Plain English with Derek Thompson - An Optimistic Guide to America’s Clean-Energy Future

Episode Date: May 2, 2023

The world is engaged in a multitrillion-dollar project to decarbonize the economy to slow or reverse climate change. But what exactly does that mean? How optimistic should we be that we can pull this off? And what new technology do we need to build to make it happen? This is a mega-pod with two guests. Ramez Naam is a writer, speaker, and one of the best technologists I know at explaining the progress we’re making toward building a clean-energy economy. And Vinod Khosla is one of the most famous venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, the founder of Khosla Ventures, and an investor in several sci-fi-sounding companies, including one that is working on fusion technology—which might be one of the most exciting and important technologies we'll ever build. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Ramez Naam & Vinod Khosla Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Sean Fennessey, one of the hosts of the Prestige TV podcast. HBO's Barry is back for a fourth and final season. And that means I'll be back recapping the show with co-creator and star Bill Hater to dive deep on the themes, scenes, and major moments in the series. Bill will provide insight into how every episode was made and why it's ending. New Prestige TV Barry recaps will go live every Sunday night when the episode ends. So make sure you're subscribed to the Prestige TV podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Today's episode is about the future of energy. This is a megapod with two guests.

First, Rameznam is a writer and speaker, one of the best technologists I know at explaining the progress we're making toward building a clean energy economy. And Vinod Kostla is one of the most famous venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, the founder of Kostla Ventures, and an investor in several sci-fi-sounding companies, including one that is working on fusion technology, fusion technology, which might be one of the most of the most of most exciting and important technologies we ever build. But before we get to the interviews, I want to say something about energy. The history of progress is in so many ways a history of energy. As the author Vachlif Smil has written, quote, the course of history can be seen as the quest

for controlling greater stores and flows of more concentrated and more versatile forms of energy and converting them in more affordable ways at lower costs and with greater efficiencies into heat, light, and emotion. End quote. That's it. That's history and progress in a sentence. And for the most part, it really has been a story of progress. An average person in the world today has, at their disposal, 700 times more useful energy

than the typical person at the beginning of the 20th century. But here's the rub. You know how every age of human civilization tends to be named after the tools that we use to build it? You know, like in the Stone Age, we used rock to fashion arrowheads. In the Iron Age, we used metal to shape swords. You could say the last 100 years or so have been the plastic age or the carbon age. Between 1870 and 2000, we invented cars and plants. planes, refrigerators, TV, computers, container ships. We built these things with material like

silicon and plastic that nature did not know how to recycle. And we powered these new, incredible machines with energy from coal, oil, gas, which was finite and non-renewable, created heat and electricity at a very high cost, filling the skies and the seas with carbon. And now we face the bill. Climate change, dispoiled natural environments, acidifying oceans. Now there's a school of thought that says, let's just stop. We've gone too far. Let's stop.

Let's turn back to the clock. There are some who sometimes go by the name de-growthers, who say the only way to save the planet now is to purposefully pull back, shrink human welfare to appease nature. I think they're wrong. I think degrothrism is a political and philosophical dead end. I think the path forward is both simply stated and very, very, very difficult to accomplish. Number one, we have to electrify as much of the economy as we can. And number two, we have to generate that electricity from clean and renewable energy sources, wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, nuclear.

As you're going to hear, I think we can do this. I think we can do it. Rather than just tell people we can eke out survival, but only if everybody sacrifices their own personal definition of flourishing, I really do think we can electrify just about everything and build a world with more clean energy. That's the promise. And here's the bad news.

Sometimes people say decarbonizing the grid requires a new Manhattan project. You'll hear that sometimes. We need a new Manhattan project for energy. That is almost comically insufficient. The Manhattan Project, which gave us the atomic bomb, cost about $33 billion in today's dollars, and it barely made contact with most people's lives. It was literally a secret.

The global energy transition is the very opposite of a secret. It's going to cost tens of trillions of dollars at least, and it's going to touch everything, every station of human existence, how we eat and farm and drink, and the clothes we wear, and the air we breathe, and much of the tech that's the technology. we need we don't even have yet. But the carbon age has to end. What we need now is a new theory of growth, a new theory of growth that works in concert with nature. That's what solar is. That's what wind and geothermal energy are. We have to move from a carbon age to a bio age. And it's going to take just about everything we've got. I'm Derek Thompson.

This is Plain English. Rameznam, welcome to the podcast. Derek, such an honor to be here. Before we dive into the nitty-gritty, I am interested in getting out of you something like a thesis statement about the direction of America's clean energy transition. What makes you most optimistic about our opportunity to move to clean energy and what makes you most pessimistic?

Derek, can I swear on this podcast? Absolutely. I'll say this. What makes me most optimistic is the exponential price decline of clean energy technologies. Every clean energy technology, whether it's solar power, wind power, batteries, electric vehicles, hydrogen is decades or a century ahead of where we thought they'd be on cost just 10, 12, 13 years ago. And for renewables and for electric vehicles, they are now either. cheaper than fossil alternatives, fossil power, fossil transport, or about to be. So that's what makes me optimistic. What makes me pessimistic is the limited amount of time that we have. There is no bright line in climate change. There is no threshold at which

everything ends and the world is completely doomed. Nevertheless, we talk about two degrees Celsius as an important threshold, 1.5 degrees Celsius as an important threshold, 1.5 has become more popular. We have missed 1.5 degrees Celsius. We have warmed already 1.3 degrees Celsius. We're going to pass 1.5 degrees in the 2030s at some point. And aside from doing solar geoengineering, which I think we should be investing much more in, we're not going to make that. But when I started in climate around 2010, we seriously thought we might be headed for six degrees Celsius of warming, 12 degrees Fahrenheit. That might not sound like a lot. That's more than the difference between now and the last ice age. That was truly catastrophic, not human extinction level,

but civilization ending climate change. We have bent that curve. Over the last 18, 24 months, there have been a raft of papers looking at new either country pledges or just pure economic analysis of current policies and economic trends in clean energy that say we've met the curve to less than three degrees, maybe to 2.5 degrees, maybe to 2.5 degrees, maybe to 2 and change, maybe to 1.9 degrees Celsius. So we have gone from a truly apocalyptic scenario to if we maintain momentum to being one where things will get worse with climate before they get better, but we could have a world of 10 billion, 11 billion people living first world lives with better human well-being than we have today, not without damage.

And here comes the profanity. The way that my friend Jesse Jenkins at Princeton talks about this is that in climate change, we're no longer totally fucked, but we're not totally unfucked either. We're in the messy middle. Every tenth of a degree Celsius that we can shift that future warming matters tremendously.

And that's what gets me up in the morning is fighting to bring it down. I've said to others that I am a rate optimist and a level pessimist when it comes to climate change. That is the rate of progress, and we're going to talk a lot more about rates is really shocking in a wonderful way. But the level of carbon already in the biosphere cannot make anybody optimistic. It just plain sucks. Yes, the level of carbon.

