The first cleantech bubble burst in the oughts, but the industry didn’t go away. And now, we’ve entered a second big wave of "climatetech" investment.
So, is this wave more promising than the first? Are we moving into a golden age for climatetech? Or is it too dissimilar to make comparisons?
Joel Makower is Cofounder and Chairman of GreenBiz, a leading media and events company at the intersection of business, sustainability, and innovation. He also serves as cohost of theGreenBiz 350 Podcast.
On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Joel joins Ross to discuss how climatetech may have followed the Gartner Hype Cycle and describe what factors caused the first cleantech bubble to burst.
Joel explains why corporations are much more involved in Cleantech 2.0 and explores the ongoing politicization of climate change, despite the efforts of some (like the military) to prepare for a climate crisis.
Listen in for Joel’s insight on the near future of climatetech and learn about the extraordinary opportunity he believes we have to reinvent our world in a way that will benefit everyone.
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Resources
The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future by Senator James Inhofe
Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m the creative editor of Nori and one of the co-founders there too. Today I have with me Joel McCower, Chairman and Co-Founder of Green Biz Group and Co-host of the Green Biz 350 Podcast. Hey, Joel. Hey, Ross. Hey, happy to have you here. I know you have a big conference coming up. Well, it seems like you always have big conferences coming up. There’s so many Green Biz available.
But you’ve been in clean tech for a very long time. I think you’ve probably seen virtually every trend come and go. I want to dive into that whole experience, what you forecast for the future. But why don’t we start at the conferences on what Green Biz is?
Joel Makower: Sure. Well, first of all, thanks. It’s great to be here. And thanks for having me on your show. So Green Biz is a media and events company based in Oakland, California. We convene people. We take on the climate challenge by creating communities that create action. Four basic topics that we lean into. One is the profession of sustainability inside companies, particularly large companies. And there’s a conference around that called Green Biz every February in Phoenix. The Circular Economy, which is a conference called Circularity.
This will be in May in Seattle this year, next year, 2023. Green Fin and ESG, which is a conference called Green Fin, which will be in Boston also in May. And then our biggest one is called Verge, which as we’re recording this, we just had at the end of October In San Jose, California, we had about 4,000 people. That focuses on climate tech. And it’s a big expo at a convention center and all that. So we have the media piece in each of those four quadrants.
We have pure networks. We have media. We do a lot of other things as well.
Ross Kenyon: We went to Verge several years ago and had a great time too. I can’t remember the last conference I went to, Joel. This could have been three years ago. It could have been five years ago. I can’t even. Who knows? Time is who knows anymore. Some point in the past, I went to Verge and had a good time. That much can be said with certainty.
Joel Makower: I’m glad to hear that. You know, it’s like what I think Robin Williams said about the 60s. If you remember the 60s, you weren’t really there. So, you know, there you go. You think you’re at Verge. So, here you go.
Ross Kenyon: That makes me feel a bit better then. Yeah. Well, what have you seen in this time? I mean, Green Biz has been around for a long time. You’ve been working in Cleantech for a long time. How did you get into it? What have you seen over the years? And I mean, I feel like you could fill up a lot of time with this, Joel. There’s probably a lot to say, but I’ll just give you first crack at it. Yeah.
Joel Makower: Well, first of all, there are two separate stories. How did I get into it? And what did I see along the way? I mean, I’m a journalist by training. I’ve also been self-employed for my entire career, 40 some years and started, have founded or co-founded three companies in the All of the information services and events space, including one called Clean Edge in a 2001 timeframe, which is still around. I’m not involved anymore looking at the clean tech space. But even before that, I created Green Biz as a website in the late 90s.
And then it grew into the company that is now 60, 70 people all over the place and all the events and things that I mentioned. But on parallel processing and the clean tech 1.0, Back in, as I said, 2000, started this company and sort of looking at what was going on out there in terms of that first wave and all the innovation and the venture capitalists and the promise, but turns out not so much actual performance of the companies that we invested. I was an advisor to a billion dollar clean tech fund and it didn’t do much except for a little car company founded by a guy called Elon.
