The four-axis ranking
We rank humanity’s most important problems on four quantifiable dimensions — quantity of humans affected, severity per capita, current solution quality, and addressable market size — and package each as a proposal in the spirit of Musk’s Hyperloop Alpha. This document is the proposal for climate change. Every number below is sourced and tagged with confidence. Every ranking is a conjecture, open to refutation.
Quantity · humans affected
8.2B
highSeverity · WTP / wealth
20%
lowWhat we are trying to solve
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.
The gap between the world and the world that is physically possible
Who is already working on this
No companies have yet been tagged to this problem in the dataset. If you know one, open a PR.
If we solve this, here is the world we get
Section in progress
The success vision and technical proposal for this problem are still being drafted. New whitepaper sections ship with each Monday newsletter drop. Subscribe to get the upgrade, or contribute on GitHub.
What the market can pay
Section in progress
Addressable-market sizing for this problem is not yet in the dataset. New whitepaper sections ship with each Monday newsletter drop. Subscribe to get the upgrade, or contribute on GitHub.
What could go wrong, and how we know we are not wrong
Section in progress
Failure modes, ethical considerations, and the conditions under which this whitepaper would be falsified are being authored as the weekly cadence ships. The Deutschian commitment: every claim above is a conjecture; we publish the conditions under which we would update. New whitepaper sections ship with each Monday newsletter drop. Subscribe to get the upgrade, or contribute on GitHub.
Who would back this
Section in progress
No capital allocators have yet been tagged to this problem in the dataset. New whitepaper sections ship with each Monday newsletter drop. Subscribe to get the upgrade, or contribute on GitHub.
Where this is wrong, tell us
Every number on this page carries a source and a confidence tag. Every section open to refutation. If a citation is wrong, a number is stale, or a conjecture is unfounded — file a correction.
corrections → use the feedback widget in the nav · open issue at github.com/adamtpang/optimism.fun