🌎 A Pragmatic Guide to Climate Tech Resources #013
my toolkit of framing and filtering the never-ending climate information firehose
TLDR: There’s an abundance of climate content out there. Rather than trying to read faster or multitask, set up the right search criteria and filters. First, understand the foundations. Then dive into specific areas based on your specific beliefs and interests.
I started out this week thinking I would aggregate all the helpful resources I’ve consumed over the last ten months. Then I’d summarize my learnings on what I’ve found most helpful. I did a brainstorm session, wrote an outline, and even had my headings all laid out nicely. But then I kept procrastinating on the actual writing. Why?
After enough pacing around and distractions, I became self-aware of the strong resistance to put out another climate resource guide. The world doesn’t need another list of climate resources. There’s already some great resource guides (example A and example B).
Not long ago, the mere existence of climate change was heavily debated. Today, there’s an abundance of climate tech content. Whether it’s books, newsletters, podcasts, or social media, the sheer volume of climate content is staggering. We need to galvanize the masses to take action, but there’s also a separate issue of how to keep up with climate. It seems like every day there’s a new bill being passed, startup raising funding, or groundbreaking technological breakthrough. The pace at which climate tech moves combined with the breadth of information often feels overwhelming.
When it comes to drinking from the firehouse of climate tech content, I’ve found tightening the knob to be more helpful than trying to have a bigger mouth. That’s all to say: approach learning about climate with the proper search and filter rather than trying to consume everything.
In starting Build in Climate, I’ve consistently felt imposter syndrome because I’m writing about topics that I start out knowing very little about. Every two weeks, I research and share what I learned (and that’s also in addition to my personal blog and podcast). While I’m far from an expert on any topic in climate, I can confidently say that I’ve had to get good at learning. Every iteration of this newsletter reinforces the meta-skills of information consumption, synthesis, and compression. To combat the information overload in climate, I’m sharing the absolute must-have resources along with the frameworks on how I keep a pulse on what’s going on in climate. Thinking about thinking is a pretty nerdy topic if you ask me, but I think it’s worth the investment given human attention is the scarcest resource in the world.
Today, we’ll be covering the following sequence:
Foundations
Climate Frameworks
Thinking About Thinking
Climate Spectrums
Getting Specific
Finding A Job
Keeping Up With Climate
Foundations
First things first. Before diving in (and before experiencing information overload), everyone should familiarize themselves with the foundations. It’s worth the upfront investment of ~5 hours to ramp up on climate-relevant science and historical data to understand how big the problem is and get an initial sense for what we can do about it. These are must-read for anyone getting into climate:
To understand just how bad it could get, read Is climate change the greatest threat facing humanity today? - 80,000 Hours
To get a top-down systems level view on the problem, check out Project Drawdown Foundations
For a comprehensive deep dive on energy (and adjacent sectors), dive into A guide to the energy transition - Tsung Xu
And lastly, tinker around with the charts on Our World in Data. There’s ton of topics ranging from energy to pollution to agriculture.
Framing the boundaries of the problem will come in handy because the edges are well-defined. Now we can start to explore and investigate the surface areas within climate.
Climate Frameworks
Frameworks help us think clearly about something, but at the end of the day they’re just abstractions. They’re a tool that’s only worth using if they’re helpful. With that said, here are four of my favorite climate frameworks - two to understand the problem and two to advance towards solutions. Rather than try and memorize them all, only keep what’s useful for you!
Sources and Sinks
At a high-level, the problem of global warming exists due to an imbalance between mostly man-made greenhouse gas emission sources and sinks that store those emissions. Viewing climate change through inputs and outputs simplifies the complexities and sets us up for the next framework for defining what the main objective is.
Reduce and Remove
As Head of Climate at Stripe Nan Ransohoff describes, the goal is to limit global average temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Ultimately, every climate solution falls under one of two levers: reduce or remove. In order to address sources of emissions, we must reduce, through carbon-free energy sources, sweeping electrification, and a revamped food system. Without direct intervention, naturally occurring sinks won’t be enough to meet our goal. We’ll have to create entirely new systems that can remove carbon from the atmosphere, at scale.
Atoms vs. Bits
If atoms represent the physical world and bits represent the digital world, then any climate solution can be oriented on this spectrum of atoms vs. bits. The reality is that there are boundless opportunities across pure software, pure hardware or hard science, and solutions that incorporate both. On one end of the spectrum you have Terra, a completely online climate education community and on the other end you have Running Tide which uses oysters for carbon sequestration. Laying it out like this way is another helpful framework to see just how wide-ranging climate tech is.