It was the only thing that actually had a success at all. And then clean tech sort of crashed and burned in around 2010 and 11. Solyndra got politicized and didn’t go away in the same way that the internet didn’t go away after the dot-com crash in 2000, 2001. But what we saw happening, and Ross, I’m sure you know the Gartner hype cycle, which is where we go across technologies and other trends where it sort of starts and then goes up to what’s called the peak of inflated expectations, and then it crashes and burns into the Trough of disillusionment.
And then it starts to slowly claw its way back through the slope of enlightenment and finally finds its setting at, it’s called the plateau of productivity. And you can track every technology in your life or before and everyone going forward. And you can go on the internet and type in hype curve and you’ll see a thousand or 10,000 different hype curves that folks have created. Gartner actually created it and I think still may own the rights to that, but everyone’s sort of done that. And so 2010, 11 was sort of that trough of disillusionment for cleantech.
And out of that, but at the same time, we started to see that something else was happening, which is that the corporates who really hadn’t been involved. I think there was a period of time in the 2000s when I was the only person who went to both cleantech and sustainable business conferences, literally. And then they started to be around 2010. A little bit of overlap. And what happened was that the corporate started to come in to say, well, they’re customers of these technologies. They’re licensors, acquirers, some cases originators through R&D of these technologies.
And that’s when we saw this mashup of the tech world and the corporate world that I had been, as I said, were two circles trying to become a Venn diagram. And they finally did that. And so that was really a pivotal moment for us. And that’s how Verge was born back about 10 years ago, where we saw that these are not just technologies, but now markets.
Ross Kenyon: What happened with the first clean tech bubble? Many people listening were probably not that involved at that time. What’s the story of it?
Joel Makower: Well, I think a lot of it was literally inflated expectations. A lot of the investors who had been through the IT revolutions and the web and a Assumed it was going to be similar. You throw some money at things and in two, three years or less, in some cases, you have an IPO and move on. And it turns out that reinventing the energy systems, reinventing transportation systems, buildings, and on and on, not so easy. And huge incumbent interests who were fat and happy didn’t want to be disrupted.
And the market wasn’t ready and these technologies took many more years to mature to be market ready than certainly in the dot com era where you had two guys in a golden retriever and six months later an IPO. That was a lot of it. And then the fossil fuel industries were digging their heels in around climate and creating false information about that. So the urgency wasn’t there. And then some of the technologies, the entrepreneurs were probably not ready as well because they maybe had come out of the dot-com world and said, oh, let’s do something in cleantech.
I mean, I know entrepreneurs who did that, some successfully, very successfully, and many not so much. So it was really a confluence of forces that, and then it got politicized. And all of a sudden, investors and others were a little bit challenged to take things on. And even this is now in the Obama era when there was a lot more support here in the United States for climate action and for technology uptake. It still was a big challenge. So we got through that. And then the investors got more realistic.
The entrepreneurs, I think, got more realistic. A lot of technology developments, I think, enabled the smart everything world, the electrification everything world that we’re now seeing. And I think that helped bring about a... Second wave, which frankly, we don’t call clean tech anymore. We call it climate tech. And I think that seems to be the term du jour at least. But now climate tech is a rapidly growing piece of this. And if you look at what happened in the federal government and the Inflation Reduction Act and several other things coming out of the Biden administration and the Congress, they’re leaning into climate tech in a very big way.
We can get more into some of that.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’d be very curious to know about what parallels and the differences with this tech boom that we’re in now for climate tech. Although I’m seeing a lot of old records and posters. I see Big Brother and the Holding Company, Mothers of Invention, and a couple others here. I’m wondering, was Solyndra the ultimate moment of the clean tech bubble? Can you say that?
