Investment metrics for climate change: Thoughts from an engineer and entrepreneur
· 28 min read
Climate change is visible everywhere you look.
Glaciers are melting at an unprecedented rate, as those pictures from the 1930s and the 2020s show.
Farmers all over the world need to cope with more frequent and more severe drought, even in moderate climates such as Switzerland.
Even the U.S. Navy is contemplating abandoning some of its major bases, as sea levels rise faster than ever.
On top, economic troubles start appearing everywhere you look.
Capital is becoming scarcer. Not just for fancy startups, but for business in general. Part of the reason is that investment in business continuity is on the rise. Part is because governments dole out huge stimulus packages in the wake of COVID-19. Part is because markets tend to become smaller due to the rising geopolitical tensions between the West, Russia, and China.
And don’t forget the costs of restoring our defense capabilities, modernizing our social security systems, and preventing future pandemics.
Oh, and we forgot the costs of climate change and the energy transition.
It’s obvious: We’re in both economic and ecological trouble, in a global context.
Shall we be scared, just because our house (or planet) is burning?
Not at all. Nothing cleans like a fire.
But to clean up our house, we will need to change some of our 20th-century habits for good. And with habits, I don’t mean micro-habits of individuals, but macro-habits of entire societies.
In this article, I propose new investment metrics adapted to the realities of climate change.
Let’s dive right in.
In general, there are two ways to tackle climate change: mitigation and adaptation.
Mitigation is the proactive part of tackling climate change. For example, it means shifting from fossil to renewable energy long before the last drop of oil is burned. Or it means reducing waste by repairing things instead of throwing them away long before raw materials become scarce.
The best time for climate change mitigation was 30–50 years ago. Unfortunately, the wider public wasn’t susceptible to effectively mitigate the then-remote threat of climate change at that time.
The world kept turning, and climate change unfolded — first slowly, and then faster and faster. It became visible by melting glaciers, frequent droughts, and rising sea levels. It started to hurt ordinary people more and more — not just in some faraway places, but also in rich countries, right at your doorstep.
And suddenly governments and people were busy fighting fires instead of preventing fires. Putting out that forest fire in your own country, and sending aid to other countries fighting ever bigger forest fires. Saving your people from floods, and supporting your farmers in droughts.
Whenever a crisis hits, people tend to focus on the crisis only and forget everything else, especially the root causes of the crisis. Whilst this is certainly understandable and might also lead to a quick resolution of a crisis, this behavior is fatal in the case of climate change: We need to fundamentally change our 20th-century habits for good to effectively curb climate change — no matter if we’re fighting a crisis or not.
Even if it is too late to focus on climate change mitigation alone, it would also be fatal to focus only on climate change adaptation, omitting to change our 20th-century habits. If we don’t invest in climate change mitigation, we will fuel the vicious cycle even more, and through it raise the costs for climate change adaptation beyond imaginable.
It’s an old saying: Easy choices now, hard life later. Hard choices now, easy life later.
For all my readers who are older than 60 years, this should resonate with you. Your generation chose the easy life 30–50 years ago, and now we are experiencing the hard life. No blame though, the deed is done, and we have to live with the decisions you took a couple of generations ago.
Life is hard now because the costs of climate change adaptation are enormous. Consider the infrastructure costs of abandoning U.S. Naval Station Norfolk, the largest naval base in the world, due to rising sea levels. Consider the economic costs of melted glaciers, preventing the agricultural sector of entire countries from being irrigated with natural water. Consider the social costs of entire populations leaving their home countries, simply because it gets too hot to survive at home.
It’s pointless to list all the cost items related to climate change adaptation. And it’s equally pointless to mention that many other pressing issues are very costly: Rebuilding our defense capabilities, modernizing social security, and preventing future pandemics, to name just a few.
Now for the hard part. It’s a fact that not even the richest countries will have enough funds to adapt to all the climate change problems, even if we wouldn’t have any other problems such as rebuilding our defense capabilities, modernizing social security, or preventing future pandemics.
Because funds are scarce, we will need to place “bets” on how climate change will progress, and decide what we will do and what we will not do based on those bets.
That will involve some hard choices: Abandoning a naval base because we bet on disproportionate sea level rises in the North Atlantic. Abandoning your hometown because we bet on extreme droughts in your area as opposed to other regions. This will not be easy, but remember the old saying: Easy choices now, hard life later. Hard choices now, easy life later.
When choosing our battles, we cannot just choose what is best now, we need to anticipate the best solution for the future. Here, I would advocate taking the learnings from the military into consideration — it takes decades to build bases or develop ships and airplanes, so you need to plan carefully to meet operational demands 20–30 years into the future.