Software in Climate
In Ben and Nathan’s Guide to Software in Climate Tech, they clarify that we need all hands on deck when it comes to software in climate:
Software can be the product, output the product, deploy the product, enable the product, or design the product.
From financing to marketplaces to running physical devices (bits coordinating atoms if you’ve been following along), there’s opportunities abound for software - the fastest, most scalable lever that we have.
Thinking about thinking
I’ve been framing “climate” as the transition to a decarbonized economy, which helps to convey how climate is a theme, not a specific sector or space. Under the umbrella are potential solutions so diverse that the only thing connecting them is climate. For example, imagine someone who works in consumer marketing for a sustainable fashion brand. Now imagine a battery cell engineer at Tesla. What they have in common is that they’re both “working in climate”, even though they may have little to no overlap in work and live completely different lifestyles.
From how we feed ourselves to transportation to how we work, just about everything has some amount of climate relevancy. What exactly defines a climate company? Do we label them based on their reduction or removal of carbon? Is that potential or proven impact? If it’s proven, then Zoom would be more of a climate company than many climate startups for how many business flights they’ve saved with virtual meetings. If potential, then we’re talking about hypothetical futures, not the practical reality. Rather than paint climate as a black and white landscape, I’ve found it more useful to view things based on how relevant they are to climate.
Which leads me to climate branding. It could be part of their mission statement or embedded in their products. It could be as subtle as using green throughout the company’s website. Different than greenwashing, which is making environmental commitments without any evidence, climate branding is a neutral term. A company branded as climate tech that recruits potential employees by emphasizing its environmental impact could be making a serious dent in carbon emissions. But the inverse is equally valid. A company without any green on their products and doesn’t self-identify as a “climate company” could definitely be a part of the solution. For example, any electrician contracting firm is going to play a key role in the transition to a decarbonized economy, although they may do zero climate branding.
Hot take: Slapping a “climate” sticker on your company’s LinkedIn page or product is mostly just a branding exercise and requires deeper examination. Ultimately, everything is connected.
A few examples:
Scaling clean energy requires robust software for streamlined deployments, enough skilled workers to install the physical equipment, and an efficient supply chain for materials procurement.
Climate and AI are not two separate industries. They’re both themes, cutting across just about every industry you can think of and it turns out, there’s a ton of overlap.
Real estate and adjacent areas (like cement) are so deeply intertwined with emissions that there’s an entire VC firm called Fifth Wall (with billions in AUM) investing at the intersection of climate and real estate.
Family planning and Education is the third most impactful climate solution according to Project Drawdown due to the ripple effects of lower fertility on energy, building usage, food waste, and transportation. Access to education leads to sustainable consumption choices, helps spur climate action, and steers people towards climate relevant jobs.
Lots of inputs and a strong filter
What’s the best way to learn about climate? Well, it’s probably the same as you would learn about anything. Morgan Housel shares why information consumption relies on many inputs, but a narrow filter:
Without flooding your brain with inputs you’ll be stuck in the teeny tiny world of what you’ve personally experienced. But without a strong filter you’ll be overwhelmed with choice and paralyzed by inaction.
But then the question remains - how do you get a strong filter? After grasping the foundations and familiarizing yourself with climate frameworks, it’s time to start forming your own opinions. Through your own climate beliefs, you’ll naturally start to pay attention to specific climate areas. The “strong filter” that Morgan refers to can only organically emerge through intentional, directed curiosity.
Climate Spectrums
I’m a proponent of the abundance agenda, the notion that in order to move forward as a society, we need more. More clean energy, more housing, more doctors, etc. Specifically in climate, we need to adopt a “yes, and” mentality. In the aggregation of all climate solutions, we’ll need individual and collective action. We’ll need distributed energy resources like solar panels and a grid with robust transmission. Lab-grown meat and reducing food waste both help to decarbonize our food systems.
everyone who works deeply in the space knows that we have no silver bullet. We need more solar and nuclear and to replace every gas appliance we can and to electrify transport and to revolutionize agriculture and to build a new financial stack and and and and. The scope of this transition requires us to blow on hundreds of dandelions to scatter thousands of seeds of ideas and talented people to build over the decades to come.
However, this is all from the perspective of how do we, as a collective society, solve the problem. At the individual level, answering “What do I do in climate?” with a hodgepodge of climate solutions can result in information overload and subsequent decision fatigue.
