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TBLI Radical Truth Podcast
Day Zero Investing - Working with Founders Right From The Start
Featuring: Christoph Klink - Partner At Antler.
Antler is a global early-stage VC. The firm leads in ‘Day Zero’ investing, an approach to venture capital focused on partnering with founders pre-launch. Antler systematically removes capital and network constraints for early-stage technology entrepreneurs by providing co-founder matching, deep business model validation, initial capital, expansion support, and follow-on funding. The firm is present in 30 cities across most leading technology ecosystems globally and has made over 1,300 investments into early-stage startups. Antler has been repeatedly recognized by Pitchbook as the world’s most active angel and seed-stage investor. Christoph Klink, Partner, Antler Christoph Klink is a partner at Antler based in Germany. Antler is the world’s leading day zero investor and the most active early-stage VC firm in Europe.
Christoph is responsible for Antler’s investments across Central Europe. Since launching its first residency for founders in Berlin in 2021, Antler has made >80 investments into tech startups, spanning multiple sectors that include climatetech, fintech and healthtech. Many of these startups are now recognised as the most promising startups in the DACH region, including NeoCarbon, clare&me and Tapline. In the last three years, Christoph has run residencies for hundreds of founders in Berlin, Amsterdam and Munich. Antler is specifically designed to remove the barriers to entrepreneurship and to support a new generation of diverse tech founders. Founders participating in the residencies have come from 50+ different nationalities and a third of the startups have at least one female founder. Christoph is recognised as one of the leading experts on early-stage investment trends in Germany and has published reports on the demographics of DACH unicorn founders and the rise of technical founders in Europe.
Global economy could shrink 50% between 2070 and 2090 from climate shocks, say actuaries
By: Sandra Laville - Grist
This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
A report by risk experts says previous assessments ignored severe effects of climate crisis.
The global economy could face a 50 percent loss in gross domestic product between 2070 and 2090 from the catastrophic shocks of climate change unless immediate action by political leaders is taken to decarbonize and restore nature, according to a new report.
The stark warning from risk management experts at the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, or IFoA, hugely increases the estimate of risk to global economic well-being from climate change impacts such as fires, flooding, droughts, temperature rises, and nature breakdown. In a report with scientists at the University of Exeter, published on Thursday, the IFoA, which uses math and statistics to analyze financial risk for businesses and governments, called for accelerated action by political leaders to tackle the climate crisis.
Their report was published after data from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service showed climate breakdown drove the annual global temperature above the internationally agreed 1.5 Celsius target for the first time in 2024, supercharging extreme weather.
Without urgent action to accelerate decarbonization, remove carbon from the atmosphere, and repair nature, the plausible worst-case hit to global economies would be 50 percent in the two decades before 2090, the IFoA report said.
At 3 C or more of heating by 2050, there could be more than 4 billion deaths, significant sociopolitical fragmentation worldwide, failure of states (with resulting rapid, enduring, and significant loss of capital), and extinction events.
Sandy Trust, the lead author of the report, said there was no realistic plan in place to avoid this scenario.
He said economic predictions, which estimate that damages from global heating would be as low as 2 percent of global economic production for a 3 C rise in global average surface temperature, were inaccurate and were blinding political leaders to the risks of their policies.
The climate risk assessments being used by financial institutions, politicians and civil servants to assess the economic effects of global heating were wrong, the report said, because they ignored the expected severe effects of climate change such as tipping points, sea temperature rises, migration, and conflict as a result of global heating.
“[They] do not recognize there is a risk of ruin. They are precisely wrong, rather than being roughly right,” the report said.
If these risks were taken into account the world faced an increasing risk of “planetary insolvency,” where the Earth’s systems were so degraded that humans could no longer receive enough of the critical services they relied on to support societies and economies.
“You can’t have an economy without a society, and a society needs somewhere to live,” said Trust.
“Nature is our foundation, providing food, water, and air, as well as the raw materials and energy that power our economy. Threats to the stability of this foundation are risks to future human prosperity, which we must take action to avoid.”
The report, named “Planetary Solvency — finding our balance with nature,” criticizes the dominant economic theory used by governments in the U.K., U.S. and across the developed world, which focuses on what humans can take from the planet to create growth for themselves and fails to take into account the real risks from nature degradation to societies and economies.
