How To Avoid a Climate Disaster

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

• Fifty-one billion is how many tons of greenhouse gases the world typically adds to the atmosphere every year.
• The world has never done anything quite this big. Every country will need to change its ways. Virtually every activity in modern life—growing things, making things, getting around from place to place—involves releasing greenhouse gases, and as time goes on, more people will be living this modern lifestyle.
• David MacKay, a professor at Cambridge University, shared a graph with me that showed the relationship between income and energy use—a country’s per capita income and the amount of electricity used by its people. The chart plotted various countries’ per capita income on one axis and energy consumption on the other—and made it abundantly clear to me that the two go together:
• mine. I read more deeply on the subject, including several eye-opening books by the scientist and historian Vaclav Smil, who helped me understand just how critical energy is to modern civilization.
• The world needs to provide more energy so the poorest can thrive, but we need to provide that energy without releasing any more greenhouse gases.
  • Irresponsible energy consumption by richer countries has mortgaged the progress of poorer countries and used the proceeds for their own gain leaving poor countries to bear the burden of climate change
• I watched Earth’s Changing Climate, a series of fantastic video lectures by Professor Richard Wolfson available through the Great Courses series. I read Weather for Dummies, still one of the best books on weather that I’ve found.
• Besides, making electricity accounts for only 27 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. Even if we had a huge breakthrough in batteries, we would still need to get rid of the other 73 percent.
• Within a few years, I had become convinced of three things: To avoid a climate disaster, we have to get to zero. We need to deploy the tools we already have, like solar and wind, faster and smarter. And we need to create and roll out breakthrough technologies that can take us the rest of the way.
• The only solution I could imagine was to make clean energy so cheap that every country would choose it over fossil fuels.
• This small decline in emissions is proof that we cannot get to zero emissions simply—or even mostly—by flying and driving less.
• I think more like an engineer than a political scientist, and I don’t have a solution to the politics of climate change.
• I wrote this book because I see not just the problem of climate change; I also see an opportunity to solve it. That’s not pie-in-the-sky optimism. We already have two of the three things you need to accomplish any major undertaking. First, we have ambition, thanks to the passion of a growing global movement led by young people who are deeply concerned about climate change. Second, we have big goals for solving the problem as more national and local leaders around the world commit to doing their part. Now we need the third component: a concrete plan to achieve our goals.
• One problem is that computer models are far from perfect. The climate is mind-blowingly complex, and there’s a lot we don’t understand about things like how clouds affect warming or the impact of all this extra heat on ecosystems. Researchers are identifying these gaps and trying to fill them in.
• We’ve already raised the temperature at least 1 degree Celsius since preindustrial times, and if we don’t reduce emissions, we’ll probably have between 1.5 and 3 degrees Celsius of warming by mid-century, and between 4 and 8 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.
• For example, when there’s a heat wave, we can’t say whether it was caused by climate change alone. What we can do, though, is say how much climate change increased the odds of that heat wave happening. For hurricanes, it’s unclear whether warmer oceans are causing a rise in the number of storms, but there is growing evidence that climate change is making storms wetter and increasing the number of intense ones.
• These stronger storms are creating a strange feast-or-famine situation: Even though it’s raining more in some places, other places are experiencing more frequent and more severe droughts.
• Droughts will also threaten the Colorado River, which supplies drinking water for nearly 40 million people and irrigation for more than one-seventh of all American crops.
• Rising sea levels will be even worse for the poorest people in the world. Bangladesh, a poor country that’s making good progress on the path out of poverty, is a prime example. It has always been beset by severe weather; it has hundreds of miles of coastline on the Bay of Bengal; most of the country sits in low-lying, flood-prone river deltas; and it gets heavy rainfall every year. But the changing climate is making life there even harder. Thanks to cyclones, storm surges, and river floods, it is now common for 20 to 30 percent of Bangladesh to be underwater, wiping out crops and homes and killing people throughout the country.