The military is a good example for another reason. It cannot afford the luxury of ideology. It has to operate and fight in the world as it exists, with the resources it has. Furthermore, it has to plan to operate and fight in the world we are creating. The same is true for the fight against climate change.
Militaries need intelligence services, and climate change needs scientists. To maximize the probability of our bets being correct, we need to base our decisions on facts and science, not on politics and emotions.
Given that funding will be notoriously short, and challenges widespread, at least we have the luxury to choose our investments wisely.
On a very high level, I would advocate three core criteria to evaluate investments: Bang for the buck, a long-term perspective, and a win-win mindset.
We cannot afford the luxury of ideology. The times of investing in 10% fuel efficiency improvement projects or disposable tableware made of bamboo are over. We need to measure every investment against avoided tons of CO2 per dollar invested. And we need to make sure that those investments with the best scores are made first — no matter if they are your pet projects or not, and no matter if you like the technology or not.
Maybe it’s better to avoid huge amounts of CO2 emissions in a less-developed country with less efficient technology than going from clean to super-clean in a highly developed country. In this respect, Asia is highly crucial to win the battle against climate change.
It’s no longer enough to score a quick win and postpone rather than avoid emissions. We need to think long-term when making decisions for our investments. Rather than having a business case for 3–5 years, I would suggest a business case where the payoffs will be reaped by your children and grandchildren.
We will need to change our mindset to get this right, as our societies are so focused on instant gratification, same-day delivery, and self-actualization that we have forgotten what it means to put rewards off or work for a greater common good instead of individual benefit.
Our systems from the 19th and 20th centuries were designed to produce winners and losers. In those times, “winning” meant becoming rich faster than others. The “others” were colonies, the communists, and… our planet.
That will have to change, otherwise there won’t be any winners anymore. We have to realize that the common good is the one single planet where all of us live. We all have to work towards the same goal, even if we might have different opinions and live in different cultures.
If we screw it up in some place, the effects will be noticed in the global climate. If someone loses, we will all lose.
Now it’s time to fill the three core criteria with life. We need to analyze and segment different investment types to effectively mitigate and adapt to climate change.
We cannot afford the luxury of ideology. The times of investing in 10% fuel efficiency improvement projects or disposable tableware made of bamboo are over. We need to measure every investment against avoided tons of CO2 per dollar invested.
And here, there is a clear primary target: Coal. Coal is a relict from the industrialization of the 19th century, one of the most polluting fuels, and still widely used all around the world. Strangely enough, coal is one of the core fuels to produce electricity, even though electrification is often heralded as the solution to climate change. I agree that electrification will solve a large part of our problems if done right — but not if we use coal to produce electricity, forget to invest in powerful and modern grid infrastructure to transmit all that solar and wind electricity or replace our strategic oil dependency by a critical mineral dependency for battery production.
There aren’t any silver bullets in climate change engineering, so let’s not promote one single solution to fight climate change; we will need many different solutions for all our problems.
And therefore, here is the secondary target: Oil and gas. The fossil energy economy is a relict of the 20th century, and it needs to go quickly if we want to ever reach zero emissions. Whether fossil fuels are replaced by renewable energy sources or by avoiding some of the consumption at all doesn’t matter — remember that it’s the avoided tons of CO2 per dollar invested that is relevant.
It’s that easy. Removing coal, oil, and gas from the global economy will do the trick.
It’s not that easy, of course, because we need to remove coal, oil, and gas globally. Think of all the people around the world earning a living from those industries. If they suddenly can’t make a living anymore, it’s going to be difficult. In this respect, there are huge differences between different regions. With three-quarters of the world’s coal being produced and consumed in Asia and Australia, try to explain to that coal mine worker in rural India why his government should ban the commodity that earns him his modest income. Resistance to change largely reflects vested interests, often due to forced circumstances: Not being able to propose to your sweetheart because you can’t afford the wedding after your coal mine job is gone might be a reason why you’re not so supportive of sunsetting the coal industry for good.
If we manage to get rid of coal, oil, and gas, and on top to mitigate the social consequences of doing so, we’re already on a pretty good path.
We need to make sure that investments with the best scores regarding avoided or removed tons of CO2 per dollar invested are made first. Remember from Part 1 that we are short on time and short on funds.
And here is the spoiler for all new technology geeks: This might mean that we start with proven, boring technologies rather than with new, fancy technologies. Because we are running out of time to combat climate change, having a good solution scaling quickly is much better than having an awesome solution that takes two decades to develop and another two decades to scale.
Let’s illustrate this by looking at a few technology examples.
