Fellows mentioned in this story: Dawn Lippert

From San Francisco Examiner

This was poised to be a pivotal year for climate tech. After weathering a difficult political environment under the Trump administration, a global pandemic that upended the world’s supply chain, a bout of layoffs and the crash of crypto, many companies were looking to both the venture capital world and the federal government’s Inflation Reduction Act to shore up their missions to help save the planet from catastrophic warming.

But then, one of the major funders of climate tech collapsed. Silicon Valley Bank, the largest financial institution to fail since the 2008 financial crisis, worked with more than 1,500 in the climate tech space. At the start of 2022, the now-defunct bank pledged to provide at least $5 billion in financing by 2027 to this sector alone.

SVB’s implosion sent shockwaves through the market, imperiling other banks, including San Francisco’s First Republic, whose share price plummeted for a second time in recent weeks, falling 47% on Monday.

The backsliding, combined with rising interest rates, has also sparked anxiety in the climate tech space with mounting concerns that it will be much harder to secure much-needed private and federal dollars, which will ultimately slow progress.

“Silicon Valley Bank was in many ways a climate bank,” Kiran Bhatraju, chief executive of Arcadia, the largest community solar manager in the country, told The New York Times. “When you have the majority of the market banking through one institution, there’s going to be a lot of collateral damage.”

This upheaval in the banking sector comes as yet another dire U.N. report warns that the world is likely to pass the 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit threshold, or the point of irreversible and catastrophic climate impacts, in the early 2030s unless governments and industry immediately transition away from fossil fuels.

This week, The Examiner sat down with Dawn Lippert, founder and CEO of Elemental Excelerator, a climate-tech nonprofit investor in projects and companies focused on climate solutions to better understand the near- and long-term impacts of the bank’s fallout. Lippert’s company supports 150 founders and companies across every part of the climate-tech ecosystem.

Continue reading at sfexaminer.com.