  • Climate poverty
• Any one of these effects of climate change will be bad enough. But no one’s going to suffer from just hot days, or just floods, and nothing else. That’s not how climate works. The effects of climate change add up, one on top of the other.
• In the worst drought ever recorded in Syria—which lasted from 2007 to 2010—some 1.5 million people left farming areas for the cities, helping to set the stage for the armed conflict that started in 2011. That drought was made three times more likely by climate change. By 2018, roughly 13 million Syrians had been displaced.
• The same study estimated that by 2080 lower crop yields would cause between 2 percent and 10 percent of adults in Mexico to try to cross the border into the United States.
• I’ve heard people object to the idea that rich countries should go first: “Why should we bear the brunt of this?” It’s not simply because we’ve caused most of the problem (although that’s true). It’s also because this is a huge economic opportunity: The countries that build great zero-carbon companies and industries will be the ones that lead the global economy in the coming decades.
• In other words, fossil fuels are everywhere. Take oil as just one example: The world uses more than 4 billion gallons every day. When you’re using any product at that kind of volume, you can’t simply stop overnight.
• As in, oil is cheaper than a soft drink. I could hardly believe this the first time I heard it, but it’s true. Here’s the math: A barrel of oil contains 42 gallons; the average price in the second half of 2020 was around $42 per barrel, so that comes to about $1 per gallon. Meanwhile, Costco sells 8 liters of soda for $6, a price that amounts to $2.85 a gallon.
• The key will be to make the clean approach as cheap—or almost as cheap—as the current technology.
  • “I want the greediest investors.” [[Chris Sacca]]
• By 2060, the world’s building stock—a measure that factors in the number of buildings and their size—will double. That’s like putting up another New York City every month for 40 years, and it’s mainly because of growth in developing countries like China, India, and Nigeria.
• Judging only by how long previous transitions have taken, “as soon as possible” is a long time away. We have done things like this before—moving from relying on one energy source to another—and it has always taken decades upon decades. (The best books I have read on this topic are Vaclav Smil’s Energy Transitions and Energy Myths and Realities, which I’m borrowing from here.)
• Fossil fuels did not represent even half of the world’s energy consumption until the late 1890s. In China, they didn’t take over until the 1960s. There are parts of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa where this transition still hasn’t happened.
• You’ll sometimes hear Moore’s Law invoked as a reason to think we can make the same kind of exponential progress on energy. If computer chips can improve so much so quickly, can’t cars and solar panels? Unfortunately, no. Computer chips are an outlier.
• Technology is only one reason that the energy industry can’t change as quickly as the computer industry. There’s also size. The energy industry is simply enormous—at around $5 trillion a year, one of the biggest businesses on the planet. Anything that big and complex will resist change. And consciously or not, we have built a lot of inertia into the energy industry.
• Since the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, America has broken ground on just two nuclear plants, even though more people die from coal pollution in a single year than have died in all nuclear accidents combined.
• America’s best-known law related to air quality, the Clean Air Act, barely mentions greenhouse gases at all. That’s hardly surprising, because it was originally passed in 1970 to reduce the health risks from local air pollution, not to deal with rising temperatures.
• There isn’t as much of a climate consensus as you might think. I’m not talking about the 97 percent of scientists who agree that the climate is changing because of human activities. It’s true that there are still small but vocal—and, in some cases, politically powerful—groups of people who are not persuaded by the science. But even if you accept the fact of climate change, you don’t necessarily buy the idea that we should be investing large amounts of money in breakthroughs designed to deal with it.
• Another argument you often hear goes like this: Yes, climate change is real, and its effects will be bad, and we have everything we need to stop it. Between solar power, wind power, hydropower, and a few other tools, we’re good. It’s simply a matter of having the will to deploy them. Chapters 4 through 8 explain why I don’t buy that notion. We have some of what we need, but far from all of it.
  • It’s not just distribution. It’s invention, incentives, and policy
• The framework of five questions that I came up with still comes in handy today, whether I’m hearing an investment pitch from an energy company or talking with a friend over barbecue in the backyard.
