I moved to San Francisco to go all in on climate tech (and discovered why brilliant technologies keep failing) Thread🧵

Client win days are the best kind! Huge congratulations to the HYDGEN on raising $5M Pre-Series A led by Transition VC to scale their industrial AEM electrolyzer technology. (thread)

At the start of October, I made a promise to make climate tech more accessible. Today, I'm proud to say, it was worth it.

Capitalism has one fatal flaw. And we've been ignoring it since the Industrial Revolution: (thread)

The companies promising to save the planet have a secret they don't advertise. And once you see it, you'll notice it everywhere: (thread)

Humanity's greatest strength has always been creating things from scratch. It's also been our most destructive habit. Let me explain: (thread)

Nature built the world's biggest carbon storage system over millions of years. But modern farming broke it in less than a century. Here’s how: (thread)

Every country that wanted hydroelectric power paid the same devastating price. And they all thought it was the only way: (thread)

Farmers are doing everything right according to the rules they were given. And that's precisely what's destroying them. Let me explain. (Thread)

Companies have billions of dollars specifically set aside to fight climate change. But the people who can actually do it can't get a penny… (thread)

We're lying to ourselves about net zero. Because there's a dirty secret about emissions that physics won't let us solve. Let me explain: (thread)

Airlines just ran out of time. They either decarbonize or get priced out of the sky. (thread)

Your food scraps could be rebuilding the farmland that feeds us. Instead, they're creating methane in landfills and heating the planet. Here's the crazy part: (thread)

The infrastructure that built American cities is now killing the people who live in them. And the victims all have one thing in common:

We're building billion-dollar machines to pull CO₂ from the air and hit net zero. Meanwhile, rocks have been doing it for millions of years. For free. Let me explain.

Oil companies aren't scared of sustainable investing for one simple reason. They're getting the money anyway. Here’s the uncomfortable truth:

Companies are buying their way to net-zero with a product no one can prove is real. The worst part? It's completely legal.

Your office building is actively burning money as you’re reading this. AC at max. Lights on. Ventilation cranked. Even though half the floors are empty. Buildings use 40% of global energy and most of it vanishes heating empty rooms, cooling vacant floors, and running lights no one's using.

We've been lying to ourselves about climate progress. We electrified cars. Put solar on roofs. Replaced coal plants with wind farms. And we act like that's enough. It's not. The industries that built the modern world are still burning it down.

Most farmers can't survive on farming income anymore. Decades of razor-thin margins finally broke the model. Here's what they're doing instead:

The factories building your future are still burning fuel like it's 1950. Steel mills. Cement plants. Chemical refineries. Food processing facilities. They all need heat. Massive amounts of it. And for years, the answer has been the same: burn fuel.

Nearly every major company you've heard of has a net-zero pledge. But the infrastructure to get there doesn't exist yet. You can't replace jet fuel with batteries overnight. You can't decarbonize cement by next quarter. And you can't rewire supply chains that took decades to build.

The electricity grid is more fragile than you think. One tree falls on a transmission line. An entire block loses power. For decades, this was acceptable. Outages were rare. Weather was predictable. Power flowed from massive plants through a web of wires to your home.

We've pumped 1.5 trillion tonnes of CO₂ into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. Even if every country hits net-zero tomorrow, that carbon stays up there for centuries, continuing to warm the planet. Emission cuts solve tomorrow's problem. They don't touch yesterday's.

Americans generate 265 million tons of waste every year. Most of it gets buried in landfills where it sits for decades, slowly releasing methane into the atmosphere. Here’s the irony: We called it 'waste management'. Really, we just hid it underground. (thread)

Renewable energy has a financing problem. Banks won't finance renewable projects without guaranteed buyers. A solar farm might generate power for decades, but if there's no committed buyer, lenders see it as too risky. No financing, no project. The renewable energy sits unbuilt. (thread)

The power grid was designed for a world that no longer exists. It was built for one direction: electricity flows from big plants to your home. For a century, that worked. Build a coal plant. Send power. Done. (thread)

Every year, farmers burn over 10 billion tons of crop residues. The smoke chokes nearby communities, the emissions rival entire countries, and carbon that could've been captured vanishes into the atmosphere. (thread)

The most expensive electricity on the grid powers nothing. They call it "peaker plants”. Billion-dollar facilities that sit idle 99% of the time, waiting for a few summer afternoons when everyone cranks their AC at once. (thread)

Clean energy is becoming more accessible every year. But we still burn fossil fuels to keep the lights on at night. There’s a fundamental problem: Solar panels generate energy when the sun shines, and wind turbines spin when the wind blows. (thread)

Your old furnace is wasting 70% of the energy you're paying for. Every time it kicks on, it burns gas to create heat from scratch, and most of it goes up the chimney or gets lost along the way. (thread)

Last year, California threw away enough clean energy to power 500,000+ homes. Solar producers were forced to either shut down generation or pay brokers to take their electricity. The grid literally couldn't handle the surplus. Here's how broken the system is: (thread)

The cheapest electricity in America is solar. But the people who need cheap electricity the most can't access it. 75% of Americans either rent, have the wrong roof orientation, live in apartments, or can't afford the $15,000+ upfront cost for rooftop panels. (thread)

You're standing on unlimited energy right now. Beneath your feet, the Earth's core burns at 10,800°F. That heat has been there for 4.5 billion years, and it'll be there long after we're gone.