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
Grabow: Foreign shipyard workers earn more than Americans despite building cheaper ships
“Well, the data suggests, actually, that workers in South Korea and Japan and Europe, they make more than Americans, and yet the ships are still significantly cheaper, so that's interesting.”
Grabow: Zero Jones Act-Compliant LNG Tankers Exist in the United States
“We can't transport it by water to other parts of the United States because there are no LNG tankers that comply with the Jones Act.”
Steingart: Redwood, Ascend, and Li-Cycle rely on scrap exceeding 20%
“Currently, all three of these companies are living off of gigafactory scrap, which is exceptionally high, over, over 20%, as I understand it.”
Lubbershane: Utilities are postponing coal plant retirements due to load growth
“The first thing that utilities are planning to build to manage their entry into the gauntlet is they're planning to not retire their coal power plants on previously agreed upon or decided upon timelines.”
Stacey Kauk says some carbon removal startups sell credits below cost
“One, they're gonna charge the cost. Their price is equal to the cost. And then there are other companies that their price Is less than the cost, and they're taking a loss because they want to come out, and they are having, they have a different business strate…”
Mills: Early US transformer shortage was driven by utility panic-buying
“But this wasn't, this was not the microchip problem, right? That was preventing automobiles from being produced, where, where literally you couldn't get the Componentry, the necessary input to produce the output. This was the toilet paper example, right? Where…”
Cantor: BYD surpassed Tesla in quarterly EV sales in Q4 2023
“BYD hit all their targets last year in terms of sales, and they've surpassed Tesla in terms of fully electric vehicles on a quarterly basis in Q four.”
Cantor: Only 4% of the $5B federal NEVI EV charging funds have been awarded
“And if you look at the infrastructure law with the five billion dollars as a part of the NEVI program, according to our charging infrastructure team, only four percent of those funds have been awarded to charging infrastructure operators.”
Cabiyo: High-quality wood pellets require whole logs, not just waste residues
“You can't make good pellets out of treetops and branches and sawmill residues. You need whole logs to do that well.”
Orbuch: High-quality carbon removal offtakes rival legacy voluntary market size
“Most of the dollars that have gone into the sort of market for higher quality removals are forward offtakes, right? Shayle Kann: Right. Shayle Kann: I guess that's true. Ryan Orbuch: So the cash is spent when the removal is delivered. And like, if you add up a…”
Orbuch: Buyers cannot purchase real carbon removal for $10 per ton
“Turns out you can't spend 10 dollars a ton and do anything real.”
Orbuch: Carbon credit registries face structural conflicts when paid by suppliers
“The methodology creation itself is often conflicted, where the supplier is paying the registry to create a methodology for them, which has some obvious issues. Or they're using some other one that some other supplier created.”
Hade: California is building basically no solar-only projects right now
“There are basically no solar-only projects being built in California right now.”
Hade: Clean long-duration storage is not remotely economically viable today
“So we're looking into things like, you know, iron air batteries, and nickel hydrogen batteries, and you know, hydrogen as a consumable fuel, right? But nothing even, like, comes remotely close to being economically viable right now for us, right? And so maybe …”
Nearly 60% of plant-based meat buyers are not substituting it for beef.
“What we hear from consumers is that about almost 60% of consumers who are buying plant-based meat are not substituting for beef. It's for a food other than beef, whether it's poultry, pork, seafood, eggs, non-meat, you know, pasta, pizza.”
Visioni: IMO 2020 sulfur cuts added roughly 0.05°C of global warming
“There's a few course estimates that, just based on Earth's sensitivity, say, suggested, says probably Alf, a 10th of a degree overall of increased warming.”
Vijendran: Full space solar system costs fell from $100B to $1B–$10B
“What was a hundred billion before, now you're looking at one to ten billion for a full system, depending on, on the scale you're looking at.”
