You have to be
You have to be able to generate usable energy without greenhouse gas emissions and you have to be able to do it cheaply if you want people to choose that approach. Ramez Naam
Quotes for All
You have to be able to generate usable energy without greenhouse gas emissions and you have to be able to do it cheaply if you want people to choose that approach. Ramez Naam
Doom yourself to horrific climate change by burning all that carbon and releasing all that CO2. Or power down society, reducing total energy usage around the planet. One leads to ecological collapse. The other is a reversion, in many ways, to poverty. Ramez Naam
We have climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions, mostly from human power and transportation infrastructure. At the same time, we have 2 billion people who live in energy poverty. Ramez Naam
Unfortunately, in the environment, I don’t see as much willingness to invest heavily in R&D as I do in consumer technology. And that’s a pity. Ramez Naam
We don’t have good global policies in place for climate. Ramez Naam
Just like you could dump oil into the Cuyahoga in the 60s and let someone else foot the bill, today you can pump CO2 into the atmosphere and let the whole world foot the bill. Ramez Naam
Often we need to use policy to level the playing field, or to be sure that a technology is managed in a responsible way. Ramez Naam
You have to be willing to spend an awful lot in that R&D phase before you see the benefits. When you look at the companies that have really won customers over in technology – say, Apple and Google – you find that they spend billions of dollars on R&D each year, often spending that much … Read more
Ozone and climate are global issues, and it’s hard to find a way in which the benefits of shutting down carbon emissions are going to pay for themselves for any given power-plant, say. Ramez Naam
I think the environmental movement is now so large and diverse that it’s hard to talk of it as a single entity. Ramez Naam