Lauren Faber O’Connor on Scaling Tech That Wins — The Unf**ck Thesis

In conversation with VX News, climate veteran Lauren Faber O’Connor—now at Lowercarbon Capital and formerly with the City of Los Angeles, CalEPA, EDF, and the UK Foreign Office—argues that the next era of decarbonization won’t hinge on policy ambition, but on technologies that simply outperform the fossil economy. Pointing to fusion clearing scientific and regulatory hurdles, AI-driven geothermal mapping unlocking new baseload, and electrochemical breakthroughs reshaping the cost curve for cement and steel, Faber O’Connor argues that the “hard-to-abate” sectors are now the ones moving fastest. Her message is direct: if governments drop their perfectionism and engage early with innovators, and if private capital keeps scaling these breakthroughs, we have the tools to unf**k the planet while actually improving daily life.

“We cannot guilt or shame people, ask people to suffer inconveniences, or accept lower-quality goods or services. That’s not an enduring transition, and not one I believe in.” — Lauren Faber O’Connor

Lauren, you’ve spent over two decades shaping climate strategy at the city, state, federal, and even global levels. Now, as a Partner at Lowercarbon Capital, share how your experiences shape the lens you bring to investing in markets, technology, and decarbonization. 

That’s a good question. I have spent the last 20-plus years working in both policy and the business of deploying decarbonization solutions. So, to me, it feels like a natural step to move into the investing space and work with the pioneering, top-tier solutions in climate and on the frontier of economic transition and economic opportunity. 

I’d spent the first half of my career at amazing places like the British Foreign Office, the California EPA under Governors Schwarzenegger and Brown, Environmental Defense Fund, putting policies, systems, and institutions in place to enable, or unleash, an economic transition that we knew decades ago needed to happen–things like Cap-and-Trade, the Western Climate Initiative, and renewable portfolio standards (RPS). And then, the opportunity to come home to LA and work for the City was a bit of a turning point; this daunting task of doing the thing, and holding myself accountable for not just setting ambitious targets in line with the policies I’d been promoting for so long, but actually executing to meet those goals.

There’s nothing more fulfilling than seeing the results of your work on and in the ground. Working for the City was the challenge of a lifetime—and completely magical, but that was because of the people I got to work with inside and outside City Hall.

As our administration neared its end, I found myself reflecting on what I was proud of, what remained unfinished, and why. Working for the Mayor and the City of Los Angeles, we had an ecosystem of ambition and vision. We had a citizenry that was extraordinarily supportive of the work we were doing, pushing us to be more ambitious and holding us accountable. Internally, we had vision and motivation across all city departments, across all of our amazing public servants. 

At the time, my reflections were on the technology solutions we needed across energy, water resilience, transportation electrification, the built environment, and infrastructure—they weren’t obvious. The solutions we did have, we weren’t yet seeing the cost declines that made them palatable for quick, wide-scale adoption. 

By the end of the administration, I was wholly focused on solving those problems. How is private capital mobilizing to rapidly scale the solutions that, as we at Lowercarbon lovingly and unapologetically say, are going to unf**k the planet?

For readers unfamiliar, describe what Lowercarbon does, and how you see venture capital enabling the deployment of climate-tech solutions.

At Lowercarbon, I’m a kid in a candy shop. Honestly. I often examine the technologies we invest in, and as I’m working with our founders, I’ll think, Why didn’t I know this existed when I needed it in my previous job? 

I have to remind myself that those technologies probably didn’t exist yet, or only in some smart entrepreneur’s head at the time. Coming to Lowercarbon is a constant “aha” moment that the economy is eminently one we can decarbonize, we can and will transition away from fossil fuels. We won’t do it because of the Paris Accords; we will do it because the technologies are just better all around.

Lowercarbon is one of the largest early-stage venture funds solely dedicated to investing in climate-tech solutions. “Early stage” because our founding thesis is to find the best technology solutions across every sector of the economy and give them the capital infusion they need to race ahead. Sometimes that means taking very early bets on what we think will be the winners in the economy, and as climate tech matures, we now also invest in later-stage companies where they’ve passed technical milestones and are really in commercialization—so we can juice that too.

When we say climate tech, first and foremost, we are de-fossilizing the entire economy. That shows up in advanced manufacturing, industrial materials, food and ag, and—towering over everything right now—energy: clean, abundant baseload and innovative ways to produce or access it better, faster, and cheaper.

We also focus on resilience, which, for better or worse, is a real opportunity and need for the private sector to help communities and businesses prepare for and respond to climate impacts. This translates to new businesses in wildfire insurance, disaster relief, grid infrastructure monitoring, rain-as-a-service, and more. 

