Want to Work on Climate? Start Here.

“Semaphore” is an ecological workplace concept created by architect Vincent Callebaut. I want to work here!

👋🏽 I am a seasoned technology startup operator who now works in VC. After deciding I wanted to apply a serious climate lens to the work I do, I started to spend around 15 hours / week learning about this space (see below for how I carved out 15 hours).

Lately, more people I know who work in tech and VC are coming out of the woodwork saying that they too want to “work on climate change” but they’re not exactly sure what that means.

Where should they start? (answer: here)

To share my thoughts on this question, I’ve put together this Climate Focus Guide of the best resources I’ve come across on how to learn about climate change so that you can:

Note: Many of the biggest impact+profit opportunities in climate are big infrastructure or ‘hard tech’ solutions where your current skillset (like mine) may not apply. You can still start working on climate right now from within your current job and life, and to do that effectively, it’s important to commit to the foundational work outlined below. No matter which option above is right for you, everyone’s welcome here.

Click to jump to the Table of Contents

First, how I did all this with a busy day job

Since I have a busy job that I love and yet wanted to make progress in a new area quickly, I did two things that I believe helped me maximize my time and progress:

I’ve included more detail about each of these options in the list below.

The 3 phases of building a Climate Focus: Learning, Connecting, and Staying in the Loop

It’s not enough to watch a few documentaries, read some stressful New York Times articles or even directly peruse the latest IPCC reports (props though).

Climate change is a highly complex systems problem, where coming up with great ideas (or knowing the best companies into which you should invest your time or money) requires a systematic approach to understanding the many facets of the challenge. In other words, you need to invest serious significant time in Learning, Connecting and Staying in the Loop.

With that, let’s have a look at the Climate Focus Guide.

Climate Focus Guide — Table of Contents

This is a long Guide, so I’ve created a Table of Contents to help you navigate. Everything that appears underlined is a hyperlink, and at the end of every section there’s a link back to the Table of Contents. Click to jump straight to any section.

I. LEARNING — PODCASTS 🎧 BOOKS📚 ARTICLES 🖋 & COURSES 📓

II. CONNECTING — SLACK COMMUNITIES 💬 & 1:1 CONVERSATIONS📞

III. STAYING IN THE LOOP — DATABASES 🏫 NEWS SITES 📰 AND POLITICAL ACTION 🗳

Note: If you know of an unmissable resource that I’ve nonetheless managed to miss, please share it in the comments below!

I. LEARNING — PODCASTS 🎧 BOOKS📚 ARTICLES 🖋 & COURSES 📓

Climate change is a complex systems problem, and if you haven’t studied it specifically, chances are there are some things you might be misunderstanding about the science and the possible solutions. Learning is the foundation to figuring out your value-add and connecting with other people who can accelerate your work, and it’s definitely an ongoing journey.

🎧 The 5 best climate podcasts

Useful for surveying the landscape and sampling a bunch of topics, learning on the go or while multitasking

Jason Jacobs founded Runkeeper, sold it to Asics, and then decided climate was more important than anything else he could do. In addition to bringing a useful entrepreneurial lens to his topics, he is a great interviewer who has impressive access to leaders in the private sector, government, and academia, and he asks tough questions when they try to bluster. MCJ also has a very high quality Slack community that you can join (see section on Slack communities below), and recently launched the MCJ Collective, an early stage fund for climate tech.

2. A Matter of Degrees

This podcast by Katharine Wilkinson and Leah Stokes takes more of a storytelling approach to presenting dense information, which makes it easy to listen to no matter how tired your brain is. It’s well-produced (reminiscent of This American Life), the stories are evocative and the hosts are likable and charismatic. There aren’t as many female voices in climate leadership as we need, so it’s extra meaningful that Dr. Wilkinson and Dr. Stokes are the voices behind this content.

3. The Energy Gang

This is a great podcast for those who want to understand the policy and political side of climate. It’s co-hosted by Jigar Shah (who is a hero of mine — see below in Books for why), Katherine Hamilton, and Stephan Lacy. They each offer different voices and don’t always agree, which is one of the highlights of this show. Their differences of opinion are your learning opportunity. It’s a more news-y approach to climate, where they break down timely topics like the election, the new cabinet being appointed, new legislative proposals, and more.

4. The Interchange

This is another podcast by GreenTechMedia, and also cohosted by Stephen Lacy, this time with VC Shayle Kann. I like the focus on emerging opportunities in the private sector, presented in shorter episodes that look at the state of specific technologies and problem sets that you might not be thinking about (like the “embodied carbon” in the buildings that we live, work, shop and play in).

