The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 3,906 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 148 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Rountree: Chaos Industries Has Worse Technology but Superior Commercial Execution
“There's, you know, a much better funded company incubated by ABC called Chaos Industries, which I personally think has worse technology, but they're doing a lot better because they've productized this, they're very good at selling it, they're very good at mark…”
Waters: US energy storage success requires partnering with Chinese companies
“The only way we're going to get anywhere in the U.S. Market with storage is by partnering with the Chinese.”
Roberts: The commercial nuclear industry is historically corrupt and incompetent
“What I don't want is the sort of generalized hype around SMRs to translate into just yet another round of a large and historically Corrupt and incompetent industry getting another giant round of subsidies dumped on its head for ultimately nothing, which is wha…”
Hertz-Shargel: Bitcoin mining raises Texas power bills by $1.8B annually
“So collectively, it's 1.8 billion conservatively per year. And that's sort of a run rate, I would say. And that represents around a five percent increase in costs of Texans, of, you know non-Bitcoin mining consumers. And that, that's across all the different s…”
House: Direct air capture to synthetic fuel is a staggering waste of capital
“Absurd, absurd, totally absurd technology that will cost, that is the, that is a staggering waste of human brain cells and capital and resources. And it's, and we should be spending at, we should always be working on the most effective, the best marginal use o…”
Jenkins: Europe can viably eliminate 100% of Russian gas by winter 2022
“Europe's current plan is to cut natural gas use by about two thirds before this winter.
Can they actually go a hundred percent?
Can they cut if they needed to, or if they needed to make a credible threat on the global stage to Putin that we will cut our gas us…”
Kann: Software engineering is the only job category truly displaced by AI to date
“And in fact, the only jobs that have been lost really because of AI to date are like software engineers.”
Tillis questions if he remains a Republican due to anti-market policies
“I'm unabashedly a conservative. I'm beginning to wonder whether I'm a Republican anymore based on this less than laissez-faire attitude we have to markets”
Tillis predicts utility rates will spike due to Biden retiring generation assets
“And now that the demand's going up, if we can't get these projects back online, I do want people to understand why some of these rates have spiked, and they will have spiked because this administration decided to take those generation assets offline.”
Eliahu-Ontiveros: Anthropic aims to add over 8 GW of power by 2027
“Anthropic, you know, one and a half gigs of capacity end of 20, 25. By 27, they won over 10 gigs, right? So they're going to build basically more than eight gigawatts in two years. That's the size of Google today.”
Eliahu-Ontiveros: Google deployed $50B in balance sheet backstops for Anthropic
“If you look at how much capital they have sort of indirectly deployed, it's already fifty billion dollars of sort of applications that they have on their balance sheets that are solely in sort of the goal of supporting Anthropix data center build out.”
Chinese automakers will likely acquire vulnerable legacy brands like Nissan and Stellantis
“One is Nissan, and the other is Stellantis, the group that owns, you know, Fiat, and Maserati, and Jeep, and Chrysler brands. Those two are the most vulnerable, so what will happen is either they'll joint venture with the Chinese And eventually be taken over b…”
Modon: EPCs reject better software because efficiency cuts billable hours
“There's no real incentive structure for an EPC to want better software. It's the same reason your law firm doesn't necessarily want like AI software to help them accelerate, you know, and reduce their billables.”
Garabedian: Deploying hundreds of small containerized electrolyzers is highly cost-inefficient
“The idea of integrating onto a site hundreds and hundreds of very small containerized electrolyzers, it turns out to be quite expensive. And in no small part, it's expensive because it's very hard to drive the cost out of those units, but also because the foot…”
Garabedian: China's low-cost solar manufacturing playbook will fail in hydrogen
“So long story short I don't think the same game that worked in solar works in green hydrogen.”
Sridhar: AI revolution cannot be powered without natural gas
“And without natural gas, we are not going to be able to power the AI revolution. That's a fact.”
