This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stinovich from Bloomberg Radio. So if you think about the venture capital world, the legendary venture capitals that really helped build the foundation of today's VC world, and the iconic companies in the tech space, you definitely have to think of our next guest. John Door went to work for Kleiner Perkins back in the eighties early eighties.
He's been involved in investing companies we all know so well, including being an original investor and board member at Amazon and Google, backing then entrepreneurs Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Jeff Bezos and so many more. He has seen innovation up close and personal, scene disruption and the evolution of our world and the action plans necessary to bring it all about well today, he has an action plan for solving our climate crisis right now, and it's very timely.
With COP twenty six continuing in Glasgow as we speak. Delighted to bring in John Doer, chairman of Kleiner Perkins, author of a new book, Speed and Scale and Action Plan for Solving our Climate Crisis. Now. He enjoys us on the phone in Menlo Park, California. John, So looking forward to talking with you. Thanks for being here with Katie and myself. UM, so much to talk about. I want you to take us back, if you would, and
you start out your book this way. Uh. And I know it's been out in a lot of press materials, but I think it's it's very telling. Um. Take us back to a two thousand six and a dinner you hosted after a screening of an Inconvenient Truth. Your daughter made some comments. Yes, my daughter was an inconvenient youth. That evening I had gone with some friends and her to see Al Gore's epic movie. But that put really the climate crisis. I think in the global conversation. Eight
million people saw that movie. But at at dinner, we went around the table and I had a number of my Republicans friends there and we talked about, well, is is the world getting warmer? Yes? Is it man made or not? There we had some disagreement over that at the time, uh, but then we asked people what they thought. And when it came to marry she turned to me and she said, Dad, your generation created this problem. You better fix it. And I had no idea what to
say or what to do? I was I was speechless. She said, I'm scared and I'm angry. And so I set out with my partners to understand climate technologies, the markets, the innovation, the forces at work. And over time we devoted over three of our venture funds a billion dollars to about seventy climate tech startups. And it was hard.
It looked for a while like the portfolio would fail, but we stood by these entrepreneurs and today that that billion dollars is worth three billion dollars and companies like Beyond Meat and Bays and and other investments. So what I learned from that is it takes guts and courage and staying power, and it's hard. But that was then and this is now. And you know, Testless what the seventh most valuable company in the world, and innovations and clean the transition to a clean energy economy. This is
the biggest opportunity of our lives. I'm I'm convinced, and John, I want to hear more about the action plan that you lay out in the book. I mean, what steps do you view are needed to take now to address this climate crisis? Well, uh, one thing your listeners can do is they can go to speed and Scale dot Com and get the plan for free. So it's ten great big objectives. The first six of those are solutions. In the latter four speed ups, I'll just go through
the solutions issue with you. If we electrify transportation, which means stop using gasoline and diesel for our vehicles, then number two decarbonize the grid by shifting to wind and solar and safe nuclear. And then number three fix our food systems, which means eating less meat and dairy, not stopping, but less while improving how we grow our crops and
reducing food waste. And if we do that, while number four we protect nature which is to stop deforestation, protect our oceans, and five clean up industry, especially the making of steel and cement is a very dirty carbon generating process. We can innovate around that. And then finally, as hard as we work at this, we're never going to eliminate all carbon emissions. So the i p c C, the U N Scientific body, says we've got to find ways to remove carbon that's being emitted on an ongoing basis
were already in the air. That's the sixth big goal. Now we don't just have to do these six things and do them all at once. Right, it's going to be a tall, tall order. We got to do them fast well. So the big objective, the big objective is to get this done to net zero by We are talking with John Door He's chairman of Kleiner Perkins. He's got a new book out called Speed and Scale, An
Action Plan for Solving our Climate Crisis. Right now, John, we've just got about a minute and a half and then we'll do some more news and then come back and finish our conversation. But you mentioned Tesla. You know what are the companies who are the innovators that you really are falling there saying they're making a difference. These are the companies that are going to be around for the long term because they get it when it comes to climate change. And just got about a minute here. Oh,
there's so many companies. Tesla for sure is one. The transportation sector is a huge area for innovation, so companies that are making better batteries. For example, it's estimated that the market to electrify all transportation is four hundred billion dollars of batteries per year. That's five times bigger. And the US online advertising market that my friends at at Google and Facebook are fighting over. So nd phase energy,
quantum escape. Uh. Larry Fink has said he thinks there will be a thousand unicorns, that's a thousand companies worth a billion dollars or more in this climate tech sector. So you think the investment money and again just got about thirty seconds here, So the E s G money, does it make sense because there's a lot of people are saying, you know, at E s G money, there's not really great metrics for measuring. Do you think it's being as productive as it could be when it comes
