Hi Climatic Thoughts readers! I'm Lisa, here with a guest post on a meaty topic that may very well be coming to a dinner plate near you soon. Read on, and I promise I’ll keep the puns to a minimum.

The beef with meat

We all eat, and we can all eat better, for our bodies and for our planet. Eating is low on Maslow’s hierarchy and high on climate impact. It’s no wonder that Project Drawdown ranks plant-rich diets as the second most impactful solution in terms of reducing heat-trapping gases. This is due to the high resource intensity of producing meat in our current food systems. Livestock produces less than 20% of the global calorie supply, but utilizes more than 70% of global farmland.

The demand for meat though, is only growing. Developed countries have seen a rise in animal-based protein consumption for the last 60 years, and the US is the global leader. In developing countries, the appetite for meat will only continue to increase as GDP levels rise and consumers’ diets move up the food chain. Realistically, convincing a large enough subset of meat eaters in developed and developing countries alike to reduce or eliminate their meat consumption is implausible. Therefore, without innovating more efficient ways to raise livestock or creating suitable meat alternatives, our global food security and our planet will remain in peril.

Alternative meat companies, such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, have already made strong headway in bringing plant-based meats to consumers. Their animal-free options mimic not only the way meat tastes, but also the way it smells, feels, cooks, and even bleeds. Cultivated meat companies (or lab-grown, cultured, cell-based…the nomenclature is still up for debate) are taking it to the next level.

An (brief) introduction to how the sausage gets made

Cultivated meat is made up of real animal cells. Does that make it real meat? Well, you can decide for yourself. Making cultivated meat is not an animal-free process, but it can be a slaughter-free process. It starts with extracting stem cells from a living creature, which can be a minimally invasive procedure. These cells are put in a bioreactor and fed all the nutrients (e.g., sugars, amino acids, proteins) needed to proliferate. As the cells cultivate, scaffolding helps create the structure and texture of meat by cueing cells to become muscle, fat, and connective tissue. They are what turns cultivated meat from mush into marbled steak; less structured products such as ground meat or hot dogs require less complex scaffolds. After a few weeks, the cells are harvested and processed into the meat products that end up in our grocery stores and on our dinner plates. While the exact climate impact is still pending as researchers continue to make process improvements, initial projections estimate cultivated beef to require 45% less energy and 99% less land, and generate 96% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than traditional beef.

Though the first cultivated burger was created and consumed nine years ago, there are a few more hurdles to overcome before you’ll be able to find it on your local grocery store shelf or restaurant menu.

Obstacle 1: Achieving price parity

For many types of cultivated meat products and cuts, achieving taste and texture parity with conventional meat is well within sight, if not already accomplished. What’s harder to achieve is price parity. The first cultivated burger cost $330,000 to research and create. Now, the cost to produce a cultivated patty is below $10, which is still significantly more than a conventional burger, but quickly nearing a palatable price point.

The crux of getting to price parity is establishing a robust ecosystem of players within the space. The issue with the majority of cultivated meat players today is that their operations are almost entirely vertically integrated across the R&D process, from bioreactor design to cell culture media to scaffolding. In nascent industries, vertical players with high integration and robust IP often dominate early on. But as industries mature, fragmentation begins to occur and specialized, horizontal players start coming in. These B2B companies offer efficiencies in the manufacturing process that can help drive down the overall cost of the product. Startups, such as Micro Meat which is focused on creating scaffolds, are beginning to build out the B2B ecosystem for the industry, but there remains a chicken and egg problem: More ecosystem players are needed to achieve economies of scale, but B2B companies are hesitant to enter until customer demand is established, the value chain is standardized, and the end product itself is at least revenue-generating, if not profitable.

While startups focused on delivering the end consumer product are still the most well-funded and recognized players in the industry, receiving the majority of the $1.38B poured into the industry last year, more innovation and investment in specialized suppliers along the cultivated meat tech stack will be crucial to moving the entire industry to a scalable, competitively priced future.

Obstacle 2: Gaining regulatory approval

In the US, the process for gaining approval for cultivated meat in the US is its own maze to navigate. The  delineation of scope between the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is murky at best. Broadly speaking, ​​the USDA regulates meat, poultry, and egg products, whereas the FDA oversees everything else - which includes fish, exotic meats, and all processed foods. A few examples where the lines are heavily blurred (and a worthwhile tangent because the absurdity is so clear): The USDA covers egg products (e.g., egg whites, powdered eggs in food processing); the FDA is in charge of whole eggs. The USDA regulates open-faced packaged sandwiches with meat; the FDA approves closed sandwiches – meat between two slices of bread.

After a battle between the two agencies for regulatory oversight of cultivated meats, in 2019, the USDA and FDA agreed to joint regulation. Collecting, banking, and growing cells into tissue will be under the remit of the FDA whereas safety inspections of turning the tissue into meat and product labeling will be managed by the USDA. Industry optimists are hopeful that regulation will come by the end of the year, but we may have to be patient for just a bit longer. Like any effort in the good ol’ American political system, lobbyists on both sides are geared up and ready for a fight.

Globally, only one country has approved the sale of a cultivated meat product: Singapore. In December 2020, as part of the nation’s food security plan to produce 30% of its food domestically by 2030, Singapore approved US-based Eat Just’s cultivated chicken products. So far, no other government agency has yet to follow suit with approval, though regulatory review is underway across nearly every continent.

When it comes to developing nations, China released its five-year plan this past January, which serves as the foundation for setting the country’s vision, priorities, investments, and policy development for the next 5 years. Cultivated and plant-based meats were mentioned for the first time, though explicit regulation has not yet been announced. Given the tremendous consumer buying power (and potential R&D and manufacturing capabilities) of these nations, the industry needs to keep a close eye on global policy decisions.

Obstacle 3: Earning consumer acceptance

With affordably priced products and regulatory approval, the last frontier for cultivated meat will be winning over consumers and their stomachs. This may prove to be the marketing challenge of the century.

The biggest hurdle to overcome will be the “unnaturalness” of cultivated meat, but the power of marketing can be nearly limitless. Through well-funded, seamlessly executed marketing campaigns, US consumers have been convinced that meat is manly and organic foods are healthier. They’ve changed their mind on alligator pears (re-branded as avocados) and the Patagonian toothfish (now known as Chilean sea bass).

But as we’ve seen with the raging debate on GMOs, consumers still have a huge preference for “natural,” even if they might not be fully informed on what that means and whether it is actually healthier. Cultivated meat faces the same stigma. One potential solution is for cultivated meat companies and interest groups to focus on the competition – to invest heavily in exposing the “unnaturalness” of the factory farming process, from living conditions to antibiotic use. One study actually found that diving deep into how cultivated meat is made had the inverse effect of pushing consumers more towards traditional meat. In the end, the biggest threat to mainstream acceptance of cultivated meat might not even be the farmers and meat producers – it might be the environmentalists. In the same way that activists initially fought hard against nuclear power, cultivated meat could face the same battle with tree huggers who tout that all-natural and organic are the only way to go.

In developing markets with less sophisticated consumers, a different marketing play is needed. As these countries and their consumers become wealthier, eating meat moves from being aspirational to being attainable. People in places that currently have very little meat in their diets could potentially leapfrog traditional sources and go straight to cultivated meat products, in the same way many developing nations have leapfrogged the PC era and gone straight to mobile. Here, cultivated meat companies can position the product as a premium option that is engineered to perfection and higher quality than farmed meat, and even leverage the existing aspirational perception of the West. Reduced emissions from the broad adoption of cultivated meats would simultaneously help developing nations, which are most at risk from climate change.

Ultimately, consumers will be forced to reckon with their own moral definitions of what they want to put in their bodies. As the gap between the individual and our agricultural systems widens, we become increasingly removed from the process that puts the actual food on our plates. But when presented with options we’ve never had before, such as the choice to buy a cultivated chicken breast rather than a traditional one, we must think about where both of those options come from. For vegetarians who are opposed to animal slaughter, is cultivated meat an acceptable substitute? For those with religious beliefs about meat, can cultivated meat be considered kosher or halal? For those who are compelled by the environmental impact, would cultivated insect meat (that tastes like seafood) be an even more efficient, low impact protein source? Sooner rather than later, we’ll be faced with these questions as we stroll down the aisles of the grocery store, choosing what to buy for our next meal. Companies in the cultivated meat space have an opportunity to help answer these questions and guide consumer choices.

What’s next on the menu

From a research and regulatory perspective, we’re right around the corner from seeing cultivated meats available to consumers around the world. The science is proving that the question is not what can be cultivated, but what can’t? As companies move towards commercialization, ruthless execution as well as significant investment in consumer education and marketing will be critical in whetting consumers’ appetites for the meat of the future.

You keep hearing about new records for gigawatts of solar deployed each year. Then you wonder what happens after all the solar panels reach their end of life? There’s got to be a recycling business opportunity given the sheer numbers. Everyone is always skating to the puck, not to where it’s going. You think this is your chance to finally be one step ahead of everyone else.

Your intuition isn’t wrong. We are putting up insane quantities of panels. In 2020 19.2 gigawatts worth of solar was installed in the US. Double the number from just 5 years prior. Almost everyone is focused on deployment, not end of life. Now there are a few panel recycling businesses today but obviously this isn’t going to deter you. It’s not about being first, it’s just about being the best. And while that might generally be true, in this case even being the best might not be enough.

May the following insights be a guide to the gauntlet of obstacles you’ll need to overcome. It’s not impossible - it’s just not going to be easy.

Obstacle 1: Economies of scale are too far away

While each new year comes with a new solar deployment record, this has only been the case since the mid 2010s. The linked graph of solar power generated in the US from 2008 to 2018 makes clear the near step-change increase that took place between 2013 and 2015. Most solar panels today are less than 10 years old but have a useful life span of around 25 years. This means there won’t be significant volumes of panels reaching their end of life for at least another 15 years. One caveat is that functional end of life is not the same as financial end of life. The adoption of newer technologies like bi-facial panels may cause operators to replace perfectly good panels well within the next 15 years. Something to keep an eye on but not necessarily something to bank on.

The lack of volume is a problem because you need it to spread out your fixed costs. In 2016 there was less than half a million tons of panels to recycle globally. By 2030 that number is expected to go up to eight million. Economies of scale are especially relevant in panel recycling because the fixed cost of a facility is high - on the order of tens of millions of dollars. It’s hard to justify that kind of capital expenditure when significant volumes for recycling are more than a decade away. Because of this there are very few pure solar panel recycling operations today. Many outfits that do offer the service have a primary business in glass or general e-waste recycling since they can use some of the machinery from those processes for panels as well.

The intuition to skate where the puck is going is correct but in this case the puck simply won't get there for another 10+ years. New and existing businesses will have to survive that period before economies of scale become a real possibility.

Obstacle 2: The per unit economics are brutal

Waiting for volumes to pick up in another 10 years before starting your panel recycling business won’t solve your problems either. That’s because the variable costs of panel recycling are terrible. A standard panel is 65” x 39” and weighs 40 pounds. A bulky item on its own but much more so when you need to transport hundreds or thousands of them to a central facility. And on top of that, only around 4 of those 40 pounds have any significant resale value. Today the revenue per panel recycled is $3 while the cost is $25. Even if half of the $25 is the fractional portion assigned to processing equipment, that still leaves a 4x differential between revenue and the remaining operating costs. Drilling down into those operating costs, you'll see that they mostly consist of transport and labor. Both of which won't go away given the variance in where you pick up panels and their condition. At the end of the day you’re moving around a lot of mass to extract a small portion of useful material. A problem which has no easy fix.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the value-to-weight ratio of an end of life panel is going to get worse as time goes on. The amount of precious metals in panels is decreasing as manufacturers look to reduce their own costs. Meaning the same effort to transport and recycle a panel will result in less revenue, further throwing the economic equation out of balance. For society it’s a positive to use less precious metals in panels. For a recycling business its just another obstacle. Price spikes from shortages in these materials could theoretically counterbalance lower quantities extracted per panel. But it's too soon to make any definitive statements on where that will net out.

All of this is disheartening but it’s only true within our current system of economic incentives. While the physics of moving around bulky panels can’t change too drastically, the way in which we organize incentives is entirely up to us. For now there's no clear line of sight to financially sustainable panel recycling in the US given the economics described.

Obstacle 3: The whole economy itself

The solar industry is incentivized to manufacture and deploy. The rules of the game say nothing about recycling. There’s almost zero regulation in the US on end of life protocols for solar panels. Rules and incentives determine what happens in a given market. Without tax credits and government loans the solar industry itself would not be what it is today. The entire modern economy is built around a linear system of production, use, and disposal. Landfilling a solar panel costs less than $3. In a system where that’s true there’s no way recycling at a cost of $25 will ever be viable. And that cost is so high because of this linear incentive system. Solar panels are made with polymers (glue) that bind a glass sheet to the modules that produce electricity. While this helps the panel withstand inclement weather, breaking down these polymers to separate each individual material is what makes recycling operations so expensive. A different incentive structure that prioritized recycling would ultimately lead to different design decisions. Only by bending the incentive system to be more circular can panel recycling become a real possibility.

Going one level deeper, economic incentives and regulations are ultimately based on our values. Do we care about never-ending resource extraction or not? Do we find it offensive to dump ever-increasing quantities of “waste” into landfills or not? So while overcoming this obstacle in the short term means lobbying for regulations that incentivize panel recycling, in the long-term the solution is reshaping our values around consumption and disposal. We’ve finally got to a point where people see electricity from renewable sources as meaningfully different than electricity from fossil sources. What if we could go one step further by making a distinction between electricity generated from recycled solar panels and electricity generated from newly manufactured panels. Or what if silver extracted from old panels was deemed more valuable than freshly mined silver? This is something we have total control over. A commodity is a commodity only if we collectively believe it. Incentives are only a reflection of what we value. As what we value changes so will the behaviors that we encourage and discourage.

A path forwards

What’s hopefully clear is that while solar panel recycling itself has some tough obstacles, the real problem is much more foundational. It’s not just that economies of scale are more than a decade away or that per unit economics still look terrible at scale, it’s that the incentive structures are working against you at every turn. That leaves you the aspiring solar panel recycling entrepreneur in a tough spot. Established panel recycling businesses deserve huge credit for finding ways to carve out an existence in this space.

The place where opportunity could exist without a change in the prevailing incentive system however is re-using old solar panels. As previously mentioned, many panels may reach their financial end of life before they physically stop working. Starting there may provide enough runway until more systemic changes come about. With that in mind here are two ideas to inspire you to keep going where others have decided to move on.

• Develop a better resale market for old panels. Existing sites are quite barebones and have little data on panel degradation. Creating a framework for quality and amassing an accompanying dataset could prove to be valuable differentiators as the volume of panels available to re-use increases.

• Build a solar farm with only re-used panels in the desert. First collect all the panels that would be landfilled but are still in working condition. Then build the necessary tools to seamlessly integrate every given make or model of panel together. Finally sell this aggregate power at a premium to consumers who want to buy power from re-used panels.

When you talk about what it means to experience climate change there’s a tendency to focus on the disasters such as wildfires, hurricanes, or heat waves. But in this moment before all of us have had to deal with one calamity or another the feeling I’m starting to notice is that of disorientation. I can’t claim it’s more than anecdotal but it’s a definite shift that’s hard to discount. Over and over I now hear stories about how specific places and times of year are no longer like what they used to be. I recently had one such experience and want to add to this growing collection of what it feels like to live in the time when our climate is starting to wobble.

Every year since I moved to the Bay Area I’ve gone home to Virginia for the holidays at the end of the year. Outside of the festivities and food, going back to the East Coast also serves as my annual taste of the winter season. Bundling up and staying warm inside is an integral part of being at home for the holidays. It’s almost definitional. But over the last three years things have started to get a little weird. My most enduring memories from the last few visits are no longer of being toasty inside but of being outdoors on abnormally warm days. While the average temperatures for December may not have significantly increased, the lived experience feels markedly different. It’s also conflicting in that for now these new warm December days are not a bad thing. In truth they’re downright preferable. Yet each of these enjoyable experiences is tinged with a sense that something is off and that something totally different is about to begin.

All these thoughts came together for me this most recent December. I was standing on the beach with my parents and brother in 70 degree weather looking at dolphins no more than 50 feet away in the water. It felt surreal. Where was I? When was it? Were these dolphins always around this time of year? It’s hard to say because it’s not often you spend two hours on the beach in December in Virginia. To witness this felt a little like intruding on their private dolphin lives. If the weather weren’t so nice, we wouldn’t be there to see what they were doing. My whole life I've had one conception of winter in Virginia. Then suddenly there I was feeling a warm breeze in my hair while staring hard at the ocean to spot dolphins as they came up for air. The incongruity between the time of year and the perfect weather was impossible to ignore. To be on the beach felt refreshing but also somehow wrong. Which speaks to the growing disorientation we will all face as climate change distorts the world around us.

Seasons provide a rhythm to guide us through time. You feel a certain way each year when you first hear a summer thunderstorm, or when you first smell spring flowers blooming, or when you first notice that you can see your breath in the morning air. Our lives are built upon this foundation of repetition. But now this rhythm is breaking apart. Something deep inside tells you that it’s strange to be sweating outside in December just from walking around*. It feels as though your body has been tricked into thinking it’s summer when your mind is very aware that it’s winter. To make matters worse, a key piece of this disorientation is that there isn’t some new normal that we can expect. Most of the days during the holidays last year were cold or at least chilly, it even snowed a little. But the four or five days where it was perfect spring weather warped my perception of the entire three weeks. There is no new pattern, just more volatility. And it starts to make you distrust yourself. Maybe even as a kid December had these strangely warm days? Maybe I’ve forgotten those other winter beach trips? Or maybe I’m just too focused on what are truly anomalous events? Whatever the answers, the result is losing a sense of time. You feel displaced in familiar surroundings. You should be on the beach in the summer, not the winter. It’s the same and different all at once. The worst effects of climate change will be unequally distributed but the disorientation as rhythms like seasons start to disintegrate will impact each of us in one way or another.

