As financial professionals prepare to gather in New York for the city’s annual climate week, they will need to address the reality that China — the world’s largest source of carbon emissions — is now the strongest motor guiding the planet to a low-carbon future. While US President Donald Trump axes the green policies of his predecessor and Europe gets caught up in a regulatory stalemate, China is quietly making a number of transition sectors impenetrable to Western start-ups.
Venture capitalists (VCs) in clean tech are starting to say out loud what they have suspected for a while: China’s dominance has left key sectors in the West uninvestable.
A group of eight VCs from Western firms agreed to share with Bloomberg the details of a July road trip across China during which they visited factories, spoke with start-up investors, and interviewed founders of companies.
They knew China has been racing ahead in sectors like batteries and “everything around energy”, but seeing how big the gap was firsthand left them wondering how European and North American competitors can even survive, says Talia Rafaeli, a former investment banker at both Goldman Sachs Group and Barclays who is now a partner at Kompas.
“Everyone needs to take this kind of trip,” she said.