• How Much of the 51 Billion Tons Are We Talking About?
• At Breakthrough Energy, we fund only technologies that could remove at least 500 million tons a year if they’re successful and fully implemented. That’s roughly 1 percent of global emissions. Technologies that will never exceed 1 percent shouldn’t compete for the limited resources we have for getting to zero. There may be other good reasons to pursue them, but significantly reducing emissions won’t be one of them.
  • Interesting and quantified argument for why some things shouldn’t be funded. #[[Natural Selection Among Startups]]
• What’s Your Plan for Cement?
• Passenger cars represent less than half of all the emissions from transportation, which in turn is 16 percent of all emissions worldwide. Meanwhile, making steel and cement alone accounts for around 10 percent of all emissions. So the question “What’s your plan for cement?” is just a shorthand reminder that if you’re trying to come up with a comprehensive plan for climate change, you have to account for much more than electricity and cars.
• Getting to zero means zeroing out every one of these categories: How much greenhouse gas is emitted by the things we do? Making things (cement, steel, plastic) 31% Plugging in (electricity) 27% Growing things (plants, animals) 19% Getting around (planes, trucks, cargo ships) 16% Keeping warm and cool (heating, cooling, refrigeration) 7%
• How Much Power Are We Talking About?
• New York City runs on upwards of 12 gigawatts, depending on the season; Tokyo, with a larger population than New York, needs something like 23 gigawatts on average but can demand more than 50 gigawatts at peak use during the summer.
• Tip: Whenever you hear “kilowatt,” think “house.” “Gigawatt,” think “city.” A hundred or more gigawatts, think “big country.”
• How Much Space Do You Need?
• How much power can we generate per square meter? Energy source Watts per square meter Fossil fuels 500–10,000 Nuclear 500–1,000 Solar* 5–20 Hydropower (dams) 5–50 Wind 1–2 Wood and other biomass Less than 1 * The power density of solar could theoretically reach 100 watts per square meter, though no one has accomplished this yet.
• How Much Is This Going to Cost?
• Most of these zero-carbon solutions are more expensive than their fossil-fuel counterparts. In part, that’s because the prices of fossil fuels don’t reflect the environmental damage they inflict, so they seem cheaper than the alternative.
  • Compare to Elon Musk breaking down the cost of battery components #[[First Principles]]
• There isn’t one single Green Premium. There are many: some for electricity, others for various fuels, others for cement, and so on. The size of the Green Premium depends on what you’re replacing and what you’re replacing it with.
• Here’s a summary of all five tips: Convert tons of emissions to a percentage of 51 billion. Remember that we need to find solutions for all five activities that emissions come from: making things, plugging in, growing things, getting around, and keeping cool and warm. Kilowatt = house. Gigawatt = mid-size city. Hundreds of gigawatts = big, rich country. Consider how much space you’re going to need. Keep the Green Premiums in mind and ask whether they’re low enough for middle-income countries to pay.
• In fact, it’s fair to say that I’m in awe of all the physical infrastructure that makes electricity so cheap, available, and reliable. It’s downright magical that you can simply turn a switch almost anywhere in a well-off country and expect the lights to come on for a fraction of a penny. Literally: In the United States, leaving a 40-watt lightbulb turned on for an hour costs you about half of one cent.
• figuring out how to get all the benefits of cheap, reliable electricity without emitting greenhouse gases is the single most important thing we must do to avoid a climate disaster. That’s partly because producing electricity is a major contributor to climate change, and also because, if we get zero-carbon electricity, we can use it to help decarbonize lots of other activities, like how we get around and how we make things. The energy we give up by not using coal, natural gas, and oil has to come from somewhere, and mostly it will come from clean electricity.
• After the corporate income tax was established in 1913, oil and gas producers got the right to deduct certain expenses, including drilling costs. In all, these tax expenditures represented roughly $42 billion (in today’s dollars) in support for coal and natural gas producers from 1950 through 1978, and they’re still in the tax code today.