We are entering a new era that will be defined by instability. There's still time to prevent the worst effects of climate change but we've already locked in a lot more disorientation as the world ceases to behave in the ways we expect. The most stunning thing about all of this is that the last global climatic shift happened more than 12,000 years ago. Some 6,000 years before recorded human history even began. We are the first of our kind to go through this experience but we’re no different than all those who have come before us. The Great Pyramids of Egypt and the Burj Khalifa were both built in the same stable climate that Earth has provided for thousands of years. There’s no precedent for the feelings that await us in the future. This era has already began for many people. For others the first signs are now appearing. Small things like spotting dolphins on a warm day in December point towards bigger things that are yet to come. In addition to the irrefutable data, the anecdotes and stories also all point in the same direction. The climate is changing and its redefining our relations to time and space. We are living in this first moment of departure from the only world any of us or our ancestors have ever known. It will take our best efforts to live with the coming disorientation and to establish new ways of understanding our familiar but changed surroundings.

*If you live in the Northern hemisphere

What’s your theory of change is a common question when discussing social movements. It’s the how and why a change you’re seeking will actually come about. In answering this question you usually end up debating whether change can happen from inside a system or if it has to happen from the outside. Put another way, does power need to change hands in order to make progress or is it possible to change the minds of those in power to achieve the same goal. I generally believe the former but recently have been thinking more about the latter. Mostly because I keep hearing about Joe Manchin.

He’s in the news a lot these days because he’s the one person holding up the Democrat's plans for addressing climate change. Now this isn’t strictly true, there are probably a few other Democratic senators who would also vote no on Biden’s plans but don’t have to publicly do so because Manchin is taking all the heat as a “swing vote”. If you zoom out however, the salient point remains that potential progress on climate hinges on the mindset and decision making of a strikingly few number of people across the globe. Take Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, for example. His newfound passion for addressing climate change has caused ripples throughout the financial industry after years of  disinterest. The ultimate impact of Fink’s new tune is yet to be seen but it’s clear that when those with outsized political or financial power switch positions, the effects are significant. So how do we foster more of these changes of heart?

My summary after reading various articles and papers is that getting anyone to shift their views on a given topic is difficult but not impossible. Presenting someone with facts and statistics is the least effective method whereas allowing someone to feel like they came to a new position on their own works best. What’s most interesting is how a more empathetic understanding of someone or something can lead to a lasting perspective shift. Two examples that come to mind are Catherine Flowers - an activist fighting to improve living conditions for her rural Alabama hometown and Daryl Davis - a Black musician who decided to meet with a member of the KKK.

• Flowers has a great book titled Waste that details her life and her effort to improve the wastewater crisis in her community. What’s relevant is that over the years she’s invited a number of politicians from both sides of the aisle to witness the struggles neighbors face when untreated wastewater floods their yards and homes. No matter their existing positions, visitors have made an honest effort to take up her cause after the tours. The night and day changes having seen first-hand the conditions stands out as you read the book.

• Here’s a full account of Davis’s story. He wanted to understand how someone could hate him without knowing him. So he scheduled an interview with a Klan leader named Roger Kelly. Over the years the two actually became friends which ultimately lead to Kelly leaving and denouncing the Klan. While Davis was attempting to understand Kelly, the reverse was also happening whether either of them realized it or not. It took some time but getting to know Davis certainly had a lasting impact on Kelly’s worldview.

The process of putting ourselves into someone else’s shoes is more formally known as cognitive empathy. This is different from emotional empathy which is when we feel the same emotions as another person. My personal theory is that there’s a spectrum for what it takes to cultivate cognitive empathy. Some people can read a book about the plight of those in the Global South already reckoning with the climate crisis and then cut back on flying the next day. Other people need to hear live in-person accounts from those who have experienced climate disasters before they take up action. And then there are the people who will only “get it” once they themselves or someone they personally know experiences hardship caused by climate change. It also can’t be ignored that some will never be swayed. All this is to say, different approaches are needed for different people when trying to foster cognitive empathy.

To bring it back to Joe Manchin - my thought is that if the few thousand power brokers and capital allocators that underpin our global economy had more perspective altering experiences, progress on climate would be much more rapid. The goal of making this group empathize with people most affected by climate change doesn’t need to be explicit action on climate. Just less resistance to change and creating some doubt about their existing positions. In combat sports a tried and true strategy is tiring out your opponent before going in for the finish. You make them bear your weight as much as possible to take the fight out of them. That way when the haymakers come their arms are down. Cognitive empathy is pinning the opponent against the ring and movements like Ende Gelände are the blows that usher in change. To expect more than reluctant acceptance is too audacious, but softening up the global elite’s positions is a victory unto itself.

Now in one sense people have always been working on this approach. Advocacy groups, NGOs, and activists continually strive to be heard by those in power. There’s no lack of organizations focused on getting inside the heads of decision-makers. Joe Manchin has been confronted by the Sunrise movement multiple times this year but to what effect is unclear. What’s lacking is subtlety. The surest way to get someone to dig their heels in is to call them out or make your persuasive tactic too obvious - it’s called the backfire effect. What’s needed is a more indirect and highly personalized approach. One where those who have political or financial power are led to have more empathy inducing experiences without raising their suspicions. It’s the plot of Inception with a different implementation plan (no drugging people to enter their dreams). Meanwhile advertisers have been planting desires into our minds for decades. Here the added requirement would be to personalize the message so that it perfectly resonates with the individual being targeted. The explicit form this approach takes might have nothing to do with climate change. But the goal would be to tweak the perspectives of specific decision-makers in a way that makes them believe they are changing their views on their own. The ulterior motive is the point.

Exactly how this would work in a repeatable manner is not clear but we can look to a hypothetical example for a rough idea. Imagine Gus - the governor of a medium sized state. In the next few months legislation to increase liability protection for those who make food donations will come to his desk. It’s being heralded as a food waste and climate change solution by its backers. Gus is a lukewarmer so anything that’s pitched as a climate solution is immediately met with heavy skepticism. There’s a good chance that he will veto this bill because he’s not bought in on the underlying premise despite the good that the bill would do for various communities. Here’s how that position might be changed -

• Our “empathy agents”  would first build an understanding of Gus’s social and information networks. Who are his close friends and what are his sources of news? This is groundwork for knowing where to insert stories, conversations, and media that Gus would eventually come across.

• Simultaneously they’d also attempt to learn everything about Gus’s life history and formative experiences. Where did he grow up, what was he like in high school, who does he respect, when did he experience adversity? This part would not be easy. How long it would take and how feasible it would be depends on the tactics deemed appropriate. Is hacking into a laptop acceptable? What about paying friends and acquaintances for relevant information? To personalize a message that moved Gus, such knowledge would be important to have.

• The next step would be tailoring an experience or narrative that would specifically get Gus’s mind churning on the relevant issue. Say a friend of his from high school had relied on a local food bank in the past during a particularly hard time. This episode could be incorporated into a piece on how better liability protection for food donators would be a major benefit to food banks across the state. Matching the contours of Gus’s life to anecdotes that could shift his thinking forms the core of this approach.

• With a crafted narrative in hand, the final step would be finding ways to have Gus stumble upon it in a seemingly natural way. Maybe the wife of a respected colleague brings it up at a party, or a trusted friend is co-opted into sending him a link to the piece. The level of underhandedness for these tactics is again up for debate. But the goal is to ensure that the narrative finds its way to Gus in an organic manner.

• Success would be determined by whether or not Gus signed the legislation when it came across his desk. Attribution would undoubtedly be difficult, just as it remains within the advertising world. And it would probably take multiple empathy inducing narratives not just a single story in order to get the desired effect.

Would this specific plan work, probably not. But it illustrates the type of non-traditional tactics that are needed in order to disrupt the status quo. Obviously it also raises the question: Is this morally acceptable? The answer depends entirely on whether you’re in the ends justify the means camp or in the means must justify the ends camp. Given the immediacy of the climate crisis and the fact that a deeper understanding of other people’s experiences never hurt anyone, my answer definitely tilts towards "It’s fine". Now there are ways to be even more manipulative as I touch on in the outline above. How “blackhat” such an approach becomes depends entirely on how dire one deems the climate crisis. My thinking here is shaped by a book I recently read - How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm. The book explores why there aren’t more radical climate organizations given the stakes at hand. Malm’s claim is that so far almost all climate groups have placed utmost belief in the supremacy of non-violent tactics. While ignoring that historically, social progress has been a result of both non-violent and violent tactics. We might not be comfortable with methods labeled as not-acceptable by polite society today but something that is "not-acceptable" doesn't mean it's not effective. And we shouldn't forget that when staring down a crisis that is nothing short of existential.

When first writing this post I wanted to focus on the concept that increasing empathy across society is the best climate resilience tool we have at our disposal. A neighborhood with high empathy will recover from a climate disaster much more easily than a community fully equipped with Tesla power walls but no ability to see themselves in others. But as it turns out this idea is not new. Many people have written about it and this paper by Robin Krznaric best captures my own thoughts. What I’ve outlined above hopefully expands the discussion on empathy as it relates to climate in a new direction even if the ultimate conclusion is that such tactics would set too dangerous a precedent. The world is a massively complex place, but I still keep thinking about Joe Manchin and how a few thousand people stand in the way of progress that helps the rest of us. Some of them will never be persuaded, but some of them are not as stubborn. So we should at least make an effort to see how we might change their minds - with a new kind of ploy that's intentionally not obvious.

As the year ends I want to lay out my motivations for one of two projects I’m now committing regular time and effort towards. If these motivations pique your interest then please reach out! The shortest pitch for this project is - If you had a shot at bringing a step change improvement in thermodynamic performance into the world, could you really turn it down? But maybe that’s not convincing enough, so let me further elaborate and hopefully by the end you’ll understand why I’m excited about this project and the the potential impact that’s at stake.

Some who and what before getting to why

A cold email back in February is how I first got involved with this project. While researching biochar - a sort of super-fertilizer and potential climate mitigation solution, I reached out to the author of an extremely well written piece on the subject. At the end of my call with Austin he asked if I wanted to hear about an invention he’d been working on that had even bigger climate implications. Now if you spend any time with Austin you’ll quickly realize just how smart he is. So the invitation to learn more was a no-brainer.

Austin’s invention is a new version of a Stirling engine. These are external combustion engines that can convert a temperature difference into mechanical work or vice versa. Toy versions operate off just the difference between the warmth of your hand and your surroundings. In commercial applications they’ve found a home in cryogenic refrigeration (i.e. storing COVID vaccines). There aren’t many use cases between the hobbyist toy engines and the niche refrigeration solutions for various reasons that I’ll touch on below. What’s important however is that Austin’s version, if it works, should significantly increase the performance of this engine cycle bringing it much closer to its theoretical optimum. To learn more about what exactly that means as well as the history of these engines, I suggest going through some of these videos and articles I’ve curated as I’ve built up my own understanding over the past few months.

Useful Stirling engine explanations:

• Video explanation from Phillips on their engine design - Part 1 and Part 2

• Video covering the Stirling cycle and engine

• One perspective on why Stirling engines never took off

• Overview of the technology and some applications

At this point you might be thinking - You and a stranger you met online want to improve a technology that can at best said to be a small niche within refrigeration? And it’s a technology that's historically been left by the wayside? And neither of you have relevant degrees or experience in engine development? What could possibly be compelling about working on this? It’s compelling because the answer to all those questions is yes. If you’re trying to make a step change improvement as we are, these feel like the right conditions under which such a feat can take place. But to be less tongue in cheek, here’s the case for why this project is worth anyone’s time and energy.

Be a part of the fourth most impactful climate solution

The world is expected to have approximately 3 times as many air conditioning units in 2050 compared to today. That’s around 3.6 billion units that have yet to be made, not accounting for all those that will have to be replaced. Current air conditioning technology makes heavy use of low boiling point substances called refrigerants in what’s known as the vapor compression cycle. The most common refrigerants are all 1,500 to 4,000 times worse in terms of how much warming they cause when compared to CO2 (called global warming potential). That’s why Project Drawdown, the comprehensive source for climate solutions, lists refrigerant management and disposal as its fourth most impactful solution.

While our technology doesn’t help with management or disposal, it could replace vapor compression cycle based units with heat pumps based on the Stirling cycle. This would remove the need for refrigerants in all the air conditioning units that have yet to be made. In addition, there’s a very real likelihood that if our technology works that it would also be much cheaper due to the performance gains provided by more closely approximating the ideal Stirling cycle. So while today the application of Stirling engines is limited to cryogenic refrigeration, a much improved version could move “up temperature” towards the larger industries of air conditioning and commercial refrigeration. And that starts to make things quite interesting from both a climate mitigation and business value perspective.

Flipping unturned stones with new technology is all the rage

Technological development is path dependent which means there are always forks in the road that are never visited. Research into Stirling engines peaked in the 1960s when companies like Phillips were looking into using them for tube-type radios and as an alternative to internal combustion engines (ICEs) for transportation. But transistor based radios came into existence and ICEs always had the advantage of being able to shift power levels quickly so resources flowed towards those technologies. The other problem is that Stirling engines are quite difficult to create at both the design and assembly phases. Especially in the era before computer simulation and advanced manufacturing processes. So competing technologies which offered more immediately valuable trade-offs received support. By the time modern techniques were available the world had already moved on from further exploring Stirling engines. Until now.

Climate change changes the equation on what features we want or don’t want from technologies such as engines and heat pumps. Refrigerants are bad, and so are fossil fuel based ICEs. Equally important is that we now have modern tools and techniques that were unimaginable 60 years ago. Looking back at paths not taken armed with new constraints (no emissions) and new capabilities (CNC lasers) can lead to new opportunities. Consider the company Turntide - the idea for synchronous reluctance motors existed for decades but only recently have we made enough advances in computer controlled servos and software to bring the concept to life (with potential for great success). Times change and what was once impossible can very easily become quite feasible - it’s worth it to find out.

This Stirling engine project is a combination of revisiting a well known concept with modern methods along with also having new modifications to the design itself. It's exciting to revisit an old fork in the road to answer the question of what happens if we choose the other route? And that’s because the nature of path dependency implies we aren’t always on the “best” path today. When you combine that knowledge with the aforementioned new constraints and capabilities, the appeal of chasing down these unexplored paths only grows. Who knows what awaits us, but the journey itself it exhilarating.

There's a sense of identity in being the outsiders

The question of experience vs. new perspectives comes up in almost every field. Experts become entrenched in their ways while newcomers are oblivious to things that are obvious to the veterans. In the case of Stirling engines, the remaining experts have seemingly stopped pushing forwards (remaining is a loaded term as most of them are in their 70s and 80s). Back in 2016 Austin tried to present his ideas to Allan Organ, a preeminent professor in the field, only to be dismissed before he even got a chance to show his work. Organ said he had given up and that there was no point to trying anything new.

And maybe the experts are right. Maybe it’s a technology that has some promise yet is ultimately impractical. They do have the expertise after all. But what if they’re wrong? Or at least what if they’ve overlooked things that Austin and I won’t because we don’t have years of failed attempts rattling around our brains? Taking on the experts and looking to prove them wrong provides surprisingly strong motivation to forge ahead. You can build culture around going against the prevailing view - just look at SpaceX and reusable rockets. Persevering where others have given up is a powerful elixir. The probability that we succeed might be low. The path to finding out is surely going to be hard. But it’s in that struggle that real bonds are built and your identity is shaped. We’re coming to this problem knowing what obstacles we have to hurdle but unencumbered by the weight of previous disappointment. Good conditions for pouring in time and energy.

If it doesn’t work, oh well, but if it does, oh boy

Zooming out a little, the broader point worth emphasizing is that if we can deliver even 50% of our hypothesized performance gains, it’s still a step change improvement for heat engines. And heat engines are the workhorses of the modern world. Processes as varied as water desalination and thermal energy storage would all be possible applications for this technology. It’s all at stake but obviously depends on whether or not theory translates into reality. Friction, heat bleeding, and many other factors will all chip away at our idealized vision for performance. On the use case side while so many opportunities do exist, each market has its own nuances and we won’t have unlimited resources to explore each and every one. Working on this project feels equal parts unbelievable and equal parts unsurmountable. Which is what makes it so compelling. Even if the likelihood of success is less than 1%, the upside is staggering while the downside is just our time and some initial capital for building a prototype. It’s hard to decline such a seemingly imbalanced set of outcomes.

Where are we now and where are we going?

So hopefully the motivations and incentives to work on this project are a bit more clear. Those are the most important factors for me when committing to any project. Everything else is something to iterate upon while keeping the end objectives in sight. Given that motivations are set, our focus is now shifting towards taking this from a hypothesis in our heads to hardware in our hands.

The goal for the upcoming months is to create a detailed 3D model of the engine and start machining the component parts required for a small scale prototype. We need to answer for ourselves whether or not the working principles Austin has theorized will work in practice. Second to that is building up contacts in industries where even a rough version of the engine could still win market share. If we have a prototype that demonstrates a pathway towards our hypothesized performance gains within the next year, we’ll then be able to start turning those contacts into customers.

If you’ve made it all the way here and are curious to get involved or learn more, reach out to Austin or me! There are so many opportunities out there but for all the reasons above this one should deserve some attention. We’re pushing forwards with our plans and eager to work with new people who bring experience or enthusiasm for the goals I’ve laid out.

