Mike Brown on the Role of Private Capital in Tackling the Climate Emergency

“A lot of people thought we were wildly pessimistic as to the speed with which we were facing this crisis. Turned out we were wildly optimistic.

This is happening faster than those of us who started getting interested in it 30 years ago could possibly have conceived.”

In recognition of the 30 year anniversary of Clouds of Change, the 1989 report from the City of Vancouver’s Task Force on Atmospheric Change, Gord speaks with a key influencers for his originating motion to strike the task force, Mike Brown.

You may know Brown’s name as one of the co-founders of Ventures West (R.I.P.) in 1968, the prototype for institutional venture capital in Canada. Or perhaps for his role in helping Ballard Power land a $1.35 million investment in 1987, on the road to becoming the planet’s first major fuel cell player.

Or perhaps you don’t know his name at all. But you should. That’s because he represents one of the most important, and least appreciated (or perhaps least well understood) factors in the race to deal with the climate emergency — capital. Moolah. Money.

He’s a capitalist, but as we learn in this conversation, from a person who’s been thinking about and working on climate change at last as long as many of this podcast’s listeners have been alive, there may not be any other choice for dealing with this emergency than using the levers of capitalism to make things happen, and fast. The marketplace? All the money needed to power the requisite innovations — billions of dollars, all attracted to speculation about the future — is there.

So people like Brown work at advancing solutions, through places like the Institute for Breakthrough Energy Technology, his incubator focused on helping companies shorten the hardware commercialization timeframe, despite the fact that he’s made his money, and “the real issues are going to turn up after I’m dead.”

He doesn’t have to do all this. Giving colour and shape to his pessimism, and using it to make his rich friends feel a little discomfort. But he also knows that when he drives around his electric car, he ain’t burning sunshine. And so he wants those rich friends to part with some of their hard-won capital, and put it towards something that will make a real difference. As he has always done.

“When I started thinking about this problem, I conceived that it was going to be something that would face my great-grandchildren. By the time we got to the mid-90s, it was about my grandchildren. By the time we got to 2005, it was about my children. Now it’s about me.”