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Last week, launched its inaugural Sustainability Leaders list. The stakes in addressing climate change could not be higher: Without fast and significant action, it will get worse – more extreme weather, food and water insecurity, mass displacement and public health crises. That’s why we’ve chosen to spotlight 50 superstar entrepreneurs, scientists, funders, policymakers and activists who are leading the charge to combat the climate crisis with real, tangible impact.
These are people like Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, who is pumping billions into clean tech; Sunrun CEO Mary Powell, who is easing the electric power crunch one home at a time; and MIT professor Yet-Ming Chiang who has launched eight climate-related startups.
Four mayors worldwide – Boston’s Michelle Wu, Paris’s Anne Hidalgo, Freetown, Sierra Leone’s Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr and Quezon City, Philippines’ Joy Belmonte – made the cut. So, too, did Wang Chuanfu, founder of Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD; British fashion designer Stella McCartney, a long-time advocate of sustainability; Rev. Lennox Yearwood, chair of the Hip Hop Caucus, a non-profit that engages young voters in the political process; and Andrew Steer, CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund, a philanthropic organization charged with disbursing $10 billion in grants to fight the climate crisis and protect nature.
One person not on the list: Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and CEO of the biggest electric vehicle company.
We’ll be hosting our third annual Sustainability Leaders Summit – featuring speakers that include former Secretary of State John Kerry, Washington Governor Jay Inslee, Matt Damon, cofounder of Water.org and WaterEquity, and Sylvia Earle, chair of Mission Blue – next week. While the in-person event is full, you can still register for the virtual version.
As environmentalist, author and activist Bill McKibben (who was also a judge for this year’s list), told : “The climate crisis is a test of whether the big brain was useful adaptation – or, more precisely, whether it’s attached to a big enough heart to get the job done.”
The Big Read
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Meet The MIT Professor With Eight Climate Startups And $2.5 Billion In Funding
Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Yet-Ming Chiang likes to fish. And it was through fishing, back in the early 1990s, that he started to notice that the New England waters were warming. “We used to catch lobster in Cape Cod,” said Chiang, in a call from his office with a Japanese style fish print of a striped bass he’d caught behind him. “Now we catch mahi-mahi. It’s really nuts.”
That glimpse of the real-world impact of climate change, with tropical and subtropical fish appearing in waters where they don’t belong, was pivotal for Chiang, who has used his research lab to cofound 10 startups. Eight of them are focused on energy and sustainability, including Form Energy, which has raised nearly $1 billion for its iron-air battery products, and Sublime Systems, which in April received $87 million from the Department of Energy to build a commercial plant to make low-carbon cement.
As the climate crisis has become increasingly urgent, Chiang’s research and his ability to spin out real-world applications from it offers hope and landed him a spot on ’ inaugural Sustainability Leaders list. He holds some 110 patents and has written more than 300 scientific articles in fields like battery technology and electrochemical production of industrial materials. Perhaps more importantly, he has used that research to launch companies to replace current carbon-based technologies with commercially scalable green and low-carbon alternatives. To date, his startups have raised more than $2.5 billion to build batteries, decarbonize cement and find more environmentally friendly ways to mine the critical minerals that are key to electrification.
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Hot Topic
Courtesy Jennifer Granholm
U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on clean energy as both vital for the climate and as a job-creating machine
What have you done differently at Energy during your term?
Our motto is deploy, deploy, deploy. That has not historically been the case. When I came in we reorganized a whole new vertical inside the department and hired almost a thousand people to execute on deploying clean energy. We’ve obviously been a great science and research agency and we shepherd the nuclear stockpile, but this issue of deploying has not historically been part of our DNA.
What do you point to as successes from funds for clean energy created by the Inflation Reduction Act?
Solar and battery. This record-breaking 11 gigawatts [of solar] just in Q2 of 2024, which is a 91% increase from the second quarter of 2023. It’s the equivalent of five Hoover dams in one quarter. And of course batteries are now seen as the fastest growing secondary electricity source for the grid.
If you think about the trajectory on this, I mean in 2020, we closed out the year, I think with just one gigawatt of battery energy storage capacity. We’re at 20 gigawatts as of July, and there’s just exponential growth in projections. Annual solar installations have doubled over the past four years, I think for 2024. In addition to that Q2 number, we’re on track to reach 38 gigawatts, which is double the prior U.S. record that was just set a year ago in 2023. Every year of this administration has been a record breaking year for solar and storage.
Incentives for clean energy projects also bring many new jobs?
We have reversed the offshoring trend in this clean energy sector. We’ve got this map if you go to energy.gov/invest. It’s got all the dots of all these clean energy factories that have cropped up across the country. It’s over 800 since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act that have expanded or have come to the United States because of the incentives being irresistible.
And it’s not just the factories. It’s also the mapping of the supply chains to make sure that we’re filling in the gaps so that we’re not substituting some reliance on OPEC with reliance on China. We are doing this – building up this clean energy supply chain in the United States.
What Else We’re Reading
The Cybertruck in the room: why Elon Musk isn’t on the first Sustainability Leaders List
How Sunrun is easing the electric power crunch one home at a time
Small scale, big impact: sustainability leaders making a difference in their communities
How the mayors of Quezon City and Freetown are fighting the climate crisis
How Jennifer Granholm’s Energy Department is pumping billions into clean tech
Schools are ripping up playgrounds to plant trees in fight against dangerous heat
Cleveland Browns owner backs new initiative to cut heavy industry emissions
At what point do climate-resilient buildings become the new norm?
Worst drought on record lowers Amazon rivers to all-time lows
Ozone layer on road to recovery despite volcano eruption, UN weather body says
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