The 1.5 Quadrillion Dollar Opportunity

I stayed up last night reading The Ministry for the Future after recommendations by Albert and Yancey. It is a searing read, making the climate tragedy we are living through visceral. The opening story of a heatwave in India chilled me to the bone and I appreciate Kim Stanley Robinson’s attempt to wake more of us up. I certainly woke up this morning feeling a greater sense of urgency to do more to help with the climate crisis.

So here is my small message to my network in tech where I perhaps have some small influence: building technology and start-ups to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels is one of the most fucking epic business opportunities of all time. At Kim Stanley Robinson lays out crisply:

“Humans are burning about 40 gigatons of fossil carbon a year...Scientists have calculated that we can burn about 500 more gigatons of fossil carbon before we push the average global temperature over 2 degrees C higher than it was when the industrial revolution began...but meanwhile, the fossil fuels industry has already located at least 3000 gigatons of fossil carbon in the ground. All these concentrations of carbon are listed as assets by the corporations that have located them and they are regarded as national resources by the nation states in which they have been found...The notional value of the 2500 gigatons of carbon that should be left in the ground, calculated by using the current price of oil is on the order of 1500 trillion US dollars”

That broadly means that at as we handbrake turn our way out of fossil fuel dependence, 1500 trillion dollars of fossil fuels (1.5 quadrillion dollars!) that would be burned over the coming decades will be replaced by something new and better. You know what’s cooler than a trillion dollars? A quadrillion dollars of climate tech!

It’s a breathtakingly large amount of money and the companies that accelerate and own that transition will likely be some of the largest ever created. There’s a reason some of the most successful venture investors are increasingly focused on climate tech.

To make this more personal, I have been angel investing in climate focused startups since 2017. Some of these startups are focused on food (Ovipost, Hoxton Farms), some on work (Hopin), some on the built environment (Infogrid), some on travel (VirtualTrips), some on transformational new materials (Stealth) and some in green infrastructure development (Stealth). My co-founder from Songkick, Michelle is also now working on a stealth climate project that I’m incredibly excited about. What has been surprising is how well these climate investments have performed. 

A large part of my reason for investing in Hopin in 2019 was that I had stopped flying for work, and hoped that over time more people would see the carbon footprint of international conferences as unsustainable until we decarbonise aviation. Hopin is now probably the fastest growing start-up in the world. Infogrid and VirtualTrips are growing extremely quickly and I think might be two of breakout start-ups in the world this year. The founders of those companies could become incredibly wealthy, while making a dent in the climate crisis.

There are obviously many ways to contribute to tackling the climate crisis beyond technology and business. I have so much respect for friends like Claire Farrell (XR), Bryony Worthington (Quadrature Climate Foundation), Mariana Mazzucato (IIPP), Sam Geall (China Dialogue) and Tom Mustill (Nature Now) who are all helping to pivot us into a more ambitious and aggressive response, but it takes all sorts, and there is a role that start-ups and investors can play too.

So if you are a founder or an investor looking for more of a reason to build or invest in climate focused startups, here’s one - you could get exceptionally rich whilst literally helping to save the world.