Joel Makower: Oh, yes. Yeah, that’s probably a good analogy. You’re talking about the wall behind me. A lot of people, professionals, have their credentials back there. I’ve got a dozen posters from the Fillmore and Avalon Ballroom growing up here in the Bay Area, San Francisco Bay Area. All the Bill Graham shows, right? Bill Graham and the Family Dog, the two competing venues. Those are kind of my credentials. Not really, but yeah. So Altamont was, yeah, that was the Rolling Stone concert in, I think, 70, 71, where...
Hell’s Angels got involved in security. There were fights breaking out. One person died and it was sort of the nadir, not Ralph, but the low point of rock performance after Woodstock and a whole, you know, the sort of golden age of rock concerts. And rock concerts didn’t go away, as you may have noticed. And it’s just things got more buttoned down, more corporate, a lot more. I mean, you didn’t have anybody sponsoring Woodstock, no Miller Coors signs or Camel or God knows or anybody else.
And so now that’s a very different world. And I think technologies and business models are They grow up like the rest of us, hopefully. And that’s certainly the case in the climate tech world.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, you have this sort of like high watermark and then it bursts and then it seems like maybe clean tech, climate tech, whatever taxonomy we want to introduce here. Takes a couple of years off. Investors, it’s in this trough of disillusionment period. And then at some point, I’m not sure how many years ago, it starts to recover. And now we’re in something related, but different. Maybe it’s worth contrasting what you see are the differences between the two or what’s different this time.
Joel Makower: Well, yeah, I mean, it didn’t really go away any more than the internet went away after the dot-com crash. This is, I think, where things get interesting and also complex because People refer to clean tech, now climate tech, as the technologies that are sort of obvious around You know, like solar and wind and electric vehicles. And there’s a thousand other technologies out there that all are, you know, are making things efficient. It’s challenging because people, you know, do you talk about someone working, you know, obviously battery technologies, but do you talk about, you know, innovative new chemicals made from plants instead of petroleum?
Is that climate tech? I mean, you know, I don’t know, but it goes into making things lighter and less carbon intensive and Maybe more resilient because you don’t have to rely on the vagaries of fossil fuel prices and other things. And you could go on and on. There’s lots and lots and lots of sort of technologies and sub-technologies. And then you fold in things like robotics and sensors and synthetic biology and just a whole list of 3D printing and optical scanning and remote sensing and those are all blockchain.
Those are all part of what’s making this next movement or wave, I guess, of technologies possible. So you take precision ag, water tech, optical scanning, and robotics just to pick four technologies. And all of a sudden, you’re growing food with a small fraction of the water that you used to. And is that climate tech? Well... You know, arguably, if you can grow more food on less land and deplete the soil less and improve people’s lives and move the needle on some issues, I guess. But it doesn’t really matter what you call it.
They’re just better technologies.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, in some ways, it’s just a marketing term. If you make a better video gaming experience and people are staying home rather than driving somewhere to do something outside, it might be lower emissions. Is that climate tech? I don’t know.
Joel Makower: Yeah, that may be a stretch, but yeah, you’re right. The point is dead on that there’s a lot of things that we do to reduce emissions, use resources more efficiently, create circular business models that aren’t generally considered at least haven’t been considered clean tech or climate tech, and yet they are critical to sustainability and to reducing the impacts of climate. There’s a lot of things in food, for example, food production, food growing, food waste, as I just mentioned on the WaterTech optical scanning robotics and precision ag where you’re doing a fraction of the water that are in this mix.
And again, how do we think about those? So these labels really are sort of arbitrary and not so helpful.
Ross Kenyon: Maybe less arbitrary as you’ve mentioned a few times that this climate tech experience this time around feels much more corporate than the previous clean tech bubble. There’s probably a more neutral way to say it than the bubble, but am I understanding you correctly?
Joel Makower: Well, I think the corporates are much more involved and they’re involved at the R&D stage. They have their corporate venturing arms that didn’t care about this stuff 10 years ago or even five that are now.
