Update: CTAN Bay Area Climate Tech COO of the Year Award
Nominations are now open for the CTAN COO of the Year award! One of the hardest jobs at a startup is COO, and as part of our upcoming holiday party this year, we wanted to acknowledge the people who keep the lights on. We invite you to nominate a COO at a Bay Area-based climate tech company! (Self-nominations are allowed.)
Save the Date: CTAN Holiday Party
The COO award will be given out at our first annual mixer/networking event/holiday celebration/fundraiser, at Barebottle Brewing Company in San Francisco on December 13. HUGE thanks to Barebottle for hosting us! Tickets will drop soon, there will be limited seats, so keep your eyes peeled.
This Week
I have a confession to make: I used to be a Burner. Everybody has an opinion on Burning Man these days, because Burning Man turned into an apocalyptic mud soaked nightmare due to the heavy rain. The whole affair was turned more bizarre by the fact that, before the rains even occurred, traffic to the Burn was held up by climate change activists, protesting against what they called the “privileged mindset” of the attendees. Or, in other words, that Burning Man is a bunch of douchebags. The irony comes from the fact that climate change almost certainly had some responsibility for the rain:
Donnelly is the Great Basin director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an advocacy group that promotes conservation and fights to stop the extinction and climate crises across public lands in Nevada, Utah and California.
"You can't directly attribute this event to climate change. But we are seeing impacts and extreme weather all over the place now ... so folks can make their own decisions about how they're observing the climate change in front of their very eyes," he told NPR.
On the other, you have the Burners themselves, grappling poignantly with the defining crisis of our generation thus:
“They’re delusional, it’s idiocy,” fumed Molly, a festival attendee. “They think they’re going to fix climate change by blocking Burning Man? I don’t care what their argument is, they can go fuck themselves.”
As a long time Burner, my opinion is: The protesters are absurd, the attendees are absurd, and the festival itself is facially absurd. The absolute lunatic absurdity of the entire thing has always been part of its appeal. That’s why I enjoyed reading Facebook and cackling aloud at the misfortune of the hapless fools stuck there in the mud. (And some of those fools are even my friends!) If you find this hard to understand, you must realize that one of the most common greetings amongst Burners is “Fuck your burn!”
But, Burning Man is also a microcosm of human society, and there are things we can learn about climate change from Black Rock City. For example: Burning Man is premised on “Ten Principles”, one of which is “Radical Self-Reliance”. But Burning Man as it’s currently constructed isn’t really an exercise in self-reliance.
Over on Bluesky, Brooke Magnanti makes a great point about this:
There’s a sanitation system and an airstrip, buses, they even have a fucking DMV, I shit you not. So, the bros (tech and otherwise) get to pat themselves on the back for their radical self-reliance, and then go home and write Op Eds about how San Francisco should flush the homeless out of SF by wielding the awesome power of the state. Like, “radical self-reliance” is hip and all, but have you tried building resilient communities? This year, in spite of the crisis-like conditions, people were pretty much okay. Some assholes fled on foot, but most people made the best of a shitty situation (literally) and tried to support each other.
Communities are the biggest tool we have to fight climate the climate crisis. Communities demand change from their governments, and support each other during crisis. The climate crisis will continue to grow in severity for some time, even under optimistic assumptions, and relying on the US “Heckofa Job, Brownie” Government to help out marginalized communities is not a bet I want to make. We have to be ready to help each other out.
But the fact that Burning Man isn’t actually an exercise in radical self-reliance isn’t really that big a deal. Radical self-expression, one of the other 10 principles, is a wonderful thing. A lot of people buy Burning Man couture off of Amazon and snort coke and act like assholes. But a lot of people, some of them artists without two nickels to rub together, build gigantic and awe inspiring spectacles, because there aren’t a lot of places where you can build things on that kind of scale.
In 2017, after about 3 years of labor, me and my friends carted out a a 15’ robotic fire shooting monstrosity. And, over the next week, I got to watch the very fine alkaline playa sand systematically decrepify it, until I ran out of spare parts to fix it at the end of the week.
That experience taught me something important: building resilient infrastructure is hard. It started me down the last decade of self-study, trying to understand the skill of building things for reliability. And for the last couple of years, my job has been studying the process of manufacturing itself, a Brobdingnagian embodiment of one of the most fundamental of human urges: the urge to build. The climate crisis is going to require us to build faster and more efficiently than we have ever done in the history of mankind, transforming our entire economy and energy system, to address the greatest crisis of our generation. And the things we build have to be able to withstand the ever-intensifying extremes of weather that the ongoing climate crisis is spawning.
Burning Man is an exercise in fake scarcity, a rich person’s ersatz developing nation. But it does give you an opportunity to learn a lot about respecting the awesome forces of nature, and planning for contingencies, if you open yourself to the opportunity for learning. If you’re just an asshole who shows up to party, then this was the year of Fuck Around and Find Out, and you found out.