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When Kurt Vonnegut reflected on the secret of happiness, he distilled it to “the knowledge that I’ve got enough.” And yet, both as a species and as individuals in an industrialist, materialistic, mechanistic culture, we are living under the tyranny of more — a civilizational cult we call progress. We have forgotten who we would be, and what our world would look like, if instead we lived under the benediction of enough.
How we got here, and what we might do about it, is what photographer, writer, illustrator, and wilderness guide Miriam Körner explores in Fox and Bear (public library) — a love letter to nature disguised as a modern fable of ecological grief and hope, partway between The Iron Giant and The Forest, yet entirely and consummately original, painstakingly illustrated in cut-out dioramas from reused and recycled cardboard, narrated with poetic tenderness and a passion for possibility.
Every day, Fox and Bear went into the forest to gather what there was to gather and to catch what there was to catch.
Day after day, the two friends forage and hunt together, watch the sun set and listen to the birds sing.
Life was good, thought Bear.
Picking berries and mushrooms,
hunting ants and mice,
catching rabbits and birds
kept them busy day after day.
But eventually, these joyful activities turn into tasks and the two friends get seduced by the trap of efficiency — that deadening impulse to optimize and operationalize doing at the expense of being.
As Bear and Fox begin gathering more and more seeds, catching more and more birds, laboring to water the seedlings and feed the birds, they suddenly find themselves with no time to watch the sunset or listen to birdsong.
This is how the allure of automation creeps in — Fox sets about inventing mechanical means of accomplishing the daily tasks, in the hope of liberating more time for leisure: an egg collector, a bird feeder, a water sprinkler, a berry picker.
Instead, the opposite happens as the forest begins to look like an industrial palace evocative of the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray’s cautionary observation that “we worship efficiency and success; and we do not know how to live finely.”
All this enterprise ends up consuming the time for leisure, subsuming the space for joy, affirming Hermann Hesse’s century-old admonition that “the high value put upon every minute of time, the idea of hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living, is unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy.”
Every day now, Fox and Bear cut down more trees to burn in the steam engines, so the egg collector could collect eggs and the water sprinkler would water the plants. At night, they filled the bird feeder and fixed the berry picker and built more cages until it was almost sunrise.
As Fox keeps dreaming up bigger and bigger engines, faster and faster machines, Bear finds himself “so tired he had no imagination left.”
Suddenly, he wakes up from the trance of busyness and remembers how lovely it was to simply wander the forest “and gather what there is to gather and catch what there is to catch.”
And, just like that, the two friends abandon the compulsions of progress and return to the elemental joy of simply being alive — creatures among creatures, on a world already perfectly tuned for every creaturely need. We have a finite store of sunsets in a life, after all.
Couple Fox and Bear with the Dalai Lama’s illustrated ethical and ecological philosophy for the next generation, then revisit the forgotten conservation pioneer William Vogt’s roadmap to civilizational survival and Denise Levertov’s stirring poem about our relationship to the natural world.
Illustrations courtesy of Miriam Körner
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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Today's queer youth are more interested in farming than ever. Eliza Pessereau surveyed members of the Queer Farmer Listserv to understand their challenges and motivations for going "back to the land."
The post Young, Queer Farmers Are Here to Change U.S. Agriculture appeared first on Edge Effects.
For the last two years, climate tech was on a tear. To be fair, so were a lot of other sectors. But when a slowdown hit tech investing in the middle of last year, climate tech startups bucked the trend and kept racking up the deals.
Now the party might be over, if preliminary data from a new report holds up.
Climate tech deal-making in the first quarter registered $5.7 billion across 279 deals, according to a new PitchBook report. The amount raised was down 36% year over year with 35% fewer deals. That’s certainly suggestive of a correction.
Investors have been keeping a closer eye on their pocketbooks as fears of a recession continue to rumble through the markets. And yet key economic indicators show a striking resilience in the U.S. economy, with strong hiring keeping unemployment low while consumer sentiment remains high. That hasn’t stopped economists and big names on Wall Street from continuing to predict a recession in the coming months. (Certainly not the first time they’ve done that.)
Still, all that noise tends to give investors the jitters. Since no one wants to be left holding the bag, investor sentiment has a way of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you’re a startup squeezed for cash, you’ve undoubtedly heard from your investors, and it may feel like a recession is already here.
Yet climate tech’s resilience has led some to call it the ultimate “recession proof” investment. Is that still true?
Maybe.