Rathi: Venture capital is overhyped for scaling global climate solutions
“From the perspective of venture capital helping scale climate solutions, I think VC is overhyped because That model might work in America, and I don't know if it's working, because there are not that many companies that have really been VC-oriented, big climat…”
Dell: Base Power lands grid storage faster and cheaper than utility-scale developers
“Our view is that we can land a megawatt, gigawatt of storage on the grid faster and more cost-effectively than the centralized utility scale developers. And for what it's worth, faster and more cost-effectively than a gas plant or a coal plant.”
Behind-the-meter nuclear data centers have no credible case for decades
“I don't think there's a credible argument for behind the meter nuclear at a data center in the near future. And by near future, I mean, The next couple of decades.”
Friedmann: Gas with carbon capture beats nuclear cold in many markets
“In many markets, that's competitive with wind, solar, and batteries. In many markets, that just beats nuclear cold.”
Koomey: Anyone forecasting 2035 data center power demand is making it up
“So I think anyone who claims to know what's going to happen in twenty-thirty-five, the data center of electricity use, I think is just making it up.”
Datar: Cultivated meat may fail while lab-grown milk and eggs succeed
“Cellular agriculture as a concept is so much bigger than meat, and it's very possible that things like milk proteins or egg proteins or just ingredients in our food Are actually going to make a bigger difference for the climate and for nutrition and food and a…”
Grunwald: Extreme Land Efficiency Justifies Supporting Industrial Agriculture
“There are many, many reasons to not like industrial agriculture, but there's one really good reason to like it, and it's that it makes food extremely efficiency, efficiently, and we need efficiency.”
Grunwald: Less Intensive Farming Requires More Land and Harms Biodiversity
“First of all, to the extent that regenerative or organic or basically more natural Kinder and gentler forms of agriculture make less food per acre. They're gonna need more acres to make food. You know, land agriculture that is less intensive needs to be more e…”
Frader-Thompson: California energy regulators are lagging behind other states on VPPs
“The one thing is I would say if you're in California and you're a regulator, the rest of the country exists. And if you look at what's going on, there are lots of examples of how you could be doing this a lot better.”
Frith: Past subsidies are not fundamental to China's current battery cost advantage
“So the subsidies from the last decade They've helped to build up these big companies that we know, BYD, CATL, Eve Energy, etc. But they're not fundamental in this, you know, in the way that people think they are to the kind of low-cost structure that we're see…”
Huang: Nissan and Mitsubishi might not exist in 10 years
“Like, who knows? In 10 years, there might not be a Nissan out there. There might not be a Mitsubishi.”
Baglino: Nuclear capital cost per kilowatt exceeds highly curtailed renewables
“When you look at the capital cost per kilowatt of nuclear with everything that is known today, it's much more expensive than even highly curtailed renewables.”
Faruqi: Utilities that fail to update rate structures will go bankrupt
“And if they don't change those utilities that don't change them, they'll go bankrupt.”
Shah: Existing grid capacity can handle load growth through 2034–2035
“The amount of load growth that we can handle, within the actual system that we've already paid for is gargantuan. It can easily take us through probably 2034, 20 35, right? Which, by which time we think nuclear will be more cost effective, enhanced geothermal …”
Stacey Kauk says carbon removal is waste management, not venture capital
“The reality is that carbon removal's in the VC world right now because there's no funding from elsewhere. And I don't see this being a long-term financing solution, because carbon removal is waste management. Like, it's just cleaning the air, like, we clean ou…”
Cabiyo: Enviva turns whole, lumber-grade saw logs into wood pellets for export
“I have a colleague that has toured their facilities in the past and saw that they were pulling whole saw logs, which is, like, stuff you would turn into lumber, like, two-by-fours, pulling saw logs and turning it into pellets to be burned in the UK or elsewher…”
Cabiyo: A Montana cobalt mine is far better than DRC child labor
“On the surface, you know, like, a cobalt mine in Montana seems like a pretty bad deal from that lens, but it's a whole hell of a lot better than the alternative, which is, you know, mining cobalt in open pits in the DRC with child labor.”
