If climate technology is dead, what comes next?

Humans have an innate desire to name things, but to be honest, we’re not always very good at it.

Take climate tech: broadly speaking, it’s a category of companies and technologies that seek to minimize or reverse our impact on the climate while helping us adapt to increasing change. On the terms, climate technology isn’t actually bad, as two words define the sector’s focus.

It is certainly better than its predecessor, clean technology. That’s what the climate tech startups today called themselves more than a decade ago. It wasn’t a very good descriptor, though. To the inexperienced, clean technology could mean robotic vacuum cleaners or new household appliances. Climate technology is easier to grasp.

But climate technology is about a decade old, and people like to feel like they’re at the vanguard of something new. This, moreover, has grown to the point where the scope of climate technology has become somewhat unwieldy. Some started explore alternatives over the past year.

Planetary health emerged as an early alternative, first invented in a medical journal Lancet In 2014, some investors huggedin order to solve the problem of partial coverage creep. Many companies are not trying to solve carbon pollution, but are still focusing on technologies that will reduce humanity’s impact on the planet. It has its appeal, but most people are stuck with climate technology.

Later, Donald Trump was elected for the second time. “Climate” has not literally gone from a rumor to a dirty word, but people are actively talking about it. to distance themselves from the term You can fight it if you want, but the exodus actually started before the election. In five years, we will call climate technology something else entirely.

What will happen? People started throwing things at the wall to see what was a stick. Planetary health is an obvious alternative; There is a descriptive and early lead. The American dynamism the platform has a clean energy board, but the term is associated with a single VC firm — a16z, whose partner Katherine Boyle invented it and practices under that name — and it includes many other things, including defense, public safety. , education, housing, etc.

Frontier technology is another, although if you think climate technology is too broad, you won’t necessarily like how much frontier technology covers. Critical infrastructure? This overlaps with climate technology, but the Venn diagram is not a perfect circle. Deep tech is another technology that includes climate technology, but includes many more things like artificial intelligence, robotics, and quantum computing.

It was the latest offer growth technology. I don’t mean to throw stones, but I just can’t see him catching. This is so common – don’t all venture-backed startups aspire to grow? — and it doesn’t capture the essence of what these startups are striving for. Is climate technology likely to create a wave of growth and industrial innovation? You don’t have to look far from China to understand this. But I think there are better conditions.

Since I’m not one to criticize without offering a solution, here’s mine: If we really need a term, I’ll suggest sustainability technology. It’s not perfect and I’ll probably think of something better in the future. But for now, I think it will. It captures the essence of what climate technology is all about: making both the world and humanity more resilient.