It's also the rate that we see is sort of a first derivative of rate. Solar and wind are growing exponentially. So Vaklav Smeal had some quote the other day, the guy I love to hate, is that all the work we've done in clean energy has made no difference whatsoever. Well, that's actually false, but you know what, it hasn't slowed down. It hasn't reduced carbon emissions. It's not just that the level is high, over 400 ppm now, but that carbon emissions are still at an all-time high, like the new amount we add every year is at an all-time high. But what's happened underneath that, Those are trailing indicators. The temperature is a super trailing indicator.

Amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is a little bit upstream of that, but still trailing. Emissions is upstream of level, but trails deployment. Deployment is upstream of clean tech and shutting down fossil is upstream of emissions. But what's upstream of that is the exponential, price plunge that makes clean energy disruptively cheap. Makes it cheaper to build new renewables than keep operating coal or gas plants, makes it cheaper soon for people to switch to EVs than to keep driving their gas guzzlers. And the continued drumbeat and advancement of policy. So that's how I see it, is that the leading indicators are really positive. Those might not even be first derivatives.

There might be second or third derivative changes that we see. And eventually they have to get down to lowering the actual CO2 in the atmosphere. So let's go all the way upstream here. One of the thesis statements that I've heard from you is that clean energy will win on cost, but only if we get out of our own way and allow it to be built. That's two different statements. Number one, the clean energy will win on cost. And number two, that we have to get out of our way and allow it to be built.

I want to jump into each of those hypotheses specifically. Number one, what does it mean that clean energy will win on cost? So energy is a fungible commodity. For most people, when you flip on the light switch at your house, you don't know what the power source is. When you get into a vehicle, you just want to get from point A to point B. You're not thinking about what the fuel is. People will, in general, buy the cheapest forms of energy services, really,

heating, cooling, lighting, manufacturing, transport that they can. A decade ago, in 2010, 13 years ago, there was no place on Earth where solar or wind or electric vehicles were cheaper than fossil power or fossil cars. That was their first phase. They were policy-dependent. By 2015, and around 2011, I started forecasting that we would see this exponential price decline. We had been seeing this exponential price decline in solar, and it would continue.

and a similar thing in batteries. I came from tech, so it was very used to Moore's Law. I was called crazy. Nevertheless, it happened. It happened actually twice as fast as I thought. 2015, we passed the threshold I said what happened around then, which is new solar, new wind, was cheaper in some parts of the world than building a new coal plant or a new gas plant.

By 2020, we started to enter the phase, the third phase, where the cost of power from a new solar farm or a new wind farm in sunny and windy parts of the world is cheaper than the fuel cost of the fuel going into a coal plant or a gas plant. That's their third phase where it's disruptive. It just makes sense even without subsidies, even without the Inflation Reduction Act, even without Europe's incentives, it just makes sense in an increasingly large fraction of the world economically to build renewables or to switch to an electric vehicle because you cut your maintenance costs and your fuel cost so much. It's just plain cheaper. And basically everywhere on Earth, those things will just be

cheaper alternatives by 2030. That's what it means that they're going to win on cost. And this is unlike anything we've seen in the history of physical energy or physical infrastructure. And I'm so interested in the fact that even the most optimistic experts have been surprised by the rate of price declines. You have pointed out that solar has. fallen by a factor of 40 in the last three decades. Wind has fallen, wind energy, the price of it has fallen by a factor of 30 in the last 40 years. Batteries down 40x in 30 years. These are extraordinary numbers. And something like this doesn't happen with something like, you know, fossil fuels, which are commodities, which is sort of fluctuate. They go up and down and up and down. Solar

energy prices are just a straight line down. Help us make sense of this. At a high level, How has this happened? Yeah, so fossil fuels are a commodity. So they suffer supply versus demand dynamics. And what happens is that when you have fossil fuel abundance, when you're overproducing, the price gets low, and the producers all reduce their production. And you also have fields get played out. So you drill a well, and that well produces for a while, but then it dies down.

So you're also competing against depletion. So commodity prices fluctuate. And we look at Oxford had this study that came out with the data from 1880 to 2020, found basically no clear trend in the long-term trend of coal, gas, or oil. Solar batteries, wind power, electric vehicles are technologies. And it's not that they have no fluctuations. There are times you have supply chain challenges or other things that cause for a couple years, maybe three or four years, crisis to stagnate or go up.

But fundamentally, like other technologies, like everything from your television screen to phones, to computers, technology just gets cheaper over time. And so that's really what's going on. They follow this phenomenon called Rights Law. Everyone in tech knows that Moore's Law. Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel coined this phrase that we'd double the number of transistors per unit area every year. 18 months. That turned into an economic law. We would cut the price of computation by half every 18 months. It turns out Moore's laws is a special case, something called a rights law. And rights law is that when you manufacture something in a factory, not build it in the field, and especially if it's a simple,

single part component, even if it's very complex to make, it's a simple, low moving part count component like a chip or like a flat screen TV and you make huge numbers of them every time you double scale, you bring down cost by a certain percent. That's an exponential. And so basically, all technologies follow that, but the technologies that have the smallest number of moving parts and are built in factories like solar panels and batteries or electric vehicles that have 90% fewer moving parts than gas vehicles, those things get cheaper, faster. And so that's what's happening. It's this phenomenon that we found in at least 65 technologies throughout history that's

happening, especially in clean energy. This is where I think a lot of people listening might be experiencing a little bit of cognitive distance because they're hearing us say, oil is a commodity. It's something like gold. but solar energy and wind energy are technologies. They're like flat-screen TVs. The price keeps coming down over time. If you simply knew that fact

and try to map it onto America's energy mix in 2023, you would assume just by knowing those two pieces of information that solar and wind might be dominating in terms of the current energy mix. Instead, solar and wind are both, as I understand it, correct me if I'm wrong, less than 10% of the total energy generation in this country. So if the technology is so magnificent and the price is coming down so historically,

why is the energy share still so low? Well, one thing that Václos-Mil gets right is that energy transitions do take a while. This is physical infrastructure. We build power plants to run for 30 or 40 or 50 years. So you have sunk cost of having built a coal or gas power. plant, and you have inertia. Nevertheless, solar and wind just passed coal generation in the U.S. That's a big deal. And globally, solar and wind were somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of all new electricity capacity generation in 2022. The UK think tank Ember, I know you had Nat Ballard

on the show recently he chaired their recent release two days ago. They projected 2023 with the first year that on a global basis, fossil fuel-powered power generation, mean coal and gas, will shrink because of the rise of renewables. Fossil generation, coal generation has already plunged in the U.S. It's plunged to levels not seen since the 1800s in the U.K., even with the war in Ukraine, we see fossil generation can be very low there. But these things, exponentials grow from a small, base. A solar a few years ago was just 1% of global electricity. Now it's 4%. They've also been, unfortunately, compensating for the decline in nuclear, or stagnation, at least, in nuclear power. So a lot of what's happened with solar and wind growth is that nuclear has been

underperforming. And so solar and wind have made up for a combination of demand growth, people needing new electricity, and nuclear declining over time. But now we're past that point, and we're at the point where solar and wind growth are just at the threshold of just plain driving down fossil generation around the world. This is a race against time, and we are already in a climate crisis. Going back to one of your thesis statements, clean energy will win on cost, but only if we get out of our own way and build it. Why aren't we building clean energy faster?

