In-Person & Co-Sponsored Events

Climate change is a generation-defining challenge. The magnitude of need for first-of-a-kind solutions makes the venture capital (VC) model an obvious choice for funding climate technologies and services. However, is the traditional venture capital model actually suited to find success in climate tech? If not, are we relying too much on the venture model to solve climate change?

Join Chicago's Climate Action Museum (CAM) and Lost The Plot (LTP) during Chicago Venture Week to explore these questions. First, Kara Rodby — founder of Lost the Plot and a Principal at an energy hardware-themed VC fund — will share her perspective on why our overreliance on an ill-fitting funding model will fail the climate movement. Pulling from her five years of experience working in climate tech VC, she challenges us to think critically about the free market approach the US and Europe have taken to fighting this time-sensitive issue.

Then Kara will lead a fireside chat with Michelle Carr and Matt Orsagh. Michelle is the CEO of Evergreen Climate Innovations, pioneers of the 501vc® model for philanthropically-funded venture investing. Matt Orsagh is a co-founder of the Arketa Institute, a think tank on post-growth finance. This conversation will explore the opportunities and challenges of alternative financing models to VC for climate hardware.

While technology is often the focus or catalyst of societal change, it is hardly ever developed with intentionality towards end use. Rather, technology has been treated as acontextual: it is developed and then applied to many different use cases that can have vastly different societal implications. It is also usually designed to solve one problem, while ignoring the other problems it may create. Industry-level regulation is often minimal, and we continue to see entire new sectors emerge for technologies that actively make peoples' lives worse.

These trends have only heightened over the last 50+ years with the rise of neoliberal politics. Since AI is a virtually brand new industry with the potential to significantly change society for better or worse, now is the time to break the cycle by slowing down and designing guardrails that limit unintended consequences, externalities, and direct harm, instead centering societal wellbeing. This is particularly important for mitigating the climate implications of the AI industry, which have the potential to accelerate climate change significantly in the coming decades.

This talk is a part of the 2026 Token Institute Film Conference, a cultural conversation built around collections of short films created with AI tools interspersed with discussions on the ethical evolution of this industry.

Lost The Plot co-hosted with Chicago's own Degrowth Institute (DGI) for a Chicago Climate Week event. With presentations from DGI's Jason Barahona Rosales and circular economy specialist Madeleine Sullivan, we talked about the fundamentals of degrowth and then applied the theory to the concept of the circular economy. This exercise helped exemplify how well-meaning sustainability initiatives may still miss the point — a key theme of Lost The Plot — and in this case can be fortified by the challenge to growth. With over 40 attendees, including a good handful that hadn't ever interacted with degrowth concepts before, we achieved our goal of engaging people in honest and unique conversations about real climate action.