ClimateTech is an important piece of the puzzle in addressing climate change, but it’s not a magic wand. What should we prioritize in climate technologies?
Here are some facts. The four hottest days in recorded global history occurred during the week of July 21-28, 2024, following 13 consecutive months of new heat records. Since July 2023, Earth’s average temperature has been 1.5 °C or more hotter than preindustrial levels (1.5 °C being an auspicious mark because it was identified as a key defense line by the Paris Agreement to avoid extreme, extensive, and irreversible heating scenarios). From late July into early August, Antarctica experienced a heat wave in (what is for the continent) the dead of winter, with temperatures as high as 50 °F above normal.
A 2021 Cornell study found that 99.9% of peer-reviewed scientific papers agree that climate change is primarily caused by humans. There is also a broad consensus among scientists that humanity must find ways to slow or reverse global heating (and its causes) as rapidly as possible to mitigate the worst effects of climate change.
And heating is just one problem within an interconnected system of problems humanity faces in the 21st century. Associated issues like biodiversity loss, pollution, soil desertification, microplastics, sea level rise, ocean warming and acidification—as well as the impacts these have on human systems such as supply-chain disruptions, mass migrations, and political volatility—collectively form what economist Adam Tooze calls the “Polycrisis.”
In many projections, especially those funded or produced by oil companies, climate technologies like carbon capture figure prominently in our path to decreasing global warming. One glimpse at all the above and it’s hard to argue that new technologies shouldn’t play a role in mitigating harm and increasing resilience.
At the same time, not all climate technologies are created equal—and some risk inadvertently prolonging or exacerbating aspects of climate change. How should the public balance their thinking on climate technologies between conflicting realities?
The Role of ClimateTech in the Polycrisis
ClimateTech is a broad category of emerging technologies and industries aimed at addressing climate change.
These include: energy (i.e., hydrogen, nuclear, solar, wind, smart grid technologies), CarbonTech (i.e, capture, storage, and offsets), FoodTech (i.e., plant-based meats, vertical farming, sustainable fertilizer), mobility (i.e., electric vehicles, batteries), materials & manufacturing (i.e., green steel, bioplastics, 3D printing), financial services (i.e., FinTech, regenerative finance, circular economy efforts), among others, as well as various “low-tech” practices like agroecology and solar ovens.
Skeptics point to the role technology has played in exacerbating harms, and the ways in which the industry is interwoven into the Polycrisis—creating waste, increasing consumerism, and reinforcing many of the very economic incentives that perpetuate climate change—including over-reliance on fossil fuels.
The tech industry mythos is predicated on notions of progress and innovation, but sometimes technological developments are deployed before it’s clear what the extent of the costs vs. benefits will be (and for whom). This is visible in how the advertising model that underpins social media platforms ultimately subverted the information sphere by incentivizing political extremes and base instincts like fear and rage. Likewise, for all the potential that AI technologies hold, they are also known to be major carbon emitters.
Even when a technology does work in a seemingly effective way with minimal adverse immediate side effects, with ClimateTech there is also always the question of the Jevons Paradox, which holds that increases in technological efficiency have the effect of increasing demand on the underlying resource. For example, as Cameron Shelley outlines, improving crop yields on farmlands through drone use could make producing a bushel of wheat more efficient, causing it to be cheaper, thereby driving more demand for wheat. This might in turn cause more forests to be converted into farmland, which might cause more pesticides to be used to sustain monocropping, which in turn can reduce soil fertility.
It’s not a guarantee that Jevons Paradox will come to pass with every efficiency gain, but this type of ecological or systems thinking is necessary for ClimateTech founders to consider, even if it’s ultimately impossible to predict all externalities at the outset. And if the situation is as dire as the climate science community believes it to be, new technologies and a culture of enthusiasm, innovation, and creative problem-solving will be a critical piece of the puzzle to mitigate as much of the harm caused by climate change as possible.
Evaluating ClimateTech and Climate Change Progress
With the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme climate events, it’s reasonable to expect the role of (and attention on) ClimateTech will increase.
This new monthly series, “Climate Change Progress,” is intended to identify the ClimateTech leaders whose work is poised to produce the most benefit while perpetuating the least harm.
Given all of the considerations outlined above, how should we evaluate the possible benefit of a given climate technology?
A starting rubric might include:
- How much does this technology stand to benefit the public? How critical is the problem space, and how urgent is the need for new tech? Playing on the idea of a startup “unicorn,” venture capitalist Christian Hernandez proposed the notion of the “gigacorn,” or a company that lowers or sequesters CO₂ emissions by 1 gigaton/year while being commercially viable.
- How much harm does it reduce vs. problems does it cause? This is especially important in evaluating how much energy a given technology uses and/or causes society to use. On The Great Simplification podcast, ecological economist Nate Hagens proposed the ideal of “Goldilocks technology,” which he describes as a “category where we get a very important human need…with very minimal energy input.”
- What are the externalities or possible unintended consequences of the product/service?
- What are the critical uncertainties related to the category the technology exists within? How might the technology’s value change (positively or negatively) depending on outcomes related to said critical uncertainties?
- What individual or collective behaviors, good or bad, does this technology incentivize?
- Does the product/service have a clear pathway to participating in an ecology of change? Do the founders demonstrate an ecological approach to the problem space rather than a one-off fix?
These will comprise the starting considerations for future installments of Climate Change Progress. Each installment will focus on particular areas within the broader umbrella of ClimateTech.
These are of course only a few of the important lines inquiry among many, as each case will bring a unique context demanding further and more specific inquiries, but they are intended as a foundation for analyzing ClimateTech through the lens of Polycrisis.