What are the most important bottlenecks to think of? There are a number of bottlenecks. If you look at, I'll talk about the U.S., but we'll talk about it globally also, look at the U.S., right now we have bottlenecks of getting clean energy hooked up to the grid. There's a thing called interconnection cues. That is the queue, that's the line to get a hookup to grid power in your local area. And those interconnection cues are now longer than three years in different parts.

In fact, one of the largest utilities, one of the largest utility areas in Japan system operators in the U.S. basically put a halt to all new solar and wind projects entering their queue, requesting connection. of the grid because it's just overwhelming for them. That's one issue. A second issue is transmission. People think, like long-range transmission. People think that solar and wind mean you can go off-grid. They certainly help.

Solar and batteries help you going off-grid. But the reality is that solar and wind... And I just want to stop you there, because when you say off-grid, I think some people will get it and some people might not. Just spell out a little bit of what you mean by going pure off-grid. So by off-grid, I mean people having their homes, power just by solar and batteries. The problem with that is you've got to build out enough energy storage to deal with the longest

non-sunny part of the year. So if you're in Arizona, that might be okay. If you're in New York, you'd have to have batteries to last you for potentially months. If you're in Seattle, where I live, you'd have to have batteries to last you for six months. So that's not really economically viable. Solar and all energy power resources are whether or it's, dependent. The Texas ice storms were caused by national gas failures, but solar and wind, you'd say, are probably somewhat more weather dependent than our other energy sources. So every model, every simulation shows that the best way to get the highest amount of renewables on the grid at the lowest cost and the highest reliability for customers is to build thousands and thousands

miles long, high-voltage transmission lines, if you look at the length of power lines China is building, we could literally move solar power from New Mexico, where it's sunny most of the time, to New York, where it's not. In New Mexico, we have a lot more land. To New York, we have a lot less. We could take the great plains that have tremendous wind resources and take power from there to both the east and west coast. But building that land, long-range transmission is a regulatory nightmare. In fact, there's multiple regulatory nightmares. There's regulatory nightmares in building renewables. You have to get permits from state level, county level, federal level. Building wind farms in particular has gotten

really hard in the U.S. But even building solar is getting hard in high population density areas. But then building transmission to get the power where it's needed is even harder than that. We just had the other day a $3 billion transmission project that moves power from Arizona, where there's lots of land, it's easy to build things, to California. It was approved. Fantastic. It took 18 years for them to get regulatory approval because they needed the Federal Bureau of Land Management, every state along the way, every county, and every landowner to all come to terms, that process, we don't have time for that. So clearing that red tape right now, in my opinion, is one of the most vital things that we have to do in order to accelerate the clean energy transition.

So I'm hearing at least three big categories of bottleneck. Number one is local nimbism, that is local areas that make it hard to or outright refuse to build wind farms. That's gotten hard to build solar farms, that's getting harder. That's energy generation. That's where the energy comes from. The energy, as you said, can't just be generated in this new future. It has to be transmitted because parts of the country are much sunnier than others. Parts of the country are much windier than others. We want to power the country coast to coast. But long distance, transmission, that continent-sized grid is really difficult to build without revolutionizing the way that we permit those long-distance transmission lines. So you have local nimbism at the energy generation part number one,

continent-wide transmission number two. Then I also heard you talk a little bit about utility integration, that sometimes the ISO simply refuse to let this energy come online. Let's talk about where this transition is actually happening fastest. And it seems to me, correct me if I'm wrong, that it's happening fastest in Texas. Why is it happening fastest? fastest in Texas. So it might stop happening fastest in Texas, as the Texas legislature has their way. But historically, over the last few years, so early on in the U.S., it happened fastest in places like California and New York that passed bills that had mandates for this much power has to come from renewables. But Texas, currently, up until just now, has been the fastest, A, it's the number one

state for solar and wind generation combined in the U.S. B is the fastest, growth as a solar market in the U.S. And that's happened because Texas has a lot of land, a lot of sun, and easy permitting for building the solar projects or the wind farms, and relatively easy transmission hookups, and an open competitive utility model. Most Americans live in states where they have a regulated monopoly utility. you don't have a choice. I don't have a choice. I live in Washington State in Seattle. I have a utility that owns the wires that come to my house, owns me as a customer. I can't choose somebody else,

and either owns or contracts the generation resources that sell the power to me. I'm a captive audience for them. Texas, very much like most of Europe, has an open competitive market, what we call retail choice, where in Texas, the company that owns the distribution lines, the power lines that come to your house, has to transmit whoever's power you decide to buy from. And so you can decide to buy from any provider who can either build their own generation assets, buy power from somebody else, and then sell it to you. And that, and similarly, it's pretty easy to build a new generation resource, with the new wind farm or solar farm, and sell the power on the wholesale market or directly to

retail customers, homes and businesses. That is a more modern system. Texas, what we call ERCOT, their grid. They're a separate islanded grid from the rest of the U.S. That's a mistake, actually. They have their own flaws. They don't really have a way to ensure sort of backup generation for reliability. But that open competitive market removes some disincentives. for utilities. Because if you're in a region where your monopoly utility owns the power generation and sells you that product, and nobody else can sell you that product, they don't actually have the incentive to bring in cheaper power from a neighboring state or someplace a thousand miles away. They might have better sun and wind. They would rather not do that. They'd rather build more

generation assets themselves and sell you their own power on their own terms. So that monopoly utility model is itself a barrier to progress in the U.S. as well. The Biden administration, obviously, wants to accelerate decarbonization, passed a bunch of laws last year, including the Inflation Reduction Act, which might be the single biggest line item in terms of spending on subsidizing any clean energy transition anywhere in the world. Did anything? in the IRA or anything that's come out of the Biden administration on the legislative side or the regulatory side deal with this utility problem? Not really. They did try to deal with a permitting problem in a separate bill. The IRA had to go through the reconciliation process, so it could only

deal with budgetary matters, not regulatory changes. But to get it passed, Joe Manchin got an agreement from Chuck Schumer that they would pass, that they would bring forward a separate permitting reform bill. That permitting reform bill, unfortunately, did not pass. It did get at least one Republican senator voting for it. I also got one Democratic

defection, Bernie Sanders. It would have made it easier to build fossil infrastructure in the U.S., but it would have made it tremendously easier to build, to permit a new clean energy infrastructure and especially new transmission. So they took a shot at that.

