How I think we can stop the climate crisis

A little reflection on a big question that I've been wrestling with for a while + how it ties into building inClimate 2.0 and writing these newsletters.

Hi there,

Happy new year! (Can you still say that on the 14th?)

Before I get back to sending the weekly “Last Week in Climate” newsletter, I wanted to start 2026 by sticking to my December promise of sharing more thoughts, reflections, and the ideas behind inClimate 2.0 and behind these newsletters.

Today, I want to try and answer a question that I’ve been wrestling with for four years and that you have probably asked yourself:

How the heck do we stop the climate crisis?

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Back in 2021, I was trying to figure out what my role should be in helping to stop the climate crisis.

Should I become a climate investor? Join a startup? Start my own thing?

I was wondering:

What is the highest-leverage thing I can work on to help solve it?

I found a lot of clarity in John Doerr’s book Speed & Scale. The idea is simple: cut emissions fast by transforming key systems, while pulling the right levers to make it happen.

I figured that in very simplified terms, our job was “just”:

1. Innovation: come up with better solutions

2. Scale: deploy them at unprecedented speed

I then understood that for the 2030 goal, reducing emissions by 50%, we’re mostly talking about scale.

According to the IEA (2023), around 80% of the emissions reductions needed by 2030 can be achieved with technologies that already exist.

So why aren’t we moving faster?

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Scaling is a coordination problem

If the tech is largely here, the bottleneck isn’t ideas. It’s coordination.

To make climate solutions the default, I’d say we need to figure out:

• Capital: the right money in the right places

• Talent: a mass migration of great operators

• Policy: making the clean choice the easy choice

• Connectivity: an ecosystem where the right people find each other

That last one - connectivity - is the one I’m obsessed with because it ties into everything we need to do.

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What if this is mostly a people problem?

Over the past four years, I’ve spoken to countless founders, investors, operators, policy makers and jobseekers; and I keep coming back to the same thought:

Wouldn’t a shocking number of their hurdles, questions, and bottlenecks disappear if they just found the right people to talk to sooner?

Because in practice:

• funding happens through relationships

• jobs happen through relationships

• policy moves through relationships

That’s how the world works.

But that is a terrible way to solve a global crisis on a deadline - to hope the right people run into each other and figure it out.

If we rely on chance meetings at conferences or random LinkedIn connections to scale these solutions, we’ll be too slow. The problem isn’t a lack of talent or capital. It’s that too many people and sectors are still working in silos.

Maybe if we lower the friction of finding the right people, insights, and opportunities, the whole ecosystem moves and scales faster?

If that holds true, isn’t there a better way to connect the dots?

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The messy work of connecting it all

I’m convinced we can still move fast enough if we build better ways for people in this very complex and broad ecosystem to connect, coordinate, and share information.

What if we had one go-to platform to do just that?

1. Community: a go-to community platform that brings the right stakeholders across the ecosystem together - not just another Slack channel, but a dedicated platform, combined with in-person events and personalized matchmaking at scale.

2. Talent: a go-to platform for great talent to move into the climate and sustainability sector and for companies to find them easily. Not just another job board, an expensive course, or another recruiting agency that can’t scale.

3. Insights: a go-to platform that enables investors, corporates, and policymakers to get a better overview of the ecosystem, not just some lists and databases that they’re charged thens of thousands of euros for.

As someone who was looking for a job in climate, as a former venture capitalist and venture scout, and as someone who was trying to find his community in this ecosystem, I just wished we had these three elements in one dedicated platform.

So that’s what I’ve been building for the past four years now with inClimate.

It’s bloody complicated and I’m far from done, but it’s finally coming together with the new version of inClimate that I’m hoping to officially launch this month.

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What do you think?

I could ramble on now about how exactly this will work as a platform, why I think we need to build this as a for-profit, and what I’m still struggling with, but I’ll leave that for another day.

If you have thoughts on this idea, I’d truly love your input.
What am I missing? What feels naïve? Where do you see the real bottlenecks?

Big hug from Barcelona,
Tim

PS: If you missed the big December update, or you’re not sure why you received this email, you can read it here.