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 70 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
Kugelmass: Any NRC administrative assistant can trigger a two-year project shutdown
“Like, any single person, you could be an administrative assistant at the NRC, at any point can raise a safety flag on any project and shut that project down for two years. This could be someone with no technical training whatsoever. If they come across a piece…”
Kugelmass: Replicating 1968 nuclear blueprints would cut global energy costs fivefold
“If you, if we just like went into those facilities, like looked at the blueprints and the Built them exactly how they were built. We would decarbonize the entire planet, and every human being would have energy that's, like, five times cheaper than they're payi…”
Chase: Solar glass and Tesla Solar Roof are a waste of time
“Exactly. And they're both a waste of time.”
Steele: Restricting fossil fuel development in emerging markets is hypocritical
“But I think if we're continuing to develop those resources in industrialized markets, it's kind of hard to say, like, well, don't do it in these markets that are still emerging.”
Jacobs: Most 2000s cleantech companies that failed deserved to die
“Back in the late 2000, when the first time we heard the Valley of Death moniker come out, most of the things that died in the Valley of Death deserved to die. They didn't have a good proposition to the customer. They didn't have an economic proposition to the …”
Kann: Electric vehicles will never discharge to the grid at scale
“I do not think we'll ever see vehicles discharging into the grid at scale.”
Kann: Sulfur injection could cool Earth 0.5°C for $2 billion
“Specifically, you might be able to get about a half a degree Celsius of global cooling out of stratospheric sulfur injection for a couple of billion dollars, which is nothing, basically, comparatively.”
Visioni: Solar geoengineering is probably better than unchecked warming
“It might still, and it probably is still going to be better than not doing than letting the warming just keep unchecked.”
Orbuch: Many low-durability carbon credits represent completely non-existent carbon removals
“Many of the, what we could refer to as low durability, low end credits today, whether it's something like improved forest management or otherwise, it's not that they're low durability, they actually just don't exist. Right? So, like, you have this weird thing …”
Bataille: Enhanced oil recovery is the first major use for captured CO2
“The first biggest use if you're going to do CCU is actually enhanced oil recovery in place of other higher emitting oil sources as we climb down from a hundred million barrels a day down to zero sometime mid-century. But, you know, obviously that's a contentio…”
Lipman: Synbio cell engineering as software is mostly marketing
“Many of the sort of publics in bio companies or the leadings in bio companies will talk about their, you know, cell engineering platform as if it's a software platform. We're really not there yet. It's more marketing than anything else in my opinion at the mom…”
Lipman: Most lab-grown meat startups will fail to reach commercial scale
“I'm anticipating that the vast majority will not be able to reach commercial scale and not be able to reach the market, so we'll either see a bunch of consolidation or a bunch of dead companies in the wake of whatever reckoning may be coming.”
Shah: Every energy hard tech success required massive government support
“I don't think there's a single success story in hard tech not one in the energy space that didn't involve massive government involvement, right? Not one.”
Rutherford: Boeing passes the buck on aircraft decarbonization compared to Airbus
“There are real merits to those fuels, but if you're a manufacturer to say, you know, we're going to build, we're going to continue to build our planes as they are today, and someone else is going to produce the fuel to make them zero carbon, it's a little bit …”
Tillis claims Barack Obama created modern-day populism alongside social media's rise
“I think what we've seen with Obama kind of really creating modern-day populism at the same time that social media was coming about, the way we get our news, podcasts, all that stuff,”
Tillis: Lawmakers ignorant of power purchase agreements are unqualified to direct energy policy
“If you're taking a definitive stand on power policy, and you don't understand something as basic as the power purchase agreements that drive it, then you're not qualified to have that discussion, respectfully.”
Black: Fission, fusion, and fracking were all invented in New Mexico
“Fission, fusion, and fracking were all invented in New Mexico.”
Lubershane: Gen-III+ nuclear reactors are all the industry needs
“So-called Gen-III technology or, you
Gen three plus technology, which is very much an incremental improvement over the light water reactor designs that have come before, is really, in my opinion, all we need.”
Orbuch: Legacy carbon markets lied to buyers about scientific uncertainty
“Buyers have been Implicitly comfortable with uncertainty for decades because we'd lied to them that the uncertainty didn't exist.”
Hertz-Shargel: Grid power resale by Bitcoin miners creates no public good
“But really, the way to view this is, this was a generation that was sitting there that they were otherwise consuming. They are just refraining from consuming it at these, during these periods. So you can't credit them for, Again, for a good, you can only credi…”
Make Sunsets founder compares his startup to test monkeys, not astronauts
“When the rubber meets the road, they need someone like me to actually, that's it. The scientists that create the Saturn B rocket didn't go into space. It was some monkey first, right? We're the monkey, we're not an astronaut.”