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 418 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
Rountree: Chaos Industries Has Worse Technology but Superior Commercial Execution
“There's, you know, a much better funded company incubated by ABC called Chaos Industries, which I personally think has worse technology, but they're doing a lot better because they've productized this, they're very good at selling it, they're very good at mark…”
Waters: US energy storage success requires partnering with Chinese companies
“The only way we're going to get anywhere in the U.S. Market with storage is by partnering with the Chinese.”
Roberts: The commercial nuclear industry is historically corrupt and incompetent
“What I don't want is the sort of generalized hype around SMRs to translate into just yet another round of a large and historically Corrupt and incompetent industry getting another giant round of subsidies dumped on its head for ultimately nothing, which is wha…”
House: Direct air capture to synthetic fuel is a staggering waste of capital
“Absurd, absurd, totally absurd technology that will cost, that is the, that is a staggering waste of human brain cells and capital and resources. And it's, and we should be spending at, we should always be working on the most effective, the best marginal use o…”
Tillis questions if he remains a Republican due to anti-market policies
“I'm unabashedly a conservative. I'm beginning to wonder whether I'm a Republican anymore based on this less than laissez-faire attitude we have to markets”
Garabedian: China's low-cost solar manufacturing playbook will fail in hydrogen
“So long story short I don't think the same game that worked in solar works in green hydrogen.”
Rathi: Venture capital is overhyped for scaling global climate solutions
“From the perspective of venture capital helping scale climate solutions, I think VC is overhyped because That model might work in America, and I don't know if it's working, because there are not that many companies that have really been VC-oriented, big climat…”
Dell: Base Power lands grid storage faster and cheaper than utility-scale developers
“Our view is that we can land a megawatt, gigawatt of storage on the grid faster and more cost-effectively than the centralized utility scale developers. And for what it's worth, faster and more cost-effectively than a gas plant or a coal plant.”
Koomey: Anyone forecasting 2035 data center power demand is making it up
“So I think anyone who claims to know what's going to happen in twenty-thirty-five, the data center of electricity use, I think is just making it up.”
Datar: Cultivated meat may fail while lab-grown milk and eggs succeed
“Cellular agriculture as a concept is so much bigger than meat, and it's very possible that things like milk proteins or egg proteins or just ingredients in our food Are actually going to make a bigger difference for the climate and for nutrition and food and a…”
Grunwald: Extreme Land Efficiency Justifies Supporting Industrial Agriculture
“There are many, many reasons to not like industrial agriculture, but there's one really good reason to like it, and it's that it makes food extremely efficiency, efficiently, and we need efficiency.”
Frader-Thompson: California energy regulators are lagging behind other states on VPPs
“The one thing is I would say if you're in California and you're a regulator, the rest of the country exists. And if you look at what's going on, there are lots of examples of how you could be doing this a lot better.”
Frith: Past subsidies are not fundamental to China's current battery cost advantage
“So the subsidies from the last decade They've helped to build up these big companies that we know, BYD, CATL, Eve Energy, etc. But they're not fundamental in this, you know, in the way that people think they are to the kind of low-cost structure that we're see…”
Stacey Kauk says carbon removal is waste management, not venture capital
“The reality is that carbon removal's in the VC world right now because there's no funding from elsewhere. And I don't see this being a long-term financing solution, because carbon removal is waste management. Like, it's just cleaning the air, like, we clean ou…”
Cabiyo: A Montana cobalt mine is far better than DRC child labor
“On the surface, you know, like, a cobalt mine in Montana seems like a pretty bad deal from that lens, but it's a whole hell of a lot better than the alternative, which is, you know, mining cobalt in open pits in the DRC with child labor.”
Orbuch: Legacy carbon registries protected brokers by pretending cheap offsets were real
“The original sin with carbon markets was this bad incentive structure encouraged by registries that weren't aligned around the problem to protect the interests of the sellers and brokers of the credits, to make them look like there are enough credits at low en…”
Orbuch: Legacy registry credits only vaguely corresponded to actual carbon cycles
“You need someone whose job it is, is to figure out the effect of a given thing on the carbon cycle. And we have said that the old registries played this role, and people believe they played that role, and that's what it meant for them to issue a ton. And that'…”
The US-Japan critical minerals agreement was tailored to preserve Tesla's tax credits
“Essentially, my conspiracy theory, Is that essentially this was a bone that was thrown to Tesla. Because Tesla makes its battery cells in North America with Panasonic. It makes some of its materials in North America. The electrolyte is made here, the separator…”
Roberts: All US natural gas utilities are facing a death spiral
“And that's an alternative to natural gas utilities, slowly withering and dying, which is what all the natural gas utilities across the country are facing right now.”
Lubbershane: New gas plants are the only near-term option for gigawatt loads
“I mean, if you do need to serve gigawatt scale new loads within, like, let's say the next three, maybe even up to five years, it's really hard to find, to think of another option that will really work, especially if that's, you know, more than very low capacit…”
Dr. Kevin Surprise: Make Sunsets' cooling credit ratio is dubious marketing
“They really, at this point, don't have any way to measure whether or not they're actually releasing the proper amount of sulfur if it's making it into the stratosphere, and it's, you know, easy, like these just round, easy numbers of correlation from, well, on…”
Dr. Buck: Make Sunsets is a performance art stunt, not geoengineering
“I don't really see this effort as relating to geoengineering. Actually, like it's basically performance. You could call it performance art. I don't know if it meets the threshold of art, but it's more of like a performance that is meant to be. A provocation or…”
Fossil Fuel Companies Are Not Necessary Climate Transition Partners
“Of saying that these are necessary transition partners, we hear this all the time, of you should be investing in these companies to either help them transition faster, or because we're not going to be able to solve climate change without them, and that just co…”
Chase: Solar glass and Tesla Solar Roof are a waste of time
“Exactly. And they're both a waste of time.”
