Attitude → application

Hi there,

I come bearing good tidings on the heels of a Climate Week that was surprisingly upbeat, appropriately no-nonsense, and altogether invigorating. No additional setup required!

A DEBUGGED DEBRIEF

February 14, 1876, wasn’t just another Valentine’s Day. There was a serious missed connection that revealed itself that day, though over the long arc of the historical record, it all worked out. Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray—entirely serendipitously—both filed patent applications for the telephone that day, with Bell's application arriving at the patent office just hours before Gray's.

While that simultaneity may seem to strain credulity (really? they weren’t working together?), the history of culture and innovation is littered with "simultaneous invention" moments. Coincidences? Maybe. God’s plan? Sure, depending on your theological persuasion. Regardless of the actual function or transmission mechanism, the overarching idea that I’ve attached myself to, having appreciated the historical record and now watching similar dynamics play out in my own areas of interest, is one that a friend recently put me on to, voiced by biologist Michael Levin.

Specifically, Michael Levin postulates that big ideas often exist in a latent ‘possibility’ space—in the substrate of the collective unconscious, in my words—waiting for the right conditions to manifest. Levin’s words are the "platonic space of morphology," i.e., borrowing from Platonist mathematics, likening the process by which mathematical truths are discovered rather than invented to ideas in general. All of this is to say that scientific breakthroughs, technological innovations, and cultural trends often emerge in the minds of many astute and tuned-in people at similar times, provided the world is ready for them. Evolutionary processes didn’t randomly stumble on the eye or brain; they uncorked a mind-bogglingly elegant solution that was always structurally available in the ether.

I raise all this because there’s a new energy to sustainability work that was palpable across Climate Week 2025, one that has significant implications for both attitude—i.e., how we go about what we do—and application—i.e., what it is we most want to focus energy on. And I think there’s an element of the simultaneous arrival in the air as this new energy coalesces, again, both in terms of attitude + application. Let’s start with the attitude shift.

Attitude: We’re all grown up

The 2024 U.S. Presidential election was shocking in a literal sense; it left many of us, myself included, gobsmacked to the nth degree, and forced us to reassess what speed and scale of energy transition and sustainability efforts are realistic and tenable based on where the world is actually at. Reckoning with all the ramifications required serious gestation and, at least in my case and probably in some of yours, grieving. Those processes take time, which is a platitude, but for a reason. But those periods and processes also create fertile soil for new things to grow when afforded and imbued with the requisite resources.

What I sense is arriving and arising now in the spaces we’re traveling in here is, to put a different spin on it, a shift from some naive idealism (the whole world will obviously get on board with climate tech!) to a seasoned, dirty boots intellectual honesty (nothing well worth but that’s still a bit ‘frontier,’ even if it’s inevitable and obvious, really, necessarily comes easy).

For more on how to describe the shifts underway, I’ll tap my friend Peter Olivier, who clocked similar trends well in a recent post of his own:

Similar to the maturation of a human being going through adolescence, as our industry or industry of industries matures, it’s exiting a more adolescent stage, replete with the adolescent qualities of high energy and also high propensity to, uh, freak out a little bit. What’s next? A more, er, adult phase of, as I like to say, “just getting on with it.” We’re clear on many of the challenges that need to be tackled and are well worth tackling, those that can make both good sense and cents to address responsibly. To quote from Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost:

I invoke the above as someone who, over the past year or so, clearly needed to do plenty of my own crisis brooding, as evidenced by what I was writing in these pages just six months ago. And if you’re still going through the anger and the grief, that’s cool! There’s no rushing that digestion and ‘coming to grips with’ process; it can’t really be coaxed into moving faster. Which is frustrating, but also just is. What we all can do is a) thank ourselves for staying in the game and moving through the doldrums and tantrums, and b) move forward with collaboration and camaraderie to make cool shit happen.

Winter turns to spring (energetically, and in the Southern Hemisphere). 

Application: Higher ground, higher leverage

Contrary to what I saw reported elsewhere, my Climate Week experience was not one that could be predominantly characterized by domineering discussions of energy demand from AI and whether and how that AI itself will be applicable to climate, sustainability, and energy challenges and solutions. That’s already the water in which we’ve been swimming in and have been for so long, perhaps so much so that it’s now rendered unremarkable. Granted, my saying this is, of course, also a reflection of the fact that once something like a ‘Climate Week’ reaches the scale of thousands of events, as this year’s Climate Week did, any one person's reflections on it will invariably be a product and projection of what they sought out and surround themselves with, as opposed to any 100% agreed upon throughlines across the whole thing. Still, it was nice that, in the water in which I found myself swimming, people were more excited to talk about the weirder shit, as I like to say.

