Climate action is boring as fuck.
I’m not a liberal with coloured hair. I don’t want to sit in circles talking about “the planet” while pretending money doesn’t matter. I want to build things. I want leverage. I want scale. I want to make money.
Or at least, that’s what I used to think — that it had to be one or the other.
But maybe I was wrong.
Maybe I can have both.
Climate Looks Nothing Like the Stereotype Anymore
In my recent episode with Theresa Ronnie — a global CEO and consultant working deep in the climate space (ironically, also from my neighbourhood, Cooke Town in Bangalore) — that old image of climate work completely fell apart.
The climate space today looks nothing like the stereotype.
It’s engineers.
Analysts.
Prompt engineers.
People designing circular supply chains, (We’ll get deeper into this later)
AI, EVs, infrastructure, climate risk modelling.
This isn’t charity or a “social mission” anymore.
It’s regular. It’s capitalist.
And maybe — dare I say — maybe kinda fun?
Okay let’s not get ahead of ourselves
BUT, it is becoming one of the largest employment and investment opportunities of the next decade.
Somewhere along the way, we were taught a false binary:
You either care about money
or
You care about the planet.
Care about both, and you’re a sellout to one side or the other.
But reality doesn’t work like that.
Climate problems are economic problems.
Energy. Food. Water. Logistics. Housing. Infrastructure.
All of it sits right at the intersection of money and survival.
Ever heard about Carbon Footprint?
The idea that climate responsibility sits primarily with individuals — fly less, consume less, feel guilty more — didn’t emerge organically.
It was pushed deliberately.
The term“carbon footprint” was coined by BP – British Petroleum to shift attention away from corporations and onto individuals. While consumers argued about plastic straws, entire industries kept emitting at scale.
The Planet Has Been Buffering Our Mistakes… but for how long?
Here’s something that genuinely blew my mind.
The oceans absorb a massive amount of the carbon we emit.
Trees do something similar — not just absorbing carbon, but storing it over time, layering it into the barks that we see that take decades to form.
But buffers break.
Charlie Munger called compounding the wonder of the world. Climate is like that except same force works in reverse — small harms compounding quietly until they’re no longer reversible. When oceans warm and forests degrade, the impact doesn’t arrive slowly. It compounds. And suddenly climate change stops being abstract and starts becoming operational.
This is why climate work today isn’t just about “saving the planet.”
It’s about building systems that don’t collapse under stress.
People. Planet. Profit. This game is a 3 Bottom Line System.
Climate-first businesses don’t reject profit.
They just don’t worship it blindly.
They operate on a three-bottom-line model:
People
Planet
Profit
Balancing all three means longer timelines, deeper thinking, and better systems. But it also creates businesses that survive regulation, resource shocks, and cultural shifts — instead of being wiped out by them.
Climate-aligned capital flows aren’t a trend.
They’re a correction.
Bridging the gap between India’s climate businesses and foreign or global capital is exactly what Theresa Ronnie is building with The Climate Desk.
The work is deceptively simple to describe:
Make Indian climate initiatives legible to global investors
Make capital usable on the ground
Turn the so-called “charity mission” into something worthy of a Nikhil Kamath–level podcast.
But right now, for the most part, it’s still unglamorous.
It’s complex.
It’s hard.
And that’s exactly why the leverage is here.
Nithin Kamath has said that the future billionaires will come from the climate space — and, he’s 100% right. Not because it’s fashionable, but because it’s unavoidable.
So Maybe the Question Was Wrong
The question was never:
“Do I want purpose or profit?”
The real question is:
“Where does profit exist in a world where purpose can no longer be ignored?”
If you’re someone who wants to work in climate research, finance, or execution — or even just wants to understand where this space is actually headed — Climate Desk is worth paying attention to.