Emily Grubert: Synthetic fuel accounting lacks structures to prevent double counting credits
“We don't really have the structures in place to ensure that that
Accounting is really happening, and looking at some of the project announcements or ideas that I've seen where both ends of the spectrum are kind of claiming the mitigation is challenging, especi…”
Sylvera rates under a quarter of carbon credits in top three grades
“We would say of the credits on the market the minority have like a strong environmental integrity. So you'd maybe say around, well actually less than a quarter, we would rate in our top three grades. And now you would have very, very high degree of confidence …”
Fury: None of 40+ biochar developers shared data with Sylvera
“In the biochar sector we reached out to over 40 developers And typically, you can issue credits with, for biochar without having to go through a very process where you'd have public documentation and a level of transparency. Not a single one would share us any…”
Top-three carbon credit broker applied a massive 23x markup
“The biggest markup we've seen from a top three broker. This is, I won't name names cause it's probably just a bit much, but it's 23 times. So, so like, so somebody's buying a credit for 85 cents and selling it for like 20 bucks.”
Lubershane: Form Energy's 100-hour battery will cost under a tenth of lithium-ion
“Form is on track to achieve a total installed cost. We're not talking about the cost of the materials here, but a total installed cost for a approximately a hundred hour battery system, which is basically a four day battery system that is in the ballpark of a …”
EPA rule mandates 90% CCS or 96% hydrogen for large gas units
“The basics are the really big plants, meaning 300 megawatt nameplate units or larger, running at 50% capacity factor or more, need to meet a Standard equal to carbon, 90% carbon capture by 2035, or 96% hydrogen co-firing by 2038.”
Hertz-Shargel: Many Bitcoin miners run even at $4,000/MWh power prices
“Some miners do have a price threshold which empirically is between 103 hundred dollars per megawatt hour but many have basically no threshold, and they will continue running up even into the thousands, up to 4000 dollars per per megawatt hour.”
Hertz-Shargel: Major Bitcoin mines are not signing offtake PPAs with new renewables
“So they are not signing new PPAs with new wind to as off takers to kind of make these plans happen. They're signing PPAs with retailers and utilities mostly conventional types of deals, such as being put on base interruptible rates. So, you know, it provides d…”
De la Garza: Geoengineering researchers universally oppose Make Sunsets launches
“Any single person you talk to in solar geoengineering research, whether they're the most bullish on it or the strongest against it, they all think that what Make Sunset's doing is a bad idea.”
Jaffe: Treasury Classifies Constituent Materials as Minerals Subject to 50% Rule
“So I think what essentially what the guidance said was constituent materials, which is going to be any of these precursor steps up to the battery component itself, essentially falls under strategic minerals. As in the strategic minerals qualification. Now they…”
Lithium processed in China temporarily qualifies for EV tax credits
“If you are today shipping your spodumine to China to be made into lithium hydroxide then that's, if China does turn out to be a foreign entity of concern, that will disqualify that material for the tax credit. So right now, it is going to be qualified, but as …”
Replacing 209 of 210 US Coal Plants With Renewables Is Cheaper
“There is probably a recent report you probably saw that 209 out of the 210 coal plants that are operating currently in the U.S. Would be cheaper to shut them down and just invest in the capital cost of building renewable energy to replace them.”
Kugelmass: No entity has completed NRC licensing for under $1 billion
“In order to get a license, you have to submit a license application. It is at minimum, in the U.S., it's at minimum four years, ah, worth of work. No one has done it for less than one billion dollars. No one has spent less than one billion dollars in licensing…”
NRC added 1,200 pages of new regulations despite congressional streamlining mandate
“And they took all of the old regulations, the regulations that drive up the costs to ten billion, or to one billion dollars, make it take 10 years, and then they added 1200 pages of new regulations.”
Koch-Blank: Historical IPCC tables underestimated the climate impact of hydrogen leakage
“There has, I mean, if you go back in the tables that have been developed by the IPCC process and used in all the national inventories for hydrogen leakage, the number has been significantly lower than some of the recent research suggests.”
Sachs: Utilities base interconnection approvals on the worst-hour annual peak
“If you want to interconnect a battery or a solar panel or whatever to the utility today, they're going to look at the worst hour or when the most demand was on that line of the entire year and tell you if you're allowed to inject or not based on that.”
