Climate Drift

AI can write your emails. It summarizes 200-page reports in 30 secs. But it cannot build your relationships. A new Microsoft Research study analyzed 200,000 real AI conversations to find which jobs are most exposed. They mapped every occupation to actual AI usage. (not influencer hype or "armchair expert" predictions) The result? 👉 "Developing professional relationships and networks" ranked among the lowest-performing AI work activities. Think about what that means... In a world where AI democratizes information, knowledge, and content creation. The one thing it genuinely cannot replicate is a human being: →Showing up →Listening →And building trust with another human being. Your network isn't a nice-to-have anymore. It's your competitive edge (how amazing is that!?). Which makes me think: The professionals who will thrive in the next few years don't just use ChatGPT. They belong to communities where real relationships get built. And now is the best time to invest. ♻️ Repost if you think human connection is underrated in the "AI takes all the jobs" bubble. 👇 Drop a comment: What community has been most valuable to your job/career/life? (I share a few communities that helped me a ton in the first comment)

Went surfing at dawn. Came back to this 👇 New members joining while I'm offline. Here's who just showed up in Climate Drift: (and introduced themselves to our community) 1️⃣ Katie Leininger - CEO who scaled a behavioral health software company from $5M → $65M. Started her career in Haiti working on economic development and bioenergy with the IDB. Now bringing serious operator muscle to food systems and nature-based solutions. 2️⃣ Emin Askerov - 25 years in power generation. Built Russia's wind and battery industry from zero - 1 GW of wind, 8 GWh of batteries. Now based in Paris, advising hardware climate startups on the thing that kills most of them: FOAK execution. Also a Kizomba dance teacher. (Yes, really.) 3️⃣ Tyler Wyka - Mechanical engineer deploying microgrids in rural Alaska and co-securing $20K to build solar drying facilities for rice farmers in Sierra Leone. Doing the real work, in the hardest places. 4️⃣ @Iwona Bisaga - Leads global clean cooking programs in humanitarian settings - bridging UN agencies, development banks, and governments to connect displaced communities to national energy plans. Climate justice isn't a side conversation for her. It's the work. 5️⃣ Steven Goldman - Climate communicator who built a battery storage campaign that landed in Bloomberg, Handelsblatt, and the Australian Financial Review. 2,100+ downloads, 190% growth between pod seasons. He makes complex climate tech actually legible. 6️⃣ Michael Findley - Decarbonizes commercial real estate portfolios for Fortune 500 companies. Runs 50-100km ultramarathons. Self-taught carpenter who restored a cabin in the Appalachian mountains using fieldstone and old barn beams. Does not do things halfway. This is Climate Drift. Operators. Engineers. Policy builders. Communicators. All working on the same mission. So grateful to be building Climate Drift alongside all of you 🙏 If you've been thinking about joining us - this is your sign. (Link in the comments...we talk to everyone to ensure you get value out of what we're building).

