Even in Seattle, people buy sunglasses. I know, I was born in a very rainy part of the world, a little hamlet called Redmond, Washington. The population was 1,200 when I was a little guy, our biggest manufacturer was the Carnation Company, our contented cows gave better milk. We had fresh fruits and vegetables at the farm gates, the smell of hay in the barn, triple-canopy rainforest, crawdad fishing in the Sammamish Slough, oyster roasts, and in-ground salmon bakes when we could catch ’em. Sigh, times have changed.
Since you’re not from there, most of the readers here anyway, I suspect you might think that we spent our days in the Pacific Northwest talking about umbrellas, galoshes and windshield wipers. Yep, those are tools we had, but we thought about sunshine. In our case, not always so easy to find, especially in the long winters in the far northwest. We had to think about the where, when and how long more intently than, say, those lucky tykes living in California or Nevada.
Today, outside your window in the bioeconomy, it might be raining — not the literal drops from the sky, but the drizzle of declining stock prices, tariff confusion, investor reluctance, commodity swings, R&D retreat, company peril. It might look gloomy outside, and clouds as far as you can see. But, as any Seattleite can tell you, it’s sunny somewhere, there are corridors of warmth and heat, a jolly lot of them, perhaps not so easy to find as yesterday, but that’s the nature of rain. In the Pacific Northwest, we accepted it, and worked with it, sometimes worked around it. We skied at Sun Valley, consumed Sunny Jim peanut butter, vacationed at Sun Mountain, and bought more sunglasses per capita than any other city in the United States. Sunny thinking is a habit of mind, we learned.
So, I’m against pessimism. And, I’m for bioeconomy professionals who want to do something more valuable than find the next shiny object to chase, trend to hype. I’d like to offer a little perspective on how to persist, which is even more important than short-term success because it is the engine that takes you to long-term success. And, that is what I wish for you, success in the long haul. But first, let’s look at where the Sunshine Corridors are, for you to achieve your deserved success.
Sunshine Corridors for Company Development
San Francisco Bay Area / SoCal
GTESI Strengths: Symbolic capital, regulatory threading, synbio talent, venture density
Best-Suited Technologies: Precision fermentation, PHA bioplastics, Steakholder
Narrative Rituals: Climate-tech as lifestyle, venture as virtue, branding of persistence
Why Strengths Persist: Deep alignment with identity-driven tech culture; carbon seen as status
Boston / Cambridge
GTESI Strengths: High-trust biomanufacturing, fed funding access, public-private rituals
Best-Suited Technologies: Itaconic acid, 3D printing, circular chemicals
Narrative Rituals: The lab saves the world, biotech as covenant
Why Strengths Persist: Academic-industrial compact; prestige economy shields from policy volatility
Midwest / Chicago Hub
GTESI Strengths: Ethanol adjacency, ritualized agricultural capital, logistics density
Best-Suited Technologies: ATJ, gas fermentation, precision ferm
Narrative Rituals: Feed the world, fuel the world, farm belt-to-fuel belt mythos
Why Strengths Persist: Farm loyalty transcends carbon; built on generational land and co-ops
Southeast (GA, NC, SC)
GTESI Strengths: Strong logistics, forest adjacency, growing synbio cluster, lower costs
Best-Suited Technologies: Bioplastics, ChainCraft, pulp-to-bio refineries
Narrative Rituals: The forest provides again, Southern industrial rebirth stories
Why Strengths Persist: Forest pride + industrial heritage = bipartisan support for remanufacturing
Seattle-Portland Corridor
GTESI Strengths: PNW sustainability ethos, proximity to timber/waste, high narrative coherence
Best-Suited Technologies: Algae, circular forest fuels, advanced pulp valorization
Narrative Rituals: Greener than green, forests reborn as infrastructure
Why Strengths Persist: Long-term cultural memory of forests + tech-enabled identity anchors
Sunshine Corridors for Project Development
California Central Valley / SoCal Desert
GTESI Strengths: Strong LCFS/RIN support, waste access, dense policy frameworks
Why Strengths Persist: Local air quality & infrastructure incentives remain politically unshakable
Best-Suited Projects: Gas fermentation, ethanol-to-jet, waste valorization plants
Persistence Framing: Clean fuel made here, proximity reinforces narrative binding
Texas Gulf / Louisiana
GTESI Strengths: Refining infra, drop-in blend capacity, labor pool, port access
Why Strengths Persist: Refining jobs and energy security narratives beat carbon politics
Best-Suited Projects: ATJ, syncrude biofuels, hydrogen integration
Persistence Framing: Freedom fuel, resilience as infrastructure
Midwest (IA, IL, NE, KS)
GTESI Strengths: Grain surplus, rail access, policy comfort, feedstock familiarity
Why Strengths Persist: Feedstock is the economy; political will is local and sustained
Best-Suited Projects: Ethanol upgrades, ChainCraft, precision feed fermentation
Persistence Framing: From harvest to hearth, moral supply chains
Pacific Northwest Inland Empire (Spokane, Boise, etc.)
