This Week in MCJ (9/26/20)
Help us find a content intern! 🙏
Hey everyone,
Thai used up all the word count of this newsletter below (his way of censoring me, ha!), so I’ll be brief.
As you probably know by now, the MCJ Collective climate fund goes live this week.
We are incredibly excited about this, but it also means we need to move quickly to scale the MCJ team. In the short term, the most pressing thing we need is a content intern! Keeping up w/ the pod, CTSS, and newsletter is a lot of work (along w/ everything else that Thai does), and Thai could use an extra set of hands to keep those trains running. Detailed description below, let us know if anyone comes to mind!
It’s a very exciting time for this little community, and a very important time for the work we are all trying to do together. Let’s do this!
Jason
📼Episodes
Here’s this week’s episode, in case you missed it.
If you’re already an MCJ Member, you can listen to the full episode here.
This week’s guest is Jason Bordoff, Professor of Professional Practice in International and Public Affairs at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) and Founding Director at the Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy.
After his tenure in the Obama Administration as Special Assistant to the president and Senior Director for Energy and Climate Change (on the staff of the National Security Council), Jason joined the Columbia faculty in 2013. As one of the world's top energy policy experts, Jason has led research and developed policy at the intersection of economics, energy, environment and national security. We have a great discussion in this episode, in which Jason walks me through the many aspects of the energy policy discussion and debate.
📼Climate Tech Startup Series (CTSS)
CTSS is a new series for members, where we feature founders of early-stage companies, sharing their startup’s business and mission. Members can check out our recent episode below and find an updated list here.
CTSS Episode 10: ecomedes with CEO & Co-Founder, Kathleen Egan
ecomedes is a startup working on reducing the cost, energy and impact of commercial buildings. Commercial buildings represent a staggering environmental footprint: they consume 70% of electricity generated; produce 40% of emissions; and use 17% of water supplies. The Gates Foundation found that the rate of construction pre-pandemic was equivalent to building a new New York City every month for the next forty years. ecomedes works to make commercial buildings more sustainable by serving as a product catalog, connecting standards (LEED, et al.) and product certifiers with sellers, vendors and brands. By providing a centralized source of truth for sustainable procurement, ecomedes is lowering the environmental impact of commercial buildings.
CEO Kathleen Egan walks me through a company overview and how ecomedes is helping to address the environmental footprint of commercial properties.
👉N.B. Kathleen is hiring for a product manager with marketplace experience and a strong understanding of API-driven strategy. You can apply here or DM her on the MCJ Slack!
🤓MCJ Seeks a Content Intern or Freelancer
We’re looking to bring on someone to help us develop and produce content (see tweet below for details). We would love to find the right candidate from within the community (or referred by a member)! Those interested can email us at info AT myclimatejourney DOT co.
👋 Welcome New MCJers!
Below are new members who joined the community and introduced themselves in the past week. You can learn more about them on #introductions, where you can welcome them to the community.
Susan Su: Based in LA, Susan is a growth advisor and portfolio manager at Sound Ventures, an early-stage consumer and enterprise fund. Susan is interested in exploring ways to increase her impact on the climate crisis.
Cristina Sorice: An LA-based robotics engineer, Cristina works in the aerospace industry, focusing specifically on autonomy systems and software engineering. She’s a voracious reader and welcomes recommendations related to climate change.
Chad Hunter: Based in Denver, CO, Chad serves as Team Lead at NREL. He collaborated with Bird on a scooter life cycle analysis.
Marian Krueger: Originally from Germany, Marian lives in Zurich, Switzerland and founded Ucair, which worked on increasing photovoltaic yields via drones and analytics. Having sold his company earlier in the year, he is working as the Decarbonization Lead at sus.lab at ETH Zurich.
Marco Ferrara: An engineer by training, Marco is the co-founder and SVP of BD & Analytics of Form Energy, a Somerville, MA based company commercializing low-cost, long-duration electrical storage.
Harsh Dubey: A soon-to-be graduate of Georgetown University, Harsh has interned in VC in San Francisco and is interested in connecting with early-stage companies and entrepreneurs in the climate space.