Ross Kenyon: 10 years ago, was it much more just like only startups or sort of like permaculture weirdos hanging out or what was it?
Joel Makower: Yeah. I mean, or it was things that just weren’t... Look, this all syncs up with the trends of corporate net zero commitments and the rise of ESG and investor pressures around risk, climate risk in particular. And so there was no... I hate to use this term, but I’ll use it, burning platform that was... Really pushing companies to do these things they were nice to do’s at best. And now they need these technologies. They need to, in their supply chains, in their own production, if they’re a manufacturer, they need to reduce risk.
They need to improve, reducing risk includes things like business continuity risk as floods and hurricanes and droughts and other things up in supply chains as we’ve seen, or pandemics as we’ve seen so much in the past few years. So this is getting corporates where they live now. They have to be doing this. And so they’re looking for these technologies. They’re hungry for some of these technologies. Not every company, but a lot of them. And so they’re, in many cases, the smart ones, they’re linking arms with some of the entrepreneurs and saying, well, this is, you know, This fuel cell you’ve developed could do any number of 14 different things.
But here’s the thing we need. We need specifically to this kind of vehicle or this kind of application. And so the entrepreneur says, well, that’s interesting. I hadn’t been looking at that. I’ve been looking at seven other things. Maybe that’s the way we should go. And that’s the way you get to market faster. So I think that’s a really interesting space. And You know, one of the challenges for entrepreneurs is how do you have those conversations with companies and how do you get in the door?
And that’s not an easy answer.
Ross Kenyon: And during the cleantech bubble, you think corporates could afford to ignore climate change in a way that we’re now it no longer even makes just bottom line sense to do so?
Joel Makower: Well, yeah, I mean, the bottom line piece of that still is challenging for some, but the question is, do you invest in this stuff, even though the paybacks may not meet your traditional hurdle rates in your company or your fund, because A, you believe in it, B, you think there’s a payoff that’s longer term down the road, or C, because you have to, because this is an investment you have to make to increase, to reduce risk. I mean, a lot of this For all the talk about doing good and saving the world and the earth and all that, a lot of this really boils down to one word, risk.
Financial risk, reputational risk, technology risk, transitional risk, right? To operate risk and on and on. And so companies, they know about risk. They have risk departments. They have folks who factor this stuff in. And by the way, risk isn’t always a bad thing. Everything we do has a risk component, maybe a really low risk, and maybe a higher risk. And sometimes that higher risk is worth taking because of some circumstance that But weighing risk is something companies do very well. And now climate, if only by virtue of the mainstream investment community, has become a risk factor.
And companies not paying attention to climate are increasing any number of risks that investors, frankly, care about.
Ross Kenyon: Maybe it’s the long shadow of Solyndra, but I associate Cleantech Bubble 1.0 as being a solar driven experience. Is that a total misinterpretation?
Joel Makower: Yeah. I mean, first of all, for people who didn’t happen to be in this space, and Solyndra was a solar company, actually a tube kind of solar collector. So that’s hence the cylindrical part of Solyndra that captured light from all dimensions or captured sunlight in all dimensions and
Ross Kenyon: therefore was going to be more efficient, which has always been the big gating issue
Joel Makower: with solar is how many photons can you convert into electrons? And they got some hundreds of millions of dollars from federal government funding, and then they went bust. And the Republicans glommed onto that, saying, that’s a waste. This is all a waste. It’s a boondoggle. It’s a caving to Al Gore and his rich friends who are all trying to make money. They added a million things, as they do. And the fact is, there’s two things. Federal government make trillions of dollars of investment through the Defense Department and technologies that never see the light of day.
So this was not even a fraction of a percent relative to that. And number two, that’s what these innovations are about. And out of failure comes successes and comes lessons. And nobody seems to get that. And by the way, there was also the aforementioned car company called Tesla that was part of the same loan program. That paid its loans back with interest early and turned into the company it’s become. So nobody talks about, thank you, federal government for backing that. They just talked about how dare you waste money on some solar boondoggle because it didn’t work out.
