Episode 225: Alex Trembath, Breakthrough Institute
Today’s guest is Alex Trembath, Deputy Director at the Breakthrough Institute.
The Breakthrough Institute is a global research center that identifies and promotes technological solutions to environmental and human development challenges. Their vision is of a world that is good for both people and nature, and they believe that human prosperity and an ecologically vibrant planet are possible at the same time. They have an eco-modernist perspective and embrace technological innovation without sacrifice.
In this episode, Jason and Alex discuss eco-modernism, the work at the Breakthrough Institute, Alex's views on the nature of the climate problem and what some environmentalists get wrong in his opinion. They also talk about potential solutions, the role of innovation, the role of policy, how urgent this challenge is and some of the best ways to address it.
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Episode recorded on August 8, 2022.
In today's episode, we cover:
[5:38] An overview of Breakthrough Institute and their focus on technological solutions to environmental problems
[7:18] Alex's climate journey and early ideological frictions with Breakthrough
[9:22] Origins of Breakthrough
[12:48] Alex's views on the right vs wrong way to think about the problem of climate change
[17:44] Dealing with climate anxiety
[25:26] Why different groups of people can look at the same data and have drastically different conclusions about the level of urgency required to address climate change
[28:02] GDP as a measure of human well-being
[31:01] Ways of decoupling emissions from economic growth
[33:49] Capitalism, colonialism, and mixed economies around the world
[39:00] Policy tools Breakthrough pursues to accelerate decarbonization
[43:42] Problems with net-zero pledges and voluntary offsets from big companies
[45:54] The role of individual behaviors and eco-modernist virtue signaling
[48:15] The role of government
[54:00] What drives Alex in his work
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Jason Jacobs (00:00:00):
Hey everyone, Jason, here. I am the My Climate Journey show host. Before we get going, I wanted to take a minute and tell you about the My Climate Journey, or MCJ as we call it, membership option. Membership came to be because there were a bunch of people that were listening to the show that weren't just looking for education, but they were longing for a peer group as well. So we set up a Slack community for those people that's now mushroomed into more than 1,300 members. There is an application to become a member. It's not an exclusive thing. There's four criteria we screen for, determination to tackle the problem of climate change, ambition to work on the most impactful solution areas, optimism that we can make a dent and we're not wasting our time for trying, and a collaborative spirit. Beyond that, the more diversity, the better. There's a bunch of great things that have come out of that community, a number of founding teams that have met in there, a number of nonprofits that have been established, a bunch of hiring that's been done, a bunch of companies that have raised capital in there, a bunch of funds that have gotten limited partners or investors for their funds in there, as well as a bunch of events and programming by members and for members, and some open source projects that are getting actively worked on that hatched in there as well. At any rate, if you want to learn more, you can go to myclimatejourney.co, the website and click the become a member tab at the top. Enjoy the show.
Jason Jacobs (00:01:34):
Hello everyone. This is Jason Jacobs, and welcome to My Climate Journey. This show follows my journey to interview a wide range of guests to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and try to figure out how people like you and I can help.
Jason Jacobs (00:01:56):
Today's guest is Alex Trembath, deputy director at the Breakthrough Institute. The Breakthrough Institute is a global research center that identifies and promotes technological solutions to environmental and human development challenges. Their vision is of a world that is good for both people and nature, and they believe that human prosperity and an ecologically vibrant planet are possible at the same time.
Jason Jacobs (00:02:20):
Now, Alex is an old friend. I first met him, I think it was at this conference at the University of Michigan, pre COVID, and we bonded there. And then I went to a Breakthrough Dialogues event that they put on every year, which was really good.
Jason Jacobs (00:02:35):
And what's interesting about them is that they have this eco-modernist perspective and set of ideals where they really embrace technological innovation and they don't embrace sacrifice. But they surround themselves with a diversity of experts that also have a diverse set of viewpoints, and not just people that share their views of the world, which I really respect.
Jason Jacobs (00:03:00):
At any rate, we have a long form discussion in this episode about Alex's journey, about eco-modernism, about the work at the Breakthrough Institute, about Alex's views on the nature of the climate problem and what some environmentalists get wrong in his view. And we also talk about potential solutions, the role of innovation, the role of policy, the role of activism, how urgent this challenge is and what some of the best ways are to address it. And of course, what some of the blockers are and what we could be doing to move faster and more effectively. I hope you enjoy it.
Jason Jacobs (00:03:33):
Alex, welcome to the show.
Alex Trembath (00:03:35):
Thank you so much for having me, Jason.
Jason Jacobs (00:03:37):
Well, thanks for coming. It's funny, we were catching up a little bit before we hit record and I think we met, it was at that University of Michigan event a couple years ago, or maybe it was three years ago at this point, but it was pretty early in my journey. And I remember that you did the November Project, which most people probably don't know, but if you are runner and like running with tribes of crazy people, then that's an organization that does great work. So we bonded over that and you had me at one of your events, I think it's the Breakthrough Dialogues it's called. So I've kept tabs from a distance, but it hit me that you'd never been on the show. So I'm so grateful that you took the time and just really excited to dig in since we've never had a long form discussion in this way.
Alex Trembath (00:04:23):
Thanks again for having me, Jason. A, it has been a few years since we've met and I've really enjoyed following your podcast in the interim. It's been a particularly long few years since you and I met at that University of Michigan event on advanced nuclear innovation in Ann Arbor a few years ago. In my other life, I lead these free group workouts by Lake Merritt in Oakland, California with this organization called the November Project. But most of my time is spent here at the Breakthrough Institute, working on technological solutions to environmental problems. So you and I had a couple things to bond over and it's a real pleasure to reconnect here.
Jason Jacobs (00:04:59):
Yeah, definitely. And I come from the technology and innovation world, which are loaded worlds in the climate world. I certainly don't believe that they're the only thing we need, I just believe that they're a thing we need. And actually, when I started my journey, I was so worried that it wasn't a thing we need, that I started by learning about everything that wasn't technology and innovation. It only came back once I developed more conviction that actually it was a meaningful lever. But it seems like at the Breakthrough Technology Institute, that technological innovation is your sole focus, or maybe talk a little bit about that.
Alex Trembath (00:05:38):
Breakthrough Institute focuses on technological solutions to environmental problems. I would say that the technological solutions to problems like climate change are our primary focus. If you had to distinguish technological solutions from political solutions, from solutions relying on personal behavior, we would certainly emphasize the technological. The low carbon energy technologies, the innovative low-carbon practices in agriculture, the ways that we can transform our industrial and transportation systems with low carbon infrastructure and technology contrasted with things like regulations and prices on fossil fuels versus also things like counting on everyone to change their diets or to change their personal behavior to address the problems.
