Sustainability

"An old proverb states: When the winds of change blow, some build walls . . . others build windmills. So, fellow windmill builders: Let’s push back on doubt and fear. Climate disasters worldwide tell us that the scariest thing we could do is nothing at all. . . . [W]e’ll all gain when we succeed - starting with jobs! We’re looking at a $23 trillion global market in the clean energy transition by 2030. . . . That means we can remake our economies, build new businesses, and put millions upon millions of people to work. . . . For too long, the climate conversation has been viewed as a zero-sum game. One of trade-offs: the climate or the economy. No longer."

"I think it’s clear now that energy has to be clean. . . . And we should do it in ways that give jobs to everybody. . . . There’s so much to do in renewable power, there is so little to do in coal."

"There are two practical ways to create the magic conditions that make fusion happen. One is called magnetic confinement fusion and the other is inertial confinement fusion. There’s gravity too, of course, but for that you need scales bigger than can be created on Earth: you need, quite literally, a star. The magnetic approach is to bind the hot matter in a reactor with an invisible web of magnetic fields. The inertial approach sets matter crashing into itself, thereby both heating and compressing it, and aims to get all the fusion done before the assembled star matter falls apart again. NIF {the National Ignition Facility} uses lasers to do this."

"In 2006, I hosted a dinner after a screening of An Inconvenient Truth, former vice president Al Gore's seminal documentary on the climate crisis. We went around the table for everyone's reaction to the film's urgent message. When it came to my fifteen-year-old daughter, Mary, she declared with her typical candor: "I'm scared, and I'm angry." Then she added, "Dad, your generation created this problem. You better fix it." . . . As a venture capitalist, my job is to find big opportunities, target big challenges, and invest in big solutions. I was best known for backing companies like Google and Amazon early on. But the environmental crisis dwarfed any challenge I'd ever seen. . . . Eugene Kleiner, the late cofounder of Kleiner Perkins . . . left behind a set of twelve laws that [included the following:] There is a time when panic is the appropriate response. That time had come. . . . My partners and I made climate a top priority. We got serious about investing in clean and sustainable technologies . . . . Our climate investments were [slow] out of the gate, and many of them failed. . . . But with patience and persistence [by 2019] our surviving cleantech investments began to hit one home run after the next. [However, we currently] have no time for a victory lap. . . . Atmospheric carbon already exceeds the upper limit for climate stability. . . . The effects of runaway global warming are already plain to see: devastating hurricanes, biblical flooding, uncontrollable wildfires, killer heat waves, and extreme droughts. . . . I must warn you up front: we're not cutting emissions fast enough to outrun the damage on our doorstep. I said this in 2007, and I say it again today: what we're doing is not nearly enough. Unless we course correct with urgent speed and at a massive scale, we'll be staring at a doomsday scenario. The melting polar ice caps will drown coastal cities. Failed crops will lead to widespread famine. By midcentury, a billion souls worldwide could be climate refugees. . . . Fortunately, we have a powerful ally in this fight: innovation. Over the past fifteen years, prices for solar and wind power have plunged 90 percent. . . . Batteries are expanding the range of electrified vehicles at an ever lower cost. Greater energy efficiency has sharply reduced greenhouse gas emissions. . . . While a good many solutions are in hand, their deployment is nowhere near where it needs to be. We'll need massive investment and robust policy to make these innovations more affordable. We need to scale the ones we have - immediately - and invent the ones we still need. In short, we need both the now and the new."

"There’s one aspect of the current fleet of magnetic fusion machines that is holding back progress. It’s a lesson that has been learned time and time again in fusion: . . . fusion works best on big scales. For conventional tokamaks, the confinement of plasma gets better the bigger the machine is. . . . When it is completed, ITER will be the world’s largest tokamak, and one of its key objectives will be to demonstrate net energy gain. It’s a behemoth. . . . ITER will take up 180 hectares (equivalent to 250 soccer fields), and when finished, its structure will have a mass equivalent to three Eiffel Towers."

"Future Outlook: Global offshore wind energy deployment is expected to accelerate in the future, with forecasts from 4C Offshore and Bloomberg New Energy Finance indicating a sevenfold increase in global cumulative offshore wind capacity - to 215 [gigawatts] or more by 2030 (BNEF 2020; 4C Offshore 2021). As part of that predicted surge, the U.S. offshore wind energy market continues to expand, primarily driven by increasing state-level procurement targets in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic, an increased number of projects clearing major permitting milestones, as well as growing vessel, port, and infrastructure investments needed to keep pace with development."

