Why Theranos Makes Me Worry About the Green Technology Revolution
Brief thoughts on "Don't Look Up" also included for maximum clickbait
My main thought while watching Don’t Look Up was: “Would that it were so simple.” The movie is an allegory for climate change, but the threat (a comet) differs from climate change in several key ways. A comet is an immediate threat with an obvious solution. It requires no collective action and affects everyone equally. Scientists can describe exactly what will happen with a high level of certainty. I wish a comet was going to hit us;1 that would be fantastic. But our challenge is climate change, which mostly affects other people’s grandkids, i.e. the single least-given-a-shit-about demographic on Earth.
The good news is that it’s getting easier to imagine what a zero-carbon future would look like. Green energy and electric cars are an ever-larger part of our lives. Game-changing technologies like fusion power might be over the horizon. Real money is also lining up behind this stuff: Investment in climate tech is up 210 percent over last year — PwC puts it at $222 billion — and, incredibly, the half a trillion dollars for climate spending in the Build Back Better bill is not the part that’s causing Joe Manchin to lose his shit!
That’s all extremely good news. I mean extremely good news — it’s exactly what we need. Unfortunately, this blog has principles, which I keep to about 40 percent of the time, and two of those principles are “be curious” and “be honest”. And if I’m being honest: I detect a certain amount of techno-hype bullshit in this green revolution. I wonder how much of that $222 billion is chasing pie-in-the-sky claims by CEOs who won't be able to deliver. Of course, some bullshit is inevitable; people who run startups need to work in bullshit the way Michelangelo worked in marble, or else they won’t get funded. But the odd and captivating story of Theranos makes me wonder: Exactly how much bullshit are we talking about here?