Climate change
Decarbonize the global economy fast enough to limit warming, while keeping energy cheap and abundant.
The scale of it
tonnes of CO2 emitted per year (fossil)
The capital on it
All tracked climate finance, public + private, mitigation + adaptation. Adaptation is only ~5% of it. Substantially overlaps clean-energy investment counted under energy abundance.
source: Climate Policy Initiative — Global Landscape of Climate Finance 2024 · confidence med · estimate, improvable by PR
The prize at the limit
Beyond clean energy: the firm that decarbonizes heavy industry (steel, cement) and removes legacy carbon cheaply sits on a multi-decade, government-backstopped demand curve. The ceiling is supermajor-scale.
comparable: an industrial supermajor + a carbon-removal monopoly · confidence low · a ceiling, not a forecast
The summary lives here. The full whitepaper walks through the four-axis ranking, existing alternatives, proposed direction, cost & scale, and suggested investors — in the spirit of Hyperloop Alpha.
Severity · WTP / wealth
share of affected person’s wealth they would pay for a solution
Priority score
12
importance × urgency, 0–100
Importance
15
humans affected × severity, gated by market
Urgency
80
direction of travel + solution gap
Neglectedness
3/10Climate is now very well funded overall, but the hard-to-abate frontier (industrial heat, cement, steel, aviation, carbon removal) remains comparatively underfunded.
medTractability
7/10For power, the cost curves already won. The remaining wedges (industry, aviation, removal) are genuine engineering frontiers with clear targets.
highWays to help
Build industrial decarbonization, clean firm power, or durable carbon removal.
Work on permitting reform, carbon pricing, and clean-energy deployment.
Climate engineering, project finance, or energy-systems modeling.
Organizations
- Global Carbon Projectdata
- Breakthrough Energycatalytic capital
- RMIresearch / policy
People to follow
- Hannah Ritchieenergy + environment, Our World in Data
- Jesse Jenkinsenergy systems, Princeton ZERO Lab
Three-lens scoring
Climate change is a problem of getting clean energy and industry cheaper than the dirty incumbents, fast. The optimistic case is strong: solar, wind, and batteries have fallen ~90% in cost in a decade and are now the cheapest power in history. Emissions are still rising, so the work is real, but the frontier is concrete: industrial heat, cement, steel, aviation, and durable carbon removal. The framing here is not sacrifice, it is abundance: the same cheap clean energy that limits warming also lifts living standards.
Companies on this quest
0 mappedNo companies mapped yet. Known gap.
Capital funding this quest
0 allocatorsNo allocators mapped yet. Known gap.
Writing about this right now
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