"What do we need to build to fight global warming? . . . The answer is actually quite simple and requires no miracle technology: we must electrify everything, fast. That means not just the supply-side sources of energy; we’ve got to electrify everything on the demand-side - the things we use in our households and small businesses every day, including cars, furnaces, stoves, water heaters, and dryers. I’m optimistic because over the last two decades {we've made} advances and cost reductions in electric vehicles, solar cells, batteries, heat pumps, and induction cooking . . . . People who are relying on governments to solve this problem don’t understand the power they have in their own hands and homes to fight global warming. . . . One astounding thing happens when we electrify everything: we would need only one-half of the primary energy that currently powers the economy. . . . The electrification of things you do for climate is good for your health. The air in our homes will be cleaner, our cars zippier and community air quality better, our appliances faster and more high-tech, like smartphones compared to rotary phones. The electrified future can be awesome."

"When it comes to climate change, I know innovation isn’t the only thing we need. But we cannot keep the earth livable without it. Techno-fixes are not sufficient, but they are necessary."

"Deploying today’s renewables and improving transmission couldn’t be more important. . . . Unless we use large amounts of nuclear energy . . . every path to zero {net emissions} in the United States will require us to install as much wind and solar power as we can build and find room for. It’s hard to say exactly how much of America’s electricity will come from renewables in the end, but what we do know is that between now and 2050 we have to build them much faster - on the order of 5 to 10 times faster - than we’re doing right now. And remember that most countries aren’t as lucky as the United States when it comes to solar and wind resources. The fact that we can hope to generate a large percentage of our power from renewables is the exception rather than the rule. That’s why, even as we deploy, deploy, deploy solar and wind, the world is going to need some new clean electricity inventions too."

"[I]t's . . . possible that some innovation will come along and make [other energy storage] ideas obsolete, the way the personal computer came along and more or less made the typewriter unnecessary. Cheap hydrogen could do that for storing electricity. . . . We could use electricity from a solar or wind farm to create hydrogen, store the hydrogen as a compressed gas or in another form, and then put it in a fuel cell to generate electricity on demand. [This] would solve the location problem; . . . although you can't ship sunlight in a railcar, you can turn it into fuel first and then ship it any way you like."

"We are aware that the industrialised countries have a particular responsibility. . . . The financing is essential if the industrialised countries are to maintain their credibility. . . . Ladies and gentlemen, with government activities alone we will not make progress. For this requires radical transformation of how we live, work and conduct business. I therefore want to take this opportunity to make a very clear appeal for pricing for CO2 emissions. With this form of pricing, which we already have in the European Union, which is to be introduced in China and which needs to be developed together with many others throughout the world, we could get our industries and businesses to find the technologically most effective and efficient ways to achieve climate neutrality. We need to work out how we can best integrate CO2-free mobility, CO2-free industry and CO2-free processes into our lives. My clear call in the Decade of Action, in the decade in which we now live, is for us to become more ambitious at a national level and at the same time to find global instruments that not only make use of taxpayers’ money but are also economically viable. And for me, the answer is CO2 pricing."

"In the midst of this global brainstorming on climate change, on behalf of India, I would like to present five [commitments] to deal with this challenge. First - India will take its non-fossil energy capacity to 500 gigawatts by 2030. Second - India will meet 50 percent of its energy requirements from renewable energy by 2030. . . . And fifth - by the year 2070, India will achieve the target of Net Zero. . . . Today, when India has resolved to move forward with a new commitment and a new energy, the transfer of climate finance and low cost climate technologies have become more important. . . . India also understands the suffering of all other developing countries, shares them, and will continue to express their expectations."

"[T]he solution has to be real economy government regulations to ban or to make higher [the] cost of the brown and polluting industries. That said, there are parts of finance which are longer-term and [evaluate] climate risks . . . and these are asset owners, the pension funds, the wealth funds and the insurance companies who are not so transactional [and] they’re not [as] interested in a deal to be done today. And they are in fact often mandated by their governments to take into account climate risk. So, I think those players will step up in this instance [turmoil in energy markets following Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine] and [now who might be] investing for [an electricity generation project with a] 10-year horizon which you have to do with gas they will [say], "Let’s do it with renewables." And we’ve seen movements like that in the UK, where they’re pivoting towards onshore wind, which before the invasion was politically unviable because of the NIMBY factor. . . . [T]he pension funds and the actual asset owners . . . have a longer term of perspective. And they are actually driving the issue to their commercial managers who have to service them and they’re saying, "Look, we want you to act on climate change," and that's a huge driver."

