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 240 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
Shah: Federal funds alone cannot hit the $10 trillion needed for climate
“That will absolutely be a failure, right? If that's all we do, you don't get to the best case. All you get is dollars out the door and whatever dollars, like, you know succeed. Like, you don't actually catalyze gigaton scale climate reduction. Because no matte…”
Gallucci: Puerto Rico's Hurricane Fiona Grid Collapse Was Preventable
“My sense is that, yes, it was preventable, especially because Hurricane Fiona was a Category One hurricane, and Hurricane Maria, when it approached the island, it was Category Five, which is the strongest level of hurricane-force winds, and when it made landfa…”
Gallucci: Puerto Rico grid crisis is forced survival, not resiliency
“Yeah, exactly, and the word that I'm hearing from a Puerto Rican journalist that I'm in touch with or I'm following is survival, that this isn't resiliency, this isn't scrappy people making do with what they can, it's people being forced to survive, and there'…”
Hamilton: No country has ever enacted climate legislation as significant as IRA
“It's, we and anybody else in the world has never done anything this significant.”
Hamilton: 10-year clean energy tax credits provide unprecedented market certainty
“The biggest, I think, is the ten-year window for the tax credits. That's just going to give a runway. It will give a level of certainty to investors and to developers and to industry.”
Friedman: Climate fiction writers grasp societal impacts better than scientific models
“The climate fiction writers seem to me to be almost on a better footing with societal impacts and with, you know, what, what's really gonna come.”
Supreme Court's climate ruling is 'bad to pretty bad,' not disastrous
“I would say bad to pretty bad. I think mainly because it's definitely not the worst for EPA because it has that flexibility still to look at other solutions. It doesn't require only regulations that focus on the power plant itself, so that makes it less bad th…”
Multani: Climate tech was not uniquely overextended during the bull market
“I think what I'd say is I don't want to tag us in the climate tech ecosystem as being sort of uniquely guilty of getting out over our skis.”
Multani: Rising offtake prices cushion clean energy infrastructure from rate hikes
“The reason why I think the impact won't be as big is as you think about the contracts that get struck, right? It's a function of your ultimate spread is a function of your offtake minus your input costs. And so, and one of your input costs is going to be cost …”
Kann: Dedicated mandates mean modern climate investors cannot easily pull back
“So I think it would be much more difficult for the broad swath of investors who are investing in, in Climate Tech Solutions now to just sort of turn the dial off than it was then.”
Paul says NCA4 estimates underestimate damages in a three-degree warmed world
“And to be frank, I think that that is actually a underestimate of what things would look like in a three plus degree warmed world precisely because a habitable planet underpins absolutely everything in our lives.”
Paul calls CBO modeling a fundamental roadblock to US climate legislation
“I do think it is a fundamental roadblock to the United States passing any climate legislation.”
Spatz: Renewable natural gas is a gas industry marketing term
“Yeah, I mean, renewable natural gas it's a brilliant marketing term that the gas industry has created.”
Unlike Jeff Bezos at The Washington Post, Musk courts public controversy
“Bezos, Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, but because of that, you don't really have any more insight into how Jeff Bezos feels about the political issues that the Washington Post covers. He's in the background. I'm sure he has his opinions, but he doesn't…”
Westhoff: Solar Protectionism Unites Obama, Trump, and Biden Administrations
“We've seen them enacted during the Obama administration, we've seen them during the Trump administration, and we've seen them continued under the Biden administration. Turns out there's one thing that they can all agree on is, ah, protectionism.”
Westhoff: Biden Clean Energy Promises Are Empty Rhetoric Under Solar Tariffs
“And Biden is also a union man, and there's a union aspect to keeping manufacturing going in the United States, and so Biden has to balance that out, but it's empty rhetoric if you're going to cut the industry off at its ankles with a tariff, and to then say we…”
Lacey: US energy insecurity is driven by housing and racism, not supply
“In the richest country in the world, we still have tens of millions of people who don't have access to reliable energy, or who can't pay their energy bills. And that's not an energy availability problem. It's a housing problem. And it's a racism problem.”
Kimber: Clean hydrogen and Bitcoin mining have viable models on cheap renewables
“There is very much a business model for making clean hydrogen or Bitcoin or whatever it is from low cost renewables.”
Schipper: Many climate adaptation organizations fundamentally misunderstand the problem
“There are lots of groups acting in the name of climate change and in the name of adaptation, but not actually understanding what either is.”
Noel: The Energy Crisis Creates the Worst Market Conditions for Coal Phaseout
“This is going to be aggravated by the crisis. This is just about the worst possible market situation regarding your, you know, your climate change objectives and the few years ahead where we were supposed to dramatically accelerate the phasing out of coal.”
Olson: Modified diesel truck drivers will reject electric trucks over self-image
“Now, you know, is the guy that's driving a diesel F-tri-fifty with a modified exhaust and a bumper sticker with expletives about our president on the back of it gonna change to a lightning owner? I don't think so, but I don't think that's about his politics. I…”
Critical mineral leverage will likely not match Saudi oil influence
“And that is a source of influence for those countries, but probably not in the same way that I think dependence on, say, you know, one country like Saudi Arabia is for oil.”
Russia is likely to be a loser in the green energy transition
“It's going to be, I think, harder for a country like Russia to make that transition. So they may be more of a loser in a transition.”
Shepard: Olympic green projects create an isolated bubble, not regional sustainability
“The idea that this is, is, is creating a sort of a brand new sustainable economic model, it doesn't really make sense, and it's why I keep going back to this idea of a bubble. You know, you rebuild for one area, you bring in perhaps new ways of powering things…”
Roberts: Most Climate-Themed Art and Media Have Been Bad
“Over the course of my career, most attempts to grapple with climate change via art, you know, music, or movies, or TV shows, or poetry, have just been bad.”
