The Ledger, every show

“There is no such thing as wilderness on planet Earth anymore. We have modified the climate such that if you're, if it's a forest, if it's a coral reef, if it's a wetlands, It doesn't exist in the same climactic band that that natural ecosystem evolved in. And …”

“So my personal forecast is the cost of solar electricity will drop by another factor of four. By the time electricity is, by the time solar is about a third of all electricity generation on Earth.”

“The most underrated of those technologies is super long duration transmission. That is probably the one that... Ultra long distance, like coast-to-coast, continent-scale transmission. It's probably the one that has the best upside and the most certainty that w…”

“Space launch is getting cheaper faster than solar. Only, only two things in history have gotten cheap faster than solar to date, which are computing and gene sequencing or gene printing. But right now, we're in a phase where the cost of space launch is actuall…”

“It's not four and fifty billion dollars of federal spending a year. It's like trillions. Because the IRA is not a pool of money. It's a per unit subsidy. And forecasters always do what? On unit forecasts, they always underestimate it, right? So the actual size…”

“Like, in an open playing field, if it's easier to build pipelines and transmission lines, Clean electricity is going to win.”

“And I think we'll have peak total fossil fuels and peak emissions sometime later in this decade, ah, towards 2030.”

“But the bad news is we have missed 1.5 degrees C, and I don't know how to say this anymore clearly, because there are people that will tell you that we might hit it. The odds of that are minuscule.”

“It's no longer the case that we have to wait all the way until we have a product commercially on sale or at scale for this to produce an exit.”

“We used to believe that, or companies like, again, I'll say Uber or WeWork, we thought, oh, they have natural network effects, they're gonna have a gigantic moat but it turns out switching costs for consumers are actually pretty low, and maybe lower, And some …”

“I do think there's lots of reasons, not in every single cleantech, but in those, the ones we make in factories, mass-produced in high volumes, that those will have a very, very rapid learning rate for decades to come.”

“Lasers are BS, because lasers don't penetrate clouds and rain, so why would you do it?”

“Sales of gasoline-powered cars peaks? Anybody have a guess? 2017, 20 18. It happened already.”

“Like, forget about reducing meat consumption. It ain't going to happen. Meat consumption is going to keep going like this and this.”

“Hydrogen-powered cars and trucks? Forget about it. That's been clear for a decade. That's not going to be cost-competitive electrification.”

“We'll probably never make hydrogen-powered planes. They don't make any sense.”

“If you look at, you know, some real darlings of The tech VC world, companies like Uber, or Lyft, or WeWork, you see companies that have burned through an enormous amount of capital, far more than most cleantech companies ever have or ever will.”

“I think it's a fair case to be made that SPACs have generated more upside for deep tech in climate tech and in other sectors than they have for any other Type of investment”

“Like, 12 hour storage, I'm convinced, is like, that's going to be solved.”

“I think offshore wind has a huge role to play, and floating offshore wind is one of the most underrated technologies, because in deep water, you basically can't do bottom out offshore wind. So around Japan, or the U.S. West Coast, I think floating offshore win…”

“The way to actually do it is microwaves, but the problem with microwaves is if you want to hit a target on Earth, you need these kilometer square arrays in space, and no one's ever built anything of that size in space.”

“I think there's every reason to believe that in the long run, energy is going to be cheaper for people than it is today, certainly as a proportion of income.”

“Today if you look at IPCC's numbers, all greenhouse gases account for about three watts per square meter of warming. That's human activity. The sulfur aerosols we're already emitting from ship fuels, from diesel engines, from coal plants, low altitude, they ca…”

“ESS, you know, my portfolio just went public two weeks ago now when we're recording this, and they've got a commercial product, but they haven't certainly hit commercial scale at this point.”

“Or the early stages, honestly, of a hundred trillion dollar clean energy revolution, essentially. We're going to turn over, that sounds like it's just a made-up number, but when you actually look at the infrastructure turnover we need to address climate change…”

“So my forecast was the cost of solar would drop by about a factor of 10 to 20 50, and it actually dropped twice as fast as I thought it would.”

“We saw this retrenchment of venture capital, and maybe it peaked around 2008, something like that, and by 2015, the dollars flowing per year had dropped by a factor of four or five, and especially for the earliest stage deals.”

“Steel is like eight percent of global carbon emissions. It's three times aviation.”

“If you go back, 2004, the world was spending maybe fifty billion on cleantech, very broadly defined. Now we're spending well north of five hundred billion.”