Tom Chi and Eric Berlow: Investing Disruptive Technology for a Net Positive World

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Welcome to the stage, founder and executive director of Summit Impact, Shira Abramowitz.

Hello! Hi everyone! Oh wow, thank you, thank you for that. For anyone I don't know yet, my name is Shira Abramowitz. I'm the executive director of Summit Impact, and we're the new 501(c)(3) social good arm of Summit.

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Our mission is to activate the power of this community to create a more regenerative and equitable future. We've built a fellowship program that has supported 108 fellows from 23 countries around the world. We've also piloted an Impact Labs model where we now build topic-based Impact Labs, like our Democracy Lab and our Criminal Justice Lab, and we're building more coming up soon.

We actually have an exciting announcement: in January 2024, we are launching a Climate Lab. So you in this room are the first to know. And the way the labs work are there are cohorts of Summit fellows, and we build year-round programs that include strategic introductions, events, and curated projects to further the fellows' objectives. So with our Climate Lab coming up, over the next few months we're going to be opening up applications and nominations for fellows, building a Leadership Council, and refining our topic focus.

So our hope, as we dive into these sessions at Summit at Sea and get to hear from some of the most amazing speakers in climate, is that you'll also take us up on the invitation to further this work year-round — to join our climate programs and to convert this learning and inspiration into action in the months ahead.

So with that in mind as the baseline, it is my absolute pleasure to introduce our first climate speaker of the event, Tom Chi.

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So Tom is a remarkable innovator. He's known for things like scaling Yahoo Answers from zero to 90 million users, using his rapid prototyping approach at Google X to build Google Glass and self-driving cars. He's also just really known for helping any team move at new speeds and jump-start innovative ideas. And he's done this with countless organizations and founders around the world.

And most recently, he has become known for his work as a founding partner at At One Ventures, where he's quickly becoming a field leader in climate investment with unmatched returns. I had the wild opportunity of meeting Tom about a decade ago on another ship, when we were working with the Unreasonable Group. And since then, something I have really deeply admired about Tom is how he's always able to expand his mind to new scenarios and new paradigms, to really invite us into how we can hold new perspectives, and then from this new way of seeing, start to rapidly iterate and create solutions and make them real in the world.

So he's here today to introduce a new way of understanding the world, a new frame for all of us about what it would take to create a net positive future, and what kinds of inventions and scaling and mindsets it will take to get us there. So with that, let's give a big second welcome, a round of applause, to Tom Chi.

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Already more applause than planned, so this is great. Okay, so this is what we're talking about today. We're going to talk about how to help humanity become net positive to nature. But in order to jump into this, let's start at the very highest level.

So something that you guys may already know, but maybe you don't, is that since the invention of agriculture, the human population on the planet has increased by more than a thousandfold — from approximately 7 million before agriculture to more than 8 billion today. And I think that people hear this number, already just the population number, and there's already some despair that sets in, where they kind of think to themselves, oh my gosh, maybe it's just too late. We just have so many people, we're already beyond a bunch of ecological limits. Like, is this even going to be possible? Can this even work within the laws of physics to make it possible that this many people could exist on this planet in a way that doesn't destroy the planet? Very normal kind of reaction. But I'm here to share some thoughts that might shift that a little bit.

So it turns out that if you were to take the biomass of all of humanity — so if you took everybody and just kind of weighed us all together on the same scale — it would end up being about 350 million tons of biomass. And that's basically the biomass footprint of humanity on the planet. Now coincidentally, there's another kind of group of organisms that have roughly the same biomass. So if you add up all the ants on the planet, it actually ends up being roughly 350 million tons as well, plus or minus 15 — you know, some ecologists and biologists are still working on that a little bit.

And in this way, ants and us are basically exactly the same. We actually take the same biomass footprint on the planet. Now beyond that, we're similar in a lot of other ways. Ants build societies that have different roles. Ants build architecture. A lot of ants are omnivores just like us. So they have a lot of similarities to us.