"[A]s an atmospheric scientist and environmental engineer, I focus most on technologies — that’s what we think about most of what we need to be able to clean up electricity, what we need for cleaner cars. But those aren’t going to make it to market and those aren’t going to help cool the climate unless there are policies that get those to be deployed domestically. And what we do domestically isn’t enough because we’re only 1/7th of the world’s emissions, so we need diplomacy to take what we do here in the U.S. and make sure that that starts being applied in other parts of the world as well. . . . [A]s I was looking at the diplomacy [I noticed that what] the United States really gets right is being reciprocal . . . when we do something, we usually insist that our trading partners go along as well. You even hear in Congress talk about if we ever did have a carbon tax, being sure it got applied as tariffs on goods that got brought in."

"Even if you're a climate denier, you should be on board with what we're advocating. . . . Our central conclusion is that we should go full speed ahead with the green energy transition because it's going to save us money."

"[[w:Energy storage#Chemical|[Storing energy using] hydrogen]] . . . is getting a lot of play now. You could burn hydrogen in a gas turbine to produce electricity. You could use hydrogen in fuel cells that produce electricity without combustion; still a chemical reaction. Or you could simply use hydrogen to create ammonia, NH3, which is another liquid, as opposed to gaseous, chemical storage medium. . . . [E]xperts say that we could probably convert the grid 80% to renewable - that's wind and solar - without having to deal with [the] long-duration storage problem. We'd still use gas peaker plants for . . . 20% of the electricity that we need. If you want to do the other 20%, you're going to have to solve that problem of . . . long-term storage for the grid, days in a row. And you could do that with gravity storage. You could do that with a chemical energy carrier. It's done with methane now. So we've got to get rid of the methane. But you could have hydrogen or ammonia or another chemical energy medium which is yet to be discovered. That's the challenge. We can get to 80%, but we can't get to 100%."

"We have taken the first tentative steps towards a clean energy source that could revolutionize the world."

"Offshore wind turbines reach even higher and wider than land-based ones. Though twice as expensive as land-based wind, their costs are falling fast. That’s making offshore wind increasingly attractive in coastal regions of Europe and the northeastern United States, where population density is high, land is scarce, and winds over the ocean far outpace those over land."

"The Inflation Reduction Act calls for spending less than $500 billion over a decade, compared with the American Rescue Plan’s $1.9 trillion in a single year . . . . But if the spending isn’t very large, how can it have such a big impact? The answer is that right now we’re sitting on a sort of cusp. Renewable energy technology has made revolutionary progress, and renewables are already cheaper in many areas than fossil fuels. A moderate push from public policy is all that it will take to transition to a much greener economy. And the Inflation Reduction Act will provide that push."

"[The Inflation Reduction Act] . . . doesn’t solve the climate challenge. This is the beginning . . . and the implementation is going to be everything. This is . . . like a starting gun for a race that's going to . . . hopefully define the coming decade of building something better."

"{The US Inflation Reduction Act of 2022} is really good for a developing economy like Indonesia due to spillover effects because of lower costs {for technologies that help mitigate climate change}."

"[T]he analogy [regarding the three recent US climate laws] we’ve been thinking about is the backbone, the brain, and the lungs. So, the backbone being the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law {November 2021} . . . . That law [includes] investment in US infrastructure [such as] roads and bridges, but including significant energy infrastructure. Then there's the brain, the CHIPS and Science Act {August 2022}, and chips being the semiconductors that are in {electric vehicles, energy infrastructure, etc.} . . . and the science part authorizes additional investments from Congress in science {related to grid upgrades, zero emissions research, etc. by the} National Science Foundation and DOE {Department of Energy}. And then the third piece is the lungs. So, [taking a deep breath] breathing into that clean energy economy, the Inflation Reduction Act {August 2022} incentivizes deployment of clean technologies and really focuses on lowering costs for American families."

"Climate security goes hand in hand with energy security. Putin’s abhorrent war in Ukraine and rising energy prices across the world are not a reason to go slow on climate change. They are a reason to act faster. Because diversifying our energy supplies by investing in renewables is precisely the way to insure ourselves against the risks of energy dependency. It is also a fantastic source of new jobs and growth."

"[COP27] ended on Sunday morning with researchers largely frustrated at the lack of any ambition to phase out fossil fuels. However, there was one silver lining: delegates from low and middle income countries (LMICs) came away with an agreement on a new 'loss and damage' fund to help them cover the costs of climate-change impacts. . . . Many blamed the energy crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for a lack of progress on fossil fuels."

