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 3,906 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 148 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
Bullard: ESG acts as a negative screen, not an alpha-generating thesis
“ESG is a set of issues, but it's not the same thing as a set of drivers. You know, they're issues to be aware of, screens and filters on making institutional investment, which is different than A, you know, an alpha case reasoned to invest capital in something…”
Kann: Carbon removal startup oversupply will force a market reckoning
“I think the overwhelming likelihood is that we're in for a bit of a reckoning in that market. In that market, I mean, both the general voluntary carbon market, and more specifically, the CDR market. Not to say everything fails, but there's just the, there's an…”
Grunwald: Feeding 2050 Population Needs Two Indias' Worth of New Land
“If, even if we continue to increase farm yields at the same rate they've increased throughout the Green Revolution we're gonna need another two India's worth of land, which essentially means, you know, gonna bye-bye Amazon and Congo rainforests, you know, very…”
Grunwald: Going vegetarian is climate-equivalent to only cutting beef due to dairy
“Going vegetarian is usually about the same as just cutting out beef, because vegetarians tend to eat more dairy.”
Grunwald: Halving Beef and Waste Won't Eliminate Yield Gap by 2050
“Even if we Reduced our beef consumption 50% in rich countries, and reduced food waste 50% in the entire world, we would still need, you know, the numbers are so bad that we would still need to jack up our yields significantly to feed ten billion people by twen…”
Fernandez: $70B infrastructure funds hold 15-year zero-loss records across all projects
“There is 70, 60, seventy billion dollar infrastructure funds that have a 15 year track record that have never lost money on any project they've invested in.”
Fernandez: Climate Startups Succeed by Deploying Tech Directly, Not Licensing
“What we found looking at over 300 projects, 350 projects in the past couple of years, is the fact that the companies that actually deploy their own technology and follow that path
Are the ones that get to success. There are companies that have spent two or thr…”
Fernandez: Skill shortage, not capital, is the biggest FOAK bottleneck
“My, our contention is that capital is an issue, but the biggest issue is the skill set that is required to be able to help the companies see a risk and really assess the risk of that big construction operation of first of a kind.”
Lafarge: Doubling grid capacity is the baseline, not a high-end scenario
“Even if you haircut the forecast growth in data centers and manufacturing by 80 or 90%, you still double the grid. And something I think we need to say more as an industry is doubling the grid is not the high-end reference case here. It's not the sort of what …”
Scheyder: Direct lithium extraction has never worked at commercial scale
“Which has never actually worked on a commercial scale but there's a lot of money being poured into it by researchers across the globe.”
Klauber: Microsoft cannot hit 2030 net-zero targets without book and claim
“Even if there's tremendous uptake, a company like Microsoft who wants to get to net zero by 2030 simply will not be able to do this without Book and Claim.”
Jaffe: Chinese state industrial policy created CATL, now the world's top producer
“The emergence of CATL, which was essentially a company that was really invented in the back rooms of the industrial governmental complex in, in China about 12 years ago that, and it essentially just, you know, it followed the plan perfectly and is now the larg…”
Jaffe: Northvolt doomed itself by attempting six gigafactories simultaneously
“What they ended up trying to do was build, essentially build six gigafactories simultaneously, which is just an impossible task to handle. And I think that the, you know, that, that the concept of build, build, perfect, and then repeat was not applied. And the…”
Jaffe: Northvolt could have worked if investors forced focus on one factory
“And if their goal and focus and their investors had pushed them very hard to get that one factory to work right, do anything you can to get that one factory to work right, and then we'll figure out everything else later. I, you know, I think it could have work…”
Jaffe: Northvolt's stranded factory will eventually produce batteries under new ownership
“But that factory, I believe strongly, is going to be making batteries. Somebody else is going to own it, and they are going to be making batteries.”
Janous: Traditional colocation data centers lack the energy talent for AI.
“And those companies that, that filled the gap in the last era are really not particularly well equipped, equipped to fill it in this era because the depth of energy talent at those companies is actually quite thin.”
Janous: Compute demand will exceed available power supply through 2030.
“It's possible, though I suspect that given the, my fundamental belief is that the demand for compute, let's just say through twenty-thirty, will exceed the available power in the market. And therefore, the marginal value of the next watt or gigawatt, frankly, …”
Ball: Green tech startups falsely assume two-cent renewable power at 100% capacity
“If you're going to be in climate tech, you want to be green, and so you're almost certainly tethering yourself to a renewable source, which means your capacity factor isn't going to be a hundred percent. So it's kind of like having your cake and eating it, too…”
Thiel: New grid storage must hit $100-$150/kWh to beat 2030s LFP
“So I think that the numbers that we've landed on in, in our work are sort of in the hundred to 150 dollars per kilowatt hour total installed system cost. If you can see a path, a pretty clear path to those numbers, with your system, then you probably have a pr…”
Lockmiller: Power is now the primary constraint scaling AI
“Power is the main constraint right now.”
Ellis: European carbon regulations will double the price of cement
“They realize this is going to, these regulations are going to double the price of cement in Europe, whether you're going to be paying for post-combustion carbon capture, or you're simply going to be paying the carbon price.”
