Why Climate Change Can't Wait - Tom Chi, Founding Partner, At One Ventures

In late 2011, the coral reef outside Tom's Hawaii home bleached and died in under eight weeks. He'd spent years in it daily — he knew the organisms, their territories, their relationships. Losing it was like watching all his friends and neighbors die.

He went to marine biologists and coral scientists to understand what happened. They told him that not only had his reef bleached that year — a large percentage of all reefs on the planet had. And the consensus among the three dozen scientists he consulted through the Fifty Reefs initiative was stark: at current trajectories, coral reefs as an ecosystem would be wiped from the planet by 2055.

That reset all his timelines. Until then, he had been reading IPCC reports projecting scenarios for the year 2100. He wouldn't be alive in 2100. He figured he'd donate some money, do a little advising, and keep his remarkable career intact. But watching the reef die in real time, in a near-term window, changed the calculation entirely.

Tom is a formally trained physicist and astrophysicist. He didn't trust the mainstream framing — he ran his own numbers. What he found was not being widely discussed: the IPCC models focused on average temperature rise by 2100, but volatility was increasing at a superlinear rate compared to the averages.

His model, built in early 2012, projected that by 2022 the world would be seeing mass fires, mass floods, and mass displacement. Lahaina. Thousand-year storms. Towns disappearing. All of it happened. The math wasn't sophisticated — it was mass energy balance calculation, the kind he had done as an astrophysicist for six years. He was confident it was right.

That confidence produced one final thought that got him off the fence: the team at Google X was going to have self-driving cars on the road within a decade. And they did. But those cars could have been invented one hundred years from now — life would go on. Coral reefs couldn't wait. Some problems are time-sensitive in a real way.

He left Google X, spent time at the front lines of ecological damage around the world, visited communities living on a dollar a day, and started investing in the teams on the ground who were actually making a difference. Eventually he formalized it as At One Ventures.

Tom is direct about "green premium" thinking — the idea associated with investors like Bill Gates that sustainable technology costs more. His response: if you're building green tech with worse unit economics than the incumbent, you're just a bad investor.

At One's framework starts with a physics audit. For any physical business, more than 90% of costs fall into three buckets: feedstock (the raw atoms being transformed), processing (the energy cost of transforming them), and transport/logistics (getting atoms in and product out).

A new technology only earns a check if it shows a major physics win on at least one of four dimensions:

No win on any of the four? Pass. The industries doing the most damage to nature have been the same thirty industries for decades — which means you can analyze each one, find its weakest cost node, and hunt specifically for the technology that attacks it.

One of Tom's sharper observations is about how the public debate has been framed. The assumption that ecological and economic goals are fundamentally opposed — that going green costs more — is, in his view, a manufactured narrative that only holds in a small slice of the actual cost structure.

In 90% of a physical business's costs — feedstock, processing, logistics — what's good for the planet is also good for the P&L. Doing things with less matter, less energy, less space is a win for both. The only place they genuinely diverge is pollution: the five to ten percent of costs that companies can externalize if regulations allow. Because that's where lobbying concentrates, it's also where public perception gets shaped.

"We've been spending all our time on the contentious five percent — and it's made us believe the wrong thing about what's possible. The companies that so wanted not to pay the cost of pollution have decided to destroy the world over it."

On the political framing of climate as a matter of belief, Tom is equally blunt: "You don't need to believe in gravity to stay on the earth. Planetary atmospheres work the way they do whether humans believe it or not. We see this across Mars, Earth, and Venus. That's not a political question. It's just physics."

Tom pushes back on the conventional freshwater narrative. Water is not a fixed commodity like gold. It's perpetually in motion — rivers, reservoirs, rainfall. And with every 1°C of atmospheric warming, the atmosphere holds 7% more water vapor. At 1.5°C above pre-industrial baseline, the atmosphere now holds roughly 10% more water vapor than at any point in recorded human history. There is more rain than ever.

The crisis isn't scarcity — it's that we've degraded surface hydrology so badly that when rain arrives, it comes as floods rather than feeding aquifers and water tables. Healthy soils absorb heavy rain and route it into the water table. Degraded landscapes can't do that, so the same rainfall that would once have been abundance now arrives as catastrophe.

There are four types of hydrology: ground, surface, atmospheric, and ocean. Right now, the way we've built on landscapes has severely damaged surface hydrology. And the potential melting of Greenland threatens to disrupt ocean hydrology — specifically the AMOC conveyor — in ways that would reshape weather patterns for much of the Northern Hemisphere. Fix the landscape, and water abundance is achievable. Ignore it, and the problem compounds.

The physics of climate doesn't care about politics. But politics can dramatically accelerate how fast you go in the wrong direction — and Tom is direct about what that looks like right now.

The Trump administration's move into Venezuela, which Tom and Prashant agree appears to be primarily about oil, is a live case study. The ideology driving it — that green technologies are a scam, that fossil fuels are the path to American competitiveness — is, in Tom's assessment, a delusional reality. "When you succeed on the petrol side, you need to make a bunch of excuses for kidnapping presidents."

Meanwhile, the countries taking green tech seriously are generating real economic outcomes:

The deeper problem is corporate capture. Governments are supposed to make decisions for all their constituents. When industries with large historical money piles use that capital to purchase policy, you get a system that props up dying technologies past their utility. Every industry that has made enormous money eventually wanes as better alternatives emerge. What's not normal is using the accumulated wealth of a declining industry to buy the future of entire governments — and with it, the future of everyone those governments are supposed to serve.

There is an evolution in how this problem has been framed — and Tom is precise about why each step matters:

The reason the distinction matters: we are currently a deeply net negative force. We've degraded soils, collapsed fisheries, bleached reefs, and disrupted hydrological cycles that took millions of years to stabilize. Merely stopping the damage doesn't repair it. In many systems — coral reefs, aquifers, biodiversity — stopping may not be enough if the damage has already crossed a threshold.

Tom is also precise about what we're actually deciding. "Saving the planet" is a category error — the earth will be here for billions more years. What we're choosing is how much human misery we're willing to accept. A planet with 90% of its biodiversity wiped out and carrying capacity collapsed to one or two billion people is still a planet. We can live on the misery curve. The question is whether we're smart enough not to.

And net positive isn't utopian — it has been done before:

These weren't compromises between ecology and economy. They were wins on both simultaneously. That is the design philosophy At One is investing into: technologies that don't just pollute less, but actively restore the carrying capacity of the landscapes they operate on.

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Tom Chi and Prashant Choubey

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