John Doerr Unveils Updated Climate Action Plan with New 2035 and 2050 Targets

John Doerr, chairman of Kleiner Perkins and a leading climate-focused philanthropist, is updating his influential climate action plan, Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now. Five years after its publication, Doerr and co-author Ryan Panchadsaram have revamped the plan and its tracking system to reflect the rapidly changing global climate landscape.

Heatmap obtained an exclusive preview of the updated Speed & Scale tracker ahead of San Francisco Climate Week, where Doerr and Panchadsaram will officially unveil the new data and analytical framework. Designed to provide entrepreneurs, business leaders, and policymakers with a clear view of global progress—and gaps—in the fight against climate change, the tracker aims to guide strategic decision-making on where to allocate attention and capital.

“We became convinced by the number of entrepreneurs, founders, technology experts, and policy people who said the Speed & Scale plan influenced my decision about what to do—not how to do it, but what ought to really be done.”

Doerr acknowledged that the world has transformed since the original plan’s release. “We had AI arrive and change the demand for electrical power, we have geopolitical forces that we’re trying to understand and cope with,” he said. “And finally, there’s just the indomitable power of markets and price. All of which is to say, we can’t stick with a plan that’s five years old. It’s time to revise it.”

Updated Objectives and New Targets

The refreshed plan retains the original six core objectives:

• Electrify transportation
• Decarbonize the grid
• Fix food systems
• Protect nature
• Clean up industry
• Remove carbon from the atmosphere

It also introduces four cross-cutting priorities to accelerate progress:

• Politics and policy
• Turning movements into action
• Innovation
• Investment

The updated tracker aligns with a global net-zero pathway, setting interim 2035 targets and final 2050 targets for each objective. Unlike the original plan, which used percentage-based metrics, the new version employs absolute figures to enhance clarity and measurability.

For example, the original target to “increase EV sales to 50% of all new car sales by 2030” has been replaced with a goal to “increase the number of electric cars to over 600 million by 2035.” According to Panchadsaram, this shift makes the targets more tangible and actionable for stakeholders.

The framework for these targets follows the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) methodology, a goal-setting system Doerr introduced to Google in the late 1990s and which has since been widely adopted across the tech industry.