🎙️ AI is one of the biggest drivers of the climate crisis. And it might also be one of our most powerful tools to fight it. The question is whether we're using it for the right things.
In this episode of Tangelic Talks, hosts Victoria Cornelio and Andres Tamez sit down with Charles F. Stromeyer IV — Principal of Frontier AI and Investment Strategy at Tangelic, with over 30 years in AI and investing — for a wide-ranging, technically grounded, and genuinely optimistic look at what climate tech can actually deliver.
Charles took his first AI courses in 1992. He's advised finance ministers, mentored climate startups at Mass Challenge, and now leads investment and AI strategy at Tangelic — including the CLRS climate intelligence platform designed to measure and verify real-world ESG impact.
This conversation covers everything from satellite CO2 imaging to nuclear fuel recycling to the 1911 Manhattan electric taxi — and what it tells us about how technology really changes the world.
In This Episode, We Explore:
🛰️ How hyperspectral satellite imaging verifies CO2 reductions before and after clean energy projects
🤖 CLRS — Tangelic's climate intelligence platform for measuring high-quality carbon credits and ESG impact
☁️ OptiCloud — the first company using AI agents to eliminate digital waste in cloud computing
🌊 AI for early warning flood systems, precision agriculture, digital twins, and global environmental monitoring
📊 Why banks reneged on net zero — the three types of climate risk that didn't map onto their objectives
⚡ How AI data centers accidentally accelerated solar past coal in the US for the first time
☢️ Small modular nuclear reactors, Oklo's 1.7 billion spent fuel recycling, and China's nuclear race
🌍 Why Africa has 60% of the world's solar potential — and only 1% of installed capacity
🚗 Electric taxis in 1911 Manhattan, WWI, and how gasoline won by historical accident
🌱 36 million clean energy workers globally — and why the job destruction myth isn't accurate
🔹 About Our Guest: Charles F. Stromeyer IV is the Principal of Frontier AI and Investment Strategy at Tangelic. With over 30 years of experience at the intersection of AI and investing, he brings a rare long-view perspective on what technology can realistically deliver for climate change.
💬 Join the Conversation: If you could fund one climate technology tomorrow, what would it be?
Drop your thoughts below 👇
🌱 Support the Mission: Help us amplify stories of clean energy, equity, and climate justice.
👉 TangelicLife.org
🔖 #AIandClimate #ClimateTech #ClimateInvestment #SolarEnergy #NuclearEnergy #CarbonCredits #ESGTracking #SmallModularReactors #CleanEnergy #ClimateFinance #DataCenters #ClimateInnovation #ImpactInvesting #EnergyTransition #TangelicTalks
🌍 AI climate tech investment, frontier AI climate, Charles Stromeyer Tangelic, CLRS climate intelligence, hyperspectral satellite CO2, Fervorit waterless cooling, small modular reactors
In this episode of Tangelic Talks, hosts Victoria Cornelio and Andres Tamez sit down with Charles F. Stromeyer IV — Principal of Frontier AI and Investment Strategy at Tangelic, with over 30 years in AI and investing — for a wide-ranging, technically grounded, and genuinely optimistic look at what climate tech can actually deliver.
Charles took his first AI courses in 1992. He's advised finance ministers, mentored climate startups at Mass Challenge, and now leads investment and AI strategy at Tangelic — including the CLRS climate intelligence platform designed to measure and verify real-world ESG impact.
This conversation covers everything from satellite CO2 imaging to nuclear fuel recycling to the 1911 Manhattan electric taxi — and what it tells us about how technology really changes the world.