Berkana is the ancient Norse word for birch tree. It can be said to represent a fresh new perspective or rebirth. Appropriate for the spirit of this project.

It’s been more than a year since I left the working world so I figured I should write something about my experience. To make it a little more useful I’ve structured this as a sort of guide for others. Over the last year I've seen more and more friends and colleagues leave their jobs without another one lined up - the great resignation is real. So to those who have already done it, I commend you and hope that this provides a little direction. And to those who are on the fence, maybe this will make the decision a little easier one way or the other. But before going any further we have to acknowledge the insane privilege of being able to leave a job to take some time off. Very few people have the opportunity to do such a thing. Unencumbered time is the ultimate luxury good. So if you are able to do it, the most important thing to remember is to be grateful. Take a step back every so often to recognize how fortunate you are, and try to pay it forward in some way. With that being said, here’s some thoughts that have stuck with me over the past year.

Three reasons why you should quit your job

Knowing why you want to take some time off is important because there will definitely be moments where you ask yourself if it was the right decision. My "why" was mostly the first two reasons. The third is something I’ve noticed over time and is not something I was anticipating at the start.

• To do an uncomfortable thing - In America, land where people take (and are given) some of the least vacation on Earth, to wholesale stop working is to go against the prevailing current in a big way. If you’re also in the young professional class then there’s even more pressure to constantly be striving for ever more. To say no to the rat-race is hard. You have to muster up some resolve to make the jump. See it as an opportunity to put yourself in an unfamiliar position and experience all the feelings that come with it. For that alone it’s worth doing.

• To stick your head out of the sand - The other effect of our 24/7 work culture is that it leaves very little room to get a sense of perspective. There are just 64 hours between 5pm on Friday and 9am the following Monday. 80,000 hours is an organization focused on answering how you can best spend the namesake 80,000 hours that constitute a typical career. As they frame it, if you’re willing to spend 6 minutes discussing where to go for a 2 hour dinner, then you should be willing to spend up to 4,000 hours or approximately 6 months thinking about your career choice - and that’s not even including everything that life involves outside of work. You can try to do this while keeping a job, but it’s the continuous expanse of time afforded by not having one that’s critical. You’re more likely to end up where you want to be if you stick your head up everyone once in a while and figure out where you’ve been and where you’re going.

• To meet your real self - I still vividly remember a poster from my 6th grade English classroom which said “Character is who you are when no one is watching”. It’s a great quote and in many ways quitting your job is a similar test. Once you lose the routine and financial support of work your natural tendencies are quickly revealed. Unstructured time might be a dream come true or it might be a waking nightmare. Dipping into your savings might be tolerable or it might be a constant source of anxiety. Defining your identity in every introduction without referring to a job might be a fun game or it might be paralyzing when meeting new people. This process of self-discovery helps breakdown illusions and reveals what makes you tick. As an example, I thought I would have made a lot more art by now but it just hasn’t happened. Work disconnects you from yourself not only because of the mental energy it demands, but also because of how many raw hours of the day it endlessly consumes.

Three learnings I’ve had since leaving my job

My own time off has mostly focused on mapping out where I might want to go in the future. And that’s reflected in what I’ve learned during this past year. If you choose to spend your time with a different intention then these learnings might not be as applicable. The first two learnings relate to the paradox of choice while the last one is more about my own state of mind.

• Optionality is intoxicating - You can wake up everyday and dream of a totally different future for yourself. One day that could be becoming an open source investigative journalist and another day it could be getting a master’s degree in public policy. When you have very few hard obligations, imagining each of these possibilities is quite thrilling. In many ways it’s more exciting to make plans for each different path than it is to actually pick one and start working towards turning it into a reality. Committing to one single area of focus has definitely been one of the bigger challenges I’ve struggled with. Even now I’m still juggling at least 2 different ideas for what to pursue. I’ve been trying to internalize the following quote ever since I found it a few years ago but haven’t got there just yet. “Anytime you have to make a choice between two (or more) things it'll feel like a loss. This loss is not regret, or an omen to change your mind, its sadness of the road not traveled. You have to accept now that you will not be able to travel down every road” ~ Anonymous

• There will never be a right answer - I’ve also come to terms with the realization that there is no objectively correct answer for which direction to go with your life or career. We live in a time where you can justify making any kind of pivot at any possible point. If you wake up tomorrow and decide you want to become a doctor you will find a way to rationalize that decision. Because ultimately the only thing that matters is how bad you want it. Asking others for advice or making a pro and con list helps a little, but in the end it’s a subjective thing that comes from digging deep within yourself. It takes a certain amount of self-honesty to know whether the path you’re choosing is what you really want or just something you’ve convinced yourself to think you want.

• The stress isn’t acute, it’s somewhat chronic - The benefit of leaving your job is that the anxiety around an urgent request that must be done by lunchtime or the dread of a contentious meeting with an executive who just doesn’t get it immediately vanishes. The ability to go to sleep and wake up without the fear of all the typical work stressors is marvelous. The drawback however is that without the structure of a work day, it’s hard to know when to stop thinking about future plans or what needs to get done. There’s always this background noise of your brain calculating whether or not your time is being spent as efficiently as possible. It’s your own savings that support you so leisure time can feel like a disservice to yourself. To live with this low-grade stress all the time is definitely something that takes some getting used to, especially if you’re a productivity minded person like myself.

Three pieces of advice for once you’ve quit

I’ve used the word structure a few times in this post because its presence and absence will greatly impact what you experience starting on the first Monday where you have nothing scheduled. I can’t tell you exactly what to do if you quit your job, but I do have some thoughts on how you can shape your time.

• BYOE - Build your own environment - The space you occupy, the people you hang out with, and the content you consume will all take on a heightened importance once you leave your job. Without the rigid routine of work your mind is able to roam far and wide. And that’s a good thing. But the surface area it has to wander is something you need to be intentional about. There was a time last year before the election where I followed a bunch of right wing twitter accounts just to see “both sides” arguments. It materially affected my mood on a weekly basis. As soon as I unfollowed those accounts I got back a considerable amount of mental energy. Similarly, moving to a new apartment with more sunlight has made spending time at home so much more satisfying compared to the past. Take the time to carefully curate your surroundings across the dimensions that matter to you. It’s exciting and will increase the chances that you accomplish whatever goals you have.

• Find someone to shame you - You’ll need to create some kind of accountability system for yourself. I try to semi-regularly check in with a number of people who I’ve met over the last year who are on a similar journey. You can only give the same update so many times before it’s too embarrassing and you’re forced to make real progress. We are social creatures and peer pressure can be a useful thing. In an ideal world you could fuel yourself on intrinsic motivation alone but I’ve found that having at least some extrinsic motivation goes a long way. The additional benefit of checking in with other people who are also taking time off is that you might make some friends. There’s a shared understanding that’s easy to bond over. Because again, intentionally hopping off the hamster wheel of American work culture is still kind of a wild thing to do. And even if your goal is to explicitly not think about how you spend your time, it still might be helpful to talk to someone about how that effort is going.

• Look to the past to find the future - One exercise I did early on was to make a list of interests, experiences, and memories from childhood onwards that stuck out to me. This ranged from toys that I liked as a kid to volunteering efforts I found meaningful as an adult in San Francisco. Within those formative episodes you might find direction for what to do with your time off and what to do after. You are the sum of all your past experiences. They compound into the present whether you like it or not so you might as well study them to see if there’s anything worth noting. Looking back can also help you understand your reactions to new things you encounter. As an example, I remember reading a lot of Tom Clancy novels as a kid and can now very clearly see how that has led to my fascination with cybersecurity as it relates to protecting the electrical grid. It all comes back in one way or another. So make a list even if it’s to just dismiss those experiences as irrelevant to your current state of mind. This is another way to bring some order to the experience of having unending free time.

I’ve learned a lot about myself this past year. The jobless journey isn’t over just yet but there’s much more clarity and direction today compared to twelve months ago. The content of my weekly “Things to do” list has markedly changed as I’ve tried to heed my own advice. Hopefully this post can serve as a point of reference for anyone who’s thinking about or has already started down a similar path. And again as I said in the very beginning, it’s a very privileged thing to take time off and you should always be mindful of that. If I had to do it all over again, I only wish I’d figured out some of my own learnings faster, but I’d still choose to take the time off without a doubt. It’s probably one of the best decisions I’ve made no matter where the journey ends up.

If you talk to a younger millennial about cults I’d wager the most common response is excitement. People want to be a part of cultish groups. To be clear, what most people have in mind is joining Soul Cycle or CrossFit, not becoming a Branch Davidian or a Rajneeshee. The desire to be in a cultish group is more accurately a desire to belong to something larger than yourself in our hyper-individualized age. This story about the decline of community in America has long been opined but it bears repeating that institutions such as religion which we’ve historically looked towards to find belonging have lost much of their influence. Corporations have tried to step into the breach but after a certain size, the profit motive and scale demanded by investors usually turns any sense of communal cohesion into a sickly charade. In the past I've written about how this decline in institution-based community has led to the rise of conspiracy theory groups which look very similar to extremist religious sects. For most people after you graduate from high school or college, you’re spit out into a world where even if you hate sports you’ll gladly join a kickball league just to feel like you’re a part of a team. Given this unmet need for belonging, it’s surprising that there isn't an overabundance of groups seeking to meet that need by centering climate change. Said another way, why isn’t there a CrossFit for taking climate action?

Now there are some groups that work on climate mitigation and provide a level of social connection. But your options today are limited. Broadly there are groups focused on political activism, environmental protection, local issues, and career transition. The most well-known are the environmental protection groups such as the Sierra Club or Greenpeace. The most communal are the activist groups such as the Sunrise Movement or Extinction Rebellion (pictured above and maybe actually a cult). And it makes sense that such groups foster the strongest sense of belonging because a core requirement of any political movement is shared solidarity. Also worth noting are the slightly less activist organizations such as 350.org and the Citizen’s Climate Lobby. All of these groups have some level of national acclaim but still aren’t household names. The Sierra Club is the largest at around 1 million members and the Sunrise movement is the smallest at around 80,000 members. For completeness we could also consider the Democratic Party as a group that focuses on climate change (or at least claims to). But the party doesn’t offer much in terms of belonging to a group. No one’s going around wearing an “I’m a Democrat t-shirt”. So despite these options, nothing sticks out as an accessible and mainstream group for where you can find community and center climate change.

I’m surprised by this mostly because in many ways climate change is an ever-expanding opportunity to bring people together to work towards a common cause. What we do in the next decade or two will set the course for another 100 or more years. The stakes have never been higher and the only viable solution is collective action - individualism will never yield the change we need. It’s David vs Goliath and Goliath is literally polluting the very air that we breathe. The climate crisis is the ultimate setup for creating a shared sense of belonging at a time when people crave exactly that. Yet as far as I can tell the two haven’t intersected at scale. The groups mentioned above are the most popular yet all combined they only have approximately 2 million members. So what exactly is preventing us from using the climate crisis as a means for filling our desire to be a part of something bigger than ourselves? I have two hypotheses.

The first is that fossil fuel interests and those who want to maintain the status quo have long worked to vilify any and all environmental movements (and they continue to do so today). Non-corporate organizations looking to focus on climate change invariably end up fighting the ghosts of previous efforts to paint such causes as radically undermining society. The opposition has gone as far as rewriting laws defining terrorism and rights to assembly in order to stop environmental movements both in the past and present. Powerful people in powerful places have undoubtedly played a role in preventing the formation of more broad based climate groups. Even today, Conservatives in America try to paint anyone who supports climate legislation as a cultist. The cumulative effect of such framing is that groups like the Sunrise Movement are tinged with a shade of radicalism to the eye of the general public. When in reality their policy recommendations are somewhat similar to what's been proposed and passed as recently as 2009. At the same time, the opposition has also rather successfully managed to convince many people that climate change is purely an individual moral failure, not the systemic and individual problem that it actually is. It’s always fascinating to watch when someone learns that the term “carbon footprint” was invented by Beyond Petroleum. Groups looking to create community around climate aren’t working in a vacuum. The opposition continues to intervene and has outsized influence in America.

The second hypothesis is that while climate change does have elements which should enable us to find purpose and communion, it also has aspects that make it equally difficult to rally around. To start, it’s an overwhelmingly massive problem. No one can comprehend what the US’s 5.3 billion tonnes of emissions per year really means. This presents a hurdle to get motivated when most things that can be accomplished in a year or two have to be measured in thousands of tonnes of CO2 - a 6 order of magnitude difference. Relatedly the problem is so massive that it touches every facet of life. Every object in the room around you needs to be decarbonized in some way. Where do you even start? Going one step further, because climate change is so all encompassing, it’s inherently a very politicized problem. In fact it’s almost entirely a political problem. While this is exciting for some, most people aren’t ready to dive into political activism. Just maintaining voter turnout is a struggle unto itself. The scale of the problem cuts both ways in terms of providing motivation to come together.

Another issue is that just existing in America means you end up emitting somewhere between 2 and 5x more CO2 than the global average. Because of the unevenness in emissions across the world and the fossil fuel industry's framing of the problem as an individual issue, people start out from a place of defensiveness. It’s similar to bringing up veganism at almost any dinner. Getting past this barrier where you need to reconcile living within a system while simultaneously demanding that it radically change is not easy and creates another roadblock for coming together. It’s not impossible to overcome this defensiveness but it creates friction when there’s already more than enough obstacles.

Which leads to the final aspect of climate change that makes it difficult to build a community around. All too often the narrative around climate change is about sacrifice with no positive vision for what the future looks like if we succeed. This stands in stark contrast to religion which has always had the allure of some kind of afterlife, salvation, or nirvana even if your time on Earth was miserable. Crypto, the new religion of our time, similarly also has the prospect of untold financial wealth so long as you believe and hold long enough. But with climate such a promise of a better tomorrow is harder to articulate. If we instantly solved the geological and atmospheric aspects of climate change, the Earth would look exactly like the one we know today. That should be more than enough but we’ve been conditioned to always expect something bigger and brighter if we put in hard work, not the same exact thing we have right now. Preventative measures are never as appealing as interventions. There’s been a few attempts like this AOC video that try to paint a vision for the future but none have found real success. If we can't define a positive vision for the future then we're left with only fear for what is to come. And while conservative groups thrive on bringing people together around fear, it's not as desirable or as approachable to most people when compared to the promise of a better future.

Given these two hypotheses, new and existing groups will need to incorporate the following characteristics in order to have a chance at more mainstream success: An emphasis on relationships as opposed to emissions reduction, a membership journey that incrementally ramps up involvement, personalized and high touch onboarding, and the creation of relevant rituals which serve to center a positive vision.

• Relationships should be prioritized over impact because the end goal is about creating a group that can survive even if results aren’t immediate. 5.3 billion tonnes of CO2 is an impossible number. No group just starting out can hope to shave even a fraction of that total. Building deep relationships amongst members which can endure long periods where nothing happens and activate with full force when opportunity arises should be the priority.

• Incrementally ramping up involvement is about meeting people where they are. Engaging with climate change means engaging with the political nature of the problem. Not everyone is ready to participate in a political action on day one. This kind of incremental build up is common to all kinds of groups. Union organizers call them structure tests while a martial arts gym might have introductory and advanced classes. And even if new climate groups don't focus on politics, an electrify-your-home club shouldn’t lead with getting new members to put solar panels on their roof as soon as they join when installing LED light bulbs is a more approachable and is still directionally correct.

• Personalized and high touch onboarding helps counteract the defensiveness or resistance that prevents people from engaging with climate. It’s also just good practice for building any kind of community. The Sunrise Bay Area chapter does this reasonably well but other groups leave something to be desired when it comes to the experience of going from their website to participating in one of their events. To enter into the climate mitigation space without a guide of some sort is tough and it doesn’t have to be that way.

• Rituals are another common feature of any successful group, whether they are explicitly called out or not. They are a glue that helps sustain cohesion within the group. More importantly they present an opportunity to repeatedly tell the story of a positive vision for the future. As a manager once told me, “Repetition does not spoil the prayer”. Articulating the relevant positive future a group is working towards is core to maintaining engagement when doomsday thinking is never far out of sight when it comes to climate change. Humans have been doing this for all of history yet in our modern times we often lose sight of how crucial rituals are for bringing us together.

I’ve yet to see any groups that incorporate all of the above into how they operate. Part of the inspiration for this post was googling “Climate groups near me” and not finding anything that really impressed me. That’s not to diminish the work that people are undoubtedly doing but to call out the room for improvement. With the cultish fitness groups the model is very well designed. You can go from googling a CrossFit gym to going to your first class pretty quickly and there’s a clear ladder of progression once you’re in. I’m a part of a number of climate related groups, some small and some large but I wouldn’t say any evoke a deep sense of belonging. In a time when we’re still living life on Zoom, the desire to be a part of something is only getting stronger. Mitigating climate change is one of the most meaningful things each of us can be a part of in our lives. Yet there’s few places today to gather with those who have similarly gotten to the point of wanting to do something and are curious about taking the first step. Not everyone is going to be able to switch their career to focus on climate change, but everyone should have the ability to participate in the effort in a substantive way. The social institutions of our past are not coming back. We aren’t built for the levels of loneliness modern society imposes upon us. And the climate crisis will continue to worsen given the emissions we’ve already locked in. The stage is set for a new breed of groups, organizations, and movements to seize this moment. There will be challenges and the opposition will not go quietly. But despite being let down by my google search, I’m still quite hopeful about the future of climate focused groups that can foster the sense of community we're all looking for.