I’m sorry, to your question, there were a lot of other technologies. There are battery technologies and fuel cells and biomass and chemicals that And e-bikes and a lot of things that, frankly, we now take for granted are part and parcel of our day, but were early and disruptive back then and probably not ready for prime time.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. All those things I associate with the last couple of years, I see e-bikes constantly all day, every day now, but even two years ago, I’m not even sure that I would have seen it to this frequency. So I don’t even really associate those with the first cleantech explosion. And maybe that’s just a failure of the longevity of my watching here that I really should be looking farther back in time, watching these first developments before they’re ubiquitous. That’s where this is happening is, you know, 20 years ago, 15 years ago.
Joel Makower: Yeah, I’m not sure how much you need to look back as much as just look forward. But yeah, there was a very broad range of technology, some of which, as I said, e-bikes proposed, they went away, and then they came back. And the market wasn’t ready, the technology wasn’t ready, the incentives weren’t there, the cultural buy-in may not have been there. All the things that made it successful ultimately probably weren’t in place. Market timing is critical on these technologies. And you can have the best technologies that just aren’t ready for the market or they’re missing one piece of not just technology, but think about policies, enabling policies.
And we’re now seeing... Some states and localities giving rebates to e-bikes, encouraging those. And so that’s spurring the market. We’re seeing more streets designed for walkability. And I know here in California, we see a lot of two-lane streets that are now one lane, and there’s a bike lane and a walking lane and a bike lane. And other things that are making, trying to wean people, not off cars, but less reliant. And so those are all enabling components of things that make these technologies ready.
It’s not just the technologies themselves.
Ross Kenyon: Many of those things you just named are policy measures. Those need to be in place to some degree to support this tech or just to enable it to be functional, seemingly. Yeah.
Joel Makower: Yes. And it’s remarkable how far this has all come in, you know, given the lack of policy support, at least in the United States. If you live in any state not called California, you’re probably not seeing the kinds of things where here in California say, oh, yeah, you know, everything’s incented from... Using less water to getting out of your car to electrifying your home. There’s significant carrots for doing that. There’s a cultural acceptance of that. No one looks at you funny. And in fact, people start to look at you funny if you’re still driving certain things.
And we can talk about shaming and the role of all that, if that’s even appropriate. But the policy environment is huge. And yet, so much happened. I mean, just during the previous administration, this did not go away, despite the fact that This administration was hugely allergic to anything having to do with clean and green or climate. And yet a lot of the biggest developments happened over those four years.
Ross Kenyon: How much of changes that happen uniquely in California do you see as cultural versus some higher level political organization? Probably hard to disentangle the two.
Joel Makower: Yeah, I’m not sure. I mean, look, it’s a blue state, very blue state. And we’ve had some very progressive leaders, Jerry Brown and now Gavin Newsom, driving this, who get both the threat and the opportunity of confronting the climate crisis and have translated that not just into words, but into actions. In some cases, in both cases, with both governors, very bold actions that put California at the forefront, at least among the 50 states, And ultimately become the default because we’re the fifth or sixth largest economy in the world, depending on how Italy is doing on any given day.
And so New York and a bunch of other mostly blue states, but not entirely, will sign on to the fuel efficiency mandates for automotives, will sign on to the appliance efficiency mandates or the home building mandates or the grid mandates. Yeah, a lot of it, I mean, we don’t own the future, but a lot of the future starts in California and fans its way out. And some of that way before California is a lot of European and other countries that are leading the way where this is less politically fraught.
Do you have any thoughts on how the near future will play out with regards to climate tech? Any new expectations this time around? I don’t think it’s going to be subject to the vagaries of world economy as much as it was. We saw some downturns 2008, 2009, and then, of course, the politicalization in 2010, 2011. I don’t see any indications of that. The climate crisis is now front and center. The solutions, the mandates for renewable energy, for decarbonizing homes, for getting out of internal combustion engines, for basically phasing down fossil fuels, There may not be as robust as we need, but the market signals are there.
