20 climate startups exploding (or past their peak)

Personality quiz. Wisdom from Carl Sagan. 14% chance to hit our climate goals.

Welcome to my weekly newsletter — a quick read about changing the world through startups, finance, humor, and wisdom. Read the archives.

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Today’s topics.

1. 📈 20 graphs — Climate tech startups that are exploding or have peaked

2. 🌡️ 14% chance — Can we hit our climate goal of a 1.5 °C temperature rise?

3. 🌎 Wisdom from Carl Sagan — What it means to live on this pale blue dot

4. 🤨 Personality quiz — Are you an Upholder, Questioner, Obliger, or Rebel?

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1.

📈 20 graphs — Climate tech startups that are exploding or have peaked

If you’re a rabid reader of our EFI newsletter (“bless your little heart”), you might recall a prior issue about the website Exploding Topics.

This site “analyzes millions of searches, conversations, and mentions across the internet”to “surface rapidly growing topics before they take off.”

In this article, they track five-year patterns in the online popularity of climate startups (example below), such as AMP Robotics, Northvolt, Pachama, Form Energy, ZeroAvia, Aclima, and more.

Note — In this context, “exploding” means that the internet loves these startups like adults love watermelon in the summer, pretending they’re carefree kids at the swimming pool again.

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2.

🌡️ 14% chance — Can we hit our climate goal of a 1.5 °C limit on temperature rise?

Recent UN research shows that we’re on track for a 2.5 to 2.9 °C average increase in global temperatures.

But averages tell more lies than slick-haired politicians during election season.

The range of temperature changes can reach 10 °C (dark colors below).

What does that mean?

• 25 °C (77.0 °F) becomes 35 °C (95.0 °F)

• 30 °C (86.0 °F) becomes 40 °C (104.0 °F)

What’s that mean for our well-being? NASA says:

• “At warming above 1.5 °C, twice as many megacities as today are likely to become heat stressed, potentially exposing 350 million more people by 2050.”

But don’t get depressed. Why?

• Scary predictions about the future are often wrong (examples here)

• Humans are amazing (e.g., NASA’s Voyager 1 is currently 15 billion miles away from Earth and sending data back to scientists)

Source: IPCC

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3.

🌎 Wisdom from Carl Sagan — What it means to live on this pale blue dot

We are everything, and we are nothing.

Carl Sagan — famed American astronomer with a voice like warm honey, the precise annunciation of a Baptist preacher, and dreams of meeting aliens — shared these thoughts in 1994 after the Voyager 1 spacecraft took a picture of Earth.

"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives.

The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.

It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.

To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

— Carl Sagan

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4.

🤨 Personality quiz — Are you an Upholder, a Questioner, an Obliger, or a Rebel?

We need to know ourselves better.

The same is true for the people we live and work with. Because they’re usually the cause of problems, not us. 😬

To that end, consider taking this quick Four Tendencies Quiz below from Gretchen Rubin — an author who takes a Type A person’s approach to unlocking happiness (my soul sister?) and has 220 million downloads of her Happier with Gretchen Rubin podcast (just like my EFI podcast…oh wait a second…)

Some of the CEOs in our EFI Fellows peer group program have seen a new light after taking this quiz. Or, more importantly, after having their team members take it.

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That’s all, y’all.

Make it a great week because it’s usually a choice.

~ Chris

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If you want more, here’s how EFI might be helpful:

• Find your tribe — Join our peer group for climate tech CEOs.

• Get clarity — Let’s do some executive coaching together.

• Meet climate tech CEOs and investors — Listen to our 180+ podcast episodes.

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