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News focused exclusively on financing for
energy efficiency and renewable energy
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Innovation spreads light everywhere. The energy transition demands innovation in how we invest, how we measure success, and how we motivate each other. It also suggests updating how we encourage innovation.
This month's guest editor is on the case. Ben Soltoff worked with us at CBEY for two years, helping students conceive and execute startups and helping us think about the entrepreneurial connections we'll be announcing soon. Now he does similar work up the road at MIT. Explore Ben's commitment to the new and his consideration of timeless values.
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Ben Soltoff
(M.B.A./M.E.M. 2019) Job:
Ecosystem Builder in Residence, Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship
How I Got Here:
My career in climate and sustainability took root, so to speak, in the forests of New England and North Carolina. I was fascinated with the natural world and the creatures that inhabit it, so I sought to learn ecology. However, I wanted to jump right into addressing the ecological crises unfolding across the planet, particularly in areas where those crises took their greatest toll on humanity. That led me to fieldwork with frontline communities in rural India, and then to climate advocacy at World Resources Institute in Washington, DC. Seeing the private sector foster global action like the Paris Agreement led me to a joint master’s in business and environment at Yale, where I discovered climate entrepreneurship. I’ve been hanging around universities ever since, helping students advance climate solutions. Universities are wonderful convening spaces where people from wide disciplines and industries can connect and collaborate. In a nod to my early interests, I’ve dubbed myself an “ecosystem builder,” bringing together resources to create a diverse, productive whole greater than the sum of its parts.
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My Current Reading Recommendations
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| When The Winners Advance, We'll All Come Closer to Winning the Sustainable Future
In my neck of the woods, the big news lately has been the Earthshot Prize, which came to Boston last week. British royalty drew most of the media attention, but the real stars were the amazing winners and finalists. You can read about them here. The prize makes a concerted effort to highlight solutions around the world, not just Silicon Valley darlings.
The Experience of Climate Change Becomes Physical - and Unbearable - as We're Hotter
Speaking of global climate impacts, I’ve been working with the US Embassy and IREX as part of the Visiting American Professionals for Iraq. I did a webinar last month on climate entrepreneurship, and the audience was very keen to learn about potential climate solutions. That’s no surprise, given that Iraq is more vulnerable to climate change than almost any other country in the world. Recently, the New York Times published an interactive article about the effects of extreme heat on people in Iraq, which drives home the danger far better than I ever could. It’s visual, personal, and deeply affecting.
Luckily, I Suggest a Couple of Resources To Sharpen Your Pitches and Keep You Current
For any startup founders out there, Startup Basecamp is a great platform that connects startups and investors. They recently released some practical tips for pitching, pulled directly from their conversations with some of the leading investors in the climate tech space.
I also want to shout out to the Climate Tech VC newsletter, which provides a phenomenal resource for anyone looking to keep up with the latest deals and other happenings in our space. I recommend it all the time to students or anyone else looking to wrap their heads around climate tech.
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| | Policy Frameworks I Use (And Would Love to Discuss)
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As Tax Burdens for New Technology Fall in the United States, Emissions Can Fall Too.
The Inflation Reduction Act is a treasure trove of climate policies that will enable critical emissions cuts over the next decade and beyond. I’d like to highlight one particular provision that’s going to open the door for a whole host of climate tech startups: the expansion of the 45Q tax credit for carbon removal and storage. 45Q has actually been around since 2008, but the credit was leveled up in 2018, and now it’s going to get supercharged by the IRA. The tax credit is increasing from $35-50 per ton (depending on the type of project) to $60-180 per ton. The largest incentives are for direct air capture projects that remove CO2 from the atmosphere and store it underground. Not only does the IRA create additional incentives for carbon removal, but also it reduces the hurdles for early-stage companies. It drastically lowers the minimum project size (by one or two orders of magnitude), and it increases the transferability of tax benefits from one entity to another.
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My Circles Extend Past Central Square, to Houston and Beyond. Tell Me Your Idea.
If you know founders, investors, or other ecosystem builders looking to connect with the climate tech community at MIT, please send them my way. Additionally, I’ve also been building bridges to the Houston ecosystem in partnership with Greentown Labs, through a program called Texas Entrepreneurship Exchange for Energy (TEX-E). If you’ve got Texas climate tech connections, please send them my way as well!
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| | The Writing That Keeps Coming Back to Me (and Why)
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Since I think so much about climate change so much during my day job, it can be hard to read non-fiction books on climate change in my spare time. It feels too much like work. That’s why I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of fiction in advancing climate solutions.
Fictional stories can take our minds to places where other modes of communication aren’t able to go, at least not as easily. They open up the fertile ground of imagination to new ideas and concepts. There’s an emerging genre of fiction called climate fiction, or cli-fi, which is like sci-fi but grounded on Earth with a focus on how future societies will deal with a changing climate.
An example that’s garnered a lot of attention lately is the novel The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. It’s an astonishingly detailed and well-researched work of speculative fiction. It presents a believable trajectory for the next few decades, based on real technologies and policies, and it explains them through the firsthand perspectives of fictional characters. Another great place to read climate fiction is the Grist Imagine 2200 collection, which shines a spotlight on short stories that portray the world in the year 2200, submitted through an annual competition. They released their second set of stories earlier this fall. And lastly, I should shamelessly plug Flourish Fiction. That's a climate fiction site that I help to organize. We publish short stories, flash fiction, and poetry, imbued with hope. Our writers come from around the globe, including both professional writers and amateurs. Many of them are climate tech professionals who use fiction to envision how their efforts today might improve the world of tomorrow.
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We'll share job listings (there are many) in our year-end issue, dropping on December 21.
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