Let’s break it down. For one, these are preliminary figures looking at data through March 31. It’s hard to say how many deals closed in the last few days of the quarter that weren’t picked up by this report. It might be billions!
Climate tech tapped the brakes in Q1. Will the slowdown continue? by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch
A warming world is going to need a lot of cold drinks. Problem is, today’s refrigeration tech is anything but climate friendly.
The way we cool our food and drinks has barely changed in a century and the technology is still reliant on environmentally harmful refrigerants. Now, a German startup thinks it can freeze those refrigerants out of the market using little more than magnets and water while consuming up to 40% less energy.
Magnotherm has been refining its technology, known as magnetocaloric refrigeration, since it was spun out of TU Darmstadt in 2019. Though it’s only a seed-stage company, the startup has already shipped five display coolers to beverage giant Coca-Cola, TechCrunch+ has learned, and it’s on track to build another 55 that will be rented out for events.
But beverage coolers are just the tech demo: “We are really building a bigger box for supermarket cooling cabinets,” co-CEO Timur Sirman said. “This is where we can actually reduce energy costs and maintenance costs significantly.” The global market for commercial refrigeration is worth $37 billion, according to Grand View Research.
To capitalize on the opportunity, Magnotherm is announcing a seed round today. In an exclusive with TechCrunch+, Sirman said the company was shooting for €5 million, “and now, we’re actually oversubscribed.” Investor interest was so great that they’re closing the round with €6.3 million.
Extantia Capital led the round, with Hessen Kapital, Lauda Dr. R. WOBSER Beteiligungs-GmbH and Revent joining. Four investors from the Better Ventures Angel Club also participated.
The technology Magnotherm hopes to dethrone is broadly used and deeply entrenched. It’s not as efficient as it could be, but more troubling are the substances it uses to keep things cool. The refrigerator sitting in your kitchen gets its chill from the physical properties of its refrigerants, the gases that loop through the cooling system.
None of these refrigerants come without tradeoffs. First generation refrigerants — freon and its ilk — chewed a hole in the ozone layer. Newer ones are more ozone-friendly, but they are powerful greenhouse gases, warming the Earth hundreds to thousands of times more than an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide.
Countries are working to phase out their use, but finding replacements hasn’t been easy. One frontrunner, propane, is flammable, and regulators have hesitated to greenlight its use in larger refrigerators in case of leaks. Carbon dioxide is another contender, but it only works as a refrigerant under very high pressures, which makes the whole system more expensive.
Magnets and water net Magnotherm $6.9M seed round to kill hazardous refrigerants by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch
Pity Donald Trump. He spent four years in office tearing up trade agreements and ranting about rewriting old ones, all to little avail. Now, a key U.S. climate law is doing more to change the dynamics of international trade than any blustering and bullying ever did.
The Inflation Reduction Act has been hailed as a win for domestic producers of minerals that are critical to electric vehicles and other hallmarks of the decarbonized economy. The most impactful so far have been the provisions that require a minimum amount of domestic sourcing and processing to be eligible for the $7,500 EV tax credit. That language alone has spurred tens of billions of dollars of investment in the U.S. battery supply chain.
But there’s no way the U.S. can produce all that’s needed — the country simply doesn’t have enough reserves, while China has a lock on many parts of the market. So the law also includes a handy loophole qualifying minerals from countries with which the U.S. has a free trade agreement. The law already qualified “North American” suppliers, and the free trade language opens the door further.
Late on Monday, the door opened a little wider as the U.S. and Japan announced a trade deal encompassing cobalt, graphite, lithium, manganese and nickel, all minerals that are key components of EV batteries. The agreement opens up both markets to new supplies of the minerals, allowing battery manufacturers and automakers to benefit from the IRA’s minerals requirement.
For now, Japan is the only country to successfully negotiate a new agreement in the wake of the IRA, but it probably won’t be the only one. The EU, which has made no secret about its displeasure with the new law, is also in talks with the U.S.
In the seven months or so since the IRA was passed, the global landscape for critical minerals and battery manufacturing has changed rapidly, and a potentially steady stream of new free trade agreements promises to keep things fluid. For founders and investors alike, that injects a fresh dose of uncertainty.
Why startups should care about geopolitical repercussions of US climate law by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch
One fusion startup is betting that a 70-year-old idea can help it leapfrog the competition, so much so that it’s planning to skip the experimental phase and hook its prototype reactor up to the grid.
