The Permit Application
Climate companies are solving existential problems with the communication style of a planning department.
Climate companies are asking the world to care about an existential problem, and yet they communicate as if they're filing a permit application.
After researching more than 100 companies in this space over the past two months, I'm convinced that nearly all of them fall into one of two communication modes.
The first is the earnest green positioning. Careful language that could pass as a government pamphlet. Stock photo of a person in a safety vest standing in a field. Soft palette, safe copy, no edge. It has such a weak signal that it gets drowned out by anything louder than a buzzing fly.
The second is somehow more boring: a wall of jargon and numbers that makes you feel numb after the second paragraph. Technical specifications formatted like an engineering whitepaper no investor will finish reading.
Both paths share the same failure. They explain without making anyone feel the stakes. The information is adequate. The architecture underneath—the thing that makes someone care before they understand the details—is absent.1 Climate communication needs less "we reduced emissions by 12%" and more "what the world looks like if this works versus if it fails."
The companies that break through—in any sector—don't do it by explaining more clearly. They make a narrative decision upstream that gives everything downstream a reason to exist. The facts don't change. The architecture does. That shift is available to climate companies right now, and almost none of them are making it.
The cost isn't just miscommunication. It's invisible. It's the talented people who chose AI over climate—not only for the equity, but because one sector feels like it's making history and the other feels like it's filing grants.2 Nobody tracks that absence.
A climate founder should almost prefer losing top talent to a competitor. Top talent never entering the sector in the first place is worse on every count.
The companies that break through don't do it by explaining more clearly. They make a narrative decision upstream that gives everything downstream a reason to exist.
The position is still open. We're yet to see a climate company with a narrative that truly moves people—enough to form loyalty, enough to define a category. Whoever figures that out first won't just win attention. They'll set the standard everyone else follows.
Footnotes
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Jerome Bruner's distinction between paradigmatic and narrative cognition maps this precisely—logical argument and storytelling operate as separate cognitive modes, and information processed through narrative structure is retained and acted on at significantly higher rates. See Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986). ↩
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The climate sector's talent gap is well-documented. LinkedIn's 2025 Global Green Skills Report found that green hiring is growing almost twice as fast as the share of workers with green skills—yet the report focuses entirely on skills availability, not on why skilled people choose other sectors in the first place. ↩
Han