Wealth inequality remains at historic levels within the US and across the globe. As a result there are growing calls for government mandated redistributive measures and bubbling resentment of the uber-wealthy from both ends of the political spectrum. A wealth tax might one day narrow the gap but there's a more immediate starting point that doesn’t require government. As participation in financial markets continues to grow, companies working on climate mitigation and adaptation have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reshape the wealth distribution curve by bringing in new market participants as shareholders. To better understand what's possible more needs to be said about why participation in financial markets is growing and why there's a near infinite need for capital when it comes to funding climate solutions.

More Americans opened a brokerage account in 2020 than any previous year. The pandemic was the main driver but two underlying shifts will continue to create an ever larger group of new market participants. One shift is the rapid decrease in barriers to entry to financial markets. Robinhood singlehandedly caused the death of fee based trading while simultaneously making it much simpler to invest money. And while there’s certainly a dark side to Robinhood’s success, no one can debate that it’s easier to buy a stock now than ever before. Outside of the public markets, AngelList is similarly making it easier than ever to access private market deals. While these deals are available only to accredited investors today, the SEC recently loosened the definition for becoming accredited. All it takes now is passing a single exam as opposed to making over $200K per year or having a net worth above $1.1M. Then there’s the next wave of crowdfunding platforms like Republic which don’t even require accreditation to participate. Like with Robinhood the user experience is intuitive and the regulations are changing in a way that makes it more appealing for companies and investors to use such a platform. And finally beyond the strictly regulated public and private markets looms the entire crypto market which has the promise of providing access to financial services without any requirements other than a smartphone with an internet connection. The tooling for participating in buying and selling assets of all types has improved drastically in the last 5 years and will continue to do so.

The second underlying shift driving more participation in the markets is a growing awareness of how the game of capitalism has to be played. Beyonce said it best in APESHIT - “Pay me in equity”. We live in a time where the mechanisms of capitalism are nakedly exposed in every aspect of our lives. There’s no way to build wealth on just an income. And this realization is more widespread than ever before. Putting wealth creation aside, ownership also means more control over outcomes. The meme stock sagas of Gamestop and AMC aren’t just funny anomalies but represent a new relationship between investors and firms. Call it shareholder activism, digital organizing, or whatever else, but ultimately it’s an effective way to get corporations to listen without relying on the government. While it starts with AMC, where a subreddit drives up the stock price leading the company to offer it’s shareholders free popcorn it quickly leads to Exxon where a more organized activist fund gains 3 board seats which now creates actual pressure for the company to take action on climate. People are participating in the markets because there’s a bleak understanding that lucking out on a few investments might be the only remaining shot at economic mobility. That's paired with the understanding that coming together as shareholders provides much more leverage than just signing online petitions or sharing posts on Facebook. The biggest obstacle now that access is easier and interest is there is simply the amount of savings people have. The most recent statistics from before the pandemic show that most stock wealth is still held by the top 10% of households. Nevertheless, ownership is everything in the world we've constructed and awareness of this fact is further driving interest to participate in the financial markets - even if it's just small amounts of money today.

At the same time as this shift in the financial markets is taking place, there’s also the growing need to invest in climate mitigation and adaptation solutions. Over $16 billion flowed into the climate tech sector last year but it will take an order of magnitude more to make a real dent in emissions. The excellent Climate Tech VC newsletter offers a glimpse of the range of solutions needed with its weekly catalogue of companies raising funding. These companies span alternative meat producers to worm based waste removal services. As the popular refrain in climate circles goes, stopping climate change requires changing everything - and changing everything means investing in a lot of new stuff. Consider that to move off of our fossil fuel dependence in the US, we have to replace approximately 1 billion machines with electric versions of themselves. The economic opportunity is staggering. Smart investors already understand that climate mitigation and adaptation businesses will provide outsized returns in the coming decades. Look no further than the performance of EIP’s climate tech index compared to the S&P 500 over the last few years. As long as we collectively believe that working on mitigation and adaption is worth our effort, the financial returns will be there. Most climate solutions are simply better than their fossil counterparts - it’s just a matter of lowering the “green premium” by scaling up these businesses. So if we zoom out, there’s a massive investment opportunity just when we’re also seeing a new wave of participation in the financial markets. That’s where the potential for shifting the wealth distribution curve can be found - by directing that participation into climate positive solutions. To do this however it will take an active effort on the part of those working within the sector.

The reason the climate sector is positioned to nudge the wealth distribution curve is because those who work within it are more attuned to the shortfalls of our economic system than the general population. My hypothesis is that there’s more willingness to engage in diversifying who profits from the success of a business in the climate sector than compared to other ones. Having talked to numerous people over the past year, I’d say it’s a group where there’s a definite willingness to grapple with the fact that the neoliberal experiment of the past 50 years has some fundamental flaws. Climate meetups and communities are some of the few places where activists and investors are routinely in the presence of each other. Or at least it’s a much more frequent occurrence than at say an AI meetup. As you learn more about climate change and its origins you almost have to stare down the extractive foundation of our economic system when it comes to the natural world. And as you stare at that, it’s only a matter of time until you start questioning whether the same economic system is also out of balance in terms of who benefits and who gets left behind. There’s this environment within climate that’s less dogmatic about the greatness of capitalism which creates the conditions for taking meaningful action towards fixing some of its less desirable outcomes.

If the trend of increased participation in the financial markets continues, the aggregate amount of capital representing those outside the top 10% of households will grow to be substantial. And as this happens, climate companies and climate fund managers should seek to be more inclusive of this new source of capital. For companies this means using platforms like Republic or setting aside an allocation in their fundraising round for frontline workers in their specific domain. For fund managers this means looking to bring on these new groups as partners. In our world of near-zero interest rates there will continue to be tons of capital searching for returns. Which means companies and fund managers have more discretion when choosing their sources of capital.

In more concrete terms consider the following. A new low carbon cement startup is seeking investment and has identified two similar funds with domain expertise and favorable terms. One fund however has a crypto-based DAO consisting of construction workers as a financial backer while the other fund has just a traditional mix of high net worth individuals. Which group gets chosen? For the startup,  the construction worker backed fund not only has the benefit of a redistributive effect but also provides more incentive alignment. Its product will ultimately be used by its own investors. Additionally the company can use that fact to gain market share against competitors. Why not purchase cement from the company whose profits will flow back to your fellow construction workers. For the fund, they’re winning deals because of their differentiated capital structure. And for the construction worker / investor, the benefit is a pathway to building wealth that was previously unavailable. Ultimately this is a return to a stakeholder model of corporate governance done through the ham-fisted method of converting stakeholders into shareholders.

It’s still very early days for this kind of model but companies like Carbon Equity and the Komorebi Collective offer a vision for the future. The former is trying to lower the barrier to entry for individuals to access private market climate funds while the latter is a group of women looking to fund women and nonbinary founders. This new direction of companies choosing to raise diversified capital and funds seeking to pool together diversified capital can only happen through sustained intentional effort. Participation in financial markets will continue to grow regardless and without focus its effects will be diffuse. The climate sector has the the unique opportunity and mindset to provide the necessary direction. And if that direction is followed by the financial success of these companies, wealth can accumulate amongst new groups thereby shifting the curve.

Wealth inequality is a problem that will take multiple solutions. The government has the most agency to effect change if it ever musters the willpower to do so. But in the meantime, connecting this new wave of financial market participation with the need for climate investment dollars could very well kickstart new pools of wealth outside the traditional top 10% of households. There are many assumptions worth calling out here - namely that enough people can actually participate in these markets to create a substantial financial block, that climate companies manage to deliver returns that outcompete other sectors, and that capital can become differentiated in terms of who’s supplying the dollars. Deeper than that is an a priori assumption that extreme wealth inequality itself is undesirable within a society. Climate companies and fund managers have an opportunity to make an outsized impact in this regard. I’ll emphasize again that it will take effort and it’s not so easy at the moment. Most companies today are still desperate for any funding, most companies also fail, and fund managers struggle to raise capital to deploy. But the future has a way of sneaking up on us in these exponential times. We’re at an inflection point in human history across a number of dimensions and the most consequential may very well be the increase in financial market participation along with the existential effort to mitigate climate change. All the problems of the Anthropocene are interconnected, so we should make a concerted effort to intersect the solutions that we’ve traditionally thought to be independent of each other.

Soon after the pandemic lockdowns went into effect people started discussing the climate implications of everyone working from home. The initial conclusion was that since a large portion of workers no longer had to commute by car, emissions would fall significantly. To some extent this has proven true but as with any complex issue the real answer is that it depends on many factors. As an example, consider that offices are generally more energy efficient than individual households. Sustained remote work could increase energy demand as homeowners rely on older air conditioning systems that draw more power to achieve the same indoor temperature as an office building. If a particular electrical grid is heavily reliant on coal or gas then emissions might actually go up. Seeing this complexity got me thinking about what other benefits remote work could have as it relates to mitigating climate change. My current hypothesis is that the real climate benefit of remote work is that it creates more opportunity for each of us to reconnect with whatever nature exists around us. Thereby making us care a little bit more about how climate change impacts our lived-in surroundings. And that matters because caring is the precursor to all action.

I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not very rigorous to support a hypothesis with only personal anecdotes but I’m going to push ahead anyways. To set the stage for my remote work hypothesis we have to go all the way back to childhood road trips where my parents would tell my brother and I to look at the trees as we traveled down I-95. I distinctly remember my response to this suggestion being, “They are just trees, what’s there to look at”. That is to say, nothing in my past has foreshadowed a real fondness for natural surroundings. Yet a year and a half into a pandemic induced remote work* lifestyle I’ve noticed a marked change in how much I care for the trees, shrubs, flowers, and animals that surround me (despite living in the middle of a city).

How remote work created this perspective change is not complicated. It allowed me to be at home for most of the day where I’m fortunate to have a large tree that’s right outside my apartment unit. And even more importantly, this tree just happens to be a favorite spot for the famous parrots of San Francisco.

At first I was genuinely shocked to see parrots no more than a foot away from my window. But over the last few months they’ve become familiar and I’ve become attached. About 10 to 20 of them visit my street seemingly every other day between 4:00 and 5:00 PM. Usually around 3 or 4 parrots will come to the tree to nibble on its flowers. The parrots might be alternating days because there's also another flock of birds that visit the trees on my street quite frequently. I'm now able to know the parrots are nearby based purely on the difference between their squawking sounds and those of their rival gang. It's only taken a few months to grow accustomed to this rhythm of bird activity. Recently however the tree’s flowers have withered and as a result the parrots have not stopped by. My first thought was that the tree was dying because of the western drought but after some research on the type of tree, a red ironbark eucalyptus, my concern has been somewhat relieved - the trees are quite drought tolerant. Seemingly the flowers have just done their job for the year. It only took a few days before I noticed that I hadn’t seen or heard the parrots. I was surprised at how fast I picked up on the change. For now my hope is that the parrots are getting their sustenance from somewhere else in the city and that they’ll return when the flowers bloom again.

While this story about the parrots is the driving anecdote behind this hypothesis on remote work’s climate benefits, the more broadly applicable anecdote is walking. Remote work eliminates commutes and generally results in more flexible schedules. The perfect conditions for adding a walk into the daily routine. And for us humans, walks are great. The physical health benefits of walking are well documented and now the mental health benefits of walking, especially in nature, have supporting evidence as well. But we should also consider walks from the perspective of the neighborhood plants. They receive our attention as we stroll past them each day. This builds awareness which means that if an invasive species takes root then someone might notice and take action. It’s a two way street and we often forget that we have a role to play in sustaining the natural world around us. So even if there’s no tree by the window with parrots, remote work makes it possible to connect with a neighborhood or city block through the most basic act of a walk.

What started as just a few seconds of staring out the window at tree branches each day led all the way to finding myself on the SF Tree map website investigating which species of tree was outside my window and then assessing how this might affect the parrot's behavior. One immediate lesson that I've repeatedly heard but now experienced is the interconnectedness of nature. While you might start off only concerned with one plant or animal, you quickly end up caring about the whole ecosystem because everything depends on everything else. This is much more powerful when lived as opposed to read about in a book.

Coming back to remote work and it's opposite, 9-5 office work, the clear implication is that with the latter my whole parrot experience would have never happened. I might not even know the parrots visited the tree let alone understand the pattern of their visits. Proximity and continuity are both equally important when it comes to creating connection with the natural world. Traditional 9-5 office work can’t provide either of those. It forces us to divide ourselves in both time and space. Commuting miles away from our homes on a concrete river only to spend hours in the midst of a concrete jungle makes it nearly impossible to establish any rhythm with nature. But all it takes to re-establish some sense of connection is a tree by the window and a few moments to observe it with each passing day. Remote work can't apply to every job and doesn't solve all the problems that plague our relationship to the Earth but it does help create the conditions for fixing what's broken.

How all of this relates back to mitigating climate change is simple. If you don’t care, you won’t act. Climate change is often portrayed as this big scary monster that can only be averted with an equally big and powerful force. But the truth is that preventing the worst will take a billion small local actions that are loosely going in the same direction. The first step needed for all that action is re-establishing a sense of belonging to the places we live. Modern work and technology have disrupted our ability to do so right as we need it the most. Before we can act on the local level and demand change from the bottom up, we have to care. And in order to care we have to really know our surroundings. The parrots have done that for me. Walks too. Learning more about San Francisco's public works division or lobbying to keep streets in SF car-free are things I wouldn’t have considered a year ago. But now I care. And while there might not be an immediate impact on emissions, this attention to surroundings leads towards a new standard of accountability. Concern for a place leading to climate action is not a new idea. But the pandemic induced remote work surge is a new opportunity to help make that idea more of a reality. With that in mind I'll end with this passage from an article by Naomi Klein that inspired this post. I suggest reading the article in it’s entirety as well.

“Climate change is place-based, and we are everywhere at once. The problem is not just that we are moving too quickly. It is also that the terrain on which the changes are taking place is intensely local: an early blooming of a particular flower, an unusually thin layer of ice on a lake, the late arrival of a migratory bird. Noticing those kinds of subtle changes requires an intimate connection to a specific ecosystem. That kind of communion happens only when we know a place deeply, not just as scenery but also as sustenance, and when local knowledge is passed on with a sense of sacred trust from one generation to the next”

* My currently jobless version of remote work :)

Recently I bought Facebook’s virtual reality (VR) headset to see if the hype around the technology is real. After testing out a few games and other apps it’s clear to me that the excitement is warranted. Despite Facebook’s questionable account login requirements, the whole experience is seamless and simple. You can go from being in a living room to being in a spaceship in under 60 seconds. More often than not I find myself actually immersed - feeling as though I really am in a different place. And this is with a headset that doesn’t even have the highest visual quality in the market today. It’s very easy to see how with another decade or two of development the level of immersion will be at least an order of magnitude more impressive. In imagining the future of VR it’s hard not to have a moment of wonder. VR will allow anyone to “go” any place at any time they wish. And with advancements in body tracking, we’ll also be able to do anything within these virtual worlds. But if you’re someone who spends a lot of time thinking about climate change then that same moment is also when you have this sickening realization that VR is ultimately a climate adaptation technology that we may not have a choice in accepting. Two recent experiences frame my thoughts that VR in 2050 could be a simultaneous wonder and tragedy. The wondrous part is the technology's ability to help us adjust if the world is less hospitable and unrecognizable compared to the past. The tragic part is the fact that we might need to rely on it at all.

The first experience was my attempt or lack thereof to exercise during the wildfire season in California last year. A running habit that was already on life support completely flatlined as the air quality made it hazardous to even go on a walk without an N95 mask. Unmitigated climate change would only make wildfires worse and more frequent. But wildfires won’t be the biggest problem for outdoor exercise. That honor would go to unrelenting heatwaves. With no climate mitigation up to 90 million people in the US could experience 30 or more days per year with a heat index above 105 degrees Fahrenheit by mid-century. That's almost a third of the country facing conditions where it’s not just uncomfortable but actually unsafe to do strenuous exercise outdoors. If something as simple as a run or a bike ride ceases to be an option for portions of the year then naturally indoor activities will take their place as substitutes. And VR is well positioned to be the substitute.

Despite shortcomings elsewhere, fitness is the “killer app” for VR. Boxing in "Thrill of the Fight" took me from skepticism to full-on believer within a few rounds in the ring. And this interview with the founder of Supernatural, a VR fitness company, goes deeper into why it works so well for exercise. While most VR workouts are just kinesthetics right now, a future where Peloton offers its own VR experience for their stationary bikes seems almost inevitable - super immersive bike rides through the landscape of your choice! The rise of working out in VR is perfectly and painfully aligned for a time when outdoor exercise might become a special occasion and not something that’s just taken for granted. VR fitness is the definition of climate adaptation and the dichotomous feelings that come with it. A VR bike ride through a national park from the confines of a bedroom is as close to magic as possible. But having to do that because it’s too hot to go outside or because the real version of that park is consistently on fire is pure tragedy.

The second experience was a realization I had a few nights ago when Google searching for images of hippos. Every few months I invariably end up spending an hour or so looking at pictures of large wild animals. In addition to hippos - saltwater crocodiles, blue whales, and anacondas are all recurring image search queries. The fact that such creatures roam the Earth is fascinating. Especially interesting is the size of these animals in comparison to humans. A male hippo can weigh up to 10,000 pounds. The world’s largest saltwater crocodile is over 20 feet long. And neither of those compare to blue whales which can be up to 300,000 pounds and over 80 feet long. Despite how often I go down this rabbit hole, I’ve yet to see any of these animals in person. The periodic Google searches keep me satisfied mostly because in the back of my mind I know that if I really wanted to see a hippo, I could find a way to make it happen. But if the world heats up beyond 2 degrees of warming, the risk that those animals go extinct rises greatly. One study estimates that fully one third of all animal and plant species could be extinct by 2070. So here too VR might have a role to play if there are no more hippos left to visit.