They failed. I hope that we'll get a chance to try that again at some point. But the utility regulation comes down to something that is often much more state by state. Now, FERC, the Federal Electricity Regulatory Commission, is working on some rulemaking process administratively to try to both ease transmission. and they've passed some rules that force even monopoly utilities to do a few things to be a little bit more competitive. Like a few years ago, they passed a rule that forced every utility in the U.S. to treat an energy storage system to let that participate in the wholesale markets, meaning that if you build a battery, you can buy and sell power on the grid.

Things like that that are nibbling away at the edges. but utility reform in the U.S., we had a wave of it of deregulating utilities. Deergulation is a word that people on the left, I'm not liberal. The deregulation is a word that liberals often don't like, but that deregulation of utilities means making utilities compete instead of making them a monopoly, and monopolies are just bad, honestly. If these long-distance transmission lines have to be built across the Midwest, And as I understand it, that is absolutely where they're going to have to be built, among other places.

What does that mean in terms of the political coalitions that are going to have to be built? Because that's a lot of rural Republican areas that we're relying on to make national decarbonization a reality in this country. But it's not clear to me that rural Republican areas care very much about decarbonization in terms of their political priorities. I have not done like a full survey of rural Republican. So I apologize if someone listening is a rural Republican and they really wanted to carbonize the grid. But it doesn't seem to be issue number one for them. How does that figure into the political challenge here? It's really interesting.

And I think there's a mismatch between voters and their elected representatives in many cases. If you look at things like Yale 360 does a survey of people's attitudes on energy. And if you leave out the word climate or decarbonization, and you just ask, what's your favorite energy source? Americans overwhelmingly say it's solar. The number two is wind, and by a distant third, it's coal. Sorry, by a distant third is natural gas, and then coal and nuclear are deep down at the bottom. If you ask Americans, should the U.S. do more to encourage electric vehicles, they say yes. Once you add climate or decarbonization into that, you get more opposition. People like solar because they perceive it as clean.

They perceive it as energy independence. People like electric vehicles because they're slick, because Tesla has reinvented what an EV meant versus where we were 13, 14 years ago. And you see an interesting phenomenon. Congressional districts in the U.S. that have the highest amount of renewable power generation are actually red districts that have lots of wind power.

So that's why in 2015, for instance, a GOP House and Senate passed a five-year extension of the federal solar and wind tax credit and then did a little bit more for wind than solar in years following. Because a lot of there, enough Congress people come from counties where wind power generates income for ranchers and farmers and even solar power generates income. that once you, like, get away from the tribal battle over climate change and just talk about energy, you start to get a little bit more bipartisanship. Now, was it enough? I mean, David Roberts, formerly from Fox, now at volts, would laugh at me for saying this. He'd point out that the Texas legislature just passed a horrible bill for grid resiliency. They say it'll basically build $10 billion of fossil fuel infrastructure that doesn't make a lot of sense. So there's infection of legislatures as well with the tribalism, sort of an anti-renewables stint. But renewables are still

much more popular than climate action. And so if we focus clean energy arguments on clean energy, that better technology, it's cheaper, it's cleaner, it generates jobs. I think we have a better shot of persuading people in these rural. rural, Republican areas, that is a good idea. So to sum up where we are now, the Mez plan is something like step one, overcome nimbism to build as much solar and wind and other renewables as possible, along with advancing battery technology to store the energy that we are generating. Number two, reform permitting so that we can build long-distance transmission lines to carry

that renewable energy across the country so that place. that aren't windy and aren't sunny can still benefit from the energy created by wind and sun and other renewable sources. And then step three, which is kind of an ongoing challenge, win, this is very much easier said than done, win the war of political persuasion, win it in Texas, when it in Republican rural areas, win it in blue states and blue cities that have their own nimbie problems, but find a way to win that war of political persuasion. Maybe I shouldn't even call it a war, but that that tug of political persuasion in order to help people see, and this is something that I think Saul Griffith is very good on, that the

renewable energy picture that we're painting is not the 1970s picture of everyone has to sacrifice. Everyone has to do a little bit less, turn the lights off, dim their sense of a brighter future. No, we are talking about clean energy abundance, which is also sort of clean electricity abundance as well. One word that we haven't mentioned yet that a lot of people want to fold into this picture is nuclear. There are some folks, sometimes called the nuclear bros, who will say that it is a pipe dream to imagine you can get anywhere near 100% renewable or 50% clean energy without nuclear. That's because solar simply takes up too much land. Wind simply takes up too much land. You either get to the promised land with a major buildout of nuclear

or you do not get there at all. That's their case, what say you? Well, let me come back to that. I want to adjust what you brought up with that Saul said. I love Saul Griffith. And he's totally right. We have to win this persuasion, and we're not asking for sacrifice.

But I will say I don't view it as a war. What decades of research on climate attitudes, and attitudes on another highly politicized topic says. And I think Chris Mooney wrote articles about this a decade ago that people have solution aversion. People don't mind solving climate change. They just think that the solution that's being proposed is live a smaller life, have a smaller house, drive less, eat less meat, and so on.

And so to persuade people of a different political view, it is incredibly important to acknowledge their worldview, to understand their values and frame things in their values. And if we frame this transition as about cleaner air and water, everybody loves that, as about a better life for your kids, as about technology and innovation, as about cheaper energy for all of us, as about economic growth and jobs, that is trust. tremendously more successful than to do anything that is about, you have to stop flying, you have to stop eating meat, you have to turn the thermostat down, all of those sort of do-less arguments. So it's a very important point, I think, when trying to politically persuade people. Can you just jump in there because Saul said something really interesting to me. We were talking about, you know, how would you sell clean electric abundance to a Trump voter, a profound Trump voter.

What would you tell them? Now look, maybe you would just allow like the culture war mullet to play out where you let the Tucker Carlson's of the world scream about the culture wars in the front and then secret Congress cleans up, you know, permitting in the back. But if you want to make the direct argument,

and I like the idea of making the direct argument, Saul said, what you say is, imagine, think about what you have to do to power your internal combustion engine today. You have to buy gas. that gas is enriching Iran. It's enriching Saudi Arabia. It's enriching countries that you probably don't like to think about and might not even like in the first place. If you have a solar panel on your roof and you have a battery and you have an electric vehicle, then your house and your

car and your neighbor's house and your neighbor's car is being powered by your own neighborhood. You are enriching your own neighborhood. That's really keeping it domestic. That's making America great again. America powering America, not America relying on some country that whatever you might not like. And so I thought there was, even if it is kind of co-opting the xenophobia of people who I don't exactly share political priorities with, an interesting way of reframing this for someone who might have a particular aversion to the solutionism you're talking about. I think that framing of energy independence is a really good one, actually. I think if you look at what's happening in Europe right now, Europe's always been a leader in climate action, but the war in Ukraine is accelerating Europe's

energy transition because now they see getting off of natural gas as an issue of energy security. And so I think that's a really good one. But look, I know lots of Trump voters. My family live in a rural county in the Midwest. I know they're friends. They're dear people to me. I love them. We disagree politically.

