Climate Matters: in conversation with Tom Rand

Tom speaks with Beyond Crisis in Toronto on the huge potential and urgent need to accelerate clean technologies to market, tackling climate change while creating massive social and economic opportunity. This rich and information-packed piece explores the amazing innovation being led by cleantech entrepreneurs today in the race to replace fossil fuel energy, catalyzing a global "cleantech revolution".

"It happens to be true that we can run our industrial economy better on renewable energy than we can on fossil fuels: but it will take a transition."

"We're trying to rebuild in a generation something that took five generations to build in the first place - and we're trying to do that in the face of very established, very powerful economic forces that benefit from the existence of that system."

"The world is going to decarbon whether one's denialist uncle cares about it or not - it's happening, and Canada has a choice."

Tom is a well-known cleantech investor, advisor, speaker, author and entrepreneur, as well as Managing Partner of ArcTern Ventures, which provides capital and other resources to help accelerate promising cleantech companies to market. Cleantech companies mentioned in the video include:

@BeyondCrisisPCM
#SmartOnClimate

[bicycleetc]

Nice idea, but we need to also suck up at least 50 percent of all CO2 released since the industrial revolution. The warming potential of existing CO2 in our atmosphere is at its infancy. That potential will be with us for over 8k years....And if Arctic and Greenland ice melts, then we have the threat of an abrupt released of gigatons of Methane; a greenhouse gas orders of magnitude more potent than CO2. So, it is not only switching to renewables that matters.