Not a horrible framing of things, although the dominant (and likely best) movement is simple technologism, where emerging battery / ev / solar / wind / geothermal / nuclear / vertical farming / artificial meat / etc disrupt mass swathes of traditional / politically entrenched industries.<p>That's spread across "max energy" (not really), "climate tech" (kind of dismissive of the results/payout).<p>What it really shows is that almost all of the cited "tribes" have aspects that are needed. Regulation, incentives, urbanization, centralization, technology, resource use reduction, cultural values, even a bit of neopastoralism (home gardens, crafts, reuse/recycling things for other purposes) is significant.<p>Doomerism is actually a very useful marketing component, because in the process of people discussion "prepping" and analyzing doom prep scenarios, people are forced to deal with problems in a more concrete and detailed way. It also works on an instinctual fear in all people, in some constructive ways. Doomer prep leads to off-grid products that converge with solar, battery, local food production and sourcing environmental tech.
An axis not apparently explored is reality vs. fantasy.<p>Looking up press about Energy Vault, a fraudulent energy-storage company whose public shares peaked at $2.4B and trade now at $4-600M, it is very hard to find anything published that equates them properly with Theranos. "Analysts" consider them undervalued, and want them to be worth $1B even though they have no product anybody not insane would buy. Apparently "institutional investors" own a big chunk of their shares. (Curiously, everybody seems to agree they have no long-term value.) FWIW, it appears they still have $100M in cash. In principle, they could still buy out a company with a product that actually works.<p>Similarly for fusion startups. Only one of them (Helion) has any possibility of ever achieving anything practical, and their odds are not encouraging. (One company, Kyoto Fusioneering, builds fake demo equipment for fusion startups, and provides a conduit for abundant fusion venture money into its founders' and maybe investors' pockets.) None of the others can ever produce so much as one erg of commercial energy.
This is an interesting read, but isn't particularly novel. Most of these "tribes" seem to just be re-branded from core literature on environmental discourse, e.g. Dryzek's "The Politics of the Earth" [1]. But I find the traditional branding a more useful framework since it's more closely related to mainstream, core philosophical discourses.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Politics-Earth-Environmental-Discourses/dp/0199277397" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Politics-Earth-Environmental-Discours...</a>
I'm curious how many people have colleagues that got a job in climate tech out of principle. There appear to be a good number of websites specifically made to advertise such positions (just google "climate jobs") that have sprung up this year alone.