In This Episode, We Explore:
🛰️ How hyperspectral satellite imaging verifies CO2 reductions before and after clean energy projects
🤖 CLRS — Tangelic's climate intelligence platform for measuring high-quality carbon credits and ESG impact
☁️ OptiCloud — the first company using AI agents to eliminate digital waste in cloud computing
🌊 AI for early warning flood systems, precision agriculture, digital twins, and global environmental monitoring
📊 Why banks reneged on net zero — the three types of climate risk that didn't map onto their objectives
⚡ How AI data centers accidentally accelerated solar past coal in the US for the first time
☢️ Small modular nuclear reactors, Oklo's 1.7 billion spent fuel recycling, and China's nuclear race
🌍 Why Africa has 60% of the world's solar potential — and only 1% of installed capacity
🚗 Electric taxis in 1911 Manhattan, WWI, and how gasoline won by historical accident
🌱 36 million clean energy workers globally — and why the job destruction myth isn't accurate
🔹 About Our Guest: Charles F. Stromeyer IV is the Principal of Frontier AI and Investment Strategy at Tangelic. With over 30 years of experience at the intersection of AI and investing, he brings a rare long-view perspective on what technology can realistically deliver for climate change.
💬 Join the Conversation: If you could fund one climate technology tomorrow, what would it be?
Drop your thoughts below 👇
🌱 Support the Mission: Help us amplify stories of clean energy, equity, and climate justice.
👉 TangelicLife.org
🔖 #AIandClimate #ClimateTech #ClimateInvestment #SolarEnergy #NuclearEnergy #CarbonCredits #ESGTracking #SmallModularReactors #CleanEnergy #ClimateFinance #DataCenters #ClimateInnovation #ImpactInvesting #EnergyTransition #TangelicTalks
🌍 AI climate tech investment, frontier AI climate, Charles Stromeyer Tangelic, CLRS climate intelligence, hyperspectral satellite CO2, Fervorit waterless cooling, small modular reactors
Category
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LearningTranscript
00:00was that when fossil fuel prices are high then what you can do is adopt solar because that's
00:09the cheapest energy source now and that conserves more of your domestic fossil fuel production
00:14so then you can either save it or you can sell it and it's projected in the u.s co2
00:21emissions could
00:22go up 28 by 2030 if all the data centers were done as currently planned versus having no data centers
00:31at all
00:42welcome to tangelic talks your go-to podcast from tangelic where we dive into the vibrant world of
00:48clean energy development sustainability and climate change in africa we bring you inspiring stories
00:54insightful discussions and groundbreaking innovations from the continent making waves in the global
01:00community tune in and join the conversation toward a brighter greener future let's get started
01:08welcome to tangelic talks a podcast at the intersection of energy equity and empowerment
01:13with your co-host victoria cornelio and andres tamas and in today's episode we've got our very
01:18own charles welcome charles thanks for having me thank you for coming on can you please tell
01:24people who you are because we know you already charles is part of the tangelic team we're very excited
01:29to get to chat to him yeah i'm charles f stromeyer the fourth and i'm the principal frontier ai and
01:37investment strategy at tangelic and i have over 30 years experience and investing in an ai
01:47and i took my first two ai courses actually in 1992 when i was an undergrad so it's actually been
01:56around
01:56a lot longer than most people think yeah i think there was someone who was shocked the other day when
02:03i
02:04said algorithms are ai and they've been around for however long what was ai like in 19 in the 1990s
02:12what was it being used for uh it was used for things like trying to predict uh let's see
02:21market fluctuations like in quantitative finance they were using artificial neural networks
02:28but they were very primitive this is before what we call deep learning ai or the transformer architecture
02:36which came out of google in 2017 but was then launched as gpt in 2018 by open ai that's crazy
02:44and how did you find yourself in this in this world what attracted you to get into this field of
02:50work
02:51well the two courses i took were very interesting the two ones in ai at oberland college in 1992
02:58and then i was at a scientific conference in 2004 and i met this guy who had developed a new
03:06kind
03:07of ai system at mit and that's really when i got interested in it again okay so it tracks back
03:14then
03:15yeah why would it be useful to have before and after data well i'll give you two examples
03:22data centers as you know use a lot of energy and water and they emit co2 and generate noise
03:31so i was a mass challenge mentor for optic cloud and they're the first to use ai agents to optimize
03:39cloud
03:40computing you can think of it like your spam email there's a lot of digital waste in there they can
