Happy St. Patrick’s Day as Callaway Climate Insights turns 5
The climate fight shifts to defense.
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When we launched Callaway Climate Insights five years ago, it was St. Patrick’s Day, the first day of Covid lockdown in California, Donald Trump was president, and climate change threatened the world.
Five years and an entire stock market cycle and presidential term later, Covid has weakened and the hangovers from celebrating the Irish will soon be gone. But the twin threats of Trump and climate change remain very much in place.
I chose climate finance to cover in my next chapter as a journalist because I knew it was an existential threat that will be with us for the rest of my life. The entrepreneurs and investors seeking to mitigate the crisis will go down in history as the heroes of our era.
But I underestimated the extent of the threat to their efforts from the forces of denial and political expediency. And the re-emergence of the dark Trump forces means climate advocates are now very much on the defensive.
That first column on Callaway Climate Insights:
David Callaway explains why this column is called Zeus in The coming battle with the climate gods: How mortal innovators and investors will save the planet.
It’s a far cry from the days when Wall Street was rushing to create environmental, social and governance (ESG) funds to feed investor demand and electric vehicle and charging station startups dominated the risk end of a hot market.
Now many of those startups and funds have been washed away, victims of inflation, high interest rates and the rush for immediate energy sources for AI data centers.
Hostility toward international climate cooperation in Washington has spread to Europe and Asia and in some ways left China as the only major player in renewable energy circles, despite its continued reliance on oil and gas.
Trump’s threats to the climate movement have even begun to move beyond cutting subsidies and government involvement to actively investigating climate groups and political opponents for fraud for climate fundraising and spending.
But outside of the political vitriol and economic pressure, climate entrepreneurs and investors are still going strong. U.S. energy capacity in solar and wind last year surpassed coal for the first time, accounting for about 17% of the country’s energy usage, according to energy think tank Ember.
Battery storage makers, plastic and carbon removal companies and unique companies that help fight wildfires or track weather data are increasingly replacing government entities strained by budget cuts and layoffs.
The short-term story has changed but the game remains the same. Climate change doesn’t care who denies it. Market cycles and political power struggles mean nothing to an environment locked into a brutal and unchanging path.
In short, like the centuries-old story of the Irish themselves this St. Patrick’s Day, this is long ball. We don’t know where the markets and politics will be in five years, but we expect to be here to tell the stories and share the insights of the only real battle that matters. Happy St. Patrick’s Day.
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Happy birthday, Ellen. Hang in there. It will get better. Cheers. Dave
Congratulations on your fifth anniversary! Yesterday was my seventy-fifth birthday, and I must say, I am more discouraged than ever. But maybe I’m wrong. As a Californian, I’m starting to grow more of my own food, which is pretty easy in the Bay Area. We’re redoing our whole yard, food garden, fruit trees, and native plants, although it almost killed me to tear up everything that was there. Take care. Oh, and I guess I should say, we’re getting a battery storage device for our solar, at the end of April, I think.