When it comes to decarbonisation, investors have been spreading their capital too thinly across companies and technologies, says Stan Miranda, founder of the True North Institute and co-founder of All Aboard.

“We will not make the right investments if we don’t face the reality of what’s happening at the atmospheric level,” says Miranda, “And for some reason or other investors in this space tend to back hope more than reality; and, as many people have said, hope is not a strategy here.”

Miranda was among the speakers at the Impact Investor Global Summit in May this year in London, where this episode was recorded.

Miranda explains the rationale behind the All Aboard coalition, a group of climate tech investors working collaboratively in a bid to find and back the “winners” among climate tech companies.

“There’s a philosophy in the climate investment world called ‘all of the above’, and the rationale behind it is that we don’t know which technology is going to work, whether it’s nuclear fusion or geothermal or clean hydrogen or various versions of carbon capture, so we need to invest in all of them. And that’s the enemy of success here,” says Miranda.

“We really need to talk to each other about what is really working commercially, what is not dependent upon policy support, and concentrate capital in those technologies. It won’t be all of them, so it should be very focused and very collaborative, not ‘all of the above’.”