Using Agency, Climate Tech
Sophie Purdom: climate tech VC, impact investing, podcast. Using your agency, a mini-guide. Listening: civil society meets sustainable finance, TBI conference; London Climate Action Week.
I had an excellent conversation with Sophie Purdom on all matters climate tech related. I put a piece out on using your agency, i.e. making podcasts, blogs and meet-ups!
Sophie Purdom: climate tech VC, impact investing, podcast
Using your agency, a mini-guide
Listening: civil society meets sustainable finance
SCOTUS vs EPA: narrowing of US federal agency power
Great Resignation: Stewardship Dinner, Nick Bloom ; also arts
London Climate Action: Listening to Views, coordination problem? Climate Open Data.
TBI: Future of Britain Conference, snazzy but lacking in practical ideas
Climate Games: David Finnigan
Japanese CEO meeting
Links (end): New Microsoft Climate Research centre; In Russia, they still dance and sing and do outdoor yoga. Small animals - like moths - enable so much more to flourish. Schedules of productive people. New Climate Solutions from Drawdown. How fast does hot water freeze? On caregiving. On UK climate strategy; Climate (broken) promises.
I was out and about for many meetings and conferences this week. As an aside, I found using London ebikes good for this (albeit still with annoying quirks) but it’s expensive, so I’m looking forward to when TFL brings in its own ebikes.
A Japanese CEO came through town (Y1.7tn | $12bn mkt cap). While some challenges are the same as US/EU companies, eg, China supply chain, hybrid/remote working, inflation… many expressions of these challenges are different. For instance, this co. is dealing with an employee turnover rate close to 3%, so out of every 1,000 people only net 30 are leaving a year. In the UK, average turnover is closer to 15% (though with much variation between sectors etc.). There is a bigger challenge of empowering women in the workforce and arguably there is a high productivity unlock possible.
It seems to me, we in US / EU are pretty far away from happenings elsewhere, eg Brazil, Nigeria, India, China… In particular China, where rolling lockdowns are still very disruptive and where the overall “Buy China” policy has and is having major ramifications for companies (and governments) but is passing most of us by.
I wrote a mini guide on using agency.
Ask yourself:
What institutional mechanisms are available for change ?
Where might you have influence?
(Tail option: do you need a new institution or new arm of an old institution?)
What story and scale up mechanisms might suit you ?
Blogs, podcasts, meet-ups, newsletters, social media, campaigns, letters
Inside-outside mechanisms
Who or what are your strong and weak social and relationship ties ?
Where do they need strengthening and how
How are you learning about your domain interests ?
Do you delegate, where you might benefit from comparative advantage, or benefit from freeing up more time
Are you travelling or checking primary sources, people and places ?
Do you deeply understand the culture, entity, system, company… you are trying to change ?
What’s your stamina like? Building over moaning. Thoughtful Action over learned helplessness. Making over breaking.
I briefly highlighted these people and projects which use various methods of agency.
Share Action: individual share holder activism and agency
Aella, polls and social media use; also podcasts and blogs
Leopold Aschenbrenner: blog, research paper, moving to study at 15; also Ben Southwood, progress studies, urban planning (Create Streets)
Start-ups, Climate Tech VC, Sophie Purdom
Micro grants: Nadia Asparouhova, Me
Podcast: Fin Moorhouse, Substacks: Matt Clancy, Anton Howes, Sophie Purdom
Art documentary: anti-abortion and evangelicals
Disability rights activism: UK rights
My own experience: meet-ups, blogging, newsletters, Podcasts, UnConference
It’s a longer read - you can check it out here.
Listening: civil society meets sustainable finance. I was part of a conference (hosted by Ben Caldecott’s Sustainable Finance Group in Oxford and Catherine Howarth’s Share Action). Lots of energy and ideas, it struck me that this “coordination problem” between different interest groups is one of the major challenges to crack.
I penned a tiny poem thinking about the weather and how stormy the outlook on politics and sustainability is. But how over the years, we’ve still progressed.
This was further reinforced on listening to Gavin Starks with Ana Yang and Meryam Omi on the climate data challenge, in particular on Open / Shared Data.
Even with many experts in the field there were many gaps and the distance between this area and the many other areas I heard around Climate Action week suggests to me that more connections and more intermingling of ideas is crucial. We have many people and resources, but they are not being allocated well or connected well.
(This is a key intangible problem that Stian Westlate / Jonathan Haskel articulate in their books).
Listening in at the TBI (Tony Blair Institute, centrist Think Tank), I thought great effort had been put in but I didn’t hear many new practical ideas. Seemed to be more important for gathering people. The TBI “convening power”.
In that respect, I still think the UnConference, OpenSpace or unstructured conference is superior.
SCOTUS has narrowed the powers of the US EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) and has raised the idea of “major questions doctrines”.
