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Money is pouring in — and deadlines are approaching fast.
There’s no quick fix for decarbonizing medium- and long-distance flights. Batteries are typically too heavy, and hydrogen fuel takes up too much space to offer a practical solution, leaving sustainable aviation fuels made from plants and other biomass, recycled carbon, or captured carbon as the primary options. Traditionally, this fuel is much more expensive — and the feedstocks for it much more scarce — than conventional petroleum-based jet fuel. But companies are now racing to overcome these barriers, as recent months have seen backers throw hundreds of millions behind a series of emergent, but promising solutions.
Today, most SAF is made of feedstocks such as used cooking oil and animal fats, from companies such as Neste and Montana Renewables. But this supply is limited by, well, the amount of cooking oil or fats restaurants and food processing facilities generate, and is thus projected to meet only about 10% of total SAF demand by 2050, according to a 2022 report by the Mission Possible Partnership. Beyond that, companies would have to start growing new crops just to make into fuel.
That creates an opportunity for developers of second-generation SAF technologies, which involve making jet fuel out of captured carbon or alternate biomass sources, such as forest waste. These methods are not yet mature enough to make a significant dent in 2030 targets, such as the EU's mandate to use 6% SAF and the U.S. government’s goal of producing 3 billion gallons of SAF per year domestically. But this tech will need to be a big part of the equation in order to meet the aviation sector’s overall goal of net zero emissions by 2050, as well as the EU’s sustainable fuels mandate, which increases to 20% by 2035 and 70% by 2050 for all flights originating in the bloc.
“That’s going to be a massive jump because currently, SAF uptake is about 0.2% of fuel,” Nicole Cerulli, a research associate for transportation and logistics at the market research firm Cleantech Group, told me. The head of the airline industry’s trade association, Willie Walsh, said in December at a media day event, "We’re not making as much progress as we’d hoped for, and we’re certainly not making as much progress as we need.” While global SAF production doubled to 1 million metric tons in 2024, that fell far below the trade group’s projection of 1.5 million metric tons, made at the end of 2023.
Producing SAF requires making hydrocarbons that mirror those used in traditional jet fuel. We know how to do that, but the processes required — electrolysis, gasification, and the series of chemical reactions known as Fischer-Tropsch synthesis — are energy intensive. So finding a way to power all of this sustainably while simultaneously scaling to meet demand is a challenging and expensive task.
Aamir Shams, a senior associate at the energy think tank RMI whose work focuses on driving demand for SAF, told me that while sustainable fuel is undeniably more expensive than traditional fuel, airlines and corporations have so far been willing to pay the premium. “We feel that the lag is happening because we just don’t have the fuel today,” Shams said. “Whatever fuel shows up, it just flies off the shelves.”
Twelve, a Washington-based SAF producer, thinks its e-fuels can help make a dent. The company is looking to produce jet fuel initially by recycling the CO2 emitted from the ethanol, pulp, and paper industries. In September, the company raised $645 million to complete the buildout of its inaugural SAF facility in Washington state, support the development of future plants, and pursue further R&D. The funding includes $400 million in project equity from the impact fund TPG Rise Climate, $200 million in Series C financing led by TPG, Capricorn Investment Group, and Pulse Fund, and $45 million in loans. The company has also previously partnered with the Air Force to explore producing fuel on demand in hard to reach areas.
Nicholas Flanders, Twelve’s CEO, told me that the company is starting with ethanol, pulp, and paper because the CO2 emissions from these facilities are relatively concentrated and thus cheaper to capture. And unlike, say, coal power plants, these industries aren’t going anywhere fast, making them a steady source of carbon. To turn the captured CO2 into sustainable fuel, the company needs just one more input — water. Renewable-powered electrolyzers then break apart the CO2 and H2O into their constituent parts, and the resulting carbon monoxide and hydrogen are combined to create a syngas. That then gets put through a chemical reaction known as “Fischer-Tropsch synthesis,” where the syngas reacts with catalysts to form hydrocarbons, which are then processed into sustainable jet fuel and ultimately blended with conventional fuel.
Twelve says its proprietary CO2 electrolyzer can break apart CO2 at much lower temperatures than would typically be required for this molecule, which simplifies the whole process, making it easier to ramp the electrolyzers up and down to match the output of intermittent renewables. (How does it do this? The company didn’t respond when I asked.) Twelve’s first plant, which sources carbon from a nearby ethanol facility, is set to come online next year, producing 50,000 gallons of SAF annually once it’s fully scaled, with electrolyzers that will run on hydropower.
While Europe may have stricter, actually enforceable SAF requirements than the U.S., Flanders told me there’s a lot of promise in domestic production. “I think the U.S. has an exciting combination of relatively low-cost green electricity, lots of biogenic CO2 sources, a lot of demand for the product we’re making, and then the inflation Reduction Act and state level incentives can further enhance the economics.” Currently, the IRA provides SAF producers with a baseline $1.25 tax credit per gallon produced, which gradually increases the greener the fuel gets. Of course, whether or not the next Congress will rescind this is anybody’s guess.
Down the line, incentives and mandates will end up mattering a whole lot. Making SAF simply costs a whole lot more than producing jet fuel the standard way, by refining crude oil. But in the meantime, Twelve is setting up cost-sharing partnerships between airlines that want to reduce their direct emissions (scope 1) and large corporations that want to reduce their indirect emissions (scope 3), which include employee business travel.