But one way that they're very different is human beings only eat about 2.8% of their body weight per day, and ants by comparison eat roughly 30% of their body weight per day — over 10 times more. Which practically translates to: in any given day, human beings will consume about 10 million tons of food, and ants will eat over 100 million tons of food. And effectively, ants are eating what 80 billion people would eat. But we're not sitting here thinking, oh my God, ant overpopulation, if we could just get these ants down we'd have a chance to live on this planet. Of course not, right?

Because ants have somehow figured out how to literally consume 10 times more of the planet than us every single day and somehow not mess it all up. And not only do they not mess it up, they actually provide a ton of valuable ecosystem services — nutrient recycling, aeration of soils, lots of valuable services to every ecosystem that they end up populating.

So it is actually not about the amount. It is not about 8 billion versus 80 billion. It's not about 10 million versus 100 million. It is actually about the style. The style in which we've chosen to consume is one that is highly destructive for every ton that we end up consuming. And many other organisms on the planet — and ants are not the biggest biomass on the planet, I just chose them because they're so much like us — there's a bunch of organisms that have a way bigger biomass footprint than ants and us, and they're doing just fine as well. So this is truly a style question and not an amount question.

Now that said, a lot needs to change in order to get that done. But the way to summarize the difference in style here is: ants are able to exist at this population, eat 10 times more, consume 10 times more of the planet than us, because they're basically following a simple rule, which is: in the process of existing, can you create more ecosystem services than ecosystem consumption? If you do that as a species, you're fine. Honestly, you could consume a very large percentage of the planet, as long as you're providing more ecosystem services than consumption, and things actually work out fine.

And not only is this the rule for ants, but it actually is the rule of basically every organism on the planet other than us right now. So this is us just trying to catch up with most of the animals on the planet. Most of the beings on the planet are already following this rule, and this is the reason why they're able to live on this planet for billions of years and make actual life on the planet more productive by existing, as opposed to what we've been doing.

Now this then begs the simple question, which is: what does it look like for humanity to provide more ecosystem services than ecosystem consumption? Or another way to phrase it is: can humanity become net positive to nature? Can we have it so that our basic existence on the planet — nature is healthier every year that we're around because we're around?

Now in order to explore this question, we need to get realistic about where we are right now, and that aspect of things is not so great actually. So this is a graph of effectively the entire Industrial Revolution. This is the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air in 1750, and this is the sum total of all of our activities. So you see how much coal we burned, how much oil, how much gas, how much cement — not talked about as often. But land use change is a huge emissions footprint. It's just we don't think about it as an industry. We think about it like, hey, we drained this wetland, big deal. Oh, we cleared out this peat bog, big deal. Oh, we clear-cut this forest, big deal. We think about that in like 20 different industries, but it's actually also enormous.

Now if it was just human activities — and human activities constitute everything on the left side of this graph — if it was just human activities, we would already be on a fully unlivable planet. You look at the stats: 280, we'd be up around the 580 range by now, which is not a planet that we would want to live on, for sure.

Now luckily, it hasn't just been us. Because if you look at the right-hand side, nature's already had our back. Nature's been trying extremely hard to fix the problem, even though we have not been trying hard to fix the problem. And nature has already sequestered almost 600 billion tons into the ocean. It has sequestered more than 600 billion tons into the land — terrestrial biomass, soils, wetlands, this kind of thing. And then the remainder is still up in the atmosphere, still sitting up there. As of 2022, we're up to 417 parts per million on average. When I first gave this talk, it was 408. So we're not doing so well on all this.

Now it's good news that nature is helping us, because if nature wasn't helping us, we'd already be in terrible, terrible shape. But for nature to help us in this way, it's also taxing things quite a bit. The absorption of that 600 billion tons into the ocean comes at the cost of the global ocean increasing in acidity by 30% since the Industrial Revolution. Think how much water that is — it's an enormous volume. But we've actually created enough carbon dioxide that 600 billion tons have been absorbed into the ocean, and that has increased the total acidity of the ocean by 30%.

In addition, the roughly trillion tons that's still left up in the atmosphere — this is the stuff that's driving climate destabilization, this is the stuff that is leading to the bad weather patterns. And actually, the stuff that has been sequestered into the land is actually mostly fine, and that gives you an interesting clue of some things that we might be able to do to start changing this dynamic.

