Crowd-investing in technological approaches to mitigate climate change
By: Wojciech Zaremba
Tags: Climate Change, Investment, Stock Market, Crowdfunding, Humanity

Here I try to outline a way to align humanity in addressing the climate change crisis through a financial instrument.

Today there are many currently speculative technical approaches to mitigating and reversing the effects of climate change: for instance, capturing CO2 from the air, growing better trees, and modifying food for farm animals to decrease methane emissions, etc. Considered individually, each approach has a low probability of success. The only way to make progress slowing climate change is by trying out many of these approaches in tandem and supporting what works.

Funding for climate change companies is limited, and as a result, they are few in number. I am proposing a fund focused on helping develop these companies. The fund would help raise money, recruit founders, and incubate their ideas. The mission of the fund would be to empower any individual on earth to contribute to solving climate change.

This fund would provide money to as many (reasonable) startups working on climate change funding as possible. Investments in the fund should be primarily viewed as very high risk (or even philanthropic), and the fund should be public, which allows global contribution. Having a public fund that benefits the whole of humanity should allow the raising of billions of dollars. This capital infusion would increase the amount of money and startups dedicated to environmental technology, which is likely to result in rapid advancements.

Currently, individuals have no easy way to support the development of negative emissions technologies and early-stage approaches to solving climate change. The fund would provide an avenue for individuals to contribute to environmental technology through personal investments. Although some individuals like myself can angel invest in environmental tech companies, doing so is not straightforward. Startups are usually open only to select individuals, and the process is quite bureaucratic for a casual investor. A public fund present on the stock market and accessible through a few clicks on Robinhood would make it considerably easier for me and others to give away part of our wealth for a better future.

Investing in such an organization should be of interest to governments of coastal cities like New York. New York plans to spend billions of dollars building coastal barriers to protect the city from floods. The build-up of the coastal barriers is treating the symptoms, not the disease. A fraction of this money could and should be devoted to the funding efforts to combat climate change directly.

Because these companies are working on frontier technologies and focused on environmental impact, they come with many more operating challenges than the average company. As such, investment in the fund should be considered high risk. There is a chance that investments would bring profit. For example, startups could make money by buying carbon offsets , or selling concrete reinforced with CO2.

Because stockholders of the fund would have a financial interest in solving climate change, they should be incentivized to push for and support policy efforts that could make companies working on global warming more successful. For example, they could lobby to increase the carbon tax which would directly help companies working on carbon capture. The fund’s success in lobbying governments results directly from its broad base of individual, institutional (and perhaps municipal) ownership.

The fund should also seek to bring transparency and data orientation to the fore in a nonpartisan way. It would track environmental metrics such as the reduction in CO2, reduction in methane, and pH of the ocean and impact of technologies on emission budgets. The details of the structure would have to be worked out.

Getting $50 from 5% of adult Americans who care about global warming would raise more than $500 million. I would personally pledge $10,000 into an organization that looks like the one described here. I hope others will join me in calling for the formation of such an organization, and that pre-commitments of capital might move someone to bring it into existence. I believe that executing the idea presented in this post could have a positive impact on the world.