For example, Twelve has offtake agreements with Seattle-based Alaska Airlines and Microsoft for the fuel produced at its initial Washington plant. Microsoft, which aims to reduce emissions from its employees’ flights, will essentially cover the cost premium associated with Twelve’s more expensive SAF fuel, making it cost-effective for Alaska to use in its fleet. Twelve has a similar agreement with Boston Consulting Group and an unnamed airline
Eventually, Flanders told me, the company expects to source carbon via direct air capture, but doing so today would be prohibitively expensive. “If there were a customer who wanted to pay the additional amount to use DAC today, we'd be very happy to do that,” Flanders said. “But our perspective is it will maybe be another decade before that cost starts to converge.”
No sustainable fuel is even close to cost parity yet — Cerulli told me that it generally comes with a “roughly 250% to over 800%” cost premium over conventional jet fuel. So while voluntary uptake by companies such as Microsoft and BCG are helping drive the emergent market today, that won’t be near enough to decarbonize the industry. “At the simplest level, the cost of not using SAF has to be higher than using it,” Cerulli told me.
Pathway Energy thinks that by incorporating carbon sequestration into its process, it can help the world get there. The sustainable fuels company, which emerged from stealth just last month, is pursuing what CEO Steve Roberts told me is “probably the most cost-efficient long-term pathway from a decarbonization perspective.” The company is building a $2 billion SAF plant in Port Arthur, Texas designed to produce about 30 million gallons of jet fuel annually — enough to power about 5,000 carbon-neutral 10-hour flights — while also permanently sequestering more than 1.9 million tons of CO2.
Pathway, a subsidiary of the investment and advisory firm Nexus Holdings, has partnered with the UK-based renewable energy company Drax, which will supply the company with 1 million metric tons of wood pellets, to be turned into fuel using a series of well-established technologies. The first step is to gasify the biomass by heating the pellets to high temperatures in the absence of oxygen to produce a syngas. Then, just as Twelve does, it puts the syngas through the Fischer-Tropsch process to form the hydrocarbons that become SAF.
The competitive advantage here is capturing the emissions from the fuel production process itself and storing them permanently underground. Since Pathway is burying CO2 that’s already been captured by the trees from which the wood pellets come, that would make Pathway’s SAF carbon-negative, in theory, while the best Twelve and similar companies can hope for is carbon neutrality, assuming all of their captured carbon is used to produce fuel.
The choice of Drax as a feedstock partner is not without controversy, however, as the BBC revealed that the company sources much of its wood from rare old-growth forests. Though this is technically legal, it’s also ecologically disruptive. Roberts told me Drax’s sourcing methodologies have been verified by third parties, and Pathway isn’t concerned. “I don't think any of that controversy has yielded any actually significant changes to their sourcing program at all, because we believe that they're compliant,” Roberts told me. “We are 100% certain that they’re meeting all the standards and expectations.”
Pathway has big growth plans, which depend on the legitimacy of its sustainability cred. Beyond the Port Arthur facility, which Roberts told me will begin production by the end of 2029 or early 2030, the company has a pipeline of additional facilities along the Gulf Coast in the works. It also has global ambitions. “When you have a fuel that is this negative, it really opens up a global market, because you can transport fuel out of Texas, whether that be into the EU, Africa, Asia, wherever it may be,” Roberts said, explaining that even substantial transportation-related emissions would be offset by the carbon-negativity of the fuel.
But alternative feedstocks such as forestry biomass are finite resources, too. That’s why many experts think that within the SAF sector, e-fuels such as Twelve’s that could one day source carbon via direct air capture and then electrolyze it have the greatest potential for growth. “It’s extremely dependent on getting sustainable CO2 and cheap electricity prices so that you can make cheap green hydrogen,” Shams told me. “But theoretically, it is unlimited in terms of what your total cap on production would be.”
In the meantime, airlines are focused on making their planes and engines more aerodynamic and efficient so that they don’t consume as much fuel in the first place. They’re also exploring other technical pathways to decarbonization — because after all, SAF will only be a portion of the solution, as many short and medium-length flights could likely be powered by batteries or hydrogen fuel. RMI forecasts that by 2050, 45% of global emissions reduction in the aviation sector will come from improvements in fuel efficiency, 37% will be due to SAF deployment, 7% will come from hydrogen, and 3.5% will come from electrification.
If you did the mental math, you’ll notice these numbers add up to 92.5% — not 100%. “What we have done is, let's look at what we are actually doing today and for the past three, four, five years, and let's see if we get to net zero or not. And the answer is, no. We don't get to net zero by 2050,” Shams told me. And while getting to 92.5% is nothing to scoff at, that means that the aviation sector would still be emitting about 700 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent by that time.
So what’s to be done? “The financing sector needs to step up its game and take a little bit more of a risk than they are used to,” Shams told me, noting that one of RMI’s partners, the Mission Possible Partnership, estimates that getting the aviation sector to net zero will require an investment of around $170 billion per year, a total of about $4.5 trillion by 2050. These numbers take a variety of factors into account beyond strictly SAF production, such as airport infrastructure for new fuels, building out direct air capture plants, etc.
But any way you cut it, it’s a boatload of money that certainly puts Pathway’s $2 billion SAF facility and Twelve’s $645 million funding round in perspective. And it’s far from certain that we can get there. “Increasingly, that goal of the 2050 net-zero target looks really difficult to achieve,” Shams put it simply. “Commitments are always going up, but more can be done.”
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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.