Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

 Roughly five years ago an energy-themed  private equity fund named JOG Capital changed its name to Carbon Infrastructure Partners, because the change reflected its new emphasis.  I wrote about this at the time, and happening across my old piece in some recent web-surfing, I wondered how the subsequent years have treated them.  Their website is here: https://carboninfrastructurepartners.com/about/ -- you will find there a brief account of their own transition from JOG.  You won't find out what JOG originally stood for -- perhaps founders' initials played a role. It is not important.  What is important is that CIP describes itself as investing in companies with find creative ways to remove, reduce or avoid CO2 emissions.  If THIS is profitable there is hope for a sustainable capitalism.  So: is it?  Unfortunately, we don't have good public data on this yet. CIP closed on its first fund of the new post-JOG era, CIP Energy Fund I, in 2022. [By "...

On Feb. 1, Watershed, a climate software company, raised $100 million from venture capitalists.  This was an all-equity round, i.e. none of the $100 million consists of lent money. Climate software, as you have probably already figured out by now. is software useful for such matters as tracking carbon emissions. An investor will put money into it only on the presumption that people and institutions are going to want to track emissions -- that THIS is a growth industry. It is, I think, good news for the planet that heavy-hitting VC investors like Sequioa and Kleiner Perkins do think so, and ponied up this money.  Watershed announced that the fund-raising valued the company at $1.8 billion.     What does that mean?  Well, it is an invitation to do a little arithmetic. If the new investors put in $100 million and this valued the whole company (100% of equity) at $1.8 billion the implication is that the new owners have taken roughly 5.5 percent of the whole....

  It is a question that may not have occupied much of the brain energy of those of you who follow my humble blog, EVEN those of you who are concerned about and follow with some care issues about carbon emissions and climate change.  How much carbon is emitted by all those commercial vessels in the ocean. Vessels travelling across the Pacific from, say, Shanghai, China to Long Beach, California, packed with consumer goods, automobiles, and so forth. Aren't they driven forward with diesel fuel?  Are efforts underway to decarbonize ocean shipping? If so: how have they fared?  I have looked into this in more depth that I care to expound upon just now. All I will say is: 1) Yes, such efforts are underway, 2) They may have made a modest contributions to the supply chain problems now being blamed on the Covid epidemic, but 3) the market is readjusting, and green shipping may be an industry-defining reality a lot sooner than green commercial transport on land. 

The news from Germany I discussed yesterday is fairly typical of developments around the globe. The Paris Agreement allowed nation-states to adopt their own targets. One might naively have expected that they would adopt easy-to-meet targets, i.e. "we will emit no more than twice as much carbon into the atmosphere next year than we did last year." But no, the politics hasn't worked that way. As a matter of what one might fairly call virtue signalling, governments have set difficult targets, such as cutting emissions by 40% as of 2020 and 50% as of 2030. They can't and won't meet these targets. Then the different political parties can flagellate each other over whose fault it is that they didn't. Meanwhile, of course, the sort of tough medicine that might make such targets in principle reachable will be blocked by the political pull of the affected interests, because the virtue signalling can't stop the politics of ass protection. All in all, I hav...