At the Cleantech North America conference, the fates of climate-tech start-ups are tangled into the balance sheets of companies who caused the crisis in the first place.

The investor encouraged me to notice which initiatives fossil fuel funders were taking interest in at the conference: not in near-term technologies that could replace or knock out their product, like solar or EVs, but in longer-term ideas that will take a lot of research and capital, and give them room to keep producing as much oil as possible in the next decade. A start-up that works in hydrogen or carbon capture makes sense for an oil company to invest in. Besides, fossil-fuel companies have a lot of money to throw around, the investor told me, and it makes sense to diversify.

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