Surprisingly there aren’t any decent safari experiences for VR right now, but it’s only a matter of time. And while the first versions might be limited in one way or another, the future of what’s possible is so obvious. Especially when considering how far graphics technology has come in just the past 10 years. Photos and videos can’t communicate the scale of these animals the same way that VR can. This was confirmed when I used a 3D sculpting app to try and create animals on my own. Even though my attempts were made of mostly blocks and squiggles, there was a distinct sense of size. I feel confident in saying that within the next 10 years a truly astounding VR safari experience will exist and it will cost under $500 (an actual safari costs between $4,000 - $15,000). That such an experience will exist is marvelous. But in a future that will be defined by climate change, there’s no way to think about a VR safari without also coming to terms with the possibility that the real animals modeled in VR might not exist on Earth anymore. This kind of climate adaptation is of the most dystopian variety. Digitally recreating a world in order to connect with what no longer exists. Yet it will be needed if we’re faced with mourning the loss of numerous species all at once. It's not all that different from how photos and videos help us grieve when our loved ones pass away. Climate adaptation will be about physical and mental adjustments and VR has a role to play in both.

VR will help us cope with a world that no longer behaves or resembles anything we’re familiar with. The fact that it’s so well positioned to do such a thing is what makes it both wondrous and tragic. Just how much of a role VR plays in our future is linked to how well we mitigate climate change. The technology itself will advance regardless because billions of dollars are continuously pouring into its development. Unlike other new technologies such as cryptocurrencies, VR in a twisted way does benefit from a world on fire. Rising global temperatures means strictly more time spent indoors. That’s the thing about climate adaptation technologies. It’s great that they can provide a way for us to persevere on a planet that’s changing, but they’re also a constant reminder that we don’t really have much of a choice. I was skeptical of VR before trying it out. Now I’m just startled by how much the future might rely on VR and what it will be tasked with providing for us.

Many words have recently been written about the climate impact of cryptocurrencies. The focus has been on the sources and quantities of energy being harnessed to mine new coins. It’s an interesting discussion but not one where I have anything new to say. What’s more interesting to me is the tension between the crypto community’s vision for the future and a planet that’s on the precipice of a climate disaster. In order to have a chance at creating the crypto-utopia of their dreams, the community’s true believers will have to reconcile the differences between their core ideologies and the reality of what it will take to preserve a stable climate. It’s not an impossible feat but it will be an immense test of mental flexibility.

So what is the ideology and vision at the center of crypto? It’s deeply libertarian and in many senses anarchist. Decentralization is fundamental to everything about crypto. No one person or group should be able to control or censor everyone else. If we assume good intentions it’s an appealing goal to strive towards. This essay by one of crypto’s truest and loudest believers Balaji Srinivasan best captures the vision for a decentralized crypto future. It’s worth a read just to understand the audacity of the envisioned utopia. It’s a future where we’ll create new countries in the cloud; where cryptocurrencies will reign supreme and existing governments will be unable to meddle with fiscal policy; where each person will be ensured a say in the law by participating in a decentralized autonomous organization. There’s a level of headiness that is hard to resist. The beating heart of crypto is freedom from centralization in every form. Who doesn’t want to have their right to vote enshrined in immutable and distributed code. Or to be able to send and receive money without paying rent seeking middlemen. Or to be able to live without fear of censorship by big social media companies. Down with centralization!

It's a vision that even communists might get behind. A sort of post-capitalist and post-scarcity world where everyone can do whatever they want and nobody can interfere with the pursuits of others. Which brings me to the important takeaway: The true believers are very skeptical of authority. Libertarianism is a core tenet and not something to be negotiated. The government can’t be trusted and has no idea that its money printing frenzy is leading us down a path to ruin. This conspiratorial tone about government overreach and the inherent flaws of fiat currency can be found in almost every forum or thread related to crypto. And it’s not surprising - if money itself can be decentralized then why not everything else. Most of crypto's true believers are certain that the future they envision is preordained. We just have to wait for the technology to scale and for everyone else to see the light. Salvation is right around the corner.

But what’s already past the corner and happening right now is the climate crisis. Regardless of when the crypto future arrives it still has to take place on Earth. Is it more likely that we create a crypto-utopia if we manage to keep Earth below 1.5 degrees of warming, or if we shoot past it and end up at 3 degrees or more? It’s not really a fair question because any vision for humanity’s future is more likely to succeed if we keep warming below 1.5 degrees. So it’s not very bold to say that the future envisioned by crypto's true believers is more achievable if we mitigate climate change.

I’ll go further and say that crypto's dreams are especially dependent on mitigating climate change. If the Earth warms more than 1.5 degrees we'll be constantly ravaged by droughts, storms, and all manner of other disasters. Those conditions are not likely to leave room for the types of libertarian playgrounds sought by crypto’s true believers. The pandemic has shown us that in times of crisis the world gets more insular and governments expand their roles. And at the human level, trust within communities becomes paramount. People turn to those they know and also towards authority figures in trying times. This has happened before and is already happening again. Basic needs also become much harder to guarantee in an overheated world. It seems unlikely that radical new forms of governance will be experimented with when we're short on food, water, and places that aren't too hot to live. Cryptocurrencies won’t disappear, but the crypto-utopia will be unreachable.

But going back to the less bold statement - The vision for a decentralized future benefits from a stable climate on Earth. A world where we’re not constantly devoting resources to securing our physical needs seems much more likely to be a place where we can make astronomical bids on blockchain native art. While some communities are already facing the reality of climate change, most aren’t. And that provides a false sense of security that’s not easy to see through. Bitcoin was created in what’s potentially the last breath of a dying era. The climate of Earth today is the best it will be for the next 100 years. Without a stable climate, the potential for cloud first countries is lower (you decide by what amount). So then the question becomes what will it take to keep the Earth’s climate stable? Can crypto’s true believers get behind the path to mitigating climate change in order to achieve their own vision? This is where it gets tough.

There’s no possible scenario in which we manage to keep warming under 1.5 degrees with out significantly more government involvement across numerous parts of the economy. Most of the progress we’ve seen today is a result of government intervention. Look no further than Tesla’s regulatory credits or the German tariffs that helped kickstart the solar boom. Regulations set the rules by which markets and corporations operate. Today these rules largely ignore the cost of carbon emissions. Voluntary targets by private groups are not very effective given there’s no penalty for falling short. The externality of emissions can only be addressed by redefining the rules. Whether that’s embodied carbon thresholds or clean electricity standards it’s going to be necessary everywhere. Even if we put regulations aside, governments are still financially crucial to deploying climate solutions. Amongst people familiar with the topic, none of this is particularly noteworthy. It’s been the established perspective for decades.

While crypto's true believers dream of a world where the government has a vastly limited role in the financial system, climate people dream of a global carbon tax that would affect every part of our economic life. By carrot or stick the government is going to be involved if we are going to mitigate climate change. Given the libertarian values that run so deep within the crypto community, this required course of action is a sort of nightmare. When you believe that governments shouldn’t control the supply of money it’s tough to simultaneously support government regulation over other parts of the economy. There’s a chance I’m painting a straw man of these true believers but having gone quite deep down the rabbit hole of crypto that doesn't seem to be the case.

And so this is the central dilemma for crypto's true believers. The best chance of realizing a pseudo-anarchist future needs Earth to have a stable climate. But maintaining a stable climate will require a lot more government intervention. Can these believers walk through the hellish fires of increased regulation in order to get to the promised land of their dreams? Maybe, but it will be hard. Naomi Klein has a fantastic chapter in This Changes Everything which explores why climate denialism is mostly found amongst American conservatives. It turns out that it’s easier to dismiss the science on climate change than it is to even entertain the idea of changing your ideology about the role of government. This is the same kind of risk facing crypto's true believers.

It’s marvelous that digital currencies, not backed by anything nor by any state, have become a trillion dollar force in the world. But this has only happened because its supporters have a religious belief that cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology will change the future of everything. This conviction is the real fuel that powers crypto. Even more so than the electricity used for mining. Supporting what’s required to preserve a stable climate means going against the core values that make true believers so enamored with crypto in the first place. It’s similar to this problem where firefighters sometimes don't drop their gear when retreating from fast moving wildfires. Letting go of the gear makes it easier to run but letting go also creates an existential crisis. Tools help fight fires. They are core to the identify of being a firefighter. To leave your tools is to leave your identity. It takes great effort to act against your identity in the heat of the moment (no pun intended). With self-awareness however change is possible. Firefighters these days are less likely to keep lugging their 25 lb. chainsaws while trying to escape a fire. It’s yet to be seen if crypto’s true believers can lay down their libertarian tools in order to help prevent the planet from overheating.

Why should we care if crypto’s true believers can develop this mental flexibility? We should care because the technology and the community aren’t going away. Price fluctuations come and go but crypto is here to stay. These digital currencies have created a new class of very wealthy people. With that wealth comes power. How the true believers use their power is important in a time when economic power often turns into political power. If this new class puts its resources towards mitigating climate change then the world stands to benefit. We should also care because crypto is a genuinely new ecosystem. The good part about libertarian idealism is that it means fewer hierarchies. The community is eager to explore new ways of organizing and interacting with the world. Ursula Le Guin once said, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings". Cryptocurrencies may just provide a path out of our seemingly inescapable system. But in order for any of this to be possible crypto's true believers will have to put aside at least some of the values that have defined the community up to this point.

Additional Thoughts:

I use the term crypto's true believers because as I allude to in the post crypto really is like a religion. You have to believe. Otherwise what are you really doing? Satoshi is the modern day Jesus. And to be a nocoiner is almost heretical. The Catholic church has maybe $15 billion but Bitcoin is at least 30x larger even after the recent sell off.

The image at the top of the post is a rendering commissioned by millionaire lawyer Jeffrey Berns for a crypto-utopia in Nevada. He's spent $300 million on this project already. So perhaps even with climate change the true believers will achieve their dreams. There just might not be space for everyone...

Follow the money. A popular saying when it comes to crime and corruption but also very relevant to climate change. Whoever controls the capital in a given sector ultimately chooses whether or not climate positive solutions are pursued. This isn’t a profound thing to point out but it can easily get lost in the focus on the solutions themselves. The recent push in the construction industry to lower the embodied carbon of buildings is a good example. Embodied carbon is the amount of greenhouse gasses emitted in order to produce a given quantity of a construction material (like a single brick). Sum up the embodied carbon for every material used in construction and that’s the total embodied carbon for a building. Reducing this to zero is just as important as reducing the emissions from operating a building to zero and arguably a much tougher problem. What I've come to believe is that there's too much focus on the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry when it comes to embodied carbon and not enough on the real estate finance industry.

Consider how a building gets built. At the center of the process is the real estate developer. This company or individual takes on most of the risk and gets most of the rewards. A real estate developer acquires the land; hires a firm to design and construct the building; files for permits; and most importantly secures financing for the project. Sometimes the developer is financing the building themselves but other times they are taking out a loan or raising funds through investors. For a developer the goal is simple: Sell or lease the finished building for a price that is higher than the cost to build it. Whether it's their own money or outside funding from a bank, the developer is beholden to providing a positive return on those dollars. As for the construction process, the new model is to hire a firm that does both design and construction under the same entity. Known as design-build, this aligns incentives since the architects work on the same "team" as the general contractor when they engage with the developer. But even still, projects typically take 20% longer than scheduled and go up to 80% over budget. Financing a building is risky business and developers want to reduce that risk every step of the way. The primary concern most always comes down to cost. If costs go too far over then either the shareholders will put their money elsewhere or the bank will foreclose on the building. Given this context the hierarchy becomes clear: AEC firms serve the developers and the developers serve the financiers (investors or lenders). Embodied carbon needs to matter to each level of this hierarchy.

Today embodied carbon is mostly the concern of the AEC industry. The focus is on getting better at measuring embodied carbon and choosing materials with lower embodied carbon values. The former is accomplished through tools like Tally, Athena Impact Estimator, or OneClickLCA and the latter is accomplished by comparing environmental product declarations (EPDs) for building materials before making a selection. Much of this emphasis is a result of organizations like Architecture 2030 and the Carbon Leadership Forum (CLF) raising awareness about this issue amongst AEC professionals. Understanding the baseline level of embodied carbon in buildings today is another active effort. The CLF has released this benchmark report that's now used to set targets for reductions in embodied carbon when possible. While the increased awareness is much needed, AEC professionals ultimately can only suggest actions such as conducting whole building life cycle assessments (WBLCAs) or choosing more sustainable materials. It's the developer who must be willing to pay for these efforts and it will have to come out of the total project budget. Without buy-in from developers there's not much AEC firms can do other than point out the problem. For the most determined AEC firms the best they can do is work towards lowering the costs of conducting these studies or making it cheaper to fabricate more environmentally friendly materials. Unless the financial backers of a project are required or incentivized to take embodied carbon into account, it's hard to envision a pathway for significant change.

There don't seem to be many developers, banks, or Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) that are publicly setting targets for lowering the embodied carbon content of their portfolios. The GRESB assessment and the LEED building certification system are popular amongst these groups but neither is very strict about lowering embodied carbon. And both are completely voluntary. The money for building projects has no strings attached when it comes to embodied carbon. There aren't any banks adding embodied carbon targets to the construction loans that they underwrite. Investors and self-funded developers aren't much better either. While some decisions such as choosing carpeting based on embodied carbon content might be easy to do, substantial reductions in embodied carbon today are most likely to be more expensive or at least create more uncertainty. The best example as I’ve covered in a previous post is mass timber. Swapping steel or concrete for mass timber is the biggest lever to reduce embodied carbon available in new construction and it is typically a bit more expensive. Even though it’s not prohibitively more expensive it’s also new in North America which adds some risk (real or perceived). Higher cost and more risk are not easy to justify when there are lenders to pay back or shareholders expecting a certain rate of return. It’s not surprising that the financiers of real estate aren’t taking a bolder stance on embodied carbon. What is surprising is that as far as I can tell there isn’t as much public pressure on these groups to reduce embodied carbon. Outside of the voluntary certification schemes mentioned above the financing side of the building sector seems unbothered by embodied carbon.

Regulation, in the form of incentives to reduce embodied carbon or penalties for not meeting certain embodied carbon targets, is the most effective means to get investors, banks, and developers to take this issue seriously. And there is some progress in North America. The Buy Clean Act in California sets thresholds for embodied carbon in steel construction materials, a few other states have similar bills that are pending, and the city of Vancouver has mandated a 40% reduction in embodied carbon by 2030 for new construction. There’s nothing new about this approach, it’s very similar to zero emission vehicle standards that states are implementing in the auto sector. So far no incentive based scheme has been implemented but that could work as well. A tax credit for reducing embodied carbon by say 10% compared to the regional benchmark would provide the financial headroom for developers to trial new methods. AEC firms are making progress in what could be considered a bottoms up approach, but top down reform can only come from government intervention in the real estate finance sector. And that's no small task in the United States where the finance industry is notorious for finding creative loopholes. The externalities of high embodied carbon must be internalized into the accounting of firms who fund new buildings. It's the only way to make meaningful progress.

That’s not to say the work of those within the AEC industry isn’t needed. Pushing for multiple life cycle assessments throughout the design process, using the Carbon Leadership Forum's EC3 tool to compare EPDs for materials, and raising awareness at every opportunity is critical. It’s just not enough. EPDs are often described as nutrition labels for construction materials. And this metaphor can be expanded to illustrate the bigger picture. Most of the work being done today in embodied carbon is akin to food journaling (measuring embodied carbon) and tracking body weight (conducting life cycle assessments). But without a robust accountability system that provides clear steps towards losing weight there’s not much of a chance for success. While the government can’t regulate anyone’s fast food consumption, it can regulate the embodied carbon diet of our buildings. Without government intervention we can only hope for incremental improvements that come from making it easier to measure embodied carbon and cheaper to create lower carbon materials. To really accelerate those solutions and go further there need to be new rules. The AEC industry should continue to do its best to lower embodied carbon on any given project but the attention must turn to those financing the projects themselves. The money is what matters, it's always what matters. Everything else is necessary but not sufficient.

Something I keep coming back to when thinking about climate change: Was it inevitable or did we really mess up? If we copy pasted the Earth a hundred times and reset the clock to the year 1000 AD, would the humans on all of those iterations of Earth also find themselves staring down a climate crisis in 2021? Obviously there’s no scientific way to think about this. We know from chaos theory that something as trivial as when a butterfly flaps its wings can be the difference between a catastrophic tornado or a mild breeze. But surely some patterns would emerge if we could do it all over again a hundred times, or a thousand times. From a systems perspective, there’s the initial conditions and then there’s the rules that define how everything works. Sometimes bad initial conditions can snowball into a suboptimal state that’s hard to change but other times the rules of the system will yield the same outcome no matter where we start. Butterflies don’t always cause tornadoes, but warm moist air running into cool dry air is a pretty reliable formula for creating them. It’s fair to ask why does this thought experiment matter if we can’t try again and are stuck with the problems we’ve created? It matters because it can provide grounds for optimism. While we can’t change the past, if we believe human created climate change isn’t completely predetermined then it should give us hope that we can meaningfully shape our future. So here’s an attempt to answer this question of inevitability across a few different sectors.

