Eric Toone, one half of the investing committee at Breakthrough Energy, speaks to conference attendees at the breakthrough Energy Summit in Seattle on Wednesday October 19, 2022.Photo by Cat Clifford, CNBCSEATTLE — Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the climate technology investment firm started by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, will begin to invest more in companies that help people and businesses adapt to the consequences of climate change.Since making its first investment in late 2017, the firm has made more than 100 investments in startups which have been primarily focused on climate mitigation — that is, reducing emissions and stabilizing the amount of climate-warming greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.It will now begin to look at companies building solutions to adapt to a hotter and wetter world, the firm’s executives said at last week’s Breakthrough Energy Summit.”It’s time to start accepting reality and that we’re not going to be able to do this fast enough, the ship is too big, it’s too hard to steer,” Eric Toone, one half of the investing committee for Breakthrough Energy Ventures, told a room full of conference attendees last week.Toone highlighted a quote from John Holdren, a research professor at Harvard who served as President Obama’s Science Advisory: “We basically have three choices: mitigation, adaptation and suffering.”Mitigation won’t happen fast enough and suffering …
