The narrative goes like this: climate tech companies are selling out. They built technology for climate adaptation and now they’re pivoting to defense. The implication is moral failure — they chose military money over mission.
I’ve been inside these decisions. The narrative is wrong. Not partially wrong. Structurally wrong.
What actually happens
A company builds Earth observation products. Flood mapping. Wildfire detection. Infrastructure monitoring. The technology is real. The capability is genuine. The climate application is clear.
Then they try to sell it.
The insurance industry wants proof of concept but won’t fund it. Government climate agencies have 18-month procurement cycles and budgets that reset annually. The adaptation market is fragmented across municipalities that each need a custom integration. The unit economics don’t work.
Meanwhile, defense has money, clear procurement pathways, and a genuine need for the same underlying capability. Synthetic aperture radar doesn’t care whether it’s looking at flood plains or forward operating bases.
The company doesn’t pivot because defense is more attractive. It pivots because the climate market doesn’t exist in a form that can sustain the company.
The structural diagnosis
This is a market structure problem, not a moral one. The technology for climate adaptation exists. The need for climate adaptation is real and growing. What’s missing is the market architecture — the procurement mechanisms, the pricing frameworks, the institutional buyers with stable budgets and clear requirements.
Defense has all of this. It has acquisition programs, prime contractors, budget lines, and a procurement infrastructure that can actually absorb new technology at scale. Climate adaptation has reports, conferences, pilot programs, and a fundamental inability to convert demonstrated need into revenue.
Why the moral framing is counterproductive
When we frame this as a values failure, we miss the structural intervention. You don’t fix this by guilting founders into staying in an unworkable market. You fix it by building the market that should exist.
That means: institutional buyers for adaptation data. Standardized procurement for climate risk analytics. Insurance regulation that mandates the data these companies produce. Government programs that create stable, multi-year demand.
The technology isn’t the bottleneck. The founders aren’t the bottleneck. The market structure is the bottleneck. Fix the structure and the companies will follow the revenue back to climate — because that’s where the underlying technology is most valuable.
The uncomfortable truth
Climate tech didn’t lose these companies to defense. It never built the market structures needed to keep them. That’s a policy failure and an institutional design failure, not a startup ethics failure.
Blaming founders is easier than fixing markets. It’s also useless.