Are you feeling a mixture of worry, anger, dread and fear? We are witnessing the destruction of federal agencies, decimation of funding of science, health and environmental protections, arrests and deportations without due process, attacks on universities, the media, law firms and judges, plus unrestrained grift and corruption. It is hard to know what we as individuals can do. Experts on authoritarianism say to speak up, exercise our constitutional rights to free speech and assembly. Contact our elected officials. Run for office ourselves. Talk to our friends, neighbors and relatives. Use our leverage through unions, fellow employees, faith communities, investments and other associations to advocate for policies that protect against climate change and advance human rights.
What else can we do? Make our homes and gardens energy efficient and resilient to climate impacts such as storms, wildfires, heat and drought. Get to know our neighbors. Have block parties. Reach out to immigrants and to people experiencing hunger and homelessness. Celebrate incremental progress on the way to building a just and regenerative future.
Events
Climate Leaders Monthly Meeting
Thursday, June 5, 4:00 - 5:00 PM PT
Join the Climate Leaders Meeting to exchange resources and inspiration with others who are working to create a vibrant and healthy future.
All leaders are welcome.
This is a monthly on-line event hosted by Minerva Ventures.
This webinar will explore how developers, consultants, and policymakers can use local data, policy signals, and past permitting patterns to anticipate public sentiment—long before tensions erupt.
Opportunities for Action
A Powerful Catalyst For Climate Action: Write a Letter To The Future
The nonprofit DearTomorrow encourages people to produce letters, poems, illustrations and other personal reflections addressed to the future. Participants have found the process to be clarifying, motivating. A “megastudy” published in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances in 2024 examined the impact of 11 different interventions on the climate beliefs and policy support of more than 59,000 people across 63 countries. Writing a letter to the future was one of the few that boosted both belief and policy support across the ideological spectrum. Read more.
Domains for Climate Action
Food and Agriculture
Wasteless Turns Lost Food Into Found Profit
If food waste were a country, it would be the third-largest global emitter of carbon. One reason: flaws in the grocery business model ensure food waste. Wasteless has a solution: dynamic pricing driven by AI. And it works. It generates instantaneous ROI, with grocers seeing results like one chain of 200 stores, that added $18.2 million to the bottom line of the meat department and prevented 2.2 million pounds of meat waste, and a Spanish grocer that grew revenue by 6.2% while decreasing food waste by 32.7%. Read more.
Co-Management of Water and Nitrogen Essential For the Future of Food
Carnegie Science’s Lorenzo Rosa is seeking solutions to the joint challenges of sustainable access to water and fertilizer to produce food for a growing population in a warming world. Rosa has identified several lower-carbon, less vulnerable alternatives for producing nitrogen. In addition, his research shows that optimizing nitrogen use and irrigation in concert in the U.S., for example, could reduce unsustainable irrigation water use by 73 percent for maize and by 26 percent for soybeans -without compromising crop yields, even with 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. Read more.
Energy
Compact, Affordable Solar Systems For Everyone
Raya Power is building a permit-free solar solution that’s friendly for renters, requires low or no upfront costs, and pays for itself in just a few years. “Our goal is to make residential solar accessible and affordable for everyone by turning what was once a construction job into a project as simple as assembling an Ikea bookshelf,” co-founder Meghan Wood says. The systems will start as low as $2500, or $40/month if financed.
Finance
Circular Economy/Materials
Water/Natural Resources/Biodiversity
Built Environment
A 15-Minute Neighborhood In Paris
The neighborhood of Clichy-Batignolles, built above a former railway yard, is a leading international example of a dense, green, walkable neighborhood with Car-free streets, geothermal heating and solar panels. See it in pictures here.
The Economics of Super Green Homes
Super Green homes are valuable for resilience, sustainability, and long-term cost savings. Learn more about what makes a home super green, and the Green Rebuild Initiative (GRI) — a program designed to streamline sustainable and resilient home rebuilding and offer crucial education to property owners, architects and builders.
Transportation
A Fuel Cell That Could Electrify Aviation
Researchers have developed a liquid sodium fuel cell with more than three times the energy density of a lithium ion battery. This makes it light and dense enough to potential power aviation, as well as marine and rail transportation, all of which require very high density at low cost, which sodium has the potential to provide. Read more.
Health
Wildfires are Devastating. What About the Toxins They Leave Behind?