Maiah Alman: Leading client success at ecomedes, Maiah seeks to cultivate relationships and conversation with fellow members. She hopes to expand her knowledge around solutions in climate tech.
Steve Lee: Leading the Square Crypto Initiative, Steve is fascinated with the opportunity of bitcoin mining’s adoption of renewable energy. He’s happy to connect with anyone interested in discussion the intersection of bitcoin and climate.
A warm welcome to the MCJ Community!
🔦Member Spotlight: Ryan Dunfee, Sr. Community Manager at AddUp.org
We’re taking the opportunity to share the climate journey of your fellow MCJers. This week’s member spotlight features Ryan Dunfee. If you are an MCJ member and want to submit your story for consideration, feel free to do so here. We can’t promise it will make the newsletter, but we will choose one to run each week, and get as many in as we can over time.
Hey MCJ community! Ryan Dunfee here. It’s great to be able to write to you (thanks, Thai!) in the hopes of digging up some new opportunities in the landscape of hard tech climate solutions. My climate journey began as a young kid, when a decades-old unlicensed dump in the woods behind my New Hampshire home first taught me that protection for the environment was not a given. Since then, an innumerable amount of adventures outside on foot, skis, snowboards, surfboards, and mountain bikes (despite a severe spinal cord injury along the way) have made me immensely grateful for all the natural world gives us, and baked in me a desire to repay that gift and make sure all are able to access it.
I’ve had quite a varied career – from adventure travel to journalism and content strategy to digital strategy in the climate advocacy space. But after doing a lot of reflection and introspection, I feel I’ll do my best work when I can be helping get new clean energy and climate solutions projects “in the ground.”
I have spent the past four years at Sierra Club as one of the leaders of the digital change management efforts there. As the Senior AddUp.org Community Manager, I’ve been in charge of growing the organizational adoption of AddUp.org – Sierra Club’s custom-built online campaigning platform, similar to a Change.org but with enhanced functionality. More than doubling the number of campaigns on the platform in my time at Sierra Club has had me leaning on my communications & relationship-building skills to mentor over 300 staff and volunteers across the organization on how to implement digital marketing best practices in their organizing and advocacy strategies. I also guide our development team on implementing the most effective improvements to the platform, particularly as they concern UX.
But while I greatly enjoy helping climate organizers become more effective in their advocacy work (I love helping people realize their potential, whether as advocates, writers, or surfers!), as well as the discovery wrought from data mining and analytics that help me identify and disseminate new best practices, I am finding myself out of sync professionally. I have done my best work in smaller organizations that move faster, allow for more creative problem-solving and experimentation with less red tape, and which allow me to assemble and empower a team to build a more tangible finished product you can look at, whether that’s a compelling news story or an adventure travel experience in the Andes. I come from a family of engineers, and while I’ve broken out a bit to hone a more emotionally-intelligent leadership style, I still love seeing tangible projects completed. As such, I’m looking to transition to a role in a smaller organization that is focused on hard tech climate change solutions and which is looking for an effective communicator and relationship-builder, whether in the context of communications and marketing or business development.
If you know of opportunities that sound like a fit for me, or work in the hard tech climate space and would be open to a short chat to offer your advice and perspective, I’d be immensely grateful! My email is RyanDunfee85@gmail.com – I look forward to hearing from you!
💼Climate Jobs
Here are some jobs shared by members of the MCJ community that we think might be of interest to you. Many of these opportunities and the MCJers who shared them can be found in #climatejobs in the MCJ Slack.
PT Membership Development Manager at Ammonia Energy Association in NYC, NY (Remote available) (job listing).
Sales Managers at Sesame Solar (Remote) (see CEO Lauren Flanagan’s Slack post).
Var. Software / Data Engineering, PM, Ops, et al. at Form Energy in Somerville, MA or Bay Area (careers page; Co-founder Marco Ferrara invites interested candidates to DM him on Slack).
Var. Positions at Rocky Mountain Institute (careers page).
