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Thank you very much

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When I was a boy, My parents sometimes

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would take me camping in California.

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We would camp in the beaches,

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in the forests, in the deserts.

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some people think that deserts are

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empty of life.

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But my parents taught me to see

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the wild life all around us,

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The hawks, the eagles, the tortoises.

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One time when we were staying up at camp,

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We found a baby scorpion with its sting around,

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And I remember thinking how cool it was

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that something could be both so cute

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and also so dangerous.

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After college, I moved to California,

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And I started working on a number of

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environmental campaigns.

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I got involved in hoping to save

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the state's last ancient redwood forest.

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And blocking a proposed radioactive waste

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repository set for the desert.

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And surely after I turned 30,

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I decided that I wanted to dedicate

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a significant amount of life to solving

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climate change.

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I was worried that global warming would

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end up destroying many of the natural

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environments that people had worked

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so hard to protect.

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I thought the technical solution were

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pretty straight forward,

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solar panels on every roof,

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electric cars in the drive way,

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that the main obstacles were political.

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And so I hoped to organize a coalition

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of the countries biggest labor unions

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and biggest environmental groups.

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Our proposal was for a 300 billion dollar

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in renewables.

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And the idea was not only we would prevent

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climate change but, we would also create

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millions of new jobs in a very fast

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growing high tech sector.

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Our efforts really paid off in 2007,

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when then presidential candidate

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Barack Obama embraced our vision.

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And between 2009 and 2015,

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the US invested a 150 billion dollars

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in renewables and other kinds of clean tac.

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But right away, we started to encounter

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some problems.

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So first of all, the electricity from

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solar roof tops in some costs about twice

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as much as the electricity from solar farms.

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And both solar farms and wind farms

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require a cover of pretty significant

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amount of land with

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solar panels and wind turbines,

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And also building very big transmission lines

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to bring all that electricity from the

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country side into the city.

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Both of those things were often very

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strongly resisted by local communities,

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as well as by conservation biologists who

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were concerned about the impacts on

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wild birds species and other animals.

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Now, there was a lot of other people

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working on technical solutions at the time

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One of the big challenges of course is

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just the intermediacy of solar and wind.

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They only generate electricity about

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10 - 30 % of the time during most of the year

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But, Some of the solutions that were

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being proposed were to convert hydroelectric

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dams into gigantic batteries.

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The idea was that when the sun was shining

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and the wind was blowing, you would pump

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the water uphill, stored for later and

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then when you needed electricity you run

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it over the turbines.