03:46find all the digital waste in cloud computing and re-optimize it so that's a software solution
03:55and then a hardware solution that i really like is a new startup from two mit researchers
04:01called ferverit and they have a liquid cooling solution for data centers that doesn't use any water
04:08software and it's much more energy efficient so you can get 35 percent more tokens out of an ai model
04:19and the neat thing about it is it could enable data centers in places that it wasn't previously feasible
04:26like africa the middle east or parts of america where there just isn't enough water for data center
04:32cooling yeah and so the before and afterward matter in this case if you wanted to demonstrate
04:40a reduction in co2 emissions from a data center you can measure before when the data center is running
04:47and then after the intervention either software and or hardware how does the data center directly emit co2
04:55uh it's because of electricity demand going up from the data center it uses all kinds of electricity like
05:03it'll it'll burn natural gas or coal and it's projected in the u.s co2 emissions could go up
05:1228 percent by 2030 if all the data centers were done as currently planned versus having no data centers at
05:20all
05:21can this like it can these satellite technologies also be used to measure for example i've seen stats
05:26about the the uh the farm that the data center ai data center that kevin o'leary wants to build
05:35and the the projected increases in both daytime and nighttime temperature in the local area would
05:44those also be able to be measured by satellite i think they would be yeah i'm not an expert on
05:50that though so i'd have to look into it but it seems like something that could also be it
05:56yeah the satellites can also measure deforestation and crop disease the ai would basically accelerate
06:03and help you understand what's going on a little bit better right and there's other ways that i can
06:10help like predictive ai with early warning systems for floods for example for better weather monitoring
06:18yeah there's also precision agriculture so i was once a mentor for a company called auto agronom
06:27and they developed technology that uses sensors and tensiometers to listen to the needs of the roots of
06:35plants and by optimizing when you feed and water them you use much less fertilizer and water so that would
06:43be
06:44one another is digital twins and urban modeling some you can model cities and see how they might respond
06:54to rising sea levels for example and then more generally global monitoring platforms like what i just
07:01mentioned with satellites that's really cool so it kind of helps us get ahead of the issues we might be
07:07facing down the line yeah hopefully hopefully is this a product of modern ai or is this just a product
07:14of like how how much how different is modern ai from like just deep learning and machine learning
07:20in the past is it more is it more dynamic and that's why it helps us more than traditional modes
07:26of like
07:26uh this sort of computing it's mostly due to the transformer architecture i don't want to get too technical but
07:33it's in gpt stands for generative pre-trained transformer now arguably there were large
07:41language models in the 1990s like they beat people at the game jeopardy okay you might remember that yeah
07:50but it wasn't really till the transformer architecture that things took off and the token usage by large
07:58language models is very important you can think of a token as like a bit of text or data okay
08:04and it's
08:05or as a unit of intelligence as far as these ai models go no no it was similar to that
08:11is is it because
08:12there is so much more data available that we can make these technologies i guess better at predicting
08:20or are we implementing them differently it's a mixture of both the big data or large data sets
08:25certainly helps with making more accurate predictions and then i guess tying that into for
08:31example esg tracking if you're able to do before and after accurate measures would that help improve
08:38for example the reputation of a company or help fight greenwashing in some way because you've got
08:44some hard evidence of how things go following the articles in the european union and things like that
08:50like is that one of the benefits of having a before and after yeah and but i don't want to
08:56sound pollyannish that finance or tech can solve all our climate problems uh lisa sachs at columbia
09:04university just had a paper out and she i don't remember the title of the paper but i could look
09:09it up she
09:11argues there's three main types of climate risks there's planetary which is things physical like rising sea
09:18levels there's economic which is reduced economic production or productivity for example and there's
09:26finance financial which would be like credit quality or stock sell-offs because of the impact so
