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 618 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
Khan: Clean tech startups need a 5x-10x improvement to beat scaling incumbents
“If you're building something that you think is a better mousetrap, like, it's 20% better, Than whatever the incumbent technology is. In all likelihood, your reaction, my reaction, when we see a company that's doing that is like, 20% better is not better enough…”
Lubershane: Startups 20-50% better than lithium-ion repeatedly get crushed
“It's kind of amazing now for over a decade, there's almost a continuous stream of companies I feel like I've seen across a wide range of different approaches to building a mousetrap to store energy that have always been in the 20 to 50% theoretically better th…”
Lubershane: Serial deployment of 1-3 reactor designs beats novel nuclear
“If I were the omnipotent energy czar of the country or the world, I would pick
One, two, maybe up to three designs, and deploy them serially and, you know, say we're gonna do 10 of these, and we're gonna see how it works out, maybe 10 of each and we're gonna s…”
Berdichevsky: Mass EV adoption requires superior products, not just lower costs
“One thing to remember is, you know, people aren't going to buy EVs just because they're cheaper than gas cars. People are going to buy EVs faster if they're just better cars. And this is one of those things that EVs can offer that your combustion car just coul…”
Belady: Chip efficiency gains increase total power demand via Jevons Paradox
“In fact, getting it very efficient may actually drive more use of it to where it'll increase and not decrease. And so I think there's a much broader view you have to take when someone says something's more efficient, it's, and they say it's going to solve all …”
Janus: Chip efficiency gains will not reduce AI data center power demand
“If let's say Meta, for instance, finds a piece of land or a point on the grid where they can pull three gigawatts, Of power on one location. And then the next day, NVIDIA comes out with a chip that's twice as efficient. Is Meta going to build a 1.5 gigawatt da…”
Baglino: Motor design engineering makes magnet materials highly substitutable
“Magnet materials, for example, are incredibly substitutable. And if you think of the design space as not just the magnet, but the magnet plus the, you know, electromagnetic system it's inside of with the steel And the geometry of the rotor and the stator and t…”
Lubbershane: 3x battery density improvement won't make electric aviation viable
“And so I think most people who've taken a serious look at aviation and even considering major step changes in battery density, let's say a three times improvement in density, From where we are today, there's just a vanishingly small share of total flight miles…”
Lubbershane: Expensive synthetic fuels make sense to preserve existing vehicle and hub infrastructure
“The more I think if you take decarbonization really seriously, then most likely that is the biggest constraint, upgrading those really expensive heavy duty vehicles, long lived vehicles and long lived hub infrastructure. And probably it does make sense to find…”
Shah: Net metering's value declines past 5% solar penetration
“I think we've always known that net metering has declining value beyond sort of five percent penetration, and, but when you get to five percent penetration, the solar industry has so much political power that they're able to keep things going.”
Shah: Zero-backfeed VPPs bypass utility permission hurdles by only offsetting load
“And so if you make a simplifying assumption, which is that no one is backfeeding anything into the grid. Right? Right? That the batteries you know, basically use case here is to make your home go off grid. Right? Sort of an energy efficiency play. So your home…”
Bordoff: Critical mineral supply shocks do not disrupt daily energy use like oil
“So critical minerals are an input to a manufactured good that can produce energy or store energy. It is not energy. We don't burn critical minerals for energy, and so if we had a disruption in some types of critical minerals, you might see delays and much high…”
Lubbershane: Building new natural gas is the easiest near-term option for utilities
“So for any electric utility, for any load serving entity, grid operator who has to meet rising demand in the next, let's call it two to three years, even up to five years, the easiest, most straightforward thing to do at this point is to build new gas fire gen…”
Cabiyo: True "waste wood" does not exist due to competing commercial demands
“Waste wood is not really, especially if we think about that twenty-fifty scenario, waste wood is not really a thing. There's always going to be a use for waste wood.”
Cabiyo: Biomass CDR developers ignoring counterfactual baselines are fooling themselves
“I think that if you're working on biomass CDR, and you're not thinking about counterfactuals every day, you're probably fooling yourself, or you have a really easy case that's going to get harder in the next couple decades.”