  • “Clean coal”
• Most countries take various steps to keep fossil fuels cheap—the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that government subsidies for the consumption of fossil fuels amounted to $400 billion in 2018—which helps explain why they’re such a steady part of our electricity supply.
• All told, fossil fuels provide two-thirds of the world’s electricity. Solar and wind, meanwhile, account for 7 percent.
• Between 2000 and 2018, China tripled the amount of coal power it uses. That’s more capacity than in the United States, Mexico, and Canada combined!
• Over the past few decades, China has accomplished one of the greatest feats in history—lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty—and did it in part by building coal-fired electric plants very cheaply. Chinese firms drove down the cost of a coal plant by a remarkable 75 percent.
• Small-scale solar can be an option for people in poor, rural areas who need to charge their cell phones and run lights at night. But that kind of solution is never going to deliver the massive amounts of cheap, always-available electricity these countries need to jump-start their economies. They’re looking to do what China did: grow their economies by attracting industries like manufacturing and call centers—the types of businesses that demand far more (and far more reliable) power than small-scale renewables can provide today.
• One problem is that fossil fuels are so cheap. Because their prices don’t factor in the true cost of climate change—the economic damage they inflict by making the planet warmer—it’s harder for clean energy sources to compete with them.
  • Force energy producers to recognize the environmental costs of the energy their customers consume
• In fact, transmission and distribution are responsible for more than a third of the final cost of electricity.
• The sun and the wind are intermittent sources, meaning that they don’t generate electricity 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. But our need for power is not intermittent; we want it all the time.
  • Could you build a space station filled with batteries attached to micro falcon rockets and every time a battery is fully charged from the solar cells it drops it and remotely lands the rocket at a distribution center closest to where energy needs to be consumed? Have two stations on either end of the planet so you’re always exposed to sunlight. And you could have lots of batteries get stored in one large falcon rocket that lands with a lot of energy vs small payloads
• That depends on two factors: how much the battery costs, and how long it’ll last before we have to replace it. For the cost, let’s say we can buy a one-kilowatt-hour battery for $100. (This is a conservative estimate, and I’ll ignore for the moment what happens if we have to take out a loan for this battery.) As for how long our battery will last, let’s assume it can go through 1,000 charge-and-discharge cycles. So the capital cost of this one-kilowatt-hour battery will be $100 spread out over 1,000 cycles, which works out to 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. That’s on top of the cost of generating the power in the first place, which in the case of solar power is something like 5 cents per kilowatt-hour. In other words, the electricity we store for nighttime use will cost us triple what we’re paying during the day—5 cents to generate and 10 cents to store, for a total of 15 cents.
• I know researchers who think they can make a battery that lasts five times longer than the one I’ve described here.
• It’s extremely difficult and expensive to store electricity on a large scale, but that’s one of the things we’ll need to do if we’re going to rely on intermittent sources to provide a significant percentage of clean electricity in the coming years.
• Most experts agree that as we electrify other carbon-intensive processes like making steel and running cars, the world’s electricity supply will need to double or even triple by 2050.
• With all the additional electricity we’ll be using, and assuming that wind and solar play a significant role, completely decarbonizing America’s power grid by 2050 will require adding around 75 gigawatts of capacity every year for the next 30 years. Is that a lot? Over the past decade, we’ve added an average of 22 gigawatts a year.
• (The best solar panels today convert less than a quarter of the sunlight that hits them into electricity, and the theoretical limit for the most common type of commercially available panels is about 33 percent.)
• Solar cells, for example, got almost 10 times cheaper between 2010 and 2020, and the price of a full solar system went down by 11 percent in 2019 alone. A lot of the credit for these decreases goes to learning by doing—the simple fact that the more times we make some product, the better we get at it.
• For example, it’s natural to think of America’s electric grid as one single connected network, but in reality it’s nothing of the sort. There isn’t one power grid; there are many, and they’re a patchwork mess that makes it essentially impossible to send electricity beyond the region where it’s made.
