Reflections from San Francisco Climate Week 2023

Hey, it’s Matthias Muehlbauer here. It’s been a little while since we last spoke, how have you been? I’ve missed you, and I'm excited to share an insider look at my travels to San Francisco for their inaugural Climate Week. As some of you may know, I attended this event in April, where I joined our friends and partners in crime from Climatebase (get the latest on Cohort 3 of the Climatebase Fellowship).

Did it compete with New York Climate Week? Well, it was an exciting journey, and in this post, I'll take you deep into the coastal elite rivalry between New York and San Francisco Climate Weeks, and the different themes that made this event a huge success.

Did you know there have been more than 22 climate conferences since the start of 2023? When building the content for our business sustainability accelerator, OnePointFive Academy, we found that people in the climate space are struggling to find consensus. Roughly 99% of standards and frameworks have ongoing consultations in process— everything is a work in progress. It only makes sense that people are tired of attending yet another conference about climate. But was San Francisco’s inaugural Climate Week any different? Here are my key takeaways.

Distrust in COP Conferences

One theme that arose during SF Climate Week was the lack of faith in COPs. COPs refer to the United Nations Climate Change Conferences that have taken place annually for the past three decades. Current murmurs indicate that many people are not willing to attend COP28 Dubai, under the leadership of a petro-state.

People are disappointed and have lost faith that the outcomes of these conferences will yield the expected and needed results. Experts at the SF Climate Week events speculated on the same sentiment I reported on last year in the lead up to COP27 at Sharm el Sheikh. This begs the question: do we engage or disengage when oil & gas influence the rules of engagement we are reliant on to find viable climate solutions and progress?

Are We Doing Enough?

Secondly, what happens if our mitigation and adaptation solutions are not enough to restore balance to our climate? What if we have no choice but to rely on geoengineering? The co-founder of Make Sunsets, an infamous geo-engineering company, told me firsthand that he would be crashing climate week events. He lambasted slow climate solutions and handed out 'Cool Earth' balloons containing Calcium Sulphate. Harvard University suggests that solar geoengineering should not be a replacement for reducing emissions or coping with a changing climate; yet, it could supplement these efforts. It was a heated (haha) theme that delved deep into some of the fractures within the wider sustainability industry.

And in actual fact, it was our own event that was crashed— that’s right. We hosted around 20 people at a small bar one night for friends of OnePointFive to swing by. We had people from Climatebase, OPF Academy, and some other great additions that joined to chat about climate, micro-climates, and uh, geoengineering. More on that in a bit.

The Climate Tech Driver

Finally, cities are seeing climate tech as a huge driver of economic activity and innovation. San Francisco mayor London Breed spoke at an exciting event that brought together the Bay Area climate tech ecosystem, including our friends from carbon removal solutions Pachama and Heirloom. It was a momentous occasion that highlighted the importance of city-wide support and involvement in climate action. This event was a significant building block in the effort to build sustainable & attainable policies and actions within communities, whilst supporting the growing climate tech ecosystem and talent that is flooding the industry.

At OnePointFive, we have seen the power of policy in converging ideas and capital through our work with the recent SEC comment period for Climate-related Risk Disclosures, and witnessed firsthand the power of convening industry and policy leads at the CenterForward Conference. Here, I recently attended and brought together Democrat and Republican perspectives in building bipartisan energy & sustainability policy.

OnePointFive Gatherings

Together with our friends at Perennial, Earthshot Labs, and Pachama, we co-hosted an event at The Commons, a newly-opened space operated by OPF’s beloved ex-Community Manager Adi Melamed.

Our moderator Tessa Landon, an ex-OPFer now working at Perennial, on the topic ‘Course Correcting Carbon' aimed to constructively bring to light the key issues in bringing quality to the voluntary carbon markets from a soil, forest, financing, and corporate buyer perspective.

The sold-out event started with a panel and ended in a workshop. Attendees debated how to drive meaningful change to revitalize carbon markets amidst recent claims highlighted by The Guardian in which 90% of rainforest credits certified by the industry’s largest verifier are worthless. The panel discussed the importance of developing a portfolio of carbon abatement and removal solutions, including different carbon projects to address carbon emissions. The speakers highlighted that the carbon industry is still nascent and it took 130 years for leading reporting standards to come together. We are still finalizing how Scope 3 emissions are sorted, and this has a direct connection with voluntary carbon markets.

Another important point discussed during the event was the impact of corporates on voluntary carbon markets. While acknowledging that corporations aren’t perfect, the speakers noted that it is important to put as much money as possible into these markets to have them reach maturity and adoption. Market mechanisms enable quality projects to get off the ground while aligning incentives to protect forest and biodiversity from agriculture & logging related deforestation.

Behind corporates are people who believe in these markets, and these purchases are driven by value-aligned people that believe in climate action. Fascinatingly, we talked about the role of storytelling to open hearts and minds (and wallets) by connecting these nature-based solutions to ideas of origins, history, locale, and the wildlife supported by carbon projects to nudge corporations into investing.

Finally, I would be remiss to not include the fantastic event hosted by New Energy Nexus, Capgemini, The Global Warming Mitigation Project, and Activate Labs. Here, we heard the best analyst in Climate Tech VC, Kim Zhou, proselytizing about the state of the Climate Tech investment space at the Climate Tech Venture Capital Investor Summit.

Danny Kennedy, OnePointFive Academy speaker & friend, and Cate Blanchett, co-host of the podcast Climate of Change, added his characteristic comedic MC-duties as he guided us through a comprehensive whip-around the Climate VC space, covering VC funding, an update on the new IRA bill, and a reminder that climate funding makes up only 2% of philanthropic funding. This event had great side acts: amazing food and the opportunity to get your red hot hands on Channing Street Copper Company Induction Stoves, a company founded by ex-Climatebase alum Weldon Kennedy producing an elegant solution to replacing the gas in your kitchen.

Conclusion

My SF Climate Week was a unique and enlightening experience. The conversations, debates, and climate change solutions raised were outstanding for the first time Climate Week graced San Francisco— a city of hustlers, startup evangelists, and mission-aligned venture capitalists writing checks. I believe these events do hold a place to connect like-minded agitators and solutionists to better our planet. Yet, we still have a way to go in using these rich ecosystems to coordinate talent, capital, and ideas. The debates and hesitation around COPs to geoengineering efforts make it clear— there is a vital role that innovation, creativity, and storytelling can play in moving the needle forward.

Until next time, San Francisco. And New York, you’re on notice!

Follow along as we attend more climate events and get updates on how you can join us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok.