Capital Investment
The chemicals and material manufacturing infrastructure that makes everything from building materials to wind turbines is very capital intensive. Current schemes for capital investment (e.g., venture, private equity), have the common goal of achieving targeted returns while minimizing risk. This model significantly favors incrementalism which makes it far easier to understand and analyze the risk profile for technological investments. It also favors low capital-intensive projects such as software and “app” projects and disfavors projects such as large-scale infrastructure and manufacturing. Achieving sustainability goals necessitates transformative technologies and dramatically reconstituted sustainable infrastructure at unprecedented scale requiring wise, patient capital at a significantly increased level.