On innovation to prepare humanity for climate-caused disasters
Why VC Won’t Save Us from Climate Collapse
Why the incentives of VC, PE and Philanthropy Won’t Save Humanity and What We Should Do Instead
TL;DR: Our current innovation ecosystem is dependent on venture capital and private equity, and therefore is optimized to create companies that meet their metric of market-beating returns that often profit from negative externalities. Those solutions we need to save humanity cannot be held hostage to those requirements, since our metric is focused on social resilience to climate collapse. If we truly want to avert the catastrophe of climate collapse we need to build a new innovation ecosystem that offers incentives to drive the outcomes we want to see.
Following the IPCC report on the climate collapse ahead of us, there have been a number of well-intentioned, well-covered initiatives declared by venture capitalists and philanthropists who believe they can innovate humanity out of the mess we’ve caused by using the tools that have brought about the digital economic boom.
Unfortunately these investors and philanthropists are either unaware or are unwilling to admit that venture capital (VC), private equity (PE), and philanthropy have…