Guess what? most of them really love solar power and electric vehicles, they have longer driving distances. They think it's cool. They think it's cool because it's cheaper. Nobody likes a coal plant in their backyard. Nobody likes when they see emissions from a smokestack, when they see smog. So I don't think it's actually that hard if we can just skip the politicization parts. When I talk to a Republican, I don't say climate change. One of the seminal moments in my life was giving a talk at a hedge fund conference, and I'd been giving talks about what we had to do for climate action. I was like, oh my God, I have to change this. I just removed climate change from the talk and just talked about the economics of clean energy

and didn't mention climate to the last slide and said, whether you like it or not, other people believe in climate change, and policy is going to get more aggressive too. But the fundamental message was, this is cleaner, cheaper, better, and that's what's going to win. And I think that, plus the energy independence argument that you're making and so on, and clean air and clean water, matter of Republicans also. Those are the things that I think persuade people across the aisle. I'm glad we went on that little cul-de-sac to bring it back to nuclear and just to remind the question, there just are a lot of people who say,

you know, Mez, beautiful dream of wind turbines and solar farms across America, it takes up too much space. It's terrible for nature. You're going to have to wipe out all these species in order to colonize all of that land to put solar panels on it. We need nuclear as a part of this vision. How much do you think nuclear needs to play a part in the future that you're imagining? So I'm a believer that we should have more tools in our toolkit that we might need. We should have more arrows in our quiver than we might need. And so I think let's go full

steam ahead on nuclear R&D. Let's streamline the NRC's regulatory process for nuclear. But I think the statement that you just related is overstated. If you look at the U.S., if we wanted to power all electricity in the U.S. by solar, we take about 1% of U.S. land area. That's equivalent. So we take about 30% of U.S. land area, a little bit more than that for agriculture, most of which is grazing land. We actually now we know we can superimpose solar on agricultural areas, animals like it, some crops like it. Wind farms take up a large amount of space. in indirect space, but the actual footprint of the wind powers themselves is small, and wind farms often coexist with grazing and farming. And if we had transmission, we could within places like

the Great Plains that have the lowest population densities. And just to be clear, when you say it coexist, you're basically saying there are a bunch of farms in America that also have wind turbines on them. So the goats and the cows are just intermingling around the huge turbine itself. Wind farm owners pay a few hundred million dollars a year to farmers and ranchers for lease rights to put wind farms, wind towers on their farms. And the farming keeps on happening and the grazing keeps on happening right up to the wind turbine. These things are heavily coexisting. And with more transmission, we could put wind turbines in even lower population density areas where they're even further away from homes. so on. Plus, we have offshore wind coming. Liberals are a little bit in the way of that with the

Jones Act that prevents us from using foreign ships to build offshore wind. We have floating offshore wind coming that can be far enough offshore that even the Kennedies can't see it from Cape Cod. We'll get rid of some more NIMBY. So we have a bunch of options. But nuclear is one of the things we should be trying to make work. When I look at, you know, how do we get? the last 10, 20, 30 percent of electricity. We know that we can get renewables up to some large fraction of electricity on the grid. Maybe it's 50 percent. Maybe it's 60. Maybe it's 70. Depends where you're at. In Arizona, you can get further than you can in New York for a variety of reasons. To get to the rest, the things we can do, those continent scale grids are actually the cheapest

and best option, overbuilding renewables for seasonality. Energy storage is getting better and better. We have eyesight on ultra-long duration energy storage because for weeks of power. But then we have what Jesse Jenkins and Princeton would call clean firm power, meaning compact power sources that are not dependent upon weather, that don't have much footprint and don't have a weather dependency. That can be nuclear. There's possibly a renaissance coming with what we call small modular nuclear reactors. Welcome back to why they're important. It could be next generation geothermal. We have a number of startups working on geothermal energy

that works not just near volcanoes and hot springs, but works anywhere on Earth. You can tunnel deeper into the crust to get magma or have fluids that are more efficient in pulling heat back up. We have a variety of other technologies, some of them so crazy, like space-based solar we're going to talk about. The problem with nuclear to date is that, that while the cost of solar and wind and batteries have been plunging exponentially,

the cost of building a new nuclear reactor has risen over time. The average cost overrun of a solar farm is basically zero. The average cost overrun of a nuclear power plant built in the last few decades is something like 108%. Right? And that's a time overrun, too. Nuclear power doesn't have a learning rate. Things that get, that have rights law,

especially cheaper, are things you build in factories that have a low part count and especially a low moving part count. Nuclear reactors are built like skyscrapers. They're stick built. They're assembled in the field and they're mega projects. The most expensive building on Earth, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai cost $1.5 billion. The cheapest nuclear reactor you could possibly imagine building in the U.S.

would cost you $8 billion. dollars. And guess what? The bigger the project is, when it's a project like that, the higher a percent overrun it tends to have. So I want to believe in nuclear, but I need to see the industry actually do stuff that brings that cost down. Now, the current hope is what we call small modular nuclear reactors. That phrase has gotten abused, and a lot of things people call small modular are not what I would consider that. But what it means to me is something that you build in a factory, the size of a shipping container, you move to site and you just plug it in and it runs. And the very first of those by a company called New Scale got design approval in the last several months. They don't

have their first construction approval. I wrote a book in 2011 where I was optimistic about them. It's taken 12 years longer than I thought or at least five or six longer than I thought to get to this point. They'll probably be expensive at the beginning. But if we get enough of them, ordered, we might see that factory manufacturing process drop and drop and cost to the point that they're economically feasible. So I don't know. I'm not sure if that'll happen or not, but I've got fingers crossed for it. You mentioned a few technologies that are on the frontier of possibility. Small modular reactors might be coming online. There might be some breakthroughs in geothermal, basically allowing us to dig so deep down into the earth that we could,

could theoretically turn any part of the United States into the equivalent of Iceland, which runs extraordinarily on geothermal. So it's kind of like, you know, you dig straight down and it's like finding a nuclear reactor underground. Aha, here we go. In fact, it is. Half of that heat produced by the Earth's crust is actually a nuclear asteroid decay. I didn't even realize that.