GTESI Strengths: Proximity to distressed forest assets, rail + river access, pulp legacies
Why Strengths Persist: Forest employment + rural recovery = long political memory
Best-Suited Projects: PHA from pulp waste, wood-to-sugar biorefineries
Persistence Framing: Waste to worth, timber towns return
Appalachia & Kentucky Basin
GTESI Strengths: Cheap land, rural workforce, forest + coal logistics rewired
Why Strengths Persist: Post-coal identity seeking renewal; any new value gets traction
Best-Suited Projects: Forest-to-jet fuels, modular waste valorization
Persistence Framing: Rebuilding where coal once burned, reverse-strip-mining for good
Guide to Using Sunshine
Good news, there are places where people still love carbon, where early-stage technology investment is job #1, where adding value to forest or agriculture assets is the everyday task that makes people put the boots on in the morning, and get on with the job. You might be feeling a little wary of trusting my message, feeling a little burned by the pace of events — turns out, carbon trust was brittle and too many people fled the scene at the first sign of trouble. Not all narratives are brittle, not every value-creating mechanism has been smashed. In fact, far from it. Here is my Guide to Sunshine Corridors and how to find them.
1. Reconnect Project Purpose to Persistent Needs
You’ve spent a decade framing your work as a carbon solution. Now the carbon scaffolding is shaky—prices down, policies thin, buyers nervous. It feels like the foundation moved under your feet. But the need your project answers never vanished. It just changed costume.
- Reframe your narrative from carbon to resilience, reliability, or reclamation.
- Ask: If carbon accounting vanished tomorrow, would this still matter? If the answer is yes, lead with that.
- Anchor your work in rituals older than the IRA—heating fuel, harvest fertilizer, community energy, structural materials.
2. Reengineer Supply Chains Toward Reliability and Ritual
If your model depends on just-in-time purity or transcontinental inputs, you’re feeling the crunch. Feedstock deals falling through. Shipping delays. Trust failing across the chain. This is not a supply chain problem. It’s a trust chain problem.
- Prioritize low-ritual-friction inputs: local ag waste, forest byproduct, known commodities.
- Design around legacy corridors: grain elevators, tank rail, barge hubs, old co-op structures.
- Fit where the system already wants to work. Let the ritual memory do the heavy lifting.
3. Restructure Capital Outreach
VCs are skittish. Bankers are pulling term sheets. Governments are backpedaling from climate commitments. You’re not imagining it. The narrative collapsed faster than your pitch deck could update. But funding didn’t disappear. It moved to where it feels safe.
- Shift the story from “breakthrough” to “linchpin.” Investors fund what their future selves can rely on.
- Bring the floor: community bonds, public co-investment, offtake from embedded players.
- Let strategic capital follow a path paved by trust.
4. Adapt Technology Toward Persistence Vectors
If your tech was designed for elegance on paper but stumbles at scale, the market is letting you know. You don’t need to scrap it. You need to bend it toward something simpler, harder, more persistent. Something the world knows how to hold.
- Pivot toward feed, fertilizer, fiber, fuel—inputs that persist even when policies don’t.
- Rebuild modules for reliability. What’s slow and small may outlive what’s sleek and fast.
- Use what’s available. Succeed where others fail because you didn’t wait for perfection.
5. Embed in Place-Based Rituals
Your tech doesn’t float in the cloud. It lives somewhere—in soil, in grain, in tank farms, in lumberyards. If the people who live there don’t see themselves in it, it won’t last. Ritual is more than culture. It’s how systems remember.
- Speak local. Drop the carbon lingo. Learn what the land and the people already say.
- Partner with the ones who stay when the grant money leaves: co-ops, rural utilities, county extension agents.
- Be there. No place lasts without someone living in it.
6. Pursue GTESI Persistence
The shiny object era is closing. The General Theory of Evolutionary Systems and Information (GTESI) reminds us: persistence is what outlives the hype cycle. If your system can store trust, compress entropy, and export reliability—it will not only survive, it will guide others forward.
- Run your model through GTESI: How high is your symbolic compression? How well do you export entropy?
- Build for 2045, not 2025. The future doesn’t need perfection. It needs fidelity under strain.
- Design as if the storm will last. Because if your system holds through that, it becomes the standard.
By the way, more about GTESI here, the concepts, the strategies, the signals and more. So, look for those sunshine corridors, they’re out there. And, don’t forget your skin cream, you’ll need factor 50, I believe, with all the opportunity that’s still beaming your way.
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