Now in addition to this, which is kind of the audit of the entire history since the Industrial Revolution relative to our relationship to atmosphere and climate, there are other bad things that are happening right now. For example, we're on pace currently to extinct coral reefs — all shallow-water corals — from the planet within 35 years. Like, all those species will just be gone. And in the process of losing all the coral reefs, 25% of marine species that we know of live directly on the reef, and they will die instantly with the reefs going.

That's not the end of the bad news, because about 15% more of the ocean has either their reproduction chain or food chain closely tied to the reef, even if they don't live there most of the year. And it means that somewhere between 25 to 40% of the ocean will be extinct by about the middle of the century. Pretty bad news on this front.

If you don't care about animals or biodiversity at all, it also directly affects a billion people in terms of their livelihoods, their food sources, all that sort of thing. So if you only cared about people, this still matters. But when you go down the direction of extincting 25 to 40% of all those species, that's an error that you can't turn back. I mean, a bunch of these things can re-evolve, but talking with coral scientists, they're like, well, coral could re-evolve, but it'll take about 15 to 20 million years. So I'm not sure who's banking on being here in 20 million years. I'm not totally guaranteeing that we as a species will be able to do that yet. So I think it would be way better for us to be extremely thoughtful in these next 30 years and kind of change course.

So obviously the damage is large and the time is short. So let's go back to this question: how could we become net positive given all the things that have happened so far? And to address this question, I'd like to introduce you to an idea. The idea is called an invention catalyst.

An invention catalyst is a type of invention that doesn't just change the object itself, but changes the way that you think about entire systems, entire ways of organizing beyond the object itself. So if you have a toaster and then you invent a better toaster, well, maybe it toasts 15% faster or maybe this one can take bagels as well as thin-sliced things. Great — like, the toaster is a little bit better. You've invented a better toaster, but the world has not changed just because your toaster is a little bit better. You have a slightly better toaster, and that's a fine invention.

An invention catalyst is something like, oh, this starts to happen and many domino effects, many catalytic effects flow from there. So as mentioned in the intro, I was part of the founding team of Google X. I worked on things like Google Glass, self-driving cars, Project Loon, the contact lens that can continuously measure glucose levels, a new approach to artificial intelligence called Google Brain that does semi-supervised learning — a bunch of different things.

But relative to the cars: if you could imagine a world where most of the vehicles out there could drive themselves, well, there's one important stat that you need to know to understand why this would matter at the system level. Right now, there's about a billion cars on the planet, and the average utilization of these cars is about 4%. It means 96% of the time that people own cars, they're not using them. Just think about your own car — you're not in your car more than 10% of the time, even if you drive a lot. The typical utilization of a car on planet Earth is 4%. And that's a lot of raw material that is going to waste. It's not providing any transportation utility.

And you can imagine a world where you have self-driving cars on like a taxi service, and instead of everybody owning a car, they can just call up the car that is appropriate for the task. Oh, you're trying to do home improvement? Get a pickup truck. You're trying to go on a hot date? Great, get a sports car. Order up the car that you need for the task, get all the same transportation utility, but each one of those cars, instead of being utilized at 4%, you could easily imagine them being utilized at 30 to 40%, and still have plenty of time for charging, plenty of time for maintenance, all that sort of thing.

So in a world where you could go from 4% utilization of a complex object like this to 40% utilization, it turns out that you don't need nearly as many cars. You could literally cut down the number of cars on the planet by 70 to 80% and not hit transportation utility at all. And just imagine the major cities of the world with 70 or 80% fewer cars.

We actually used a joke in the team that once we actually got it all working — and I can talk a lot about exactly where we are right now; it's pretty far along and also it's not everywhere yet, as you know — but once we got this working, we would go to all the cities on the planet and find all these signs that say "parking lot" and erase the trailing letters. So just "park." Because like 30% of urban areas are basically used for parking, depending on the city. The real flat cities, even more than that — could be 40 to 45% of your city. So imagine being able to reclaim 30 to 40% of a city for natural areas, which help combat heat island effect, or create community spaces, all that sort of thing. It could completely revolutionize many things beyond just having a car.

