Recareering for the climate era
You may already be in the right job to fight climate change
Simple climate action // I S S U E # 3 9 // RECAREERING
That moment when you know
I started collecting the stories a few years ago. Anecdotes about the moment when people I interviewed said they were changing their life to work on climate change.
At first, they came in a trickle. Now, it’s become a flood.
People like Peter Reinhardt, founder of Charm Industrial, who sold his software company this year for $3.2 billion and is now growing plants for bio-oil in California to pump underground and sequester the carbon. Or Tim Latimer, a former petroleum engineer, who started the geothermal firm Fervo to retool industry skills to mine clean energy. Or Osi Van Dessel, a former SpaceX engineer, whose life changed after witnessing the West Coast burn several summers back.
When wildfires scorched millions of acres, smothering the region under red, smoke-filled skies, he turned his attention back to Earth. “You could call me an expert in aerospace, but really engineers are just problem solvers,” he says. “There are challenges that don’t seem to be getting solved on Earth that we need to get right….I just realized I wanted to pivot into the climate space.”
Stories like this are not outliers. A sea of change is sweeping across the labor market, and people entering the climate business don’t look like those in most other industries. “You have a founder that’s worked on other things for 10 years, and then says, ‘I figured out that the only life mission I have is this,’” says Gustaf Alströme, a partner at one of Silicon Valley’s most successful startup accelerators, Y Combinator. “There aren’t that many categories where we have founders saying things like this.”
This month, our correspondent Eleanor Cummins takes us on a journey about recareering for climate change. Thousands, perhaps millions of people, are asking what they can do in their professional lives to slow climate change.
The conventional wisdom says: Go back to school. But for most, earning a new degree isn’t practical (or possible). Luckily, Eleanor shows us the unexpected and unconventional ways people are changing their careers, and refocusing their current positions, to join the climate fight.
Here we go.
Michael Coren
Has the climate crisis made you reconsidered your career or career goals?👷♀️👨🌾👩🚀
No, but I'm curious to hear about others' journey this month and consider it myself .
I don't think recareering is an option for me at this point.
Climate startups
By Michael Coren and Eleanor Cummins
Jason Jacobs hosts My Climate Journey. The podcast brings together people who want to transform their lives to tackle climate change. The former software entrepreneur never thought his life would come to this. He founded GPS fitness tracker Runkeeper in 2008. After it was acquired by ASICS, he set out to find a new startup idea.
But Jacobs had an epiphany while searching for what to do next with his life: everything seemed to pale in importance relative to fixing the climate.
Tens of thousands of people now follow Jacobs on My Climate Journey as he talks to CEOs, start-up founders, and investors about what they and their companies are doing to decarbonize the world and the innovation climate change is driving. On Slack, thousands of MCJ members chat about their own climate journeys every day. Meanwhile, his fund, MCJ Collective, invests in early-stage companies tackling the climate crisis — from energy and carbon removal to real estate and resiliency.
Here are some of the things he’s learned over more than 150 episodes.
As told to Michael Coren, condensed from interviews conducted in 2020 and 2021.
When I came in, I really wanted to know from the experts, are we doomed? Is there anything we can do? The next phase was: There's things we can do, but it's only the most important stuff and nothing else matters. At that time, I was judgy — Your personal footprint, what’s the point? Companies increasing efficiency, what’s the point? If it’s not a big moon shot, then what’s the point? I started realizing everything is interconnected here. Now I know it all matters, right? The big stuff matters, the small stuff matters, the grassroots stuff, the CEO stuff. That, that was a big “Aha!” moment for me, because it was like: We need everything.
No one else knew about each other. My inbox was this amazing place and for a while I was making connections one on one. But then it was like, we’ve got to get all these people together, so I set up the Slack room. Then I said, we need to get these people together in person. It was on my to do list for a long time. But in the interim these meet-ups just started happening.
The podcast started as a hack to get everybody to talk to me and build all these relationships and learn. I'm building a knowledge repository so that other people will come after and make up their own careers faster. Selfishly, it’s also going to be strategic for whatever I ultimately do in the category.
My listeners come in as learners first, which is a big difference for how Silicon Valley came into “cleantech 1.0.” They came in as narcissists first and they said, “We're going to disrupt some shit, and we're going to do the biggest stuff and throw tons of capital at it.” This time they're like, “I don't understand the problem and I need to take time to learn.” Another big difference is that when people hear cleantech they think energy, but climate tech is literally every industry.
People are looking to reorder and find purpose in the next chapter. I have listeners from Silicon Valley that are further in their career, have financial flexibility. They swing a big bat. They can't think of a more purposeful problem. They don't understand it and they don't know how their skills are transferable or how to help. So they come in as learners first. But they’re not stopping with the pod, they're starting with the pod.
People are coming to this on their own from every industry: from academia, from oil and gas, from the car industry, from science. From wherever. But the common thread is, “Yes, I need to feed my family. Yes, I need to worry about tuition and mortgages and things like that. But if we don't deal with this crisis, none of this other stuff is going to matter.” They’re like, “I need to put this more front and center so I can look myself in the mirror and look my grandkids in the face one day and tell them that I did everything I could.”
I think this is a red pill/blue pill situation. Once you take the red pill, climate change is so obvious it just burns in your brain. But until you take it, you don't think about it. So I'm less concerned with needing every start-up to look a certain way. I'm more concerned with getting everyone to take the red pill. Because once you take the red pill, you're gonna figure out, “Am I going to stay working at Facebook and organize the employee base, or am I going to split out and start a non-profit?” It doesn't matter, because once you've taken the red pill you're going to be trying to figure out how you can have the biggest impact while also feeding your family.
Hothouse is a weekly climate action newsletter written and edited by Mike Coren, Cadence Bambenek, Jemima Kiss, and Jim Giles. Everything we publish is free to read — your donations fund our writers and artists.