The Climate Change Fight Enters a New Phase
The message at the Global Environment Facility Assembly was scale baby, scale
Like all climate conferences, there’s good news and bad. Leaders of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) conference in Vancouver have come to one common view: Its time to scale. Early stage startups, pilots, projects and indeed entrepreneurs are past their sell-bye dates. Its time to shift focus to building a huge green economy — globally. NOW.
This is a message I’ve been touting for….like twelve years now. As they say, timing is everything. If you want to slow climate change, then show people how they can make money from it. Works every time. As I’ve said often, in five years there will be no argument on climate change, except who’s going to make the most money from it.
Climate leaders, environmentalists, financiers, NGOs, government leaders and anyone else focused on slowing climate change are realizing time is running out. It’s all well and good that we have successful outcomes here and there, we need successful outcomes everywhere. Hence the focus on systems, big money to scale, and eliminating the barriers to large scale impact.
Being a climate tech entrepreneur (fill in your descriptor of choice: cleantech, greentech, whatever your phase of choice is) is no longer sexy. In fact, I think the world may have passed us early stage entrepreneurs by. The prevailing attitude seems to be its time to find some adults to really scale these solutions. We need to get serious.
No s__t.
Only one, little, tiny problem. Who’s going to invent the future? Anybody paying attention knows that we need new, big ideas to solve problems between now and whenever we get to Net Zero (2050 is still the target). My money is that these ideas won’t come from big companies or big organizations or big projects. No, I still think we need the folks who are going to risk everything on making a bet on the future.
My vote is while everyone is focusing on scale, we get serious on building the innovation infrastructure necessary to fuel future innovators. Globally. And like NOW. We can do both.
Fred