Steele: Restricting fossil fuel development in emerging markets is hypocritical
“But I think if we're continuing to develop those resources in industrialized markets, it's kind of hard to say, like, well, don't do it in these markets that are still emerging.”
Jacobs: Most 2000s cleantech companies that failed deserved to die
“Back in the late 2000, when the first time we heard the Valley of Death moniker come out, most of the things that died in the Valley of Death deserved to die. They didn't have a good proposition to the customer. They didn't have an economic proposition to the …”
Visioni: Solar geoengineering is probably better than unchecked warming
“It might still, and it probably is still going to be better than not doing than letting the warming just keep unchecked.”
Orbuch: Many low-durability carbon credits represent completely non-existent carbon removals
“Many of the, what we could refer to as low durability, low end credits today, whether it's something like improved forest management or otherwise, it's not that they're low durability, they actually just don't exist. Right? So, like, you have this weird thing …”
Lipman: Synbio cell engineering as software is mostly marketing
“Many of the sort of publics in bio companies or the leadings in bio companies will talk about their, you know, cell engineering platform as if it's a software platform. We're really not there yet. It's more marketing than anything else in my opinion at the mom…”
Shah: Every energy hard tech success required massive government support
“I don't think there's a single success story in hard tech not one in the energy space that didn't involve massive government involvement, right? Not one.”
Rutherford: Boeing passes the buck on aircraft decarbonization compared to Airbus
“There are real merits to those fuels, but if you're a manufacturer to say, you know, we're going to build, we're going to continue to build our planes as they are today, and someone else is going to produce the fuel to make them zero carbon, it's a little bit …”
Kann: Data centers lower local electricity rates but increase macro power prices
“At the local level, data centers seem to on balance, probably decrease electricity prices currently. And at the macro level, they are definitely a factor contributing to an increase in electricity prices.”
Wong: AI has higher potential upside in grid operations than planning
“I think it is the complete opposite. I think the potential is even higher.”
Wong: The grid has enough latent capacity for most data centers today
“So let me just make a statement here, which is, I believe the grid has enough existing latent capacity to connect the majority, if not all of the data centers today.”
Tillis claims Barack Obama created modern-day populism alongside social media's rise
“I think what we've seen with Obama kind of really creating modern-day populism at the same time that social media was coming about, the way we get our news, podcasts, all that stuff,”
Kann: V2G economics do not pencil for EV drivers with $7,000 hardware
“GM, for example, their bi-directional charging bundle runs about 7000 dollars before installation. And grid programs so far have paid drivers a lot less than that. It just doesn't pencil.”
Seventy quantum hardware startups could fail without hurting sector vitality
“There are too many organizations out there, and I can confidently say 70 of them could go belly up in the next two years, and it ultimately wouldn't affect the overall vitality of the sector, because the smart ones will rise to the top, and the ones that perha…”
Eliahu-Ontiveros: Microsoft has dropped to fourth in hyperscaler energy sophistication
“I don't think I wouldn't call Microsoft now the second. I probably would rank them fourth now. I think you've seen Amazon step up pretty dramatically, and you've seen them at the frontier of a bunch of, you know, unique type of deals.”
Eliahu-Ontiveros: Nvidia risks losing silicon share unless it backstops neocloud power
“It's actually becoming a pretty existential risk for NVIDIA because if they don't support the NeoClouds, they're at risk of basically seeing Google Amazon and others take tremendous market share on the silicon side, right? So you would see Tranium take, take m…”
Eliahu-Ontiveros: Deploying Bloom fuel cells means being islanded for life
“And if you do bloom, you're basically islanded for life. Either that, or maybe you get good at some point, and then you move your fuel cells to some other location but you can't use them as backup. It's not a very efficient solution for backup purposes.”
Yedvab: Stardust silica particles can offset 50 years of global warming
“We believe that for, I would say, to provide cooling, which is comparable to the heating of the last 50 years, our simpler particle, the one which is composed of amorphous silica by itself is enough, but if you need to go higher, the second more complex partic…”
Kann: Power is the rate limiter to AI growth
“And understanding the multiple factors that drive failure of new transmission, I think, is key to understanding why power is, in my opinion, The rate limiter to AI growth, and why upward pressure on electricity prices will probably sustain for a while.”
Fulgham: China's renewable curtailment is likely higher than reported
“In the meantime, that means that curtailment likely is significantly higher than what is being reported, or at least that's what we expect from when we look at how much capacity has been installed and how much generation is actually growing.”
Von Munch: Nothing prevents fusion from being as cheap as any energy source
“If you look at the capital cost of the driver, if you look at the capital cost of balance of plan equipment if you look at the fusion game that you need to believe in, there's nothing preventing fusion from being as cheap as anything else out there”
McAvoy: Sustainability is no longer top priority for US energy buyers
“Like, sustainability was number one on everyone's list. In the U.S., it is not anymore.”
Modon: Fixed-firm EPC contracts use scope loopholes to trigger change orders
“Most of these fixed firms aren't really like industry themselves. I mean, we've seen time and time again where it's like a fixed firm doesn't really mean a fixed firm because there's inevitably some way that in the thousand page contract that you assigned with…”
Gramlich: Hyperscalers fundamentally require full grid connection for five-nines reliability
“My understanding from the hyperscalers and the data center developers is that they all really, really want the Full network transmission service with all of the good, you know, backup and cushion that that network provides to their operations, and the Five Nin…”