Thank you very much
When I was a boy, My parents sometimes
would take me camping in California.
We would camp in the beaches,
in the forests, in the deserts.
some people think that deserts are
empty of life.
But my parents taught me to see
the wild life all around us,
The hawks, the eagles, the tortoises.
One time when we were staying up at camp,
We found a baby scorpion with its sting around,
And I remember thinking how cool it was
that something could be both so cute
and also so dangerous.
After college, I moved to California,
And I started working on a number of
environmental campaigns.
I got involved in hoping to save
the state's last ancient redwood forest.
And blocking a proposed radioactive waste
repository set for the desert.
And surely after I turned 30,
I decided that I wanted to dedicate
a significant amount of life to solving
climate change.
I was worried that global warming would
end up destroying many of the natural
environments that people had worked
so hard to protect.
I thought the technical solution were
pretty straight forward,
solar panels on every roof,
electric cars in the drive way,
that the main obstacles were political.
And so I hoped to organize a coalition
of the countries biggest labor unions
and biggest environmental groups.
Our proposal was for a 300 billion dollar
in renewables.
And the idea was not only we would prevent
climate change but, we would also create
millions of new jobs in a very fast
growing high tech sector.
Our efforts really paid off in 2007,
when then presidential candidate
Barack Obama embraced our vision.
And between 2009 and 2015,
the US invested a 150 billion dollars
in renewables and other kinds of clean tac.
But right away, we started to encounter
some problems.
So first of all, the electricity from
solar roof tops in some costs about twice
as much as the electricity from solar farms.
And both solar farms and wind farms
require a cover of pretty significant
amount of land with
solar panels and wind turbines,
And also building very big transmission lines
to bring all that electricity from the
country side into the city.
Both of those things were often very
strongly resisted by local communities,
as well as by conservation biologists who
were concerned about the impacts on
wild birds species and other animals.
Now, there was a lot of other people
working on technical solutions at the time
One of the big challenges of course is
just the intermediacy of solar and wind.
They only generate electricity about
10 - 30 % of the time during most of the year
But, Some of the solutions that were
being proposed were to convert hydroelectric
dams into gigantic batteries.
The idea was that when the sun was shining
and the wind was blowing, you would pump
the water uphill, stored for later and
then when you needed electricity you run
it over the turbines.