The LA Fire Health Study Consortium, with involvement from Harvard as well as universities in California and Texas, are studying the long-term effects of the Eaton and Palisades fires on air, water, soils and surfaces of properties that didn’t burn. The 10-year study will provide Los Angeles with health information in real time, critically important since the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers won’t be monitoring soils in the area. So far their testing has revealed both reasons for optimism, and concerns about toxins present in homes in the area. Read more.
Climate Interventions:
Regeneration, Methane, Geoengineering, CCUS
A Decentralized Solution to Turn Air Into Gasoline
With a machine the size of a refrigerator, Aircela has demonstrated a device that combines direct air capture and on-site fuel synthesis to create vehicle-ready gasoline from air, water and renewable energy.
Adaptation and Resilience
How Resilient Is Your Community?
The Washington Post, in partnership with AlphaGeo, has created an interactive model that allows you to examine the overall climate resilience of your local community. The model pools data on both risk (from flooding to wildfire to hurricanes) and resilience (energy, social and economic indicators, infrastucture and health) to give you a relative risk/resilience indicator. Check it out.
Scientists Live-Streamed 100 Hours About Weather and Climate
This event already happened, but the website contains a wealth of resources to help us understand how vital the science of weather and climate are to our survival. From the water cycle to drought, weather stations to soils, the site has compiled links to vital information, and also to explanations of the impacts of US federal government cuts. Explore it for yourself here.
Policy
Smart Climate Policy Could Help the US in a Trade War
Former Presidential candidate Tom Steyer makes a case for increasing the deployment of clean energy solutions as a possible intervention to slow U.S. inflation. Says Steyer, “As a thought experiment, my team gathered data on the U.S. energy market to estimate the potential deflationary effect that accelerating clean energy development could have on the American economy. At the end of our analysis, we found that accelerating renewable energy development nationwide could reduce inflation by 0.58 percentage points — meaning that if inflation were running at 4%, widespread clean energy would bring it down to 3.42%. This would save the average American family approximately $441 each year, or nearly three months’ worth of electricity bills.”
22 Youth Plaintiffs Sue the Trump Administration
Represented by the nonprofit legal group Our Children’s Trust, the young people are between seven and 25 years old. Most are from Montana, where the suit was filed, though Hawaii, Oregon, and other states are also represented. “Trump’s fossil fuel orders are a death sentence for my generation,” said Eva Lighthiser, 19, the named plaintiff. “I’m not suing because I want to. I’m suing because I have to. My health, my future, and my right to speak the truth are all on the line.” Read more.
USDA To Repost Climate-Related Web Resources
The department had removed resources on its websites related to climate-smart farming, conservation practices, rural clean energy projects and access to federal loans related to those areas after President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration. In response to a lawsuit filed back in February by the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Working Group. Read more.
Eleven States Want To Make Big Oil Pay for Climate Damages, Even As the Trump Administration Threatens to Shut Them Down
Vermont and New York already have climate Superfund Laws on the books. Now 11 more states, from California to Maine, have introduced their own bills. Proponents like Maryland state delegate Adrian Boafo say that the pushback from fossil fuel companies, Republican-led states, and the Trump administration “emboldens our fight.” “It means that we have to do everything we can in Maryland to protect our citizens, because we can’t rely on the federal government in this moment.”
Meanwhile Trump has declared the lawsuits a threat to the American economy, calling them “ideologically motivated” obstacles to his goal of energy dominance. The Justice Department took the aggressive step of pre-emptively suing two states to try to prevent them from even filing lawsuits like these.
Up To Date Data On Federal Science Funding Cuts From AAAS
“Make no mistake, if Congress enacts the President’s skinny budget, the consequences for the future of our nation would be catastrophic. The United States will no longer be in the global race for R&D leadership—we will have lost it. Economic benefits will accrue to other nations. We will lose the ability to set standards, influence priorities, attract and retain talent, and determine the outcomes for the health, prosperity and security of our nation. America is at a crossroads. It is up to our federal lawmakers to reaffirm their long-standing bipartisan support for science and technology investment by rejecting this budget.” May 2, 2025 by Sudip Parikh
Chief Executive Officer and Executive Publisher, Science Journals, American Academy for the Advancement of Science. See for yourself: https://www.aaas.org/news/fy-2026-rd-appropriations-dashboard.