Alex Trembath (00:06:23):
I think all of these things exist in feedback loops with each other and technology in particular is really policy driven in really under recognized ways or historically under recognized ways. So I wouldn't draw exactly a bright-line distinction among all of those different approaches to dealing with the problem. But if you were to, we are certainly focused on making low carbon alternatives to fossil fuels cheaper, more effective, more scalable through influencing policy, through influencing our understanding of the climate problem in mainstream media and popular discourse and actually getting folks, whether they're investors or policy makers or other stakeholders excited about next generation, low carbon alternatives to fossil energy.
Jason Jacobs (00:07:07):
Great. And maybe just for context for listeners, talk a little bit about the origin story for BTI, but also talk a little bit about your journey and what led you to do the work that you're doing today.
Alex Trembath (00:07:18):
I'll start with myself, I guess. I've been at Breakthrough for most of the time that Breakthrough's existed at this point, although not since the very beginning. So I discovered the Breakthrough Institute when I was an undergrad at UC Berkeley. I would describe myself at the time as a fairly conventional progressive climate activist type, really focused on the ways we needed to change our patterns of behavior, change our consumption, radically reform at least, or even dismantle capitalist institutions in the United States and around the world, and to punish and ultimately abolish the fossil fuel industry and the other institutions that were causing climate change.
Alex Trembath (00:08:01):
And I discovered the ideas of the Breakthrough Institute by seeing the co-founders speak on campus and then encountering the work of a bunch of researchers at the Breakthrough Institute while I was an undergrad, researchers like Jesse Jenkins, who has been very prominent in the news this week, as we're recording with the passage in the US Senate of the Inflation Reduction Act, which Jesse has been observing and analyzing very closely recently. I remember being really thrown off and a little bit put off by the ideas of the Breakthrough Institute, which used a language of optimism and a language of technological innovation, which runs to this day pretty steadily against classical environmentalist thinking.
Alex Trembath (00:08:43):
The idea that these techno fixes will come to solve our environmental problems runs against the classical environmentalist ideology that we need to reduce our consumption and reduce our activities, we need to live in greater harmony with nature and consume less and change our lifestyle and change our systems and institutions radically to confront environmental problems.
Alex Trembath (00:09:07):
That was the ideological friction that I encountered in college. And I personally came out the other end of that, very techno-optimistic, very what we now call eco-modernist and ended up getting a position at the Breakthrough Institute as a researcher, and I've been there ever since.
Alex Trembath (00:09:22):
Breakthrough was really founded around 2008 in response to the reemergence of these old environmentalist ideas around reducing human consumption, dismantling the industrial systems of production that create the modern world. This reemergence happens a little bit around the release of An Inconvenient Truth in 2006 and with the rise to prominence of climate policy.
Alex Trembath (00:09:51):
And Breakthrough was really created around 2007, 2008, to establish again, a more optimistic environmental politics and politics of abundance, not politics of scarcity, and to focus on the policy side on major investments in clean energy research, development, demonstration to, as we put it, make clean energy cheap. So that's the substantive origins of the Breakthrough Institute in a nutshell.
Jason Jacobs (00:10:15):
I'm just curious, when you look at the people that work in the Breakthrough Institute are the theories of change and the viewpoints around the, or many of the key hot button issues in climate, are they consistent across the organization or do they vary greatly?
Alex Trembath (00:10:33):
We have a consistent school of thought here, which we call eco-modernism, which is really, again, a school of thought that centers on the ideas of abundance and human achievement, technological innovation, economic growth. Those are some of the broad non-negotiables for being, or certainly even wanting to work at a place like the Breakthrough Institute.
Alex Trembath (00:10:53):
Underneath that though, what's kept me attracted to the Breakthrough Institute as an institution and to our wider community for all these years is that those ideas, that umbrella, really welcomes a really broad range of other ideological dispositions.
Alex Trembath (00:11:10):
So both on staff and at our events, we have had socialists, we have had libertarians, we've had left liberals, we've had conservatives, again, both in our broader network and on staff at the same time, all making a variety of ideological and substantive cases for technological innovation for reforming our systems of production in the direction of sustainability.
Alex Trembath (00:11:35):
Obviously we're pro economic growth, so there's not probably going to be a degrowther working at the Breakthrough Institute. And a major focus of ours over the last decade or so has been innovation in advanced nuclear reactor technologies. So you'd be hard pressed to be anti-nuclear or anti GMO, like you see a lot of in the institutional environmentalist movement, and work at the Breakthrough Institute. But even within our, I would say very assertive and pretty well thought through, I think school of thought there's a good amount of political diversity and background diversity in terms of who shows up here.
Jason Jacobs (00:12:11):
And before we get too much into the work of Breakthrough, maybe I'll just hit pause on that and just talk a little bit about the problem of climate change, just to calibrate on how you think about that before we talk about solutions. The problem itself, I mean, I've heard you talk about how you have some frustration, for example, with the way it was portrayed in Don't Look Up or things like that. I've seen the progressive Democrats, for example, and the IPCC as well, talk about 12 years, and this is how much time we have and this budget and it's an emergency. I'll stop leading you here and just ask, how do you think about the nature of the problem?
Alex Trembath (00:12:48):
I think there's a few mistakes that certainly the progressive left makes when they describe the problem of climate change, but that is I think broadly popular and the default frame of climate change, even outside the left, which some of those mistakes are A, that climate change is primarily a problem of corporate conspiracy by big oil or the fossil fuel industry or something like that. B, that climate change is something that can be addressed primarily through changing personal behavior, and we're growing too much, we're consuming too much and that we really need to degrow and consume less in order to be more in balance or in harmony with the natural world. And then the last mistake is treating climate change like it is a cataclysmic event coming towards us at 1.5 degrees of atmospheric warming or two degrees or something like that.
Alex Trembath (00:13:42):
So I think the right way to think about climate change is that it is an emergent problem caused by the solving of old problems. And those old problems include things like starvation and mass poverty and mass malnourishment and the problems that existed pretty universally before the industrial revolution.
Alex Trembath (00:14:00):
So with the industrial revolution and the steam engine and the internal combustion engine and diesel engines and jet engines, and the ability to exploit fossil fuels to radically increase economic growth and availability of energy and food and shelter, we solved for billions of people around the world problems like widespread maternal and infant mortality, widespread poverty and starvation, lack of housing, lack of food, lack of modern energy.