The “major questions doctrine” requires Congress to authorize in plain and direct language any sweeping actions by administrative agencies that could transform the economy.
So unless US Congress is explicit in its legislation then an agency on a “vast significance” can not use powers, i.e. where legislation is “vague”.
Importantly, I view this case as chilling for other US federal agencies. In particular the SEC on climate disclosure rules. I have downgraded my view on the chances of SEC rules on climate. They are now down to 41% chance of passing (from 64% a few weeks ago). There is still a decent chance because many large investors are broadly supportive of the rules, and the SEC serves investors as one of its primary stakeholders.
NYT article on SCOTUS and EPA. SCOTUS has made major rulings in the last few months on guns, abortion, state-church seperation and now EPA and federal agency powers. For conservatives these are a set of extra-ordinary wins on constitutional “orginalism”, less technocractic power, less Federal power. For progressives, these are catastrophic roll back of rights and powers developed to combat real problems.
Progress is not a straight line. But I reflect the US is pushing through an era where increasing socio-political battles are impinging on its ability to direct its energies to long-term thinking, and so the rise of the China-Russia complex will be of no surprise by 2050.
Great Resignation: Stewardship Dinner, Nick Bloom ; also arts. I co-hosted a dinner with Chris Roebuck to discuss the “great resignation”, hybrid and remote work, and the living wage. I spoke to economist Nick Bloom on similar matters. It seems to me we now have a central set of principles that employees are expressing and better companies are managing this work transition better than others. It’s no longer the case that we don’t know what to do. We know quite a lot about what we can do (although with some unanswered questions). Message me if this is your area and want longer discussions.
I do think this is a short-medium term structural head wind for live performing arts which we have not resolved. Partly, as city centre footfall is less and will continue to be less.
That said, great art will still be attractive. Sitting in on the climate games that David Finnigan has developed, I reflected that this is something audiences enjoy and find a lot of value in. Also, see Glastonbury and music festivals.
Excellent chatting with @SophiePurdom on all things Climate Tech VC discussion impact, brown spinning and investment philosophy.
Sophie Purdom co-writes a climate and innovation newsletter read by tens of thousands, ClimateTech VC. Sophie has worked in start ups as an operator. She is a venture capitalist investor. She has written widely on sustainable investing.
We speak on how Sophie came to climate tech investing, the importance of knocking on doors and being helpful.
What Sophie learned working for local government (Providence) and how climate has always been her through line into investing.
We discuss what areas of climate tech are over-invested in and under-invested in, and why she’s interested in the climate-industrial-tech area.
We chat about investment philosophy, the VC geography and gender lens and how she seeds the landscape on access to capital at the seed and pre-seed stage.
Sophie explains the concept of “brown spinning” and the pros/cons of taking assets private or selling brown assets to less responsible entities.
“This concept is what we would call brown spinning. So taking publicly held brown or underperforming - from a climate perspective - assets private in order to hypothetically avoid rigorous accounting and operate with capital providers that are less ESG inclined. Fascinating topic. One of the many downsides to divestment: if there's a will then money will often find a way to finance these things.
One positive example in the case of reversing brown spinning is AGL in Australia. One of the largest energy giants out there and billionaire, Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes playing the activist investor role as an individual, coming in and buying up more and more percentage ownership in this business in an effort to strongly nudge activists, push them towards greener practices and he succeeded in getting that board vote and changing the outcomes of that business. So that's one very rare splashed all over the front page of the media example of how there's a way of green spinning these private brown assets potentially back to good. But to be fair, the majority of the stories that should be told unfortunately go in the other direction.
One that caught my eye …Another billionaire, Harold Hamm is trying to take the shale (gas) Company that he founded - Continental Resources - private. He owns (already) about 83% of this oil and gas US based company. The idea is take the company private because the public market investors are skeptical of plowing money into a non-ESG aligned (strategy). He thinks he can get a better return or cheaper capital in the private market - the quintessential brown spinning concept. I'm concerned about it. I'm not exactly sure what you do here other than you can't go too hard or too fast on ESG reporting requirements without bringing folks along on the management train and leave them out because the worst case scenario is they hop off of the reporting requirements and go operate in the dark.”
We play over-rated, under-rated on: Lifting Weights, Carbon tax, Green New Deal, Tesla, Carbon offsets, Nuclear Power, Carbon removal and the woolly mammoth.
We finish on Sophie’s current projects and her career and life advice.
Check out Sophie’s newsletter here.
Links:
MSFT Climate Research centre. I think this is an underinvested area, so this is pleasing.
In Russia, they still dance and sing and do outdoor yoga.
Small animals - like moths - enable so much more to flourish
There is no perfect schedule:
New Climate Solutions from Drawdown
How fast does hot water freeze?
I’m invested…
On caregiving
On UK climate strategy
Climate (broken) promises