Big-Oil Investors are the Future of Climate Technology
This article was authored by a 3rd party not related to PlanetVoters.com and any opinions or views expressed are not a reflection of PlanetVoters.com.
At the Cleantech North America conference, the fates of climate-tech start-ups are tangled into the balance sheets of companies who caused the crisis in the first place.
February 15, 2024
“The world does not end at 2 degrees C,” Bill Gates told the British podcast The Rest Is Politics in an episode that aired in January. Gates, one of the strongest and earliest supporters of tech as a tool to address the climate crisis, has spoken before about his belief that we’ll blow past 1.5 degrees—but his more recent assertions that 2 degrees C is unavoidable took many by surprise.
“There’s no stopping us passing 2C,” he said. “In temperate zone countries, in terms of your overall economy or livelihoods, it’s actually not a gigantic thing. Yes, you have to pay to make various changes, you have to have air conditioning.… The really bad stuff is, say, you let it go above 3 degrees.”
I listened to the Gates interview sitting in a hotel ballroom in San Diego on January 23, surrounded by hundreds of attendees of the cleantech conference I’d come to observe. The conference was partially sponsored by an arm of Breakthrough Energy, the venture fund Gates founded in 2015 to invest in climate innovation.
I felt the familiar pit of despair in my gut that I get when I think about just how little time we have left to act on the climate: of how quickly our world seems to already be spinning out of control, even at less than 1.5 degrees of warming, let alone the 2 degrees Gates seems to be hand-waving away. Outside the ballroom, San Diego was in shambles after nearly three inches of rain had fallen the day before, making for the city’s fourth-wettest day in history.
To read the full article, click here:
https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/cleantech-conference-climate
