Hoo Koo E Koo

Climate change is perhaps the biggest threat we are facing as a civilization — if things go wrong, they will go really wrong across all disciplines of life for pretty much everyone. Heralded as the point of no return by thousands of organizations and scientists for decades, the moment when it will become too late to save the climate of our planet from a dramatic shift is now estimated to be just about 7 years from today.

The world is waking up to this on a larger scale every year. Beyond recent US declarations, “China, some of the Gulf States, and India are investing in green energy on a scale that would have been considered improbable even a decade ago. “ reports McKinsey. Venture Capital investment in climate tech is growing rapidly, with $60bn coming in the first half of 2021 alone, reports PwC. Climate action is becoming better funded by the day, which is spurring a wave of innovation and entrepreneurship. The solutions are becoming accessible. The price of solar energy, for example, plunged from $21 per watt in 1980 to $1 per watt today — making it cheaper than natural gas.

COVID-19 has opened the eyes of many on the issue and increased popular demand for action. “At the height of the coronavirus pandemic in April 2020, with many countries in lockdown, daily global CO2 emissions fell 17% compared with 2019 levels. The drop is certainly major — emissions were temporarily comparable to 2006 levels — but the fact it was not, even more, gives an insight into how much deeper emissions cuts need to go than the lifestyle changes available to individual people.” — wrote BBC Future.

Popular demand for climate action is driving companies to choose carbon-neutral sources of power. In 2020, Facebook (now Meta) announced that they had reached carbon neutrality. “We set these goals in 2018 and today we are one of the largest corporate buyers of renewable energy,” Facebook said. “We have contracts in place for more than six gigawatts of wind and solar energy across 18 states and five countries. All 63 projects are new and located on the same electrical grids as the data centres they support.” — this follows declarations from Apple, Google and many others.

The United States is transitioning away from coal and is innovating in a wide array of green technologies, such as batteries, carbon-capture methods, and electric vehicles. We are seeing a continued push for lowering carbon emissions and the use of alternative carbon-neutral fuels. What is coming onto the agenda, much more than the gentle action and greenwashing of past decades, is large scale industrial carbon removal and sequestration.

Big polluters like the US and China are making bold promises about energy sustainability and independence. We are seeing a diversity of new technologies aimed at both reducing and removing the world’s emissions, unleashing a wave of innovation to compare with the industrial and digital revolutions of the past.

Over the next five years, the energy transition will reach a tipping point. The cost of new-build renewable energy will be lower than the marginal cost of fossil fuels, according to the World Economic Forum website. Renewable energy is rapidly becoming a preferred “mainstream” energy source, according to Deloitte. A BCEI whitepaper released by Square points to the crossroads between progressing decentralization of finance and accelerated scaling of renewable energy.

As reported by Blackrock, the pandemic has added fuel to pre-existing structural trends and now “the tectonic shift towards sustainable investing is accelerating.” Much like in Climate, this is pushing ahead a large wave of entrepreneurship and innovation, however, focused more on the consumer (b2c) space.