"India has to do it for itself. . . . And India needs to do it for the world."

"Last year was a double milestone for decarbonizing the world’s energy system. It was the first year when investment in the energy transition equaled global investment in fossil fuels . . . . [And] 2022 was . . . the first year when investment in decarbonizing energy surpassed $1 trillion. The year-on-year increase of more than $250 billion from 2021 was the largest jump yet."

"Climate change and biodiversity loss . . . pose an even greater existential threat [than the COVID-19 pandemic], to the extent that we have to put ourselves on what might be called a war-like footing. . . . Putting a value on carbon . . . [is] absolutely critical. . . . [W]e need a vast military style campaign to marshall the strength of the global private sector[, which has] trillions at its disposal . . . . [E]ach sector needs a clear strategy to speed up the process of getting innovations to market [and we] need to align private investment behind these industry strategies. . . . If we can develop a pipeline of many more sustainable and "bankable" projects, at a sufficient scale, it will attract greater investment. . . . CEOs and institutional investors have told me that alongside the promises countries have made, their nationally determined contributions, they need clear market signals, agreed globally, so that they have the confidence to invest without the goal posts suddenly moving. . . . [[w:Charles, Prince of Wales#Natural environment|[W]e are working]] to drive trillions of dollars in support of transition across ten of the most emitting and polluting industries [including] energy, agriculture, transportation, health systems and fashion. . . . I can only urge you, as the world’s decision-makers, to find practical ways of overcoming differences so we can all . . . rescue this precious planet and save the threatened future of our young people."

"Offshore wind's remarkable potential: The global offshore wind market grew nearly 30% per year between 2010 and 2018, benefitting from rapid technology improvements and about 150 new offshore wind projects . . . in active development around the world. . . . Yet today's offshore wind market doesn't even come close to tapping the full potential - with high-quality resources available in most major markets, offshore wind has the potential to generate more than 420,000 [terawatt-hours] per year worldwide. This is more than 18 times global electricity demand today."

"A carbon tax offers the most cost-effective lever to reduce carbon emissions at the scale and speed that is necessary. By correcting a well-known market failure, a carbon tax will send a powerful price signal that harnesses the invisible hand of the marketplace to steer economic actors towards a low-carbon future. . . . A consistently rising carbon price will encourage technological innovation and large-scale infrastructure development."

"Offshore wind is in a category of its own, as the only variable baseload power generation technology. . . . Offshore wind output . . . hourly variability is lower than that of solar [photovoltaics]. Offshore wind typically fluctuates within a narrower band, up to 20% from hour-to-hour, than is the case for solar [photovoltaics], up to 40% from hour-to-hour."

"[W]ind and solar power have been rapidly winning market acceptance. Last year, the installed capacity of solar power in the United States nearly doubled. And wind is now being harnessed to produce 5.5 percent of America’s electricity, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration."

"Rather than an eyesore on the roof, it becomes actually a feature of the home. People are going to start wanting to put {building-integrated photovoltaics} on the front side of their home to show that they have solar."

"The transition to renewable energy can be greatly accelerated if the world’s governments finally bring the engineers to the fore... I was recently on a panel with three economists and a senior business-sector engineer. After the economists spoke... the engineer spoke succinctly and wisely. “I don’t really understand what you economists were just speaking about, but I do have a suggestion... Tell us engineers the desired ‘specs’ and the timeline, and we’ll get the job done.” This is not bravado.... The next big act belongs to the engineers. Energy transformation for climate safety is our twenty-first-century moonshot."

"The clean energy portfolios of some of the largest corporate buyers rival those of the world’s biggest utilities. These companies are facing mounting pressure from investors to decarbonize - clean energy contracts serve as a way to diversify energy spend and reduce susceptibility to the tangible risks associated with climate change."

"If you told me that innovation had been frozen and we just have today's technologies, will the world run the climate change experiment? You bet we will. We will not deny India coal plants; we will run the scary experiment of heating up the atmosphere and seeing what happens. The only reason I'm optimistic about this problem is because of innovation. . . . I want to tilt the odds in our favor by driving innovation at an unnaturally high pace, or more than its current business-as-usual course. I see that as the only thing. I want to call up India someday and say, "Here's a source of energy that is cheaper than your coal plants, and by the way, from a global pollution and local pollution point of view, it's also better.""

"The only way you can get to the very positive scenario is by great innovation. Innovation really does bend the curve."