The report called for a paradigm shift by political leaders, civil servants, and governments to tackle global heating. It said: “Leaders and decision-makers across the globe need to understand why these changes are needed.
“It is these extremes that should drive policy decisions … policymakers are currently unable to hear warnings about risks to ongoing human progress or unwilling to act upon them with the urgency required.”
The report proposes a planetary solvency risk dashboard, to provide information to support policymakers to drive human activity within the finite bounds of the Earth.
Tim Lenton, the chair of climate change and Earth systems science at the University of Exeter, and a co-author on the report, said: “Current approaches are failing to properly assess escalating planetary risks or help control them. Planetary solvency applies the established approaches of risk professionals to our life-support system and finds it in jeopardy. It offers a clear way of seeing global risks and prioritizing action to limit them.”
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Ingka Sets €1bn Goal to Accelerate Recycling Capacity Expansion
By: Hammaad Saghir
Ingka Investments, the investment arm of the Ingka Group, established its ‘Circular Investments’ division in 2017 to support sustainable innovation. To date, the firm has allocated around €333 million to circular economy ventures and plans to expand the fund to €1 billion rapidly.
Ingka Investments manages a portfolio of approximately €27 billion, with over €3.5 billion in renewable energy assets. Its Circular Investments arm targets startups, and scaleups focused on recycling innovations and capacity building, particularly in materials critical to Ikea’s business models, such as plastics, food, textiles, and wood.
According to investment portfolio director Lukas Visser, the division will maintain its focus on these priority materials for future investments but plans to expand into new markets beyond its current focus in the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France.
Circular Investments has supported impactful ventures, including:
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RetourMatras: A Dutch company specializing in mattress recycling. Its technology extracts up to 80% of materials by weight from used mattresses, enabling Ikea to incorporate recycled components into over 30 product lines.
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Next Generation Group: A company developing breakthrough chemical recycling technologies for hard-to-recycle plastics, advancing the circular economy in the plastics industry.
Visser noted that Ingka Investments typically backs profitable businesses looking to scale their operations but is also open to earlier-stage investments in breakthrough recycling technologies.
Managing director Peter van der Poel says Ingka Investments is far from a passive investor. The company takes a hands-on approach, offering financial backing, practical support, industry connections, and engagement with policymakers and regulators to help its portfolio companies thrive.
He noted that better regulation and legislation could help to unlock even more funding, stating: “Through investments, we are committed to doing our part to ensure that valuable materials are recycled and reused in the production of new products. What would help us go further is if legislation was stronger at prioritizing recycling over incineration and landfilling, for example, by ensuring that Extended Producer Responsibility schemes were resulting in higher recycling rates. We also welcome eco-design regulations to encourage the demand for these recycled materials, and we are actively collaborating with relevant authorities and other stakeholders to address these issues.”
Source
UK charging firm warns over changes to electric car sales amid ‘difficult’ market
By: Jasper Jolly - The Guardian
Pod Point reports weak demand for new cars as government says no firms will pay fines over ZEV mandate
A charging company has said proposed UK changes to electric car sales rules could increase uncertainty over demand, as it said that it had been caught out by lower numbers of purchases by British drivers.
Pod Point, which is majority-owned by EDF Energy, said weak demand for new cars meant it made revenues of £53m in 2024 from its sales of chargers and services, compared with a £60m target. The London-listed company’s share price slumped by more than a third on Monday morning.
The car industry has been warning of tough market conditions for more than a year, with slower sales across the market hitting electric cars particularly hard, because they still tend to be more expensive upfront (although not in the long run) than petrol equivalents.
The weakness has prompted the industry to lobby the UK government to relax sales quotas, known as the zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate. The rules force carmakers to sell more electric cars every year.
The headline target for 2024 was 22%, rising to 28% this year, but carmakers also have significant “flexibilities” that allow them to effectively sell fewer cars and the government has opened a consultation that is expected to relax the rules further.
For charger companies, the prospect of even lower electric car sales would be a blow. Melanie Lane, the Pod Point chief executive, said there was “a difficult market backdrop” in the EV industry, with a “weaker-than-expected private EV market” that hit its sales of home chargers.