09:36part of the problem with the banks committing earlier to zero carbon and then reneging is these
09:44different types of climate risks they didn't map well onto their objectives which is sort of it sort
09:50of defeats the point of of uh of making that commitment if you're going to take it back
09:56just because it doesn't align with your objectives that's sort of but it really really is a great
10:02indication of the cultural state of things yeah and there's an old saying that impact investing is kind
10:08of like a houseboat it's neither a great house nor a great boat this is because of the tension between
10:15wanting to make a positive impact versus needing to make a profit yeah is this a tension that we see
10:21a
10:22lot in climate tech in general yeah because initially with with climate tech there's various barriers to
10:31getting it to the communities that need it most and one of those is the high upfront capital costs of
10:37doing a big solar project or a wind farm for example there's the high initial price for consumers for
10:46certain of them like in africa you can do pay as you go solar and that works well but evs
10:51are expensive
10:53but because of the iran war there's a lot of interest in cheap evs from china going to other parts
10:59of asia and even africa and then there's an uneven playing field because fossil fuels have a lot of
11:08heavy subsidies and even indirect subsidies that support them so it's sort of yeah it's sort of
11:15very unfair although tech like how would how would the subsidies for green for example energy or
11:23uh alternatives differ from the ones for fossil fuel um well the you look at the leader in clean energy
11:31it's china and they do industrial subsidies and other techniques to favor and prop up their industry
11:40and for example from about mid-march to mid-april the total volume of solar panel exports from china
11:51roughly doubled a lot of that went to asia and africa led by nigeria and once uh i told the
12:01finance
12:02minister of nigeria that a good strategy that i thought of in 2008 but and i told her later at
12:09the
12:09africa business conference at harvard business school was that when fossil fuel prices are high
12:18then what you can do is adopt solar because that's the cheapest energy source now and that conserves
12:24more of your domestic fossil fuel production so then you can either save it or you can sell it at
12:31the
12:31higher export price so that's not a direct subsidy but it's a way that even clean energy can help conserve
12:39fossil fuels absolutely it can help you keep it as either an economic reserve or as uh as uh just
12:48emerge for in case of emergency right or you can use less at home so there's less pollution or you
12:54can
12:54sell it at the export price which is much higher than the domestic price this is for net exporters of
13:01fossil fuels like nigeria i guess a lot of people when they hear fossil fuels they think it's extremely
13:06contradictory to the green space and renewables and things like that is there something we're
13:14missing when it comes to these things is that sort of a knee-jerk reaction i don't think it's entirely
13:20an
13:21unjustified reaction because global emissions and temperatures are at relative highs and they're
13:27projected to go higher so but one thing with clean energy myths that people have about it is it's not
13:37a guaranteed 100 clean silver bullet like there's heavy resource extraction so for batteries and solar and
13:47wind you have to have lithium cobalt and rare earth metals and 90 percent of the rare earth metals come
13:54from
13:55china and there's complex supply chains and there's infrastructure updates yeah so the production of
14:02it isn't necessarily scot-free yeah but that said another myth is that evs are powered by dirty electric
14:10grids because they're powered by natural gas or coal but in the long run transitioning to evs is much less
14:18carbon intensive than maintaining internal combustion engine vehicles right okay oh the good news about
14:26this is that there's something called moore's law which says that the power of semis rough conductors or
14:34computer chips roughly doubles every year and the cost comes down proportionally well with solar it's been
14:44even quicker than that and with batteries it's been even quicker than solar so the idea that renewables
14:51cost more just isn't feasible anymore because solar's the cheapest global energy source and we now have
14:57smart grids and batteries that can handle it at least with sophisticated electric grids they know how
15:03to incorporate it is that specifically talking at a mass scale like a company or a country or household
15:11finances like having solar in your house it depends on if there's um net metering so
15:19if i like in my neighborhood if i well we're on an independent power company but if i was on
15:27a grid
15:27like here in the northeast of the u.s and i had solar and i generated excess electricity i could