• Construction on the TransWest Express, a transmission project designed to move wind-generated power from Wyoming to California and the Southwest, is scheduled to begin in 2021. The project is supposed to become operational in 2024—some 17 years after planning began.
• If there’s one thing I love about my work, it’s the opportunity to meet with, and learn from, top scientists and entrepreneurs. Over the years, through my investments in Breakthrough Energy and in other ways, I’ve heard about some potential breakthroughs that could be the revolution we need to get to zero emissions in electricity.
• Here’s the one-sentence case for nuclear power: It’s the only carbon-free energy source that can reliably deliver power day and night, through every season, almost anywhere on earth, that has been proven to work on a large scale.
  • #[[Nuclear Energy]]
• It’s no secret that nuclear power has its problems. It’s very expensive to build today. Human error can cause accidents. Uranium, the fuel it uses, can be converted for use in weapons. The waste is dangerous and hard to store.
  • #[[Nuclear Energy]]
• Nuclear power kills far, far fewer people than cars do. For that matter, it kills far fewer people than any fossil fuel.
  • #[[Nuclear Energy]]
• I’m very optimistic about the approach created by TerraPower, a company I founded in 2008, bringing together some of the best minds in nuclear physics and computer modeling to design a next-generation nuclear reactor.
  • #[[Nuclear Energy]]
• TerraPower’s reactor could run on many different types of fuel, including the waste from other nuclear facilities. The reactor would produce far less waste than today’s plants, would be fully automated—eliminating the possibility of human error—and could be built underground, protecting it from attack.
  • #[[Nuclear Energy]]
• Nuclear fusion. There’s another, entirely different approach to nuclear power that’s quite promising but still at least a decade away from supplying electricity to consumers. Instead of getting energy by splitting atoms apart, as fission does, it involves pushing them together, or fusing them.
  • #[[Nuclear Energy]]
• The main type of hydrogen that’s usually used in fusion can be extracted from seawater, and there’s enough of it to meet the world’s energy needs for many thousands of years. Fusion’s waste products would be radioactive for hundreds of years, versus hundreds of thousands for waste plutonium and other elements from fission, and at a much lower level—about as dangerous as radioactive hospital waste.
  • #[[Nuclear Energy]]
• I’ve spent way more time learning about batteries than I ever would’ve imagined. (I’ve also lost more money on start-up battery companies than I ever imagined.)
• Inventors have studied all the metals we could use in batteries, and it seems unlikely that there are materials that will make for vastly better batteries than the ones we’re already building. I think we can improve them by a factor of 3, but not by a factor of 50.
• At TerraPower, we’re trying to figure out how to use molten salt so that (if we’re able to build a plant) we don’t have to compete with solar-generated electricity during the day. The idea would be to store heat generated during the day, then convert it to electricity at night, when cheap solar power isn’t available.
• We could use electricity from a solar or wind farm to create hydrogen, store the hydrogen as compressed gas or in another form, and then put it in a fuel cell to generate electricity on demand. In effect, we’d be using clean electricity to create a carbon-free fuel that could be stored for years and turned back into electricity at a moment’s notice.
• Here’s the problem: Right now, it’s expensive to produce hydrogen without emitting carbon. It’s not as efficient as storing the electricity directly in a battery, because first you have to use electricity to make hydrogen and then later you use that hydrogen to make electricity. Taking all these steps means you lose energy along the way.
• Capturing carbon. We could keep making electricity as we do now, with natural gas and coal, but suck up the carbon dioxide before it hits the atmosphere. That’s called carbon capture and storage, and it involves installing special devices at fossil-fuel plants to absorb emissions. These “point capture” devices have existed for decades, but they’re expensive to buy and operate, they generally capture only 90 percent of the greenhouse gases involved, and power companies don’t gain anything from installing them. So very few are in use.
