This piece originally appeared on the DexMat blog during Climate Week NYC. Reposting here for the readers of this blog, who have been putting up with my moonshot metaphors for well over a decade.
From mastering fire, to developing life-saving medicines, to sending humans to the moon, it is in our DNA to imagine new ways forward and then drag those ideas kicking and screaming into reality. Now, as we train our collective sights on climate change, we need that same stubborn belief that a brighter future is possible.
But How Do We Proceed With Confidence When The Picture Looks This Bleak?
We are already living with shrinking sea ice, deforestation, collapsing biodiversity, and coral reef die-off, all while coughing our way through polluted air and trying to keep communities safe from wildfire, extreme weather, and severe heat. No wonder so many people feel discouraged, overwhelmed, and powerless.
From where I sit, though, recognizing the severity of the challenge is the first step toward solving it. Our climate future is rife with opportunity if we act today, and signs of hope glimmer everywhere.
For example, while the first global stocktake on the climate treaty confirms that countries must accelerate, it also shows meaningful progress; the Paris Agreement has already driven actions that significantly reduce forecasts of future warming relative to pre-adoption estimates. The report card also found that many actionable, creative climate solutions are sitting on the shelf ready to be implemented.
Meanwhile, electric vehicle sales of all types are surging, displacing 1.5 million barrels of oil every single day. Corporate climate action is accelerating, with an 87% increase in companies setting science-based targets last year alone. And the Inflation Reduction Act is actively launching a more auspicious chapter for climate action across the United States.
These and countless other examples feed my sense that, like the original moonshot, we can and will do the “impossible.”
From One Moonshot Moment To Another
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win…”
- John F. Kennedy
President Kennedy gave that speech in Rice Stadium in 1962, well before I was born, but the words became a mantra for me. I have written before about why that speech still gives me chills, and part of it is admittedly parochial: I spent four years shedding blood, sweat, and tears on that very field as a Rice football player. Kennedy asked, “Why does Rice play Texas?” Anyone who has watched that particular matchup knows he was making a point about doing hard things with long odds.
The other part is that I grew up immersed in the space industry thanks to my mom, a space historian at the National Air and Space Museum. From an early age I was surrounded by physical evidence of what happens when smart, motivated, aligned people are given the political will to do something impossible. That sense of can-do, will-do, must-do has followed me through my entire career in climatetech, where the biggest constraint is almost never physics; it is imagination.
Why bother trying to make dirty, centuries-old materials like steel a little greener when we can instead reimagine a world unconstrained by steel entirely? Once you allow yourself to imagine all-new materials, you start to see how transformative technology ripples across every category downstream.
Insurmountable Challenge, Or Profound Opportunity?
Addressing climate change isn’t just about slashing emissions; it is about making life better for everyone. One of my longtime sources of inspiration, Nobel Laureate Rick Smalley, helped me see that by doing the hard work of solving climate, we incidentally solve many of the top challenges facing humanity over the next century: health, water, hunger, poverty, and inequity.
And we achieve those benefits without tightening the proverbial belt. Skeptics treat climate as a giant cost center, and even some of climate’s most prominent messengers frame the fight in terms of sacrifice and scolding rather than opportunity, but the opposite is true; climatetech is a $100 trillion investment opportunity. The fortunes of tomorrow will be built on the climatetech of today. Investing in a better climate future will yield unfathomable returns: social, environmental, and economic.
Seizing Opportunity With Transformative Innovation
Working in this field, I have found it hard not to be optimistic. Fresh opportunities showed up every single day while building and leading Third Derivative, where we mobilized more than $1B into more than 150 transformational climate technologies, any one of which had catalytic potential. Then again, having reviewed thousands of startups there, I also came away keenly aware of where the biggest gaps still were, which is precisely why I left to go build the next game-changing climatetech venture.
That search led me to DexMat, a nanotechnology startup making steel, aluminum, and copper obsolete with advanced, carbon-negative materials like Galvorn, because it has the potential to be the most transformational innovation in the climate fight to date. Our exponential growth curve puts us on track to reach gigaton scale of impact faster than any other lighthouse technology.
We are not alone in the effort. Alongside other tireless climatetech leaders like BlocPower, Cemvita, and Syzygy, we actively encourage other transformational tech to push harder, move faster, and invest more, because we are all in this global fight together.
Our Climate Mission Is Clear: Solve It
During the 1962 speech, Kennedy didn’t ask if we could put a person on the moon by the end of the decade. He said it would be hard, that we would have to get started right away, and that we would do it anyway.
We are in a similar moment now. By doing the hard work and pushing past seemingly insurmountable obstacles, we can and will build a sustainable, prosperous, equitable world. Decades from now, the work we do today can spark hope for future generations facing their own moonshot moments.
Six months ago, Silicon Valley Bank failed the week after I announced DexMat’s funding round, and for about 72 hours it looked like we might set a land speed record for fastest startup failure in history. We came out the other side stronger. That is more or less the whole climatetech experience in miniature: the setbacks are real, they are frequent, and they are survivable.
So when the climate news is dark, I try to be a beacon of light and remind myself and others that there is nothing a team of mission-driven, motivated humans can’t do. I choose to shoot for the moon with optimism, because I know we have what it takes to get there.