Hope in climate tech
We’re in need of a little bit of hope. 1.5 degrees seems out of reach. COP27 fizzled out, the UK government just greenlit a coal mine. Carbon emissions are now higher than they ever were before the pandemic.
For anyone working in climate it feels like constant doom scrolling in a digital world of outrage. And for everyone else, faced with the overwhelming scale of planet death, it’s only human to look away and live for short term, hoping someone else will fix it.
So what’s made this week different?
Real people, meeting in person, in one place.
With hope.
We had hope because we were witnessing people with a real chance of reducing emissions by 100s of millions of tonnes gathered in the Cambridge Union. They bring not problems, but solutions.
Real touchable solutions in food, energy, materials, water, buildings, delivered at the speed our climate needs.
They were the twelve ventures graduating from Carbon13’s Venture Builder and as a grand finale, they were showcasing their innovations to hundreds of invited guests, first at the Cambridge Union, and then at EY’s Wavespace. EY has supported these ventures throughout their journey and we are very grateful for their support and their recognition that these founders are not just sharing incremental solutions but ideas which will reshape systems and build the world of the 2030s.
The future is Net Zero. Our ventures are already building it. And for once, we could all see into the future and see not a burning world, but a thriving one. It felt like a much needed ray of hope.
How is the 3rd cohort of our Venture Builder solving the climate crisis?
Here’s a recap of the twelve ventures – and how you too can work with us to create the future you’re hoping for.
Firstly, food. It’s important. We need to stop deforestation, nurture soil health for generations, deploy land for solar energy, and fertilise our food to meet the growing demand. And as Indonesia’s forests burn and soil in America blows away and Argentina’s harvest fails and the UK’s rivers choke with fertiliser, who’s doing something about this?
Enter Sun Bear Bioworks, Elaniti, Sunjul and Nium. You should explore their work in more detail here, but here’s the good news. Sun Bear Bioworks will replace palm oil on an industrial scale, – with a mix of yeast, precision fermentation and machine learning to make a product with the same functions as palm oil – but without the catastrophic loss of forests.
To nurture our soil to recover from our current topsoil-spoiling methods, you’ll first need to measure it. Elaniti is plugging the data gap in soil health—there can be 1000 different microbes in a teaspoon of soil, so this is skilful stuff– and then improving crop yields, with a mix of physics, biochemistry and machine learning.
The only permanent energy source on earth is the sun. Rolling out acres of solar power has already started, we now need to accelerate. Sunjul specialise in agrivolatics, the idea that solar can benefit agriculture and vice versa. Again, data is key: to enable financing, to understand risk, and accelerate deployment.
Nium also straddle clean fuel and agriculture – they have invented a revolutionary new way of producing green ammonia in “Minions”, mini reactors. The applications? The creation of green fertiliser on-farm, or facilitating hydrogen, one of the clean fuels of the future.
With the energy transition, batteries are both the heroes and the villains. Batteries enable electrification around the world, but are made of rare materials with destructive supply chains. But hope is found in The Battery Recycling Company who have the answer as to how we move from extractive production, to a recycling one.
Green energy includes solar, wind, and hydropower. Yet only 2.5% of green energy investment goes to hydropower, hampered by again, data. Accounting for emissions for water is holding back investment and if something’s a problem for the water industry it’s a problem for every industry. Open Hydro is solving this problem and becoming the first company to measure emissions from water.
And back to investment, it’s data again that’s holding back the transition to Net Zero, or specifically, the funding of it. The great news is that Rescope’s innovative platform enables investors to double down on sustainable investment strategies, and respond to climate risk reporting mandates.
Now look yourself up and down, there’s something hurting the planet and you’re touching it right now. Your clothes. The fashion and textile industries are some of the most polluting and yet a tiny amount of clothes are recycled. Zoritex however have a plan. They use innovative technology to sort textile waste by fibre and return to the supply chain.
By the time you’ve read this blog, another carbon intensive building will have been completed. 40% of emissions are caused by the built environment already, and 80% of the buildings which will stand in 2050 have either been built or are in construction now.
How do we affect this global juggernaut? Certainly consumers are impotent as any renter or mortgage holder can testify. Well your reason for hope lies with Mortar IO and PreOptima. The former enables retrofitting at scale (which means decarbonising existing buildings) and the latter drives low carbon design of building assets, so that one day, every building will be low carbon in design and construction from the first architect’s sketch.
And finally, we come to materials. Well, one material. It’s made from fossil fuels and it permeates every corner of our world, from the seas of Antarctica to your own lungs. It’s plastic.
We need to reduce plastic production, and enable its recycling – you might spend hours sorting your rubbish at home but the vast majority of the world’s plastic is burned or dumped in a hole in the ground. We have two rays of hope in Cohort 3.
Circular11 can take piles of contaminated and mixed plastic waste destined for the incinerator, and turn it into building materials. 17Cicada are going one step further and inventing a new type of bioplastic made through bacteria. A durable and versatile material which won’t leave our land and bodies filled with microparticles.
This is just the speed recap of twelve highly technical and complex startups. But I hope you can see the hope.
Because, the good news is that we have the tools and we have the technology to solve the climate crisis. What’s missing right now are the thousands of people who should drop what they’re doing and focus their one precious journey on this earth to doing something to save it. COPs and governments are too slow. Activism too slow. Consumers too small.
But Carbon13 is a community that was designed to make this happen. We were created to be the place where the people who are determined to save the climate can actually start doing it.
We take individuals and we empower them to change global systems.
Through our cohorts in Berlin and Cambridge, we’ll be launching 200 startups a year by 2024. Applications are open now to join both programmes. And every one of those 200 new startups will have the potential to reduce emissions by 10 million tonnes a year.
And that gives me hope.