Quotes About Innovation

The reason the world emits so much greenhouse gas is that—as long as you ignore the long-term damage they do—our current energy technologies are by and large the cheapest ones available. So moving our immense energy economy from "dirty," carbon-emitting technologies to ones with zero emissions will cost something.

The Gates Foundation's whole approach to saving lives is based on the idea that we need to be pushing innovation for the poor while also increasing demand for it.

TerraPower's

The vision is about empowering workers, giving them all the information about what's going on so they can do a lot more than they've done in the past

The world needs to provide more energy so the poorest can thrive, but we need to provide that energy without releasing any more greenhouse gases.

fission, carbon capture and sequestration, offshore wind, cellulosic ethanol (a type of advanced biofuel), and meat alternatives.

Consider that the first Model T that rolled off Henry Ford's production line in 1908 got no better than 21 miles to the gallon. As I write this, the top hybrid on the market gets 58 miles to the gallon. In more than a century, fuel economy has improved by less than a factor of three.

Besides, making electricity accounts for only 27 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. Even if we had a huge breakthrough in batteries, we would still need to get rid of the other 73 percent.

Keep in mind that this isn't fake meat. Cultivated meat has all the same fat, muscles, and tendons as any animal on two or four legs. But rather than growing up on a farm, it's created in a lab.

To sum up, the path to zero emissions in manufacturing looks like this: Electrify every process possible. This is going to take a lot of innovation. Get that electricity from a power grid that's been decarbonized. This also will take a lot of innovation. Use carbon capture to absorb the remaining emissions. And so will this. Use materials more efficiently. Same.

Y'all feel like playing Minecraft on the Xbox 360?

High-profile accidents at Three Mile Island in the United States, Chernobyl in the former U.S.S.R., and Fukushima in Japan put a spotlight on all these risks. There are real problems that led to those disasters, but instead of getting to work on solving those problems, we just stopped trying to advance the field.

If you could pick just one thing to lower the price of, to reduce poverty, by far you would pick energy.

Nuclear fusion. There's another, entirely different approach to nuclear power that's quite promising but still at least a decade away from supplying electricity to consumers. Instead of getting energy by splitting atoms apart, as fission does, it involves pushing them together, or fusing them.

And consider how long it took for oil to become a big part of our energy supply. We started producing it commercially in the 1860s. Half a century later, it represented just 10 percent of the world's energy supply. It took 30 years more to reach 25 percent.

The energy industry is simply enormous—at around $5 trillion a year, one of the biggest businesses on the planet. Anything that big and complex will resist change. And consciously or not, we have built a lot of inertia into the energy industry.

The average retail price for a gallon of jet fuel in the United States over the past few years is $2.22. Advanced biofuels for jets, to the extent they're available, cost on average $5.35 per gallon. The Green Premium for zero-carbon fuel, then, is the difference between these two prices, which is $3.13.

If we get a breakthrough in cheap hydrogen, for example, we might not need to worry as much about getting a magic battery.

I'm also a technophile. Show me a problem, and I'll look for technology to fix it.

In particular, Green Premiums are a fantastic lens for making decisions. They help us put our time, attention, and money to their best use. Looking at all the different premiums, we can decide which zero-carbon solutions we should deploy now and where we should pursue breakthroughs because the clean alternatives aren't cheap enough. They help us answer questions like these:

We already know the emissions number; it's 51 billion tons each year. As for the cost of removing a ton of carbon from the air, that figure hasn't been firmly established, but it's at least $200 per ton. With some innovation, I think we can realistically expect it to get down to $100 per ton, so that's the number I'll use. That gives us the following equation: 51 billion tons per year x $100 per ton = $5.1 trillion per year

We need to channel the world's passion and its scientific IQ into deploying the clean energy solutions we have now, and inventing new ones, so we stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

CGIAR is the world's largest agricultural research group: In short, it helps create better plants and better animal genetics.

Tip: Keep the Green Premiums in mind and ask whether they're low enough for middle-income countries to pay.