The 2023 Climate Drift Year in Review

And what is coming in 2024

👋 Hey, Skander here! Welcome to the first Climate Drift of the year, where we demystify climate solutions and empower you to find your role in the race to net zero..

A lot has happened last year, so before we start with new deep dives again, time to review the last year, and highlight some of ours and your favorite articles.
Last but not least: we will give a glimpse into what we have planned for this year.

Let’s dive in 🌊

P.S.: Subscribe here if you haven’t already, we would love to have you onboard.

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Looking back on 2023

Climate Drift began with a simple idea. In a conversation with non-climate friends, I shared my theses and research spanning the past two years. Their suggestion? Publish it.

So, together with Marco, we gathered, wrote, and published. Every day for 2 months, we dove deep into climate solutions, 5 to 15-page essays on anything from hydrogen to transportation, and mushrooms.

Climate Drift’s reception was way over our modest expectations.
Our readership now spans the 3 audiences of the climate world: 

• Climate investors, from small climate angels to large sovereign wealth funds

• Companies, from Fortune companies wanting to be greener to climate tech companies working on solutions

• People who want to join the fight and shift to climate.

So we got to work:

• Helping climate investors & companies:
  We talked to dozens of investors and companies, seeing where we could help, leading to some interesting internal projects and some even more interesting soon-to-be-coming public projects.
  If you want to work with us, drop us a line at [email protected] .
  

• Helping climate job seekers:
  We opened up our calendars for 1on1 climate career mentor calls, talking to hundreds of you, and spending 100+ hours helping people find their perfect climate role.

We just opened up a new batch of 1on1 climate career mentor slots, you can apply here:

As we couldn’t go through the full waitlist of 350+ 1on1 mentor calls, we ran our first 3-hour-long climate career transition workshop with a few hundred of you. In case you missed it, the 2nd one is planned for the end of this month.

So what’s coming in 2024?

In 2024, we're diving deeper.

🔬 Collaborating with investors & established companies, we're launching public research projects that should benefit the whole industry.

☀️ We will feature more climate companies, explaining and highlighting their solutions.

🚀 Last but not least: we're starting the Climate Drift Career Accelerator, helping a group of our readers into their dream climate roles, accelerating the climate transition.

We will have more to share about all of them, but for now let’s shine a light on the Climate Drift Career Accelerator:

The Climate Drift Career Accelerator is an 8-week program for mid-career and exec level climate job seekers.

We are going to cover:

→ Understanding the inner workings of 8+ high-impact climate sectors.

→ Applying transferable skills to a real challenge of a climate company.

→ Deep dives on every aspect of the climate job transition, from perfecting your pitch to negotiating your offer.

→ Building connections with founders, VCs, and other experienced professionals.

We are very glad to partner up with some of the greatest climate tech companies and investors out there and are accepting applicants on a rolling basis right now:

Onto our favorite articles of 2023.

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What we covered in 2023

This year Climate Drift published 55 articles. Let’s look at the summaries of the most popular and most important posts of the year.

The Five Most-Viewed Articles

The five most-viewed articles on Climate Drift according to page views:

Our Climate Solutions Map: Our constantly updated Climate Solutions Map now showcases over 220 solutions spanning 12 critical sectors: Transportation, Power, Food & Agriculture, Workforce, Building, Software, Finance, Circular Economy, Carbon Removal, Nature Conservation, and Water.

How to use Toasters and Bricks to reduce 25% of global emissions Our 2 Part Series on the problem of Industrial Heat, and how Rondo is solving it with Toasters and Heaters.

Carbon Offsets Explained Our 3 part series on the Origin of Carbon Offsets, the problems currently plaguing the offset market, and the future of Carbon Offsets.

Why Carbon Engineering’s $1 Billion Acquisition is the Best & the Worst for Climate Tech Our 2 part breakdown of the largest Climate Tech acquisition of the year shone a light on the good and bad of the acquisition, creating a wave of takes across the ecosystem. 

We need to talk about Mushrooms This one was a lot of fun to research and write: A breakdown of the cutting edge of the mushroom market, complete with a deep dive into Small Hold, one of the most interesting companies in the space.

Some of the great guest posts

We also wanted to share the 5 guest posts that resonated the most with you:

We need to talk about rocks - Explaining Carbon Removal through Carbon Mineralisation, by our friends at Arca.

Avoid these 12 circularity road blocks - A lot of you were interested in diving deeper into the Circular Economy - and we got our friends at Pentatonic to share the biggest mistakes happening when building circular economy roadmaps.

Lab grown meat is not a climate solution - Lab grown meat got a lot of press this year, so we are glad for Chris to pick up the other side of the argument: Why lab grown meat is not a climate solutions.

Confusing Messaging is costing your climate company - Alex dove deep into how to fix messaging for climate companies, sharing his learnings in this article.

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Thank you for joining us on this journey. Every like and every message motivates us to write more, share more, build more and jump on more calls.

Let us know what we should cover this year - as a comment or an email to [email protected].

Tomorrow we are going to continue with a guest post we were looking forward to a lot: the story of a screenwriter turned NASA engineer, into tech and now into Climate tech.

Looking forward to this year 🌊

Skander