Fighting climate change by investing at the molecular level

Focusing on carbon abatement won’t create the kind of solutions to climate change that are needed to address the global limits on temperature rise. Today’s investors are devoting capital to the least effective climate change solutions, resulting in an inefficiency of capital allocation in the cleantech space. Meanwhile, current VC models fund businesses that take too much time to get to market – time we don’t have when it comes to fighting climate change. To achieve net zero in the next eight years, capital must be deployed beyond carbon abatement, but also on the molecules and greenhouse gases that have the most climate-damaging impact. Investment should focus on those commercially proven technologies that achieve the highest carbon return on investment per dollar deployed.