Investors are coming in big time and there are laws around this. And so some things may slow, some new worthy technologies may not get the investment as we If we go into recession or worse in the US or globally. But my sense is that it’s a blip and that we are on a course that is inevitable. It’s just the question is, how long can the incumbents drag this out so they can squeeze every nickel out of the assets that they have? They’ve done a really good job of that through disinformation and lobbying and other things.
A lot of times lobbying through disinformation. And so question is, how long can I get away with that before the culture and the politics take over? And how many states will say, you know, like Congress, you want to roll stuff back, you know, fine, but we’re going to roll stuff forward. And in spite of that, and all of a sudden you’ve got 10, 20, 30 states that are taking some action and that becomes the default standard. And yeah, there’ll always be Texas and Florida and Mississippi and North Dakota and Alaska and a few other states that are going to be the laggards.
But even some of them, I mean, look, Texas is the biggest win state now. Why Governor Abbott isn’t getting dinged for having really screwed up both the freeze and the storms that have knocked out power during his term in Texas. Nobody seems to care about that. In other states, that might be fatal, but it’s not for him. So they’re going to keep going as long as they can squeeze their own political futures out of this as well.
Ross Kenyon: I’m wondering at what point we’ll see the politicization of this decrease. I mean, one of the most hopeful things I’ve seen is the degree to which the Department of Defense and military are preparing for climate change. I mean, they’re practical people. And I think it was safe to say as an institution tends to be more conservative than other parts of the government. Surely that should be a sign of things to come for people. But maybe the disinformation and misinformation is so widespread that it doesn’t prevent people from getting elected.
It’s not pulling the lever in the right kind of way to actually depoliticize this.
Joel Makower: Yeah. I mean, the military budgets are so opaque that I don’t know how many people really appreciate the fact that the Department of Defense in the United States is really leading the way in a lot of these things. It’s all about risk. I mean, when you’re sending a tanker full of diesel out into the battlefield to refuel tanks and other things, it is a rolling bomb waiting to explode. And so being able to generate electricity on site through wind or solar or something else is a huge risk reduction factor.
It may also make them more mobile and more resilient in a number of different ways if they can just shut it down and move it to a different spot. And so they care deeply about this stuff. You know, they also recognize that they are going to be stepping into skirmishes, if not wars, that are based on climate, where resource shortages, food shortages, droughts, where there’s going to be mass migration around the world that’s going to, you know, cause some kind of potentially government overthrows of government. And then, of course, all the, you know, those who are trying to keep things as they are, who are still making money off the incumbent technologies.
I mean, this is going to get ugly and the Defense Department is going to find itself in the middle of this. So they know the direction of travel for the world on these topics and that they want to be ready and they want to be resilient themselves.
Ross Kenyon: I find that to be extremely persuasive. And I’m wondering why in right of center facing climate chatter, that isn’t more prominent. Because I find that to be, if you do care about the military in that way, the fact that they’re taking it seriously should really help push that along. Is there any reason why that rhetorically isn’t more employed?
Joel Makower: Look, Ross, if you read the comments and the commentary about why Climate change is still seen as the greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American public, as Senator Inhofe said some time ago from Oklahoma. They all have all kinds of, to them, rational reasons. It’s not just, you know, we need to protect fossil fuels, of why this, we don’t need to go there, that these are natural cycles, that these things are not proven, that there’s actually... And then there’s just the reality of facts and science and the role that’s taken on in our current reality that people don’t believe it or they ignore it or they just have, as Kellyanne Conway once said, they’re alternative facts.
And so that’s just the reality we live in. What influence and power do those voices have? And for a long time, they had significant impact. And I think now they’re being somewhat marginalized, but they still have a lot of ears of a lot of people who, particularly those who happen to represent fossil fuel interests or mining interests and choose to believe a whole different reality than the overwhelming science community. That’s their choice. The question is who’s believing them and how do we marginalize those voices?
