Climate tech is counting on falling costs, rising demand to ride out the political storm (2025)

The onstage sign at this week’s San Francisco Climate Week captured the question on many people’s minds: “Are We F#cked?”

“I love the subtlety,” cracked author and entrepreneur Paul Hawken as he took the stage at an event organized by climate venture firm Climactic.

His answer to the question: “Maybe not – but if we keep going at the same rate we’re going, then yes, absolutely.”

The actual title of the event, “It’s Go Time!” better reflected the prevailing attitude of climate tech founders and funders spread out across the city. The program of Climate Week events felt less frothy than in recent years.But wherever they gathered, climate techies projected business-as-usual and called the low-carbon transition unstoppable.

Indeed, the Trump administration’s gutting of environmental rules, climate risk reporting, and green financing flows, along with uncertainty around tariffs and the future of the investment tax credit and renewable energy credits, got less attention than, say, innovations in regenerative agriculture, carbon markets and even nuclear power.

An inaction by the White House did attract notice: Earth Day came and went without the executive order targeting climate nonprofits and foundations that had been expected and feared.

At Elemental Interactive, a daylong showcase of climate tech startups hosted by Elemental Impact, founders said they are more concerned about supply and demand than policy uncertainty. The supply is the pipeline of cost-effective solutions that are moving past first-of-a-kind demonstrations and into full commercial production.

Carbon capture

Among the founders on stage at Elemental Interactive were Garth Sheldon-Coulson of Panthalassa, which is harnessing wave energy for all-in-one data centers that bob in hot air balloon-shaped buoys in the open ocean.

Nitricity’s Nico Pinkowski said the organic fertilizer maker is ready to open a $12 million production facility south of Turlock, Calif. to produce 8,000 tons of fertilizer a year.

“This is a big deal,” Pinkowski said. “We’ve crafted a model to make a fertilizer factory –a profitable fertilizer factory –for millions of dollars, rather than billions of dollars.”

Falling prices means that renewable energy now represents the vast bulk of new electricity generating capacity for economic, not environmental, reasons. But the continued burning of fossil fuels means carbon emissions, and global temperatures, keep going up.

That is making carbon capture, at large-scale and low-cost, an urgent necessity. Such solutions are more likely to involve soil carbon and other nature-based solutions than hardware-heavy direct air capture systems.

“Our ability to sequester carbon in the natural world is going to happen sooner, bigger and cheaper than anyone, especially including me, expected,” said investor Tom Steyer of Galvanize Climate Solutions.

Mati Carbon, which uses enhanced rock weathering, this week was named the winner of a $50 million X Prize for carbon removal (for background see, “How Mati Carbon is using the carbon markets”). Runners up included Brazilian biochar producer NetZero, Houston-based Vaulted Deep, which buries unusable organic waste to prevent emissions, and London-based UNDO, another enhanced rock weathering provider.

Bangalore-based Boomitra uses satellites and sensors to inexpensively verify carbon sequestration in soil and compensate farmers on more than five million acres. Founder Aadith Moorthy said the company can generate high-quality carbon-removal credits at under $40 per ton in Latin America.

“There’s an opportunity right here at a price point that is reasonable for decarbonization to be done at the gigaton level today,” Moorthy told Steyer.

Carbon removal via direct-air capture technologies costs considerably more. Some may not even reduce carbon, since they are at least initially powered by natural gas, such as Oxy’s 1PointFive subsidiary.

“Why are we investing in this?” Hawken said at the earlier event. “It’s just bizarre.”

Direct-air carbon capture gets a boost from federal funding – and Occidental Petroleum

Messaging matters

Hawken, along with activist and CNN commentator Van Jones took aim at the standard in-group climate tech lexicon and called for simple, direct language. They said communications (or lack thereof) shoulders part of the blame for the world’s inability to slow carbon emissions.

“The climate narrative has been a massive failure,” said Hawken, whose most recent book is “Carbon: The Book of Life.”

Take climate resilience. “What does that even mean?” Jones asked. “If you’re working in that space, I bet it’s on something cool. Does it help reduce asthma? Does it make traffic flow better?”

Or regenerative ag: “Why not just ‘be a better farmer’?”

Energy efficiency: “It sounds weird. It sounds like it comes from somebody who went to college. Why not just, ‘We’re wasting energy and need to fix it.’ Nobody likes waste.”

For his part, Hawken offered surprising praise for “greenhushing,” the practice of hiding environmental initiatives for fear of political retribution.

“Greenhushing may be a good thing, because there was a lot of BS before,” he said. “Companies should have just shut up in the first place. Making claims was a real mistake.”

The climate sector’s reliance on buzzwords not understood by the mainstream has exacerbated the pigeonholing of climate tech as a left-of-center movement, asserted Jones, who received a $100 million philanthropic award from Jeff Bezos in 2021. Climate advocates had failed to land their message with a mainstream public more occupied with kitchen table issues.

“I’m trying to save this movement from the tar pit called the Culture War,” Jones said. “We’ve languaged ourselves into irrelevance.”