Quotes About Technology

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.

How much stuff does it take to build and run a power plant? That depends on the type of plant. Nuclear is the most efficient, using much less material per unit of electricity generated than other sources do.

Nuclear power kills far, far fewer people than cars do. For that matter, it kills far fewer people than any fossil fuel.

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.

How much power does it take? The world 5,000 gigawatts The United States 1,000 gigawatts Mid-size city 1 gigawatt Small town 1 megawatt Average American house 1 kilowatt

The United States gets around 20 percent of its electricity from nuclear plants; France has the highest share in the world, getting 70 percent of its electricity from nuclear. Remember that by comparison solar and wind together provide about 7 percent worldwide.

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.

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.

Natural gas followed a similar trajectory. In 1900, it accounted for 1 percent of the world's energy. It took seventy years to reach 20 percent. Nuclear fission went faster, going from 0 to 10 percent in 27 years.

Why do energy transitions take so long, anyway? Because… Coal plants are not like computer chips.

The largest power station in the world, the Three Gorges Dam in China, can produce 22 billion watts. (Remember that the definition of a watt already includes "per second," so there's no such thing as watts per second, or watts per hour. It's just watts.)

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.

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.

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

Making Carbon-Free Electricity Nuclear fission. Here's the one-sentence case for nuclear power: It's the only carbon-free energy source that can reliably deliver power day and night, through every season, almost anywhere on earth, that has been proven to work on a large scale.

It wasn't enough to deliver cheap, reliable energy for the poor. It also had to be clean.

What's most important is that the world get serious once again about advancing the field of nuclear energy. It's just too promising to ignore

Technology is only one reason that the energy industry can't change as quickly as the computer industry. There's also size. 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.

The countries that build great zero-carbon companies and industries will be the ones that lead the global economy in the coming decades.

Instead, in all likelihood, in a zero-carbon future we will still be producing some emissions, but we'll have ways to remove the carbon they emit.