We also have a strong investment thesis in carbon removal, because the science is clear: we have to deal with legacy emissions, and there’s a real market emerging for that globally.

As you speak to, Lowercarbon operates with a “triple bottom line” thesis. Given current federal headwinds, and speaking generally, has the defunding of climate-related initiatives impacted the way Lowercarbon assesses investments?

It’s interesting to characterize it as “triple bottom line,” especially in the current macro environment, because ultimately, for climate solutions to win, they have to win on solid economic and economic-only grounds. That is the fundamental thesis at Lowercarbon. We cannot guilt or shame people, ask people to suffer inconveniences, or accept lower-quality goods or services. That’s not an enduring transition, and not one I believe in. 

I’ve seen the innovation ahead of us. I experienced it while working at the City. We didn’t sacrifice anything to meet our goals, and in doing so, made people’s lives better and made the City function better.

In the current macro environment, yes, it’s frustrating to see how much we are shooting ourselves in the foot…But none of what we do is charity. The upside of having been in this work for so long is that I’m used to this pattern of political peaks and valleys, and all that comes with it—but I believe we're always moving in the right direction.

The economic trends are clear: cleaner solutions are better, faster, cheaper. A lot of the priorities of this administration, using different words, are to accelerate the solutions we're already investing in. Steel, cement, critical chemicals, critical minerals–it’s about onshoring and securing supply chains as a national security imperative, which benefits many climate tech companies and can reduce emissions, including those in our portfolio. Energy abundance and the race for energy security to dominate in an AI-run future is extraordinarily accelerative to low-carbon solutions, and we’re seeing synergy in advanced manufacturing, in energy technologies, and in resilience. The key thing is that we are not alone in recognizing this dynamic; the investor base for these technologies, whether you care about climate or not, is growing.

If you were addressing a classroom full of idealistic people who are somewhat dismayed by capitalism, how do you reach them with the thesis you just shared?

I would want them to put themselves in other people’s shoes. What are we really asking of people and of society? How do we relate to each other when it comes to our commonly shared goals of prosperity, quality of life, and interpersonal connection, and what’s keeping us apart?

Climate actually doesn’t have to be a wedge. It can bring people together if we communicate in ways that allow us to relate. All of the solutions that climate tech brings forward enable that quality of life. We want to be healthier. We do not want to worry about the lights turning on, our power reliability during a massive storm, or our water supply. 

These are things we don’t want to worry about, because when we do, everything else goes out the window. You can’t think rationally or in the long-term interest, and such challenges can be extraordinarily motivating for entrepreneurs. The markets are certainly responding.

Less than a decade ago, you oversaw the City of LA’s Green New Deal, which aggressively promoted the decarbonization of energy, water, transportation, and ports. Looking back, how naive or accurate was the agenda—and does its language need to evolve today to continue winning the day?

So, I think carbon is really a proxy for economic activity, and it’s actually not a bad metric for measuring growth or output. But as a result, advocating for carbon reduction can be misconstrued as advocating for lower economic growth. This is partly how language around carbon has become so politicized. 

I’ve lived through the world of writing two versions of documents, depending on the audience. Here’s an example: a while back I was appointed to a statutory board at the Department of Energy called the State Energy Advisory Board—and it had a few local government reps but was mostly state energy officials across the U.S. I would sit every quarter with colleagues from red, blue, and purple states, talking about what we wanted the federal government to know about our priorities in energy, power, and transportation.

The eye-opening thing was that there really never was a disagreement on our priorities. We shared a lot of the same goals for what the Department of Energy and the administration should do to deliver abundant, efficient, affordable energy to communities. It was a great experience, and reminded me how the fundamentals of our work transcend political lines.

Pivoting to the specific technologies Lowercarbon is backing: you named fusion’s potential during your remarks at this past VerdeXchange Conference. 

Are you still as bullish on fusion today?

Fusion is one of the most exciting and transformational opportunities we have the privilege of pursuing at Lowercarbon, and we had the foresight, or hutzpah, of being early. 

Before I joined Lowercarbon, our founders—Chris and Crystal Sacca and Clay Dumas—were accused by some as a little out of their minds. What they saw and now looks obvious in hindsight comes from the fact that they took the time before launching these investments. They got into the labs, dug into the real state of the technology, and worked closely with entrepreneurs as they sketched out the earliest paths toward commercial fusion. None of it was taken lightly.

We were really seeing three dynamics unfolding. First, when our first fusion fund was forming, we hadn’t, as a scientific community, reached Q > 1, which is the breakthrough where you yield more energy than you put in. That hadn’t happened yet. Second, we had an uncertain regulatory landscape, and third, there had been no transactions in fusion energy. Between 2020 to 2023, all of these uncertainties were resolved.

