Climate change: A VC's eye view

I was among the first to get a copy of John Doerr’s exceptional book, due to be released on November 11, as far back as July 2021, and its own scale of ambition in terms of thought leadership and actionable insights were breathtaking. It is by far one of the most important books of our times, solving for both design and implementation, via a global action plan to save the only planet we can call home as of today. I always like to jokingly say that we Indians perform any task the slowest in the world for the first 90 per cent of the time, but are the fastest in the world in the last 10 per cent of the time — the world appears to have reached this option now. We have no options left but to perform the fastest in the last 10 per cent in the last innings before humankind is reduced to a footnote of history.

When this warning comes from the most important venture capitalist of our times, John Doerr (and his co-author Ryan Panchadsaram) who has been there, done that, talked and walked the talk, the world needs to take notice. And act on the OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) outlined in the action plan. 

Mr Doerr is brutally honest in accepting that his generation created the problem in the first place and is now providing imaginative solutions through cleantech investments and thought leadership to make the solution happen. Further he emphatically argues that the developed world, which has enjoyed the benefits of energy till date, must take the lead and cut emissions first, set an example for the developing world to follow, for the latter has billions of people to take care of by growing the size of its economic cake first.

Speed & Scale’s  top-line OKR is to reach net zero emissions by 2050 — and to get halfway there by 2030, a critical milestone. In the face of such a fraught and enormous challenge, OKRs will keep us clear-eyed and practical. The annual sum of all human-caused emissions is 59 gigatons of CO2 and the solution involves a combination of avoidance (don’t emit), efficiency (use less) and removal (cleaning up the leftover). Even if we follow the action plan, only half of carbon dioxide emissions will be removed from the atmosphere within 30 years, the balance will stay with us for many thousands of years. And we must stop the atmosphere from remaining an open sewer or a trash can, which is what it is now with all the dumping that’s going on.

Today as we enter the  third  decade  of  our  momentous  century, the  perfect  storm  is  brewing  thanks  to  the alignment of policy, technology, and innovation and, as it were, “Moore’s Law” is hitting the cleantech  industry  too! Investments and innovation offer the best hope for a planet frayed by Covid-19 and not wanting to deal with yet another emergency soon. India, for instance, had imported neither oil nor natural gas from the US till 2016. It had picked up just 309,000 barrels in 2015. In 2019, India imported $8.25 billion of oil products from the US,  propelling it to be the third largest  destination for US crude. This needs to be reversed gradually, in favour of renewables. On funding, India alone needs $30-50 billion every year for the next 10 years in renewables, whereas the world is investing roughly about  $300 billion  annually (as against  about  $500 billion being  invested by the oil  and gas industry). Can the major sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) of the world, which control between them conservatively about $30 trillion, be persuaded to come forward to set up a “Clean World Fund” to fill the funding gap?

The book argues that the OKRs for saving the world from climate disaster are: 1. Electrify transportation; 2. Switching to clean energy; 3. Fixing food; 4. Protecting nature; 5. Decarbonising manufacturing; 6. Scaling up carbon removal. And do this by using policy and politics (each is useless without the other), movements, innovation, and investments. Each chapter of the book is a clear, easy to read description of each of these and makes enormous sense. This is their “napkin solution” pretty much like FDR’s to win the World War. That worked then, and there is no reason this won’t work now provided we get enough of that intangible, invisible substance called “political will” among the top leadership of the planet.

In sum, Speed & Scale  is an actionable manifesto for humanity to save the planet from us. Mr Doerr makes a compelling case to show that it is now cheaper to save the earth than to destroy it. His book is a brilliant, unputdownable treatise of our times to focus attention on the most important problem of our times.

The reviewer is an IAS officer. Views are personal. @srivatsakrishna