So you guys get what an invention catalyst is, right? It's not just a slightly better car. It's a thing that could change entire systems because it now exists.

Now let's take this idea of an invention catalyst and let's bring it to that question of trying to get to a world where humanity can become net positive to nature. And with that, I'm going to share some invention catalysts. As mentioned in the intro, I am now a professional investor — like, apparently you just need to file some forms with the SEC. Anyway, but these are from our portfolio, so fully disclosed on that front. But I think you will get a sense of what an invention catalyst looks like practically in these settings.

So one of the companies that we support is called Dendra Systems. The video was before they changed their name, so don't worry about that too much. And Dendra Systems has created a set of drones — these are very early days, the most modern ones you'll see slightly more modern ones in the videos — but each one of these drones is able to plant 120 trees per minute. And being able to plant 120 trees per minute is a real useful trick if you're trying to get ecosystem restoration and repair the planet to happen at scale.

So with that, we're going to watch a quick video of them restoring some mangroves in southern Myanmar.

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So check this out: this is what it looks like two and a half months later, and then this is what it looks like 14 to 16 months later. Same landscape. And this was something that was fully impossible five years ago. Five years ago, when we first invested in this company, they planted one oak tree that was an inch and a half tall. But by understanding that this mechanism is a totally different mechanism, this is something that could have a type of scale that human beings would never be able to organize enough people — and especially, mangroves are especially tough because they're on tidal mud flats. So when you try to go out there, you're at least knee-deep in mud, but sometimes chest-deep in mud. It is not the best situation for you to be trying to traverse many hectares.

And actually, to this point, this team just won a $30 million contract to restore all the mangroves of Abu Dhabi. So that's a 25,000-hectare restoration. We're not talking small scale — this is tens of thousands of hectares of scale now that we are getting to.

Now why would this be important relative to that previous question? Well, it turns out that a tree at maturity — the typical tree at maturity weighs between 2 to 20 tons. A giant redwood can be 2,000 tons, so lots of variation obviously, but a giant redwood is not a typical tree. A typical tree at maturity weighs between 2 to 20 tons. And it turns out that trees are roughly 50% carbon by mass. So when you see a mature tree — a 2-to-20-ton tree in front of you — you are also seeing 1 to 10 tons of carbon.

And where did that carbon come from? Well, it turns out that all that carbon came from the air. And actually, almost all the mass of a tree comes from the air — like, more than 95%. Every plant that you see is basically crystallized air. That's actually where they get most of their mass from. They get a couple essential nutrients from the soil, but it doesn't actually add up to very much mass — it's just used in different chemical processes in order to have their biology work. But yeah, plants are basically crystallized air, including trees.

And it means that if you could get enough of those to come back — and we've already cut down about 40% of all trees on the planet as of this point — which means that there's plenty of space and plenty of room. The planet can obviously support a lot more trees than we currently have, because we just took them away over the last two to three hundred years.

And yes, this thing works in a lot of ecosystems. We actually planted in 20 different ecosystems on four different continents already. This had actually been a strip mine up at about one mile above sea level in central Australia. It had been a strip mine where they extracted all the ore, and then after they extracted all the ore, they put the dirt aside and then put the dirt back on top — they call it the overburden. The overburden used to be called an ecosystem, but hey, this is what it looks like after the overburden comes on.

And then the team went out there and planted for one week, and 18 months later, this is what the landscape looks like. And I want to point to this one, because the mangroves are a monoculture planting, but that's because the ecologist told us to do that. They basically said, hey guys, the mangrove ecosystem doesn't really get started until the mangroves start coming up. Then we can plant other things, but you got to start with all mangroves.

In this particular case, we started with 17 different species at the suggestion of the local ecologist, and this technology is able to plant in a biodiverse way, not just in monocropping. And I think a really beautiful metaphor here is: we planted 17 species and we came back a year and a half later — well, actually we checked in a couple times throughout the 18 months — and we measured how many species were on the landscape at that point. Over 70 species.