to climate change initiatives? Just quickly, the data shows that investments in sustainability outperform those that don't. So my answer is yes. I want to get right back to our guest still with us as John Door, he's chairman of Kleiner Perkins Still with us from Menlo Park, California. His book out his speed and scale and action plan for solving our climate crisis. Now, as I mentioned earlier, a legend really when it comes to the venture capital world,
early investor in Amazon and in Google. So John, you laid out, um, you know what needs to be done in terms of decarbonizing the grid, fixing the food system, which I agree, I've done a lot of work on that that's really crucial. But then there's for um, what you call the accelerants. Get talked to us a little bit about that. Well, we have to do all these things at once, and we have to do it by
and in fact their specific goals. So the four accelerators to get this done in time are to win the politics and policy in every nation around the world, to turn movements into action, not just protests but code read actions, to innovate, and then to invest, to invest like our lives depend on it, because they literally do. And we we we have to have more urgency and ambition. We've
got to go for the big carbon emissions. I say in the book, go for the gig it times well, and let me you know, when someone lays out it, and forgive me, it's not just you, because I feel like there's so many different things about how we solve this and how we go about it, and it kind of my head gets a little muddy. But I'm glad we're talking about it and we're starting to put a lot into action, because that's how you get things down. Do we have until to get a lot of this done. Uh,
this is the decisive decade. You're on an important point. We have to cut emissions in half by the end of this decade to have a reasonable chance of having a habitable planet in so, no, we have to reduce emissions. That's eight percent next year and eight percent the year after that and after that. We have not reduced emissions in the history of civilization, except briefly during the pandemic.
We've got work to do well when it comes to, you know, cutting emissions, doing this work, turning this into code read actions. I mean, who is at the forefront here? Who is responsible for that? Does that fall more on corporations or governments to really take a leadership role there. We need corporations, we need governments, we need leaders we we we need nonprofits, we need entrepreneurs. Of all these parties. The ones that are lagging, in my estimation are the
governments of the world. They're responsive to their political forces, and we have not made climate a top two voting issue in the twenty largest emitters. It is in Europe now, it's not in the US, it's not in China, it's not in India. We have work to do, to win the politics and the policy to elect government officials who
make this a top priority. One thing I wonder about, and you're someone who understands capital flows and going into innovation, right, what I wonder is, as we track the Katie and I attract the public markets and everybody here at Bloomberg day in a day out, how is it that companies will move aggressively enough unless there are some kind of measurements or metrics or penalties. So when they report earnings, for instance, shouldn't there be a climate metric that you
get penalized on if you're not being aggressive enough? Like, how do we need something like that in order to really make certainly the corporate sector move fast enough. We do, and it's happening. There's the Net Zero Investor Alliance, which has a hundred and fifty trillion dollars of investor capital committed to UH invest in companies that have made and declared and report on pledges to achieve net zero. I'm really pleased by the movement underway in the investment community.
I'm really pleased are our goal is to have a hundred percent of Fortune global five hundred companies commit to net zero by not. Walmart has committed they're going to do that. Amazon's leading a coalition of companies that are doing the same thing. So uh, investors demand it, employees insist on it. It's the right thing to do. And I mean you definitely have seen that demand if you look at the flows into some of these e s
G funds and e s G investments. But I mean, in the past year, you've really seen a lot of concerns about greenwashing come to the forefront. I mean, I'm curious your thoughts on that. How much of an issue you think it is? And I mean, how can investors discern that they're actually putting their money behind sustainable causes. Well, we need audits, we need reporting, we need standards for
higher quality what are called offsets. But more than anything else, we need to cut the fifty nine giga tons of emissions we have every year to net zero. We've got to reduce emissions, then conserve energy, and at the same time remove some of the stubborn carbon that's that's still
out there. You know, I'm thinking about people who are listening, and I guess individuals can make a difference, But it sounds like from what you're saying it's really institutions that are going to move the needle here, and whether it's our public institutions or private institutions, John, That's what it kind of ultimately comes down to, is that fair, Well, we need individual action, but we're at a place in time now where that's not enough. And I've been really heartened.
And the book tells the story of individuals who get their communities, for example, to adopt clean buses through collective action, or they get their employers to make commitments to to net zero. So, uh, we need them both. We need them now. H Yeah, we're we're out of time. No, my heart's kind of breaking here. He just got about thirty seconds here. What is it that worries you so much when you hear statistics about the climate change or
about climate change? Is a deforestation or what just very quickly if you could deforestation stopping it, which is one of the outcomes of the of the COP twenty six process, is U is an encouraging pledge. There was a pledge to reduce methane emissions by that's a fast acting improvement. But the pledges are one thing. It's the action that
follows that we need to track. Well, John, you are welcome anytime because I'd love to continue this conversation, so please come back, UH and look forward to it, and thank you so much. John. To our chairman of Kleiner Perkins his book Speed in Scale and Action Plan for Solving our Climate Crisis Now