Postdoctoral Fellow at Mérida Labs in Vancouver, British Columbia (job listing).
Sr. Software Engineers and Supply Account Managers at Nori in Seattle (careers page).
VP of Engineering, VP of Manufacturing et al. at Lilac Solutions in Oakland, CA (careers position).
Head of Global Climate Strategies at Waldron in San Francisco, CA or other locations (job listing).
Battery Design Engineers at Electric Era (careers page).
Vice President of Development, Individual Giving at Conservation International
📢Climate News
Highlights of news this week related to climate change.
Boston-based XL Fleet, a hybrid vehicle company, announced it would go public via a SPAC (reported via the Boston Globe; PDF). Congrats to MCJer and XL Fleet Founder & Chief Strategy Officer, Tod Hynes!
As reported by The Wall Street Journal, New York regulators are pushing insurers to take action in managing the risks presented by climate change. This follows warnings from other regulators worldwide, concerned about the havoc climate change may wreak on the financial system.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced this week that his state would phase out the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035. His order also calls for the state to “take more actions to tackle the dirtiest oil extraction and support workers and job retention and creation…”
📈Climate Investing Insights
MCJer Azeem Azhar recently shared a report he published with Celine Herweijer, Partner at PwC U.K., showing the growth in climate tech venture investing. Key insights, which were covered by Tech Crunch and can be read in the full PwC report, included an 84% CAGR between 2013 - 2019 in dollars invested, a spike in the number and size of deals, and other interesting and encouraging trends.
📰🎧Recommended Reading/Listening
Below are recently published articles and content that we find interesting and/or that were shared by fellow MCJers.
The Wall Street Journal: “Tesla’s Battery Day: Why Elon Musk and Other Car Makers Are Fighting Over Batteries” (PDF)
The New York Times: “Climate Disruption Is Now Locked In. The Next Moves Will Be Crucial.”
Aclima Blog: “A wildfire-driven rise of orange skies, falling ash, and fine particulate matter in California”
📚If you’re looking for a new book to read, consider the newly published, “All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for The Climate Crisis.” Edited by Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson & Katharine K. Wilkinson, this collection of essays focuses on women leading the climate movement.
🎟Climate Events
As a reminder, we have a MCJ Events Calendar, where you can view and post events for the rest of the MCJ community to attend. When posting an event, please refer to this checklist.
*We’re highlighting a few upcoming events below; please refer to the events calendar for a complete list.*
Climate Changemakers Virtual Fundraising Event (Tuesday, September 29th, 4 PM EST)
Climate Changemakers is hosting a fundraiser for two pro-climate Senate candidates, Theresa Greenfield (Iowa) and Cal Cunningham (North Carolina). As MCJer and Climate Changemakers co-founder, Eliza Nemser, explains, “North Caroline and Iowa are 2 of the top 5 most winnable Senate races nationwide. And if Cal and Theresa win, we basically clinch a pro-climate Senate majority—and humanity is saved! We’re fundraising via GiveGreen, so 100% of funds go directly to the candidates, and contributions are “stamped” as climate-concerned, which demonstrates the weight of the climate vote.” You can learn more about taking part here.
Community Chat: “An Overview of Climate & AI” (Thursday, October 1st, 1 PM EST)
You can register here.
Elections as a Lever on Climate Action: ‘How to Make an Impact in the 2020 Election’ (Friday, October 2nd, 1 PM PST/ 4 PM EST)
This action-oriented conversation will continue with the theme of this MCJ series: viewing elections through a climate— rather than a partisan— lens. The discussion will focus on concrete ways to get involved in the election (from Federal to down-ballot races), in ways that strategically advance climate action. The panelists are MCJ community members
- Audrey Lee (Co-Chair, CE4B)
- Eliza Nemser (Co-Founder, Climate Changemakers)
- Caroline Spears (Founder, Climate Cabinet)
- Cody Simms (Co-Founder, Climate Changemakers, and Startups Affinity Team Co-Lead, CE4B)RSVP HERE to receive zoom details.
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