use a scalpel

1. I love talking about “elegant climate solutions.” When you can trim the fat in the system, you can reduce waste and emissions, and earn more. Of course, this logic does not always apply, but I love the framework. Look for the inelegance in a system, and see if it can be surgically removed. 

2. A couple of examples: 

   1. Breakthrough tech: There is justifiably a lot of interest in critical minerals - building blocks of electrification. Building a large enough supply of critical minerals is an enormous undertaking, full of harm to workers, geopolitical obstacle courses, and with deleterious environmental effects at the mine site. What can be made elegant here? Recycling the critical minerals that are in existing infrastructure when they reach their end of life (think: EOL EV battery recycling). There are many players in that space, and luckily they are making needed progress. More elegant still? Creating technologies - chips, batteries, magnets, and so on - that do not need critical minerals. 

   2. Efficiency & Integration: 30-40% of food produced around the world is never used. What an absolute nightmare - the use of tremendous resources to feed no one and turn into methane at the landfill. Solving some of the leakages here requires logistics, marketplaces, and integration of existing technology. Think: Spoiler Alert, Mill. 

   3. I love EcoPragma Capital’s Michael Liebrich’s quote here: ““Burning stuff is stupid….It makes no sense to have a flame at 2,000° C to heat a house to 21 degrees. That is not elegant. That can’t be the answer. As you go through the whole economy, you can see the inelegance. Two-thirds of primary energy is thermal waste. That’s ridiculous.” - from a talk with TDK Ventures