Something inside the Climate Drift community that's awesome? We call it Unhinged 👇 Skander Garroum - my co-founder 🙏 - just goes. No filter. No LinkedIn polish. The kind of breakdown you only get when the person talking has actually lived it. Who is Skander? - 3x founder across US & EU - Climate VCs pay to have him in their phone - Single focus: deploying senior leadership talent into high-leverage climate solutions Here's what most climate tech conversations miss: Everyone talks about China, AI, nuclear - like it's academic. But when your supply chain actually runs through Chinese manufacturers, or you're the one trying to hire the right operator into a first-of-a-kind factory - you need the real numbers, not the LinkedIn version. So here's what we've covered so far. 1️⃣ China already won the clean energy race Skander spent a month on the ground in China. Not reading reports. Actually there. (plus he grew up in Hong Kong) What he came back with: - China is building 30 nuclear plants right now. The US is building 1. At 1/10th the cost. - Zero to 40,000km of high-speed rail in 15 years. - Not a single EV salesperson mentioned climate - because the products don't need it. - European VCs now run a blacklist of climate tech categories they won't invest in. Because Chinese competition already made them unwinnable. 2️⃣ How to actually break into climate leadership roles While everyone's blasting out AI-polished CVs, Skander's answer is counterintuitive: 👉 Give away your best ideas. Many people published what we call a "Challenge" inside Climate Drift last year.
 Most of them were shocked by who reached out to them to “talk more”. Jonathan Castrodale went from the Gates Foundation - NDA-heavy, tricky to explain - to a role in sustainable aviation fuel, by mapping the entire stakeholder landscape as an outsider. Laura van Meer built Airbnb's ambassador program from 0 to 3,000 people. Then packaged that exact playbook for climate marketing teams. Joseph DeNatale obsessed over why heat pump deployment was stalling. Now he runs operations at Jetson ($1M heat pumps in the sales pipeline). This is the kind of intelligence we trade inside Climate Drift: Founders, investors, and senior operators share the messy, specific breakdowns that actually matter. The LinkedIn version of this doesn't exist. Most conferences give you 10% of this intel…at best. Two ways in:
 → Join our vetted community of senior professionals: https://buff.ly/jj3XRLi
 → Senior exec making the leap into energy, transportation, carbon, new industry? Apply for our Executive Program (12 weeks concentrated effort, zero fluff): https://buff.ly/Lqaqodm Let’s go 🙌

Here's what our community talked about last week. Spoiler: it's not what most climate conversations sound like. 1️⃣ What do you do when a Big Oil headhunter calls - about your climate project? One member has spent years trying to prevent a single African lake from erupting and releasing 4.5 gigatons of CO2 in one day. An event that could kill 5 million people. A major oil company just sent a headhunter. The funding would accelerate everything for them and team. Handing over control could shelve it forever. He's lived that story before at a mining giant that cleared out 1,000 people and kept the books - then found themselves stranded without anyone who knew what was in them. So what do you do? 2️⃣ Energy solutions should actually be climate solutions. An ecologist in our community is fighting to improve a proposed 208 tractor-trailer-sized lithium-ion battery installation - on a floodplain wetland. She came to office hours with the problem. Another member - who literally published a - was in the room and provided clarity, intel, and "here's where the tech is right now" perspective. That's the community working. 3️⃣ What do you do when career opportunities stop looking like the ones you know? One member is finishing their MBA and getting unsolicited speaking invites to international conferences focused on water. They didn't plan for this. The question: how do I navigate a career inflection point I never saw coming? When you sit at the table with people doing this work, one thing becomes obvious fast. The opportunities inside climate to have a massive impact? They are everywhere. But there is a problem? Most people never get close enough to those conversations to act. Or even hear about them in the first place. That's what Climate Drift and our community is for. Link in comments if you want in.

Most people think living sustainably costs more. It doesn't. We've made it look expensive. Last week I dropped off a jacket at our local seamstress. $15 and 10 minutes. That jacket has another 3 years of life. Yesterday we did the grocery run at the community bulk store. No packaging. Cheaper per kilo. Half the food waste. Tomorrow I’m going to borrow my neighbors electric lawnmower for the 30th time. We share tools. I bake them cake in return. Builds relationships. All were faster and cheaper than the "sustainable" alternative. And my money + goodwill went to a neighbor - not a corporation trying to greenwash me. The biggest lie in climate right now? That living sustainably is a luxury. It's not. Rooftop solar and EVs are great - but they're not the only path. The most impactful things are also the cheapest: - Fix what's broken before buying new - Shop bulk, skip the packaging - Borrow before you buy - Eat less meat - Ride the bike You don't need a $60k brand new EV to give a damn. Just start with a seamstress, a bulk store, and slightly different habits. What's your version of "everyday sustainability" that actually works?

Published Angus Shaw's piece on Friday. A guy building a carbon removal company from his basement. Pre-revenue, pre-brand, pre-everything. 7,000 readers over the weekend. People told us they read it multiple times. And by Monday, three serious people had reached out to collaborate with him. This was our first behind-the-scenes company challenge piece on Climate Drift. The whole idea: share your thinking publicly before it's perfect, and the right people find you. Check it out here & ping Angus to be part of this journey: https://lnkd.in/dkuZ-eXK Let's build climate solutions in public! Ping me if you want to collab on one.

