Some of Saul Griffith's ideas
23 Nov 2019Bret Victor has a great article for engineers interested in climate change. Today I (re)found Saul Griffith and have been equally inspired. I’d like to post some links here just to help push him further up google. And if someone reads the quotes here, also good.
First some necessary Silicon Valley bashing which will hopefully inspire you engineers plodding up the B-Ark gangplank to turn around because there’s more important work to be done!
Silicon Valley has taken the best minds of our generation, and made them use brain, and cognitive science to help you purchase shit faster [source].
As someone who has spent decades trying to build green technologies he’s probably a good person to listen to about how we can design the funding systems (I wonder what he thinks of the ease of innovation in Europe…).
I have always strongly believed the US needs a new kind of National Lab. It would be completely distributed and would put individuals, startups, odd private/public partnerships, even students (as opposed to their professors) on a level playing field. It would fast track contracting and make the overhead for being on government contract so low that everyone could afford to do this research work. This is how we could get all of America involved in innovating the technologies we need. It wouldn’t be siloed in ossified cold-war research models [source].
I exist at the coal face or maybe I should say exist at the solar cell of this issue. I haven’t had to really place a job ad to hire people for the last decade. I have volumes, probably ten of the best and brightest young Americans who’ve been trained by the best universities in the world, volunteer themselves to me every week: “We want to work on energy technologies.” “We want to work on climate change.” “We want to come and work for you; we have our own ideas.” Without a doubt, there is at least ten-fold the good ideas in the minds of our young people that are currently being underfunded. And you want to get the money as directly as possible to the 25-year-olds, not their professors. Their professors are working on last year’s technology. You’ve got to get it to the grad students who are imagining next year. ARPA-E can do that. I would argue that it should have funding that looks more like DARPA’s $3bN a year as a budget [source].
His four funding stages of energy technologies:
The 1st is fundamental and exploratory research finding out what is possible and exploring new opportunities.
The 2nd is development. This is applied research taking fundamental ideas and shaping it into a technology with the potential to have an impact.
Bankability (the 3rd) is using the proven elements of research and development and building a tested and piloted project or product sufficient to get first customers (the ones that will take a risk) and private investment (that wants to see that a customer will buy it). This is definitively the energy technology’s most difficult valley of death and a giant opportunity for ARPA-E to help accelerate energy technology transition to market. This stage may also include assistance in funding the manufacturing innovations required to bring the technology to market.
The 4th category is commercialization and deployment. This is where the government should not be involved, this is financeable by banks and late-stage venture. This is where the market can pick the winners [source].
Refreshingly for a technologist, he’s not irrationally all for technology and technology only
That all said, Team Warren does make it seem like the climate fight is a bit more of a science project than it really is. There is already an obvious, attainable, no-miracles-required pathway to at least the first half of decarbonizing — right through electrification [source].
He described that pathway here. I won’t quote his technological arguments or his point that the legislation and systems are setup to make green tech difficult as I think they’re talked about enough. But his ideas to fund the decarbonisation were ideas I hear less often:
I abhor what I’m about to tell you because I’m in technology, I’m a nerd, I’m a science and engineering nerd. Love technology. But the solution to climate change at this point is a financial product
So you add all those things up [solar panels, electric car batteries, heat pump] and that’s maybe a $50,000-$100,000 expense for that household. After which, if you could finance that at their home mortgage interest rate, like 4% or 5%, the payments on that interest rate would be about $4,000 to $5,000 a year. So they would be saving $3,000-$4,000 a year.
So it looks like it cancels. A bank in Australia, and in fact I’ve had conversations with the heads of two out of four of the largest Australian banks, convincing them that they needed to make a financial product which was a green refinance. Or a climate mortgage, if you like [source].
Despite the positvity of the decarbonisation possibilities, he does have quite a daunting caveat to it:
If we make every single purchasing decision correctly starting next year [2020], humanity barely gets a climate outcome that’s tolerable.
So it’s like we have to do something beyond the free-market. Whether that’s incentive, whether that’s mandated, whether it’s creative financing, it has to be something that’s not happened to that effect [source].
He does have ideas of how we can tackle the other 50%. One I’ve never heard before is to buy out the oil companies:
I have a new crazy idea that we can’t solve climate change without engaging large hydrocarbon companies… This is going to be the great Faustian bargain of achieving a climate goal that we want.
So I think the grand Faustian bargain is, a government basically absolving the fossil fuel companies. Or maybe even purchasing from the fossil fuel companies their proven reserve assets. To give them a capital injection that they can then use to finance the roll-out that we need for renewables.
And that may sound insane, but there are already companies that I don’t think they’ve quite got there yet, and they’re hypocritical, and they’ve got 100 years of fossil fuel experience. But I see Shell stumbling towards this. I see other big fossil entities sort of stumbling toward this.
So on start-ups versus the rest of the world, no. I think the start-ups can be as optimistic as they want about solving climate change. But on the timeline we need to deploy, we need to roll things out. On the timeline that we need to finance the solutions, we need to everyone, and all of the capital [source].
All of his ideas I’ve mentioned here are huge. And remarkably he actually seems to be working on all of them. Saul Griffith is living proof there is no excuse to be creating products to help people purchase shit faster. Aim high.