👋 Hello to 17 new readers who joined in the past three days! We are 291 climate buddies 🌳

This is the second time this week that you hear from me. Usually, I write on a weekly cadence but boy oh boy was The Drop conference awesome. Yesterday evening when I got home, my girlfriend asked me how it was and I said: “It was the most magical experience I’ve had in a long long time.” I’m beaming 🤩

All the impressions and inspiration have to be put in writing. I promise, this essay will be a fun one.

I drank the climate tech Kool-Aid a while ago.

In a recent essay titled “Climate Tech: The Greatest Game”, I summarized my core belief:

I understood it in abstract terms but this week I felt it. Finally.

Before we dive into climate, I’d like us back to 1897.

My hometown - Vienna - was at its peak. The capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire, one of the largest metropoles in the world, and a melting pot of various cultures. The quintessential manifestation of the time was the Viennese Coffee House - a place to meet, discuss, and inspire.

Cafe Griensteidl was chief amongst them because it was the watering hole for some of the luminaries of that time:

It was a hodgepodge of ideas and looked something like this 👇

Tim Urban - the crazy mind behind Waitbutwhy - would call this an Idea Lab. A space that favors (a) independent thought, (b) intellectual diversity, (c) humility, (d) and most importantly productive arguments. This era was called Fin-de-siècle Vienna and was the catalyst for progress across arts and sciences.

2022 in climate has similarities to 1897’s Vienna. Let me explain 🌳

The term ‘Scenius’ was coined by musical pioneer Brian Eno, who described it as “the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.”

Scenius is an answer to one of the most important questions of historians: “Why are some periods and places so astonishingly more productive than the rest?”

Packy McCormick wrote a seminal essay on this topic called “Conjuring Scenius”. Seriously, grab a coffee and read it on a weekend. In it, he walks through various periods, which have driven tremendous progress. Unsurprisingly, Fin-de-siècle Vienna was among those.

But Packy didn’t only lay out the historical context, he also created a list of ingredients, which help kickstarting a scenius:

Let’s see how all of these play out in the current environment and why we see the Emergence of Climate Scenius.

So here are the four ingredients as I perceive them right now:

The Renaissance followed the Bubonic Plague, Les Années folles arose after the first World War, and Silicon Valley was the result of the defense ramp-up during World War 2.

Now, we have at least three separate catalytic currents:

The result is a highly dynamic environment. All rules are tossed out of the window and new ones are being made up on the fly. This might look like “risk” to some but the other side of the same medal lies reads “opportunity”.

Additionally, crises harden people, as Sebastian Junger wrote in his book Tribe:

We share the pain.

In this industry, we have a commonly understood Everest that all of us are aiming for: Net Zero carbon emissions by 2050.

It is ambitious yet achievable. It is quantified yet leaves enough room for creativity. It is the social contract we had been missing for many years.

Packy McCormick argued a super important point in his essay:

In climate, this objectivity is carbon. We are measuring everything in terms of emission reduction, emission avoidance, and carbon capture. This fosters creativity and accelerates innovation. The variety of solutions (technology, biology, chemistry, social adaptation, synthetics, etc.) in climate tech is just mind boggling 🤯

We have a common goal.

It’s no longer 1897 but community and interaction are still important.

Luckily, we have expanded our ways of interacting with each other. Many people I met at The Drop use the following mechanisms to increase inspiration and serendipity:

All of the above leads to sharing of learnings and failures, co-investing opportunities, and general network effects, which benefit the entire industry. Remember, you’re just one question away from a life-changing introduction.

We succeed together.

In “Climate Tech: The Greatest Game”, I wrote:

This was before actually meeting this journey group in person. And what a difference that makes.

In the two days in Malmo, I met plant scientists who are now funding carbon capture companies, industrial designers who act as futurists to help companies imagine solutions for the future, and entrepreneurs with fuck-you-money who still wake up every single day with the single goal to give us a fighting chance against climate change. All of this diversity is fueling our own creativity.

We improve together.

Maybe there’s something wrong with my brain but every time I think about the conference, the climate buddies, and the mission at hand, I feel high!

It energizes me beyond belief and increases my conviction that this is the way. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if in a couple of decades we look back on today and see that this was the origin of a Green Rockefeller.

This week alone we had two massive gatherings: The Drop conference in Malmo and Climate Week New York. What we’re seeing is a ton of driven people who are tinkering with the world around them. It goes beyond bits and into the realm of atoms. We are working with the fundamental building blocks of our world: elements, infrastructure, and economies.

Some are building the utilities of the future, others are developing foundational technologies, and the rest is exploring all the various nooks that this game has to offer. This diversity drives the Emergence of Climate Scenius.

We share the pain.

We have a common goal.

We succeed together.

We improve together.

As I mentioned, I drank the Kool-Aid a while ago but now I’m starting to sell it 🙌

Want to join? If yes, ping me and let’s chat.