5. Nori — Reversing Climate Change

Nori is a climate tech startup that has done a great job with a podcast that is much more ‘content’ than ‘marketing.’ They do sometimes plug their brand on episodes, but the host, Ross Kenyon, is fun and engaging, and they have some great guests covering everything from “carbon negative carpet” to a journalist who thinks we should aim to increase the US population to 1 billion Americans. It’s great that Nori isn’t afraid to give a platform to controversial discussion topics, and I also appreciate the variety.

Note: There are many more vertical-specific podcasts, so if you’re very interested in energy, policy, etc, you can easily rabbit-hole through additional related suggestions presented in your podcast app.

👆 Return to the Table of Contents

📚 3 Cornerstone climate books

There are many great works on climate change. I’ve included a few of my personal must-reads that seem to guide the most action. I’d love to get tips on next best reads. Amazon pages are linked for convenience, but libraries are great as well!

By Paul Hawken, Katharine Wilkinson (yes! also from A Matter of Degrees)

This book is a beautifully designed and richly researched survey of solutions to climate change. It will leave you feeling hopeful, excited and intrigued by some of the opportunities you read about. It’s a great place to start because it breaks down solutions and their problems into easy-to-remember categories, and helps you learn the terminology. It’s also a great reference book to come back to you as you further your survey, but don’t let it become a ‘coffee table book’ for occasional browsing. I was fortunate to have a book club that forced me to read the whole thing cover to cover, which was incredibly useful in gaining both a broad view and decent fluency in the productive work happening in climate. The book is part of the broader Project Drawdown effort which is itself an incredible resource.

2. The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future

By David Wallace-Wells

The title says it all. This book presents extensive research to show us some probable hell scenarios unless we make meaningful progress on climate change in the next 10 years (preferably sooner). While some in the climate space criticize climate activists for not focusing enough on the “positive,” I think it’s worth noting that there’s actually a lot of negative, and we need both carrot and stick to make things happen.

3. Creating Climate Wealth: Unlocking the Impact Economy

By Jigar Shah

This book was one of the main points of inspiration that shaped my own climate journey. Jigar Shah founded SunEdison, pioneered a new SaaS-like model for financing expensive solar equipment (called the Power Purchase Agreement, still widely used today), and has a matter-of-fact entrepreneur’s attitude to the climate crisis that I personally relate to. Climate is a big problem, and solving big problems in general creates value for a lot of people. When you create a lot of value, you usually get to capture some of that value. There’s a lot more to it, but that is the central message that should be uplifting to any entrepreneurially-minded reader.

👆 Return to the Table of Contents

🖋 8 Must-read articles and inspirational blog posts

In addition to a few key investigative and research articles that really accelerated my understanding (these are often more current than books, naturally), it helped me to read a few people’s more narrative-style blog posts on their own learning path towards climate-focused work. These gave me the emotional strength and personal permission to be more public about my own focus on climate change, so I’m sharing a few here.

Inspirational blog posts

What else I’ve read that’s good

👆 Return to the Table of Contents

📓 This 12-week climate course

Useful for structuring the vast ocean of climate information, identifying mentors, and meeting people with similar interests

Terra.do is the ‘OG’ online climate bootcamp, anchored by professors and scientists who have spent decades studying and pioneering climate science, and built into a friendly and inclusive community and online portal. It’s time intensive, and it isn’t free, but the quality is high.

The geographic and cultural diversity adds a new dimension to understanding climate attitudes and solutions, and is largely missed in most of the other material I’ve seen. For example, I love My Climate Journey and AirMiners, but Terra is the only place where I’ve been able to connect with people who can outline in firsthand detail what is happening on the ground in India, the Philippines, Colombia, and more. In my cohort, there are entrepreneurs, science masters and PhD students looking to get a quick-start before their more intensive full-time programs, engineers, filmmakers, investors, from Europe, North America, South and Southeast Asia, Australia and more.

👆 Return to the Table of Contents

II. CONNECTING — SLACK COMMUNITIES 💬 & 1:1 CONVERSATIONS📞

💬 Top 3 Slack communities

Useful for hooking into a hub of activity and connectivity. Not useful for structured learning or feeling organized in your day!

Great Slack community full of about a 1,200 members, many of whom come from backgrounds in tech (operators covering all functions + founders), finance (VC, PE, investment banking), management consulting and academia. The people in this community are impressively high quality, so this is a treasure trove of potential cofounders, team members, investors, advisors and mentors. Just be careful not to ask them to Google anything for you ;)

2. AirMiners

More focused on carbon removal specifically, AirMiners organizes killer talks over Zoom with deep subject matter experts. This Slack community supports that effort by bringing together a high quality group, many of whom are deeply and directly involved in the space. To me, everyone seems to be an expert, and yet everyone has been very open to contributing guidance to a newbie like me. I’ve had a number of live conversations through connections made in AirMiners.

