Our goal is to spotlight businesses we believe could help make a dent in climate change. This year’s list includes companies from a wide range of industries, headquartered on five continents. If you haven’t checked it out yet, I highly recommend giving it a look. Each company has a profile in which we’ve outlined why it made the list, what sort of impact the business might have, and what challenges it’s likely to face.
In the meantime, I wanted to share a few reflections on this year’s list as a whole. Because this slate of companies exemplifies a few key themes that I see a lot in my reporting on climate technology.
1. Addressing climate change requires building a lot of stuff, on a massive scale, and fast.
A handful of the companies we included on this list stand out because of the sheer scale at which they’re building and deploying technology. And we need scale, because addressing climate change requires going from tens of billions of metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions every year to net zero.
BYD, for example, featured on our 2023 list, and it was a clear choice for our team to feature the company again.
For a while, the title of the world’s largest electric vehicle (EV) producer has depended on how you define an EV. If you include plug-in hybrids, BYD takes the crown. If you take the purist point of view and only count fully battery-powered vehicles, Tesla wins.
But now, BYD is knocking on Tesla’s door for even that purist title, outselling the company in the last quarter of 2023. The company’s dominant speed and scale at getting EVs onto the roads makes it one I’m keeping my eyes on.
Other companies are still growing but making significant progress. LanzaJet just opened a factory in Georgia that can produce nine million gallons of alternative jet fuel each year. That’s only a tiny fraction of the billions of gallons of fuel used every year, but it’s a major step forward for alternative fuels. And First Solar, a US solar manufacturer, just opened a $1.1 billion factory in Alabama, and plans to open another in Louisiana in 2025.
2. With climate impacts embedded in longstanding systems, we need creative new ways to tackle old problems.
There are parts of the race to address climate change that most people are probably familiar with. Fossil fuels and their associated emissions are clearly visible in power plants, for example, or in gas-powered vehicles.