Alex Trembath (00:14:27):
With that solving of old problems through technological innovation comes this new problem, a problem of abundance. And in addition to having abundant food and energy in the world today, we have abundant carbon emissions in the atmosphere and that causes side effects, side effects that we mostly call climate change, the heating of the atmosphere, which affects ecosystems, which causes the oceans to expand and causes sea level rise, causes an increase in extreme weather events over long periods of time.
Alex Trembath (00:14:55):
Those are problems of abundance, which are different than the problems of the pre-industrial era, which were mostly problems of scarcity. In that sense, I think we should mostly prefer problems of abundance to not having nearly enough food, energy, shelter, freedom to go around, like really everyone on earth experienced before the industrial revolution. But it is a problem and it's a problem that we believe we can fix through the same basic processes that led us to this problem, which is continued economic growth and technological innovation. And then the last thing I would say is that climate change is a problem. It will impose costs on humans and ecosystems this century, and those costs get higher and worse with every 10th of a degree of global warming we get. Every degree of warming that we get will cause more loss and harm and damage and costs than would otherwise be the case.
Alex Trembath (00:15:44):
But there really is no bright-line beyond which we reach an uninhabitable planet or beyond which we encounter a level of warming the human civilization cannot withstand and lead to global collapse of human society and extinction, as some prominent climate communicators would argue. Less warming's better than more warming and we should try and limit warming to as low a level as possible, but there isn't a 12 year or parts per million or degree deadline the way I think a lot of people, including folks in the international policy-making community still talk about it.
Jason Jacobs (00:16:18):
Now I'm not a climate scientist, but one thing I've observed is that in general, and I'm sure there's exceptions, but in the climate science community, it seems that the closer one is to the data, the more despair and hopelessness they feel. They talk about eco-anxiety, they talk about burnout and how many people need to leave the profession because staring at this seemingly insurmountable problem day in and day out without feeling like you have a hand directly in the solution. I had someone on the show the other day who started in academia, focused on the problem and had to switch to the solution, because it was too depressing just to focus on the problem and not being able to address it to make it better. But why do you think that is that so many people that are so close to the data feel such despair given how you just described your view of the problem? Where's the disconnect there?
Alex Trembath (00:17:16):
I'm not sure what the incidence of despair and climate anxiety is in the world, especially if it is in fact the case that the more you know about climate change, the more despair you feel. I'd be curious to what degree that is the case. I would say that we've got a bunch of climate scientists here on staff and in our network of senior fellows at the Breakthrough Institute who push back really hard against the idea of doomism and despair at the climate problem.
Alex Trembath (00:17:44):
I think a way to do that as you suggested is to at the same time as you're trying to understand the climate problem, or you're trying to understand, okay, where do we think emissions are going? Where do we think temperatures are going? What kind of effects do we think that'll have? How do we reduce those emissions? How do we get a hold of temperature increases this century? How do we make society more resilient? A focus on solutions paired with an understanding of the problem, I think can help alleviate that despair and anxiety.
Alex Trembath (00:18:10):
For the folks who do feel a sense of despair and anxiety, I think that is often associated with the lack of awareness of the tremendous technological progress we've made in the last several decades on things like nuclear energy and solar and wind and batteries and electric vehicles, new technologies that are coming to the stage right now, like enhanced geothermal, next generation nuclear reactors, enhanced hydrogen technology, solutions across the agricultural space, like alternative proteins and feed supplements for cattle. There's a tremendous amount of solutions happening that I don't think everyone is fully aware of.
Alex Trembath (00:18:47):
But then the last thing is that I think there is a invasion of the scientific discipline by bad environmentalist ideas, like the idea that nature is super fragile and humans are on the cusp of breaking it to the point of overall collapse, like the idea that demarcating lines for understanding climate change, like 1.5 degrees or two degrees or three degrees are themselves hard thresholds or hard deadlines. You have plenty of scientists who seem to think that, but I think it's just a mistake of scientific thinking to make that conclusion. And I'd say that there's a very healthy number of scientists who would push back on the idea that being closer to the science makes you more anxious or depressed about it, although that does happen.
Alex Trembath (00:19:32):
Our directors of climate and energy here at the Breakthrough Institute, Seaver Wang and Patrick Brown have pushed back on some of the doomism. One of our senior fellows Zeke Hausfather, Kate Marvel from NASA, Katharine Hayhoe, Jacquelyn Gill, a bunch of names that come to mind who have pushed back on the idea that an understanding of the climate problem must bring with it anxiety, paralysis, depression. I think there's psychologically healthier ways to think about it. And like you say, I think that emphasizing the progress we've made to date and the solutions that are budding today is an important part of that.
Jason Jacobs (00:20:07):
You mentioned that this is a problem of abundance and that problems of abundance are preferred to problems of scarcity. I'm still learning, that's the caveat for all of this, but it seems that the GHGs that are up in the atmosphere are up there for hundreds of years. And so therefore, even if we're reducing emissions, as long as we're still emitting, then things will continue to get worse year over year, even as we're making progress, and so much of the future damage in the coming decades is already baked in. So let me just take a pause there. Do you agree or disagree with what I've described so far.
Alex Trembath (00:20:49):
Agree a hundred percent. That is the climate problem in a nutshell, which is that anything you emit today in terms of carbon emissions, whether it's carbon dioxide or methane or the other greenhouse gas emissions will in some form or other stay in the atmosphere mostly for hundreds of years and continue to warm average temperatures for that whole time. And so there's really three things you can do at a high level to reduce the harms of those emissions. One is you can reduce emissions, you can use solar or nuclear, electric vehicles instead of fossil fuels so that you're producing fewer emissions than you would otherwise. The other is that even if emissions are not at zero, which is where they need to be to really stop warming, you can continue to make society more resilient to the impacts of climate change that we've already baked in with our past emissions and will continue to do so as we try to get emissions close to zero this century.
Alex Trembath (00:21:36):
And so that's going to be things really largely driven by economic growth, better housing stock, emergency services, emergency planning for extreme weather events, making our coastlines more resilient through a variety of solutions to address sea level rise, innovations in agricultural technology and practices to make our farming systems more resilient to drought and heat stress. So really, adaptation. We will have worsening climate impacts over the coming decades and we need to be investing in technological and other solutions to adapt to those. And then the last and probably most speculative is how much carbon we can suck out of the atmosphere to maybe not just get carbon emission to zero, but to start reversing some of the warming that we have caused with our 200 odd years of emitting carbon so far. And there's a whole bunch of folks working on ways to suck large amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere in the long term, whether through rock mineralization, or big machines that capture carbon directly, or enhanced photosynthesis to get our trees to absorb more carbon over time. And I think there's a lot of exciting possibilities there in the long term, but that is the most speculative of the major solution sets to the problem.