The decades-old concept, known as a stellarator, is deceptively simple: design a fusion reactor around the quirks of plasma, the superheated particles that fuse and generate power, rather than force the plasma into an artificial box. Easier said than done, of course. Plasma can be fickle, and designing “box” around the fourth state of matter is fiendishly complex.
That’s probably why stellarators spent years in the fusion-equivalent of the desert while the simpler doughnut-shaped tokamak ate everyone’s lunch, and nearly all of their research funding.
But not all of it. Type One Energy is the brainchild of a handful of physicists steeped in the stellarator world. One built the HSX stellarator at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, two more performed experiments on it, and a fourth worked on the Wendelstein 7-X reactor, the world’s largest stellarator.
Together, they founded Type One in 2019 and nudged forward their approach to fusion at a steady pace. The company wasn’t in stealth — TechCrunch+ identified it as a promising fusion startup last year — but it was operating on a slim budget.
Fusion startup Type One Energy gets $29M seed round to fast-track its reactor designs by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch
The funding landscape remains very tough for technology startups, but there are still some pockets, and specific companies, driving a lot of interest among investors because they look like they’ll break through whatever current macroeconomic trends that are gripping the world.
Today, a startup out of Munich called IntegrityNext announced that it has raised its first-ever funding, an equity round of €100 million ($109 million), for a new twist on supply chain software: a platform that helps organizations with lots of suppliers automatically audit and monitor those companies for compliance with environmental and sustainability governance (ESG) rules, both those that companies set for themselves, as well as those coming from a growing body of regulation.
The funding is coming from a single investor, EQT Growth, and it will be used to continue building the breadth of the platform as well as the company’s go-to-market position. IntegrityNext has a growing number of customers — there are even a few would-be suppliers — across the U.S. and Europe, so the plan is to build more capabilities to meet that opportunity.
Those capabilities will stay in the area’s environmental and ethical labor commitments, and for now, there are no plans to loop in audits around, say, whether a supply chain implicates a company in the act of breaking embargoes on countries over political disputes or issues of national security.
The crux of the product is a platform that acts like a big data ingestion engine, sourcing information that is publicly available to help develop risk profiles for different markets and different companies, complemented by regular contact with businesses in the supply chain to supply details. All this is compiled into a database that then provides a warning system and audits for IntegrityNext’s customers to better understand what is going on in their supply chains.
What they do next is up to those customers, though: they can then use this to help either require their partners to change things, change the partners themselves, send in human auditors for deeper investigations, or I guess nothing at all. But ultimately, this is about building a way to manage what might be thousands of suppliers for some companies.
“You have to find an efficient way to manage that,” said Dominik Stein, a partner at EQT Growth. “You can’t go to every company and do every check yourself; it just doesn’t work.” (Stein’s joining an advisory board with this round.) From what I understand, a typical customer might pay $60,000/year for the service, but the figure could be significantly higher or lower depending on the size of the supply chain.
IntegrityNext, and this round, are part of a group of startups that have grown impressively over several years but flown under the radar. The startup has been profitable since 2004, and has been completely bootstrapped until now. On its own steam, it’s picked up a 200-strong list of enterprise customers, including Siemens Gamesa, Infineon and SwissRe, with a supply chain database that monitors close to 1 million suppliers across 190 countries.
According to CEO Martin Berr-Sorokin, who co-founded the company with Simon Jaehnig (CRO) and Nick Heine (COO), they decided to raise capital now to essentially strike while the iron is hot. The company had never taken outside funding, but it had no shortage of inbound interest, he said, and the state of the market and the fact that raising might not be as easy later swayed things.
“We wanted to have a strong partner for our next growth phase,” Berr-Sorokin said in an interview. “We were getting to the next phase, and we need support for hiring, extending our network, sales and marketing, and going into new markets in Europe and the U.S. We didn’t have to do it. It was an option, and we feel lucky to have done it.”
ESG is evolving rapidly as a market opportunity. On one hand, consumers, thanks in part to social media, have become significantly more aware of how a business’ supply chain might effectively paint that business with the tar of labor exploitation and poor environmental practices, and that is putting a lot of pressure on those businesses to do better. The businesses themselves, meanwhile, are at the end of the day run by humans. Some may be hard-nosed when it comes to getting business done at any cost, but a good number have a conscience and want to do right by that, not just for the sake of appearances.
On the other hand, there have been notable developments playing out in the regulatory realm that might make whatever “nice to have” that has swirled around ESG into more of a “must do.” In Germany, companies with more than 3,000 employees are required to provide audits and reporting to demonstrate their own ESG compliance — compliance set by regulators — lest they face fines and other penalties. That number is coming down in 2024 to 1,000 employees. In Europe, there is regulation in progress that will place similar requirements on EU companies, bringing down the number of employees even more, to 250.