Humans would invariably end up using fossil fuels in some capacity in every copy paste iteration of the Earth. The rule at play here is that there are very few substances as energy dense, accessible, and transportable as coal and oil. Reinforcing that rule is the biological imperative of humans to expend as little energy as possible in order to survive and reproduce. In our modern world vegging out on the couch causes physical and mental health issues but for most of human history that has been the ideal state: To reduce energy output and increase energy input. Fossil fuels are amazing at helping to do just that. A society with fossil fuels can move away from converting solar energy into muscle power (in the form of food) thereby saving themselves a great deal of energy output. In place of muscle power they can convert stored chemical energy (fossil fuels) into mechanical power. Usage of fossil fuels is definitely something that happens no matter who invents the steam engine or where oil is first put to use. Now assuming that humans are bound to use fossil fuels, would they have any ability to control how much gets burned? In addition to being wired to conserve energy humans are also predisposed to prioritizing the short term over the long term. We’re all just kids from the famous marshmallow study showing that delayed gratification is something that’s hard to practice. This evolutionary benefit of shortsightedness also seems like a rule that would repeatably result in more and more fossil fuel usage as the number of humans increased. Give an organism an easily exploitable energy source and what else should we expect? Where it gets more interesting and seemingly less predetermined is the human ability to go beyond short-term thinking. Once humans on a different iteration of Earth discovered the greenhouse effect and its relation to fossil fuels, what would they do? This seems dependent on those fateful butterfly wings given how varied any other iteration of Earth would be. In our own history we came surprisingly close to taking action on the problem between 1979 - 1989 as this fantastic piece by Nathaniel Reich explains. Unfortunately no substantive change happened and 50% of all emissions have happened since 1990. So at the broad intersection of energy dynamics and evolutionary tendencies there is a level of inevitability to the climate crisis. The wiggle room comes from the extent to which humans could act against their biological imperatives in the face of how easy life with fossil fuels can be.

In the building materials sector (11% of total emissions) the analysis is similar to fossil fuel use because they’re connected by one material: concrete. It is a highly versatile material which is strong, durable, and producible almost anywhere on Earth. What ties it to fossil fuels is the manner in which concrete is made. More specifically the manner in which cement, the binding agent in concrete, is made. We make cement by collecting a bunch of limestone, heating it up to 1450 degrees Celsius, and then grinding it up into a powder. In a world where fossil fuels are plentiful, creating that high heat is easy and affordable. Modern Portland cement was invented in Britain by Joseph Aspdin in 1824. A big reason he was able to do so was the readily available coal found in England that could be used to heat up his kilns. The qualities of concrete make it hard to not use once it is discovered. Even before Portland cement, humans have been using natural cements to make concrete for ages. The Pantheon is over 2,000 years old and is still doing just fine. So here as well there seems to be a rule as opposed to a suboptimal state. If society is reliant on fossil fuels then it’s only a matter of time before it figures out how to make cement. And once it has cement, concrete has too many appealing qualities and will be poured anywhere and everywhere. Today concrete is the most consumed material in the world outside of clean water. The only crack so to speak would be how often on different iterations of Earth humans end up placing the same value on permanence and the associated desire to defy nature. While concrete is now dominant, humans have made structures out of natural materials for hundreds of years. And some of those non-concrete structures continue to remain standing. In a world where the cultures of the Mongols or the indigenous groups of North America remained prominent, the idea of permanent concrete structures may not have ever come into being. Ultimately however fossil fuel use and concrete aren’t easily separable. Therefore it's likely that most iterations of Earth would still end up with a lot of emissions from building materials.

The transportation sector (14% of total emissions) is less about any rules and more about the pathways by which societies develop. The fundamental question is how many iterations of Earth end up with the same culture of  individual car ownership as our real world. Internal combustion engines (ICE) would surely develop given the properties of fossil fuels. A 100 kWh Tesla battery weighs 1300 pounds and has the same amount of energy as 3 gallons of gas (18 pounds). However, it’s unlikely that ICEs are are always implemented in the same way when it comes to enabling mobility for people. Individual car ownership traces its roots to the value America placed on individual freedom and the country’s geography which is defined by vast amounts of open space. This culture has been exported abroad and now can be found all over the place. No doubt in all iterations of Earth humans would want to move about in as convenient a way as possible. But the most efficient way of doing so would always be tied to the geography of the land and the living arrangements of the society (dense or spread out) where ICEs first grew prominent. That is to say, what would transportation look like if America wasn't the birthplace of the mass manufactured car? The public transit systems of cities like Shanghai, Tokyo, and Singapore prove that convenient mobility doesn’t require cars. The ways in which we move and live are so flexible and malleable that in each iteration we could expect huge variability in the dominant mode of mobility. There aren’t any properties of individual car ownership that seem durable to repeated trials. To make a claim that the same model of car ownership would always occur in every iteration of Earth is to make a claim that an emphasis on individual freedom is an innate feature to human development. And that doesn’t seem reasonable given the numerous cultures in our past and present that do not have the same emphasis.

The food sector (34% of total emissions) is easily the one that is least governed by any hard and fast rules of the universe. At the intersection of food and climate is the cow. Humans domesticated bovine species two independent times prior to the year 1000 AD. Cows are an integral part of humanity’s path to modern civilization. Despite that, it’s very clear that in our current world we are in an inefficient situation when it comes to our level of meat consumption in relation to its impact on the environment. Unlike other animals cows not only need vast amounts of land and water but also burp methane directly into the air. Humans had to incorporate meat into their diets around 250,000 years ago when a previous climate shift occurred. But even by the year 1000 AD meat consumption wasn’t a necessary condition for the survival of humanity. Our omnivorous abilities are prolific and allow us to live almost anywhere on the planet unlike other animals. There’s no path of least resistance that compels the levels of meat eating seen today. Food is culture and initial conditions matter a great deal in that regard. In America the rise of meat can be tied to the ample land available to raise livestock along with the relative lack of meat available to European immigrants in their original home countries. Irish settlers used to write back to their families exclaiming about their ability to eat meat everyday. Something unheard of in a country that was still recovering from the potato famine. This unique set of circumstances paired with the industrialization of America led to the rise of a meat industry that’s transformed but never slowed down. But for most of our history meat consumption has been just one portion of our diet and roughly 280 million people in India don't eat meat at all. While our culture today might be locked into a heavy meat diet, the case for this to be a repeating feature across iterations of Earth seems weak. Food is also behavior and behavior can be affected by even small perturbations.

Where does all this speculation leave us? So many variables have been left out and even if they weren't we'll never be able to actually create such copy paste simulations. I see this thought experiment as a practice in questioning why things are the way they are. Having a point of view on the enduring rules for how the world works helps with thinking about how the world might change in the future. In this version of Earth we have to contend with the lock-in effects of our bad initial conditions. A world without cars is possible, but how to get there from a world already filled with them? It’s tough, but not as tough as going from a world filled with concrete to one without it. And that’s why knowing where we’re facing a path of least resistance and where we aren't is important. Understanding the difference can help direct focus to areas where progress might be made more quickly. Humans despite our evolutionary shortsightedness are capable of adopting a huge variety of lifestyles. Tackling the problems where we can leverage that capability in order to reset some initial conditions through power of will is a good first step. We don’t get to rewind the clock and there aren’t any other iterations for us to do some trial and error. All we can do is keep asking questions and use the answers we come up with to chart a path away from the precipice of the climate crisis.

Additional Thoughts:

The closest thing to this thought experiment I’ve come across are articles suggesting that climate change is the Great Filter event that prevents civilizations from achieving interstellar travel as part of Fermi’s Paradox. The paradox in short form is that if other intelligent life in the universe is likely, then why have we found no evidence of it? The Great Filter is one answer - That there exists some unknown obstacle that prevents intelligent life from spreading across the stars. Climate change understood as a population exceeding the carrying capacity of its planet and then collapsing could be a Great Filter event. Can’t reach for the stars if you’re melting away on Earth.

This experiment is also useful for thinking about future developments. Some would argue we’re also at the precipice of a monumental shift in our monetary system. Moving from fiat currencies to proof-of-work backed cryptocurrencies. Should the future of our monetary system be tied to technologies that incentivize leveraging the cheapest energy available regardless of its source? Will we curse ourselves for choosing yet another suboptimal way of living if the promise of renewable powered cryptocurrencies never takes hold and miners continue to burn coal for power? It would be a travesty to look back in 50 years and see that our monetary system could have had a different solution but we opted for one that somehow managed to directly tie burning more fossil fuels to maintaining functionality. Understanding whether the rise of cryptocurrencies is a path of least resistance or just a result of strange initial conditions is worth some thought. To any crypto-fanatics, yes not all cryptocurrencies are backed by proof-of-work but clearly the biggest ones today are and Bitcoin seemingly will never move away from it.

I broadly see two well-defined paths for individuals who want to work on mitigating climate change. The first is getting more people to care enough about the issue such that they are willing to take action. The second is working on specific solutions that decarbonize activities within the five overarching sectors that need to reach net-zero: Energy; Mobility and Transport; Food, Agriculture, and Land use; Heavy Industry; and Built Environment. More recently however I’ve come to see a third available path. It incorporates the more appealing aspects of the two well-defined ones while minimizing some of the downsides. This is what I call a Goldilocks path.

Getting more people to care about climate change and then take action doesn’t usually lower emissions directly. But it does make people more receptive to the changes and solutions required to get to net-zero emissions. As an individual the easiest way to get involved is to join an organization that’s geared towards changing the minds of both everyday people and political leaders. The Sunrise Movement is the most obvious organization in this space. The work to be done here is that of persuasion. Whether it's getting a state government to approve the development of community solar farms or whether it's passing Biden’s climate infrastructure bill, it's all about changing minds. And it’s no longer really about convincing Republicans that climate change is real although that’s still an issue. It’s more about convincing people and politicians that there needs to be even more scale and urgency in dealing with the crisis. The benefit of this kind of work is that the feedback cycle is relatively quick and defined. Elections happen every so many years, laws either pass or don’t, and polls indicate how sentiment is shifting. What’s better is that even if a candidate loses or a bill doesn’t pass, the effort to raise awareness isn’t completely wasted. The effects of this type of work build and accumulate over time. The main drawback in my view to this type of work is that it’s a few steps removed from solving the physical processes of climate change. A law mandating a price on carbon doesn’t mean emissions immediately go down, someone still has to find a way to decarbonize steel manufacturing. And that leads to the other path.

Decarbonizing activities that have heavy emissions is very different from the work of changing minds. This path is all about the specifics within a given industry. The evaluation for whether you as an individual are being useful is measured by whether your solution is adopted by the market and resultantly reduces emissions. This directness to actual emissions reduction is what separates this from broader efforts to take action on climate. Put another way and as I discussed in another post, there’s fewer mental hoops when working on something like decarbonizing cement making. The work to be done here depends greatly on what activity you pick. And while there are many different solutions, ultimately you have to choose a single one and forge ahead since each requires total dedication. More examples of this type of work would be new geothermal power plants, soil carbon sequestration, or electric aviation. The benefit as mentioned is the directness to lowering emissions. There’s also likely more financial rewards if doing this type of work. One drawback however is that there is lots of risk. That new type of cement might just never work. And while hopefully learnings from one endeavor can be applied elsewhere, it's not guaranteed. Of even more concern is that the feedback cycles can be quite slow and ill-defined. Some industries just have long sales cycles. And sometimes even if a substitute process has zero emissions it might never achieve cost parity. Going down this path is all about choosing to be specific. It prioritizes proximity to physical solutions at the cost of uncertainty.

In the process of exploring that second path, I’ve come to understand a third way. This Goldilocks path involves changing the minds of those within a given industry in order to make them more open-minded to climate positive solutions that relate to their specific domain. It’s not about convincing a conservative farmer to vote for the local Democrat nor is it about genetically engineering crops that inhale more carbon dioxide. It’s about changing the minds of farmers so that they’re ready to fully embrace solutions like tree intercropping or biochar amendment. It’s a combination of persuading people to take action and immersing yourself in the relevant zero-emissions solutions. The work is about raising the awareness of those within a sector to the point where the actions they’re willing to take are aligned with the climate solutions that are needed. For an individual this means having a shorter and more well-defined feedback loop along with having proximity to the actual work of replacing emissions heavy processes. It also means not having to pigeon hole on any one solution. Just like the first path, measurement and charting progress is possible through observing adoption rates. Even before adoption you can survey and poll industry constituents to gauge their willingness to try new methods. And just like the second path, success at such an effort requires having technical knowledge about the climate positive solutions a sector needs. It’s a middle ground between raising awareness for broad based climate action and diving headfirst into a single climate solution. But understanding why this is a viable path in addressing climate change requires understanding the current state of affairs within many sectors.

For many sectors what’s required is not revolutionary technologies but more adoption of just-about ready technologies. There is a small leap of faith that’s required but it’s a leap that’s usually supported by data. It’s also the case that while most sectors have members who are somewhat set in their ways, there’s not a total unwillingness to change. This is best exemplified by farmers who switch to organic farming but only after they’ve seen the neighboring farmer successfully do it. Dan Barber’s The Third Plate in one section chronicles how a whole upstate New York community converted to more sustainable agricultural practices after a succession of farmers saw their neighbors make the change. The needed methods and technologies exist. They just aren’t adopted because someone needs to take that first step of changing their mind and taking a chance. In the construction industry, mass timber provides a similar example. The building techniques are solid, the fire safety test results are impeccable, and the installation times are lower yet adoption has taken a while to accelerate. The hesitance to build tall buildings with wood is what needs to be overcome, not any technological challenge. Again, it’s about changing minds not creating new solutions. One final example from the power sector would be increasing the growth of commercial and industrial (C&I) solar. The financing options are growing and the installation costs are going down, but convincing building owners that they should invest in a solar rooftop is still non-trivial. It's that final bit of hesitance that needs to be alleviated. Working on changing minds within a given sector is powerful because in most areas the solutions are there, they just need to be adopted with more urgency. If the solutions didn’t exist or the unwillingness to change was too high, then just working on advocacy for solutions within a sector wouldn’t make this third path viable.

As an individual looking to effect change, raising awareness for specific solutions in a hyper-targeted way might be the best option. It’s a strategy that’s not as broad as evangelizing the Green New Deal, but it’s also not as constraining as working on a very specific solution such as green-hydrogen steel manufacturing. It’s somewhere right in the middle. There is not enough time to let the market itself bring about climate positive solutions so some people need to do the work of accelerating adoption by helping more people believe that another way of doing things is possible. In any sector if there are more people simply willing to entertain a climate positive solution, then every solution that comes along in the future will benefit. I see this third way of doing things as culture change within an industry as opposed to within a society. The first two paths are well defined and receive much attention. This third path is yet to become as well known but some organizations are doing this work within their respective sectors. Woodworks for construction and the Rodale Institute for agriculture are two good examples. As more and more people pivot their careers towards climate, hopefully this new Goldilocks path will grow more prevalent as people see the opportunity this kind of work represents. Somebody will always need to work on convincing conservatives to care about climate and somebody will always need to work on nuclear fusion. But somebody also needs to make sure that more building owners are open to putting solar on their rooftops by convincing them of the long-term benefits. This is the path for those who want to combine aspects from both of the well established methods for working in climate while forging a new direction that's just right for them and the planet.

When broken down by sector, Building Materials and Construction represent 11% of all greenhouse gas emissions. For context, the rest of the sectors are Industry (30%), Building Operations (28%), Transportation (22%), and Other (9%). Building Material and Construction emissions are intrinsically tied to the steel and concrete industries, which each respectively emit around 8% of all greenhouse gas emissions. In the United States, outside of residential homes, almost all of our buildings are made from those two materials. One reason for this is the strength of those materials. Another is because they helped heal a wound in our psyche caused by the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 when numerous wooden buildings were burned to the ground. But 150 years onwards, with the climate crisis pressing down upon us, tall wood buildings are once again on the rise in North America. They represent a lower-carbon alternative that can reduce our reliance on steel and concrete. The construction industry calls it mass(ive) timber and it’s actually been popular in Europe for almost 30 years now. The technique involves glueing or laminating smaller dimensional lumber into epically sized panels and beams which can then be used to construct buildings up to at least 18 stories high. David Roberts has an excellent overview of mass timber and this NYT article is also worth a read. It’s not the only solution for decarbonizing the Building Materials and Construction sector but is one that has gained substantial traction in the last 5-10 years.

Many words have been written on the exact means by which mass timber can reduce the embodied carbon of our buildings. What I’m interested in is how mass timber illustrates some common themes across the climate solutions space. Broadly they are: acquiring large technology companies as initial customers, dealing with the misalignment of our economic systems and Earth's ecological systems, and needing to plan within a context where Earth's climate has already changed. Understanding these themes as they relate to mass timber should help guide those involved with the material as it begins to attract even more attention.

It's become abundantly clear in the last few years that if you’re working on a climate technology solution, big tech companies are your best bet for a first or significant customer. While we should always be suspicious of greenwashing, these companies are at least putting up money. The most substantive trend thus far has been the growth in renewable power purchase agreements made by the likes of Apple and Google. More recently the trend has been purchasing carbon accounting software and funding carbon removal projects. Tech companies generally have healthy margins and leadership that seemingly does want to decarbonize. A perfect combination for an initial customer. And even in the worst case of greenwashing, these companies represent a means for paying the bills long enough to work a solution down its cost curve.

Mass timber buildings are another area where this is happening and even large non-tech companies are involved. Microsoft, Walmart, Toyota, and Google all have significant mass timber plans. In most real estate contexts cost drives everything and lifecycle assessments are definitively just "nice-to-haves". With these large corporations however, the climate story mass timber provides is compelling and the capital to spend is available. It’s even more appealing because unlike a far away solar farm or carbon removal project, everyone can see and touch a mass timber building. The long-term promise of mass timber outside of replacing steel and concrete is that can also lower construction time and therefore costs. This has yet to be repeatedly proven however. Using these companies to find that proof is critical to future growth. To put it in a well known framework, it’s the Tesla method. Gain experience and reduce costs with those who can afford to pay a premium, and then take those improvements and move downmarket. In an ideal world this kind of “trickle down” strategy would be unnecessary but such is not the case and leads to the next theme.