Jason Jacobs (00:22:47):
What's your view on how aggressively this change needs to come about? You talk a lot about technological innovation, is radical change needed? And that's not to point at any specific domain, it's just to say generally, in the aggregate, is radical change needed?
Alex Trembath (00:23:04):
Yeah, I think my basic answer to that question is no. I think that climate change is one among many problems in the world today. I think another mistake that a lot of climate observers or climate advocates make in talking about climate change is as if it is this totalizing all encompassing problem, the likes of which humans have never seen before and we have to put everything else aside and bend all will towards radically addressing the problem, whether through degrowth or a quote-unquote, "World War II style mobilization of infrastructure and technology to deal with the problem."
Alex Trembath (00:23:37):
I think that rising temperatures and the effects of those are one problem in the world today. There's still a billion people around the world who don't have any access to electricity today. There's still hundreds of millions of people around the world living in some form of political dictatorship. There is still oppression and slavery in the world today. These are problems largely distinct from climate change that we need to be tackling at the same time as we try to innovate our way towards low carbon energy and agricultural systems.
Alex Trembath (00:24:05):
And oftentimes that will actually mean using more fossil fuels in parts of the world than we do today. You could triple natural gas consumption in Sub-Saharan Africa based on the levels that Sub-Saharan Africans use today and emissions from the continent would still be less than 1% of global emissions. And that is a continent with a billion people on it today. And so I think that when people talk about radical solutions, they talk about things like instantly dismantling the fossil fuel industry or programs of degrowth and things like that when it might make sense to have pretty aggressive phase out of the fossil fuel industry in rich countries, but not in poor countries.
Alex Trembath (00:24:45):
That's one reason I lean away from radicalism as it talked about. I think if we're going to be radical about anything, we should be radical about investing in technology infrastructure and economic growth to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels and to accelerate the growth and resilience and prosperity of all humans around the world, but I don't think that's what people mostly mean when they say we need a radical solution to climate change.
Jason Jacobs (00:25:10):
Why is it that different groups of seemingly smart and well thought out, and mission-aligned people can look at the same data and have such drastically different conclusions about the level of urgency that's required?
Alex Trembath (00:25:26):
At the end of the day, the answer to your question is a scientific fallacy that is made. What people will say is that they're just looking at the data and they're just looking at the science, and the science tells us that we need a radical global program of degrowth, or the science tells us that we need to turn all of our electricity system globally over to nuclear reactors, that's what the science is telling us. The science is an input into our decision making. It's an input into our discourse. It's an input into our ideological and pragmatic political preferences. It does not in the case of climate change or really in any realm is not the last word on what societies or advocacy organizations or political parties want to do.
Alex Trembath (00:26:11):
And I think the reason that there is disagreement over the science is because the disagreement isn't mostly over the science, it's over what kind of world do we want to build? Do we want, for instance, a world of high consumption and high growth rates, or do we want to tighten our belts and live more simply? That's a legitimate dispute, but it is one that is largely independent of the science of atmospheric warming.
Alex Trembath (00:26:34):
Do we want a broadly laissez-faire libertarian approach to our political and legal systems, mostly going light on regulation and government power, or do we want to move in a more socialist or public power direction where you're pursuing more of a French or Scandinavian style oversight of industry? That's another, I think very legitimate political dispute that groups have in and outside the environmental movement.
Alex Trembath (00:27:03):
And I would say we'll probably never pick one side of any of these disputes and that we'll always be muddling through a variety of political values and ideological programs. But I think that is why there is a at times puzzling level of disagreement over the quote-unquote, "science." And it's because the science tells us a number of things.
Alex Trembath (00:27:25):
It tells us that the earth is getting warmer. It tells us that warming has effects that can be deleterious on human systems and ecosystems, but it doesn't tell us what kind of approach we should have to solving it. It doesn't tell us what kind of social or political ideology that we should line up to support. Those are old disputes that you can't really navigate your way around with the science, and I think that's where the disconnect comes from.
Jason Jacobs (00:27:50):
And so when you think about GDP, for example, do you believe that, that should continue to be the primary measure of growth?
Alex Trembath (00:28:02):
I'm very okay with GDP being the primary measure of growth. As I understand that, there has been this critique from ecological economics, environmental economics, from the environmentalist movement for a long time, that GDP is a bad measure of human wellbeing and human achievement because it doesn't capture for instance, the environmental costs of our economic system. That's one critique.
Alex Trembath (00:28:25):
It doesn't capture the actual wellbeing effects of human leisure, for instance, because when I'm going for a run, for the most part, I am not contributing to the economic wellbeing of society, but I am enjoying my life. When I'm spending a lazy afternoon, staring at clouds with my wife, I am not contributing to GDP, but I am making my world a better place and that's not captured by GDP.
Alex Trembath (00:28:49):
And those are, I think, very important, both philosophical and measurement critiques of gross domestic product as a measure of human wellbeing. But I think if you look at all the other ones, things like the human development index that try to account for non-monetary contributions or to account for environmental externalities, that if you look at all the other alternatives to GDP, they're all positively correlated with GDP.
Alex Trembath (00:29:15):
And GDP is the one that can be measured fairly holistically and systematically across the world, taking into account different cultural differences with regards to leisure time, take into account the different levels of carbon intensity of economies. And so the literal metric might not capture everything, but as GDP has gone up over time, continuing to this day, levels of education and democracy have gone up, levels of conventional air and water pollution, especially over the last 50, 70 years have gone down, malnutrition and famine have declined, economic and social freedom for women and girls and other marginalized communities have declined over time, infant and maternal mortality have declined, lifespans have gotten longer.
Alex Trembath (00:30:00):
And increasing GDP is positively correlated with all of that, even for the most part to this day in rich countries, and certainly in poor countries where people still live tens of fewer years on average than they do in rich countries, where there are still food shortages and shortages of modern energy.
Alex Trembath (00:30:16):
And so GDP might not capture all of that and it might not capture the gains to be made to human society from political liberation or the gains to be made in access to knowledge at all times, but I think it's still a reasonably good proxy for all of those things. And increasing broad social wealth GDP leads to better housing stock, more resilient societies in a way that suggests to me that we probably shouldn't scrap it as a measurement. Maybe we should supplement it, but I still think that economic growth as measured by GDP continues to be a good thing for both humans and in the long run for non-human nature.
Jason Jacobs (00:30:54):
Is it possible to fully decouple emissions growth from economic growth?