Climate News
The World May Be At the 2°C Threshold in the Next Five Years
A new report from the World Meteorlogical Organization (WMO) predicts global average temperature is expected to “remain at or near” the 2°C threshold within the next five years, much sooner than previously predicted. “Every additional fraction of a degree of warming drives more harmful heatwaves, extreme rainfall events, intense droughts, melting of ice sheets, sea ice, and glaciers, heating of the ocean, and rising sea levels.”
Even Partial Deforestation Reduces Rainfall
A first of it’s kind study of deforestation impacts on rainfall in the Amazon shows that even the 3.2% reduction in forests in two heavily deforested states in Brazil: Mato Grosso and Rondônia, reduced rainfall by 5.4% during the dry season. The study found that this reduction in forest severely impacted the water cycle not just in the immediate area, but in surrounding areas of the Amazon as well. As trees disappeared, the evapotranspiration through the trees that moves water from soil and leaves into the atmosphere declined by 3.5%. Less water in the atmosphere weakened convection, and that lack of convection meant no afternoon storms. And while this study was conducted in the Amazon, the results it documented, basic physics of the water cycle, would impact anywhere deforestation increases, including already dry areas of the US now threatened with increased deforestation of public lands.
Plastic is Even Worse For The Climate Than We Thought
The Plastics & Climate Project, a nonprofit research group analyzed hundreds of studies of plastic and climate change. They found that in addition to the 5% of all GHG emissions tied to plastic production, microplastics in the environment also play a major role. They disrupt the natural cycles that pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, release methane when they disintegrate, and may impact the earth’s reflectivity, among other impacts. “We know the greenhouse gas emissions from plastics are being undercounted, and therefore plastics are using up more of the carbon budget than is currently assumed,” said Holly Kaufman, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute and one of the lead authors of the new report. Read more.
The Threat Isn’t Coming, It’s Here
Many markers, from temperatures above the 1.5°C threshold target, to the accelerating rate of sea level rise, indicate that we are not approaching a future climate crisis. It’s happening now. “The poles are unraveling together now — deep ocean warming, ice sheets showing early signs of irreversible retreat,and 14% of the polar regions’ natural cooling effect gone. The systems we thought were slow and glacial are changing faster than we can model, faster than we can respond.” Read more.
Jim Hansen Gives More Insight Into the Accelerated Pace of Warming
In this brief video Dr. Hansen provides an overview of a paper published by his team earlier this year both explaining and sounding the alarm about accelerations in warming.
The Polycrisis: Unexpected Emergent Behaviours and Convergence of Undesirable Impacts
With a systems lens, this paper in Global Sustainability attempts to provide insights into how the complex web of interacting global crises may play out.
Minerva Ventures LLC believes:
MV and our team believe in the US Constitution and the importance of upholding the rule of law, including the rights of freedom of speech and assembly to ensure a vibrant democracy. We believe in the necessity for sound scientific research to guide policy and risk assessment. We believe that a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives makes our society more creative and resilient. Our culture, economy, and well-being depend on collaboration with people, nations, and institutions around the world. We will do all we can to defeat fascism and to build an inclusive society that works to restore healthy ecosystems, welcoming communities, and a safe and stable climate. Humanity faces challenges that we humans set into motion. It will take all of us working together to overcome those perils to build a better future.
About Minerva Ventures:
Are you concerned about climate change and seeking ways to take action? Business survival depends on addressing competitive challenges every day. Leaders attend to urgent business matters while counting on tomorrow’s weather and operating conditions to be similar to yesterday’s. What happens when underlying conditions change as climate consequences become more severe? It is hard to adjust to a disruptive future while you are focused on competing today.
Minerva advises clean tech companies on strategic and business development. We help you find customers, new markets, and new investors to build your momentum and success. Minerva helps established companies create strategies to identify and contend with climate risks to your business. Discover how you can protect your operations, assets, products, and services. Understand how climate risk will affect your suppliers, customers, and partners. Determine how you can strengthen your company to navigate change and seize opportunities as markets reconfigure in the face of the coming changes. Find innovative ways to change your operations, products, and services to help address climate change. Consider policy measures that your industry can pursue that will help address shared risks.
Minerva can help you find new solutions that will make your business more resilient and adaptable to change. Your company will be advancing climate solutions rather than just reacting to disruptions to your industry and markets.
Visit Minerva Ventures’ website at MinervaVentures.com!
Newsletter Editor: Dinyah Rein, Consultant, Minerva Ventures, LLC
Managing Partner: Marianna Grossman, Minerva Ventures, LLC
Copyright (C) 2024 Minerva Ventures. All rights reserved.
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