The new reality is that the next wave of climate tech investments will be bold, outlandish, desperate, and probably dangerous.
In 2022 the world had a viable path towards solving climate change. The recipe was simple enough: just rapidly scale out climate technologies like renewables, EVs, heat pumps, alternative proteins, and low carbon concrete and steel.
By 2024, geopolitics and the rise of GenAI have cast doubt on that scenario.
Governments view short term threats with adversaries as more urgent than climate change.
Companies and investors are slowed by high interest rates and slower than expected adoption.
Early adopters of “electrify everything” products are running out and the early majority aren’t sold yet.
Rise of AI
Meanwhile, the rapid adoption of energy-intensive AI models will increase global energy demand much faster than anyone predicted in 2022.
The fact is that AI leaders are already warning us that we need to consider previously outlandish climate solutions such as geoengineering (Andrew Ng) and fusion (Sam Altman).
Andrew Ng advocating for geoengineering
As someone deeply invested in both climate solutions and AI, I personally have pretty severe cognitive dissonance. What good are my EV and solar panels when I spend my day building large scale AI systems that have a carbon footprint of 100 people? And this is puny compared to the scale of Big Tech AI deployments, which themselves are puny today compared to what they will be in 3-5 years.
Path Forward
The unfortunate reality is that Andrew Ng and Sam Altman are right. The “electrify everything” strategy of 2022 is dead. Don’t get me wrong – the world still needs to follow through with that plan because it’s the best we’ve got. But we need to reset expectations about how far it will get us.
The new reality is that the next wave of climate tech investments will be bold, outlandish, desperate, and probably dangerous.
Jared Rand is a data scientist specializing in natural language processing. He also has an MBA and is a serial entrepreneur. He is a Principal NLP Data Scientist at Everstream Analytics and founder of Skillenai. Connect with Jared on LinkedIn.
