Some of what’s going on in the world of sustainability SPAC activity is a bit silly. But a lot of it is not. It’s reflective of how bad the acquirers have been in these markets, as a whole.

A lot of these companies should have been bought up earlier by aggressive incumbents.

In the “tech” markets, this is what happens. The big incumbents know they have to be somewhat aggressive in grabbing promising new players and their teams’ knowledge, or else they miss out.

In energy, food, water, waste and transportation, this has not been so.

Instead, most of the incumbents in these sectors have labored under the misperception that they can sit around waiting for bargains. So it became a waiting game of startups hanging around as long as they could while incumbents waited around to lowball those who couldn’t hang.

Which, of course, led to both the unnecessary death of some really cool clean tech startups who didn’t have really patient venture backers, and a lot of pent-up retail equities investor interest in these stories as well (“the incumbents aren’t moving quickly, so what’s next?”)

In some ways, the people who should be most threatened by this SPAC wave aren’t the snarky investors like myself, or even those retail investors who overpay now.

It’s the incumbents. Their laziness means new deep-pocketed competitors now.

Challengers who were afterthoughts until suddenly having 9-figure balance sheets and a lot of aspirations to go take on the incumbents with all that capital.

So now the new waiting game: Which incumbents will start doing panicky buying sprees first?