Saving the Planet/ClimateTech investment opportunity

4 min readDec 6, 2022

Saving the planet

Climate action is complex. This is my version of trying to over-simplify and understand the levers that affect climate and the opportunities that arise from dealing with the crisis we have created.

By we — I mean the industrialised west, through both carbon release and resource mis-mgmt

By Climate action & crisis — I mean the obvious fact that the climate is warming through human effects of the past 200 years and the effects it will have on the planet and people.

Some other facts to consider:

Industrialised west created the problem, mostly before we knew what we were doing. The developing countries are at a different point in their industrialization and power journey and should not be penalised for it.

Biodiversity and Natural Capital is an important consideration to consider for carbon capture, the value of supporting nature and simply enough, that it’s our role to protect nature when we realise that that is what we simply need to do.

Carbon offsetting is not the answer. Some aspects of it might have been ok five years ago, but not now. Its a neutral at best option for organisations that are at the start of their journey. When it is done, it is better to do it as part of a properly managed biodiversity solution — i.e. its not about sitka plantations in the wrong place.

So, decarbonisation.

Where is all the carbon being released from for our activities and for what?

Power in the socket — this is electricity generation for home, business, services.

We need to generate this electricity with renewable energy. At the moment, this will be on and off shore wind, PV and soon to be floating wind. Renewables are intermittent, so you need ~2x the amount of energy for the grid in renewable generation, plus storage. This could be new scale batteries or hydro. There will probably still be small amounts of relatively clean gas required for emergencies, but where you see coal or oil power generation, consider it gone.

Heavy industry, specifically cement, steel and fertiliser generation. Not easy to replace the gas turbines needed to get the heat needed for these processes. These are big industries — for the economy and for carbon. There seems to be talk about hydrogen power here, and then you extend that to hydrogen generated from electrolysers powered by more renewable energy.

Transport — powered by oil (petrol and diesel). This needs to get replaced in two well known ways. EV — esp for buses and trains (more renewable power generation). And unusually, we have to get rid of cars. Helped by urbanisation and extended public/shared transport networks, but ultimately, we need to reduce the single occupancy vehicles in favour of much better scale efficiency.

Heating. I think you‘ll see the trend here. Currently delivered by oil/gas for domestic and commercial premises, we need to replace it with a renewable energy powered form of heating. That would be heat pumps. And like Transport also needing to up its efficiency, this is the role of better building insulation and building management — optimise the heat that is utilised for our buildings.

Food & Ag. Here’s a problem area and the 1st one outside of general renewable power replacement. Its different since we are talking about methane release, not carbon from fossil fuel burning. It’s the most diversified by stakeholders (farmers) and that’s a stakeholder group with unusually strong lobbying eg Ire, France, US. Plus we still need to feed people, which thankfully seems to be capping out at 10bn from the exponential growth we had observed for 200 years to 2000.

A big area to improve here is protein replacement — that’s replacing beef with aquaculture and plant or lab proteins. Across the board, we also need to look at fertilisers, not clearing natural tree cover and protecting biodiversity in land and water.

All of these actions taken to the necessary target, will reduce carbon emission by perhaps 90%. We need to get to zero so that we can start to restore the planet as well. That final 10% will come from two sources. Organised biodiversity building — that is appropriate re-forestry and re-wilding and direct carbon capture through a variety of emerging technical solutions.

Couple of further points to note here:

Neither new bleeding edge tech for carbon capture, nor carbon offsets are the answer to the climate crisis, they come for the final 10% part. The tech for renewable generation, transport and heat is already here. We are now in a utility scale optimisation step.

Biodiversity is not a nice to have, it has a value for carbon in and of itself — check out Natural Capital processes like the Ted talk in the link below

There are tech & venture investment targets all over the place. Better batteries for mobility and grid stability. Optimisation of renewable energy generation and dispatch to the grid. Offshore floating wind. Valorisation of biological waste from human and animal (high calorific value). Replacement and recycling of heat and materials generally from across all of our manufacturing value chains (sustainable design)

Note that water is a critical nature, health and industrial resource and needs increased support

Awareness of the full life cycle of products, especially as we ramp up some materials like rare earth metals for the electricity transition

Augment production at point of use (3d print), last mile delivery (drones) and remote working that reduces transport

This blog wont discuss the SDGs, but they and other principles are strong frameworks to add Vision/Mission ot the work you do in trying to support climate action and to do so fairly in a developing world. I dont think we should need to support de-growth principles yet.

And many more opportunities, once you accept the base principles and scale needed — electrify the grid, heat, transport, decarbonise industry, remove waste, protect and use nature to support

This blog leans heavily on concepts in these deeper reading/viewing

Saving the Planet/ClimateTech investment opportunity

Written by Alan Costello