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 109 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
Grunwald: Only 5% to 7% of Irrigable Farmland Remains Unirrigated
“Only five to, maybe five to seven percent of the world's agriculture that could be irrigated still needs to be irrigated which is a sort of wonky way of saying that it's going to be a lot harder to increase yields, you know, now that most farmland is irrigated…”
McGavis: Data centers are currently the largest consumer of cooling
“Today, the biggest consumer of cooling is data centers. So as we talk about AI and all the AI applications, all that doesn't exist without a significant amount of cooling to keep those servers warm and keep those data centers operating.”
Kann: Startups are proposing spray-on catalytic coatings for wind turbines
“I've seen a couple of startups proposing this exact thing. Surface treatment with some kind of spray-on catalyst that you put either on wind turbine blades or something else that, in principle, would oxidize methane in the atmosphere.”
Leah Ellis: Labor represents 80% of concrete's total installed cost
“The total installed cost of concrete is, is 80% labor, and so even if there's a premium on the cement part, once you roll that into concrete, and then concrete's a very small part of the building, and then, you know, but it is a big part of the carbon footprin…”
Charlotte Johnson: Great Britain is the world's second-largest battery market outside California
“GB outside of CAISO or outside of California is the kind of second largest, most mature battery market.”
Briscoe: GGRF clean energy projects will arrive in Q3 or Q4 2025
“You'll, you'll, you'll begin to see the impact of throughout the ecosystem from a workforce development perspective and from a community engagement perspective, and then you'll see projects probably towards the third or fourth quarter of next year.”
Berdichevsky: Solar has 10x higher value per kilo than batteries
“There's like a 10 X difference in the value per kilo of the good between batteries and solar. So it's still a lot more efficient and effective and faster to ship solar around the world than it is with batteries.”
Belady: Microsoft's 2016 Cheyenne grid-interactive power model was never duplicated
“That was in 2016 that was done. It's almost a decade later, and I don't think it's ever been duplicated.”
Friedmann: Hundreds of companies convert CO2 into building materials
“Now there's hundreds of companies that turn CO₂ into those kinds of products.”
Friedmann: German pipeline opposition forces CO2 transport onto Rhine river barges
“We're seeing that happening right now in Europe, where basically, instead of doing pipelines, they're doing barges. They're putting CO₂ on boats and shipping it down the Rhine, and the reason why is because they can't get a pipeline through Germany. Like, Germ…”
Steingart: Pyrometallurgy represents majority of battery recycling in China
“In my experience, or at least in my conversations with Chinese recyclers in, in China, where there are fewer local restrictions on having pyro in certain provinces. Pyro is, as I understand it now the majority of recycling methods.”
Cantor: BNEF projects roughly 32% US EV sales growth in 2024
“So we just released our year ahead at the end of December, and we see about 32% growth.”
Brooke: Alternative hydrogen acceptor feed additives reduce methane by less than 10%
“The alternative hydrogen acceptors, things like nitrate is a, has been a common one, although its general efficacy is generally lower than 10%, and there's a limit to how much you can feed.”
Larson: Coal plant retirement announcements increase year over year
“Every year more coal operators announce more retirements than they did the year before, right? And if we see that trend continue or accelerate in response to this regulation, I think that's going to be another important place to watch”
Schneider: Aswan Dam Lost Hydropower Productivity Due to Rapid Silt Buildup
“In the Aswan example, for example, there's so much silt moving in the river, that, that, you know, a side effect of that dam is that it rapidly, unfortunately, became a lot less productive as a hydropower asset because it filled up with silt, and there wasn't …”
ESG Was Originally Created to Diversify Institutional Risk
“So ESG was originally invented by institutional investors who wanted to be able to diversify across new classes of risk.”
Friedmann: The United States already has 10,000 miles of ammonia pipelines
“The fact that blew my brain is the United States has already 10,000 miles of ammonia pipeline in it.”
Reinhart: Climate models demand 70% to 80% methane cuts by 2050
“And so the climate models are fundamentally depending on us Dramatically cutting methane by, you know, every model's different, but 70, 80% by 20 50, or by 2100.”
Iron and steel production drives India's emissions growth faster than coal
“India's largest source of emissions growth. It's not coal power. It's steel, iron and steel.”
Hill: 2023 renewable installations will drop significantly below 2022 levels
“We'll see a much lower install capacity in twenty-twenty-three of renewables than in twenty-twenty-two, or than what was projected due to supply chain constraints.”
Kann: Industrial heat generates 25% of global emissions, surpassing transportation
“Industrial heat is the single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the world. Full stop. I will pause there. It is responsible for more emissions annually than all transportation globally put together. About 25% of all of our emissions come from burni…”
Ellis: Contractor labor makes up 90% of installed concrete costs
“What's interesting is that 90% of the cost, the total installed cost of concrete, is actually labor from the contractor.”
Steele: More Nigerians get power from diesel generators than the grid
“In Nigeria, more people get power from a diesel generator than they do from the grid.”
Yergin: IRA provides 5x tax credits for using union labor
“Five times the tax credits if you use union rather than non-union labor.”
Yergin: Europe is entering recession and US will likely follow
“And so I think certainly Europe's going into recession, and a pretty high expectation that the U.S. Will be in a recession, and that's now permeating the oil price”
Friedmann: Lancaster, California runs its municipal operations entirely on waste biomass
“City of Lancaster in California is running the entire city on waste biomass. They're putting it into a plasma gasifier, and they're running their trucks, and they're running their power systems, and they're running their heating entirely on waste biomass.”
