Could the Solution to Climate Change Be 50 Phone Calls Away?
Eric Perreca
Managing Partner at Onset Capital and Blue Marble Capital Partners
Bio | LinkedIn
Eric Perreca has spent his career in the defense, energy, finance, and ESG space focused on technology solutions. He is a former U.S. Navy SEAL Team Officer, Strategy Consultant, Mergers and Acquisitions Investment Banker, CEO of two renewable energy companies, Managing Partner of an impact Private Equity Fund, and Founder and Managing Partner of two Private Equity firms.
“What if, like the US Navy SEALs, we operated with an unyielding perseverance to win coupled with resilience in our approach to solving the climate crisis?”
I’m a former Military officer and Navy SEAL working on climate change — which is to say, I have a unique perspective on the issue.
SEALs learn to solve problems differently than other military units. We are taught to bring a unique, non-standard approach in the midst of ambiguity — not just for survival, but for strategic impact and to succeed. In business we call parts of this entrepreneurship. Yes, we follow Standard Operating Procedures, but we also bring a more varied mindset to finding great (not just good) solutions. We don’t eschew risk; instead we identify and manage those risks at every level. Often, the best solution involves more risk than most would be willing to take.
We need to approach the climate challenge with the same mindset: keep what’s working, but bring in better ways to solve problems creatively. Even if they seem risky.
Most people lean into their trust of democracy and the hope that global efforts will fix it, though this is actually too risky. They think large scale systematic programs like renewable energy standards, carbon tax, subsidies and federally backed loans are the answer. They help, but they also add complexity — and serious delays.
What if, like the SEALs, we operated entrepreneurially in our approach to solving the climate crisis? What if we tapped into the fresh mindsets that brought us Google, antiseptics, and the x-ray instead of defaulting to the risk-averse, old guard mentalities that permeate our industrial and infrastructure base. What if we brought them together with ambitious university students and successful mentors in the private sector? What if we told them their lives depend on it and there are no limits to the solution? I wonder where we would end up.
Hacking for Defense is a prime example of what that would look like — and is only a preview of what we, as a nation, could produce at scale. And it begins, in earnest, with 50 phone calls.
The program assigns the unsolved problems plaguing government entities to small, diverse teams of graduate and undergraduate students, who must then quickly come up with a solution. They are taught to truly understand the problem — not just through traditional research, but through grassroots, on the ground methods: picking up the phone, meeting in person, comprehending as many viewpoints, needs, and barriers as they can across the industries the problem touches. Often they learn something that reveals they misunderstood the problem, leading them to pivot to a better solution that solves a bigger problem.
Guided by the Business Model Generation and Lean LaunchPad processes, which involves the private sector, government, and non-profit mentors and sponsors, the teams accomplish two things: they find a viable and scalable solution to the issue, and then replicate it within an sustainable economic model. Not only has this worked, but many of the solutions that have come out of the “Hacking for” programs have become commercialized startups with millions in investments — and garnered the interest of some of the most powerful institutions in the world. From work done in one college quarter. One.
If we replicated this entrepreneurial approach to climate change — in the form of “Hacking For Climate,” — our nation could generate many promising paths to the solutions we so desperately need, right now. The problem has never been a lack of innovation of budget, it’s been time. Our deadline has been set for, not by, us; we do not have the time to stick with the usual government processes.
Case in point: it took 40 years to get solar power fully commercialized. While the current administration is generating solutions, they are primarily regulatory and financial in nature. Solar, wind, ethanol, geothermal, advanced batteries, and many other innovations have taken decades to get to market, and that’s in part because we put the onus on individual State leadership to deploy the best solutions for them. While some Federal programs have been supportive (and at times critical), they were designed as lights at the end of a tunnel and not the direct pushes or pulls that we now need.
Realistically, we need to reduce the time it takes for developed technologies to have commercial solutions at scale from 40 years, and most often at least 20, to four years: two years to finance, and two years to start building at scale and repeat the process. And we need to do this knowing no single solution will move the needle, but hundreds will. How do we get hundreds of potentially viable solutions? Hacking for Climate. Tapping into university research hubs around the world, leveraging hungry academic minds, and facilitating their work in partnership with the other organizations that keep our economies moving and our people safe can move the needle faster.
What about money? Everything must justify the expenditure of taxpayer dollars. Simply put, there is no better justification than protecting the good of the American people — and for that matter, the good of the planet. As the devastating (and costly) effects of climate change increase with each year, we can no longer allow the building of one coal plant a week to enable countries to catch up on GDP at the expense of the world to continue. That may be impossible to stop diplomatically but we can figure out how to take those plants and eliminate negative emissions, creating a better, cleaner source of energy and do those over and over across all the world’s infrastructure systems. And this is just one example. We need to do this for power, transportation, water, waste, communications and all our major global warming emissions segments.
We can and should change the way we problem solve in the 21st Century, but few act on that sentiment, which is why there are limited solutions that match the Hacking for Climate approach. It’s the kind of solution that Navy SEALs understand: doing something differently that goes beyond the goal of simply surviving, but thriving.