[HN Gopher] Chasing gigacorns: Five things we learnt about inves...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Chasing gigacorns: Five things we learnt about investing in climate
       tech
        
       Author : doener
       Score  : 13 points
       Date   : 2022-08-13 13:34 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (sifted.eu)
 (TXT) w3m dump (sifted.eu)
        
       | telchior wrote:
       | Back around 2008-2012, investors were dumping massive amounts of
       | money into cleantech. It's interesting to see how much the
       | definition of what "cleantech" is, has changed since then. Back
       | then it was solar, energy storage, hydrogen, carbon capture,
       | biofuels. They found out that basic science and material research
       | are extremely difficult, involve a ton of failures and don't
       | really fit the 10-year payback timeline that VCs expect. (The odd
       | man out here is fusion research, which is currently hot but
       | definitely not possible in 10 years.)
       | 
       | Now cleantech VC is all about eliminating waste and finding
       | efficiencies in existing industries. I guess that's a good thing,
       | it's low hanging fruit that's un-sexy enough that most investors
       | ignored it in Cleantech Hype 1.0. But I do wonder who, exactly,
       | is now funding the stuff that burnt VCs the first time around.
        
       | gardenfelder wrote:
       | Climate change - the entire subject - is a really complex space,
       | one in which human behaviors and attitudes are shaping the
       | outcomes for which investors are now asked to fund defensive
       | projects.
       | 
       | This is what I wonder: what if there was a way to tame human
       | behaviors and attitudes and thereby reduce the need for such
       | investments.
       | 
       | To me, that situation seems analogous to Ike's admonition to
       | "beware of the military industrial complex" - to which we can now
       | add "university". By which I mean that it seems like there are
       | financial incentives made in heaven for reducing CO2 which is, in
       | part, put there by human behaviors, some of which are
       | incentivized by commercial activities (think: muscle cars, RVs,
       | etc, vs public transportation, anemic electric vehicles, etc).
       | 
       | Which leads me to wonder: what about investing in those
       | technologies which can contribute to the reduction of the human
       | side of the overall equation. VCs seem to be chasing a
       | "demand"-side which is created by an overachieving "supply"-side.
       | Stocks and flows.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2022-08-13 23:02 UTC)