Originally published on Radical on 2024-09-08. Opportunity cost refers to the loss of potential received value by choosing to not do something or by choosing a different route. One opportunity cost of sleeping late, for example, is not having the opportunity to see the sun rise. Tired from nursing a baby in the middle of

Originally published on Radical on 2024-09-04. Whether you’re investing your time or your money (or someone else’s money) in impact work designed to address, mitigate, or reverse climate change there are really only two criteria that matter in terms of making a meaningful impact: Everything else is largely greenwashing, a red herring, or mere incrementalism.

Originally published on Radical on 2024-07-18. A growing sector of climate tech and green investments is concerned with what can best be described as “upgrading nature”. Things like ‘better’ insects, ‘improved’ trees, ‘enhanced’ wood, ‘supercharged’ vegetables, ‘superior’ algae, ‘more efficient’ cows. The separation of humans and nature, known as dualism, which is a key enabler of capitalism’s exploitative relationship with the

Originally published on Radical on 2024-06-28. Climate Performance Potential, or variants thereof, is the “in” term for measuring the investability of a climate startup. Although there is no standard or agreed upon way of measuring this almost every climate tech investor has some version of this metric at play in making investment decisions. The measure

Originally published on Radical on 2024-06-21. We need to invest less and compost more to start harvesting meaningful climate outcomes. Financial investments into startups, including climate tech startups, expect a one-to-one return. Of course in terms of quantity they expect a one-to-many return but I’m referring to the kind of return: investing Euros should return Euros. Investors put money into a

Originally published on Radical on 2024-05-30. 80 climate startup pitch decks on my desktop. 58 claim they will be doing things at scale. Most of the rest have similar goals. Typically in some variation of “decarbonising [industry] at scale”, “planetary scale regeneration, or “when we’re at scale we’ll save [tons of carbon here]”. The possibility and

Originally published on Radical on 2024-05-26. In 2021 I watched aghast as Nacho Gimenez, then Managing Partner of BP Ventures, spoke to a packed room about BP’s commitment to decarbonisation. This was during Carbon13’s venture builder programme of which BP was a major sponsor. A key part of his rationale behind BP’s commitment, was the notion that his

Originally published on Radical on 2024-05-17. What if the thing you’re good at is not needed? What if your hard-earned skills are making the climate crisis worse? What if you’re great at hammering, but the task is to drill a hole? This is a road many tech and climate entrepreneurs are unwilling to tread. And