Zou: Climate tech success is graduating to project finance, not mega-rounds
“Specific to climate tech, it might not make sense to define success as an absolute dollar in venture investment, because at the end of the day, when we think about all this hardware and, you know, hard tech that needs to develop into projects, you want these c…”
Jaramillo: Grid storage value drops between 12 and 75 hours of duration
“What we find in the modeling is that there's a lot of value for sort of up to 10 or 12 hours, let's say. There is less value. I'm not going to put a specific number, but there's, there is less value that we see very markedly in the system until you get back up…”
Jaramillo: Multi-day storage halves the land footprint needed for solar buildout
“By having cost-effective multi-day storage, you can incorporate More renewable energy without sacrificing reliability at basically half, half the land cost, and that, by that I mean you only have to put solar on half as many acres to get the same benefit and t…”
Lovering: Lack of demand-pull policy drove high US nuclear costs
“What's really been missing with nuclear in terms of policy to help bring down the cost is that demand pull policy. And so this is why you see that nuclear is cheaper and gets cheaper over time in places that have a lot of growth in demand for electricity becau…”
Software-style version iterations fail in food because poor first impressions are permanent.
“But with, you know, Beyond Meat, for example, launching Beyond Burger version, two point oh, three point oh, four point oh it's not an iPhone. You know, this is not a situation where you hook somebody on basic functionality, and they stick with you one, two, t…”
Visioni: Halting all human emissions immediately would cause near-term global warming
“We know that if today, if tomorrow morning there were no more anthropogenic emission of anything at all in the world, The main impact that we would see in the first decade, it would be a warming, because this aerosol effect that is masking part of the warming …”
Visioni: Unintended shipping aerosol drop reveals safe threshold for geoengineering experiments
“This example of the shipping regulation should really be Can really tell us a lot about this, right? So, because we're, we are claiming that this effect is maybe there, but it's small, and a lot of climate scientists are sort of saying already, in a way, befor…”
Emily Grubert: Carbon removal is a depletable resource due to physical constraints
“With CDR in particular, I think we would do well to really recognize this as essentially a depletable resource in some ways. You know, there's an amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere that means we're not going to run out anytime, you know, in the foreseeable future…”
Corbeau: Hydrogen Is a Conversion Business, Not a Rent Business Like Oil
“From an economic point of view, many developing countries want to benefit the maximum from hydrogen, and hydrogen is not a rent business. It's not like oil or gas. It's a conversion industry, so you are never going to get as much revenues and benefits as you w…”
Hawkins: Mycorrhizal fungi cannot be engineered to draw down additional carbon dioxide
“It's not like we can somehow use mycorrhizae
To additionally now draw down more CO two than they are already.”
Fury: Lack of legal liability incentivizes carbon developers to inflate impact figures
“Where there's an incentive for the number to be high and there's no legal no legal consequence for you putting an extra zero on the end. People tend to put an extra zero on the end which is just like human nature and like, you know, people want their, they bel…”
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…”
Gramlich: Utilities resist cheap grid tech because it hurts rate base returns
“Our utilities love their capital in the rate base. They don't love quite so much cheap things that can solve problems without a lot of capital in the rate base. So that's the problem with grid enhancing technologies.”
Surprise: Geoengineering researchers cannot control real-world technology deployment
“The experts who are researching this stuff are well-meaning and well-intentioned and are attempting to be very careful, but even with those safeguards that they're trying to impose on themselves, they are not going to have control over how this technology actu…”
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.”
De la Garza: Environmental opposition no longer stops rogue geoengineering experiments
“Some kind of critical mass has been reached where two years ago, a strongly worded letter from indigenous groups and Greenpeace and other environmental organizations was enough to dissuade the researchers at the time from Doing this kind of thing from, in that…”
Kann: Solar radiation management offers ultra-cheap cooling compared to carbon removal
“One of the things that we do know as pretty likely is that it's possible you could do solar radiation management that would deliver substantial reduction in warming for a very, very, very low cost relative to all the other approaches that we're seeing out ther…”
Kann: Markets solve supply chain bottlenecks, but not permitting or transmission
“The rest of these, I think, not that I'm like a
Pure Chicago-style economists, but I think the market ultimately solves most of them.
