Act II: Lowercarbon Capital

When disaster strikes, what people need isn’t complicated: somewhere safe to stay, a place to rebuild, and the coverage to make them whole. Yet time and time again, those basics fall through. Following record flooding in Florida in 2024, fewer than ten percent of those approved for temporary housing actually got it. Six months after

The best battery upgrade? The one you can have right now. Recently, Chinese EV giant BYD and battery maker CATL made waves with some big promises about ultra fast-charging cars. But, those claims come with a catch: to reap the benefits these new batteries supposedly deliver, they will first need massive investments in brand new

The Colorado River, a lifeline for 40 million Americans, is so dry these days that the Hoover Dam’s turbines barely spin for months each year. Phoenix has halted some housing permits because the aquifer is just about tapped out. In the last few years, Mexico City and Cape Town nearly hit “Day Zero,” when residents

Two years ago, Lowercarbon proudly put the first dollars into Crux, a startup Alfred Johnson and Allen Kramer co-founded to capitalize America’s energy and manufacturing superiority. They saw a great wedge: transferable tax credits, which went from non-existent when they incorporated to a multibillion-dollar market within months. Everything they had worked on over their careers

Fixing an industry broken by climate change.  As convective storms, wildfires, and floods get more frequent, more intense, and more common in areas that were previously in the “No worries, guys, we’re fine” zone, property owners are becoming more dependent on insurance. But just when they’re needed most, insurance companies have been leaving owners high

Lessons from Pitch Deck Mountain.  There’s plenty of chatter these days about the dreaded “growth-stage gap” in climate tech and hardtech — the Bermuda Triangle where many promising startups vanish before they can raise that coveted Series B. As you can imagine, with over 120 portfolio companies, and a couple billion dollars under management for

Crazy is just another word for massive untapped potential.  Most ideas that change the world sound pretty bonkers at first. Phytomining, for example — using plants to “farm” metals — was once a pipe dream. Certain scientists have pursued it for decades, but it was mostly written off as too inefficient and expensive to be

We owe a lot to cement. Buildings, bridges, a dangerously warming planet. No building material on Earth emits more CO2 than cement. And no building material is more ubiquitous. See where I’m going with this? For those keeping score at home, cement production makes up a full 8% of all global CO2 emissions.  In no

It’s a new day for carbon markets. Carbon removal is on a roll, with total carbon sales in the last year alone jumping a staggering 600%. But to scale the industry from billions of dollars a year to tens of billions and beyond, someone has to rebuild trust in carbon markets, fixing the reputational damage

Building climate tech isn’t like building software. Not even close. You can’t troubleshoot a first-of-its-kind carbon capture device by A/B testing from a comfy office or by sending out user surveys. Of course, you can model a lot of carbon capture on a computer, or even do a whole Ph.D. on it. (I actually did.)