Shah: ACES is the first commercial hydrogen storage salt dome
“Yeah, so, I mean, I don't think there's ever been a salt dome repurposed for hydrogen in this way and so there's certainly been test facilities that have been built in the past, but to our knowledge, there's never been a commercial hydrogen storage salt dome, …”
Shah: Liquefied hydrogen shipping costs are generally over $8 per kilogram
“So then you end up with you end up with, you know, liquefied hydrogen, you know, shipments, which generally is very hard to do at less than eight or so dollars a kilogram of hydrogen.”
House: Processing Indonesian nickel laterites costs $15 to $25 per kilogram
“Indonesia is really a high-cost producer. They produce out of a type of deposit called laterites, which are almost like metallic dirt low concentration, kind of high processing costs. It costs, you know, it costs 15, 20, 25 dollars a kilogram to process that.”
Atkinson: Distribution utilities lack systems to handle FERC 2222 energy resources
“It actually mandates that those aggregations are allowed to cross multiple connection points between the transmission system and local grids. And so that actually puts quite a bit of pressure onto distribution utilities to figure out mechanisms that would allo…”
Hsu predicts the ITER fusion project will achieve first plasma by 2026
“First plasma on Eater is expected in, hopefully, within a few years, twenty-twenty-five, twenty-twenty-six timeframe.”
Bayes: 2025 Clean Energy Investment Was Front-Loaded for Safe Harbor
“I mean, we absolutely saw that investment Almost across the board was front-loaded into the first half of twenty-twenty-five, and so that's a reflection of the desire in many ways by developers to achieve certain safe harbor milestones so that they essentially…”
Araque: Traditional hydrothermal wells reach at most a mile deep at sub-boiling temperatures
“For traditional hydrothermal not, not very deep at all. You're going maybe a mile at most, and you're getting as hot as what the water that's down there gets you. It's usually sub-boiling. It's hard to get to boiling temperatures. You're talking about 200 degr…”
Kann: Global electricity spending has historically never exceeded oil spending
“We've never spent more of GDP on electricity than oil historically.”
Kann: Renewables starting construction by 2026 bypass placed-in-service deadlines
“ITC, PTC, the Tax Credits for Wind and Solar, where the rules are set in the bill such that you can commence construction by the end of twenty-twenty-six and then not be subject to a restrictive placed in service date.”
Dumoulin-Smith: Solar leasing outnumbers direct consumer loans two-to-one
“Broad strokes, you've got a two to one ratio already of leasing companies versus folks doing you know, loans already and doing their own financing, right?”
Bullard: U.S. energy exports now match import levels from the 1980s
“We now export about as much energy on a trailing 12 month basis as we imported in the early 19 eighties.”
Grunwald: Average American Discards Over $1,000 in Food Annually
“The average American wastes more than a thousand dollars a year on food that ends up going in the garbage.”
Single operator averted disaster during the Oldsmar water plant cyberattack
“You know, in that case, attackers tried to manipulate the chemical levels in the water supply. It was the quick action of a single operator that prevented a disaster.”
Lockmiller: US data center vacancy rates have dropped below 1%
“We ended 20, 23 sub two percent in vacancy rates across data centers in the U S you know, when you think about what that is compared to, you know, another commercial real estate asset, that's like, you know, tiny crumbs of capacity that are sort of spread acro…”
Ellis: The average US cement kiln is 50 to 60 years old
“Also, the average age of cement kilns in the U.S. Is about 50 to 60 years old, and we're starting to see some turnover in the capacity that's built here.”
MacDonald: PG&E increased wildfire budget by $4.9B from 2021 to 2023
“Utilities, look at, if you look at PG&E, they increase their wildfire budget by 4.9 billion dollars between 2021 and 2023.”
Loo: Over 50% of operating ships bunker at one preferred port
“In fact, we did a survey with BCG and the survey showed that you know ships actually, the bunkering patterns are very, I would call them centralized. So more than 50% of the ships on the water today have a favorite port and the favorite port is defined as bunk…”
Steingart: Early Tesla used laptop battery cells to avoid explosion risks
“Six years later, after all of these batteries catching fire, the initial team at Tesla said, let's just use cells that we don't know don't explode, which are cells that are in laptops. So the immediate predecessor to the cell that Brett took apart was used in …”
Cantor: Sub-$36k pricing unlocks half of US new car market
“When you get those EVs below 35,000 dollars or in the 36,000 dollar or less range, you're unlocking about half of the U.S. New passenger car sales market.”
Kann: Concentrated EV charging has doubled peak load on local distribution circuits
“There are real examples of neighborhoods with lots of electric vehicles, everyone charging at the same time during peak hours, And effectively doubling the peak load on that circuit.”
Lubbershane: DOE Counts Over 100 GW in Notional Green Hydrogen Pipeline
“The DOE right now counts well over basically a hundred gigawatts worth of sort of notional green hydrogen project pipeline out there”
Freeport-McMoRan surpassed Codelco as the world's largest copper producer in 2022
“The largest producer of copper in the world is, there's a tie. So last year there was a change in the ranking. It was usually was Codelco, which is a state-owned company, a Chilean state-owned company. Codelco was the largest producer of copper, and last year …”