Governments and universities have been quite successful inventing the big stuff, and they're also best situated to fight climate change via the other, equally important, avenues: getting agreement on worldwide collective action, incentivising the private sector , and transforming economic structures, habits, cities etc. For example, Germany almost single-handedly financed the 90% reduction in the cost of wind power generation with subsidies.

One initiative from VC-land that might be of interest to you is Y combinator's research effort into the future of cities. That may seem only tangentially related, but a well-designed city could probably eliminate the need for private car ownership and radically reduce the energy need for heating. Add in reduced use of materials for construction (apartments instead of single-family houses), smart concepts to share equipment among neighbours (washing machine, tools etc) and a few lifestyle choices we already see people in cities making, I wouldn't be surprised if energy usage could be reduces by 2/3 without loss in quality of life.

It is wicked hard to convey the destruction, loss. Especially to policy makers.

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Methinks the best thing all governments could do is operate with an open ledger. All receipts, contracts, expenditures, procurements, permits, everything publicly posted in real-time.

It's hard to govern not knowing what the hell is happening. Even policy makers are kept in the dark. And they definitely don't have the staff to keep up.

I've done numerous FOIAs (public records requests). It's onerous and almost completely ineffectual. And by the time you get the data you've asked for, the window of opportunity has passed.

Great point re data. The tools for dissemination of data are getting better and there is a growing open data movement within government. My own experience has been that greater education is needed for policy makers - they often fear releasing data in case it will be used against them or don't understand the potential benefits of releasing data. In the GIS world there has also been resistance due to policy makers wanting to recover the cost of data acquisition.

The problem is that data needs to be transformed into a story, in order to communicate anything meaningful.

But as soon as you turn data into a story, you introduce some degree of bias, which inevitably becomes politicized.

The only way around this is there's no way around this. We have to accept the reality that the agenda hawks (on both sides) will continue to polarize issues. Continue to use the tools and data available to us to tell the best stories we can, while understanding that no one story is the truth. All the while, we have to avoid succumbing to the deep polarization being used against us to divide and conquer. We are all in this together.

TL;DR: IMHO, Conservation is an accounting problem, adding externalities to the ledger, making local tax payers aware they're getting screwed.

I volunteered for a wetlands conservation group, about 10 years during the 90s.

Wetlands, riparian areas, bogs, marshes, etc are habitat for birds, fish, their predators. They slow down the water during storms. They clean the water. Etc, Etc.

We might have slowed down some development, in one county that had somewhat better governance than its neighbors. But habitat destruction continues. Ditto flooding. And the fisheries we were trying to protect were later proposed for endangered species status (all but gone).

One signature achievement was creating birding trails, partially funded by state tourism bureau, to better rake in those sweet eco-tourism dollars. (~$140m/yr during the late 90s.)

People will be surprised that Bush Sr signed the first federal wetlands protection legislation. Lots of optimism during the Clinton years. Then Bush The Lesser happened. And after a decade, we just kinda ran out of steam. Today, I honestly don't know who's working this issue locally.

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I have one more point to add. It's notable that the "environmental movement" was born in Southern California, where the residents could see the destruction and consequences occur in real-time vs spread-out over generations.

I guess people will only start caring when we literally run out of fish or Alaska melts.

The drawing down of natural capital is simply not accounted for, despite the fact that early models of value (Smith, Boehm-Bawerk, Marshall) were consistent, if not outright encouraging of this.

If oil companies (or the holders of lands from which it was withdrawn) had to account for the 100 million years plus of formation time in their accounting, the economics (or rather, finances) would change markedly.

The challenge is to identify a cleaner and cheaper way to do something and then disrupting the hell out of the existing field.

The guys attempting to grow meat in labs are set to disrupt things when their meat becomes cheaper than slash and burn burgers(it likely already is as the true cost of rainforest loss is externalised - rainforest loss to soya fields that is 70% fed to cattle amounts to the same thing: rainforest loss for meat).

Once they're done with meat maybe it is possible to culture high quality wood in a lab. They'd save the amazon rainforest and make themselves and their investors a ton of money.

But the patten is there, already laid out. The only role bureaucracy might play will be to get out of the way. To not impede.

That's an incredibly myopic view of reality, and of the history of scientific progress. Bureaucrats eradicated polio and smallpox, invented the internet, space travel, GPS – and actually almost anything important you could think of (if you include public universities and publicly-funded research). They have the power to massively support new technology until it is self-sustaining. There wouldn't be any renewable energy production today without the help of bureaucrats organising massive subsidies that allowed these industries to scale up to competitiveness. With regards to power-consumption, regulation has played a massive role in decreasing energy needs: from fuel efficiency standards to seemingly stupid stuff like standby modes, which used to consume dozens of watts continuously because that was a few cents cheaper to manufacture, and consumers just didn't care.

Tesla is a fantastic company. But their best allies are just those bureaucrats and politicians: many countries support electric cars with tax breaks, sane countries have long ago started taxing the externalities of oil consumption, and there are thousands of initiatives on the smallest local level to allow electric cars to compete.

Cities create reserved parking with charging infrastructure, or open bus- and taxi-lanes to electric vehicles. Universities have massively invested in the basic research that made not just those cars possible, but also the generation of it's power from non-fossile fuels. Not to mention that (at least in sane countries), public transport and bike infrastructure have probably prevented CO_2 emissions at a rate that's still 3 or 4 orders of magnitude ahead of Tesla.

I don't think anyone in their right mind would call the purchase of technology from privately funded research at a public university (Polio) to count as bureaucrats innovating, nor would I say that bureaucrats did any of those things, with the exception of space travel which was indeed fully done in-house by NASA.

The real innovation that government could bring to environmental issues is consumption-based pollution taxes instead of convoluted, mis-incentivizing mandates like Obama's call for each auto company to each produce one 54 MPG car by 2025.

Tesla wouldn't need the bureaucrats if we had a fair, simple, liberty-maximizing set of environmental regulations.

It has another potential role to play though: safeguarding the playing field. For each Tesla trying to make the world a better place, there's an Uber, fucking society over for profit. The role of bureaucracy should be to allow the former and prevent the latter.

If the advent of Uber has resulted in a billion drink deaths not happening but one person making $2 less per hour, it's clear. The other way around is clear too. But as it is right now, you can't assert that as is. You have to bring something more convincing to the table.

Freedom Markets™ is a religion, not economics.

Last time I've read related news those lab-grown muscle cells were supplied with calf blood serum. That makes your sustainability speculation sound more like wishful thinking.

I'm sure they're working on that issue, but we're not even close to being able to feed billions with vat-grown meat. And you need to feed that meat with some nutrients too, probably plant-derived ones. So on a per-calorie basis feeding the humans with those plant-derived nutrients directly would probably be more efficient, if your goal is to reduce carbon footprint.

Technology is only the thing we use to compensate our failure in the other areas.

But it's a never ending race.

If we don't solve the root of the problem, technology will also bring more power to act badly, which we will need to compensate with better tech, etc.