We’ve not only hit Q > 1, but we’ve gone significantly beyond that in the lab. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has determined it will not classify and regulate fusion the same way as nuclear fission. It doesn’t have the same properties or risks. They’ve concluded to consider it in the same category as a particle accelerator, like the impacts of an X-ray machine. States can determine how they want to oversee fusion, and you don’t have to wait for the NRC. That is, to the tune of decades, an accelerant.

We’re also beginning to see PPAs, or true commitments to purchase fusion energy. In the last year, Boston-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems signed PPAs with Google and Eni to buy power from their first plant in Virginia. They’re working with Dominion Energy, which is all-in on making this happen, as is the surrounding community. People are very supportive.

I’d parallel the fusion industry to what happened in space travel. Once it moved out of the halls of government and academia and into a commercial ecosystem, we discovered many new ways to build rockets and use cases for them. Diversification and competition have driven down costs and accelerated innovation. We’re seeing the same thing in private fusion development, and we need to be talking about it. 

Even in the last year, there has been significant recognition and increased coverage in the news, so people are learning more and getting comfortable with this new resource. As we begin to see more viable pathways for fusion energy and use cases such as grid-connected and behind-the-meter applications, it’s a diverse and rapidly evolving space.

Beyond fusion, what other climate-tech breakthroughs capable of bending the emissions curve is Lowercarbon focused on?

Fusion is a category of its own and truly transformational. I’d say on the energy side, we’re also seeing some incredible innovations that are kind of breaking our minds a little bit—not because they’re unimaginable, but because we, as a society, had a very conformed view of certain energy types and the constraints around them.

Take geothermal. The constraints we assumed about the availability of geothermal energy—even conventional hydrothermal resources—were wrong. I have the opportunity to work with a company called Zanskar. They’re completely blowing the lid off our understanding of geothermal limits. Their AI-driven, proprietary GIS and sensing technologies can detect heat sources where no one thought they existed. And they’ve now proven this over and over again. It’s incredibly exciting. Geothermal isn’t a new technology, but the way they’re expanding its map and using prospecting tools we didn’t have even a few years ago is transformational.

Also on the energy side, we’re seeing that what are, in theory, simple manufacturing innovations are delivering paradigm shifts across the entire portfolio. Think 3D-printed turbomachinery enabling power-dense, zero-emission oxy-combustion turbines from companies like LA-based Arbor, or Panthalassa’s ocean-based, Starlink-connected energy for compute—essentially floating data centers powered by limitless deep-ocean hydropower using surprisingly simple, mass-manufacturable hardware. These innovations are being deployed before 2030 to directly address some of the biggest constraints the system faces today.

In the built environment, a significant amount of carbon is embedded in industrial materials. This was something we cared about long before the data center explosion, but that explosion has accelerated sustainable-materials innovation—cement, steel, and asphalt. The breakthroughs in electrochemistry over the last decades, driven largely by the push to scale batteries, have now spilled into industrial manufacturing.

What’s interesting is that these were always labeled “hard-to-abate” sectors. What I’m realizing is: they’re not hard to abate; they were just late to the abatement party. Because they’re late, they’re going to scale faster. There are extraordinarily exciting opportunities there.

Past VX speakers have highlighted the difference between how Japanese and Israeli companies decide when a new technology is ready for market. Japanese firms typically wait until a product is fully tested before introducing it; Israeli firms tend to launch early, trusting the market to iterate and improve. In your view, which strategy ultimately proves more effective?

We shouldn’t underestimate the idea of perfect being the enemy of the good.

If we track the companies and technologies we’re most proud of as a society, those serving the most good and moving the fastest, it’s the ones that innovate in real time, responsibly, and transparently. Those are the winners.

To close, your entrepreneurial instincts can sometimes clash with the more defensive posture of the public sector. How do you successfully engage both entrepreneurs and regulators?

I think about this a lot and what I’m coming around to—this sounds oversimplified—but in the end, we’re all humans, and relatively simple beings. A lot of this comes down to human nature.

A really important ethos to bring into the public sector is: get out of our silos, spend time outside of our normal domains, our social and professional spheres. By building familiarity with the innovation ecosystem, its pace of change, how quickly technologies are being de-risked, and the value of early movers, we’ll be able to demonstrate more value creation back to the constituents the public sector is accountable to.

We’re ultimately accountable to individuals and their experience in the economy, because that trickles into capital markets in one form or another. There’s so much more we can do—on the outside (of government), and when I was on the inside—to foster these connections and get comfortable doing new things. Bringing multiple stakeholders to the table helps mitigate risk-taking, which comes down to social engineering, relationship-building, and engagement. That’s what breaks through silos.