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.
In terms of wild life, some of these
problems just didn't seem like
a significant concern.
So, when I learned that house cats
killed billions of birds every year.
it put into perspective that hundreds of
thousands of birds that are rather killed
by wind turbines.
Basically seemed to me at the time that
most if not all of the problems of
scaling up solar and wind could be solved
through more technological innovation.
But as the years went by, these problems
persisted, and in many cases grew worse.
So, California is a state that is really
committed to renewable energy.
But we still haven't converted many of our
hydroelectric dams into big batteries.
Some of the problems are just geographic,
It is just, you have to have a very
particular kind of formation to build
and do that.
And even in those cases, it's quite
expensive to make those conversions.
Other challenges are just that, there is
other uses for water like irrigation,
And maybe this is the most significant
problem is just that, In California,
The water in our rivers and reservoirs
is growing increasingly scarce and
unreliable due to climate change.
In term of the situation of reliability,
As a consequence of it, we have actually
had to stop the electricity coming from
the solar farms into the cities because
there are just have been too much of it
at times, or, We have been starting to
pay out neighboring states as Arizona to
take that solar electricity, The
alternative is to suffer from blowouts of
the grid.
And in turns out that,
when it comes to birds and cats,
Cats don't kill eagles, Eagles kill cats.
What cats kill are the small common
sparrows and jays and robins,
Birds that are not endangered and not at
risk of going to extinct.
What do kill eagles and another big birds
like the skite, as well as owls, and condors.
And other threatened endangered species
are wind turbines.
In fact, they are one of the most
significant threats to those big birds
species that we have.
We just haven't been introducing the air
space with many other objects like we have
wind turbines over the last several years.
And in terms of solar, you know,
building a solar farm is not like building
any other kind of farm, you have to clear
the whole area of wild life.
so, this is a picture of one third of
one of the biggest solar farms in
California called ivanpah.
In order to build this, they had to clear
the whole area of desert tortoises.
literally, pulling desert tortoises and
their babies out of borrows,
putting them on the back of pickup trucks
and transporting them to captivity where
many of them ended up dying.
And currently, the current estimates are
that about 6 thousand birds are
killed every year.
Actually, catching on fire above the
solar farms and bulging to their death.
Over time, it gradually struck me that,
there was really no amount of technological
innovation that was gonna make the sun
shine more regularly or wind blow more
reliably.
In fact, you could make solar panel
cheaper, you can make wind turbines bigger
But, sunlight and wind are just really
dilute fuels, and in order to produce
significant amount of electricity,
you just have to cover a very large land
mass with them.
In other words, all of the major problems
with renewables aren't technical,
They are natural.
Well, dealing with all of this unreliability
and the big environmental impacts obviously
comes that a pretty high economic cost.
You know, we have been hearing a lot
about how solar panels and wind turbines
have come down in cost in recent years.
But that cost has been significantly
out wade by just the challenges of