"Cheaper coal and cheaper gas will not derail the transformation and decarbonisation of the world’s power systems. By 2040, zero-emission energy sources will make up 60% of installed capacity."

"Every percentage point increase in homegrown renewable energy makes us that much more energy secure. The progress in electricity is encouraging, but growth is not yet strong enough in renewable heat and transport to meet the government's objectives."

"Renewable energy: dumbest phrase since climate change. See the first law of thermodynamics, dumbass."

"One of the real breakthroughs is when someone figures out long-term storage capacity."

"We have long supported a carbon tax as the best policy of those being considered. Replacing the hodge-podge of current, largely ineffective regulations with a revenue-neutral carbon tax would ensure a uniform and predictable cost of carbon across the economy. It would allow market forces to drive solutions. It would maximize transparency, reduce administrative complexity, promote global participation and easily adjust to future developments in our understanding of climate science as well as the policy consequences of these actions."

"[N]ew renewable power generation projects now increasingly undercut existing coal-fired plants. On average, new solar photovoltaic (PV) and onshore wind power cost less than keeping many existing coal plants in operation, and auction results show this trend accelerating – reinforcing the case to phase-out coal entirely."

"Climate change is already . . . costing our nations trillions of dollars [and] we know that none of us can escape the worst that’s yet to come if we fail to seize this moment. . . . But . . . within the growing catastrophe, I believe there’s an incredible opportunity . . . . We have the ability to invest in ourselves and build an equitable clean-energy future and in the process create millions of good-paying jobs [while we] create an environment that raises the standard of living around the world. . . . When I talk to the American people about climate change, I tell them it’s about jobs. It’s about workers [and the] communities that will revitalize themselves around new industries and opportunities. . . . So, let’s get to work."

"I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that."

"Although photosynthesis typically has an energy conversion efficiency below three percent, it is, together with heat from the sun, the main energy source of all living organisms, and the energy source from which biomass and fossil fuels are derived. Each year the earth receives an energy input from the sun equal to 15,000 times the world's commercial energy consumption and 100 times the world's proven coal, gas and oil reserves."

"There is one forecast of which you can already be sure: someday renewable energy will be the only way for people to satisfy their energy needs. Because of the physical, ecological and (therefore) social limits to nuclear and fossil energy use, ultimately nobody will be able to circumvent renewable energy as the solution, even if it turns out to be everybody’s last remaining choice. The question keeping everyone in suspense, however, is whether we shall succeed in making this radical change of energy platforms happen early enough to spare the world irreversible ecological mutilation and political and economic catastrophe."

"[The] solar-energy firm known as Solyndra, which the [[w:United_States_Department_of_Energy|[US] Energy Department]] had backed with a $535 million loan guarantee [made the] unexpected announcement last week that it is filing for bankruptcy, leaving hundreds of workers jobless - and taxpayers on the hook for almost all of its government-backed loan. . . . [I]t’s not too early to draw some policy lessons from Solyndra’s ignominious downfall. . . . [G]overnment is no better than the private sector at picking industrial winners - and usually worse. . . . To the extent that government creates jobs by subsidizing particular companies, it does so by shifting resources that might have created jobs elsewhere. Political favoritism, or the appearance thereof, is an inherent risk . . . . When "green jobs" promises don’t pan out, it does the environmental cause more harm than good."

"The current level of climate finance ambition has broadly been preserved. There is no regression, which was a real risk given the current context. . . . While some have argued that no agreement would have been better than a bad one, I fail to see how waiting until next year — or even the year after — would have led to a more favorable outcome."

"{COP29 set} a new annual target for global climate finance {by} reaching a deal for $300 billion a year by 2035. {However,} many developing countries said {this} amount was far too low. They also warned that the deadline for a decade away in 2035 would hold back the world's transition to clean energy. . . . Though he has yet to take office, climate denier Donald Trump's . . . election meant the U.S. could offer little at {the conference. . . . Also, the parties} reached a deal to allow countries to begin establishing {carbon} credits to bring in funding and offset their emissions, or to trade them on a market exchange."

"The International Energy Agency (IEA) . . . reckons that the global installed capacity of battery storage will need to rise from less than 200 gigawatts (GW) last year to more than a terawatt (TW) by the end of the decade, and nearly 5TW by 2050 . . . . Fortunately, though, the business of storing energy on the grid is at last being turbocharged. . . . A plunge in the price of lithium batteries is fuelling their adoption on the grid. . . . Sodium-ion batteries are one promising alternative {and incumbents} are rushing to develop the technology for the grid."