When one faces a seemingly insurmountable problem, a common piece of advice is to break up the job into smaller pieces. Some progress, the thinking goes, is better than doing nothing.

That, in general, is how startups and their backers have approached the species-threatening specter of climate change. Whether the focus is clean manufacturing, energy efficiency, renewables, sustainable packaging, or a host of other focus areas, the broad bet is that we can take incremental steps to curtail our carbon-spewing ways. READ MORE