Next month’s Climate Week NYC will showcase green energy startups and solutions — and the stakes of a presidential election that will be just six weeks away.
“We only get two choices,” says Abe Yokell of Congruent Ventures, an early stage climate tech investor in San Francisco. “One choice is blow it all up.” The other: Preserve what is arguably “the biggest climate, energy and industrial policy that has happened over the last 100 years.”
Yokell is part of the newly formed Climate for Kamala, which is kicking off Climate Week with what it calls a “blowout” fundraiser for Vice President Harris’s campaign, at the old Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn on Sept. 23. The event aims to raise $5 million from 1,000 invitees, including family offices. That would far eclipse the take from a separate VCs for Kamala Zoom fundraiser earlier this month that raised just $176,000, according to its organizers (see, “VCs embrace Kamala Harris’s vision for an economy that works for all”).
Climate for Kamala was sparked by Shomik Dutta of Los Angeles-based Overture Climate VC, who sprang into action soon after President Joe Biden announced he was exiting the presidential race. Dutta quickly recruited Yokell, along with others including Clay Dumas of Lowercarbon Capital and Lowercase Capital, Brendan Bell of Aligned Climate Capital, and Michael Smith of Regeneration VC.
Other prominent pure-play climate tech investors that are part of the group include Elemental Excelerator’s Dawn Lippert, Obvious Ventures’ Andrew Beebe, James Rubin of Aligned Climate Capital, and Lowercarbon’s Chris and Crystal Sacca (see “Chris Sacca: ‘Cheaper, better, faster, stronger, simpler and just plain cooler’”).
“It is going to be an enormously powerful industrial alliance,” Dutta told ImpactAlpha. In a LinkedIn post, he called the group “a “barbarian horde of talented climate founders, investors, executives, philanthropists, activists and nonprofit leaders.”
“If you spend time gleefully poring over the IRA, Infrastructure Bill, and CHIPS Bill, surely you have a few hours to help elect the people who delivered it,” Dutta wrote.
The group just started working with Climate Voters for Harris-Walz, a nascent campaign-led initiative that will launch next month, Ela Jetter, a Harris campaign climate policy consultant, told ImpactAlpha. She added that the campaign was “building a tent that looks outside of typical climate circles” to include people working in fashion, film and grassroots activism. Climate for Kamala plans a call with existing and new participants on Aug. 29. (See, “Beyond Chicago, Harris seeks to ride a revival in wages, entrepreneurship and ownership“).
Climate business agenda
Just as some cryptocurrency investors are throwing their support to former President Donald Trump in hopes of boosting their returns, some climate investors are considering their portfolios as well as the planet in backing Harris.
Climate action got short shrift at last week’s Democratic National Convention, but climate investors and founders are clear-eyed about what’s at stake. For starters, Trump has pledged to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits on his first day in office if re-elected.
While awards under the IRA’s $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction are now out the door (see, “Green bank and community lending plans shift into high gear”), Dutta and Yokell worry that other provisions, including Department of Energy clean energy incentives, may be open to challenge.
The long-term vision of Climate for Kamala is to create a new voice for the climate tech industry in Washington, DC, that bridges existing organizations focused on niche areas like wind and solar power, and industry groups like the National Venture Capital Association, the broader industry’s principal lobby and trade group.
“Nobody has really carried what we view as a business-oriented climate agenda,” Yokell told ImpactAlpha.
Dutta — whom Yokell called “the chief instigator” of the new group — along with Dumas and Bell are former Obama administration officials, giving them insights into the DC power corridors that clean tech VCs largely abandoned after the 2007–09 financial crisis decimated the then-nascent industry.
With trade groups and lobbies, “There are these individual verticals — you’ve got the smart grid group, you’ve got the solar group. Each of these has their own constituencies,” Yokell said. “We want to make sure that the climate world has a voice as a general statement.”
Climate for Kamala also includes David Rusenko of Leapforward Ventures; Brandon Hurlburt and Jeff Navin (Boundary Stone Partners); Richard Kauffman at Generate Capital; Mosaic’s Dan Rosen; Kiran Bhatraju of Arcadia; Sophie Purdum of Planeteer Capital; Matt Eggers of Prelude Ventures; Sam Kass of Acre Venture Partners; Nik Mittal of Molecule Ventures; and Leonardo Banchik at Voyager Ventures, among others.
At stake
The investors want to ensure that the hundreds of billions of dollars in incentives for clean energy production, electric vehicles, batteries and green infrastructure created by the IRA and other major legislation enacted under the Biden-Harris administration stay locked in place. They also want to protect nearly $150 billion in incentives and tax credits under the CHIPS and Science Act for American semiconductors manufacturing.
And they want to ensure the US doesn’t fall behind Europe’s clean energy transition and the continued participation of fast-growing polluters China and India in the global transition to a green economy. Coordination between the US and Europe “enables the most secure path forward for global collaboration and participation from China, India, Japan and all of the other governments required for success,” said Regeneration VC co-founder Smith.
The bigger picture for what Dutta called “a loose confederation of venture capitalists and industrialists that can invest in sustainability and climate” centers on the business case for green energy.
He said that those who oppose or deny climate change were setting themselves up to lose political and commercial advantages. He was referring to lawmakers who fail to support the IRA; to companies that don’t rigorously address the material risk of greenhouse gas emissions to their business models; and to the need for an environment in which more startups can economically push forward their development of climate-friendly solutions.
“There is a powerful emerging group of drilled-down, serious industrialists building the decarbonized future,” Dutta added. “Their voices are just starting to emerge. Opponents of decarbonization should tread carefully. We will come for them.”
Policy challenges
Climate change, of course, affects voters of all parties, and red states as well as blue ones. Indeed, repealing the IRA may prove difficult because the law’s tax incentives have predominantly benefited Republican-led states. States like Georgia, Texas and South Carolina have attracted a big share of the nation’s chunks of EV, battery and solar plants and the good-paying jobs that come with them.
Earlier this month, 18 House Republicans signed a letter urging House speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, not to undo the IRA — the first such action by GOP lawmakers.
But they remain a minority in the party. The Project 2025 Agenda prepared by the Heritage Foundation for a second Trump administration takes an ax to the Biden administration’s climate policies, calling for the withdrawal (again) from the Paris climate accord, the expansion of Arctic oil drilling, the repeal of a 2009 EPA finding that carbon dioxide emissions are harmful to human health, and the eradication of references to climate change across the federal government.
Such plans “are a very real and present danger to the delicate progress that the venture, growth and infrastructure communities have been making on bringing the next generation of emission reduction technologies to global scale,” Smith said.
Industry collaboration
As of now, the group isn’t proposing new policies or initiatives.
“This is not a policy platform — this is just to get Harris and Walz elected,” Aligned Climate Capital’s Bell told ImpactAlpha.
The Climate Week fundraiser at the 19th-century Romanesque Revival landmark in Brooklyn, where Domino produced sugar for decades, aims to collect $5 million in $25,000 chunks. Most startup founders are equity-rich but cash-poor, so the group is roping in ultrawealthy individual investors and founders who have sold their startups or taken them public, Yokell said.
An unspecified special guest from the Harris camp will attend. Dutta promised on his LinkedIn page “an amazing band, great food, and a fun god damn time.” The band hasn’t been locked down, but Dutta said he loves Bon Jovi. Suggestions might come from Regeneration VC’s Amsterdam-based Smith, a touring DJ who has performed alongside Guns N Roses, Rihanna and Diplo.
Climate-tech is “a very collaborative industry,” Yokell said. “It has not yet gotten fiercely competitive like traditional venture.”
