Crypto’s bare-knuckle politics come to climate

About this episode

The episode discusses the political dynamics between the crypto and renewable energy industries in the context of the 2024 election cycle.

Last year, clean energy attracted double the investment of fossil fuels. It's now a multi-trillion dollar industry globally, and the dominant source of new capacity in the US. And yet in the 2024 election cycle, the entire renewable energy industry donated just $2.5 million to political campaigns. The oil and gas industry donated $75 million just to elect one man. Now consider crypto. A few years ago, most politicians treated it as a fringe technology at best. And then the crypto industry decided it was done being ignored and attacked. It built a war chest and spent hundreds of millions of dollars in 2024, representing nearly half of all corporate political spending that cycle. As a result, crypto went from regulatory target to political kingmaker in a single election cycle. Clean energy has been a legitimate economic force for over a decade and still gets pushed around Washington. Why? How does an industry that's winning on economics keep losing in politics? This week, we're live from the Prelude Climate Summit, a gathering of the top investors and companies in climate tech. Stephen Lacey is joined by Chris Larsen, the billionaire co-founder of Ripple, who helped engineer…

People in this episode

Host: Stephen Lacey

Guests: Chris Larsen, Mike Brune

Topics covered

• crypto
• climate change
• political donations
• renewable energy
• investment
• regulation

Keywords

• crypto
• climate tech
• political spending
• renewable energy
• investment
• Sierra Club
• Ripple

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Ripple, Sierra Club, Clean Break Fund

Places: US

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