15:33sell
15:33it back to the utility and save money that way okay so it is becoming more affordable overall
15:40yeah and it goes back also in the developing world to what you said about esg benefits for example
15:47when a household in africa gets solar for the first time or clean cooking then the women and girls don't
15:55have to spend as much time collecting firewood they can study more they can work more they get more free
16:02time yeah and that's one of the things that in the black and white conversation of energy
16:08kind of get lost sometimes of it's not just about you know being able to turn on the lights is
16:15the
16:15knockoff effect of having access to these you know be empowered into the grid or having some energy
16:21independence is how it frees up your social life as well i want to focus a little bit on finance
16:28from a perspective of climate technology sounding very promising but then where does the funding
16:35and scalability come in because like you said it's hard to get it to the people that need it most
16:39but isn't that true of most charity projects right getting them funded and scaled well the reality is most
16:48startups and non-profits fail and so part of it is that scalability issue how do you climb the valley
16:56of death for clean tech startups there's depending on the type of startup for example with an impact
17:04or circular economy startup in africa you have to scale it with both public and private sector resources
17:12it's not sufficient to scale it just privately unless it's truly some kind of breakthrough technology
17:19that just pays for itself okay but that's the general problem especially in the u.s is the clean
17:25tech valley of death where you get some funding you build a prototype it works but then scaling it
17:31economically um in the clement space is a priority then environmental impact or commercial viability it
17:40depends on the region that's one of the barriers to getting clean energy to people who need it is
17:45uncertainty and fragmented regulation and trade tariffs all right okay yeah because
17:55with uncertainty it's harder to finance a long-term project and as you can imagine trump in the u.s
18:03is
18:03now promoting more coal so but thankfully a recent project in the u.s just raised 3.5 billion for
18:11solar
18:12and batteries so it's still doable and the really good news here in the u.s it was widely covered
18:19on
18:19the news yesterday for the first time ever consumers are now getting more electricity from solar than from
18:26coal oh wow that is good news not in the u.s and i didn't figure that that's very interesting
18:36yeah
18:39and the other thing is there's more emphasis now on nuclear now the leader in nuclear in the u.s
18:46is the u.s and eu but china's catching up they recently are building or have built six new large
18:53nuclear reactors so it's predicted by the end of the decade they'll be the leader in nuclear power
18:59but global warming's a global issue so every little bit helps yeah when it comes to i believe by year
19:07they're on track to to beat out everyone else when it comes to nuclear and that that'll be a that'll
19:14be a
19:15pretty pretty good chunk of their advantage over the entire world and having very very stable uh
19:22um clean energy yeah here in the u.s there's some emphasis on larger nuclear but there's a lot more
19:30recently on small modular nuclear reactors and i was once a mass challenge mender for oklo which now
19:40trades on the stock market under the symbol oklo and one thing they're doing is they did they just
19:48announced a 1.7 billion private center for recycling spent nuclear waste into new nuclear fuel right
19:56because newer newer tech uh reactors can use all of the fuel like it can use the the primary fuel
20:04and
20:04then the waste from it to keep itself sort of going right yeah it's also they might have the potential
20:10to create tritium which is needed by commonwealth fusion systems they're the most prominent
20:18commercial fusion project in the u.s because like i feel like uh when it comes to when it comes
20:25to
20:25nuclear like the the i'm very close to i love nuclear energy and um the this is like sort of
20:34the silver
20:34lining to the mass implementation of ai data centers in the united states that they've reactivated the
20:40conversation and this year updated a lot of the legislation about nuclear right um do you feel
20:47like this will get america more back on track it's like the timelines what what used to happen with
20:53nuclear in the united states is that the the timelines and the regulations would make it so that it just
21:01wasn't viable uh in a way in a proper way right um so now that we're seeing all of these
21:10uh small
21:11form factor modular nuclear reactors sort of being the main discussion where do you think they're going
21:18to be implemented or like do you see actually see it realistically like having multiple reactors going online