Along the way of my own climate journey, I’ve started to form my own beliefs about how we move forward in climate. I often find myself in some amount of disagreement with other folks in climate which I think is actually a good thing. It’s important that we debate ideas rigorously and hold opposing viewpoints since we all care about solving the same problem. If everyone in climate was in consensus, then we’d all be in an echo chamber full of seemingly tree-hugging hippies.
Examining your climate beliefs will help guide you towards a more specific, tangible role to play. In reality, the set of climate solutions will be a weighted portfolio. Exploring climate through a series of spectrums can help you figure out which specific area(s) to bet on. You can think of it like one of those silly Buzzfeed quizzes that tells you which Hogwarts house you’d be sorted in. Useful if the result resonates, but otherwise just a thought exercise.
There’s many ways to organize the possible climate solutions and here are just some. See where you sit on these and if you’re pulled towards a particular topic or pushed away from others. Either way, it’s helpful to narrow down on what to pay attention to within climate:
individual vs. collective action
de-growth vs. green industrialism
scaling existing solutions (like solar + wind) vs. future bets (green hydrogen and direct air capture)
distributed Energy Resources vs. the grid
carbon tax vs. carbon removal
EVs everywhere vs. public transit
carbon insetting vs. carbon offsetting
plant-based protein vs. cultivated meat
vertical farming vs. regenerative agriculture
Getting specific
Through researching various topics for several months now, I’ve realized that finding resources is not the main challenge. In the grand scheme, finding things to read or people to talk to is not that hard. The real challenge is in constructing a reality tunnel customized for your personal beliefs that optimizes between exploring broadly and going deep on specific areas.
Finding information more or less will feel like stumbling into insights if you’re already paying attention to the right places. Like any good historian or archaeologist, it’s best to get as close as possible to the primary source. Talking to engineers, scientists, founders, and investors who spend their days immersed in one idea is by far the highest leverage way to learn. Getting on the phone with experts can be tricky so the second best way is to carefully and thoroughly digest deep dives written by people who are already putting in the work. Deep dives like this one on materials by Tsung Xu or this one on carbon dioxide removal by Jamie Wong.
Going beyond articles which are inherently one-time and one-directional, communities are another great way to ramp up fast. There’s larger, general climate communities like My Climate Journey or Work on Climate which have dedicated channels for specific topics. That works, but I’ve found that the more focused the community is, the greater the concentration of curious, dedicated people. Some examples include AirMiners for CDR, DER Task Force for energy, and Activate Fellows for the hard sciences.
Finding a job
Although finding a job and founding a startup both require rigorous learning, they have fundamentally different objectives. While the majority of employees are hired through public job postings, startups are founded on hidden insights. There are plenty of climate job boards out there like ClimateTechList. On the other hand, finding “the right idea” can often feel like wandering blind through a maze that keeps shape-shifting.
When deciding on a job offer, you have to reach a level of comfort in someone else’s idea in exchange for a paycheck. When starting your own startup, you have to feel even more confident because you’re committing to work on something very hard for a long time that has a statistical track record of mostly failures. Emerging founders also have a higher conviction threshold than prospective employees because they’re signing up for a bigger commitment. The average tenure of a tech employee is only three years while it usually takes between seven to ten years for a startup to exit.
Finding a climate job often requires choosing from a pre-determined, well-defined set of options. Building a startup is threading the needle between recognizable problems and non-consensus potential solutions. While the former has a looser, wider set of constraints like “I want to work on clean energy software for at least $150K”, the latter requires a tighter, narrower scope like “We streamline residential solar installations by helping installers automate their design phase using Lidar and geospatial data”.
If you’re seeking a job in climate, I recommend reading Nan Ransohoff’s Finding a job in climate and checking out Work on Climate. Also, don’t sell yourself short! As discussed earlier, climate touches every sector. Chances are, you already possess valuable skills and experience - even if it’s from a “non-climate job”.
Keeping up with climate
I’ve already referenced a few foundational readings and deep dives, but truly keeping up with climate requires some amount of recurring information (and I’m not talking about the news). It sounds obvious, but staying in the loop requires following sources that consistently share new information. In keeping up with the whole “there’s already enough climate content out there” theme, I’ll distill my recommendations to only a few:
For newsletters, check out:
And consider following climate folks on Twitter. Start with these four and then you’ll be able to find more people to follow from there:
I hope you found this useful! Today, there’s an abundance of opportunities in climate and there’ll only be more in the future. Progress starts with a mindset that fosters long term, intentional learning.
Love this article. Well said, structured, resourceful. Thank you Matt. You describe exactly my place in the climate sphere now: getting too much info and not setting a strong filter. I'm on it!