We launched our Thought Leadership for Humans cohort at Climate Drift. Holy sh*t was that first session good 👇 Here's the thing: the most under-leveraged resource is the brain of authors. You read the book, you get intel. But talk to the author? You go 10x deeper. Last week I sat in on a session with @Anne-Laure Le Cunff (author of Tiny Experiments). Katie Gilbert (who's the force behind our course) invited Anne-Laure to show us how she designs tiny experiments to overcome fear and achieve goals. Here's one example: How to kill fear of public speaking (we all have it). Anne-Laure used to have nightmares for 2 weeks before any presentation. Stomach cramps. The whole deal. Her experiment: Record 1-minute videos for 7 days. Post to social media. Day 1: Took 10 takes to post her first video. Day 7: At the airport gate, recorded in one take without hesitation. The insight: You need to prove to your brain there's no death scenario. Once you do that, the fear response disappears. Now let me tell you - I've been founding, scaling, and exiting companies since 2011. I've been around the block. But sitting there with senior operators and investors, listening to Anne-Laure? The clarity of thought was next level. Simple. Hits to the core of who we are as humans. And you can implement it in the next hour. Immediate impact. Huge value. (Katie, I think we should have charged more for this course 🤣) Not sure if Katie is letting in latecomers (DM me and I'll see what I can do). Or fill out this application for the waitlist for next cohort: https://buff.ly/2LYdU4T More on how we think about thought leadership here: https://buff.ly/pDCFHQv

~1 year ago I came across NICE (No Internal Combustion Engine) 👉 Turning old gas guzzlers into EVs 😍 I remember thinking: " Lauryn Morris is operating on a different level." She wasn't just building cars; she was rewriting the unit economics of the entire industry. Fast forward to last week: I’m checking my Climate Drift calendar, and there she is on my screen. Lauryn just joined our Climate Drift community. She’s exactly the kind of "builder" that makes our community so special. Just look at what she’s pulled off: → Designed and built pilot vehicles using reclaimed Tesla batteries at $20–30K price points, challenging an industry oriented around $100K+ bespoke builds (and taking home Best SUV at Electrify Expo 2024). → Realized the supply chain was the real bottleneck and shifted from D2C builds to B2B infrastructure, defining the first UL-aligned certification for second-life EV components. → Created a first-of-its-kind marketplace and "reverse factory" model for regional EV processing. She’s here to pay it forward, mentor, and learn from other Climate Drifties. This is why I love building Climate Drift. You come for the mission and you stay because the person sitting "next" to you is a literal force of nature. If you think you have a cooler intro story than "I turn old SUVs into EVs" --> I’ll comp your first month of membership. 😅 👇 Apply to join the Climate Drift community here: https://buff.ly/xcB2jVN

The "Driftie" Takeover at Spark Climate Solutions 😅 There is a specific kind of magic that happens when you pair "Big Tech" operational excellence with "Big Science" climate solutions. So stoked to announce that Sarah Pritzker has joined Spark Climate Solutions as their new Chief Operating Officer! Sarah is an absolute force. She came to us with a background in food/ag and high-growth tech (Capsule, Circular), looking to bridge the gap into deep climate impact. Now, she’s helping lead an organization focused on the single biggest lever for near-term cooling: Methane. Why Spark is a big deal: → Methane is responsible for a massive slice of today’s warming. → Because it only stays in the atmosphere for about a decade, cutting it now is our fastest way to slow the rate of warming in our lifetimes. Sarah isn't alone at Spark, either. She joins: 👉 Barrett Olafson (one of our original Climate Drifties who transitioned from banking to lead Spark’s work on enteric methane). 👉 Ilissa Ocko (Senior Climate Scientist and ex-presidential advisor, who recently blew our community’s minds in a private session on super-pollutants). Seeing the "Driftie" network cluster around high-leverage problems like methane emissions is exactly what we hoped for when we started. Congrats Sarah and team. We can’t wait to see what you and the team build! #Sustainability #Leadership #Methane #ClimateAction #Community