• Earlier, I mentioned a related technology called direct air capture. It involves exactly what the name implies: capturing carbon directly from the air. DAC is more flexible than point capture, because you can do it anywhere. And in all likelihood, it’ll be a crucial part of getting to zero; one study by the National Academy of Sciences found that we’ll need to be removing about 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year by mid-century and about 20 billion by the end of the century. But DAC is a much bigger technical challenge than point capture, thanks to the low concentration of carbon dioxide in the air.
• What I can say for certain is that we need a concrete plan to develop new power grids that provide affordable zero-carbon electricity reliably, whenever we need it. If a genie offered me one wish, a single breakthrough in just one activity that drives climate change, I’d pick making electricity: It’s going to play a big role in decarbonizing other parts of the physical economy.
• America alone produces more than 96 million tons of cement, one of the main ingredients in concrete. That’s nearly 600 pounds for every person in the country. And we’re not even the biggest consumers of the stuff—that would be China, which installed more concrete in the first 16 years of the 21st century than the United States did in the entire 20th century!
• Years ago, I predicted the demise of paper as electronic communications became more common and screens became more ubiquitous, but it doesn’t show much sign of going away anytime soon.
• To repeat a theme that comes up repeatedly in this book: This progress is a good thing. The rapid growth you see in these two photos means that people’s lives are improving in countless ways. They are earning more money, are getting a better education, and are less likely to die young. Anyone who cares about fighting poverty should see it as good news. But, to repeat another theme that comes up a lot in this book: This silver cloud has a dark lining. Making all these materials emits lots of greenhouse gases.
• We manufacture an enormous amount of materials, resulting in copious amounts of greenhouse gases, nearly a third of the 51 billion tons per year. We need to get those emissions down to zero, but it’s not an option to simply stop making things.
• We emit greenhouse gases (1) when we use fossil fuels to generate the electricity that factories need to run their operations; (2) when we use them to generate heat needed for different manufacturing processes, like melting iron ore to make steel; and (3) when we actually make these materials, like the way cement manufacturing inevitably creates carbon dioxide.
• Why? What did Ehrlich and other doomsayers miss? They didn’t factor in the power of innovation. They didn’t account for people like Norman Borlaug, the brilliant plant scientist who sparked a revolution in agriculture that led to the gains in India and elsewhere. Borlaug did it by developing varieties of wheat with bigger grains and other characteristics that allowed them to provide much more food per acre of land—what farmers call raising the yield.
• Here’s the conundrum: We need to produce much more food than we do today, but if we keep producing it with the same methods we use now, it will be a disaster for the climate.
• A hard-core vegan might propose another solution: Instead of trying all these ways of reducing emissions, we should just stop raising livestock. I can see the appeal of that argument, but I don’t think it’s realistic. For one thing, meat plays too important a role in human culture. In many parts of the world, even where it’s scarce, eating meat is a crucial part of festivals and celebrations.
• Artificial meats come with hefty Green Premiums, however. On average, a ground-beef substitute costs 86 percent more than the real thing. But as sales for these alternatives increase, and as more of them hit the market, I’m optimistic that they’ll eventually be cheaper than animal meat.
• At least 17 U.S. state legislatures have tried to keep these products from being labeled as “meat” in stores. One state has proposed banning their sale altogether. So even as the technology improves and the products get cheaper, we’ll need to have a healthy public debate about how they’re regulated, packaged, and sold.
• In Europe, industrialized parts of Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, more than 20 percent of food is simply thrown away, allowed to rot, or otherwise wasted. In the United States, it’s 40 percent. That’s bad for people who don’t have enough to eat, bad for the economy, and bad for the climate.
• It’s been estimated that if we couldn’t make synthetic fertilizer, the world’s population would be 40 to 50 percent smaller than it is.
