Hello from Singapore (not Sharm El-Sheikh), where I am joining the fifth annual Bloomberg
The past few weeks in the technology sector have been eventful, and for many people, painful. Some of the largest and most established firms have laid off tens of thousands of employees, bringing the total so far this year to more than
The world of climate, meanwhile, is moving in the opposite direction. Climate-tech venture funding is
Tech is shedding jobs, and in places, shedding luster. Climate is expanding, and so are its human capital needs. If this sounds like the start of a great rotation in attention, interest, and employment — it could be.
Peter Reinhardt, the founder of carbon capture company Charm Industrial, recently posted a roadmap for where people with certain software skills might find a
It is not only the tech skills of tech, so to speak, that will be of value for climate companies. At the New Economy Forum I caught up with Parag Khanna, the Singapore-based author and himself the chief executive of a climate company (it uses AI to forecast climate risks to real estate). Khanna noted that climate businesses are also going to need general corporate skills as they grow, including in areas that are less cutting-edge but no less essential. Experience with significant scaling is one such skill: Very rapid corporate growth is impossible to learn in the abstract. Successful climate businesses will scale to the point that they inevitably encounter policy and regulatory challenges, the navigation of which could be critical to global success. Experience navigating complex policy, regulatory, and political environments is also something that many former tech workers have.
As Conor Sen, my colleague at Bloomberg Opinion, has written, the sour taste left from the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX might change how people look at "the
I would argue that climate fits that bill, even if many people in the field are still wearing hoodies (I cannot speak to the beanbags). Note that the issue of climate change has been normalized enough that the recent passage of the IRA
As I was writing this column, I received an alert for an online event hosted by the jobs board Climatebase that's
Nat Bullard is a senior contributor to BloombergNEF and Bloomberg Green. He is a venture partner at Voyager, an early-stage climate technology investor.
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Nathaniel Bullard in Washington at