YC Office Hours for Startups Tackling Climate Issues

What are those "climate issues" that you are referring to?

The only issue - but it has nothing to do with climate - is how to position your company so that it financially benefits from state-organized plunder (whether it's through direct fiscal spending, or though indirect theft such as subsidies).

Can someone provide an example of a startup actually impacting Earth's climate, or showing any indication whatsoever that it could, without employing direct or indirect use of force? Let me guess: you can't.

So pretend that it's about entrepreneurship? At least several commenters (such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20883900) say it makes no sense to try and instead argue in favor of the use of force (ie the government directly telling you want to do) which is indeed true - it's a use case in which "climate entrepreneur" is just an overhead. If you want to solve a problem with more government, you might as well get these unnecessary startups out of the picture - less overhead, more resources for the problem solvers in the government.

Culture is not universal. Although many people in the world aspire to an American style life, each culture has it's own roots. Appealing to those roots is probably important in guiding people to a different, but not worse, way of living.

For example, in many parts of South East Asia people avoid heating and air conditioning. It's considered unhealthy to over manage your environment in that way. Where I live, in Japan, I've always thought it was really unfortunate that western clothes became popular -- for most of the south western portions of the country it really is a under performing choice. If, when Japan was transitioning from a poor country to a rich country, an emphasis was made to prefer native clothes which are better suited to the climate, it would have made a significant difference in how people acted.

There will always be a subset of the population that are going to want the American utopia of a detached, climate controlled bungallo full the the brim with furniture and gadgets, but it doesn't need to be the goal of the entire population -- even if they want a comfortable and rich lifestyle. Appealing to the existing culture is a good way to get people to appreciate a different way of living.