Forget banks Investors should be worrying about the climate

News Summary

  • Rather than invest in fusion or batteries or carbon capture or grid management tools, they seem content plowing their money into ad optimization software, corporate spend cards, corporate SaaS platforms — CRM, marketing or payments, take your pick!
  • In other words, to fund companies that lease software on a monthly basis rather than sell perpetual licenses, VCs invested more money than the entire GDP of Slovakia.On the other side we have clean energy, which includes everything from batteries to renewable fuels, building electrification, solar, wind and more.
  • Last year, global VC firms invested just $4.25 billion in carbon capture and a mere $1.1 billion in fusion energy, per PitchBook.
  • In case you’re bad at math, investments that eliminate carbon pollution in myriad sectors of the economy were one-third those made just to sell software on a monthly basis.Venture capitalists once backed companies that took big, consequential swings.
  • Yet the technology has such tremendous potential, both for the climate and for returns, that investors should be pouring enormous sums into the market.In that way, fusion shows a way forward.
  • But that would mean that many would fail, too.Fortunately, fusion isn’t the only climate tech that’s in need of investment.
The reports issued by the U.N.s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are usually grim affairs. But even by that standard, last weeks seemed particularly bleak.The upshot is that the world has [+5596 chars]