Alex Trembath (00:31:01):
Yeah, it's a great question and it's one of the primary research questions of the Breakthrough Institute. There's a couple different kinds of decoupling. There's relative decoupling where wealth increases and emissions increase, but just at a slower rate, and so that both lines are going up over time, it's just emissions are growing more slowly than wealth.
Alex Trembath (00:31:20):
Then there's absolute decoupling where growth continues, but emissions are declining. As a analysis we published a year or two ago found, that's the case in almost every rich country around the world. Growth is continuing and absolute emissions, including emissions from imports from other countries on the absolute decline.
Alex Trembath (00:31:38):
Now, the question is, can you get to total decoupling? Can you get emissions to zero? And that empirically is not something that we have done yet, even in countries where emissions are declining. For the most part, you still rely overwhelmingly on oil for the transportation sector, for instance, or overwhelmingly on oil and gas in the industrial sector.
Alex Trembath (00:31:57):
Getting emissions to zero is I think completely plausible this century as a bunch of the technologies that I've talked about, solar, wind, batteries, geothermal, advanced nuclear, electric vehicles, hydrogen, precision agriculture, alternative proteins, carbon removal, as a bunch of these technologies grow and improve in scale, I think we can get emissions close to zero and get that total decoupling that you're talking about.
Alex Trembath (00:32:22):
But it still has not been done and we don't know how fast it can be done in a given country or around the world. That's what we focus on at the Breakthrough Institute is where is decoupling happening fastest? What are the investments and political approaches and ways of understanding the problem that allow us to decouple fastest and how can we advocate for more of that type of climate action, more of that type of policy change.
Jason Jacobs (00:32:48):
Some of the critics of capitalism I get the sense are not just critical of it from an emissions and can you separate it from GDP standpoint, but I'm going to try to articulate what I think their argument is. I'm sure a bunch of them will tell me I got it wrong, but they talk about colonialism. They talk about how capitalism is inherently extractive. They talk about the huge income inequality and the corresponding emissions footprints, how I think it's the top 10% of emitters from an individual standpoint equal all the emissions from the bottom half of the population. And then they also talk about the corresponding environmental injustice that occurs where the people that least contributed to the problem are the ones that bear the brunt at least initially, and are least equipped to adapt and make their systems and infrastructure, et cetera, more resilient. How do you think about that? How do you react to some of those arguments?
Alex Trembath (00:33:49):
One thing I would say is that when people talk about capitalism, they're talking about a mode of economic production that doesn't really exist anywhere around the world for the most part. What we have in every country on the planet really is mixed economies. We have a combination of free markets and public power over corporations, over some of those markets and a welfare state. That varies radically from country to country. But I think it tells you that critiquing capital C capitalism is mostly critiquing an idea, not a system that actually operates in the world. I would say that, like with science, you can pursue unjust actions within capitalism or as we saw quite vividly in the 20th century with dictatorial communism or anything in between. What I would note is that colonialism especially long predates capitalism or, and oppression and marginalization and colonialism were the norm for all of human history. Almost nobody lived in a democracy before this thing we call industrial capitalism came along 200, 300 years ago.
Alex Trembath (00:34:52):
Since then the tools of industrial capitalism have gotten much more powerful. So you can have more advanced vehicles and weapons with which to oppress people. Again, whether you are the capitalist Western Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, or communist oppressive USSR or China in the 20th century through today, I would say that it's not so much the system of production and the tools as the political systems and the systems of political power that use those tools. That's one problem with the idea of capital C capitalism being the primary cause of climate change and something that we need to dismantle for all sorts of reasons. I also think that you can have a very reasonable argument about what level of personal fossil energy consumption or whatever is too much in a free capitalist system. The latest is, are Taylor Swift and Kylie Jenner flying their private jets too much? Are we eating too much beef? Some of the really carbon intensive consumer behaviors.
Alex Trembath (00:35:58):
But again, I would note that while carbon emissions among the very rich are high, higher obviously than for the global poor, which contribute almost nothing to the absolute amount of carbon emissions, carbon emissions are going down in rich countries and they're going up in low income and middle income countries. And that's really the direction that emissions should be going. Whether Taylor Swift should be flying around in a private jet, if emissions are going down anywhere, it should be in the richest parts of the world while China and India and Indonesia and Bangladesh and Nigeria and Kenya and Pakistan and a bunch of other low and middle income countries, they need more fossil energy for fertilizers, for transportation systems, still for electric power, for a whole bunch of modern infrastructure and technologies that allow them to reach levels of modern prosperity and freedom that we have in the wealthy world.
Alex Trembath (00:36:48):
And that level of growth in consumption and activity in fossil energy use is driven sure, still to this day by quasi capitalist modes of production and institutions. Again, it's really all mixed economies, but there's free markets, there's exploitation of natural resources. There's all the things that anti-capitalists have a problem with that are to this day, driving growth and improvements in human wellbeing around the world. So I think it's simplistic and actually directionally a mistake to attack capitalism as the cause of climate change or the downfall of society, or the driver of extractivist or colonial actions in the world. Those things exist and oppression exist and colonialism still exist today, including I would argue from wealthy well-meaning environmental minded policy makers. But I think that it's a mistake to attack the abstract mode of production, as opposed to the actual policy.
Jason Jacobs (00:37:40):
You talk about how technological innovation is underestimated and that it's got huge potential to get us to where we need to go, and that the economic engine will power that innovation in increasing quality of life, as we increasingly decouple from emissions and ultimately hopefully bring it in the other direction through, again, technological innovation. What I want to understand better is it sounds like, and again, correct me if I'm wrong, but that you believe more in free markets and laissez-faire libertarianism, regulation light, if you will, policy light, meddling light. And what I want to understand is what incentive is there for corporations to change, if they've got a good thing going, and there's no consequences for the pollution? And if they do act, they can do offsets, they can do CCS and capture the carbon at point of emissions. They can do misleading propaganda, tobacco-like advertising and propaganda all so that they can keep living off the fat of the land if you will, with their high emitting energy sources that has been feeding them, their families, their communities for decades and generations even.
Alex Trembath (00:39:00):
I would say that ideologically the Breakthrough Institute in particular straddles the classical dividing lines between libertarians and socialists or Democrats and Republicans, again, by embracing what I would describe as a nimble ideologically flexible policy agenda that we think can make sense more or less, depending on if you live in the United States or if you live in Finland, or if you live in France, you live in Singapore, you live in Korea.
