A big part of any startup pitch is some kind of guess as to how big the potential target market is.
This is often referred to as the Total Addressable Market, or TAM for short.
Climate tech startups are no different. If they want to raise money they need to show they’re chasing a large and growing market. We get an added twist though because in climate tech we also need to show that the market in question has two characteristics: that it is a high polluting or high emission one and that’s it at least theoretically possible to reduce that pollution through some intervention.
This is often referred to as Total Addressable Carbon, or TAC for short.
We therefore often end up with a lot of posturing along the lines of “we’re tackling an industry responsible for 2% of global emissions!” or “we’re addressing a market with emissions equalling those of the entire UK!” Inevitably also this drives energy, creativity, and finance towards the “biggest emitters”, according to a ranking of their emissions as segmented by industry.
In a textbook case of missing the wood for the trees this allows the real culprits to remain hidden in plain sight.
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In her 2013 book “90% of Everything“, Rose George shone a critical light on the maritime shipping industry revealing, through he research, that around 90% of all globally traded goods spend at least some time on a ship at some point in their lifecycle. Very often more than once.
This has now become a widely accepted statistic and, relatedly, it’s estimated that maritime shipping accounts for 3% of global emissions. As the stuff on ships doesn’t magically load and unload itself and needs transportation on both ends, the real carbon footprint of goods transportation is typically closer to 11% of global emissions.
But what’s on those ships? In those boxes in those containers?
It’s by and large stuff for household consumption and use. Rice, televisions, sneakers, Teslas, airplane parts, oil, furniture, flowers. Coal. Stuff that give or take accounts for about 60% of global emissions. Add that to our previous percentage and we get 70% of global emissions arising from globally shipped goods and trade.
Ok, its not scientific but its a good enough heuristic to make my point and my point, once made, will still stand even if it was just 50% of global emissions.
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Here’s the point.
Stuff tends to get shipped on big big boats when its part of an industrial supply chain operated by a big big corporation.
So its quite a safe assumption to make that the instigators and beneficiaries of a lot of this global trade—this 90% of everything—are capitalist organisations who seek to maximise profit above all else. In this scenario, any environmental, cost, or labour efficiencies made to the transportation mechanisms and supply chains are usually offset by increased absolute production.
The thing that needs to be tackled, disrupted, therefore is not the ship or the truck or the factory but the underlying system: the maximum-profit-at-all-costs paradigm implemented by capitalist companies.
Irrespective of whether they are hundred-year-old companies or fresh-faced startups unless the mindset employed is different the outcome will remain the same.
That’s what you, we, need to tackle if we want to address something with a “total addressable carbon” of 70%. All the other two-percents are really just tidying deckchairs on the titanic.
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Photo by Ian Taylor on Unsplash
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