"Clean Tech" ☀️💨 to "Climate Tech" 🌏 and what it means to me.
A deep dive into my reawakening around climate
From “clean” to “climate”.
"Clean tech" was all the rage in the 2000s. Investors were excited about new ways of making energy that were lighter on the environment, but market forces like the '08 financial crisis, the fracking boom in the US and the sharp drop in solar panel prices from China were, among other reasons, why "clean tech 1.0" ultimately failed, losing investors billions (for more on 💰, read this). Tesla's one of the few companies left standing from back then, while most of the solar and biofuels plays of that era have since gone under (Exhibit A: Solyndra).
The boom and bust nature of tech investment reads like fashion trends, "one day you're in; the next day you're out" (thanks, Project Runway 💁♂️). And with a bust, came another boom. Since the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, the excitement around "clean" technologies have picked up steam again, but the conversation has shifted away from clean energy towards a zoomed-out view on climate change more broadly (touching every sector in the economy). In fact, the movement spawned a new term - "climate tech" - and the investment numbers (BNEF, Axios) suggest investors have come back with a vengeance (and many newcomers have joined in on the frenzy too).
My journey to clean tech.
I began reading about clean energy quite randomly after a science class in middle school about the fractional distillation of crude oil 🛢️ (aside: check out Thom Hartmann’s essay on ancient sunlight that has a really awesome reframe on what fossil fuels are). When you're brought up to be clean and tidy, the thought of spewing earth-harming pollutants into the air just seems wrong. Clean = good; fossil = bad.
Add to that the release of An Inconvenient Truth in high school, and just like every other climate nerd out there at the time, I was hooked on the climate trail. The image of Al Gore on top of a scissor lift 🪜 pointing to the plot-shattering upward trajectory of the Keeling curve 📈 will always remain with me. And at the time, flattening that curve (not that other meaning) meant working on clean tech.
Getting in while others were getting out 🏃♂️.
As an overeager college student, I tried my best to do my part tinkering in research labs working on clean energy. All while the sector took a gut-wrenching cliff-dive in the early 2010s. A Bay Area visit in 2011 summed it all up for me: driving by the Solyndra factory 🏭 just weeks after it had shuttered, paint still fresh, feeling defeated. The tech darlings then were social media companies (Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram), not clean tech and most certainly not “climate tech”.
By the time 2015 rolled around, I'd spent several years building up a slew of R&D projects, and my two years in grad school were spent traveling across India trying to find traction on a new way to monetize stranded gas. I was tired and in need of a break from clean tech. I stepped away from school for the first time and moved out to the Bay Area. My refuge from "clean tech" for the past 6 years has been at Planet 🌎, where I've continued to do "climate" work (before "climate tech" became a thing) designing satellites 🛰️ that monitor change on the ground. But being away from clean tech has, at times, made me feel a bit lost and lacking in purpose.
The climate tech wake-up call ⏰.
6 years of a climate-change-denying administration, record wildfires, record hurricane seasons and the warmest years on record were a much-needed wake-up call for me. As the language in the tech zeitgeist shifted from "clean" to "climate", I was reminded why I got into all of this in the first place. It was about trying to fix climate change, not just about clean energy or clean water, or pollution, as important as those problems are on their own. "Clean" doesn't get to the heart ❤️ of the matter. "Climate" does. It's wild how a single word can define an entire movement and peoples' sentiments. "Clean" got a bad rap, so all of the chips moved to "climate". And where the money doesn’t go, the tech doesn’t flow (yes, I just rhymed).
And hence, my relationship to climate change, which was once channeled through my work on clean tech and which I thought had summarily ended when I left it, was reawakened in the new climate tech movement. "Hello, Climate!", indeed.
Climate tech is exciting to people because the words "climate change" have been (in some circles) broadcast enough times and with enough fear that it rallies people's emotions where everything is on the line. I don't necessarily agree with this fear-based method, but it definitely gets people's attentions. We want to believe that climate tech companies will succeed and that climate tech is the right thing to work on because the flip side - the scenario where we fail and the planet warms >2 °C by the end of the century - engenders a feeling of disappointment and failure that takes on an existential nature, i.e. apocalyptic doom. When the stakes are this high, everyone wants in and hope is heightened because we can't afford to fail much anymore.
In the end, I'd become pretty jaded about clean tech, even though I'd been all-in on climate change. So whatever this "climate tech" thing becomes, and whatever name it's given down the road, I'll be taking the long view 🧐. Hello (again), climate. Let's save our goodbyes for when you cool down a little bit.