Alex Trembath (00:39:26):
And some of those places might be more towards the laissez-faire side of the median political view to describe it simply, and some might be more towards the more socialistic state power side of that dispute. And I think that all such systems have potential advantages. So if you describe more so than maybe the Scandinavian countries or a lot of East Asian countries, or places like France, which have more nationalized energy systems, have more public power over corporations, heavier regulation and actual management of corporations, the United States is more laissez-faire than that, but we also invest far more as a percent of GDP in technological innovation, through things like the national laboratories and incentives for deployment of new technologies.
Alex Trembath (00:40:16):
So is that more libertarian? Is that more socialistic? It's not really free market laissez-faire, but it's also not nationalizing the electricity system, it's somewhere in between. Likewise, some of the fastest decarbonization that has ever occurred, occurred in countries like Sweden and France, which after the oil crises of the 1970s did nationalize their electricity system and just mandated the rapid build out of nuclear power plants, going from 28 to 80% low carbon energy in France's electricity system, for instance, over less than 15 years. That's an example where geopolitics and current events and ideological makeup of France's leadership lined up in the direction of more state-led power that actually led to rapid decarbonization through the pursuit of really this one technology, conventional fission reactors. I don't think that, that is likely to happen in a place like the United States, but if it were, I think it could power decarbonization through that type of policy agenda and those types of policy tools.
Alex Trembath (00:41:18):
So what we at Breakthrough try to do is be fairly ideologically nimble and flexible in our understanding of what policy tools to pursue, to accelerate decarbonization. For instance, when the COVID lockdown started, we advocated along with actual policy makers and a lot of other observers. We advocated for big economic rescue of the entire economy, which ended up being, were taking place in things like the Paycheck Protection Program and loans to private businesses. And we argued at the time that the government should be investing in those systems, not just transferring dollars to them and actually get some skin in the game. That didn't exactly happen, but it was, I think, a plausible, and credible view that one should take that if the government is actually investing in corporations, in industry directly, not just by financing R and D in national laboratories, then they might deserve some skin in the game.
Alex Trembath (00:42:10):
This is an idea that University of Sussex economist, Mariana Mazzucato makes all the time. I think that we're mostly operating in a mixed economy that isn't laissez-faire, libertarian paradise, or nationalized Marxist paradise, and we have to navigate nimbly through all of that. But I think one can easily imagine a variety of political and power relation approaches to decarbonization, and those change sometimes very radically. The COVID lockdowns and the response to COVID was one such realignment where we didn't nationalize anything, but we have spent, I've lost count, several trillion dollars of new government spending over the last two years on COVID recovery, on infrastructure. As we recorded this, we're about to spend another $400 billion on subsidies for clean energy. That's why I think we try to be a little bit nimble and opportunistic with our ideological preconditions for policy action.
Jason Jacobs (00:43:04):
So what do you think of these big corporations and their net zero commitments and the integrity of those commitments?
Alex Trembath (00:43:10):
I'm mostly quite skeptical. There are some big companies like Stripe, the online payments company, and Google come to mind as companies that are really investing in advanced low-carbon energy procurement. Stripe in particular is doing a bunch of investments in innovative carbon removal technologies. They're innovating across the supply chain, what's called scope one, two and three emissions. So not just the emissions associated with their operations, but the sourcing of natural resources and all their activities.
Alex Trembath (00:43:42):
There is definitely some industry leaders, Google, Apple, Stripe, but for the most part, I think a lot of these net zero commitments to date are grounded on really voluntary carbon offset programs where the corporation either pledges to achieve, or pledges to spend a certain amount of their revenues, sequestering carbon equivalent to their corporate emissions. And I think most of those voluntary carbon offset commitments are not worth very much.
Alex Trembath (00:44:15):
They're mostly literally worth close to $0 per ton CO2, the claim being that if you're a big corporation, you can pay not to have this forest cut down that would hypothetically be cut down otherwise, but that forest was probably never going to be cut down. And that is a rampant problem in the voluntary carbon offset and carbon removal market. I think that's where a lot of the net zero commitments actually come from in a concrete sense.
Alex Trembath (00:44:43):
Most of these commitments are not based on committing to source 100% of their energy from zero carbon sources or to directly and verifiably capture carbon from the atmosphere. And so unless they're actually doing that, unless you can look at where all their electricity comes from, it all comes from solar, nuclear, wind and geothermal, and none of it comes from oil and gas and coal, and all of the carbon that they're saying they captured can be verifiably measured, then I think a lot of those net zero commitments, we should look at extremely skeptically.
Jason Jacobs (00:45:13):
What about from an individual standpoint? I mean, you talked about how personal behavior change, you're not convinced it's a helpful lever for change. Do we have a personal responsibility, for example, to try to eat less beef or to fly less or to try to avoid fast fashion or flying private, for example, or what about our houses? Do we have a responsibility, assuming we have the means, which is a big if, most people don't, but to look at solar panels and electric vehicles and heat pumps and efficiency improvements and things like that? Do we have a duty to do that, or is it just someone else's problem?
Alex Trembath (00:45:54):
Yeah, once again, one of the things that makes me really energized and excited about being an eco-modernist and working at the Breakthrough Institute is there's a variety of views and patterns of behavior from eco-modernists, many of whom would say, yes, that we do have a responsibility to live as low carbon lifestyles as possible, given the systems and technologies we have available today, which means that for some eco-modernists veganism is a ethical imperative.
Alex Trembath (00:46:20):
I am not a vegan, I fly in planes mostly because from my moral and practical calculus, the thing that decides whether climate change will cause more or less harm in the coming decades in this century will necessarily have far less to do with the aggregated decisions of billions of consumers than the innovation on the productive side of things. I think both of those are of legitimate ways of thinking about an eco-modernist approach to lifestyle.
Alex Trembath (00:46:52):
I would say that I get pretty excited about what I call eco-modernist virtue signaling, which would be things like supporting a community solar plant in your neighborhood, or being, as they call it, a YIMBY, a yes in my backyard advocate who advocates for more and denser housing that can lower emissions from commuting and other things.
Alex Trembath (00:47:13):
One of the most obvious ways to do what could be called eco-modernist virtue signaling is to eat impossible burgers and to eat more of these alt proteins that allow people to continue consuming meat and protein with a much lower environmental impact, hopefully in the long run.
Alex Trembath (00:47:29):
So again, I think there's a variety of views that one can have on whether and how personal behavior matters in a ethical accounting sense like what are my emissions and how much does that matter in the world? You can have a variety of views about the virtue of virtue signaling, like I show up for pro-housing demonstrations and advocate pro-housing policies in my neighborhood, and I eat fake meat a lot of the time partially to talk about it with you and to support those industries.
