went public in 1966. Soon what had been
“noble” capital started to become mon-
eymaking capital; tax laws were changed,
pension funds jumped in, and venture funds
became a giant profit-seeking asset class that
proudly compared itself to a shark.
There is now a broad movement afoot to
return the venture capital model to its phil-
anthropic roots, specifically where climate
change is concerned.
Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures
and, more recently, Jeff Bezos’ Earth Fund
are both multibillion-dollar philanthropic
entities that act, essentially, like very risk-
tolerant angel investors. There are others,
too, including Arati Prabhakar’s Actuate,
which plans to use philanthropic funds to do
interdisciplinary research with a social pay-
off. The Cambridge, Massachusetts–based
Prime Impact Fund, which draws from mul-
tiple sources of philanthropic wealth, issues
long-term loans to startups that promise to
launch “gigaton-scale emissions projects”
like extracting lithium sustainably, pulling
carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and
heating and cooling in environmentally
friendly ways. If a single investment yields
returns, those can be reinvested or con-
tributed to another philanthropic cause. If
investments don’t work out (they are high-
risk, so of course some go bust), the contri-
bution will be viewed much the same as a
traditional grant.
If the idea of giving billionaires tax breaks
while they decide which climate technolo-
gies get angel funding makes you nervous,
there is a more democratic option—green
banks, which use public capital as seed
money to make low-interest loans to com-
panies with emissions-reducing technol-
ogy. Green banks have some bipartisan
support, and a recent House proposal sug-
gested endowing a nonprofit national cli-
mate bank with $35 billion in federal funds.
Reed Hundt, founder of the Green Capital
Coalition, says that such a public investment
would be leveraged to borrow $350 billion,
which could then be loaned to projects that
have the potential to reduce carbon emis-
sions significantly. By reinvesting this money
as the loans are paid off, he says, the scheme
could put $1 trillion into early-stage technol-
ogy over the next 30 years.
Green banks could be coupled with other
public initiatives like government-backed
green bonds, or even something like war
bonds, which would allow individual inves-
tors to put their retirement money to work
supporting an environment they wouldn’t
mind growing old in. Hundt sees green cap-
ital expansively: “The goal here is to have
renewables provide cheap and clean power
to 100 percent of humanity really, really
quickly, while at the same time shoving the
carbon industry into the past.”↙
THIS SOUNDS WONDERFUL, DOESN’T IT? WE
already have the tools, we have the people
and the programs, we even have a decent
amount of capital. So why aren’t we already
making the future happen faster and shov-
ing carbon into the past?
It’s ironic, but in many ways all these Cold
War institutions and the relatively exotic new
sources of philanthropic and green capital
are more shovel-ready than the mind of the
American voter. What’s wrong with us? The
answer, I think, is that we have been con-
ditioned to be passive about technologi-
cal growth, and after years of arguing over
whether climate change is occurring, we’ve
also become resigned to the idea that tack-
ling it in a robust way is politically impossible.
It is time for us to reexamine these myths—
and also to design a new innovation system
that benefits more people more directly.
Blame a legacy of Cold War secrecy, as
well as a much more recent dogma that
relentlessly celebrates individual entrepre-
neurs. The economist Mariana Mazzucato,
director of the Institute for Innovation and
Public Purpose at University College Lon-
don, has spent years studying the way the
US government uses taxpayer funding for
innovation. She points out that the system
has long socialized the risks of bringing
technology to market while privatizing the
gains when entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs
applied that technology to consumer goods.
In other words, a lot of innovative tech that
has made some people rich was built on pub-
lic investment, but taxpayers have no idea
they underwrote the whole thing.
Mazzucato suggests that taxpayer-funded
innovation should instead put us in control—
by including ways for citizens to influence
policy, transparency in funding, and ways
for the funders—us—to profit. And politicians
should start talking about taxpayer invest-
ments in technology as a source of pride.“You’re part of this massive shift in global
capitalism, greening production, distribution,
consumption patterns—it kind of makes you
happy to be alive!”
But what about the politics? For the past
25 years, the challenge has been getting
the political system to simply buy into the
reality of climate change. Because that
was a long and exhausting war to which
many people dedicated their careers, it’s
still the struggle that transfixes the peo-
ple who write and worry about the envi-
ronment. Meanwhile the climate itself has
moved on, and soon the discussion will
too. It’s already happening: Republicans
have begun proposing carbon taxes on the
floor of Congress. As the future unfolds with
one Australian fire or Indonesian flood after
another, magnified by social media, invest-
ing in climate technology will become a
point of bipartisan agreement.
Anyway, as Niagara Falls showed, tech-
nology changes politics almost faster than it
changes the world. Building a better, cheaper
solar panel could accommodate any num-
ber of ideological positions, from support
for a Green New Deal, a wonk’s preference
for cap and trade, a Republican carbon tax,
a more libertarian turn toward local micro-
grids. Or, for that matter, a 21st-century FDR
could reincarnate and entirely nationalize
the electrical grid. We should anticipate these
shifts by deploying technology in ways that
give more power to the very people who have
funded its development.
When we do begin to decarbonize our
world, there will be new challenges: We’ll
need to get used to the very weirdness
and randomness of faster innovation—the
notion that what starts with light bulbs over
a waterfall winds up sparking an environ-
mental movement and handheld computers
filled with cat memes. This is what Activate’s
Ilan Gur calls “the stochastic nature of inno-
vation”—the sheer unpredictability of what
happens when a technology hits the com-
plex system that includes markets, global
societies, and the planet’s climate. “But the
one thing we know is that if you don’t define
the horizon of change that you want to see,
and you don’t plant those seeds of innova-
tion, then you won’t ever get there.”LISA MARGONELLI (@LisaMargonelli) is
the author of, most recently, Underbug: An
Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology.