This is an excellent blog post by entrepreneur and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla about some of the "instigators" that are working to help solve our climate crisis and some of the areas in which we probably should be focusing on next. One of the things that's noteworthy about the post is that he distills it all down into 12 areas of focus that -- if solved and if scaled -- could have a material impact on carbon emissions. They are (verbatim):

1. Electric vehicles & automotive batteries

2. Food & agriculture, especially meat

3. Low carbon transportation: Air transportation (jet fuel), shipping (electrofuels, biofuels?)

4. Cement or substitute construction material

5. Low carbon dispatchable electricity generation (fusion, geothermal, nuclear)

6. Public transit

7. Grid storage (long duration battery storage)

8. HVAC

9. Industrial processes (hydrogen?)

10. Fertilizer (hydrogen)

11. Water

12. Steel

Looking at this list, it is clear that some of these things are already happening (and some aren't). I currently own an ICE vehicle, but I'm fairly certain it will be the last non-electric vehicle I ever own. It's also not clear whether I will want to continue owning a car. Dynamic mass transit and overall autonomy are things that we've talked a lot about on this blog.

But here's the other idea put forward in Khosla's post. If these are in fact the 12 most impactful and important categories, then we may only be 12 or so companies away from real solutions. We only be 12 or so entrepreneurs away from meaningful societal change. When you look at it this way, the climate crisis should hopefully feel a lot less daunting.

In 2015, Marshall Burke, Sol Hsiang, and Ted Miguel published a paper in Nature that looked at the relationship between temperature (climate) and economic output. They examined the historical impact of temperature changes (1960-2010) on 166 countries and then used this data to try and predict the potential future impacts of climate change on GDP per capita.   

What they discovered is that temperature has a non-linear impact on economic production. Put differently, there’s an optimal annual average temperature. And it turns out to be 13 degrees celsius. If a country sits below this average number, then warming increases productivity. But if a country sits above this number, then warming has a negative impact on productivity. And the impact gets worse (stronger negative correlation) at higher temperatures.

Some of you are probably wondering whether the correlations they found should be interpreted as causation. For what it’s worth, the study tries to correct for non-temperature related economic changes (such as a recession or policy changes) and it also looks at how individual countries perform against themselves during temperature fluctuations. So the control and treatment groups are arguably pretty tight.

All of this suggests that there are a number of countries that stand to benefit from climate change (at least from this perspective). They are the ones that are cold today.