And yeah, the military, I’m sure there’s a reason why they understand why the military is doing this and they’re all for it. And yet it still doesn’t, for them, persuade them to support any global efforts to combat the climate crisis.
Ross Kenyon: I can’t leave our audience on such a grim note here. Do you have anything you’re looking forward to? Well, I mean...
Joel Makower: I think that we are in an extraordinarily exciting moment, unbelievably exciting moment and terrifying. But let’s stick with the exciting part that we have an opportunity to really reinvent our world, not just an opportunity, but a mandate to reinvent our world, how we live, transport, heat, cool, eat, shop, recreate, pretty much everything we do and to do it in a way where it’s better, frankly. It’s better for our health. It’s better for our kids. It makes us more resilient. There’s an abundance that comes out of it.
It’s not about living in some cold, dark world. No, I mean, you’re laughing, Ross, but there are people who believe that still, a lot of them. And so this is a huge opportunity. And to do all of this in a way that benefits everybody, those in every... At every level of the income ladder, those in the most marginalized communities, not some elitist high income kind of thing. So this is just an extraordinary opportunity. On my better days, when I’m not reading the political news, I could not be more excited about the future and optimistic about what’s possible out there.
The question is, do we have the will? Do we have the money? It’s really the will, more than anything, to get all this done. And again, I’ll just say that in spite of the politics, in spite of the four years prior to the Biden administration, We made a lot of progress. Now we have the wind at our back of the CHIPS Act and the Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act that are going to inject far more, even than the experts believe. The impacts of that, both directly and indirectly, are huge.
So we are about to see The golden age of climate tech. And it’s not going to be just a year or two. And it’s not going to go away if politicians or the economies sort of work against it. It’s an inexorable march of progress. And I think we all have to recognize and lean in and celebrate that. It seems like a good place to do that would be any of the Green Biz events that are coming up. Maybe you can run us through that one more time for our audience if they’d like to attend.
Well, you can go to greenbiz.com and learn about them. We have the Climate Tech Conference, which we just finished, so it won’t be around again until the last week of October in San Jose, California next year. And we do ones on circular economy and sustainable finance and the profession of sustainability. But the best thing to do is just go to greenbiz.com slash newsletters. We have seven of them, including one on climate tech, including one on food and energy and transportation and mobility and others.
And they’re free. And there’s just a lot of information that is our analysts track the trends. And you’ll also learn about upcoming conferences.
Ross Kenyon: And people can also get more of you personally from your podcast too. How’s that all going? What’s the like? It’s, you know, we just celebrated our seventh year of Green Biz 350. Wow. I already feel like I’ve been doing it a long time. Seven years though? Wow.
Joel Makower: Yeah. We started right before COP21, the Paris COP, that was 2015. And here we are, we’re talking right on the cusp of COP27, but the numbers don’t work because we skipped a year. So it should be COP28, which would have made it seven years. Anyway, it’s a fresh one every Friday. Go to greenbiz.com slash 350, 350, and you can learn more about that.
Ross Kenyon: Links to all of those things are in the show notes. Check them out. Go to a Green Biz event. As I mentioned earlier, I once went to Verge and had a really great time. I think I might have even been more than one. I can’t even remember. Well, we got to have you back the end of
Joel Makower: October in San Jose. It’s going to be epic. We’re going to have six, 7,000 people there. It’s going to be amazing. You should do some, come and set up a studio and do some interviews down there. It’ll be, we’ll show you a good time, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. Yeah. Let’s talk. That sounds good. Well, thanks for being here, Joel. It’s my pleasure, Ross. Thank you. Thanks for listening. If you like what we do here, please give us great rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thanks for tuning in. Check out Green Biz’s links in the show notes and have a lovely day. Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify, that’d be much appreciated.
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