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 2,090 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 24 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
Plant-based meat retail volume has suffered 33 consecutive months of declines.
“And what's happened since then is about, I think, 33 consecutive months now of volume declines. The category was down three percent in twenty-twenty-one. It was down eight or nine percent in twenty-twenty-two, and then this year so far in twenty-twenty-three, …”
Survey: One-third of consumers refuse to buy plant-based meat under any circumstances.
“There's about one third of consumers out there tell us they're not buying plant-based meat, They're not interested. There's about 20% of consumers that are not interested in plant-based beverages.”
Norris: ERCOT connects energy projects 2.5 times faster than PJM
“The overall peak load in PJM is approximately two times that in ERCOT, and yet PJM's interconnection rate overall for all resources over the past two years has been approximately 2.5 times less than ERCOT.”
Norris: ERCOT decouples grid upgrades from interconnection to speed up projects
“The defining feature of ERCOT's interconnection process is that they don't rely on the interconnection process itself to identify and pay for grid upgrades. And this enables them to interconnect projects much more quickly and at much lower cost.”
Visioni: IPCC estimates surface aerosols masked 0.3 to 0.4°C of warming
“Right now, the IPCC estimates that aerosol emissions from the surface have probably hidden a small fraction of the overall global warming, probably 0.3 to 0.4 Celsius. Whereas Pinatubo itself, just by that outburst of that tiny fraction of sulfate compared to …”
Webber: US food cold chain outspends Switzerland and Sweden's total energy
“We use more energy for our cold chain than countries like Switzerland and Sweden use combined for all purposes.”
Webber: Shipping wine from France to NY uses less energy than California
“Wine from France delivered by ship to New York is less energy intensive than the closer wine in California moved there by truck.”
Webber: Dietary choices impact the environment far more than food miles
“The transportation miles Tends to get the most attention, but actually is not as important. A great study came out of Carnegie Mellon over a decade ago, looking at sort of these food miles, and they're, the conclusion they had was that food choices, meaning th…”
Webber: Multi-paddock cattle grazing can achieve net-negative carbon life cycles
“There are some analyses just actually they will be carbon negative on life cycle because what the cattle do if it's not too concentrated will improve the soil health and take CO two out of the atmosphere.”
Dominion Energy cannot power new Northern Virginia data centers until 2026.
“So for example, it's been reported that the electric utility in Virginia, Dominion, has basically told data center developers that they don't have capacity. They can't serve additional data center demand in Northern Virginia, which is one of the biggest areas …”
Lubbershane: Amazon turns to Bloom Energy fuel cells for Oregon data centers
“Amazon announced that they've got these three new data centers in Oregon that they're going to be, at least for the short term, powering with fuel cells from Bloom Energy, natural gas powered fuel cells. And part of that is because they just can't get connecte…”
Lubbershane: U.S. battery factories in development will consume over 1% of national power
“We've added up Roughly speaking about a terawatt hour's worth of new battery manufacturing capacity that's really credible and under development in the U.S. Today. And by that, I mean a terawatt hour's worth of battery capacity of annual battery production... …”
Vijendran: Space solar becomes economically viable below $1,000 per kilo launch costs
“The cost benefit studies for space-based solar power have shown in the past that once you get to cost below A thousand dollars or a thousand euros per kilo to low Earth orbit, then you're getting into the ballpark where this could be economically viable.”
Vijendran: Mass production has reduced satellite hardware costs to ~$1,000/kg
“Mass production. Techniques to build space hardware, and that's brought the cost of space hardware down to of the order of thousand dollars or so per kilogram as well from where it used to be in order to magnitudes higher.”
China announces plans for gigawatt-scale space solar by 2050
“China has also in the last five years made announcements towards putting gigawatt scale Space-based solar power systems into orbit by 20 50 with demonstrations planned later this decade.”