Alex Trembath (00:47:59):
I don't think most people are religiously consistent about their personal consumption in any way, I certainly am not either. I do think it's an important and interesting question that again, I would say we at Breakthrough have a variety of views on it, and I think a bunch of those views are totally legitimate.
Jason Jacobs (00:48:15):
What is the optimal role that you hope government will play?
Alex Trembath (00:48:19):
The government could, if given democratic legitimacy based on some sequence of events that we have yet to experience, the government could decide to nationalize the electricity and transportation systems in the United States and systematically decarbonize those systems. And if they're not doing it in a authoritarian way that is disconnected from political will, then I think something like that is totally reasonable.
Alex Trembath (00:48:43):
I think like I've been saying what's more likely and certainly more likely in the global average is that we'll continue to have these mixed economies, a combination of free markets and public investments and public power and welfare states. And so I think the common denominator in all of that is government investments in research, in basic science, in demonstration of new technologies, in deployment and management of infrastructure, roads, transmission lines, pipelines, riverways, things like that, management of public goods, including the public good of accelerating technological innovation, which can be accomplished again in a variety of political mixes and modes of production.
Alex Trembath (00:49:23):
But I think that, that's the optimal role of government across that diversity of modes of production is accelerating technological innovation through targeted technology inclusive, at times risky and speculative investments in innovation. I think that's true in and outside the energy and climate space, but that's really the common denominator and the thing that we focus on.
Jason Jacobs (00:49:45):
And given the polarized climate where you've got these loud minorities with megaphones on each side of the political spectrum that are rewarded by the algorithms and hogging the headlines, if you will, where does politics fit into all of this? And what I'm getting at is, I mean, presumably although we didn't have bipartisan support for the IRA bill that just got done, I mean, presumably it's certainly a heck of a lot easier if you do have bipartisan support. But I just don't know how you achieve it, given how polarized we are as a nation, certainly amongst the elected officials. So how do you think about that?
Alex Trembath (00:50:27):
Like we said, as we're recording this, it really looks like the Inflation Reduction Act almost $400 billion in subsidies and other spending on low carbon innovation is being advanced by the Democrats and only the Democrats, and the Republicans are firmly opposed to it. There are very few or vanishing hopes for really aggressive marquee climate legislation that has bipartisan support. That said during the Trump administration, Congress created a new tax credit for carbon removal called the 45Q tax credit. They created the gateway for accelerated innovation in nuclear at the Department of Energy, which was about understanding and investing in and supporting innovators and promising technologies in the advanced nuclear space. Federal R and D for clean energy technology across the spectrum, electricity transportation, and beyond went up 25% during the Trump administration while the Trump administration was proposing slashing that spending. Congress just keeps upping the ante because there actually is bipartisan support for spending on clean energy and other low-carbon technological and infrastructural innovation.
Alex Trembath (00:51:33):
One of the very last things that happened during the Trump administration, was President Trump signed, he signed all of this policy, was tens of billions of dollars that Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski and democratic Senator Joe Manchin had been working on for years, the Murkowski-Manchin provisions that were included in Trump's last omnibus budget bill. None of those things, and maybe even all the aggregate stuff that happened during the Trump administration compare to the $400 billion Inflation Reduction Act, but you do actually have interest in spending on infrastructure, on innovation, on technology from Republicans and Democrats. And who is in power and the political dynamics and the polarization will inevitably, as they always have with all policy, affect how that policy gets enacted in any given Congress, any given year, any given administration.
Alex Trembath (00:52:21):
But I'm quite optimistic that some form of continued increase and hopefully improvement in the way we spend on clean energy innovation will continue after the Biden administration, after the 2030s with Republicans and Democrats certainly bouncing back and forth between control of the federal government over the rest of our lifetimes, because that's what's happened for the last generation. Republicans and Democrats have traded control over Congress since climate change has been on the political map and tax credits for deployment and new R and D programs and new regulations have come from both Republicans and Democrats. They tend not to participate on big marquee pieces of legislation like the Democrats one shot at a big reconciliation bill this year, but they have always cooperated on this smaller, quieter, as we put it, behind the scenes spending that can actually have very big effects.
Alex Trembath (00:53:14):
That's where a bunch of the low carbon technologies we have today came from, not from big world saving climate legislation. That's not where solar panels and lithium-ion batteries and wind turbines and nuclear reactors came from. They came from investments in the US innovation system, investments in the national labs, investments in tax credits for promising technologies. And I think that will continue to be the case.
Jason Jacobs (00:53:37):
So personal question, Alex, but just given your level of optimism and techno-optimism and your framing that we're essentially going from good to better, and that the markets will figure it out, why do you do the work that you do? What is it that's driving you to do this work? And what is it that you find fulfilling about it?
Alex Trembath (00:54:00):
Yeah. I took a class senior year of high school called Nature Nexus that was taught by Paul Toda and Chad Evans, who I want to give a shout out to here. And it was a class that combined ecology with religious studies and nature writing. And I was raised first in the Midwest and then in San Francisco, California with an environmental ethic, a care of sustainability and stewardship over the natural world. And in this class called Nature Nexus, senior year of high school, I realized that this is what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to go to college and get some kind of degree in environmental something. I wasn't sure what at the time, but I knew I wanted to help solve environmental problems in the world, as I thought about it at the time to help save the world.
Alex Trembath (00:54:41):
And so I went to UC Berkeley and then ended up getting a degree in environmental economics. And like I got to, at the beginning of our conversation, I, over the course of my undergraduate years, went from being a catastrophist doomer to being much more excited about the progress that was being made in the world that became increasingly hard to deny as you look at rising wealth and falling poverty rates, declining violence and declining exposure to extreme weather and things like that, and I got very excited about accelerating technological innovation. So the whole policy program of the Breakthrough Institute is what attracted me to this place and what has kept me here. It's an almost lifelong value that I've had. I've always loved the outdoors. I've always loved non-human nature I've realized when I was inspired by educators in high school. And I was raised by educators, my twin brother is an educator, my wife is a former educator. So I think I'm quite impressionable by teachers and professors and educators, but I was particularly inspired to pursue this as a career.
Alex Trembath (00:55:42):
And it was really another type of inspiration in encountering the ideas of the Breakthrough Institute and of eco-modernism and of these techno-optimist approaches that involve addressing environmental problems while uplifting humanity and enabling new forms of creativity and activity in the world. It was a combination of those inspirations really in my late teens and early 20s that set me on this path that I think I'm still on today.
Jason Jacobs (00:56:07):
Well, there's still a whole bunch that we haven't covered that it'd be fun to, but we're also coming up on time. If it's okay, maybe we'll just do a speed round. Does that work?