21:25maybe like one to uh i guess it's more on the timeline of four to five years from now yeah
21:32that's the current plan and they get activated on government and military sites initially uh
21:42but that's a bit of a very important debate now is how economically feasible will scaling up small
21:50modular reactors be versus traditional large nuclear power plants and i'm not convinced anyone really
21:58knows yet is nuclear on energy source that could be adopted in other places in the world it could be
22:05but
22:06there was a recent report that to give you an example if we installed more renewables that would do
22:14more for climate change than any direct air capture scheme because that's not very economical either and the
22:22advantage africa has the whole continent of africa they have 60 of the world's best solar potential
22:30but they only have one percent of installed capacity so i mentioned the startup fervor it what you could do
22:38in
22:38theory we don't know yet to scale but you can make a solar power data center for africa or the
22:45middle east
22:46and it wouldn't need any water for cooling with the liquid cooling alternative that fervor it has
22:52how does the liquid cooling alternative work do you know like i did yeah they submerge it in a special
22:57kind
22:58of liquid and unlike other liquid cooling systems it has much smaller bubbles which are much more efficient
23:05for heat transfer this is emerging that's on the surface of the servers themselves this is weather
23:12specific to where the center is yeah traditionally you couldn't build a large data center in the middle
23:19east africa or say arizona because there's no water to cool it with yeah i was wondering the reason i
23:25ask
23:26is because a lot of climate solutions are developed and then one of the issues i've seen with scalability
23:33is the context specific discussion of these technologies so for example you can't import the
23:38same technology to every place right a lot of the solutions have to be specific to context right it
23:44depends on the locality for example in the leading science journal nature there's recently a news article
23:52about there's going to be a lot more gullies in africa these are where they're there's not a lot of
24:00underground infrastructure and the rain suddenly forms and creates a gully in the ground so all these
24:07things these weather and climate and environment specific things have to be planned for before you
24:13do a large clean energy project and people are looking at what's called parametric insurance
24:20to hedge clean energy projects from climate change and physical risks but parametric insurance can be
24:27expensive and then we get into the finance tension again of needing funding i want to close off
24:33thinking about sort of in the next decade do you think we have a climate technology today that could
24:39be truly transformative in the way that it's being implemented at the moment or that we're close to
24:46breaking through i'm not an expert on nuclear fusion but commonwealth fusion systems just published five
24:52scientific papers claiming they'll be able to produce more energy than they use that would be a huge
25:00breakthrough if it works and can scale commercially i feel i'm always very skeptical when i hear that
25:07because that that that sort of claim comes around every five years saying it's five years from now
25:14yeah i agree and it really depends on the region the the best overall technology for climate change
25:21is solar because it's the cheapest and there's so many places where there's plenty of sunlight
25:27and the myth that solar doesn't work when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't work when the
25:34wind doesn't blow that's not really true because of improvements in smart grids and batteries
25:40so for example in england where it's rainy 80 percent of the year we could still have solar
25:46yeah they have some solar in england and then they also have offshore wind power they could do
25:51geothermal potentially geothermal looks very promising as well yeah okay so there's a lot to be excited
25:59about geothermal seems to be working really well for like greenland if i remember correctly yeah i don't
26:05remember which one either good okay well thank you charles for helping us understand all of that
26:12you know as always you can check out the blog at tangeliclife.org slash tangelictalks where we'll
26:19have some research um that charles has mentioned and some links to some of the things we've talked
26:24about and some extra questions because we're going to stay on for a little bit but we'll catch you guys
26:28on the next one thank you
26:36let's talk power let's talk change for rural lights to brighter days equity rising voices strong we're
26:46building tomorrow where we all belong tangelictalks energy equity pride in power in the world side
26:56by side a spark becomes a fire a vision that's true together we rise it starts with you