Transmission and permitting don't fall into a category that the market ultimately solves, necessarily, because, as you said,…”
Kann: Startups relying on zero-cost energy must show positive unit economics today
“We see a lot of startups who are doing something where their sort of fundamental assumption is marginal cost of energy is going towards zero, and maybe that, that could be true over a longer time horizon, but show me how you can deliver positive unit economics…”
Mandating more than ten percent clean material procurement by 2030 will fail
“If we, if you try and make it a larger percentage of a supply chain from these enormous buyers early on in 2030, you'll fail. Because the technology simply cannot scale that quickly to meet extraordinary demand.”
O'Donnell: No business case for thermal storage beyond 20 hours
“And that says that we don't see a business reason for very, for storage beyond about 20 hours of storage. That if you have about 20 hours of storage, You know, there's going to be about 10 or 12% of annual energy that you're going to get from something else.”
Ellis: Low-carbon cement green premiums are negligible for building owners
“90% of the cost of cement being labor, and only five percent being materials costs, even, even as these new technologies for making cement you know, until they get to scale, they're going to have some sort of green premium associated with them, but that green …”
Yergin: WTO consensus is over, replaced by US-China competition
“Well, that's gone. That is gone. It is now the era of great power competition, and that's the U.S. Versus China.”
Yergin: Historical energy price controls were completely counterproductive
“Well, I think the lessons of those price controls were that they were completely counterproductive. They did not send any message about demand, and they hindered the development of supply”
Beard: Syndicates must fund five sequential geothermal projects to avoid data-wait death
“We should not be waiting for five years of operational data. The reason he needs that is because he, you know, he needs to get funding for a second project, and that's why we need to fund five outright. Bam, bam, bam, bam. Stamp them out one after the other. I…”
Chay: Treating uncalibrated models like sampled soil creates a race to the bottom
“If you're in a market and everything looks like a ton, so I could take any of these approaches and get tons that I can sell, and they look the same in the market you really result in a race to the bottom. It's way easier to not sample anything and get some ton…”
Mukhopadhyay: Electric Aircraft Need 500 Wh/kg Batteries Near Theoretical Limit
“Whether you're talking about nine, 19, or a hundred seat aircraft, you require at least a doubling of current battery technology, and that's really a significant increase, especially when you're thinking about just lithium ion batteries. That is close to sort …”
Jacobs: Capital Markets Cannot Catalyze Underdeveloped Infrastructure Markets
“When you have an underdeveloped market, the capital markets are unlikely to be the catalyst for that market to develop. You really need to see customer demand first and foremost that is solid. You need to have products that have product market fit, as you well…”
Kann: Web3 cannot solve the shortage of high-quality carbon credits
“The actual challenge is A very limited supply of high quality carbon credits or carbon removals and a huge supply of really low quality, really bad carbon credits or offsets. That is the actual problem, and Web three is not really a solution to that.”
Friedmann: Biomass is more valuable for carbon removal than energy generation
“Biomass is pretty crappy energy, but pretty good carbon. So, At almost any reasonable carbon price, it is more valuable to remove the CO₂ than turn it into energy. That carbon removal is actually more valuable than most energy products.”
Bhatraju: Utility payment history beats FICO scores for clean energy financing
“What we have found is that on-time payment history can be a better indicator of future payment history than something like a credit score or FICO score”
Orbuch: Avoided deforestation carbon credits have near-zero net impact due to leakage
“Avoided deforestation, for example, is like a classically cheap and conceptually compelling credit especially in, you know, say the Amazon that's I mean, basically impossible to prove the counterfactual because there's often significant amounts of leakage, and…”
House: Fundamental physics makes lithium irreplaceable for high-density batteries
“There's not another element out there that happens to be the lightest metal and the electropositive, most electropositive metal, which also happens to complex very effectively with transition metals. Instable layered oxide crystal structures. Like, there isn't…”