And that opportunity is definitely one being spotted by others: Worldfavor and Prewave are also building platforms that automate the process of businesses auditing and monitoring suppliers. Others like Salesforce have started to put ESG supplier monitoring into their sustainability product sets, and a startup in France, Sesamm, is building AI tech to help companies with their sustainability commitments.
That’s not the whole story, though: there will be inevitable pushback on these regulations, and there is a big question mark over how all of this will play out in one of the biggest and most industrialized nations in the world, the U.S., where some legislators have floated the idea of not only staying away from any regulation of this kind, but even proactively discouraging developments on this front as counter to economic progress. Businesses are also not all on board.
“Yes, some companies complain, but others see it as a competitive advantage to be good in ESG,” said Berr-Sorokin. “Of course the regulatory regime helps us, but if it gets pushed back, we still have trends in our society and good corporate practices.”
IntegrityNext raises $109M for a platform to audit supply chains for ESG compliance by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
Ever since they were discovered over 100 years ago, superconductors have seemed a bit magical.
You might have seen one on YouTube, levitating above a pool of liquid nitrogen, shrouded in vapor as the super-chilled seventh element boils off. Or maybe you’ve been inside a much larger one that was cooled by liquid helium, generating tremendous magnetic and radio waves that allowed doctors to peer inside your body as part of an MRI.
Even with their delicate temperature requirements, superconductors have become key players in science, medicine and technology. So you can imagine the excitement when earlier this month, a team of scientists led by Ranga Dias, a professor at the University of Rochester in New York, claimed in a paper that they’d created a room-temperature superconductor, one that exhibits the same magical properties at 69.8 degrees Fahrenheit, to be exact.
If the claims are true, and if scientists are able to refine the product further, it could become a truly transformative technology. Fusion reactors, which rely on superconducting magnets to confine the blazing hot plasma, would grow smaller and cheaper. The electrical grid would stand to be transformed, as lossless superconductors would make transcontinental power lines a reality. Maglev trains might stop being the butt of jokes and become a real alternative to air travel.
In order to capitalize on their research, Dias and Ashkan Salamat, co-author on the paper, founded a company called Unearthly Materials.
I recently stumbled upon a YouTube recording of a virtual talk Dias gave to a Sri Lankan scientific society and university in which he claimed to have raised a $1 million seed round and a $20 million Series A for Unearthly Materials.
In his presentation, Dias claimed to have prominent investors, too. The $1 million seed round featured Union Square Ventures’ Albert Wenger, Spotify’s Daniel Ek, Dolby chairman Peter Gotcher and Wise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus. The Series A included Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Open AI’s Sam Altman; Ek and Hinrikus followed up.
Though its website is spare, and LinkedIn lists just six employees, Unearthly Materials is not exactly a secret. But at the same time, the company isn’t tracked on PitchBook and doesn’t appear on Crunchbase. It’s unusual for a widely publicized startup to raise $20 million without writing a blog post or issuing a press release.
Unearthly Materials claimed to have big-name investors, but they weren’t all on board by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch
For all the focus on carbon pollution produced by shipping and aviation, some of the most challenging to abate will probably be residential buildings. In the U.S., housing units stand an average of 130 years before they’re torn down, according to a recent study.
Homes and apartment buildings built 100 years ago, or even 30 years ago, are woefully underprepared for the energy transition. More often than not, their major mechanical systems rely on fossil fuels, their electrical systems are undersized, and their walls and windows are leaky and poorly insulated.
All that can make for housing that’s less comfortable and less efficient than it needs to be.
Nearly a decade ago, Donnel Baird realized that in many cases, paying for retrofits like this can be cost-prohibitive, requiring a lump sum payment upfront. Even though the benefits might accrue over the years, it was a hurdle many owners couldn’t or didn’t want to cross.
So he founded BlocPower, which has been chipping away at the problem for nearly a decade, developing a roster of projects to prove its retrofit-as-a-service business model that’s focused on low-income communities. This week, it announced that it had raised nearly $25 million in equity and $130 million in debt financing.
The Series B round was led by VoLo Earth Ventures and joined by Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund, Credit Suisse, Builders Vision, New York State Ventures, Unreasonable Collective, Kimbal and Christiana Musk, Gaingels, Van Jones, Kapor Capital, My Climate Journey, Tale Venture Partners and NBA star Russell Westbrook. Debt financing was led by Goldman Sachs.