Pod Point said the difficult times would continue in 2025, and that it was unlikely to meet market sales expectations. The consultation over changes to the ZEV mandate “could further increase near-term uncertainty for the sector”, it said.
The government has said that every carmaker in the UK would in effect achieve their targets – albeit using the flexibilities – and avoid large financial penalties for failure.
A Department for Transport (DfT) spokesperson said: “Thanks to the flexibilities in the ZEV mandate, we’re confident the whole market will comply with the 22% target and that no car manufacturer will need to pay fines.”
The statement came after analysis by T&E, a campaign group on transport and environmental issues, found that only one carmaker would have to resort to buying “credits” from rivals in order to avoid fines. T&E has called for the government to resist manufacturers’ calls to weaken the rules, arguing that the mandate is working as planned.
The industry has complained that the rules are too strict amid declining demand. Mike Hawes, the chief executive of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, a lobby group, said manufacturers are having to spend £4.5bn to discount electric cars to make them attractive for buyers and hit the targets.
He said: “What is clear is that the pressure on the industry is intense, with even those brands that have complied demanding government support for consumers, or a review of the regulation to be sure it is delivering the vibrant market, business opportunity and economic growth we all need.”
The DfT spokesperson said: “2024 was a record year for switching to electric, with 382k EVs sold across last year – a 21% increase on 2023.
“Getting this transition right as more people make a switch to electric vehicles will support the growth of the market in the UK and will provide an opportunity to tap into a multibillion-pound industry that will create high-paid jobs for decades to come.”
Source
Trump Is Once Again Quitting The Paris Climate Accords
Last time, quitting the Paris Agreement was largely symbolic. Not this time.
President Donald Trump is once again withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate accords, pulling the nation whose factories, cars and power plants contributed the most cumulative planet-heating pollution to the atmosphere out of the first global pact to slash carbon emissions enough to prevent the world’s average temperature from reaching dangerous new heights.
Trump said Monday he plans to halt implementation of the federal government’s efforts to meet its target to slash America’s greenhouse gas emissions by up to 66% below 2005 levels over the next 10 years. The move, which came via an executive order kickstarting the withdrawal process, followed the approach he took in 2017.
“We’re going to save over $1 trillion,” Trump said to the announcer at the Capitol One Arena in Washington, D.C., as he signed the order from behind a desk, shaking his head to show his disapproval of what the emcee called the “Paris climate treaty.”
The withdrawal, initially announced in an email from the White House laying out Trump’s policy priorities, will put the U.S. in league with Iran, Libya and Yemen as the only United Nations-recognized countries outside the global pact.
The next steps include formally announcing the U.S. withdrawal to the U.N. Once that step is taken, the process will go much faster than the last time the U.S. quit the Paris Agreement under Trump’s direction.
Under the U.N. rules at the time, the U.S. withdrawal took three years to take effect, allowing former President Joe Biden to swiftly reinstate American participation in the accords. This time, however, the U.S. could completely quit the Paris Agreement in just one year.
“It is deeply regrettable that the United States has signaled its intention to withdraw from the Paris Agreement once more. In doing so, the United States will join a tiny club of countries outside of the global consensus,” said Kaveh Guilanpour, the vice president of international strategies at the Washington, D.C.-based climate group C2ES. “There is no sugar-coating this — it will be harmful to global efforts to combat climate change, and so ultimately, also harmful to the future prosperity and security of U.S. citizens.”
Since the early 1990s, the parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change have gathered annually to discuss ways to coordinate a global effort on cutting the emissions from fossil fuels and agriculture that accumulate in the atmosphere and prevent the sun’s heat from radiating back into space. It wasn’t until 2015 that China and the U.S. signed on to a global pact explicitly designed to cut emissions.
The deal — brokered in Paris when France hosted the roving annual conference typically held in November — was hailed as a triumph of international negotiations between the world’s two biggest economies, and a turning point in a new era of rapidly worsening weather extremes.
Yet agreeing to cut emissions proved harder than actually scaling back the pollution.
For nearly a decade, the rich countries who bear the most collective responsibility for changes to the atmosphere refused to fork over the billions of dollars pledged to help poorer nations develop new, cleaner energy sources to lift themselves out of poverty and build infrastructure to adapt to the rising seas and more violent storms already occurring.
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