Orbuch: Legacy carbon registries protected brokers by pretending cheap offsets were real
“The original sin with carbon markets was this bad incentive structure encouraged by registries that weren't aligned around the problem to protect the interests of the sellers and brokers of the credits, to make them look like there are enough credits at low en…”
Orbuch: Legacy carbon offset market operated as an aligned house of cards
“Because the registries and the feedback loop with the registries is to just keep issuing credits and make each credit look the same as every other credit, everyone's incentivized the other way because the buyers don't want to go back and say, Wow, all this mon…”
Orbuch: Legacy registry credits only vaguely corresponded to actual carbon cycles
“You need someone whose job it is, is to figure out the effect of a given thing on the carbon cycle. And we have said that the old registries played this role, and people believe they played that role, and that's what it meant for them to issue a ton. And that'…”
The US-Japan critical minerals agreement was tailored to preserve Tesla's tax credits
“Essentially, my conspiracy theory, Is that essentially this was a bone that was thrown to Tesla. Because Tesla makes its battery cells in North America with Panasonic. It makes some of its materials in North America. The electrolyte is made here, the separator…”
Roberts: All US natural gas utilities are facing a death spiral
“And that's an alternative to natural gas utilities, slowly withering and dying, which is what all the natural gas utilities across the country are facing right now.”
Lubbershane: New gas plants are the only near-term option for gigawatt loads
“I mean, if you do need to serve gigawatt scale new loads within, like, let's say the next three, maybe even up to five years, it's really hard to find, to think of another option that will really work, especially if that's, you know, more than very low capacit…”
Fury: Forestry projects frequently claim credits for pre-funded government plantings
“Maybe your, maybe the field report was in China, and the Chinese government paid us fully to do that project as part of its, like, regional reforestation initiatives five years before the project even started, right? So, and this is, like, not a theoretical ex…”
Carbon auditor approved dead mangrove project because specific sample plots survived
“And we've seen that, for example, in a mangrove project where we were asking the auditor who's doing the verification, the MRV, hey, you know, what was going on in the project? We knew that most of the mangroves were dead, right? So, and they were like saying,…”
WattTime finds 85% of Bitcoin mining load is powered by fossil fuels
“And so Watt Time, that is the general methodology that they use. They found that 85% of incremental load from Bitcoin mining comes from coal and natural gas plants.”
Hertz-Shargel: Siting Bitcoin mines beside existing renewables merely displaces clean power
“The reality is that The total number, the total amount of load on the system has grown, and therefore all you've done is displaced other customers who would be served by that renewable generation. So it's, and so your number of pigeons has grown, and so you kn…”
Song: Make Sunsets received FAA clearance and a NOTAM for balloon launch
“So we got, got clearance by the FAA. Like, we just got issued a NOTAM.”
Dr. Kevin Surprise: Make Sunsets' cooling credit ratio is dubious marketing
“They really, at this point, don't have any way to measure whether or not they're actually releasing the proper amount of sulfur if it's making it into the stratosphere, and it's, you know, easy, like these just round, easy numbers of correlation from, well, on…”
Dr. Buck: Make Sunsets is a performance art stunt, not geoengineering
“I don't really see this effort as relating to geoengineering. Actually, like it's basically performance. You could call it performance art. I don't know if it meets the threshold of art, but it's more of like a performance that is meant to be. A provocation or…”
Fossil Fuel Companies Are Not Necessary Climate Transition Partners
“Of saying that these are necessary transition partners, we hear this all the time, of you should be investing in these companies to either help them transition faster, or because we're not going to be able to solve climate change without them, and that just co…”
Kugelmass: Global SMR sector is entirely PR, with zero physical construction
“Well, there's virtually nothing actually being built globally anywhere for anything other than the traditional reactors. There's a lot of press announcements. Our company is building stuff, but we can get to that later. And then everything else is very theoret…”