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In late September it felt like the world descended on New York City. In some ways it did—the UN General Assembly was in town for their annual meeting. But there were also more than 6,000 people in town to participate in Climate Week, an annual gathering of investors, innovators, NGOs, academics, and politicians tackling the climate crisis.

Because it’s New York, and because there was last year, Climate Week felt more Wall Street than Greenpeace.  The DOE’s Loan Program Office shared that for every public dollar spent on the energy transition there were $5-6 dollars put in by the private sector. Professors from NYU and Columbia discussed innovations in the financial markets to derisk the energy transition and first of a kind (FOAK) investments. Top executives from the beauty industry considered the merits of aluminum versus plastic packaging. Deloitte hosted a two-hour workshop on the integrity of carbon markets. And new technologies with promising results were being discussed everywhere.   Lines for some tech demos were like getting into the hottest club in Manhattan. The climate tech excitement was palpable. 

Climate tech, an amorphous term, usually refers to any technology that mitigates greenhouse gases or helps society adapt to a changing climate. Think electric vehicles, renewable energy, and low carbon materials. However, climate tech can also refer to efficiencies in mining, the digitization of buildings, regenerative agriculture, and carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). It is a massive sector with a growing influence in the marketplace. Almost all Fortune 500 companies have investments in climate tech and estimates suggest it will be a nearly . 

Is Colorado Ground Zero for Climate Tech?

It’s common to think climate tech is synonymous with the Bay Area, however, Colorado is rapidly becoming a new hot spot.  There are more than 80 climate tech start-ups with headquarters in the Front Range. Denver-based , a natural hydrogen company, just raised a quarter billion dollars in its Series A.  , a green steel company, is building its first pilot plant in Boulder. Another Colorado company, , was just awarded $50 million from the DOE to expand its development of solid-state batteries for EVs.  

Why Colorado?  One investor dubbed the Front Range the ‘Goldilocks’ of clean tech-- not too built out or too expensive, and with just the right amount of talent, funding, and government support. Colorado has a unique set of amenities that makes the state attractive to founders and investors. Home to 24 federally funded scientific labs, like NOAA, NREL and NCAR, and major research institutions like CU, CSU and Colorado School of Mines, Colorado is a ‘hub of climate research and technical expertise.’ Its traditional strengths in aerospace research and the pharmaceutical industry give it an additional competitive edge. 

With so much research happening, there are plenty of opportunities to commercialize big ideas. CU, for example, is among the top five universities for startup creation. Co-founders Greg Reiker and Caroline Alden are examples of this ecosystem at work. Their company, , came from quantum technology developed in a CU lab and is now playing a crucial role in monitoring methane emissions around the state. Another startup, , producer of low carbon cement, licensed IP from CU’s biotech and engineering departments. , a mushroom based meat, was originally developed by Tyler Huggins and Justin Whiteley as PhD students at CU. Capitalizing on this momentum, Venture Partners launched the program in 2023 to pair university technologies with seasoned entrepreneurs. 

(Interested in learning more? CESR is hosting LongPath Technologies on October 15th with the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship. Register .) 

Additionally, Colorado has a suite of policies in place to support climate companies. Colorado has been at the forefront of energy efficiency and clean energy for some time, approving a renewable energy portfolio standard back in 2004 and being an early adopter of (property assessed clean energy), an innovative program that helped expand rooftop solar. Money from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is speeding things along, as well.  Vestas, the wind turbine manufacturer, invested $40 million to expand their operations in Brighton and Windsor. Colorado is using money from the IRA to meet emission goals in the state’s Climate Action Plan, through initiatives in transportation, land use and regulation of the oil and gas industry. The state was recently designated a Quantum Tech Hub by the Biden-Harris administration and received $41 million to strengthen its quantum computing capacities. Finally, NSF awarded $160 million to fund the Colorado-Wyoming Climate Resilience Engine, which will support the development of new technologies for drought and wildfire resilience.  

Finding a Shared Vision

In some ways, what’s happening in climate tech could not be more exciting. There is definitely a revolution to remake and reorder the world to respond to climate change. When I started working in climate nearly 20 years ago, the community was mostly made up of NGOs, government partners, educators, journalists and scientists. But now the business community is involved, and the rooms are full of accountants, financiers, analysts, strategists, entrepreneurs, and it's great! We need all of these people and more. 

And yet the excitement is masking some hard truths. To start, we are not meeting our climate goals. The world has warmed 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the Industrial Revolution and though the results are not yet apocalyptic, they are certainly getting there.  Last week, Hurricane Helene became a category 4 storm overnight dumping across the Southeast and killing nearly 200 people. In 2023, the United States had costing a billion or more in damage. (For context, there were three such disasters in 1980.) I heard little at Climate Week about adaptation—in other words how can we not just mitigate greenhouse gases but also build resilience to withstand the impacts of climate change?  Should we have a massive government program like the Civilian Conservation Corps to shore up defenses against extreme heat or sea level rise? Do we need new financial tools to help homeowners move away from climate danger zones? Can we create better building materials to withstand heat, wildfire and floods? Weather disasters are leaving communities with crippling consequences, and we need a massive infusion of talent and capital to solve these problems now.    

Second, we need to be honest about how the digitization of everything is actually going to affect the planet (and people). Data centers are gobbling up farmland, using millions of gallons of water daily and generating an energy crisis in America. In Virginia, which is already the data center capital of the world, —the equivalent of 1,000 new Walmart Super Centers. The IEA predicts artificial intelligence will in the next few years. It caught my attention at Climate Week when developers were touting CCS as an offset to the data center emissions issue. Emissions are just a small fraction of the environmental impact of AI and yet enthusiasts seem to always cite clean energy as a panacea to the industry's problems. What if instead of seeing climate goals as an emissions math problem we took a more comprehensive look at environmental impact? What then would 'net zero’ look like? 

Lastly, and most importantly, nature needs a spot at the table. Discussions of biodiversity and the millions of other species on Earth were eerily absent from Climate Week.  In all the hustle and bustle and techno excitement few people mentioned the reason all this matters — the necessity of ecosystem services for survival and a general awe at the power of nature.  In fact, it was a conversation between Jane Goodall, the famed primatologist, and Craig Foster, the director of My Octopus Teacher, that brought a room full of business leaders to a grounding halt. Craig showed a of an octopus stealing his camera and filming him, the 1001st species in the kelp forest. Jane performed a ‘hello’ in chimpanzee and talked about the first time David Greybeard, her beloved primate friend, touched her hand.  And then they both waxed poetic about how Mother Nature needs a spot at the Board Room table, leaving much of the audience in tears. 

Accomplishing the insurmountable is a favorite pastime of the human race. The Pyramids? The Manhattan Project? The Moon Landing? These are all moments in history that happened due to extraordinary orchestration, precision, technical prowess, money, leadership . . . all things we have in multitudes if only we have a shared vision.  I have my fair share of anxieties about the planet, but I am a climate optimist. I am a strong believer in the power of collective action and in the role of business to create meaningful change.  Here at the Leeds School of Business we have the opportunity to lead and train our business students to be a part of the solution.  I am hopeful we can do just that. 

Want to be a part of the solution? Check out CESR’s programs and the SRE certificate for undergraduates in business.

Katherine Ratledge is the Program Manager at CESR and attended Climate Week in NYC earlier this month. She manages the Clean Energy Pathway for MBAs and the SRE certificate program for undergrads at Leeds.