Environment

Salesforce has often preached about responsible capitalism, and today at Dreamforce, the company’s annual customer extravaganza, it announced a notable achievement in the battle against global climate change. The company said that it has achieved effective Net Zero energy usage across its entire value chain with 100% renewable energy, while purchasing carbon offsets when that’s

Traditional meat production is about as far from a sustainable process as we’ve got, but our chances of getting everyone to give up “real” meat are lean. Animal Alternative is one of several companies looking to make meat indistinguishable from the animal-based kind using bioreactors and cultured cells, and it aims to empower local producers

Quill Robinson Contributor President Joe Biden has pledged to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030. He intends to meet this ambitious target through a wave of new federal spending and government programs. But our best hope for reducing carbon emissions isn’t new government spending. It’s a technological sea change — one that

Farming sustainably and efficiently has gone from a big tractor problem to a big data problem over the last few decades, and startup EarthOptics believes the next frontier of precision agriculture lies deep in the soil. Using high-tech imaging techniques, the company claims to map the physical and chemical composition of fields faster, better, and

Ford said Thursday it will invest another $250 million and add 450 jobs to increase production capacity of its upcoming F-150 Lightning to 80,000 all-electric trucks annually. The announcement comes after receiving more than 150,000 pre-orders for the all-electric pickup truck. The additional funds and jobs will be spread out across its new Rouge Electric

The climate crisis is creating massive demand for data capture as industries grapple with how to decarbonize. Put simply, you can’t cut your carbon emissions if don’t know what they are in the first place. This need to gather data is a big opportunity for startups — and a wave of early companies have already

In order to support a buildout of renewable energy, which tends to over-generate electricity at certain times of day and under-generate at others, the grid is going to need a lot of batteries. While lithium-ion works fine for consumer electronics and even electric vehicles, battery startup EnerVenue says it developed a breakthrough technology to revolutionize

Supply chains can be a complex logistical challenge. But they pose an even greater environmental challenge. And it’s that latter problem — global supply-chain sustainability — where UK startup Sourceful is fully focused, although it argues its approach can boost efficiency as well as shrink environmental impact. So it’s a win-win, per the pitch. Early

Siegfried Glenzer Contributor Siegfried Glenzer, a recipient of the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award, is a professor and high-energy-density division director at Stanford’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and a science adviser for nuclear fusion company Marvel Fusion. The quest to make fusion power a reality recently took a massive step forward. The National Ignition Facility (NIF)

Mayors have the toughest job in the world, and leading a city is only getting harder. Even as populations swell in urban cores across the world, climate change is constraining the geographies where that growth can happen. Coastal communities which are popular with residents are also taking a gamble when it comes to rising sea

A report on the future of solar energy from the Department of Energy paints a sunny picture, if you will, of the next three decades, at the end of which nearly half the country’s energy will be provided by the sun. But for that to happen, big pushes need to happen along four major lines:

Many efforts are underway to reduce the environmental impact of cars, but what about the tires those cars ride on? Continental thinks it might help. Roadshow reports the company has introduced the Conti GreenConcept (yes, a concept tire) where more than half of the materials are “traceable, renewable and recycled.” You can even renew the

Direct to consumer online sales have helped a number of female-focused startups get products to market in recent years — often pitching better designed and generally more thoughtful feminine hygiene products than mainstream staples. The lack of innovation in the mainstream market for feminine hygiene has certainly created a gap for startups to address. Examples

Oren Ezer Contributor Oren Ezer is CEO and co-founder of ElectReon, a shared energy platform that provides wireless charging for electric vehicles. President Joe Biden’s plan for electric vehicles (EVs) to comprise roughly half of U.S. sales by 2030 is a clear indication that the U.S. is making strides in decarbonizing its transportation systems, which

The climate is finally hitting a climax. Decades of discussions and reports by scientists have yielded pathbreaking works by writers like Elizabeth Kolbert, and today, climate fiction and non-fiction are even becoming global bestselling works. Everyone wants to read about collapse, dystopia, the aftermath — it’s in the very air we breathe after all, what

One of the consequences of rising CO2 levels in our atmosphere is that levels also rise proportionately in the ocean, harming wildlife and changing ecosystems. Heimdal is a startup working to pull that CO2 back out at scale using renewable energy and producing carbon-negative industrial materials, including limestone for making concrete, in the process, and

