Living in San Francisco can insulate you from some of the world’s problems. Climate change is not one of them. Over the past two years, residents have been advised to stay indoors on some days because of smoke from nearby wildfires. Another burning season is about to start in earnest. California’s state government says climate change “has created a new wildfire reality”.

In the long term, many Silicon Valley offices could be flooded if — or when — sea levels rise by two metres. Protecting the Bay Area against floods and storms would cost an estimated $450bn. Water shortages are also expected to worsen.

Yet few of Silicon Valley’s amazing achievements have had a bearing on climate change. The world’s most innovative place lacks answers to the world’s existential problem. The contrast is striking, given that many tech employees worry about the issue.

The biggest companies act as if climate change is tangential. Although Google and Facebook power some or all of their data centres with renewable electricity, they rarely engage more broadly with their role in increasing global energy use.

Perhaps it’s a clever ruse by Big Tech to demonstrate it isn’t as powerful as politicians think: like a modern King Canute, it can’t control the waves. More plausibly, it points to an underlying failure of the Valley.

Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal, liked to say, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Actually we wanted clean energy; we got cryptocurrencies that use as much electricity as Argentina. We wanted sustainable transport, instead we got millions of car-hire drivers.

Where are the tech products that help us slow global warming, and adapt to a warmer world? At this rate, parts of the world will gain access to multiple food-delivery apps just as they lose access to clean water. Alexa, tell me why it’s 100 degrees outside.

One problem is that Silicon Valley’s model of venture capital — which works so well on some problems — cannot easily address climate change. It excels in developing software for the US market and then spreads globally.

Clean technologies require much more capital and engineering, and often the low-hanging fruit — such as retrofitting dirty factories — lies outside of the US. The best green tech start-ups are not concentrated in California, undermining the network effect on which the Valley is built.

After Al Gore’s 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth, one major venture capital fund, Kleiner Perkins, did bet heavily on clean tech — and fell from grace partly as a result. It didn’t help that the US government failed to accelerate environmental regulation.

For years, this disengagement with climate change had one high-profile exception: Tesla’s Elon Musk. Like Tom Cruise’s character in Top Gun, the electric car pioneer was a mixed blessing. You could replace fossil fuels — but only if you were as unique and as rich as he was.

There are a couple more examples now: Impossible Foods and Los Angeles-based Beyond Meat have started selling meat alternatives with lower carbon footprints. But Kleiner’s John Doerr says much of the investment in environmental technology still comes from family offices, rather than conventional venture firms. A lot is riding on Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the $1bn clean tech fund led by Bill Gates.

The first generation of Valley entrepreneurs — William Hewlett, David Packard and Intel’s Gordon Moore — spawned foundations with a strong environmental bent; the current generation has directed its giving elsewhere.

Of course the hard choices involved in stopping global warming don’t fit well within the tech industry’s usual optimistic, convenience-focused rhetoric. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai hardly mention climate change in speeches. Apple has hired a former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, to head its efforts, which include making suppliers use renewable energy. But the focus is still on mitigating the company’s impact, rather than broader change.

Silicon Valley promises to tackle the world’s biggest problems. When historians look back at our era, they may ask why the people with the most ambition, capital and appetite for risk failed to aim a little higher.

henry.mance@ft.com

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