Climate Innovation Calls for a New Kind of Environmentalism

Innovation has always been core to the American story — and now, it is core to any story that successfully addresses climate. The International Energy Agency estimates that 35% to 46% of the emissions reductions we’ll need by 2050 will come from technologies that still require innovation in order to scale.

Yet there’s a gap between what society urgently needs and what our institutions are built to do. Environmentalism, especially, must evolve from a movement that merely protects to a movement that also builds and innovates.

As an environmentalist, I am profoundly grateful for the hard-won battles of the environmental movement over the past 50 years; fighting pollution, toxicity, deforestation, and community harm has been essential to the health of our families and ecosystems. Yet in this moment, we need to complement these efforts by cultivating a new generation of environmental organizations who have the drive to build in their DNA.

Today’s environmental leaders can drive innovation forward, or they can stand in its way.

Elevating Innovation for Environmental Progress

I founded Elemental Impact 15 years ago to invest in bold entrepreneurs who are building and scaling the next generation of critical technologies. As a nonprofit investor, we pair catalytic capital with deep expertise to create lasting environmental and local impact, supported by philanthropic and government funders. We recycle any returns back into our nonprofit to invest in future companies.

We’ve seen a common pattern in many discussions where philanthropic and environmental priorities are being set: Most nonprofit organizations remain structurally oriented toward preventing harm — not innovating on solutions. The world needs vigorous efforts to speed and spread clean energy technology, and we must find a way to do this in partnership with traditional environmental protection.

Here’s an example of how the dynamics often play out today: One entrepreneur we know is building a carbon dioxide removal facility, and we’ve been partnering with her on community engagement. While she has seen strong support from local businesses, policymakers, and labor leaders, she has also encountered early resistance from one unexpected group: environmental advocates. “This experience has been eye-opening and disheartening,” the entrepreneur told me over gingerbread cookies. “I became an entrepreneur to change the world — and now I’m facing a barrier I didn’t expect.”

We see this story again and again as entrepreneurs trying to deploy new technologies face pushback from those with largely the same goal: to slow down and ultimately reverse global climate change while supporting human health and well-being.

For instance, my team recently engaged in a planning session with large environmental philanthropies to talk about the future of data centers. With global investments in data centers expected to reach nearly $7 trillion by 2030, we know that meeting their energy, water, and material needs — and the needs of the communities they’re in — will be essential. Yet the conversation focused solely on how to stop data centers from being built. Building new infrastructure at this scale requires solving for numerous complexities, and we need a strategy for community and company engagement that is just as nuanced — one that prioritizes local benefits and leverages the market momentum to accelerate clean energy and sustainable materials faster than would otherwise be possible.

This dynamic also shows up in policy designs that operate too slowly to keep up with the race to address climate change. At times, we see the environmental policy agenda working against environmental innovation. This has real consequences, in some cases doubling the cost of the very solutions we need to build.

There are many ways technological innovation can provide tangible benefits across both communities and the environment. Elemental’s investment in a geothermal company helped support a local university in creating an apprenticeship program in rural Utah, leading to good jobs and economic development while also providing clean power. This is an example of philanthropy, through our nonprofit investor model, working in concert with technology in a way that is highly catalytic.

Philanthropy’s Opportunity to Be a First Mover

Philanthropy has often stepped in to seed new movements, empower new leadership, and provide risk capital when there are market or policy challenges. However many funders we talk to are not yet leveraging philanthropic capital to shape markets, which is exactly what’s required to accelerate climate innovation.

The research backs this up. More than 90% of philanthropic leaders believe climate change will negatively affect the people and places they serve, according to a 2022 study by the Center for Effective Philanthropy. But less than 2% of foundation dollars have gone to advance climate solutions, per a separate analysis last year by Climateworks Foundation. And based on our conversations with researchers and funders in the space, we estimate that only a fraction of that goes to organizations that are focused on accelerating new technologies.

It’s important to remember that solar, batteries, and electric vehicles were once considered risky, untested, and controversial. Now they’re proven to be better, cheaper, and faster than their alternatives in large part due to philanthropic and government support in their early days. But to address today’s environmental challenges, those solutions are not enough. New breakthroughs in critical minerals, fertilizers, wildfire management, industrial efficiency, carbon utilization, next-generation energy systems, and so many more need the same catalytic support.

“Enhanced geothermal is only where it is today because of backing from philanthropy-funded initiatives that took risks where others didn’t,” Tim Latimer, the CEO of next-generation geothermal company Fervo Energy, an Elemental portfolio company, told us. This capital is particularly essential now, when government funding has been ripped away and hundreds of critical technologies are seeing their financing gap widen as they attempt to scale.

At Elemental, we work with influential philanthropists and foundations that are leading the way by funding innovation and new technology deployment. These organizations and others like them are the ones pushing the art of what’s possible with philanthropic capital and showing entrepreneurs that they are the solution — not the problem.

Building to Advance Societal Progress

We know market interventions from philanthropy work. With catalytic capital, Elemental companies are 2.5x more likely to scale from early to late stage, and for every dollar we invest, our companies unlock an additional $100 of follow-on capital. Working every day with entrepreneurs, we have unique visibility into how innovations succeed, fail, or get blocked.

In the age of artificial intelligence, unprecedented technological change, and an affordability challenge brewing in the U.S. energy sector, we need leaders who understand the leverage points in technology and are finding creative opportunities to make the biggest environmental and social impact. We know that new technologies carry risk, and not all will drive social progress. But the way forward is to help shape and accelerate the ones that will contribute the most to the communities where they operate. That includes being a responsible participant in our changing climate.

This is the best time in history to have a front row seat to innovation. Magic can happen when entrepreneurs, philanthropy, government, corporate leaders, and communities come together to drive speed, scale, and impact. Let’s be bold and build.