If you spend time around climate discourse, you start to notice the choreography: the same panels, the same platitudes, the same tired argument about whether we can “bring everyone along.” Meanwhile, the weather is becoming less reliable – and the costs are showing up in everyday life, from insurance premiums to repairs after floods and fires.
Tom Chi doesn’t have much patience for that whole routine. In a wide-ranging conversation about his new book, Climate Capital: Investing in the Tools for a Regenerative Future (Wiley, 2026), the Google X co-founder and innovator offered a metaphor that’s both blunt and clarifying: “Trying to solve the climate problem by first persuading people who don’t accept the basic physics is like trying to build an aircraft with people who don’t believe flight is possible. You don’t get anywhere.”
This isn’t “stop persuading.” It’s “stop postponing.” Secure the minimum agreement needed to act, then let real-world progress do the persuading.
Chi has honed this capacity across a range of disciplines, from astrophysical researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory at the age of 15, to Fortune 500 company consultant. He’s played a pivotal role in the development of tools that are synonymous with the modern age, including Microsoft Outlook and Yahoo Search. At Google X, he shaped Google Glass and its self-driving cars. As a founding partner of At One Ventures, he is driven to direct seed funding to disruptive tech innovations that help industries become a net positive to nature.
Chi says we need to change how money, rules and decisions work – and we need to move quickly. To achieve that, he offers a diagnostic: watch the vocabulary. “When you’re actually advancing on a problem, the language around the problem keeps advancing.”
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In fields that are genuinely learning, nouns evolve. Conversations become more precise. Arguments get technical. Questions shift from whether something is possible to how it’s built, financed, regulated and deployed. You can feel the difference between a debate that is stuck performing morality and a discipline that is moving toward execution.
Climate hasn’t had enough of that linguistic evolution. In fact, it has often moved in the opposite direction – toward softer terms and convenient vagueness. We’ve normalized “climate change,” a phrase that makes a crisis sound like a gradual shift you can adapt to over time. But what we’re living through is a loss of predictability: more extremes, more swings, more disruption. That’s why “climate destabilization” is the more accurate description, according to Chi.
Chi argues that the real story isn’t just warming; it’s volatility, or the breakdown of predictability that underpins everything from infrastructure engineering to actuarial models. As he puts it, “The killing edge of climate risk is volatility, not averages. We should have been tracking variance and standard deviation.”
Averages don’t overwhelm storm sewers; extremes do. Averages don’t shift growing seasons, then whiplash them back; variance does. And in Canada, where climate impacts are now colliding with household budgets, volatility is increasingly visible on one front in particular: insurance.
When catastrophic losses rise and become harder to price, the cost doesn’t stay in the balance sheets of insurers or reinsurers. It moves into premiums, deductibles, exclusions – and then into politics. Affordability becomes the headline, and the climate signal gets translated into the language of family finances: can I insure my home, and if I can, what am I giving up to do it? For Chi, “destabilization” captures how climate risk migrates across systems – from weather into underwriting, from underwriting into housing costs, from housing costs into inequality.
Climate Capital is about how the economy is designed – and how capital can be used to redesign it, so we stop financing damage and start financing durability. Chi treats economics as a design discipline, not a natural law. Which is another way of saying: the world we have is not inevitable; it’s governed.
And governance, in his telling, is not only spreadsheets and oversight. It’s culture. It’s relationships. It’s the invisible infrastructure of decision-making inside institutions that claim they want change while rewarding stasis. Chi’s most practical move is to argue that the “soft stuff” is not soft at all: “The financial performance stuff is table stakes. The other half of board management is emotional labour – and the quality of relationships is what determines outcomes.”
Transitions fail not only because technologies don’t exist, but because institutions can’t hold the trade-offs. They fracture under conflict, treat legitimacy as branding and assume that trust is a “nice-to-have” rather than a form of capital that compounds, or collapses.
This is where Chi’s “4Cs” rubric – critical thinking, creativity, compassion, community – becomes less a personal development list and more an institutional capability set. Critical thinking to interrogate the assumptions embedded in risk models. Creativity to fund deployment pathways, not just prototypes. Compassion and community to maintain the relational capacity required to make hard decisions repeatedly, at speed, without losing the room. This last requirement becomes non-negotiable in a destabilized climate, he argues.
The climate conversation doesn’t need another round of rhetorical victories, Chi says. It needs different builder behaviour: procurement that values resilience, not only unit cost; financing structures that bridge first-of-a-kind projects across the valley of death; investment committees that treat adaptation as investable infrastructure, not an afterthought; and insurers working with governments and builders so “build back better” stops being a slogan and becomes a default.
The test of whether we’re moving forward won’t be whether we publish another eloquent climate statement. It will be whether we can start naming things as they are and following up with tangible actions.
The following excerpts have been edited and condensed.
Chi on the urgency of the era
“There is a type of urgency to technology, but it’s really more a competitive urgency where you try to be the first to do an innovation. You’re going to be the first to go and get a new feature out there, to be more attractive to customers, all that sort of thing. There is no more foundational timeline to it other than the urgency of capitalism: trying to be an innovator in a competitive field.”
“But when I saw the [coral] reef die and I talked with a bunch of coral scientists about it, a very specific timeline started to come into view. We mostly talk about them as planetary tipping points, and I actually think that’s a little bit too abstract. There’s a lot of things that are happening which are one-way doorways we will not be able to go back through. If a lot of the Amazon rainforest fully succeeds in becoming more savanna-like, then that’s not something that’s easily reversible.”
“There’s a point where things either become undoable time-wise because the thing has become extinct or the thing has disrepaired so extensively where it becomes economically unviable for us to go sustain it in the better state. [Seeing] that recontextualized a lot of things for me.”
Chi on climate vocabulary
“I wanted to use a term that would capture what I was seeing in the data, all those disruptions. And the best word that I could come up with was ‘destabilization,’ because whether it’s warmer or cooler, you will be destabilized compared to your historical baseline. Whether it’s wetter or drier, you will be destabilized. Whether you’re now having thousand-year storm events every five years – which is kind of the zone that we’re getting into right now – or whether for you it’s a 100-year storm every three years, that is all still destabilized. And I wanted the term that would be accurate for all the spots on Earth and reflective of the numbers. Because I’m a scientist first, right? I want to make sure that we get the numbers right. And then I try to make the communication true to what the actual truth is, as opposed to what will elicit the least amount of action and emotional sentiment.”
Chi on climate change deniers
“The entire dialogue has been hijacked by the climate deniers. We’ve spent so much time trying to go and reason with people that have no interest in reason. Trying to go and solve climate change after convincing climate deniers is like trying to go build an aircraft with people who don’t believe in flight. You just don’t get anywhere.”
Chi on the ‘average’ trap
“The easiest way for the scientific community to coordinate was to move toward averages. It’s relatively easy to agree on averages: You did a study. I did a study. We did a study. Let’s add all the data points together. We can find the centre of gravity here. We can find the averages.”
“Now the problem is that it’s the volatility that is the killing edge of climate, not the averages. What a half-a-degree increase might mean in a particular spot on Earth might mean six degrees hotter in the summer, five degrees colder. We should have been looking at things like standard deviation, variance, other sorts of volatility metrics. That would have given us a way more realistic sense of how soon it would be before we would have, for example, disruptive scales of wildfire. Because it was way sooner than most people thought when they were looking at the averages.”
Shilpa Tiwari is the founder of No Women No Spice and Isenzo Group.
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