• There’s a huge gap in agriculture. Thanks to fertilizer and other improvements, American farmers now get more corn per unit of land than ever. But African farmers’ yields have barely budged. Narrowing the gap will save lives and help people escape poverty, but without innovation it will also make climate change worse. (FAO)
• The big breakthrough came in 1908, when two German chemists named Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch figured out how to make ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen in a factory. It’s hard to overstate how momentous their invention was. What’s now known as the Haber-Bosch process made it possible to create synthetic fertilizer, greatly expanding both the amount of food that could be grown and the range of geographies where it could be grown.
• In the same way that Norman Borlaug is one of the great unsung heroes of history, Haber-Bosch might be the most important invention that most people have never heard of.
• But this isn’t primarily a technological problem. It’s a political and economic problem. People cut down trees not because people are evil; they do it when the incentives to cut down trees are stronger than the incentives to leave them alone. So we need political and economic solutions, including paying countries to maintain their forests, enforcing rules designed to protect certain areas, and making sure rural communities have different economic opportunities so they don’t have to extract natural resources just to survive.
• Although it’s been barely 200 years since we first burned fossil fuels for transportation, we’ve already come to depend on them in a fundamental way. We will never give them up without a replacement that is nearly as cheap and that’s just as capable of fueling long-distance travel.
• It’s aviation, trucking, and shipping—not passenger cars—that account for all the emissions growth in this sector.
• On average, after a car rolls off the assembly line, it runs for more than 13 years before reaching its final resting place in the junkyard. This long life cycle means that if we wanted to have every passenger car in America running on electricity by 2050, EVs would need to be nearly 100 percent of auto sales within the next 15 years. Today they’re less than 2 percent.
• I’m optimistic about biofuels, but it’s a tough field. I had a personal experience that shows just how hard it is to make a breakthrough. A few years ago, I learned about a U.S. company that had a proprietary process for converting biomass, such as trees, into fuels. I went to visit its plant and was impressed by what I saw, and after doing due diligence, I invested $50 million in the company. But its technology just didn’t work well enough—various technical challenges meant the plant couldn’t produce at nearly the volume it needed to be economical—and the plant I visited eventually shut down. It was a $50 million dead end, but I’m not sorry I did it. We need to be exploring lots of ideas, even knowing that many of them will fail.
• But if you want to add more distance and power—for example, if you’re trying to run an 18-wheeler loaded with cargo on a cross-country trip, rather than a school bus full of students on a route around the neighborhood—you’ll need to carry many more batteries. And as you add batteries, you also add weight. A lot of weight.
  • What about battery switch out?
• It’s rare that you can boil the solution for such a complex subject down into a single sentence. But with transportation, the zero-carbon future is basically this: Use electricity to run all the vehicles we can, and get cheap alternative fuels for the rest.
• As sea levels and floodplains change, we’ll need to rethink where we put homes and businesses. We’ll need to shore up power grids, seaports, and bridges.
• One study by a UN agency found that if women had the same access to resources as men, they could grow 20 to 30 percent more food on their farms and reduce the number of hungry people in the world by 12 to 17 percent.
• By the middle of this century, the cost of climate change to all coastal cities could exceed $1 trillion…each year. To say that this will exacerbate the problems most cities are already struggling with—poverty, homelessness, health care, education—would be an understatement.
• In this book, I’ve been emphasizing the inventions we need to get to zero—new ways of storing electricity, making steel, and so on—but innovation is not just a matter of developing new devices. It’s also a matter of developing new policies so we can demonstrate and deploy those inventions in the market as fast as possible.
• Companies in the energy business spend an average of just 0.3 percent of their revenue on energy R&D. The electronics and pharmaceutical industries, by contrast, spend nearly 10 percent and 13 percent, respectively.
• In general, the government’s role is to invest in R&D when the private sector won’t because it can’t see how it will make a profit. Once it becomes clear how a company can make money, the private sector takes over.
• Markets, technology, and policy are like three levers that we need to pull in order to wean ourselves from fossil fuels. We need to pull all three of them at the same time and in the same direction.