I was kind of making it up as I went along, but it's nice to know that sometimes I stumble into a true statement. what's the most important thing we need that we haven't invented yet? Like allowing yourself to dream a little big, because everything we've talked about so far, just but everything we've talked about so far, the declining cost of wind and solar and batteries, this is all real.

What's not real that would just be so fantastic to have? So look, I'll try to say this by answering the big picture. If you look at where carbon emissions around the globe come from, I'll simplify. That's called four quarters. one quarter of electricity. That's where we're making the most progress. A second quarter is transport. It's less than a quarter. Ground transport, electric vehicles are going to win. We don't have a solution for ships or planes yet. I think Nat Ballard said electrofuels, drop-in fuels. We can burn an existing airplane engines, existing ship engines. That's important.

Another quarter is industrial emissions and building heat. So making steel, making cement. We're working on that. But probably the hardest one in my mind, Fortease not really growing, but it could, is the emissions from agriculture, forestry, and land use change. The IPCC calls AFOLU. That basically means mostly that is cattle. And the deforestation caused either to graze cattle or to grow the crops that we feed the cattle. But it's a hodgepodge of other things. It's manure decompose. on fields. It's the application of fertilizer that then decomposes synthetic fertilizer that decomposes into nitrous oxide, a very, very powerful greenhouse gas. So if I look at, I think I said this in a tech crunch article years ago, cows scare me more than cars. And so I think I'm with Nat on electrofuels being a huge one, but we're making progress on that. Industrial decarbonization is a really big one. We're making some progress on that. But I think all of those things, I said they're fungible commodities. People like to just flip on the switch, buy a product,

get in a vehicle. They don't care how it was made where it came from for the most part. But food is different. Food is highly, highly, highly cultural. A lot of investors, deep tech investors from Vinod Coastalide, Steve Jervinson, to a whole bunch of people that have been in this field for a long time, have invested in alternative proteins, whether they're plant-based, microorganism-based, or fermentation-based, what we call cellular agriculture or cultured meat.

I'd love to invest in that, but I'm actually somewhat skeptical. I think that cultural adoption of new foods that are not what we were raised, with is actually a very, very long slow process. And I think the economics of some of these things like actually using beef cells in bioreactors to make artificial beef is actually really, really, really hard. And it's not proven that it's going to drop exponentially. And so I think we have to find a way to make traditional on-field agriculture, not vertical farms, but

agriculture out in the open on farms tremendously more productive. We've got to grow more food per acre and find ways to chop down or reduce the emissions from all the related stuff like fertilizer and manure and use regulation to protect our forests and peatlands and so on globally to get that chunk of emissions under control and shrink it. Ms. Thank you so much. This was like, I mean, not even like a college lecture. This was like a college course. I so appreciate the extraordinary density of information and the honesty that some of these problems are in the process of being solved and some of them are really big.

And we need new big ideas to match their scale. Thank you so much for doing this, man. I appreciate it. Absolutely my pleasure. Great to see you. Talking again soon. That was our interview with Rames Nam. Next up, we have legendary venture capitalist Vinod Kostla talking about the future

of clean energy tech we don't have yet. I think as Bill Gates once said, about half the technology that we're going to need to decarbonize the economy fully, we haven't yet invented. This second part of the interview is about those uninvented challenges.

Here's Vinod. Vinod Koslo, welcome to the show. Great to be here. Great to be here. I always love talking about climate. Well, and you've been in the climate space for a long time. And I actually wanted to get your perspective first on a little bit of history in what feels like a very molten moment for this domain of technology. So when most people think of Silicon Valley, I think most people think about software,

consumer tech, apps, social media, maybe enterprise tech, a bit of fintech payments. There are a few clean energy standouts like Tesla. But do you agree with the premise that climate tech, has been a harder nut to crack than software. And if you do agree with the premise, why do you think that's been the case? Well, first, the set of investments in Clean Tech 1.0 were actually more successful than the narrative goes that it was a failure. If you invested in Tesla,

it didn't matter what else you failed at. If you invested in Impossible early, it didn't matter what you failed at. If you invested in quantum scape early, it didn't matter what else you failed at. So my view is there was a set of good solid sound investments early. They took much longer than anybody anticipated, including myself, to mature. And part of it was there was investments in climate. then there was a phase of getting enamored and unreasonable evaluations.

And you might remember that about other recent cycles in consumer and fintech and others. Greed kicked in. People wanted to get on the bus, invested at high valuations. And then when others stopped investing, there was a case of musical chairs, not enough chairs, for all the startups and not enough funding for all the startups. So that was the narrative. But people who sustained through that, and people got off the bus,

took their losses. We took a very different approach. We stayed patient. Because of that, we have companies like quantum scale. You know, no matter what the valuation is now, whether stock is up or down, we have a huge return. companies like impossible foods.

No matter what the valuation is, we have a huge return because it was single-digit millions free money valuation. And so whether it's single-digit billions or multiples of that, it doesn't really matter. So people who sustain through the tough times

and it did take triage and careful planning of reserve funding and because funding outside became less available, they did fine. In all of venture capital, whether it's climate or others, it's a hits business. You get one or two hits in a fund out of 40 investments. The fund does well.

If you don't get them, it does poorly. So I do think funds that stayed with it did well. It took much longer. And the technologies are much harder to not only develop, but deployment is much harder. That's where I want to drill down a little bit further. And just to catch up some listeners, you mentioned Tesla, Impossible and QuantumScape. Tesla, everyone knows that's EVs, Impossible, like Impossible Burgers, that's food.

And QuantumScape is a battery manufacturing company. I want to drill down on this question of, you know, yes, Impossible and QuantumScape might have had huge returns for Kostla, but they're not necessarily the kind of brand names of, say, like, you know, social media or some of these B2B or FinTech companies that lots of people know, whether, you know, Venmo or Snap or Facebook. And I wonder whether, you know, when I look at this space, I think, well, you know, the physical world is more regulated. And maybe atoms are harder than bits. And maybe there is a deployment challenge in climate tech where you're dealing with heavy equipment, you're dealing with, you know, physical objects that is not the same as it is for

software, where you're basically talking about an infinitely scalable piece of code. Do you agree here that there are just differences in scaling technology that is hardware versus software? Well, let me do a better analogy. So, yes, physical bits are harder, but longer lasting. You don't go in and out of fashion like in software you can. You know, compared I can catch you just as easily. The other thing I want to point out is these are much larger market. So quantum scale.

You know, $100 billion of risk. revenue would be a very small share of the battery market. $100 billion of automotive revenue for Tesla is a very small share of that market. Lanza Tech, one of the early Gen 1 opportunities, sustainable aviation fuels, $100 billion would be a small piece of the market. And that's another success story. So I could repeat success story after success story, or going after market. it's much larger than Google, but will take much longer to establish.

