Things I Learned from Five Years in Climate Tech
Good analysis of the entrepreneurship in the energy sector. I might email him about this contradiction:<p><i>1. Consumers don’t care about energy</i><p>versus:<p><i>I don’t believe that we’ll get where we need to go without a global price on carbon. This is why I volunteer with the Citizens’ Climate Lobby to build political will for a national carbon fee and dividend policy in the US</i><p>Someone pointed out to me around 15 years ago that &quot;green&quot; is terrible branding for environmentalism.<p>Taxing carbon makes living more expensive for people. Most people on the margin will reject anything that makes energy more expensive for them. Dyslexic philosopher George W. Bush once said, &quot;Fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me—you can&#x27;t get fooled again.&quot;<p>People don&#x27;t trust scientists, they trust engineers, because engineers own up to their mistakes and usually make a second-generation product that&#x27;s better than the first edition, whereas &#x27;science advances one funeral at a time&#x27; (the standard paraphrase of Max Planck).<p>The vast majority of people absolutely 100% <i>do not care</i> about their carbon output. They care about their wallets and quality of life. Advocating for carbon taxes is an exercise in futility, encouraged by artificial fear. IMHO, climate alarmism is propagated by people with good intentions and incomplete analysis of reconstructed data. Scientists have only recently put temperature sensors on the Juan de Fuca volcanic ridge, there&#x27;s no sensors on the vast majority of the ocean ridges, and only in the last... ~40 years have they started to put fleets of automated temperature buoys into the oceans... We&#x27;ve had a mild winter where I live, but Baghdad Iraq had atypical snowfall this month [0].<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usatoday.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;news&#x2F;world&#x2F;2020&#x2F;02&#x2F;11&#x2F;baghdad-iraq-snow-winter-storm&#x2F;4722838002&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usatoday.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;news&#x2F;world&#x2F;2020&#x2F;02&#x2F;11&#x2F;baghdad...</a><p><i>But I feel more and more that we’re approaching the point at which technology has gone about as far as it can within the confines of a 20th century policy regime.</i><p>The 20th century brought us the electric utility model, which encouraged the economy to develop to use as much energy as possible.<p>Humanity&#x27;s best hope is not figuring out how to de-carbonize the economy, but to finish the Book of Physics and figure out where all the energy is hiding. Nikola Tesla promised us it&#x27;s out there. 21st Century physics is tiptoeing towards an answer.