The Climate Movement Devolved Into Infighting Because Mainstream Institutions Ignored It
“You just end up talking to other climate people, and you end up Arguing with other climate people and forming these sort of teams and factions within the climate movement because no one else is paying attention. So I think that's sort of like become the cultur…”
Only Spielberg and Scorsese Can Override a 20 Test Screening Score
“Maybe Spielberg and Scorsese are two people that could score a 20 on a movie and say, I don't care, put it in 3000 theaters anyway.
David Roberts: Right.
Adam McKay: No one else on the planet has the clout to tell a studio, I know we got a 20, but go with it.”
Spector: Hawaii transition failure would be an unforced error aiding critics
“If things don't go smoothly, it certainly could give fodder to people who say that, hey, it's dangerous to move too fast on this stuff, or, you know, we need these coal plants, they're reliable, and this new, newfangled stuff isn't. You know, so that, that wou…”
Hamilton: Expecting Manchin to Back a $4T Bill Was Unrealistic
“And he's moved a little bit on them, but he was not going to move a lot, and so when a close to four trillion dollar bill was introduced with the hopes that Joe Manchin would come along, it was not very realistic.”
Canary says buyers reject biomass carbon credits if wood has alternative uses
“Even if I wanted to, like, we wouldn't have the customer adoption to pay for those credits if it could have gone to a mill or it could have gone to an energy facility or something along those lines.”
Dennett: Structural demand for US copper will hold regardless of politics
“The structural logic at the end of the day is going to hold regardless of who's in office, because you can't electrify anything. You can't build AI data centers without copper, and much of the world's current refining and processing capacity sits outside the U…”
Investors now refuse to fund biotech without early commercial traction
“So investors now are unwilling to give gobs and gobs of money when you don't have commercial traction or a plan for revenue and what you're going to get that revenue. And they're not necessarily willing to wait years and years for that to happen.”
Cloud seeding cannot scale to daily use with silver iodide
“We want to scale it like irrigation is used today in agriculture, at least in the U.S., and in order to do that, we want to have an agent that, that degrades in the environment, that goes away in the environment, and cloud seeding can't scale with silver iodid…”
Climate hard tech often targets inherently low-value markets
“The reality of what it takes to develop hard technologies and to commercialize them for markets that are inherently not crazy high-value markets all the time.”
Su: Understanding geopolitics should be a core requirement for all investors
“I think it should be everybody's job as an investor. So, so that would be the first thing is I consider it to be kind of one of the top bullet points in the job description”
Su: GPs may hesitate to call committed capital from Gulf LPs
“So, GPs, and I think we saw this at the beginning of COVID as well, GPs may self-censor especially with those Gulf LPs in a time when it feels a little bit awkward, to say the least to be going around You know, with your hand out for money even if it was alrea…”
The oil and gas industry is equipped to scale geothermal energy
“The oil and gas industry is primed. The infrastructure is there. It's already primed to scale geothermal once the industry, again, is ready to scale. We don't have to wait on new skill sets being built”
Tech giants back CDR to secure future low-cost capacity
“There are companies like Microsoft, Frontier, and others that are seeking to create a market and build a supplier base. I see those companies providing the leadership in the market. They're doing it for good reasons for themselves as well. Securing a first rig…”
Precast concrete could be transformational for advanced nuclear reactor construction
“The opportunity around precast concrete, which is really just, like, potentially completely transformational in terms of how we build these buildings. Totally conventional and a lot of non-nuclear construction, but how do you do this for the nuclear requiremen…”
North American TAM for Graphitic Energy's carbon byproduct is 3 million tons
“There's carbon that goes into the steel-making process, into lubricants, into refractories, and so Stephen's really been instrumental in building out what we think is a, you know, three million ton a year total addressable market for our carbon in, in North Am…”
Jewett: Tech companies are shifting toward longer-term power offtake agreements
“I think now we're seeing a little bit more of a robust demand from the tech community for slightly longer-term thinking, and there's a lot more, you know, real negotiating leverage behind a lot of those off-take agreements in a way we haven't seen before.”
Madrone: Land preservation wasn't seen as valuable enough to justify risk
“Our value proposition of preserving the land, I think at that point in time, wasn't Accepted as being a good enough value proposition to be worth the risk of us moving forward.”
Chan: Scaling CDR demand requires compliance markets or government procurement
“And then there's that kind of question of like, hey, what would take that step change up to real demand is probably more of a compliance market or governmental demand as well.”
Dave: Climate Finance Lacks Offtake Frameworks Beyond Solar and Wind
“We are starting to build the vocabulary and the talking points, but we're not quite there yet because we've historically really only done solar and wind.”
Beebe: Corporate consensus on climate commitments is weakening
“I don't think the corporate consensus is as tight as it even was four years ago. I think that people are hedging their bets, hemming and hawing”
Domenech: Micro-reactors have greatest impact by replacing diesel generators
“I'd spend it on micro-reactors, because that's where I think you can have the most impact around the world displacing diesel generators.”
Ravindran: Energy innovation happens behind the meter, not at utility scale
“But now when you're looking at a lot of the, ah, innovation, the growth, The activity, the dynamism in the industry, it's all behind the meter.”
Palazzi: Energy companies are shifting from hard-coded models to production AI
“I think that's a big shift that has taken place, that in production by companies that are serving real customers, AI is used much more commonly. So a shift from hard-coded, pre-set-up, fully visible models into more machine learning and AI.”