So like I said, this is a molten moment for Queen Tech, and there's been incredible developments we've heard about in solar and wind and battery technology. I want to talk about fusion technology. You've made a bet on the company Commonwealth Fusion. Tell me about why you made that bet. Well, I met Bob Mumgard at Commonwealth Fusion. when he was a senior fellow at the MIT Plasma Fusion Lab, and he started talking, and he wanted to start a company, but there was no business plan per se. And it seemed like in a classic Nassim Thalib,

consequences of failure was you lose $100 million or $200 million. The consequences was success was trillion-dollar markets. that seemed like a very asymmetric kind of payoff. You lose one time to your money, you can make a thousand times your money. That it was worth taking those risks, and it was hugely contributing to one of the largest problems on the planet, climate change, and one of the largest markets, energy. So it was very much, it consists. consequences of failure for small, the consequences of success were really, really consequential

for humanity and financial markets. Yeah, can you take a step back and actually explain, you know, I know your passion about fusion technology. What is fusion? How is it different from what most people think of as nuclear power, which is fission technology? What is the, what is the promise here? Here's the promise. In fission, you have, have fuel, which is radioactive. You need to refine it, put it in, your waste is radioactive. Some of the technologies used in fission are not only bad input, bad output, but also have huge consequences in nuclear proliferation, in weapons, nuclear bombs, and all that.

So lots of upside in fission, but lots of downside. Fusion only has upside. So fission is breaking a heavy atom like uranium into parts. Fusion is combining simple things like dutriam, which is isotope of hydrogen and tritium together, fuse them together, as fusion implies, and you get energy out of that. No waste products. A year's worth of supply could fit in your bedroom. or your office,

of fuel supply. So very small amounts of fuel, very clean, no risk of nuclear proliferation, no nuclear waste to speak off. And so fusion is likely regulated compared to fission. Because the risks are small.

The production method is exactly the opposite, combining molecules, splitting a molecule into parts. And so it is not even regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It's more like a linear accelerator

in your nuclear medicine facility at your hospital if it has such a facility. So, lightly regulated, very easy to deploy. And more importantly, it can be compatible

with today's energy infrastructure. So you could build power plants with fusion, much simpler to build what I call fusion boiler. Just build a boiler that replaces your coal boiler at an existing power plant. You don't need new permits, new plant sites, new grid connections, new turbines. You just generate steam like your coal boiler does,

your natural gas boiler does. Replace the boiler, feed it into turbines. and voila, you've suddenly converted every power plant in this country. And I believe that will be entirely possible within the early 2040s to replace every coal and natural gas plant in this country and replace their boiler with renewable power from fusion. Very exciting vision. That would represent one of the most important energy breakthroughs

in the history of humanity. You know, currently, fusion supplies 0.0% of America and the world's energy needs. So let's talk about that journey from 2023 to the 2040s. What don't we have? What are the key breakthroughs that we still need to make fusion a viable energy source on a large scale? So today, we haven't proven fusion works, which means energy output from a fusion reaction is higher than the energy you need to put in.

That's called the Q factor in QEQ greater than 1. That is more energy out than inside in. It's a critical milestone. Now, we are well on our way, I believe, of proving it. A year or two, this way or that, but I'm almost convinced in the 20s, multiple parties will be able to demonstrate Q greater than 1 and a few Commonwealth being among the leaders in fusion

will be able to demonstrate it with technologies that directly produce power plants, not sort of a demonstration, but production technologies or pre-production technologies. So nothing will be designed in a way that can't be scaled immediately. So a timeline would be, you prove it by 2025, 26, Helians claiming it can do it sooner and be great for humanity if they did. But in the 20s, we will demonstrate fusion, which is cube greater than one, more energy out than

in. Hopefully with production technology, we'll build the first power plants in the early 30s and then we'll start to scale them. And if you take my strategy, if you build your fusion reactors to be compatible with coal boilers, not coal power plants. So they don't replace coal power plants. And we can come back to the political dynamics of that in a minute. You're in a very good shape.

You're just building boilers. They happen to be fusion boilers. And I'll tell you a story. In the Second World War, the 10 years before we had built something like 5 or less than 10 Liberty War, ships in the 10 years before the Second World War. In the five years, post-the-war starting, we got committed to building Liberty warships and starting at the San Ramon Ironworks, not far from Silicon Valley, here in north of

San Francisco, we built 5,000 warships in five years because we were committed to it. I contend a fusion boiler will be simpler than a Liberty warship and much smaller in size. And so can we build by the early 40s once we have the production technologies scaled up a thousand a year? Absolutely. We could replace every coal and natural gas power plant in this country with a future oil with a fusion boiler in less than five years, is my belief. and that is my hope for humanity and vision for the future of fusion. There's a question on the tip of my tongue.

Oh, it's very optimistic. I brought you on for the optimism. So you're giving me what I wanted. The question of the tip of my tongue is a little bit hard to express, but I hope I get it in my first go. You're optimistic that this breakthrough moment in fusion where the experiment generates more energy

than it consumes is coming sometime in the next few years. But as you said, even the scientific experiment that this technology is based on has never actually been successfully held ever. What makes you optimistic? What are you seeing? What kind of proxies or clues are you or people like Sam Altman? And again, you guys have Commonwealth. He's invested in Helion. What are you seeing that makes you think this is possible? The following things. First, for the last 50 years, the best talent didn't go into nuclear technology's vision of fusion. That's changing rapidly.

The best minds, the best PhDs at MIT and Caltech and Stanford want to work on really impactful and exciting problems. Much more capital is going into very diverse experimentation. If you do a plan for something like an ITAR reactor, which is a global effort, that's a 50-year plan. Nobody in their right minds should do a project that's 50 years long. Commonwealth Fusion in three years demonstrated a 20 Tesla magnet, which was the single largest risk to making fusion reactors not only possible, but economic. in three years. So they did what took ITAR 30 years to do in three years, and they have a stronger, better magnet for the first time.

And we set our minds on some number less than $100 million, much less than $100 million, proving we can build the most critical component, which is the fusion magnet. Now it's building the reactor. And I visited the site, a construction facility. the building is almost complete in Devon's Massachusetts. I was there two weeks ago. Very, very exciting for me to see it come together in a way where I totally believe manufacturing will be possible relatively soon thereafter.

So what's different? The people are different. The experiments are much more modular and shorter. They will prove fusion 10 times faster from magnet to fusion. improving than ITAR clients. Maybe it's five times faster. So very compressed timelines, very entrepreneurial efforts, not government efforts, long-term government efforts. So that's exciting. But maybe even more exciting. I have a particular point of view. Sam has a different point of view. And I respect his opinion a lot. There's very few things Sam does that I call

And so I'm presuming Hylian is a serious credible effort. And there's probably half a dozen others that I would say credible efforts in the U.S. alone, not counting all the foreign efforts. Those are really, really important. So diversity of efforts increase the probability of success that one of them will be successful and transformed energy for the humanity in a very, very significant way. very likely. At this point, I'd say it's much more likely than not, that we will have fusion power plant. Fusion proven in the 2020s, power plant in the 2030s, and massive scaling in the 2040s. Last question on fusion. If this is still speculative, why talk about it? Why not just say, well, we've got fission technology. We've got OG nuclear reactor technology. Let's just stick with that.