Now what happened? Well, it turns out that even when you destroy the landscape this badly, there are still seeds underneath that are waiting. They're waiting for the conditions to get good again. And when those conditions come back, then things can start to flourish again. And I think it's just a beautiful metaphor for a lot of the work that we do. I think there's something latent inside of both us as humanity and also what nature hopes to do — that if we just stop being so damaging for a little bit, there's seeds that are waiting to come back out, and if we just give it a little bit of a nudge, actually a lot more can happen from that nudge.

Now if you have an invention catalyst like this, what might be possible? Well, remember, there's a trillion tons of extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. If trees weigh 1 to 10 tons of carbon, then if you could plant a trillion of them, you basically get pretty close to getting a lot of that carbon back into trees. Now, what a trillion would look like would be 20 billion trees per year for 50 years. And it turns out that with this tech, it only takes about 9,000 drones and 450 operating staff and $80 million worth of operating costs. And the seed costs — depending on what seed you're planting, can be quite expensive or it can be a fraction of a penny — but just the pure operating expense is actually quite inexpensive to go after the actual solving of climate change, as opposed to just adapting to everything being flooded and burned and destroyed.

And this is the one other thing to mention, because you guys are familiar with Moore's Law, right? It's basically like, okay, processors are getting faster at this exponential rate. And one simple way to tell whether you're working with an exponential technology or not is it looks like a straight line on a log-log plot. So this is actually a log-log plot with the price per hectare in terms of the cost of restoration coming down by factors of 10, and obviously the scale of restoration going up by factors of 10. And you actually see our first job, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh — and then I got to fill in the latest dots, but obviously Abu Dhabi is like 25,000 hectares right here.

So effectively, yes, just like Moore's Law, we are cutting in half the cost of ecosystem restoration every couple years. And you're going to get to a spot where honestly a lot of things that we thought we couldn't afford to restore before will suddenly become affordable. Or if you were going to restore something, you might be able to restore it five times more land with the same budget.

Okay, with that, we're going to go on to a different catalyst, because I need to finish on time. So this one comes from the land of agriculture and growing. Because obviously, ecosystem restoration — those are things that we hope will grow back, but agriculture we spend a lot of money on every single year. And in all the catalysts that I'm showing here, I'm showing options for us to get to a trillion tons of sequestration in the right ballpark.

So in this particular case, what you're seeing here is an image of Gabe Brown's farm. People know Gabe Brown? Yes, some people do, very good. Yes, nice. This is an educated audience.

Well, Gabe Brown is one of the kind of forefront pioneers on soil-regenerative agriculture. And I had been reading about a lot of folks doing soil-regenerative agriculture. I visited farms all around the world trying to understand it, and Gabe's was a real standout. So I went to Gabe's farm with a team of soil scientists, and we actually took hundreds of soil cores, really characterized what had happened on his farm and how he was doing it.

And for folks that don't know the terminology: there's Horizon A, B, and C soil. Horizon A soil is the richest, darkest topsoil. Horizon C is the underlying substrate, and B is something in between. The average farmland in the U.S. has got a quarter inch of Horizon A soil. That is what we are banking on to be able to keep feeding ourselves — a quarter inch of topsoil on average across the U.S. It's a little scary, which is why the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization is like, hey, things are going to get real tough within 60 to 70 years, because we just kind of run out of topsoil.

Well, on Gabe's land, he was averaging 29 and a half inches of Horizon A soil. This marker, from the crumbly to the slightly less crumbly, is the native Horizon B mark. And we took hundreds of soil cores — this was not an unusual core. Some of them had three feet of Horizon A soil. And he built this many feet of Horizon A soil in less than 25 years. So more than an inch of topsoil build per year. And not by throwing a bunch of inputs on it, but basically working with nature in order to have those management practices come up way, way better.

Now what we're seeing over here is — Gabe actually took me to the edge of the land, because he manages right now about 4,000 acres in North Dakota, and through his organization he manages an additional 35 million acres. So he by himself is having a real interesting impact on the world.

But he took me to the edge of the land, which is right next to his neighbor's land. And he kind of took out a shovel and just took a shovel of his land, which is over here, and he took a shovel of his neighbor's land, which is 50 meters away. And you can tell the difference. I mean, honestly, this probably doesn't even have a quarter inch of Horizon A soil.

