomas Mohr, a hydrogeologist who wrote the book on the investigation and remediation of 1,4-dioxane, polyester plants could simply require employees to wear respirators, and there are commercially available technologies available to filter out the chemical from wastewater — things like vacuum stripping and incineration, collecting it on a resin, or blasting it with ultraviolet light. But these processes are specialized and come with added costs.
That latter consideration is important for an industry that is already struggling to compete with low-cost polyester from China and other developing countries. Of the 115 American polyester manufacturing companies in the 1970s, only 12 remain in business today, according to a history book by Unifi, the polyester manufacturer in Reidsville.
Unifi barely survived the great textile offshoring of the late 1990s and early 2000s, mostly by shrinking and laying off large swaths of its workforce, buying and setting up plants in China and South America, and specializing in premium recycled polyester in its North Carolina plant. At the beginning of February, Unifi announced it would cut costs to shore up its finances. Adding a high-price treatment unit might be too much for it to bear. (Unifi said its spokesperson on this topic was not available for comment.)
Belliveau of Defend Our Health said he would be happy to see PET and polyester go away. But that’s a far-off vision for such a popular material. “EPA is not known for its radical vision, so I doubt they’re going to call for the shut-down of PET polyester in the U.S.,” he told me. “They might say that we need to adopt a drinking water standard or put better control in plants for workers.”
“Often there is a multi-year phase-out period,” Kalmuss-Katz said. “There is time to respond to innovate and to develop safer alternatives and to get those out into use.” Some of those alternatives could be polyester recycling technologies. France-based Carbios and California-based Ambercycle, both startups working on textile-to-textile polyester recycling, say their processes don’t produce 1,4-dioxane. A representative for Circ, a Virginia-based textile recycling startup, would only say that it, “is adhering to all local and federal regulations to ensure its process is in line with the highest regulatory standards for safe chemistry… this is something the team will be following closely as data becomes more available.”
Polyester has become a core part of almost everyone’s wardrobe, used for its high performance, versatility, and affordability. More importantly for the Carolinas, it provides some of the few remaining jobs in a formerly vibrant textile center. To that, Kalmuss-Katz said, “Congress made pretty clear that the price of producing polyester cannot be fenceline communities are left with disproportionate and unreasonable cancer burdens.”
Still, even if the EPA’s decision is the final nail in the coffin of the PET and polyester industry in the U.S., it doesn’t really solve the problem, or rather, not for everyone. Like other industries before it — leather tanning, rayon manufacturing, dye houses and dye manufacturing — it will continue to exist in its dirtiest form in other, less regulated countries. If the United States’ past history of offshoring turns out to be prologue, most consumers probably won’t notice the difference, except perhaps in slightly cheaper prices. Fashion companies will certainly notice, but are incentivized to look the other way.
For a few people paying attention, polyester will simply join a long list of products — chocolate, electronics, cheap meat — that come with a niggling feeling in the back of our minds: this has probably harmed someone on its way to me.
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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.