Grogan: Clarion-Clipperton Zone holds more nickel than all land resources combined
“There's an area called the Clarion-Cliberton Zone. It's between Mexico and Hawaii. It has a estimated resource of nickel that is larger than the entire global terrestrial nickel resource. So more than you have in the entire global terrestrial environment in th…”
Corbeau: Japan's Hydrogen Strategy Envisages 20% Ammonia Co-Firing with Coal
“When you are looking at, you know, the Japanese hydrogen strategy, they do envisage to use that combined with coal. So right now they are looking at coal firing with 20% of ammonia, and this is why it could be potentially a bigger market for ammonia.”
Kann: Underground fungal networks hold a 13-gigaton carbon sequestration pool
“There is an underground network of fungi that partner with plants that results in a, about a 13 gigaton pool of carbon sequestration underground. That's equivalent to about 36% of the annual emissions from fossil fuels in the world.”
Zindler: 80% to 85% of US Solar Equipment Came From Four Southeast Asian Countries
“About 80, 85% of All the equipment that was being installed in the U.S. Was coming from those four countries, and given that we don't make much stuff in the U.S., imports are massively important”
China holds 45% to 55% of global copper smelting capacity
“Roughly 50, between 45, 55% of the smelting capacity in the world, so companies that purchase the concentrate and smelt it, are in China.”
All 2021 US wind and solar equaled only 5 days of primary energy supply
“All of the wind and solar power generated in twenty-twenty-one, if you were to bottle all of that energy up and store it in sort of the same way that we store fossil fuels, it would be only about five days worth of energy supply.”
Thermal storage media can store heat at $5/kWh or lower
“The core energy storage components of these materials can be in the ballpark of five dollars per kilowatt hour or lower.”
Hertz-Shargel: Bitcoin Miners Restart Defunct NY Fossil Plants
“They also chase defunct oil and gas plants because those can be sort of rehydrated and turned on and used directly for mining. And so that has happened a lot, especially in New York, these sort of mothballed plants that are able to be turned on and run Pretty …”
Lacey: Make Sunsets Launched Geoengineering Balloons Near Reno Following Mexico Ban
“Their first experimental launch in the Mexican state of Baja resulted in a swift regulatory response from the Mexican government, but undeterred, they were ready to run another test, and a few weeks ago, they launched some more balloons just outside of Reno, N…”
De la Garza: No US federal regulation prohibits releasing sulfur balloons
“There's no federal regulation that prohibits someone from putting some of that burned sulfur in a balloon and letting it go.”
Schneider: Natel's hydro turbine blades achieve over 99% fish safety
“And those two things basically, you know, create a turbine blade that has now been shown many times over to be greater than 99% safe for fish passage.”
Jaffe: Freyr, Northvolt, and Volkswagen shifted European plant plans to US
“We've actually seen a shift, in some cases, a shift of battery plants that were planned for Europe where they said, we're gonna stop developing this and instead turn to building a plant in the U.S., Fryer did that, Northvolt did that, and a couple others have,…”
Jaffe: Treasury left Foreign Entity of Concern undefined in EV credit guidance
“They did not give guidance on how they define foreign entity of concern for the purposes of the EV tax credit. And, you know, they didn't give any guidance. They were asked very specifically, is, is a country a foreign entity of concern? Do you have to name th…”
Moffat: Dairy RNG hits -500g CO2 carbon intensity compared to fossil gas
“Fossil natural gas has a carbon intensity over
60 grams of CO₂ per unit whereas renewable gas is typically lower carbon landfill gas probably being the closest to fossil natural gas, anywhere from a 20 to 40 grams of CO₂, whereas a dairy project could be like …”
Moffat: JPL found capped California landfills remain major methane emitters
“The Jet Propulsion Lab did, flew the landfills in California, as an example, and even though they had landfill gas capture, they still were a major emitter of methane.”