And his neighbors had actually stopped growing for the last two years, because when I visited, it was the third year of continuous drought where that landscape had gotten less than 5.5 inches of rain per year for three years in a row. So everybody else around him had stopped producing. His farm was still producing at 95% capacity, even with that little water available. The soils were so healthy that they could draw on water from rains many years ago, and the residency time when a rain did happen fueled the crops for a long time.

But the most impressive moment was — obviously you can visually see the difference — but Gabe was like, hey Tom, let me try something. Can you smell the difference? And he basically held this out and he held that up, and I was like, I can tell they smell different, but I don't know any more than that. And then he smells his land, and then he smells the neighbor's land, and he proceeds to rapid-fire list out like 10 management practices. Like, okay, they're short on potassium, and this is what they got to do. He's just using his nose — this literally happened in 10 seconds right in front of my face. I was like, holy crap, what just happened?

And for every day since then — for six years, because this photo is from six years ago — I've been looking for a replacement for Gabe Brown's nose. And I have now found one. But let me tell you why that's important first.

So this is what's up with the use of land on the planet. A bunch of the planet — 70% of the planet is covered with oceans. The 30% that is not covered with oceans, 71% of it is habitable, 10% is glaciers like in the ice caps, 19% is extremely barren land like the middle of the Sahara or some extremely low-biomass type environments. So only 71% of the surface area of the planet is habitable.

And it actually turns out that we use 50% of that for agriculture. So when people say, oh my gosh, how are you going to get enough room for trees? Well, actually, if we could just fix how we did agriculture, then that would make a huge difference. And you can see trees are already trying to make their way back — they're second biggest by a lot. But we've cut it down a lot. It was almost two-thirds of the planet at some point, and we cut it down to 37%.

Anyway, when you look at how agriculture is used, it's almost all in protein production, even though protein production is only 18% of our calorie mix. So if we could start growing more intelligently, and if we could be managing a large swath of land like this in a way like what Gabe is doing, then you could potentially be drawing down the trillion tons of carbon deficit. If all the soils in the world could get 11% richer in carbon, then that would actually pay back the entire debt up through the Industrial Revolution.

On Gabe's land, he went from about half a percent soil organic carbon to 13% — so that's a lot better than 11% better. He multiplied it by 30 times. It's enormous compared to the gap that you need to make. And even if you just say we're just going to do it on the land that we manage for agriculture — even just the cropland, though actually his farm does both animals and plants, so it actually is applicable to that entire pie — then actually we could pretty quickly pay this stuff down in the order of just maybe two decades.

Now, we're not that organization yet. We're not that civilization yet. And part of the reason we're not that civilization is nobody has Gabe Brown's nose. Nobody can just pick up a clump of this thing and say, here's the management practice you need, these types of cover crops, you need to be focused on phosphorus and you focus on whatever — he's just smelling, just rolling it out of his mouth like that. Nobody has it.

But we just invested in a company that — this is the replacement for Gabe Brown's nose, obviously. Actually, this is how it all works. For people that have a background in physics and optics, it's kind of like a laser and barometer, but there's a couple different changes. The things are circularly polarized, the two lasers are offset by a quarter wavelength, and you modulate the intensity so that the square of their intensity always equals one. And if you do all that, then the mathematics allows you to magically subtract out fluorescence from Raman backscattering.

And Raman backscattering is one of the most sensitive ways for us to measure anything on the planet. It's about a thousand to ten thousand times more accurate than the next closest way of doing it. But we've never been able to do it out in the wild. We can do it in a lab when there's just one molecule that we're looking for on a backdrop of a different molecule. You can use Raman to measure that extremely closely. But when you get to something as complex as soil, then there's this noise called the fluorescence floor, and nobody's been able to remove the fluorescence from Raman until these folks did.