Frith: Lowest battery spot prices will rise while average prices continue falling
“I think, you know, unfortunately, we're probably going to see prices increasing, you know, moderately in, in the next kind of year or so, I would say, or kind of, let's say two years out, we'll probably see higher prices than we're at today. But I don't think,…”
Frith: Normalized US LFP cell production is 8% costlier than China
“For a LFP cell produced in China, 35 gigawatt hour facility you're looking at around kind of 68 dollars per kilowatt hour. So this isn't kind of optimized for these super low prices that we we're seeing today, but Assumes a kind of LFP material costs of about …”
Frith: Northvolt's yield struggles inflated costs and lost BMW's contract
“Northvolt started manufacturing cells on its plant around the end of twenty-twenty-two, I believe. So, kind of, we're coming up to two years now. And if the, you know, media reports are to be believed, they're still having a huge issue with yields. They can't …”
Frith: Chinese battery makers lack international IP for next-gen chemistries
“The technologies that are about to be adopted and, you know, going back to Silicon as an example here, right, imminently going to be adopted in electric vehicles. A lot of Chinese companies don't have the freedom to kind of operate and sell that material outsi…”
Frith: Western-Chinese partnerships can enable differentiated battery manufacturing onshoring
“Partnerships with kind of Chinese cell manufacturers, Western technology developers, I think is a big way that would be kind of almost a win-win situation for everyone, and would see us onshoring battery manufacturing in, in, in the US and Europe, with a diffe…”
McCoy: Permit loss stemmed from misunderstanding tribal sovereignty and water standards
“And I think part of that revocation came from a lack of understanding the tribe's sovereignty and their water quality standards, and so it just reinforced that This was a position that was needed in our company so we could start to build the bridges between in…”
Apley: DAC market will be increasingly supply-constrained for 2030 and 2035
“If people are trying to secure the volumes for 2030, 30 or 20, 35, when they potentially want to actually fulfill their net zero ambitions, then I clearly see this will become more and more supply constraint.”
Çubuk: AI simulations will never completely eliminate physical lab work
“So I think, I can't imagine a future where we completely eliminate lab work. Because, first of all, we don't know if quantum mechanical simulations will ever become good enough to correctly predict experiments, you know, all the time.”
Çubuk: Physical materials experiments are as noisy as computational simulation errors
“In material science, I think one of the issues is the experimental data is actually quite noisy. So, you know, this is something that you might hear often that simulations and DFT isn't very accurate, and that's true, but maybe one thing that People don't noti…”
Lubershane: US obsession with novelty created dependence on China's manufacturing scale
“And I think, you know, comparing the US and China, part of the issue with the US is, you know, we really do kind of tilt towards this mindset of novelty and, you know, boldness and daring and restlessness, which are definitely huge assets and strengths for the…”
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: 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.”
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…”
Khan: There are more carbon removal startups than meaningful buyers
“Depending on how you want to define it, I'm pretty sure there are more carbon removal startups than there are carbon removal buyers, at least at any scale, like meaningful scale of buyers.”
MacDonald: DOD climate procurement will rapidly lower civilian adaptation tech costs
“Like, this is a part of the public sector that's going to rapidly lower the cost of stuff that, like, regular civilians need, and that could extend to stuff like, you know, detection of vector-borne illnesses or other illnesses or biometric sensors that detect…”
Bredariol: IEA estimates global flare combustion efficiency at 92%, not industry-claimed 98%
“We at the International Energy Agency estimate that the combustion efficiency of flares globally is at around 92%. That's a much lower number than what you might hear from the industry. They will often refer to 98%, but it's in line with several scientific stu…”
Johnson: Geologic hydrogen extraction costs should match natural gas extraction
“If you can find hydrogen under the ground, the reality is you should be able to produce it from a volumetric standpoint at a similar cost that we produce natural gas out of the ground.”
Johnson: Natural hydrogen and biogenic CO2 can reach aviation fuel parity
“You could even take, you know, natural hydrogen produced at optimized prices, combine that with biogenic CO two, and you could make kerosene for sustainable aviation fuel pretty darn close to cost parity to the kerosene that just comes out of oil refinery.”
Johnson: Natural hydrogen fields require just 1-3 MWh input per ton
“Our best estimates for a natural hydrogen field is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of one to three megawatt hours of energy in to pull a ton of hydrogen out. So that's one to three megawatt hours of parasitic costs of, you know, running compressors and …”
Johnson: Geologic hydrogen rivals nuclear fusion in potential decarbonization impact
“I think geologic hydrogen should be mentioned in the same breath”
Dell: No steel company is commercializing large-scale blast furnace carbon capture
“There's very little going on in the world of carbon capture in the steel industry right now. There are a there are no large-scale efforts to commercialize this technology. Like, there isn't a single steel company anywhere in the world that's like, we're gonna …”
Berdichevsky: It may take many years to absorb online battery capacity
“I think these shocks of supply-demand shocks will start to be smaller and smaller, but it'll take us a few years to, it may take many years to use up the capacity that's already online.”
Berdichevsky: Some US battery factory projects will get mothballed
“So I do think some of these projects are still, are not going to go forward at certain stages. You know, and that's kind of classic. A lot of times, you know, maybe half the announced projects end up getting built. The pipeline is way bigger than the demand to…”
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…”
Kann predicts US data center capacity will double by 2030.
“I'm on the oversight here. I'm betting that there will be more than 20 gigawatts of new data center capacity in the United States by then.”
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 …”