Can entrepreneurs save the climate?

That’s the question Dan Lashof of NRDC leads with in his review of Cold Cash, Cool Climate.  Lashof has published extensively on climate science and policy, so I was happy he chose to review the book.  Here are the first few paragraphs of the review:

“Entrepreneurs have to be optimists. They invest their energy, time, and money based on their vision for the future. Many times their optimism isn’t justified and their enterprise fails. But sometimes they succeed. And when they do they create the future.

This is exactly the approach we need to create a safer climate future argues Jonathan Koomey in his new book Cold Cash, Cool Climate: Science-Based Advice for Ecological Entrepreneurs. Koomey’s approach is best summarized by the quote from Alan Kay that he uses to introduce Chapter 3. “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

There are plenty of reasons to be pessimistic about our chances of success and Koomey fully recognizes the scale of the challenge. In fact the book includes a nice summary of climate science and lays out clearly the very rapid rate of change needed to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, a goal Koomey adopts as his design objective. To get there he notes that not only must new capital investments be focused on zero or very low emission technologies, but some of the existing capital stock will need to be scrapped before the end of what is currently considered its useful life.”

To read the full post, go here.

---