So now we have a tool where you can scan your soil in the course of just a couple minutes and it'll come back with all the readouts. So it is slower than Gabe Brown's nose, but it does the things that Gabe Brown does in terms of: here's all the compounds that are in there. Notably, it can also tell the difference between labile carbon, biological carbon, and mineralized carbon. And this is actually really important in the carbon markets where people want to discount everything that biology creates, since, well, that doesn't count — that can go away, the thing can rot and that'll return some of the stuff back to the atmosphere. It's true, but mineralized carbon doesn't do that. But we've never been able to measure how much of the soil carbon was mineralized versus labile. And this basically does that in the same reading as it is doing the reading that tells you exactly which nutrients are missing from the soils and how to manage your land.

So if anybody's an investor, this company is actively raising right now. But that's not the whole point here. This is just a point to say, think about the catalytic impacts of being able to give this kind of tool to all the farmers of the world. And not every farmer needs to own one either — you could measure stuff three times in a season and you would get a lot of the impact. So a group of farmers could just share one. Though, we are quickly bringing down the cost of this. Our team has been working with this team, and we already brought it down from $40,000 to less than $10,000. We're pretty sure we can get it to just a couple thousand when we get to manufacturing scale, which means it should be affordable. Farmers in the U.S. spend $200,000 on a tractor, right? So getting it down to a thousand or two should make it affordable for most folks.

So with that, I've given you two important catalysts. But I'm going to do a little bit of a perpendicular one. And this actually is an image that came the day before the first time I ever gave this talk. We're on a rooftop in Quito, Ecuador, and it's 2018, and a really interesting thing happened. I was out there to speak to a group of Latin American entrepreneurs and get more connected to that ecosystem and get them inspired to do this type of work.

But it turned out that that point was exactly the same time as a different conference that was happening on exactly the same day, which was the 10-year anniversary of the Rights of Nature being added to the Ecuadorian Constitution. Because Ecuador had some major economic issues — they got off of the peso, they moved on to the dollar. So if you go to Ecuador, they use the U.S. dollar. And then they rewrote the Constitution as part of doing this, and when they rewrote the Constitution, they added just a couple sentences — like 17 sentences — that have to do with the Rights of Nature.

And paraphrasing a bit, it has to do with the right of a river to be able to flow, the right of a forest to be able to regenerate. And those are nice words to have on a piece of paper until it's actually tested in court. But what was great is, 10 years on, a bunch of that actually got tested in court, and nature won a lot of the time.

Now unfortunately, when nature lost, it lost to oil companies, because they also wrote oil into the Constitution. So as a head-to-head constitutional battle, I don't know — I wasn't there, but you get it. But in all the cases where they didn't constitutionally write that they could also damage the environment, nature was winning. And that case law basically set that kind of tone that Ecuador can become a pioneer at a lot of these things and have been able to protect a lot of the ecosystem.

And I kind of mention this because all the catalysts I've been showing so far have to do with physical changes in the world — like a machine that can plant 120 trees a minute, or a machine that can measure thousands of soil compounds in a minute. Great. But there are shifts in our consciousness that can make a difference as well.

And I'll actually give you one more concrete one along these lines. So in other work that I did, back in 2013, way before I started the firm, I was working with a team called Kingo Energy in northern Guatemala. And they basically help people that have never had electricity get access to electricity for the first time. So far, that organization has helped more than a million people get access to electricity for the first time in their lives.

Long story short, though, these people live on a dollar to two a day. So if you try to come to them and say, hey, we invented this thing, costs $150, you get all your energy through solar, it can power your cell phones, it can power your lights, all that kind of thing — people don't have great phones, but there's always some people in the village that have a phone — then this could completely transform your life. Well, if you only live on a dollar to two a day, how's that going to fit in your budget?

So we actually decided to change the sales and deployment model. Instead of the classic hardware retail model, where you basically sell a piece of hardware and you make all the money as the manufacturer at the point of sale, we made it into a pay-as-you-go model. And this sounds like a very small difference in consciousness, but here's the main difference.

If I make all of my margin at the point of sale, I am highly incentivized to make the thing as cheap as possible while it still works, so that I get the most money at the point of sale. So if the thing costs $30 to produce and I sell it for $100 — if I can figure out a way to make it for $20, even better. And this is why we've had an entire generation of hardware that breaks down in so little time. I mean, if you have a blender from the '50s, it's fine, it's working great. If you have a cell phone that's four years old, it's like a piece of garbage, right?