Climate change can very easily be characterized as the misalignment between an economic system that is built around never-ending growth and a natural world where there’s no process that has never-ending growth...heat death and all. I’ll continue to push my recommendation to read Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics if you haven’t yet. Every climate solution in one way or another has to contend with how to succeed in an economic environment that pushes for infinite growth while relying on a natural environment that is very finite. Even the fossil fuel industry has had to placate fears of “peak oil” for decades. The debate between decoupling and degrowth is too nuanced to cover here but the point remains that we’re pushing up against the barriers of Earth’s natural systems while still locked into the economic system that’s got us to this point.

As it relates to mass timber, we’re getting close to having the technology to count every tree on Earth. The finiteness of trees and their place in our hearts makes the misalignment of economic and natural systems especially pronounced when it comes to mass timber. The good news is that it’s not an immediate problem in North America. Forests have been growing in wood mass for the past 50 years despite all of our residential construction. Mass timber itself isn’t even tracked by the USDA lumber consumption and production reports yet. The bad news is that there very much is some optimal quota of harvest that balances the ability of forests to serve as a carbon sink and the capability of mass timber to sequester carbon and offset steel and concrete usage. What happens when we hit that quota and demand continues to increase or investors push for more growth from the industry? Balancing the needs of our economic system against the limits of our natural systems must be confronted head on. Proactively supporting smarter regulation, afforestation efforts, and R&D into lab grown wood seem like the best answers at this time. It’s not an easy problem but given the visibility of trees and mass timber buildings, tackling this issue must be top of mind moving forwards.

The final theme is adjusting to a world that has already shifted under our feet. Despite the clamor of environmentalists that climate change has arrived, most industries have yet to really internalize that even the world of ten years ago is not relevant to what is happening today. Hurricanes are more intense, heat waves are increasing in frequency, and wildfires are burning more land. Living in a world where the climate has changed means taking actions that incorporate what’s different. A good example of this is Climate AI, a new way of making weather forecasts for farming in a world where just using the historical average no longer works. A not so good example is the recent Texas power catastrophe. Natural gas power generators did not winterize their systems because they wanted to save money and didn’t account for the fact that such cold snaps are now very much a possibility in a world where the climate has changed. Success in the future will be tied to our ability to adapt to higher variance in the environment.

In the world of mass timber, this means contending with the growing threat of wildfires in places like California and the Pacific Northwest. The ever present danger of wildfires will mean changing the way we think about how to use our forest resources. Fire-risk modeling is a growing field and with it comes the possibility of predicting where and when fires may occur with higher degrees of certainty. It’s not inconceivable that a Minority Report style preemptive harvesting practice is what’s required in the future. Forest management today involves thinning smaller diameter trees in the hopes of preventing wildfires from spreading. But if we now live in a world where there are more fires regardless of thinning and we know with high confidence which areas are most at risk, it might make sense to harvest trees in those areas in advance. Consider that in 2020, over 4 million acres of land burned in California alone. All the carbon in those trees that burned is now in the atmosphere, but if those trees were put into mass timber construction that carbon would have been sequestered into buildings instead. This method of thinking is lacking today because we’ve yet to fully readjust to our changed world. Wildfires are a balanced part of a forest ecosystem, but they might not be in our future where balance no longer exists. This is another situation where mass timber provides a clear cut example of how new adaptions will be required to adjust to our changed world.

The trajectory of mass timber in North America is already one of rapid expansion for the next few years. But beyond that the degree to which it becomes a standard in the construction industry depends on how the themes discussed affect the companies involved. Architecture and construction firms  should seek to work with more of those large corporations who can afford to fund those initial projects. The entire supply chain should keep the tension between economic growth and environmental sustainability in mind and take steps to bring alignment at every opportunity. And forest owners and panel manufacturers should start to adapt their strategy and tooling for a world that burns more. Wood as a building material has its roots in the farthest reaches of our past. Mass timber is quickly growing into the future of our lives. How far it extends is all that’s left to be seen.

While playing Minecraft with two friends recently, I finally got what it means to live in this age of human made climate change. What happened in the game was fairly simple as I'll describe. What’s more perplexing is how this deeper understanding came from a decade old video game and not through all the other climate content I've consumed in the last year. And so what follows is an attempt to get to the root of why playing Minecraft might be more profound than most of the other ways we think about climate.

For those not familiar, Minecraft is a sort of digital Lego game. You start out empty handed in an infinitely large world with various biomes. There’s no explicit goals but the main things to do are build and explore during the day while surviving each night when creatures that can harm you come alive. You “mine” blocks to collect resources and then “craft” objects like axes, shovels, or furnaces. In the beginning, wood from the trees is all you need to create rudimentary tools to survive. Over time with different resources such as coal, iron, and gold you create better tools to make in-game life a little easier. Given that there is no real objective to the game, you mostly just end up building fantastical houses or setting out to find new environments and resources. If it’s still confusing then check out this video. Understanding the game is key to making sense of how it all relates back to climate change.

So what happened? My friends and I had found a new biome which could best be described as a savanna. This is worth noting because in the previous three times we’d played together we’d been unable to find any new landscapes and were eager for a change of scenery. Within this savanna was also a new type of tree called an Acacia tree. Most trees in Minecraft when cut down and placed as blocks are some shade of brown, but these trees formed blocks that were almost orange. For a game of limited graphical quality, a more orange color of wood was a big event! Also worth noting is that in coming to the savanna, we’d left our previously constructed home behind. We needed a new place not only to protect ourselves in the night, but also to mark our arrival in the new land. It’s probably obvious what happened next. It’s the story of the Anthropocene told in the span of a few hours.

We constructed our new home from the Acacia trees but nearly cleared all of them in the process. Real humans have done this across every continent throughout history. This turned out to be no different for us. Two things stuck out as we built our Acacia wood home. The first was how over time we had to keep walking further and further to find more trees to chop up. When you’re playing a game for only two or three hours, walking an extra thirty seconds over and over again becomes a noticeable inconvenience. The second was that the landscape simply looked more barren. What was once an area filled with trees became open plains right before our eyes. One of my friends even tried to plant tree saplings, but they never managed to take root. It was all virtual but came with a surprising sense of loss.

That loss was counterweighted by the motivation to complete constructing our wooden house before calling it quits for the night. And ultimately the desire to finish the project overpowered any frustration about walking further to find the remaining trees or how the surrounding area might look afterwards. Despite being in a video game, this age old tale of deforestation felt markedly real. It was a microcosm for actual human development. We were at once the loggers, the builders, and the concerned environmentalists. The desire to leave the new biome untouched and the eagerness to have a house made of orangish wood strained against each other. We joked about this realization in the moment but in my head the thought lingered: Why was this video game so much better at conveying something I thought I already knew?

The answer comes down to scale and individual agency. Minecraft is a place where you can change an entire landscape in a few hours. It’s also a place where you're in charge of making everything you need to “survive” from scratch. In the real world, the scale of human activities pressing upon the Earth is not comprehensible to any single human. Our modern lives also entirely remove us from the processes by which raw nature is transformed into the manufactured goods we know. We live in a time where any human activity has to be measured in the billions or trillions. Yet each of us individually knows almost nothing about where the food on our plates or the wood in our homes come from. We’ve lost the ability to single handedly affect the world around us, but collectively cannot stop ourselves from tearing the Earth apart. What does it mean to cut down 15 billion trees annually? I'm not sure. I can barely understand 1 billion. How can you turn a tree into a 2 x 4? Not by hand. But maybe with this $10,000 portable saw mill. Minecraft is different. You can see the scale of your actions and also have to perform every step of turning a landscape into a built environment yourself. It’s the pairing of having outsized impact but not having efficiency that makes Minecraft insightful. The real world doesn’t work that way. You can’t have scale without efficiency. So the system becomes effectively infinite while your perception stays decidedly finite. The result is incomprehension.

I’ve learned a lot about humanity’s effects on the Earth through so many different sources. I know in my head that we’re on a pace to deplete many of the Earth’s resources. But I didn’t fully get it until I nearly deforested a virtual landscape. It’s the difference between learning from the mistakes of others and having to make the mistake yourself in order to learn a lesson. Our everyday lives have no avenues to do the latter. We can’t clear cut a forest on our own and even if we could the planet can’t afford each of us doing that just to learn a lesson. To make the point a different way, consider David Attenborough and his recent documentary on Netflix. He gets it because he’s spent over 60 years watching the world he knew disappear with his own eyes. I watched the documentary yet it still didn’t click because I didn’t live it the way he did. What makes the Minecraft experience resonate is that it finds a way to compact decades into hours. Where you not only watch the landscape change, but also partake in the processes that force the landscape to change.

Actual experience beats outside observation. Minecraft provides a unique way to experience the collective effect of humanity on the Earth. So while we should all read The Unhabitable Earth, watch David Attenborough’s documentary, and go sit in a forest, we might only find real understanding once we start chopping down trees in the realms of Minecraft.

Project Drawdown has reducing food waste as its 3rd most effective means for mitigating climate change. In the United States close to half of this waste happens at the consumer level. The average American wastes 21% of the food they purchase per year. When I first read about this problem I was stunned by that number. How can there be that much waste, what is happening? Nobody actively walks into a grocery store with the goal of trashing 1 out of every 5 things they buy. And there’s also no culture war on the issue, everyone agrees food waste is a bad thing. This FoodPrint article goes into the causes for this waste and they include: food spoilage, making too much, confusion on expiration labels, over-purchasing, and poor planning. After spending some time thinking about my own food habits, I realized that while the breakdown FoodPrint provides on causes is good detail, it’s ultimately just poor planning that creates household food waste. The first four causes are simply different expressions of an underlying inability to accurately forecast what, when, and where we’re going to eat in a given week or month. If we always knew what our stomachs would want in advance, we’d all be perfect shoppers and eaters. Planning is the root of the problem and the existing food system makes the problem worse. The system incentivizes “more” at every step and no one upstream cares whether the food goes down our throats or down the trash chute. The money comes in regardless. To solve the problem of household food waste there are some short-term steps that can mitigate the issue, but in the long-term the solution to eliminating household food waste is to eliminate the need for planning altogether.

To better illustrate the complexity of planning and why food waste happens, consider the challenge facing a family with two kids. Starting with goals, the parents’ primary objective is most likely making sure their children are healthy. On a week-to-week basis however they’re probably optimizing around convenience and getting the kids to eat anything at all at the expense of health. On top of that, each parent and each child have their own preferences on cuisine in general and on a given night. So if they’re committed to eating a meal together everyday, they need to routinely find the perfect alignment between health, convenience, and preference. And this doesn’t even include the choice between cooking at home or ordering food from a restaurant. With all of this in mind, the parents must find the time in their schedule to make a trip to the grocery store and purchase food that might work for everyone. To keep piling on, the United States also doesn’t have a strong cultural tradition around food. There’s no set standards for what makes up a breakfast, lunch, or dinner that can serve as a guide for what to make regularly. All of this leads to the titular question, who other than the most ardent meal preppers can accurately say what they want to eat for dinner three days from now. What parent can correctly predict what the whole family will agree to even one day from now. Very few. Imagine running a factory where you have no idea what your customers want next but you're still required to have the right parts to make the requested widget at a moment’s notice. Do we really expect that you’ll be able to order exactly the right parts such that there’s nothing left when you’re done. There’s no chance given the context of modern life.

Lack of planning is the root cause of food waste, but there’s a few factors that amplify the problem. The first and hardest to shake is our own biology. Our prehistoric counterparts never knew when they’d get their next meal so a tendency to over-eat is wired into our brains. When we enter the grocery store that’s designed to profit on this evolutionary vestige the result is invariably over-purchasing. The second factor is that grocery stores in modern America are unbelievably cheap compared to the past and the rest of the world. Over the last sixty years household spending on food has fallen almost in half from 17% of our budget to a little less than 10%. All the more reason to load up the shopping cart. What’s an extra $1.29 for an avocado in case the 10 at home aren’t already enough. And that leads to the third factor, there’s no penalty for wasting food. The trash service will collect our garbage regardless of how many avocados we throw out. Other than the guilt we have when tossing out something that we didn’t eat in time, there’s no cost to dumping whatever we want in the trash. Which brings up the last factor, there’s also no good way to measure how much food we toss out. It’s trite but true that there’s no way to manage something you can't measure. To add insult to injury, one study revealed that when we scrupulously keep track of our food waste we underestimate the actual amount by about 50%! So planning is hard, but it’s made so much harder because our 40,000 year old brains have to contend with cheap food, no consequences to waste, and no reliable method to know how much we’re wasting.

In the short-term there are a few methods for reducing household food waste to some extent. The most relevant steps with regards to planning are checking the fridge before going to the store, making a shopping list, and meal prepping. There’s also the Waste Free Kitchen Handbook by Dana Gunders which covers many more methods beyond planning. The emphasis is on better planning because it helps prevent food waste at the source. Donating excess edible food is equally good but composting is further behind in the hierarchy of efficacy. Across the existing online suggestions and Gunder’s book, what sticks out is that all the proposed solutions require so much effort on the individual level. Not that we shouldn’t expect more of ourselves in the climate fight, but assuming that everyone will implement all the recommendations is folly. And even if we all start religiously checking the fridge before going to the store that doesn’t magically improve our ability to actually predict our food desires. It’s not completely hopeless though, there’s a case to be made for technology to help remove friction and increase our ability to be better meal planners. Fridge cameras, computer vision based waste tracking, AI-assisted shopping lists, and food donation marketplaces will find their respective places in our lives over time. Outside of technology, emphasis on eating healthier should also lead to less waste. Eating healthier requires the same planning and prepping that serves to reduce waste. Between more public awareness for individual action and friction reducing technology, there’s a pathway for making incremental improvements to the waste problem. But to completely solve the problem, we have to go beyond just incremental.

In the long-term the solution isn’t for each of us to become savant-like meal planners. It’s to make planning entirely unnecessary. We should also solve the larger problems of our food system that contribute to waste, but assuming those are even harder to change, it’s the planning piece that’s easiest to address. Making food last longer before it goes bad is the first step to eliminating planning and it’s already in the works. Whether it’s natural coatings for produce, ethylene absorbing balls, or alternative dairy and meat products, making food last longer means less of a need to plan when it has to be eaten. If we have 8 months to use our oat milk at home, we’re almost certainly not going to accidentally forget to drink it before it goes bad. We already know that shelf-stable food such as pasta is the least wasted category of food today. Longer lasting food takes one big swipe at eliminating planning but doesn’t remove it entirely. It’s also likely to face backlash as "unnatural" given what we’ve seen with genetically modified foods despite their safety.

We might not end up with food that never spoils but we’re certainly on a path to have electric vehicles and self-driving cars within the next decade. Those two technologies will eliminate food planning by allowing for guaranteed 10 minute grocery delivery. If we can even just have produce, dairy, and meat products at our doorsteps that fast, the need for planning out when to consume what’s in the fridge is reduced significantly. Just-In-Time cooking!  EVs are needed to cut out the emissions for all the transport required in the US. And self-driving technology reduces the price of delivery to a point where mass adoption is more likely. There’s no need to keep avocados at home when they can be at our doorstep within 10 minutes of a craving. Our pantries can keep just the essentials and the rest can be put into a "fridge" in the cloud. This system moves demand planning from the household level to providers who can build models that understand the eating behaviors of entire neighborhoods and adjust supply accordingly. There’s no denying it’s a cringeworthy techno-futurist vision, but most of what’s described is already happening independently today. GoPuff and Gorillas are offering delivery of certain goods within minutes, Amazon is putting electric delivery vans on the road this year, Waymo’s self-driving taxis no longer have human drivers, and ShelfEngine and Afresh Technologies are working on ML-based grocery store demand forecasting. Projected out another 10 years and it’s reasonable to assume that all of this gets rolled into one service that eliminates food planning in the name of convenience thereby solving our household food waste problem. It’s a realist vision for how the problem is solved, as opposed to hoping that the entire food system and our behaviors are upended all at once. Just-In-Time processes helped Toyota become the world’s largest automaker because along the way it helped them reduce waste in the manufacturing system. The same can be done in the home.

At first I was surprised that food waste was so high on Project Drawdown’s list of climate solutions. It seems so removed from the classic image of smoke stacks belching greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. But food is core to human survival. The development of agriculture is what kicked off the long road to those very smoke stacks. Growing and finding food is probably the problem humanity has collectively spent the most time on in our history. So now I see why problems around food production and waste rank so high, they’re a reflection of our constant struggle to shape the Earth to ensure our survival. It’s hard because our systems around food production and consumption are some of the most entrenched ones we have as a society. Given that context, solving the problem of food waste means we must leverage solutions that can take on such incumbency effectively. Incremental approaches are necessary but not sufficient. Despite centuries of practice, we’re not getting better at planning our food consumption and reducing waste. So the solution has to rethink the problem. Poor planning creates waste. Better planning reduces waste. Eliminating the need to plan gets rid of the waste entirely.

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Models help us understand how to achieve a desired outcome given certain inputs. What we choose to include and what we choose to exclude from a model dictates what gets consideration and what gets forgotten. Everyday millions of models come into the world. Each modeler striving for elegant simplicity. Make the fewest assumptions possible and then at the very bottom of the spreadsheet add a footnote in the smallest font listing everything that isn't included. The climate crisis was born from these footnotes of exclusion. Interactions that were too complex or consequences that were too far away were simply left out. All stemming from a lack of understanding paired with a lack of incentive. The sinister thing about a model is that once we start using one, we anchor to it. We stop seeing reality and only perceive reality through what we’ve constructed. Our modern world is built on incomplete models. And incomplete models are worse than nonexistent ones. Mitigating climate change dictates we do the hard work of building complete models across all of our human activities.