An overarching theme that’s coming to the fore, with ripples across sustainability and energy, is the shift to points of higher leverage. To take a crude analogy from military strategy, it’s as if many of us are coming home to the idea that, if you’re overmatched on the battlefield in some capacity, it might be time to regroup and seek higher ground. Not morally, but literally or logistically. Go to the citadel on a hill. There’s leverage there. Wading back out of the analogy, in terms of what I concretely mean by higher leverage applications, I’m seeing a lot more interest and enthusiasm for solutions and challenges that I’ve covered often here and in my writing about super pollutants with Lauren Singer, that, at least for a time, it didn’t seem the world was entirely ready for (again, calling to mind Michael Levin’s insights about simultaneous arrivings), be it super pollutant mitigation work itself or even more traditionally “fringe” ideas like weather modification. What were once niche environmental experiments are now serious investment theses.

In terms of what I’m actually seeing and what I saw and heard on the ground last week, here’s an example to ground us. The literal language and English usage inherent to referring to greenhouse gasses other than carbon dioxide as “super pollutants” is not something that featured in Climate Week 2024 or other recent conferences and discussions at all. This year, however? “Super pollutants” seemed to be on the tip of everyone’s tongue. Even at non-super pollutant-focused events, when I chatted with folks about what they’d seen, heard, and observed in their respective Climate Week experiences, many reflected that super pollutants came up quite a bit.

In terms of what I think helped lay the groundwork for people to get excited about applications like super pollutant mitigation, which has long been neglected from a capital allocation perspective, i.e., in terms of what’s moving the Overton Window, so to speak, it’s all downstream of the ‘attitude’ discussions outlined above. Operating from a place of grounded pragmatism and intellectual honesty—especially with respect to what lies within our sphere of influence and what doesn’t—is one catalyst pulling people towards higher leverage points.

Double-clicking on that idea, it’s the deeper appreciation of the scope and scale of macro forces that aren’t under our control, but that do require a response (chief among them being Earth’s climate systems and the warming trajectories the world is facing, as well as the reality of significant political whiplash and therefore, insufficient political will, whatever your political persuasion) that has people getting serious about finding areas where they can apply themselves and get significant output for appropriate input.

To reiterate, what are the applications of higher leverage that are getting a lot more play? My short list is couched in broad categories, including super pollutants and weather modification, as well as adaptation, though noting that the latter is “in” isn’t exactly news. In my mind’s eye, there’s a sort of continuum forming, a la the below. This doesn’t suggest at all that any side of this spectrum is better or worse, nor that any side or category is more deserving or less deserving of funding. We’re working with a larger toolkit than a few years ago, born of a wider aperture and a more mature perspective.

Sustainability and climate tech circles have their mojo back. What’s left to prove now is, well, pretty much still everything, starting with whether that mojo is actually “workin’,” as the famous blues song goes. Weird cultural references aside, everything’s still on the table and for the proving as far as adequately responding to climactic challenges is concerned, and for the most part—save for a few standout successes so far—even still with respect to whether companies building the requisite solutions can make real money. But we’d have never gotten far with a purely idealistic attitude, nor a purely defeatist attitude. Nor without seeking out points of higher leverage and building and appreciating a fuller toolkit of solutions. So thanks for being here and sticking along thus far.

OTHER COOL STUFF

BloombergNEF Pioneers

Applications are now open for BloombergNEF Pioneers, an annual technology and innovation competition spotlighting the breakthrough solutions and disruptive technologies with the greatest potential to accelerate the global energy transition.

This year, the folks at BloombergNEF are looking to support innovators tackling three of the world’s toughest climate and energy challenges:

• Technologies for sustainable, scalable data center infrastructure

• Flattening the duck curve

• Decarbonizing shipping and heavy transport

• Wildcard – open to any other game-changing climate tech innovators

The winners of each year's competition gain access to the BNEF research platform for a year, are covered in Bloomberg News, and are invited to Bloomberg’s invite-only executive summits. Register your interest by October 17 (2-min initial form) if you’re building game-changing climate solutions, and spread the word to others to apply here.

SOSV Climate Tech Summit

Hear from the world’s leading climate tech investors, founders, and technologists at the 5th Annual SOSV Climate Tech Summit, Nov 3–7, 2025 (free and virtual). The Summit will explore the breakthroughs, challenges, and future of the climate tech ecosystem. Check out the confirmed lineup of speakers, which includes investors like Chris Sacca (Lowercarbon Capital), Mike Schroepfer (Gigascale Capital), Vinod Khosla (Khosla Ventures), Shannon Miller (founder of Mainspring), Carlos Araque (founder of Quaise), along with special guests such as Jigar Shah (former Department of Energy), Kim Zou (Sightline Climate), and many others. 

Register now to save your spot.

PODCAST

If all of the above wasn’t enough content for you, I recently went on Marco Pimental’s The Capitalist Hippie podcast to talk about what’s alive in the current moment for climate tech and sustainability. While we recorded this a few month’s ago already, I still offered many insights that skirt around similar ideas on the application front to what I laid out today, particularly around how the headline catalyst of AI and energy demand will have derivative and downstream ripple impacts for many different categories and solutions.

Listen here.

I'm curious to hear whether and to what extent everything explored today tracks for you.

Otherwise, go with grace,

— Nick