A strange thing happened yesterday. I wrote a LinkedIn post publicly critiquing MCJ Collective for uncritically platforming fossil fuel companies on their influential #climatetech podcast, and for the thin-skinned way in which they responded to criticism.
I promptly started receiving messages from people I didn’t know saying things like “you are a hero.” I found this equal parts startling and gratifying (though this particular compliment was surely overstated!), but more surprising still, the people who were DMing me were mostly not publicly engaging with my post. That struck me as strange, until a friend wrote to say that I was “a brave man.” I came to the conclusion that people were afraid.
But of MCJ? I could hardly believe that. Sure, I may have critiqued their handling of an important issue, but as a long-time listener of the podcast, (I hope still) a friend of the team, and an LP in their fund, that the good folks at MCJ were frightening anyone was difficult for me to imagine. Setting aside that their success to date has been nothing short of legendary (a case study in execution for which the whole team deserves credit, but most especially Jason Jacobs and Thai Nguyen), I am quite certain that no one on the MCJ team is out to scare anyone.
Why then this fear? The climate policy and climate tech worlds that I am proud to be a part of are certainly not characterized by it – quite the opposite. These are the most refreshingly warm, welcoming, collaborative, and affirming professional spaces in which I’ve ever had the pleasure of participating, and I feel lucky every day to be a small part of big meaningful work, surrounded by lots of people I like and respect.
Surely many people working in the fossil fuel industry feel much the same about their work environments, or so I’d hope at least, and yet it is easier for me to see where the fear might come in – what with the private armies murdering activists in the Niger Delta; the various autocrats poisoning their political enemies or having journalists murdered and dismembered; not to mention what my own government (that of the United States, that is) did in Iraq in the name of oil; and that’s before coming to the decades of oil and gas companies lying to the public to prop up their own profits while accelerating the planet towards a kind of climate cliff.
And this, perhaps, speaks to the impasse at which we’ve now collectively arrived in climate tech. We are no longer marginal. By the end of this decade, green energy will just be energy, and climate tech will be the largely invisible fabric of everyday life. Perhaps the participation of O&G companies in this transformation is necessary, or even desirable, and either way, as a pragmatist and a materialist, I see it as inevitable.
What is not inevitable is how we choose to navigate the irreducible complexity of the dynamics in the world around us. Many investors I respect actively work with O&G CVCs – as one friend put it “To whom [the O&G companies have] given $500M to hide the $100s of billions elsewhere” – and my impression is that there is deep talent and expertise within these entities. I personally have no purity test on this front, contra much of the straw man-baiting of folks who would like to reduce a left climate tech perspective to a caricature; however, I do think it’s important to, at very least, remain critical, and ideally, not do things like let representatives of an O&G company – even its nominally climate-focused CVC – on a podcast to peddle a false narrative. This is one place where I’d draw a line, and why I wrote my post yesterday.
For better or worse, from here, the questions for climate tech will only get harder. Soon, we won’t just have one raging billionaire in our sector, misbehaving at the helm of an auto company; we’ll have a great many very large and powerful corporations that, no doubt, will do what big corporations do and abuse their power for their own ends. To the extent that those ends can be, to some extent, aligned with averting the worst potential outcomes of the climate crisis, I’ll see that as a qualified good, but whether with respect to corporate power, or to the distorting influence of O&G (and other) wealth on climate tech venture capital, I foresee some necessary soul searching as we approach the second half of this decade.
Hopefully, the institutional LPs and (U)HNWIs in Abu Dhabi, Houston, Riyadh, and elsewhere who are increasingly helping to fund climate/energy transition are seeding the demise of the industry that has made so many people in places like these so fabulously wealthy, but in the meantime, the least we can do is continue to live and work in ways such that people in our industry aren’t afraid to speak their minds (and that powerful actors in climate tech don’t end up, as so often happens, in yes-person bubbles of their own making).
The most we can do is much, much more than that! But that can be for some other post…
Oh, and to head off some obvious potential trolling – yes, energy is very important! But so is a stable climate system on planet Earth, and after 30+ years of lies, delays, etc, it is hard to take seriously the sudden burst of concern from certain O&G maxis about, for example, energy poverty in the Global South. We were cooking with gas, and (fossil) plastic did make it possible. In the past tense.
A better world is possible, and we’re moving towards it very rapidly. Fossil fuels, for the most part, will not be a part of it.
Climate / Change 