Moffat: Synthetic methane costs over $30/MMBtu with near-zero carbon intensity
“It is going to be more money, so you're going to be in the over 30 dollars in MMBT to be able to sell it, and your carbon intensity is not going to be negative. It's going to be hovering around zero or a little higher depending on your renewable mix that you p…”
BlackRock's ESG Funds Heavily Invest in Fossil Fuels
“And so BlackRock, for example, has hundreds of ESG funds. A lot of them invest you in fossil fuels, an industry which fundamentally cannot exist in a world where we have solved climate change.”
Indiana Anti-ESG Bill Could Cost State Pension Fund $7 Billion
“Just a couple of days before we are having this conversation, a financial analysis was released looking at this anti-ESG bill in Indiana, and so there's this GOP push across the country to, you know, pull public pensions out of ESG Investing. And in Indiana, t…”
Bullard: Global car sales peaked at 85M and dropped below 70M
“So, like, not only did sales peak at about eighty-five million and decline to below seventy million as of the third quarter last year on a trailing twelve-month basis.”
Bullard: EVs account for more than 100% of auto industry growth
“More than a hundred percent of the auto industry's growth It's coming from electric vehicles. Like, they are the only growth, ah, cohort within cars.”
Bullard: Solar projects average 1% cost overruns compared to large infrastructure
“The mean cost overrun for solar power is one percent, and only two percent of solar projects ever have a cost overrun of more than 50%.”
Bullard: Only 1.2% of Fortune 100 board members have energy expertise
“Like you find 1.2% of the Fortune 100 board knows anything about energy.”
Bullard: 38% of US corn crop meets only 10% of gasoline demand
“So we grow in the range of about fourteen billion bushels of corn every year in the United States. Of that, last year, 38% of it went to ethanol that's being used for fuels. Which means that about 40% of the U.S. Corn crop meets about 10% of our motor gasoline…”
Bullard: Global agricultural land use peaked around 2000 at over 37%
“We had a peak in the total percentage of global land area used for agriculture right around the turn of the millennium, a little bit more than 37%. And let's be clear, it hasn't come down massively. It's come down maybe one percent of total global land area.”
Bullard: Small shifts in China's coal use equal a top-10 nation's power demand
“China's little moves in coal consumption are like the size of top 10 country electricity consumption in any given year.”
Bullard: Political anti-ESG sentiment is almost uniquely a US phenomenon
“Anti-ESG sentiment is at the political level almost uniquely U.S. It's something that happens really only here. It's not nearly as big of a topic in Europe at a sort of polity level, or definitely not at like a local politics level”
Bullard: Four-hour battery storage system costs surged 25% in 2022
“The four-hour system cost for, you know, an energy storage system went up 25% last year.”
Kugelmass: US nuclear capital costs rose tenfold from 1968 to 1978
“What you saw from 1968 to 1978 was a tenfold increase in price for the exact same product delivered because that was a tenfold increase in the profit that the companies were allowed to make.”
Koch-Blank: Hydrogen leaks indirectly cause warming by extending methane lifetime and creating water vapor
“Basically what happens is that the hydrogen that leaks has itself a global warming potential, which has been considered, but then also it has an effect of extending the lifetime of methane in the atmosphere basically causing the methane to stick around longer,…”
Europe quietly continues to import Russian LNG despite the war
“We are importing Russian LNG. And, you know, I wrote a little note on that, and suddenly everybody realized, oh, actually, Russian LNG is still coming to Europe. Yes, it's still coming. Nobody's talking about that. This is actually included in the global LNG s…”
Xi Jinping's zero-COVID policy inadvertently saved Europe from a gas crisis
“The reason, one of the main reasons why Europe has been going through the past year is because of Xi Jinping and its zero COVID policy. Because Chinese gas demand has been muted, its LNG imports have declined massively, and China in 2021 was the largest LNG im…”
Friedmann: Shipping liquefied hydrogen adds $3 per gallon equivalent compared to ammonia
“If you tried to liquefy hydrogen and ship that instead of ammonia, and then regasify it at the other end, that basically adds about three dollars a gallon gasoline equivalent compared to just moving ammonia around.”