BlocPower hits its stride, landing $25M Series B to expand its residential energy retrofit platform by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch
Climate change is a problem important and pressing enough that investors have begun to grasp the opportunities that arise when trying to solve it. Now, they’ve started to cast their nets wider for other, adjacent opportunities.
Tech that serves to conserve the oceans while using it to replace older, more harmful means of generating energy and food seems to be one such opportunity. In fact, when we asked 10 investors in the sector to share their thoughts on the space, we quickly learned that ocean conservation tech startups are seeing more and more interest from generalist investors now that climate change is hot and people are seeking more ways to mitigate its effects.
“Climate change used to be more focused on terrestrial operations. It is now ‘warming’ up to ocean conservation,” Daniela Fernandez, managing partner of Seabird Ventures, told TechCrunch.
The world’s oceans and its climate have always been tightly coupled. Winds generate ocean currents, which in turn influence weather patterns both over the open water and deep into the continents.
“Our planet is 70% ocean, so the urgency of facing and solving climate change can only be properly addressed if we include the ocean in the equation,” said Rita Sousa, partner at Faber Ventures.
The open ocean also contains tremendous amounts of energy. Previously, accessing it meant drilling into the ocean floor to tap hard-to-reach deposits of oil and gas. But today, it increasingly means tapping the enormous energy represented by the ocean’s winds and waves. Just offshore wind alone has the potential to meet global electricity demand by 2040, according to the IEA, which is well in excess of all offshore oil and gas production today.
Stephan Feilhauer, managing director of clean energy at S2G Ventures stressed the viability of technologies like offshore wind as commercial alternatives to fossil fuels: “Offshore wind has established supply chains across the globe. It is possible today to manufacture, install and operate gigawatts of offshore wind energy using technology and equipment that is well established and has years of operational data to help us understand its performance. Offshore wind is the only ocean-based renewable technology that meets these criteria today.”
The oceans are constantly exchanging gases with the atmosphere, too; most importantly withdrawing and storing about 30% of all carbon dioxide pollution. The ocean’s capacity as a carbon sink has created problems for myriad marine life, which have depended on historically stable acidity levels that are now creeping higher. However, this very capacity also creates opportunities to put key nutrient cycles to work and capture humanity’s excess emissions.
“A healthy ocean will continue to provide crucial opportunities for carbon sequestration,” said Peter Bryant, program director (oceans) at Builders Initiative. “There are a number of opportunities for increasing the ocean’s ability to store carbon. We have biological approaches that include ecosystem restoration, seaweed cultivation and iron fertilization; chemical solutions where you use minerals to lock dissolved carbon dioxide into bicarbonates; and electromagnetic approaches that store carbon by running electric currents through seawater.”
Founders and investors have a growing appreciation for the ocean’s potential as a resource for renewable energy and its capacity to buffer and even solve some of the climate problem. “We’re confident in the ocean’s resilience here. It’s simply one of the best resources we have in the fight against climate, and that means opportunity,” said Reece Pacheco, partner at Propeller. “We won’t achieve our climate goals without the ocean. Full stop.”
Christian Lim, managing director at SWEN Capital Partners, agreed: “It took too much time, but finally the ocean is being recognized as a critical piece of our fight against climate change.”
We spoke with:
Climate change is the elephant in the room. Has the issue’s rising profile sucked the air out of the room or is it bringing attention to ocean conservation that otherwise wouldn’t be there? How have things changed in the past five years?
Climate change has been a topic for decades. It used to be a “nice to have” about a decade ago: “If you have the extra funds to perform climate risk assessment, then we will dedicate it to climate change.”
Now, it’s more of a “must have.” If we don’t address climate change, we’ll see more extreme weather events. Over the past five years, we’ve seen more focus on ocean conservation, but there is still a $149 billion annual ocean funding gap. Climate change used to be more focused on terrestrial operations. It is now “warming” up to ocean conservation.
We are just now beginning to see a distinct shift in tone. The thinking used to be that “the ocean is a victim of climate change,” but now the thought is more “the ocean can become a climate hero” and plays a huge role in reducing our carbon footprint. Yet, this shift is still very much in its infancy. In particular, the philanthropic community is just starting to recognize that there is an urgent need to support efforts to develop ocean-based climate solutions.