• To see the effect of policies that don’t keep up with technology, look at the nuclear power industry. Nuclear is the only carbon-free energy source we can use almost anywhere, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. A handful of companies, including TerraPower, are working on advanced reactors that solve the problems of the 50-year-old design used by reactors you see today: Their designs are safer and cheaper and produce much less waste. But without the right policies and the right approach to markets, the scientific and engineering work on these advanced reactors will go nowhere.
  • #[[Nuclear Energy]]
• The lesson here is that policy makers need to be clear about the goal they’re trying to achieve and aware of the technologies they’re trying to promote.
• Amid the oil shocks of the 1970s, the Danish government enacted a number of policies with an eye toward promoting wind energy and importing less oil. Among other things, the government put a lot of money into renewable-energy R&D. They weren’t the only ones who did this (around this time, the United States started working on utility-scale wind turbines in Ohio), but the Danes did something unusual. They paired their R&D support with a feed-in tariff and, later, a carbon tax.
• The point is that when we focus on all three things at once—technology, policies, and markets—we can encourage innovation, spark new companies, and get new products into the market fast.
• This is a crucial distinction, though it’s not one that’s immediately obvious. In fact, it might seem like “reduce by 2030” and “get to zero by 2050” are complementary. Isn’t 2030 a stop on the way to 2050? Not necessarily. Making reductions by 2030 the wrong way might actually prevent us from ever getting to zero. Why? Because the things we’d do to get small reductions by 2030 are radically different from the things we’d do to get to zero by 2050. They’re really two different pathways, with different measures of success, and we have to choose between them. It’s great to have goals for 2030, as long as they’re milestones on the way to zero by 2050.
• This is urgent work. We are at the same point today with climate change as we were several years ago with pandemics. Health experts were telling us that a massive outbreak was virtually inevitable. Despite their warnings, the world didn’t do enough to prepare—and then suddenly had to scramble to make up for lost time. We should not make the same mistake with climate change.
• In energy, software, and just about every other pursuit, it’s a mistake to think of innovation only in the strict, technological sense. Innovation is not just a matter of inventing a new machine or some new process; it’s also coming up with new approaches to business models, supply chains, markets, and policies that will help new inventions come to life and reach a global scale. Innovation is both new devices and new ways of doing things.
• These categories will sound familiar if you’ve taken Economics 101: One involves expanding the supply of innovations—the number of new ideas that get tested—and the other involves accelerating the demand for innovations. The two work hand in hand, in a push-and-pull fashion. Without demand for innovation, inventors and policy makers won’t have any incentive to push out new ideas; without a steady supply of innovations, buyers won’t have the green products the world needs to get to zero.
• And at Microsoft, we created a large group that did nothing but research, something I’m proud of to this day. Essentially, their job is to increase the supply of innovations.
  • Thread #[[Contrary Research]]
• Make bigger bets on high-risk, high-reward R&D projects.
• But this fear of failure makes R&D portfolios shortsighted. They tend to skew toward safer investments that could and should be funded by the private sector. The real value of government leadership in R&D is that it can take chances on bold ideas that might fail or might not pay off right away.
• Often, the risks that come with testing new products and introducing them in the market are simply too great. Investors get scared off. This is particularly true for low-carbon technologies, which can require a lot of capital to get going and may require consumers to change their behavior pretty substantially.
• And—this is a really important point—lowering the Green Premiums that the world pays is not charity. Countries like the United States shouldn’t see investing in clean energy R&D as just a favor to the rest of the world. They should also see it as an opportunity to make scientific breakthroughs that will give birth to new industries composed of major new companies, creating jobs and reducing emissions at the same time.
• As for the ideas you can’t support, you may feel compelled to speak out, and that’s understandable. But I hope you’ll spend more time and energy supporting whatever you’re in favor of than opposing whatever you’re against.
• But as my friend Hans Rosling, the late global health advocate and educator, wrote in his amazing book Factfulness: “When we have a fact-based worldview, we can see that the world is not as bad as it seems—and we can see what we have to do to keep making it better.”