Books on climate change, as diverse as the library is, tend to fall into a couple of categories. There are the field guides and observational accounts that chronicle the destruction of our world and make it legible for readers worldwide. There are the policy and tech analyses that splay out options for the future, deliberating

Bill Gates has solved many problems in his (professional) life, and in recent decades, he’s been dedicated to the plight of the world’s poor and particularly their health. Through his foundation work and charitable giving, he’s roamed the world solving problems from malaria and neglected tropical diseases to maternal health, always with an eye toward

When it comes to climate change, it might seem that a book entitled “How to Do Nothing” would not only be irrelevant, but also downright obscene and even dangerous. Not to mention that after more than a year of pandemic living, many people are understandably fatigued at the prospect of continuing to keep their lives

One of the most unfortunate fault lines in climate change politics today is the lack of cooperation between environmentalists and the national security community. Left-wing climate activists don’t exactly hang out with more right-leaning military strategists, the former often seeing the latter as destructive anti-ecological marauders, while the latter often assume the former are unrealistic

When did indoor air become cold and clean? Air conditioning is one of those inventions that have become so ubiquitous, that many in the developed world don’t even realize that less than a century ago, it didn’t exist. Indeed, it wasn’t so long ago that the air inside our buildings and the air outside of

Space may be the endless frontier, but here on Earth, we define space in the modern sense as something enclosed. Walls, fences and barriers enclose space, define it and make it legible. In fact, the sense of limits is so strong these days with place that we often have to add qualifiers like “open space”

Cruise, the self-driving car company under General Motors, has launched a new initiative called Farm to Fleet that will allow the company to source solar power from farms in California’s Central Valley. The San Francisco Chronicle was the first to report the news that Cruise is directly purchasing renewable energy credits from Sundale Vineyards and

Wildfires are burning in countries all around the world. California is dealing with some of the worst wildfires in its history (a superlative that I use essentially every year now) with the Caldor fire and others blazing in the state’s north. Meanwhile, Greece and other Mediterranean nations have been fighting fires for weeks to bring

BreezoMeter has been on a mission to make environmental health hazards accessible to as many people as possible. Through its air quality index (AQI) calculations, the Israel-based company can now identify the quality of air down to a few meters in dozens of countries. A partnership with Apple to include its data into the iOS

Creating single-family homes for the homeless using 3D printing robotics. Developing construction systems to create infrastructure and habitats on the moon, and eventually Mars, with NASA. Delivering what is believed to be the largest 3D-printed structure in North America — a barracks for Texas Military Department. These are just some of the things that Austin,

A quick survey of many of the most highly valued electric vertical take-off and landing companies shows one thing in common: All of them are developing aircraft powered by batteries. But a growing suite of aviation companies, turned off by what they see as the energy density limitations of lithium-ion batteries, are turning instead to

Mark Mills Contributor Mark Mills is the author of the forthcoming book, “The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and a Roaring 2020s.” He is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a Faculty Fellow at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering. Investors and politicians embracing a

Floods are devastating. They rip asunder communities, wipe out neighborhoods, force the evacuation of thousands of people every year and recovering from them can take years — assuming recovery is possible at all. The U.S. government estimates that floods in recent decades (exclusive of hurricanes and tropical storms) have caused an estimated $160 billion in

Among Apple’s more recent social good initiatives is the Impact Accelerator, an effort launched about a year ago intended to find and elevate minority-owned small businesses taking on sustainability and climate change. The program now has its first 15 participants, gathered from all over the country for a three-month program and a shot at an

As more consumers embrace plant-based diets and sustainable food practices, Rise Gardens is giving anyone the ability to have a green thumb from the comfort of their own home. The Chicago-based indoor, smart hydroponic company raised $9 million in an oversubscribed Series A round, led by TELUS Ventures, with existing investors True Ventures and Amazon

Pivot Bio makes fertilizer — but not directly. Its modified microorganisms are added to soil and they produce nitrogen that would otherwise have to be trucked in and dumped there. This biotech-powered approach can save farmers money and time and ultimately may be easier on the environment — a huge opportunity that investors have plowed

