Issue #5 | October 2025
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Why sustainability marketing fails (and how to fix it)
A massive amount of capital is flowing towards AI now… three or four years ago, there was definitely a hype cycle around climate tech.
In our latest podcast episode, I sat down with Nick van Osdol—a climate tech investor, storyteller and founder of Keep Cool—who's worked for years at the intersection of venture capital, climate solutions, and now artificial intelligence. What struck me wasn't just his insights on where capital is flowing, but his pragmatic take on how climate tech needs to position itself in an AI-obsessed world.
Let's break down what's happening at this collision point and what it means for founders building in 2025.
The attention problem
While climate tech was the darling of venture capital just three years ago, AI has dramatically shifted where attention (and dollars) are flowing:
Climate VC funding slowed in the U.S. since 2021–2022 highs.
Fundraising got tougher: many first-time fund managers couldn’t raise follow-ons.
Meanwhile, global climate spending (infra + bank debt) still tops $2T annually.
The money didn’t vanish, it just shifted attention. AI now has narrative gravity, pulling capital and headlines with it.
The takeaway: To capture investor and customer attention, climate founders need to position solutions at the intersection of sustainability and AI, either enabling AI’s growth (power, storage, cooling) or using AI to unlock new climate outcomes.
From the archives: when positioning transforms perception
What made it work? Customers weren’t just buying a radio, they were buying confidence that it would perform flawlessly and last. Reliability itself became the differentiator.
The climate marketing lesson: In an AI-saturated world, climate founders should use the same framing. Don’t pitch your solution as “green” or “cheaper.” Pitch it as designed for durability under pressure—the system people can trust when power demand spikes, GPUs heat up, or infrastructure is stretched to its limits. Quality is the story.
Case study: when positioning trumps purpose
Nick shared how climate founders win not by selling sustainability outright, but by reframing their value in terms of business-critical outcomes.
Take the example of energy storage:
Early pitches framed it as a decarbonization tool: “cut emissions with clean storage.” The response was lukewarm. But when the same technology was repositioned as “AI uptime insurance”—a way to guarantee that data centers and GPU clusters wouldn’t go dark—suddenly the conversation shifted.
Operators and tech investors weren’t buying climate virtue; they were buying resilience, certainty, and competitive advantage.
The principle: Climate solutions resonate most when they’re framed as indispensable to progress in other industries, from AI to mobility to infrastructure. Don’t just market climate as “good for the planet”; market it as the engine that enables what’s next.
Three practical takeaways from the AI-climate collision
1. Position energy solutions as AI enablers: With data centers projected to consume 11% of global electricity by 2030 (up from 2-3% today), climate founders should position clean energy solutions as critical infrastructure for AI's future, not just environmental necessities.
2. Use AI to solve climate’s “impossible” problems: The most compelling climate startups now use AI to solve previously intractable problems, like using predictive modeling to optimize wildfire response or identifying optimal sites for renewable energy infrastructure at scale.
3. Target methane over carbon: Methane is 84 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas in the short term, yet receives disproportionately less investment attention. It's also valuable when captured (unlike CO2), creating immediate economic incentives beyond environmental benefits.
What's working now: the hardware renaissance
After years of venture capital's obsession with software, we're witnessing a renaissance in hardware investment, particularly at the intersection of climate and AI.
Nick's observation:
There’s been a pretty concerted shift and excitement to hardware solutions… from a decarbonization or from the problem-solving perspective, it’s definitely worthwhile that folks have an appetite to invest in hardware solutions.
The strategy: Position your climate hardware solution as the critical infrastructure that enables AI's continued growth. Show investors how policy support (at federal, provincial/state, or municipal levels) creates multiple paths to scaling beyond venture capital alone.
Listen to the full conversation
For more insights on navigating the collision between AI and climate tech, check out my full interview with Nick on The Capitalist Hippie podcast.
In the episode, he also covers:
Why climate tech should be framed as intellectually stimulating rather than just purpose-driven
How Tesla's RoboTaxi represents the perfect marriage of climate tech and AI
The underexplored opportunity in methane mitigation and utilization
Why adaptation and resilience technologies are attracting increasing investment