3. Climate Action Tech

This is an initiative and accompanying Slack community focused on tech workers, particularly engineers, particularly in large tech organizations. Organizing tech workers is an incredibly powerful way to pressure companies to make big changes (see Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, Googlers for Climate Action and Microsoft Workers 4 Good for examples), and technology is a huge emissions generator — all those data centers run on something!

Note: There are many more Slack communities, but there’s also a good amount of overlap between these and other initiatives (eg, a climate course will have its own Slack, a climate political action org will have its own Slack). These are a great place to start, and if you find you need even more, then might I suggest you spend some of that time on Books / Courses / Conversations? See below.

👆 Return to the Table of Contents

📞 1:1 Conversations that are worth everyone’s time

Working in VC, my job is to build and nurture relationships. This has given me very useful skills on the climate path, as most people in this space — no matter how ‘high up’ — are pretty open to spending a few minutes speaking with you to share knowledge and help guide your path.

The Learning steps above are a crucial prerequisite to having productive conversations that don’t waste the other person’s time; better to do your time there first, before asking a time-constrained expert to help you answer questions that are Google-able. When you do arrive at the master’s doorstep, your shared time together will be much higher leverage.

How I did it with a busy day job

I set up 3–5 new calls per week with other folks working in climate, usually in the later afternoon or weekend time slots when my schedule is less packed with normal work activities.

There is nothing like learning-by-building, and the second best to that is learning by talking to those who are building.

Tactical tip — date your notes

Working in VC, I have been trained to take detailed notes on every conversation because I know I won’t remember the details in 6 days, let alone in 6 months when the minute details of that conversation might become relevant again.

I keep a running file for each person or entity that I speak with, with a different date stamp for each conversation. I manually add the date stamp, so that even if I go in and edit something later, which changes the auto-generated date stamp, I still know exactly when the original conversation happened. (Note: I keep this low-tech and simply use the Notes app, which syncs between my iPhone and my laptop so I always have the notes on hand.)

👆 Return to the Table of Contents

III. STAYING IN THE LOOP — DATABASES 🏫 NEWS SITES 📰 AND POLITICAL ACTION 🗳

🏫 3 Useful climate startup / company trackers

Useful for quick lookups, reference and context. No need to reinvent any wheels here!

2. ClimateScape.org is a comprehensive repository of organizations and funders. As a web product, it’s structured more like an actual searchable DB, so it’s handy for doing quick research by category. They have great coverage, but are understandably missing some smaller / fast-emerging startups. Their coverage includes:

3. Carbon Plan is a massive database of carbon removal projects and companies, accompanied by in-depth research on different aspects of carbon removal

👆 Return to the Table of Contents

👩🏻‍🏭 2 Great job-finding resources

If you’re looking for a job in a climate company, here are some tools for that:

👆 Return to the Table of Contents

📰 My top 7 climate news sites

I’m a news-addict, but I also personally find it’s all too easy to scroll general climate headlines all day long, and the forget what you really learned at the end of it all.

So, I think this category is great for following specific topics you’re more interested in, after you’ve done a general survey of all that’s out there on climate. Otherwise, it could mind-boggle you with the trees and distract you from seeing the forest, if that makes sense?

👆 Return to the Table of Contents

🗳 3 Ways to take political action

Policy is a massive enabler, and none of the incredible progress we’ve seen in climate would be possible without the activism that shapes it. The legacy energy industry has had “activists” fighting to forward its causes for over a century, and this work has been highly effective in shaping policy, which then shapes industry and even influences consumer behavior. Fortunately, there are also some very smart organizers pushing for positive change on climate.

👆 Return to the Table of Contents

What climate change resources have you most loved? Please share and leave a comment below.

Special thanks to Fabri Caracausi and Jose Montoro for their edits and improvements.

--

--

Investing in a climate-positive future at Toba Capital. Ex Sound Ventures, Stripe, Reforge, 500 Startups.

Get the Medium app

A button that says 'Download on the App Store', and if clicked it will lead you to the iOS App store
A button that says 'Get it on, Google Play', and if clicked it will lead you to the Google Play store
Susan Su

Investing in a climate-positive future at Toba Capital. Ex Sound Ventures, Stripe, Reforge, 500 Startups.