Dispatch from TechCrunch Climate Summit
Written by Allyson Beach
Innovators, VCs, and funds gathered at UC Berkeley for the TechCrunch Session: Climate 2022 to discuss the future of climate tech. While growing innovation signals a shift towards climate investment, panelists made one thing clear: it’s not enough.
In the session “How Corporations Can Be Better Citizens,” Jet Blue Technology Ventures President Amy Burr spoke about the effect of the recent SEC climate disclosure proposal: “Disclosing information like this is one of the best ways to drive change. You know, if you don’t measure it, if you don’t look at it on a really regular basis, you’re not going to actually enact the change you’re looking for.”
Mark Kroese, General Manager of Sustainability Solutions at Microsoft followed, “We think it’s a great thing. Microsoft has an open letter to the SEC advocating for this…We’re in the ‘pledges to progress’ transition. So a lot of companies made net-zero pledges - about 2,700 - and we now need to make progress. And I hear it every day in our executive briefings where companies are like ‘help us, help us, help us.’ So [the SEC rule] will be an accelerant to innovation and an accelerant to accountability and transparency – and it’s a good thing.”
Regulators are just one of many stakeholder groups that expect greater transparency and corporate action on sustainability and diversity. Kroese shared, “I think we’re in a really encouraging era where I think the heart and soul of companies now is to do the right thing. And a lot of it is because consumers are not going to buy from companies. And the younger they are, the more Millennial, the more Gen Z, they’re just not going to buy from companies that aren’t doing the right thing.” Disclosure will identify corporate sustainability challenges, which will require scaling innovation to solve those gaps.
Conversations called for companies at every stage to take action -- even those just starting out. In a discussion between William Collins, the Director of the Climate & Ecosystem Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and TechCrunch writer Harri Weber, Collins addressed one way new companies should take action: “The first question I would ask is, ‘Does your company have a Chief Sustainability Officer? Is there somebody in the C suite whose job it is to look at the sustainability of your operations?’ I would then ask, ‘What is it that the CSO is doing in terms of a strategic implementation plan to reduce the carbon intensity of your operations?’” Weber concluded, “At least at the smallest scale, seek out expertise as best you can.”
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