About | Alternate Future

About Alternate Future

Working across decarbonization, climate risk, and carbon removal, we use Climate Pragmatism and decades of experience to:

1. Help climate founders with product, strategy, scaling, and fundraising.

2. Help execs in any sector implement pragmatic climate strategies to reduce carbon and improve P&L.

Our Founder, Peter, is a decarbonization and product expert. He has a background at the exec level with startups and growth stage companies, in climate and across sectors.

What is Climate Pragmatism?

If we can’t reshape capitalism, then the opportunity is to merge decarbonization into it. The opportunity is in translating science and academia into business and operations. The opportunity is to put a shrewd decarbonization strategy right next to a shrewd growth strategy and to put smart climate investment right next to smart P&L management.

We think this opportunity is especially important and overlooked in the startup ecosystem where the next wave of entrants into the S&P 500 are currently being built.

Climate Pragmatism is our answer – it's a practical approach to decarbonization that pops the academic bubble, dispels common myths, and helps companies improve their P&L. We seek and evangelize common sense approaches to help our planet decarbonize. Is the climate crisis scary? Yes. Is it complicated? Very.

We use strategic perspectives to whittle away at the noise and get everyone focused on action. We teach you the difference between real impact and things that look better on paper. We give you a practical onramp into existing frameworks. We help you reduce emissions while simultaneously improving your P&L. Let's get pragmatic.

A NOTE FROM OUR FOUNDER

I've always had a healthy distrust of incumbent systems. Achieving incumbency means making choices and sacrifices that inherently do not benefit the greater good. Wether it's a departure from logic, morality, or neutrality – or all three – somewhere along the way incumbent systems lose their north star.

Through my interactions with this wild world, I've learned that toppling over incumbent systems – that is a revolution of them – is rarely the path forward. It's a shift from one extreme to another. 1 to 0 and back to 1. There's no progress in that. Just bloodshed.

Instead, incumbent systems need course correction. They need collaboration. They need healthy pushes from their partners and constituents to change and evolve. In this approach, we find much more progress and ultimately better outcomes for everyone.

See you out there,
Peter

A Final Thought

I wrote this in 2019 when Alternate Future was just starting out. I think it still rings true for anyone considering a venture into the unknown in any part of their life:

Our journey is an elemental one. Yes, of course, in the sense of carbon and climate, but also to prove that the advice we've been given about how to deal with extreme uncertainty is true. We've heard from friends and family, mentors and colleagues, leaders and the occasional bumper sticker that "it's about the journey, not the destination" and "take leaps and have faith the universe will catch you". Easy to say, hard to believe, harder yet to put into action.

Before Alternate Future was created we stood on the precipice and wrestled with this advice in the context of making an impact on climate change and our own personal arcs. Is it too late? Will we make a difference? Is this too risky? What will happen next? And so on. We decided that we didn't know - and importantly that that's okay. We're gonna go for it anyway.

And so, we start this journey now and we'll see what comes next.