Battery joint ventures have become the hot must-have deal for automakers that have set ambitious targets to deliver millions of electric vehicles in the next few years. It’s no longer just about securing a supply of cells. The string of partnerships and joint ventures show that automakers are taking a more active role in the

Jeff Sternberg Contributor Jeff Sternberg is a technical director in the Office of the CTO (OCTO) at Google Cloud, a team of technologists and industry experts that help Google Cloud’s customers solve challenging problems and disrupt their industries. Environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors should be key considerations for CTOs and technology leaders scaling next

General Motors said Wednesday it is adding two new zero-emissions vehicles to its commercial portfolio as it looks to expand its first-to-last-mile business arm, BrightDrop. The first vehicle will be a battery electric cargo van under the Chevrolet brand that will likely be similar to the popular Chevy Express van. The second will be a

V2Food is one of many new contenders in the alternative protein space, founded in Australia but now setting its sights on Europe, Asia and beyond. It has a few key advantages over the competition, and with €45 million in new funding it may be finding its way to plates in the Eurozone soon. The company

A major UN scientific report has concluded that human activity is changing the climate at an unprecedented rate. The report has been describe as a “code red for humanity” by its authors. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is stern and blunt in its conclusions: “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed

This week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its major sixth assessment report on the physical science of climate change. The details are grim, if getting more precise, as better and more comprehensive data becomes available. As my colleague Mike Butcher summarized yesterday, it’s “stern and blunt in its conclusions.” While many of the

Reducing global greenhouse gas emissions is an important goal, but another challenge awaits: lowering the levels of CO2 and other substances already in the atmosphere. One promising approach turns the gas into an ordinary mineral through entirely natural processes; 44.01 hopes to perform this process at scale using vast deposits of precursor materials and a

The founders of Holy Grail, a two-year-old startup based in Mountain View, California, are taking a micro approach to solving the outsized problem of capturing carbon. The startup is prototyping a direct air carbon capture device that is modular and small — a departure from the dozens of projects in the U.S. and abroad that

Here at TechCrunch, we’re big fans of startup competitions. From our Extra Crunch Live Pitch-offs all the way up to the world-famous Disrupt Startup Battlefield, we can’t get enough of ’em. So we’re hooking up with Extreme Tech Challenge (XTC) to present the Extreme Tech Challenge Global Finals, a startup competition focused on powering a

Jaguar Land Rover is developing a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle based on the new Defender SUV, and plans to begin testing the prototype next year. The prototype program, known as Project Zeus, is part of JLR’s larger aim to only produce zero-tailpipe emissions vehicles by 2036. JLR has also made a commitment to have zero

G2 Venture Partners, a firm that spun out of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has raised $500 million to support entrepreneurs that aim to make existing industries more efficient, environmentally friendly and socially responsible.   With Fund II, G2 is most bullish about technologies in transportation, logistics, manufacturing, agriculture and energy, with an increasing focus on

Tristan Abbey Contributor Tristan Abbey is President of Comarus Analytics LLC. He served as senior policy advisor at the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and as director for strategic planning at the National Security Council. No single question bedevils American energy and environmental policy more than nuclear waste. No, not even a

Meghan Hind Contributor Meghan Hind is an operations analyst for SOSV. Her role includes gathering and analysing data on SOSV portfolio companies and syndicate investors, managing the funds’ databases and CRM, and reporting SOSV’s quarterly investments to external data providers. On Earth Day, April 22, SOSV published the SOSV Climate Tech 100, a list of

When it comes to sustainable livestock production and agriculture, measurement is the first — and sometimes most elusive — step in the process of turning our food system from a carbon emitter into a carbon sink. So DSM, a science-based company that focuses on agriculture and other parts of our food systems, and Blonk, a

Every startup is trying to fix something but Terraformation is tackling the only problem that must matter to all of us: Climate change. This is why it’s in such a big huge hurry. Its mission — as a ‘forest tech’ startup — is to accelerate tree planting by applying a startup-y operational philosophy of scalability

Electric vehicle startup Fisker Inc. has set a moonshot goal of creating its first climate neutral car by 2027. Fisker has yet to bring a vehicle to market — climate neutral or not — making this an ambitious target. The all-electric Fisker Ocean SUV, which is still on track to go into production in November