Until now, most climate funders focused on terrestrial or atmospheric issues, and ocean funders focused on important, but only tangentially climate-related ocean issues such as ending unsustainable fishing practices and establishing marine protected areas. The ocean is already the biggest carbon sink on the planet, and we need to better understand both what absorption of all that carbon is doing to ocean ecosystems, and how much more it can potentially contribute without disrupting its other critical ecosystem functions.
It’s also been encouraging to see governments taking action to truly prioritize and create financial incentives for investing in climate/ocean innovations, such as the bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed in the U.S. in 2022. There is also an upswell of talent realizing that working a “typical” job is no longer an option if we won’t have a livable planet in the next seven years. We are seeing society reset its priorities and climate is one of the highest ones at the moment.
Climate change has been called “recession-proof” because governments and investors have come to recognize the scope, scale and urgency of the issue. Do you think that’s true of ocean conservation tech as well?
Yes. Climate change and ocean restoration are inherently linked. The ocean is humanity’s biggest protection against climate change, as it produces more than half the air we breathe and absorbs 93% of excess heat from global warming.
Ocean tech and climate change companies and investors all have the same goal. The urgency of the climate crisis has kept passionate funders and entrepreneurs engaged in the development of solutions regardless of the state of the economy.
Climate change has affected the oceans greatly, causing everything from rising water temperatures to more acidification. How are you approaching the question of climate change in your investments?
Seabird Ventures is internally tracking impact and reporting on social and/or environmental factors in our investments. We have externally reported on the following key ocean impact areas:
To fix the climate, these 10 investors are betting the house on the ocean by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch
Every year, about 35% of the food supply in the U.S. is wasted. About half of that’s because of picky eaters or outsize restaurant portions, but the rest happens further upstream, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, with about 6% to 13% occurring at grocery stores.
For grocery stores, which operate on very thin margins, that loss is significant. The environmental toll is big, too: Grocery store and other retail food losses in the U.S. alone represent 10 million to 20 million metric tons of carbon pollution annually. That’s about as much as some entire countries, like Kenya or Guatemala.
A large part of food waste’s carbon problem happens at the landfill. There, microbes break the food down anaerobically, meaning without oxygen. That process releases methane, a greenhouse gas that’s 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide over 20 years. Landfills can capture the methane and burn it, using it to produce power, for example.
Burning the methane transforms it into carbon dioxide and some other pollutants. While the pollution burden isn’t ideal, from a climate perspective, it’s probably better than the alternative. Only about a fifth of all U.S. landfills capture the gas; the rest just let it seep into the atmosphere.
Part of the problem with landfill gas is that it can be hard to capture. If you’ve ever seen a landfill, you probably understand why. They’re not exactly precision machines.
Intercepting food waste before it hits the landfill changes the equation, though. That’s where Divert hopes to step in.
The company, which was founded in 2007, works with grocery store chains like Ahold Delhaize, Albertsons, Kroger, Safeway and Target to tackle the problem. It starts by analyzing a store’s waste stream and suggesting ways to minimize waste in the first place.
Divert bags $100M growth equity, $1B financing to tackle grocery store food waste by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch
The current battery boom might feel familiar to those who lived through the clean tech bubble that burst a decade ago, with an awful lot of money being invested in what are still nascent markets.
But certainly they’re bigger this time around: The number of electric vehicles on the road has more than doubled in the last seven years, for example, and demand doesn’t seem to be slowing. Market share for EVs has been growing even as the overall automotive market has softened in recent years.
It’s been enough to convince automakers and battery companies to commit nearly $300 billion to building a raft of gigafactories around the world, including more than $38 billion here in the U.S. alone. That confidence has cascaded through the market, driving waves of investment that have resulted in over $42 billion in venture and private equity capital committed to battery research, development, commercialization and manufacturing.
For battery startups like Michigan-based Our Next Energy, betting it all on the automotive market, which is notoriously fickle, can be a risky proposition. Demand for cars and trucks often craters when the economy tumbles. EV sales have been historically tied to an even more volatile indicator: gas prices. As COVID showed, just a few ripples in the automotive supply chain can send shockwaves through the market. The automotive market has a lot of volume, sure, but that doesn’t make up for the fact that margins are typically thin.
As investments go, the automotive sector doesn’t seem like a great place to make massive, long-term bets like the kind required for gigafactories.
And yet the money keeps flowing, and companies like ONE and its investors are increasingly confident that this round of climate tech investments will turn out very differently from the last. What’s behind that bravado?
Why so many gigafactories? It’s not just EVs driving demand by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch
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