I Saw the Future of Climate Technology—and Its Big-Oil Investors (The Nation)

Quoting:

At the Cleantech North America conference, the fates of climate-tech start-ups are tangled into the balance sheets of companies who caused the crisis in the first place.
Yet, walking around the conference, you could hardly tell that we’re running out of time. In the hours and hours I spent onsite attending panels and chatting with participants, I only heard the term “Paris Agreement” mentioned once. Mentions of 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees were few and far between, as were discussions of any UN proceedings or the need to phase out fossil fuels. It was much more common to walk into a panel and hear a detailed breakdown of US tax credits for carbon dioxide versus any focus on how last year was the hottest in recorded history.
But it was hard not to square the lack of urgency with some of the conference’s most prominent attendees: fossil fuel companies. There is perhaps no other industry where the foxes are invited as openly into the henhouse as in cleantech. And while they may make their own net-zero pledges or talk up their investments in different energy sources, these companies benefit when people forget just how urgently we need to phase out their product or how much damage they’ve already done to the planet.