Hydroelectric dams, photovoltaics, and large-scale wind farms work well and can be deployed and scaled relatively quickly — because they are proven technologies. However, the political environment and the resulting regulations often hinder time-to-implementation and scalability: For example, there are some green activists in my home country who still fight against new large-scale hydroelectric projects on the grounds of protecting habitats in areas that were covered by glaciers less than a decade ago. I leave it to you to judge if it’s better to build a new hydroelectric dam high in the mountains, or import electricity generated by fossil fuels.
I almost don’t dare say it loudly, but nuclear technology is also a proven low-emissions technology — albeit with its own problems of course. Whilst building new nuclear power stations might neither be quick nor sensible in the long term, extending the lifespan of existing nuclear power stations might provide us with lots of coal-free electricity at least for a couple of decades. Model calculations also suggest that getting to net zero emissions is the cheapest when taking the modernization of existing nuclear power stations into account.
Compare this with the 20+ years of announcements that fusion reactors will be available at any moment. In 1999, when I was in high school, I had the chance to visit the Joint European Torus (JET) project in Culham, England. This project was shut down at the end of 2023, with three companies setting up shop in the same location. They aim to build demonstration plants, but it’s still unclear if fusion power has the commercial potential its proponents hope.
Last but not least, let’s talk about synthetic aviation fuel. Replacing oil for long-distance flights is one of the harder problems in battling climate change. Creating synthetic kerosene out of air and sunlight is possible now, but still 4–6 times more expensive than regular kerosene.
As for all new technologies, scaling and reaching cost efficiency for fusion power and synthetic kerosene will take time — time we don’t have anymore if we want to effectively curb climate change.
At the same time, just because we are running out of time doesn’t mean it’s not sensible to pursue new technologies. We just need to focus on projects with a favorable time-to-implementation score — which will buy us time until the new technologies become effective at scale and affordable.
There is another thing that can buy us time: CO2 removal. No matter if we use large-scale reforestation, soil carbon sequestration, or direct air capture, removing CO2 from the atmosphere will slow down climate change and buy us time to fully transition from coal, oil, and gas towards renewable energy.
Just like with CO2 avoidance, always keep the economics in mind when looking at CO2 removal projects. Removing one ton of CO2 through soil carbon sequestration is still 5–10 times cheaper than removing one ton of CO2 through direct air capture.
New technologies are exciting, deserve the benefit of the doubt, and should be allowed to fail. That’s how agencies like DARPA work to generate breakthrough innovations like the internet, self-healing fabric, and others.
The difference between military innovations created by DARPA and energy innovations is that the military usually doesn’t care too much about energy consumption. Effects-on-target and time-on-target decide between victory and defeat, not energy efficiency.
To achieve net zero, we need to be careful not to create new energy technologies that consume more energy than we get out of it. For example, fusion reactors still need more energy input to spark the fusion than they produce energy output. Much of the hydrogen is still produced with electricity that was generated from fossil fuels. Direct air capture consumes much more energy than reforestation.
Energy input-to-output is a variable metric. Technologies tend to become more energy-efficient over time, so assessing a technology’s energy efficiency over the past few years might provide informative insights into its scaling readiness and potential.
There are other important factors than just hard metrics as described in part 2. Even with the most efficient CO2 removal and avoidance technologies, you will thirst and starve to death without water and biodiversity.
Even though billions of people still don’t have access to clean water, water is heavily underpriced in the rich world. No research is needed here, it’s enough to look at toilets: in many rich countries, they are flushed with drinking-quality fresh water. That’s only possible when water is underpriced.
Whilst the financials of this investment do not look favorable with today’s water prices in Switzerland, I am convinced that water prices will explode over the next decade. Going back to my solar energy investment ten years ago, I am now earning a handsome amount of money every year from selling my excess electricity to the local utility.
When looking at investments in climate change technology, it might pay off to invest before resource prices explode.
Irrespective of the price, freshwater is scarce. Farmers have started realizing this, too, and are experimenting with techniques such as not using fertilizer at all, using compost and humus extensively, or planting trees in their vegetable fields to save scarce water.
It’s common knowledge that farmers don’t take any experiments for the fun of it. Farmers are a breed of down-to-earth people, and they change when a changing climate shows them that there is no other way to succeed but to change with the climate.
Despite all the technology out there, farmers still work with and in nature. They serve as bell-weathers for climate change, as they are much more dependent on the climate and nature than other professions.
When looking at investments in climate change technology, it might make sense to ask a farmer for advice before making an investment decision.
No water, no life. Humans survive without eating for weeks, but they can’t survive even for days without drinking.
So if water is missing, it becomes the top priority very quickly. Missing water can not just spark wildfires, it can also spark large-scale migration. Similarly, too much water from rising sea levels can also spark large-scale migration.
Therefore, it’s in society’s best interest that nobody has too much or too little water.
This article is also published on the author's blog. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.
Christopher Caldwell
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