221–230 of 282 posts
We'll make a site that says "Hur Durr! Duh globul warming" is you give us... Oh , I don't know... 25 million bucks! Deal?
I didn't go further than that. They prove in one paragraph that they haven't understood the climate problem at all.
Curious, anyone working on automation in the mining space? I'm interested in jamming out with people about doing work in the industry. Or using airships in places like africa to transport minerals from mines to regional hubs (e.g. to avoid the huge delays on roadways currently happening between DRC and Zambia).
The main challenge is getting capital.
Let's get in touch!
The agriculture section is disheartening. What is the VCs worlds' obsession with cellular ag and mushrooms? Totally missing the forest for the trees here. Global calorie supply is dependent on the Haber-Bosch process i.e. Nitrogen fixation. The next big agricultural breakthrough will be some form of nitrogen fixation: 1. That is not affected by a reduction of fossil fuels 2. Is on par with Haber-Bosch in terms of ele…
Would hydrogen work as a fuel source here? It would make sense for heavy machinery to use hydrogen rather than batteries as an energy store because it is a lot more energy dense (and lighter), but it's still not as energy dense as fossil fuels.
> These startups offer commercial solutions to decarbonize society or remove carbon from the atmosphere. By doing this at speed and scale, we have a fair chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change. The financial opportunity of doing so is massive: an estimated $3-10 trillion in EBITDA will be up for grabs. As one example, Tesla has pushed the car industry to go electric while making $75B in annual revenue at a 60…
Of course that's not what a VC wants. But a VC doesn't really want ecology either, they want money. Pretending to be green just happens to be a profitable strategy.
Almost all climate tech is greenwashing; superficial solutions. Climate issues require deeper system changes. We need a system which encourages financial prudence and frugality instead of one which encourages financial recklessness, infinite growth, consumerism and bullshit jobs. The problem needs to be solved at the lowest monetary incentive layer. How much energy is wasted by people travelling to and from their bul…
I'd say that the solutions should start from the top first. 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global GHG emissions.[1] That's a mind-boggling statistic. The counterargument is, of course, that these companies are supplying the demand; that consumers should vote with their wallets, change their habits, recycle, reduce their "carbon footprint", etc. This is the usual deflection propaganda pushed by the companies…
I've always found that stat to be misleading, as it uses the word "responsible" in a very unconventional way: essentially, GHG emissions come from fossil fuels extracted by these companies, even though the companies themselves aren't the ones using the fossil fuels nor producing the GHGs.
This upstream analysis just doesn't seem very useful to me. You mention
>If only a fraction of these companies changed a fraction of their processes[...]
but I fail to see how China Coal (top 1), Saudi Aramco (2nd), or Gazprom (3rd) could do anything about their process to significantly reduce the amount of emmisions from their products.
It's true that the world does need to structurally change to reduce fossil fuel consumption, but going after the producers would at best be a confusing way to apply a carbon tax.
Other solutions from climate tech like better electricity production and storage needs to happen simultaneously, not after by "getting our priorities straight".
a few ideas, in no particular order - stop burning fossil fuels to the altar of the crypto crazy - stop burning enormous amounts of fossil fuel to produce AI models that poorly replicate human skills, without asking if someone wanted it - support power efficient devices or appliances. I despise Apple, for a lot of reasons, but the M series is a big step in the right direction. - don't buy Teslas, buy small cars that…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree 100%. This is big part of the motivation behind our new startup Earthmover: https://earthmover.io/ Our mission is to make it easier to work with scientific data at scale in the cloud, focusing mainly on the climate, weather, and geospatial vertical. My cofounder Joe Hamman and I are climate scientists who helped create the Pangeo project. We are also core devs on the Python packages Xarray and Zarr. We think th…
I'm curious, have you considered using PyTorch or JAX for tensor processing? ML libraries seem to be much further along when it comes to performing compute-intensive, hardware-accelerated operations on Tensor's. And you get gradients basically for free (in terms of developer time). Also, the kernel compiler being added PyTorch 2 looks very promising.
Since 2018, I have been learning and experimenting with Climate-related activities along with Climate Scientists. The notable ones include building an aeroponics farm inside Bangalore city and delivering rare herbs to a few known cookhouses (YC interviewed and rejected us on this). The other, where I missed most of the involvement but a few, was a prototypical installation of a Vanadium Redox Battery.
In 2022, I went all in, and our team figured that most folks (individuals and companies) outside of the ones involved in Climate just want to get things done and don't know what to do about it. We also realize that to be commercially viable while fighting climate change; we need to get involved end-to-end. We started with data and the sexy tech, but we don't even mention that now when talking to potential customers.
Some well-known and "successful" climate-tech companies have already started on that path -- building an end-to-end channel -- then sell, up-sell, and side-sell their services, tools, and solutions. Think of how Microsoft owns the channel and introducing a new product is just showing up.
We are still very early and have a lot to learn, and act/do. My best wishes and luck to all those doing one or the other thing toward fighting Climate Change.