My view is even if I got a new reactor design, getting a permit to build it near San Francisco would be 10 or 15 years just to get through the public hearings because it's nuclear fission. Fusion won't have that barrier. In fact, the facility in Devons really is right next to a community and nobody cares. The biggest problem we've had is when they invited all the townspeople to have a joint get to know each other, there was a traffic jam for the first time in Devons. But other than that,

there's no problems at all. So, sighting will be accelerated by 10 to 15 years relative to Fission or a coal plan for that matter. So, accelerated, permitting, simple, safe,

and of course, cheap power. I want to transition now from Fusion, which is this brilliant, sci-fi, futuristic technology that currently doesn't exist anywhere in the world, but might someday be the most important technology that we come up with, to something that's the opposite in every single way, and that is cement. Cement is boring. Concrete is boring to most people. It is boring, in part because it's so ubiquitous. Concrete is the most used material in the world after water. And it is an incredibly energy-intensive

manufacturing process. Talk to me a little bit about why you find cement interesting and what you've invested in to help green, so to speak, green in quotations as a verb, the process of making cement and concrete. So let me start with the story. In the Second World War, the U.S. needed to fly planes to China. They took old skeletons of calcium carbonate out from under the ocean, dred them out, laid them out, crushed them out, and they reset as cement that was air strips airplanes could land on. That is what cement is. Calcium carbonate going from one form to another or more complex chemicals, including silicates and a few other things. But essentially you take limestone, which is rock, drive off the carbon dioxide by heating it to a thousand degrees or higher. and taking the line, which is calcium oxide, and essentially recarbonating it into carbonates.

But you're producing the one using a lot of energy to heat up rock and gigatons of rock and driving a lot of carbon dioxide into there. If you could capture that carbon dioxide and put it back in the cement as carbonates, you've done two things. Increased the production capacity of the plant, reduce the cost per ton of cement, and produced a lower carbon cement. And if you start to replace the heating in the kilns

that heat the limestone up, you've then reduced the other half of carbon dioxide production from energy, whatever is used to produce heat. So two parts of it. One is the carbon dioxide you drive off limestone, and the other is the heating off the kill. This power plant in Redding, California,

this year will demonstrate that we can produce, capture the carbon dioxide and put it back in, and produce coordinates that behaves like semi. Sets the same, sets as fast, set says strong, has similar characteristics. so it can be used to build your freeways or your house. So we'll be doing that.

Then the second phase becomes replacing the kiln with either electricians or other renewable sources of energy for heat. And we have companies doing that too. And so that'll be phase two to go from a 50% reduction in carbon footprint to much lower. But there's something really, really optimistic about this. we are not doing what some others are doing, trying to bubble carbon dioxide through cement to get it captured, which is a niche market.

You can't do it everywhere. Or using some other materials like silicates and others, and I won't go into the detail. There are niche approaches that do a little bit. This is a scalable approach that does a lot. At existing cement plants. So existing cement producers will become your friends, not your enemies, because you're replacing that. By the way, same story in fusion.

I gave you a story of replacing existing coal plants, extending their life, making their owners feel better, and your friends, not your enemies. That's the politics. You want to upgrade existing infrastructure. It's much, much cheaper than any expert would say the energy transition costs, because you are upgrading existing plants, you're simplifying the politics because those facility owners because become your friends, whether it's cement or coal power plants, and they become your boosters. So timelines are much, much shorter. Permitting is simpler. You don't have to have the CAPEX to build all these plants. So these silly numbers you hear about trillions and trillions

of dollars, it'll have incrementally and will happen because this is economic to do with high rates of return on the capital-needed property. So that's why I'm optimistic about cement and fusion. It does seem like a thesis of yours that I'm connecting across all these categories is you're thinking about deployment problems that are downstream from solving the scientific problem. So you think if we solve fusion, how do we take advantage of existing coal plants? if we solve the clean cement problem, how do we take advantage of existing cement plants? If we have to decarbonize the problem of dirty aircraft fuels,

how do we find a way to do that with the existing fleet of aircraft that exists without having to overhaul everything? So it seems like one of your feces that's operating here on the entire climate space is how do we find a way to be both radical in our sort of scientific approach, in our optimism, while realistic about the fact that we can, We can't simply wave a wand and just have the entire sort of cap-x expenditure of all these places, you know, whether it's, you know, industrial development or aircraft, we can just wave a wand and have it all

disappear. We have to use what's already built. Is that a purposeful thesis that you're applying across these categories? So, yes, we are thinking of scaling at very large scales. And I find funded's reports on scaling, stupid. because they're not seeing innovation. They're extending technologies from the past. If you scale power, solar power, what happens?

Well, I'm thinking about it differently. How long does it take to build 5,000 nuclear plants? Well, I'm thinking about it differently. You don't have to build new plants. You don't need 15 years to permit each plant. Land use, critical. Resource use, critical. So we do look at that.

And then the capital flows have to have high rates of return for capital to flood in. And if I can prove the rates of return, then capital's not an issue. Last question. What do you say to skeptics who say, you're just making stuff up? Green cement, fusion, none of this stuff exists. Why pay attention to it? First, I would say skeptics never did them possible. You have to be optimistic.

But this idea that things haven't been proven so they won't happen is what experts and pundits do. That's not what doers do. Doers go do shit. Sorry for the word. And they get things done. So take AGI. Two years ago, people said impossible. This won't work.

Scaling large language models won't work. Suddenly, chat. GPD goes six times power, five times faster to 100 million users than TikTok. So it doesn't, it's not proven until it's proven is sort of my view. And I look at the process steps along the way of making something happen. We invested in Open AI four or five years ago. And we expected a sequence of steps that were relatively predictable. Exactly when this kiddie-hawk moment was for AGI or AI, one couldn't predict, but didn't need to.

We knew it would come and the consequences would be really, really consequential. A hundred million users in 60 days. It's just unthinkable. People would say it would never happen again. TikTok was more like a year or just under a year to a hundred million. user. Well, it happened. I would suggest all the process steps to fusion are on this path of a critic health moment like AGI, AI just proved to us. And so that's what makes me optimistic. It's not just irrational optimism. That is all the time we have. Vinodokosa, thank you so much.

Great. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening. Plain English is produced by Devin Manzi. If you like the show, please go to Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Give us a five-star rating. Leave a review. And don't forget to check out our TikTok at Plain English underscore. That's at Plain English underscore on TikTok.