Russia withheld European gas supplies months before the invasion of Ukraine
“Russia was actually not booking more capacity in order to send gas to the market. So we had the impression that they were a little bit withholding, you know, gas supplies.”
The EU did not voluntarily cut Russian gas; Putin cut supplies
“The European Commission is always very prompt at saying, uh-oh, We have been very successful at reducing our imports of Russian gas. I mean, look, you know, they have been really down. And I'm saying, well, I am very sorry, but actually you have not Mr. Putin …”
Friedmann: Science is unsure if atmospheric ammonia increases or decreases net warming
“As we looked into this in our report, one of the things we discovered is that if ammonia gets in the air and atmosphere, we do not know today whether it makes greenhouse gas warming bigger or smaller. A lot of evidence suggests it improves greenhouse gas warmi…”
Inflation Reduction Act erases green premiums across most heavy industrial sectors
“In all of our different sectors now, cement, steel maybe not aviation fuels entirely, in almost all of our sectors, it is now as inexpensive to build the clean alternative as it is the dirty one, thanks to the IRA.”
O'Donnell: Intermittent electricity is the cheapest energy in human history
“The reason why these Resistance heated electric thermal storage things are only emerging now is that it's only in the last few years where intermittent electricity has become the cheapest form of energy that humans have ever known in civilization's history, ri…”
Chase: No perovskite lab product can last ten years in the field
“You still don't have a perovskite lab product that would really last 10 years in the field. And bear in mind that silicon solar modules are under warranty for 25 years, and a lot of developers are talking about forty-year lifetimes being assumed these days.”
Chase: European Solar Salespeople Pitch Returns Based on Unrealistic Power Inflation
“When salespeople sell solar systems, they have a very strong incentive already to assume that the power prices will increase, and then tell the consumers, oh, it will pay back in X years, or it will make you an IRR of 50%, and you look at them, and they're act…”
Reed: External Transmission Can Support Under 1% of ERCOT Load
“And then ERCOT is incredibly isolated. So there's one or two ERCOT has some minimal Back to back and some minimal AC at sort of very low voltage, but incredibly isolated. I think less than one percent of their load or something is available via transmission. C…”
Reed: Non-ERCOT Texas avoided prolonged blackouts through grid interconnections
“And even the parts of Texas that were not run by ERCOT, especially, right, were experiencing this extreme weather, but did not have this massive multi-day blackout problem. Because they had so much more power available and were able to share it.”
Reed: Underground HVDC may cost only 1x to 2x of overhead lines
“There's some estimates out there that you might actually be closer to parity as opposed to the sort of five to 10 X that's normally cited. It could be closer to one to two X if you think about power over distance. So mile by mile you're more expensive, but gig…”
Slesserev: Enhanced rock weathering lacks field proof even locally
“The catch is that we still don't have many field studies, and so it hasn't really been proven even at a local level, let alone at scale. And it's, I It's probably pretty hard to quantify how much CO₂ is actually being removed via that pathway. There are many p…”
Slesserev: No-till farming can actually deplete soil carbon at deeper depths
“Basically shifting tillage regime it means that not only are you changing the biology of the system and the rate at which carbon Flows through it, but also changing the vertical distribution of carbon, because tilling soil mixes carbon, and it also influences …”
Beard: Drilling 70,000 geothermal wells yearly to 2050 meets global energy demand
“Current oil and gas well drilling capacity in the world, which is roughly, you know, 70,000 wells a year. We do that every year between now and 20 50. That meets global energy demand.”
Beard: $1 billion could launch every active geothermal startup into field testing
“I mean, a billion dollars could launch every team I'm aware of into the field. That's, I mean, look, that's a drop of the bucket compared to the climate Problem.”
Chay: Soil carbon protocols broadly lack measurement, permanence, and additionality
“We did a really interesting review of all of the protocols, so all of the crediting rules that are currently used to issue credits to soil carbon in collaboration with Jane Zelikova, and basically, you know, you have these PDF documents that, maybe you have mu…”