Now, at the end of the day, that's because there was a piece of metal and it's like, you know what would be cheaper? Some injection-molded plastic. So we'll change that out. Oh, you know what would be cheaper than this component that has a mean time to failure of 20 years? Well, 10 years, because people change their cell phones every five years. So we'll just change this to 10 years. And little by little, they get more margin, but it means our devices basically — we don't have any devices that last 10 years anymore. It's crazy.

So the tiny shift in consciousness here — and the way that people do this is called BOM optimization, where you stack-rank all the components by expense and then for all the expensive components, you figure out how to swap them out for cheaper components. This is how every hardware engineer on the planet does their work today.

Now the tiny consciousness shift when you go to pay-as-you-go is — I did the simple calculation that if we could modify the hardware, even if we added $5 to the cost of hardware, if it could extend the life of the hardware by more than six months, that would more than pay for itself in a pay-as-you-go model. And given that, we're incentivized instead of stack-ranking by price and making everything cheap, we stack-rank by most likely to fail and we actually make everything more robust.

And we added about $14 to the cost of the device, but we've had this stuff in the jungles of Guatemala for over a decade now. We've had almost zero device failures. You could not be in a worse condition for electronics. But because we focused on mean time to failure as the optimization, as opposed to the lowest possible price — which is a tiny mindshift, honestly it took the same engineers, we didn't need to hire different staff, we did the whole thing in a month and a half — not different skills, just a slightly different mindset with a completely different outcome in terms of reliability.

So last thing I got to say because I got to get off stage: I started a venture firm that only does this type of work. So we've got 35 investment catalysts right there — actually, some of them got cut off, sorry about that — but we have 35 investments right now. We had a $150 million Fund One. I'm almost done raising a $300 million Fund Two. So if you know folks that want to take part in Fund Two, then come talk to me. And with that, I gotta say thank you.

[applause]

Oh, and yes — if you want to talk to me, then I'm going to be at the climate investing thing later tonight, and then also the one tomorrow. And also I'll be around after the talk today. Okay, thank you.

All right, one more round of applause for Tom. That was amazing.

[applause]

And it's so inspiring to consider the kind of mindset shifts that can really take us into the next chapter, into this net positive future. And at Summit Impact, we really believe in understanding the question that Ayana Elizabeth Johnson teaches us, which is: what happens if we get this right? What does it look like to create this better future?

We also believe in really expanding our perspective to get a field-level view of what's working, what's not, where resources are flowing, and to really be able to visualize the field to enhance the strategic decisions we make and the resource allocation that we use.

And so we are very fortunate to collaborate with someone who is truly pioneering the work of visualizing and understanding the field of climate. Eric Berlow is a data ecologist. He's an expert in ecology, in complexity science, and in big data. He's currently the CEO at Vibrant Data Labs, where he builds open-source tools to empower a growing ecosystem of partners that are tackling the climate crisis.

And Eric's research on ecological complexity, which includes publications in Nature and Science, has been recognized among the top 1% of most highly cited papers in the field. So for anyone who's been in academia at all, you recognize just how significant that is. Eric is the founding director — he was also the founding director of the University of California's first Science Institute at Yosemite National Park. He also co-founded a data interface company that was acquired by Rakuten. He is a TED Senior Fellow and was listed among Top 100 Creatives by Origin Magazine.

So hopefully now you're getting the picture that Eric's expertise spans across fields, and this makes him a particularly interesting person to hear from when it comes to trying to navigate the highly complex challenges like climate change. So we've had the fortune of partnering with Eric as he builds maps of the climate field and using them to inform our programs at Summit Impact.

And I'm excited to hand the stage over to Eric now so he can share a bit of his approach and his perspective, and also an idea of how we can all be working on the most critical aspects of the climate field. So with that, please join me in giving a really warm welcome and round of applause to Eric Berlow.

[applause]

[Eric Berlow's presentation on the Climate Finance Tracker follows, discussing ecosystem gaps, social equity gaps, and deployment gaps in climate funding]