Incomplete models lull us into a false sense of confidence. The respect for actual observation is lost as reliance on a model grows. If we have no information about how something works then we’re forced to start from a more holistic place where everything merits consideration. If we have a model which indicates that more of input A leads to more of the desired output B, then there’s little reason to think about output C. To ground this in example, we can look to the differences in agricultural practices between North American indigenous tribes in the 15th century and North American industrial farmers in the 20th century.

When indigenous tribes lived off the land, there was no knowledge of nitrogen, oxygen, or carbon dioxide. No scientific understanding for why plants grow. Indigenous tribes had their own ways of knowing but the Nitrogen-Phosphorous- Potassium model of agriculture we’re familiar with today was nonexistent. Despite lacking an understanding of underlying mechanisms, indigenous tribes practiced some of the most sustainable agriculture that’s ever taken place on the continent. Without a streamlined model to use, their ways of knowing relied on generational observations that considered all aspects of the land.

Whatever knowledge indigenous tribes had accumulated was wiped out by the genocide of American expansion in the intervening period between the 15th and 20th centuries. In its place industrial agriculture took root along with new methods of thinking. Armed with scientific and financial knowledge, the model for agricultural production could be vastly simplified and consequently scale across the continent. Once the importance of nitrogen to plant growth and the means for manufacturing synthetic nitrogen fertilizer were established, the agricultural model became a single line: Add more nitrogen as input to get more crop as output. Most agriculture today still rests on this model: Fertilize fertilize fertilize! All the other elements of the farm ecosystem were lumped into the footnotes and promptly forgotten. Or at least forgotten until the past few decades when the effects of such an incomplete model became too problematic to ignore. From anoxic dead zones in the ocean to degraded soils across the globe, the one line model has shown it’s vast limitations.

This is the story of climate change. Overtly simplistic models scaled to the point where all that was ignored comes leaping out of the footnotes to wreak existential havoc. The reasons for relying on these incomplete models have mostly to do with our choice of capitalism as our dominant economic system and the value or lack thereof it places on anything other than profits. Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics provides the most cogent analysis on how the flawed models of free market capitalism have led us to this point. However, outside of our choice of economic system, incomplete models are also the result of a historical lack of capability to accurately simulate how the world works in a way that can scale. As we move further into the 21st century this part of the incomplete model problem can more readily be addressed.

We’ve past the point of being able to return to indigenous “no model” ways of knowing due to genocide and current size of the human population on Earth. We also can no longer rely on the incomplete models that have brought us to this climate precipice. What’s left is to build complete models that account for all the interaction effects in a system and that work on multigenerational time scales. The only advantage that simple models and dirt cheap fossil energy have left us is computing technology. That’s everything from pea sized smart sensors to farm sized data centers. Prehistoric humans learning to cook food resulted in less energy going to the stomach for digestion and more energy going to the brain for thinking. Similarly, we can view reliance on fossil energy for everything from farming to air conditioning resulting in less effort needed for survival and more effort available for creating computing technology. Despite cornering ourselves into a climate crisis, our advances in computation are already serving as the building blocks for new models that require no footnotes. Indigenous tribes considered all aspects of nature because no models were available, we will now consider all aspects of nature because any model can be created.

The models to come must center on how to live within the thresholds of Earth’s natural systems. This means creating the tools to understand ecosystem level interactions as well as molecular level interactions. Much of this work has begun but an overarching vision has yet to tie it all together. We must make sense of the world anew, in a way that doesn’t ignore what we find too complex or too inconvenient. And to do so we must leverage technologies ranging from cameras counting fish in the water to computer simulations of bacteria. Industrial agriculture must yield to precision and regenerative agriculture. The future involves applying research from soil microbiology and mycology instead of applying more nitrogen onto our infertile lands. We have to remember what was once known before: Everything is connected to everything else. It’s all one system and we should see ourselves as the orchestrators not the dominators. In practice this is revenue forecasts accounting for river run-off or demand planning accounting for desertification. That’s what it means to make models without footnotes. And while humans may not be able to comprehend such levels of complexity, machine learning algorithms may be well suited to do just that. Given there’s no going back, the only remaining path is to go deeper down the rabbit hole. To construct models that reflect reality so closely that we return to observing the world for what it is, not as a loose interpretation locked in a spreadsheet.

There’s a popular piece of business advice that to get started in a new industry one only needs to know enough to be a "little dangerous". In reality knowing enough to be a little dangerous is extremely dangerous. We’ve seen this play out over the last 200 years with our planet as the test subject. Not knowing anything or knowing everything forces us to respect the entirety of the planet. The middle ground of incomplete information is the worst possible scenario and one that we've been stuck in for far too long. When we look back we should be outraged that we ever had footnotes listing out all that we let ourselves ignore.

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The result of electrifying everything and scaling up renewable power generation is a growing inseparability between internet communication, software, and the physical movement of electricity. A Tesla isn’t just an electric car, it’s an internet car with over the air software updates. Nest thermostats don’t just save you money on heating and cooling bills, they are aggregated to lower power demand during peak hours of the evening. Residential solar rooftop installations don’t just have an on / off switch, they are controlled with an app from wherever. As control of electricity shifts more and more to a combination of software and internet based protocols, the risk of compromise scales even faster. Compromise in this case is not leaked personal information but malicious takeover and control of the movement of electricity. This type of attack is cyber-physical, bridging the gap between the internet and real world systems. To combat this cybersecurity risk we need to better quantify said risk when evaluating technology trade-offs, push for more private-public partnership on protections for the coming smart grid, and bias towards decentralization at every opportunity.

It’s not mere coincidence that electrifying old fossil based technology and increasing renewable power generation leads to more software and more internet communication. It’s the only path forwards at the moment. Renewable power is intermittent and utility scale battery storage has yet to become truly competitive. Therefore there’s a growing need to more efficiently manage power resources as well as distribute them across any given region. Both of which require increased coordination, which means more algorithms and more connection. Speeding up this process is the urgency that the climate crisis demands. There’s no time to wait for "just over the horizon" breakthrough battery technology. Renewables are being deployed at ever faster rates, and the electrification of everything is starting to take off. Without an easy way to store our renewably generated electricity, the only viable path is connecting everything to orchestrate an autonomous dance across time and space.

The concern about the growing risk of cyber-physical attacks as electricity goes online comes from the fact that traditional power plants which specifically try to separate their control systems from the rest of the internet have already been compromised in recent years. Andy Greenberg’s Sandworm provides a fascinating account of how Russia was able to remotely bring down Ukranian power plants multiple times. If critical infrastructure which strives to air-gap itself from the web can be taken down, then what confidence can we have in consumer-grade technology that will increasingly play a role in when and where electricity gets made and stored. Putting aside the vulnerability of internet based communication, there’s all the software that will serve as the orchestrator in our clean energy future. The code written to perform the dance across time and space will exponentially increase the surface area available to would-be attackers. Look no further than the recent SolarWinds hack for proof of this risk. The coming smart grid is critical to mitigating climate change, but its vulnerabilities could wreak havoc upon countless parts of our lives.

As one example of how these cyber-physical risks play out, consider the fleets of electric trucks and vans that are about to hit the streets. One report projects there will be 54,000 of these vehicles on the road in the US by 2025. If each of these vehicles has a modest 100 kWh battery, it adds up to 5.4 gigawatt hours of energy needed per night to charge them up. For comparison, that’s more than half of the output of a large coal-fired power plant...over the course of a whole year. Now imagine if the charging station software for a fleet of delivery trucks is hacked thereby giving attackers the ability to stop or start charging the trucks at will. Such control over even one fleet in a city could cause massive disruption to its grid, let alone the business of the company operating the fleet. While nothing like this has happened yet, there is research that maps out a feasible way to conduct almost exactly this type of attack. Thousands of large roaming batteries controlled by software and connected to the internet present a risk that we're not prepared for today.

To reduce the cyber risk that’s coupled with decarbonizing everything, the first step is to better quantify said risk and account for it when making decisions. It’s so early on that even the metrics to define what’s acceptable aren’t fully baked. Most of what can be found is still in the realm of research papers. Daniel Geer, a famous cybersecurity expert, has repeatedly pushed for the quantification of cyber-risk as connectivity and interdependency booms. We might never get to actuarial standards of risk measurement but even low-medium-high estimates for potential economic loss in the event of disruptions will be useful. The quantification of risk will allow for more meaningful comparisons when dealing with power generation or storage proposals. Consider closed loop pumped hydro systems (massive water batteries). Cost estimates for digging the reservoirs and filling them with water run in the billions making them infeasible to scale up today. However since they can operate without much connectivity, the risk of cyber-physical attacks will be low. Especially if the alternative for a decision-maker is for example reliance on vehicle-2-grid technology (EVs serve as batteries for the grid). That option should be more expensive when considering the risk of all the dependencies that could be hacked. These adjustments based on the potential for cyber-physical compromise may lead to  significant shifts in the solutions chosen. The path to more quantification seems likely to come from the cyber-insurance industry as it expands further into renewable energy technology and distributed energy management. Not accounting for the true costs of “smart” solutions is foolish in the best case and disastrous in the worst.

Cyber-physical attacks have the potential to cause black outs across large swathes of the US. And the attacks most likely to cause such damage will not come from rogue hacker groups looking for a payday but state actors looking to destabilize the country. Given what’s at risk and who would most likely be responsible, government involvement is guaranteed. We also shouldn’t forget that the US itself undoubtedly has plans for such attacks against other nations. The point however is that when it comes to mitigating the risk of such attacks, private enterprise should work with government to address the worst case scenarios. An active partnership between the two is better than leaving the risk mitigation to just one or the other. Private enterprise shouldn’t have to bear the entire burden of preventing attacks launched by nation states. Nor should the government have a sole monopoly on those protections. What this relationship looks like is yet to be determined, but companies like Dragos already have connections into government agencies and may serve as a model for future iterations. Given the secrecy around cyber attack and defense, it’s not unreasonable to assume more of this public-private cooperation goes on behind closed doors already. Making such interactions transparent would be ideal but may very well jeopardize the success of the partnership. The stakes are too high and the geopolitical ramifications are too big to not have some level of cooperation moving forwards.

The most powerful strategy to mitigate the cyber-risk inherent in our climate solutions is to bias towards decentralization across every dimension. The world is still haunted by Windows vulnerabilities. We should not repeat past mistakes by relying on a single platform for the core systems that facilitate all of our power generation and storage. There’s a tendency in our current iteration of capitalism for individual companies to gain monopolistic market share and then never relinquish it. It’s a formula for disaster if services those companies then provide become compromised. Going back to the electric vehicle example, it's high risk for one company to dominate charging station infrastructure. Hacking their system would result in catastrophe everywhere. A healthy marketplace with shared standards but different technologies and approaches would prevent any single compromise from doing significant damage. That’s not to say decentralization is always better as in some ways it's easier to protect one power plant compared to thousands of rooftop solar installations. But again the over-arching tendency of our economy today is to reward consolidation and centralization, so pushing for the opposite at every turn serves as a check against the natural order of things. With sufficient decentralization across the control of technology and resources the risk of devastating cyber-physical attacks will be lowered.

There’s no viable alternatives to doubling down on software and connectivity as we tackle climate change but there is opportunity to ensure that we mitigate as much of the risk as possible. The strategies above may not be sufficient but are undoubtedly necessary. The scale at which climate solutions need to be implemented puts us at a disadvantage to start. More awareness and understanding of what could go wrong should serve to balance the odds as we move forwards. To quote Daniel Geer in Sandworm, dependence on a stable climate poses at least as much of an existential risk for humanity as dependence on stable computer networks. And the Internet has a time constant of change five orders of magnitude smaller than that of climate. Such is the challenge we face as we hurtle into the decade of climate mitigation.

Every hour of every day of every year

A framework I’ve found helpful for understanding what it means to get to 100% carbon-free electricity generation is a 24 x 365 grid. Each of the 8,760 squares represents an hour of power generation in the year that needs to be emissions free. I first came across this diagram reading Google’s 2019 discussion paper on their corporate efforts to match 100% of their data center’s electricity demand with zero-carbon sources at every hour. In Google’s version of the diagram (shown below), green indicates a 100% clean energy match and grey means a 0% match. The gradation across each day and throughout the year reveals where there’s progress and where difficulties remain. More organizations in the private sector and in government should adopt this method of thinking about power generation for themselves or the region in which they are responsible. This framework makes the problem tractable and makes the end goal clear. Every hour of every day of every year must be 100% clean — each square needs to be solid green.

A benefit of the 24 x 365 diagram is the breakdown along the axes of time of day and time of year. Both are critical because the pathway to 100% clean energy runs through massively increasing solar and wind energy generation which are highly time dependent. While this framework makes visualizing the utilization of those two technologies easier, it also puts emphasis on the most important objective: Achieving 0 emissions from power generation at all times. The goal isn't just deploying 500 more megawatts of solar or closing down a specific natural gas plant, it’s about bringing each hour to 100% clean energy generation. Tactics should stay tactics while strategy is created to bring portions of the day or year to 100% zero emissions through any number of methods.

While useful on its own, the 24 x 365 grid is even better when paired with the ability to zoom in and observe the quantity and mix of power generated each day. These types of charts are common today among grid operators. NY ISO and CA ISO both have real-time dashboards of energy mix on their respective websites.

With the 24 x 365 grid and the per day breakout in hand, we can reason about what improvements would happen if specific actions are taken. Consider the following two examples.

Example 1: Adding more solar generation

Building a new solar farm would immediately allow afternoon hours during the summer to achieve a higher level of carbon free generation. Using the two visuals we can quickly see where a solar farm would provide benefits during the year as well as a specific day.

Example 2: Building a closed loop pumped hydro system

Closed loop pumped hydro systems can be thought of as very large water batteries. During the day water is pumped from a lower reservoir to a higher one using renewable or other energy sources. Then in the night water is piped down leveraging  gravity to spin a turbine thereby generating power. This system enables providing non-intermittent power in the evenings across the year but especially in the winter months when shorter days make solar infeasible during the late afternoon and early evening.

Even tactics such as short duration battery storage and demand response programs can be visualized with this framework. Batteries can extend the window of operation for solar and wind by storing excess electricity production. A 4-hour capacity of battery storage can enable solar and wind to take on peak demand in the evening hours. Residential demand response programs, where customers are paid to use less energy during certain parts of the day, when mapped onto the 24 x 365 grid would also serve to make certain hours cleaner as fewer peaker plants would be needed to meet consumer demand. The per day breakout would similarly show a lower total quantity demanded and a cleaner mix of energy generation. These two visuals provide an easy way to conceptualize the effects of many different solutions all while keeping focus on the singular goal, 0 emissions at every single moment.

We collectively need to solve for 8,760 hours each year. Making each individual hour 100% clean will take a combination of technologies. What this visual framework provides is a map to gauge how far we’ve come and what remains. There’s a satisfaction that comes when checking off an item on a to-do list, we should consider this the same. 8,760 to-dos, some harder than others, but all equally necessary. I hope these visuals are used more broadly across the climate space both in the private and public sector.

Below I’ve created an interactive version of the 24 x 365 grid and per day demand graphs using data from the NY ISO in 2019. Hover the cursor over the 24 x 365 grid to see the breakout for an individual day.

Carbon Free and Fossil Fuel generation in the data:

• Carbon Free consists of: Hydro, Nuclear, Wind, and Other Renewables

• Fossil generation consists of: Dual Fuel, Natural Gas, and Other Fossil Fuels

Low hanging hours first

For any organization to have the most impact, the next step after constructing a snapshot of their 24 x 365 grid is to identify the low-hanging hours currently available. Low hanging hours are those hours of the day or year which are the easiest and cheapest to convert from fossil energy to clean energy. Depending on the geographic area that could be afternoons in July when the sun is always out and PV panels are readily available, or evenings in October when the wind blows continuously and turbines are relatively the cheapest. Not all hours of the day will be as easy or cheap to convert but emissions averted at 9 AM are the same as emissions averted at 12 PM. And in mitigating climate change, reducing emissions is of utmost importance.

On that last point, the advantages of tackling the low-hanging hours first are two-fold. One is that tackling those hours first preserves more of the “budget” of allowable emissions for the harder to clean hours of the day. The nature of climate mitigation is that emissions averted sooner are much more valuable than emissions averted later. A great illustration of this concept comes from Robbie Andrew who shows how far emissions must fall in each subsequent year depending on when we hit peak emissions in order to stay under 2°C of warming. Assuming priority can only be given to one initiative at a time, the low hanging hours are the place to begin. This isn’t exactly like a to-do list where the common advice is tackle the hardest task of your day first. In that sense it's the complete opposite, clean the easiest parts of the day first and leave the difficult parts of the day for later.

The second advantage builds off of the first. As the low-hanging hours run out, demand for fossil energy will only exist for those harder to convert hours of the day. As a result, costs for fossil generation will increase as the fixed costs of those plants become spread across reduced hours of operation. Higher costs for fossil generation will make more expensive clean generation technologies such as geothermal more competitive. Without this demand reduction based cost increase or a price on carbon, these farther out zero-carbon baseload technologies may take too long to become cost competitive. This advantage could be hobbled by factors such as contract terms, political lobbying, or subsidies to fossil power generators. All of which may limit how fast fossil generation costs go up. But at some point the market overrides all barriers. Cheap energy is cheap energy.

Armed with the 24 x 365 framework and a strategy of addressing low hanging hours first, any organization is properly equipped to start the daunting task of getting to 100% clean energy. With climate change every solution is needed, but at the same time we cannot forget the power of prioritization. Tackling low hanging hours first provides some sense of direction in a flood of possible actions.

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