Carl Hart: Drug Use for Grown Ups (Book Review)
Having enjoyed Michael Pollan’s “How to Change Your Mind” on psychedelics (in particular psilocybin), I was intrigued by a book that goes much broader on drug use: Dr. Carl Hart ’s “Drug Use for Grown Ups .” Hart is a [...] Read more
Mask Mandates Were Effective
Yesterday I took a day off after my second vaccine shot and promptly made the mistake of getting myself into a Twitter fight about the effectiveness of mask mandates (ugh, looks like other party deleted their tweets leaving only my [...] Read more
Supporting the Other Decriminalization: Sex Work
New York State finally passed a bill that legalizes marijuana and justly releases people serving time for the kind of drug crimes that now are no more. The enforcement of the drug bans were always super racially skewed, primarily targeting [...] Read more
Fighting the Climate Crisis with Oil, Gas, and Coal Assets
One of the objections to a green energy policy are the potential jobs lost in the oil, gas, and coal industries . It doesn’t suffice to point out that there will be new jobs created installing solar roofs or building [...] Read more
Preparing Communities for the Climate Crisis
The more you know about the climate crisis, the harder it is to not be depressed at least some of the time. The challenges ahead are vast and the will to action still small by comparison. So we already know [...] Read more
Climate and Crypto
I have been asked how I can reconcile my support for crypto/blockchain with my concerns about the climate crisis. So here is a blog post laying this out. Crypto/blockchain is a fundamental innovation that addresses an important problems facing us [...] Read more
Mitigating the Climate Crisis: An Overview
Late last year, we announced the USV Climate Fund. At the time, we wrote that “[m]itigation is working on the causes of the climate crisis through either emissions reduction or drawdown of existing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.” In today’s [...] Read more
SilviaTerra
Key to addressing the climate crisis is changing the balance in the so-called carbon cycle. At present, every year we are adding roughly 5 gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere*. Since atmospheric carbon acts as a greenhouse gas this increases [...] Read more
USV Climate Fund
At USV we describe ourselves as a “thesis-driven venture capital firm.” For our core fund, we have been investing against Thesis 3.0 for some time. Over the last couple of years, we have been developing a separate Climate Thesis, including [...] Read more