Launching a Climate Fund
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. — Carl Sagan, 1994
Climate change and humanity
The fact that humanity is changing the world around us is nothing new. Ten thousand years ago, we moved from adapting and moving around to change the soil and the crops around us. In the last hundreds of years, we accelerated that change by using fossil fuels. We burned carbon dioxide buried deep underground and shot up the pollution into the atmosphere. And we knew that it would cause problems.
The problem is that now we are accelerating. We are like the car running down the hill without breaks. We need to get back to the driver seat and push the brakes. We need all hands on deck to solve this.
We need to understand how the climate model, and its feedback loops, works. We also need actions to reduce our footprint, reverse the damage done, and prepare for the new world.
Reduce, Reverse, and Prepare
To reduce, many companies make products of today better, with less materials, waste, animal products, or energy. Some of these are solved by actually using less material in production or material or processes that impact the world less, or by reusing or sharing the product.
Within reverse, the company needs to do something that sequesters greenhouse gases (in layperson terms “sucks down carbon dioxide or methane from the atmosphere”). Luckily there are many things that do, for example, biomass such as trees, peat, or algae, as well as some novel industrial methods that need carbon dioxide to create materials that we use already (cement, steel, plastic to name a few).
Regarding prepare for a new world, we are facing enormous challenges due to climate change such as harsher weather and heat, and regardless of whether we manage to stay within an inhabitable temperature, we will need to prepare for a new reality. This includes thinking about the future of food and agriculture, how to prepare for mass migration due to weather changes, and to build more sustainable future cities.
The role of startups
We believe that innovation plays a crucial role in handling the impending disaster. Many reasonable existing solutions can be accelerated with taxes, policies, current consumer demand, and corporate changes. But, as the climate crisis is an exponentially increasing problem, we need exponential solutions.
Humanity has only invented three things that scale of that speed and effectiveness; ideas, money, and software. The unity of these three is software powered startups.
In the last two years, we have seen a rise in extraordinary entrepreneurs taking on the challenge of contributing to a climate positive world. And, the last months, we have seen more and more venture capitalists realizing the financial opportunity in ClimateTech startups.
When we considered what the three of us could do, we realized that we spent all of our working lives building software, models, startups, and investing and helping entrepreneurs. The question was if we should start a startup or a fund, and we felt more fit to do the latter.
Announcing Pale Blue Dot
Today, we are announcing Pale Blue Dot, a seed-stage venture fund focusing on companies that, with scalable technologies, reduce and reverse the damages humanity has done and is doing to the climate and prepare us for the new world come.
We see the importance of having a new perspective on the issue, as many of the solutions are new, and the problems are unevenly distributed. Therefore, we see diversity as a core tenant in solving the climate issue and hope to work with entrepreneurs from various backgrounds and perspectives.
If you want to connect with us, you find all of our contact details on our webpage: Pale Blue Dot. Please get in touch!
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