Alex Trembath (00:56:16):
Absolutely.
Jason Jacobs (00:56:17):
Cool. In this I'll just throw out some topics and just tell me the first few sentences that come to mind about what you think about them. So the first one is solar geoengineering research.
Alex Trembath (00:56:28):
Yeah. I think that solar geoengineering research should absolutely be pursued. I would even certainly lean in the direction of advocating maybe after some more research, the experimental or demonstrated deployment of solar geoengineering techniques, not as a break glass in case of emergency stop climate change just by shooting sulfur into the atmosphere or whatever, but as a way to slow warming, as a way to slow atmospheric warming at a global level, while we continue to accelerate decarbonization and investments in climate resilient societies and infrastructure. I don't imagine that it'll be the principle lever that we solve this problem with, but I'm extremely open to it personally.
Jason Jacobs (00:57:13):
What about offsets?
Alex Trembath (00:57:15):
I mentioned Stripe, which my former colleague Zeke Hausfather is working at now. I think that in addition to places like Columbia, where Breakthrough senior fellow Julio Friedmann works that Stripe and a couple of these other companies and research outfits are paying very close attention to engineered carbon removal possibilities. Whether, again, that's rock mineralization or big machines that suck carbon out of the atmosphere, I'm really optimistic about a bunch of those carbon removal possibilities. I would just say that I'm much more inclined towards carbon offsets and carbon removal solutions from quote-unquote, "engineered systems" than from a lot of the natural carbon offset stuff. If you're online and you're paying for shipping for a doo-dad for a pair of running shoes, and the shipment option says, you can pay a buck 90 to offset the shipping from this or whatever, or you can offset the emissions from your shipment for $0, that's when I think you should start to get skeptical. We don't know how much it'll cost to suck carbon out of the atmosphere in 50, 100 years, but it'll cost more than $0. I believe in carbon offsets as long as they're credible, well engineered systems and that there's actually some money behind them, otherwise I think it's smoke and mirrors.
Jason Jacobs (00:58:32):
Long duration storage.
Alex Trembath (00:58:34):
I go back and forth on long duration storage. In a sense, it would be very helpful for instance, because if you have a bunch of solar in the desert, you're actually over generating electricity in the middle of the day in July, but in January, the solar panels are covered in snow or they're not generating anything. And if you could take that surplus from July to January, it would solve a big technical problem with deploying these intermittent technologies. The problem is then you have a large battery or battery equivalent that is just sitting there doing nothing for half a year or for several months, and actually capitalizing projects like that is economically challenging to say the least. I think probably my understanding is that the most promising solutions involve things like pumping gas into geologic formations, where most of the potential energy isn't lost there over time like it would be in a battery. But even so, I think it's much more likely that we'll achieve low-carbon energy systems through a combination of intermittent resources like wind and solar, short scale energy storage on the order of hours to days or weeks tops, because these technologies do actually have to make money, and then firm resources like hydroelectric, advanced nuclear, enhanced geothermal. I think it's more likely that we'll have a mix of those resources than we'll have 80, 90% wind and solar grids with a bunch of long duration storage on them. I just think both the economics and the engineering of long duration storage are pretty speculative, although I'm glad that there's a bunch of folks working on it.
Jason Jacobs (01:00:07):
And I'm realizing that my list is probably longer than we'll have time to get through. So I'll just pick a few juicy ones. What about CCS?
Alex Trembath (01:00:15):
Bolting, carbon capture and storage onto existing coal and natural gas plants today is just pure economic cost for the utility or for the industrial user or whatever, and so I would be surprised to see a ton of CCS systems bolted on to existing coal, natural gas, fertilizer plants, et cetera today, as opposed to just replacing that capacity with low carbon generation.
Alex Trembath (01:00:42):
That said, there are these integrated carbon removal systems like the NET Power natural gas plant that uses a new thermal process for producing electricity and capturing the associated carbon and using the associated carbon in an integrated way that I think has really strong potential for providing firm electricity, on-demand electricity to the grid while capturing carbon in a economic, commercially defensible way.
Alex Trembath (01:01:09):
And so I think as we're talking about carbon capture at the point of combustion, I think it's more likely that we'll see a lot of that from these integrated designs, as opposed to big machines that you attach to existing coal and gas plants and things like that.
Jason Jacobs (01:01:23):
Last question, if you had a magic wand and you could change one thing to most accelerate our progress, what would you change and how would you change it?
Alex Trembath (01:01:30):
I think the magic wand that I would wave is just to ... I'll be as narrow as possible to try and stick with the spirit of the question. I think I would pretty rapidly license this next generation of advanced nuclear reactors.
Alex Trembath (01:01:46):
We are licensing them, but I think much more slowly than is called for, which gets back to my bigger answer about the ways that our regulatory state is at this point, inhibiting progress on innovation and deployment of low carbon technologies, at least as much as it is enabling it.
Alex Trembath (01:02:02):
I do think, and research at Breakthrough has shown this, that if we license some of these advanced reactors this decade, then they could be generating 10, 20, 40, 50% of US electricity by the middle of the century. It's a matter of getting the reactors licensed. And I think that it could just have a tremendous national and global impact on emissions, on human wellbeing, on air pollution.
Alex Trembath (01:02:24):
And it's not a sure thing that the NRC will license these reactors and commercialize them in a sensible way. And I think it is an extremely high leverage policy pursuit that we at Breakthrough are really trying to push. But of course, if we had this magic wand, it would be even easier.
Jason Jacobs (01:02:39):
Alex, anything I didn't ask that I should have, or any parting words for listeners?
Alex Trembath (01:02:43):
I don't think so. Jason, I really appreciate this. And I've long appreciated really the spirit of curiosity and intellectual generosity that you bring to these conversations. And I just really appreciate being invited on.
Jason Jacobs (01:02:55):
Well, I'm so glad you came. I learned a lot and that typically means that listeners will too. So thanks, Alex. And best of luck to you and the whole BTI team.
Alex Trembath (01:03:03):
Thank you so much, Jason.
Jason Jacobs (01:03:05):
Hey everyone, Jason here. Thanks again for joining me on My Climate Journey. If you'd like to learn more about the journey, you can visit us at myclimatejourney.co. Note, that is dot co not dot com. Someday we'll get the dot com, but right now, dot co. You can also find me on Twitter, @jjacobs22, where I would encourage you to share your feedback on the episode or suggestions for future guests you'd like to hear.
Jason Jacobs (01:03:35):
And before I let you go, if you enjoyed the show, please share an episode with a friend or consider leaving a review on iTunes. The lawyers made me say that. Thank you.
