Climate Capital: Investing in the Tools for a Regenerative Future

by Tom Chi

320 pages, Hardcover

Published February 17, 2026

Reviews

[Mert Topcu · Rating 5 out of 5]

What Tom Chi does better than almost anyone is expose how the fundamental assumptions in our existing economic frames are incomplete, how they systematically exclude the value of human connection, biodiversity, and natural systems not as an oversight but as a structural feature.

Some chapters left me wanting to go deeper but that's the nature of a book that's trying to break the frame and build a new one across the entire landscape.

Don't let the title narrow your expectations: this book reaches well beyond climate tech and speaks to anyone questioning whether the frames we use to measure value and seemingly create value are measuring or building the right things.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

4Cs framework = critical thinking, creativity, compassion, and community

Part 3 is where it comes together. Instead of throwing out economics and capitalism (like in calls for "degrowth"), this book proposes adjusting capitalism to account for environmental equity (e.g. healthy watershed resources) which can still be pro-growth. That is probably the biggest contribution from the book in my opinion.

There are some other positive reframing ideas, for example that labels for "capitalism" and "socialism" are really about efficiency vs. availability; both can be important to prioritize and are not actually mutually exclusive. Similarly, "conservatism" and "liberalism" in politics is like maintaining or preserving a garden vs. expanding the garden, which are both needed again rather than contradictory.

However, the examples are not fully convincing:
- Traditional Hawaiian land management is a nice and interesting example but very limited. How extensible is that really? Probably not very. The fact is that native populations were overrun in the course of history which is how we ended up where society is today, and going back to more sustainable methods like that might require vastly lower carrying capacities which means population collapse. We can possibly use technology development to augment this but we should be honest that this remains unproven. Things like some mangrove planting drones is frankly not enough to prove it.
- The author likes to mention his work on Google Glass which many would call a failed product, although perhaps it was just too early. (Also, the author knows that most people will not have access to Google X level of financial resources. If Google can only get so far, what does that imply for others? Scale back projections accordingly.)
- Another example is from 2013 when politicians in Singapore began studying policies to retrain taxi drivers into other jobs once self-driving cars automates their employment, but in the years since then, ride-sharing networks have greatly increased the numbers of human drivers while autonomous vehicles are still only in the earliest phases of rollout; so you might call them farsighted, but you could also say they were actually wrong, at the very least in timing.
- Another proposal is transparency on political donations, which is good, but we already have this; except for anonymous PACs, you could already look up what people have donated, although the vast majority of people likely do not bother.
- Other proposals are for shorter term lengths and "fast cycle prototyping" which is an obvious idea when your background is R&D engineering, but is likely not really that appropriate for politics. It depends on the required time period for a given body of work, if the minimum required timeframe to do a project is 1 year then holding daily elections for the supervisory position is not going to help. There are valid cases where term lengths should arguably be longer, not shorter; for example in quarterly corporate earning reports for public companies.

So interesting, worth reading, but not as convincing or strong as the author would probably like.